4 ms·

This is pop-sci journalists once again ruining the message by either not understanding the paper or by dumbing it down to the point it becomes lazy and counter-

This is pop-sci journalists once again ruining the message by either not understanding the paper or by dumbing it down to the point it becomes lazy and counter-factual. I think it's mostly the former, because there definitely exists a way to "explain it like I'm five" without telling mistruths. This pop-sci garbage has me hardcore Gell-Mann amnesia-ing [1] the rest of the journalism industry. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

godelski 2y ago
> counter-factual Be careful, a counterfactual is not just something that is in opposition to the facts[0]. I bring this up because one common way a message is misinterpreted is that words are overloaded. So people read a thing, understand it with one definition of words, but the intended definition is different. Because knowledge is often passed through a game of telephone[1] context is often lost or degraded, making it harder to decode the intended meanings. Probably worth mentioning that there is no lower bound in complexity for a lie, but the is for truth. Worse, no real "truth" exists, it is just ever approaching something that is "more correct" with exponentially increasing complexity. I often wonder if we've just advanced so far that we can no longer make sense of things with first or second order approximations. That it's just so difficult to find sufficient approximations that we break down. Our desire to have answers is stronger than our desire to understand. I suspect this is a great filter if there are any. It makes sense for any evolved creature to hit this point, as we definitely know computational complexity increases dramatically with respect to higher order terms. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_thinking [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_game

godelski 2y ago

> counter-factual Be careful, a counterfactual is not just something that is in opposition to the facts[0]. I bring this up because one common way a message is misinterpreted is that words are overloaded. So people read a thing, understand it with one definition of words, but the intended definition is different. Because knowledge is often passed through a game of telephone[1] context is often lost or degraded, making it harder to decode the intended meanings. Probably worth mentioning that there is no lower bound in complexity for a lie, but the is for truth. Worse, no real "truth" exists, it is just ever approaching something that is "more correct" with exponentially increasing complexity. I often wonder if we've just advanced so far that we can no longer make sense of things with first or second order approximations. That it's just so difficult to find sufficient approximations that we break down. Our desire to have answers is stronger than our desire to understand. I suspect this is a great filter if there are any. It makes sense for any evolved creature to hit this point, as we definitely know computational complexity increases dramatically with respect to higher order terms. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_thinking [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_game