3 ms·

Can you give an example of an incomprehensible piece of writing (any writing, never mind a proof) that has commercial value commensurate with the costs involved

by chongli 2mo ago

Can you give an example of an incomprehensible piece of writing (any writing, never mind a proof) that has commercial value commensurate with the costs involved here?

a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
Yeah, how many people do you think understand the Linux kernel in full? What percentage of the people using it to great commercial effect can understand it? How's your understanding of Schroedingers "An Undulatory Theory of the Mechanics of Atoms and Molecules"? You seem to be using the results of it as applied to semiconductor engineering just fine. And, I promise you, most semiconductor engineers haven't read it in full, they just accepted the results as passed on by several layers of teacher. I have a paper on routing algorithms, which I have attempted to read to my cat. I don't think my cat retained much, but they seem to be enjoying the cat food that got delivered using the results. I'd suggest that we're going to be a lot closer to the cat than the author of the paper when AI takes off.
- bluefirebrand 2mo ago
  > how many people do you think understand the Linux kernel in full? "Not many people understand some things fully" is so massively different from "the human mind is incapable of understanding some things that AI will understand for us"
  - a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
    Yeah. We're only starting the journey of building tools better at thinking than the human mind, so expecting me to have examples of things it produces is a little hard, don't you think? The best I can do is things that are incomprehensible to nearly everyone, but still provide value. There's a small leap of imagination to consider an author that understands it and can show others how to leverage results without understanding be mechanical rather than biological.
- chongli 2mo ago
  You've moved the goalposts. The original claim was about producing mathematics that are in principle impossible for any human to understand. All the stuff you've listed is understood by some person, and that understanding is the source of its value. Now that we've cleared that up, can you furnish an example that satisfies the original claim of incomprehensibility and value?
  - a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
    You asked for examples, for a technology that we're still building. Maybe you can see the issue with that? Anyways, people benefitted greatly from Newton's laws of gravity, even though we still don't have a quantum-compatible set of laws for it. The laws of gravity are still incomprehensible for people, but the approximation that we've observed is still immensely valuable.
    - chongli 2mo ago
      No, I gave you a lot more leeway than that. Take any utterly incomprehensible piece of writing from the entire history of civilization and demonstrate its value. You keep falling back on "incomprehensible for some people" but that wasn't the claim. It was about a text which is incomprehensible in principle; that is, utterly impossible for any human to ever understand.
      - a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
        Can you give me an example single piece of writing that the author didn't claim they understood? I don't think that any utterly incomprehensible writing exists. If you want examples where nobody but the author understands it, examples are a dime a dozen.
        chongli 2mo ago
        So you concede the point then. The age of humans comprehending things is not coming to an end. And therein lies the rub. When it comes to intellectual labour: Understanding == Value If a mathematician produces something incomprehensible then it has no value. It's meaningless. Indistinguishable from random noise. An AI which produces incomprehensible text is producing no value. We didn't need to spend trillions of dollars on LLMs to figure that out. Markov chains can do that job perfectly well.
lowbloodsugar 2mo ago
I know right? And there’s only a market for maybe 5 computers in the whole world. Paul Krugman (1998): predicted the internet’s economic impact would be no greater than the fax machine’s. The 1876 Western Union memo dismissing the telephone as having too many shortcomings, and the banker telling Horace Rackham not to invest in Ford because the automobile was a novelty. We are in good company!
- orphereus 2mo ago
  Past performance does not guarantee future returns.
akiselev 2mo ago
> Can you give an example of an incomprehensible piece of writing (any writing, never mind a proof) that has commercial value commensurate with the costs involved here? It depends on what exactly you mean by "commercial value commensurate with the costs involved" but I'd volunteer the 3G/4G/5G specifications and the other documentation required to implement the mobile network protocols. 5G is currently sitting at over 50,000 pages and it's one of the reasons Qualcomm/Broadcom/Apple are the only ones who can realistically make a mobile radio. I don't think there is a single human to whom more than a few thousand pages would be comprehensible at a time except for the occasional genius.
- chongli 2mo ago
  Read the rest of the discussion. The claim is about text which is in principle incomprehensible to humans. If there exists a text which only one person can understand, that person can communicate their understanding to others, even if that doesn't help them with the original text. That dissemination of knowledge is what provides the value, not the mere existence of the text. If that person forgets or dies before they can share their knowledge then it will be lost. We have many examples of this from history: ancient texts written in a lost language. These texts provide us with no value until the day they can be deciphered, unless you count linguistic puzzle-solving as a virtue.
  - a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
    > If there exists a text which only one person can understand, that person can communicate their understanding to others, even if that doesn't help them with the original text. If there exists a text which only an AI can understand, that AI can communicate their key conclusions to others, even if that doesn't help them with the original text. The only difference here is the amount of meat involved. Perhaps tossing a few steaks on the server racks could help with that.
    - chongli 2mo ago
      If an AI can communicate its findings to us in a way that we can understand it, then its findings are by definition intelligible to humans. Your claim was about texts for which this is not possible.
nickysielicki 2mo ago
Can you give an example of a 4-wheeled vehicle that could move at tens of miles per hour before the automobile was invented?

by chongli 2mo ago

Can you give an example of an incomprehensible piece of writing (any writing, never mind a proof) that has commercial value commensurate with the costs involved here?

a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago

Yeah, how many people do you think understand the Linux kernel in full? What percentage of the people using it to great commercial effect can understand it? How's your understanding of Schroedingers "An Undulatory Theory of the Mechanics of Atoms and Molecules"? You seem to be using the results of it as applied to semiconductor engineering just fine. And, I promise you, most semiconductor engineers haven't read it in full, they just accepted the results as passed on by several layers of teacher. I have a paper on routing algorithms, which I have attempted to read to my cat. I don't think my cat retained much, but they seem to be enjoying the cat food that got delivered using the results. I'd suggest that we're going to be a lot closer to the cat than the author of the paper when AI takes off.

bluefirebrand 2mo ago
> how many people do you think understand the Linux kernel in full? "Not many people understand some things fully" is so massively different from "the human mind is incapable of understanding some things that AI will understand for us"
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
  Yeah. We're only starting the journey of building tools better at thinking than the human mind, so expecting me to have examples of things it produces is a little hard, don't you think? The best I can do is things that are incomprehensible to nearly everyone, but still provide value. There's a small leap of imagination to consider an author that understands it and can show others how to leverage results without understanding be mechanical rather than biological.
chongli 2mo ago
You've moved the goalposts. The original claim was about producing mathematics that are in principle impossible for any human to understand. All the stuff you've listed is understood by some person, and that understanding is the source of its value. Now that we've cleared that up, can you furnish an example that satisfies the original claim of incomprehensibility and value?
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
  You asked for examples, for a technology that we're still building. Maybe you can see the issue with that? Anyways, people benefitted greatly from Newton's laws of gravity, even though we still don't have a quantum-compatible set of laws for it. The laws of gravity are still incomprehensible for people, but the approximation that we've observed is still immensely valuable.
  - chongli 2mo ago
    No, I gave you a lot more leeway than that. Take any utterly incomprehensible piece of writing from the entire history of civilization and demonstrate its value. You keep falling back on "incomprehensible for some people" but that wasn't the claim. It was about a text which is incomprehensible in principle; that is, utterly impossible for any human to ever understand.
    - a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
      Can you give me an example single piece of writing that the author didn't claim they understood? I don't think that any utterly incomprehensible writing exists. If you want examples where nobody but the author understands it, examples are a dime a dozen.
      - chongli 2mo ago
        So you concede the point then. The age of humans comprehending things is not coming to an end. And therein lies the rub. When it comes to intellectual labour: Understanding == Value If a mathematician produces something incomprehensible then it has no value. It's meaningless. Indistinguishable from random noise. An AI which produces incomprehensible text is producing no value. We didn't need to spend trillions of dollars on LLMs to figure that out. Markov chains can do that job perfectly well.

lowbloodsugar 2mo ago

I know right? And there’s only a market for maybe 5 computers in the whole world. Paul Krugman (1998): predicted the internet’s economic impact would be no greater than the fax machine’s. The 1876 Western Union memo dismissing the telephone as having too many shortcomings, and the banker telling Horace Rackham not to invest in Ford because the automobile was a novelty. We are in good company!

orphereus 2mo ago
Past performance does not guarantee future returns.

akiselev 2mo ago

> Can you give an example of an incomprehensible piece of writing (any writing, never mind a proof) that has commercial value commensurate with the costs involved here? It depends on what exactly you mean by "commercial value commensurate with the costs involved" but I'd volunteer the 3G/4G/5G specifications and the other documentation required to implement the mobile network protocols. 5G is currently sitting at over 50,000 pages and it's one of the reasons Qualcomm/Broadcom/Apple are the only ones who can realistically make a mobile radio. I don't think there is a single human to whom more than a few thousand pages would be comprehensible at a time except for the occasional genius.

chongli 2mo ago
Read the rest of the discussion. The claim is about text which is in principle incomprehensible to humans. If there exists a text which only one person can understand, that person can communicate their understanding to others, even if that doesn't help them with the original text. That dissemination of knowledge is what provides the value, not the mere existence of the text. If that person forgets or dies before they can share their knowledge then it will be lost. We have many examples of this from history: ancient texts written in a lost language. These texts provide us with no value until the day they can be deciphered, unless you count linguistic puzzle-solving as a virtue.
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
  > If there exists a text which only one person can understand, that person can communicate their understanding to others, even if that doesn't help them with the original text. If there exists a text which only an AI can understand, that AI can communicate their key conclusions to others, even if that doesn't help them with the original text. The only difference here is the amount of meat involved. Perhaps tossing a few steaks on the server racks could help with that.
  - chongli 2mo ago
    If an AI can communicate its findings to us in a way that we can understand it, then its findings are by definition intelligible to humans. Your claim was about texts for which this is not possible.

nickysielicki 2mo ago

Can you give an example of a 4-wheeled vehicle that could move at tens of miles per hour before the automobile was invented?