4 ms·

What are these “parameters” by which performance is measured? You’re all programmers, you all set parameters all the time that are completely arbitrary, you de

What are these “parameters” by which performance is measured? You’re all programmers, you all set parameters all the time that are completely arbitrary, you design the systems through which actions are performed. What does it mean to be a great musician, to be able to write music as good as Mozart? But Mozart never wrote anything as good as Mozart! To be great means breaking the boundaries of all values, to create something that goes beyond being merely “good enough”; good enough according to some standard set by somebody else. Hit your targets, maybe you’ll be good. We should not be raising kids to be “good enough”…infact, let them be terrible! I’d rather they be awful at everything in every concievable way then hit the same targets over and over again.

drdeca 2y ago
> To be great means breaking the boundaries of all values, No? A great runner doesn’t go beyond the values of running faster over longer distances. Proving great new theorems does not require going beyond traditional notions of proof. Not all well-defined scoring functions take the form “f(distance to some subset of the space of possible behaviors)” for some decreasing function f. You can have a well-defined function which is unbounded. If the space of possible behaviors/results isn’t compact, then following a scoring function may lead to going further and further out, not just getting close to one thing.
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  Measurable performance doesn’t put into question the measure itself. Recursion, which is kind of bullshit imo, did require reinventing the concept of a “proof,” and now, as a side effect, we have programming. Of course we are wrapped up in certain histories, but those histories can only command us, in a certain sense, if we follow their measures—we would be going “further out” into the same. “Running” might be the oldest useful activity of humanity, but competetive running probably doesn’t antedate the industrial revolution—there was no concept of a “run” for hunter-gatherer societies. Frankly, nobody attempted to engineer humans through education, training, to be good at hitting specific, measured targets before the industrial revolution. Without consciousness of this, one is no different from the machines which test them. Maybe one person wins a gold medal one year, another another, but year in and year out they are ruled over by a number alone. There is no choice or freedom here, in the end a great runner is no better than a great pair of shoes, perhaps the ones they’re wearing. The point of this discussion is education. I would like to think, though I can never prove it, that we are more than things that can be engineered to hit specific targets. And if we raise our kids to do that, then they will never be more than machines. There is no measure for a great thinker, a great artist: they create their own. So I’d rather live in that world, where everyone freely determines their actions, than in one where the breadth of all their actions are predetermined for them.
  - drdeca 2y ago
    I just don’t think that a particular measure of value, is necessary something for which “hitting the target” is a good analogy. Going beyond what has been done before, even in qualitatively novel ways, can be favored by/within a fixed notion of what is valuable. One can explore wild new ideas and actions whole still in pursuit of one fixed way of evaluating what is valuable. Now, if your claim is something like, “We can never (or at least not in the near future) adequately describe what we really value, and focusing too tightly on achieving those approximations to it which we know how to express, leads to worse outcomes.”, then yeah, I suppose I agree.
    - DiscourseFan 2y ago
      >One can explore wild new ideas and actions whole still in pursuit of one fixed way of evaluating what is valuable. It was this way with Leibniz and Spinoza, that everything fell under a One, an infinitely analyzable substance that, at the very limit, at the very edge, which only the intellect of God could understand, was the perfect synthesis and the completion of the entire universe. Its for that reason that I don't call myself a Hegelian, but at least I believe in something that Hegel saw in Kant: that the power of the infinite is not for some God in heaven infinitely distant from mankind, and we are just the poor image, his murky reflection. The end of the Phenomenology of Spirit is called "Absolute Knowing," and what is the truth of absolute knowledge? There it is, God became Man, and from "Out of the chalice of this realm of spirits / Foams forth to him his infinity." God is dead, and from that sovereign truth reigns the absolute knowledge that, in every action determined with full conscious intent, the infinite is grasped, the infinite power to determine world history! Values? The horizon, the constellation of value, is like a net that ensnares that seed of power. One must be strong enough to break through value itself, to achieve the revaluation of all values. To take flight into the other side of infinity.

drdeca 2y ago

> To be great means breaking the boundaries of all values, No? A great runner doesn’t go beyond the values of running faster over longer distances. Proving great new theorems does not require going beyond traditional notions of proof. Not all well-defined scoring functions take the form “f(distance to some subset of the space of possible behaviors)” for some decreasing function f. You can have a well-defined function which is unbounded. If the space of possible behaviors/results isn’t compact, then following a scoring function may lead to going further and further out, not just getting close to one thing.

DiscourseFan 2y ago
Measurable performance doesn’t put into question the measure itself. Recursion, which is kind of bullshit imo, did require reinventing the concept of a “proof,” and now, as a side effect, we have programming. Of course we are wrapped up in certain histories, but those histories can only command us, in a certain sense, if we follow their measures—we would be going “further out” into the same. “Running” might be the oldest useful activity of humanity, but competetive running probably doesn’t antedate the industrial revolution—there was no concept of a “run” for hunter-gatherer societies. Frankly, nobody attempted to engineer humans through education, training, to be good at hitting specific, measured targets before the industrial revolution. Without consciousness of this, one is no different from the machines which test them. Maybe one person wins a gold medal one year, another another, but year in and year out they are ruled over by a number alone. There is no choice or freedom here, in the end a great runner is no better than a great pair of shoes, perhaps the ones they’re wearing. The point of this discussion is education. I would like to think, though I can never prove it, that we are more than things that can be engineered to hit specific targets. And if we raise our kids to do that, then they will never be more than machines. There is no measure for a great thinker, a great artist: they create their own. So I’d rather live in that world, where everyone freely determines their actions, than in one where the breadth of all their actions are predetermined for them.
- drdeca 2y ago
  I just don’t think that a particular measure of value, is necessary something for which “hitting the target” is a good analogy. Going beyond what has been done before, even in qualitatively novel ways, can be favored by/within a fixed notion of what is valuable. One can explore wild new ideas and actions whole still in pursuit of one fixed way of evaluating what is valuable. Now, if your claim is something like, “We can never (or at least not in the near future) adequately describe what we really value, and focusing too tightly on achieving those approximations to it which we know how to express, leads to worse outcomes.”, then yeah, I suppose I agree.
  - DiscourseFan 2y ago
    >One can explore wild new ideas and actions whole still in pursuit of one fixed way of evaluating what is valuable. It was this way with Leibniz and Spinoza, that everything fell under a One, an infinitely analyzable substance that, at the very limit, at the very edge, which only the intellect of God could understand, was the perfect synthesis and the completion of the entire universe. Its for that reason that I don't call myself a Hegelian, but at least I believe in something that Hegel saw in Kant: that the power of the infinite is not for some God in heaven infinitely distant from mankind, and we are just the poor image, his murky reflection. The end of the Phenomenology of Spirit is called "Absolute Knowing," and what is the truth of absolute knowledge? There it is, God became Man, and from "Out of the chalice of this realm of spirits / Foams forth to him his infinity." God is dead, and from that sovereign truth reigns the absolute knowledge that, in every action determined with full conscious intent, the infinite is grasped, the infinite power to determine world history! Values? The horizon, the constellation of value, is like a net that ensnares that seed of power. One must be strong enough to break through value itself, to achieve the revaluation of all values. To take flight into the other side of infinity.