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> We unknowingly gave particularly high rewards for metaphors with creatures. I recall a math instructor who would occasionally refer to variables (usually rep
by nomilk 6mo ago
> We unknowingly gave particularly high rewards for metaphors with creatures.
I recall a math instructor who would occasionally refer to variables (usually represented by intimidating greek letters) as "this guy". Weirdly, the casual anthropomorphism made the math seem more approachable. Perhaps 'metaphors with creatures' has a similar effect i.e. makes a problem seem more cute/approachable.
On another note, buzzwords spread through companies partly because they make the user of the buzzword sound smart relative to peers, thus increasing status. (examples: "big data" circa 2013, "machine learning" circa 2016, "AI" circa 2023-present..).
The problem is the reputation boost is only temporary; as soon as the buzzword is overused (by others or by the same individual) it loses its value. Perhaps RLHF optimises for the best 'single answer' which may not sufficiently penalise use of buzzwords.
- kybb4 6mo agoThey give everyone the false and very misleading impression that with One prompt all kinds of complexity minimizes. Its a bed time story for children. Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety asserts that for a system to effectively regulate or control a complex environment, it must possess at least as much internal behavioral variety (complexity) as the environment it seeks to control. This is what we see in nature. Massive variety. Thats a fundamental requirement of surviving all the unpredictablity in the universe.
- LifeIsBio 6mo agoHad a math prof in undergrad that once said, “this guy” 61 times in a 50 minute lecture!
- DrJokepu 6mo ago> I recall a math instructor who would occasionally refer to variables (usually represented by intimidating greek letters) as "this guy". I also had an instructor who was doing that! This was 20 years ago, and I totally forgot about it until I have read your comment. Can’t remember the subject, maybe propositional logic? I wonder if my instructor and your instructor have picked up this habit from the same source.
- kombookcha 6mo agoI recall my old chemistry/physics teacher doing it too - "now THIS guy, he's really greedy for electrons" and stuff like that.
- adammarples 6mo agoMaybe they're French? They tend to do that, translating celui
- Tyr42 6mo agoMy instructor for Epsilon Delta proofs and limits would always talk about "his cousin in Romania" picking the Epsilon and him picking the Delta. i.e. forall epsilon > 0. exists delta > 0. forall d with |d| < delta. |f(x) - f(x+d)| < epsilon. If we had a proof, no matter what epsilon his cousin from Romania picked, we could always find a new delta which would satify his cousin and let him pick the worst d in range. This worked better than just saying "pick any epsilon", as it convayed the adversarial approach better. Another book I read used the Devil as the one you are trying to convince, but it's nowhere near as fun as "his cousin from Romania".
- thatguymike 6mo agoA decade ago I gave a presentation on automata theory. I demonstrated writing arbitrary symbols to tape with greek letters, just like I’d learned at university. The audience was pretty confused and didn’t really grok the presentation. A genius communicator in the audience advised me to replace the greek letters with emoji… I gave the same presentation to the same demographic audience a week later and it was a smash hit, best received tech talk I’ve given. That lesson has always stuck with me.
- Atiscant 6mo agoI had a similar experience explaining logic, especially nested expressions, with cats and boxes. Also for showing syntactic versus semantic. We _can_ use cats if we wanted and retain the semantics. Also my proudest moment as a teacher was students producing a meme based on some of the discrete mathematics on graphs. They understood the point well enough to make a joke of it.
- starshadowx2 6mo agoThis is sortof like how Only Connect switched from using Greek letters to Egyptian hieroglyphs. I'm not sure if it was a joke or not but it was said that viewers complained that the Greek letters were "too pretentious" and obviously the hieroglyphs weren't.
- setr 6mo agoI’m fairly positive the Greek alphabet mixed in Latin would measure quite poorly for legibility, if anyone did that study. Long before it’s an issue of pretentiousness
- WindyMiller 6mo ago[It was also in direct reference to this comic.](https://www.overyourhead.co.uk/2011/01/rarely-connect.html https://www.overyourhead.co.uk/2011/01/rarely-connect.html)
- starshadowx2 6mo ago
- retired_account 6mo agoI had a calc prof years ago that would say f of cow, or f of pig instead of x or g. It was more engaging trying to keep track of f of pig of cow than the single-letter func names. He was one of those classic types; you could always catch him for a quick chat 4 minutes before class, as he lit up a cig by the front door. Back when they allowed smoking on campus, anyway.
- mNovak 6mo agoI had a similar, really great prof, who would always ask for what the next variable would be, so we'd end up with trees and smiley faces. His point was to not make assumptions (c is always a constant etc), but it made the classes more engaging too. And, somehow every example ended along the lines of "then you hand this to your boss, kick up your feet and have a nice glass of scotch."
- moffkalast 6mo agoMath instructor (I imagine): Look at this dude! Look at the top of his fraction! AHH! hah! hah!
- kindkang2024 6mo agoShow me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome. Timeless, be it human or machine