7 ms·

Taste for Makers (2002)

70 points by misframer 11y ago

Jun8 11y ago
It's amazing how close pg's ideas in this essay are to those of David Deutsch's in his Beginning of Infinity, e.g. on the topic of why flowers are beautiful to humans as well as insects (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMiP2SM8Tpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMiP2SM8Tpk).
- nicklovescode 11y ago
  I was happy to see someone else bring up that book as well. I did not imagine someone else or make a connection
melling 11y ago
I wish I'd known 20 years ago how important design was going to be. Getting my 10,000 hours of design isn't going to be easy. I started this course a few days ago on Udacity: https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-the-design-of-everyday-things--design101 https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-the-design-of-everyd... And I'm using this subredit to learn how to draw: http://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals http://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals
quizotic 11y ago
Back when I was a 16 year old mediocre chess player, the captain of our high school team took me aside, set up a position and asked "Do you like white or black?" I looked at the board and said "I don't know." And channeling a Yoda then decades in the future, he said "That is why you lose." His name was Matthew Looks, and his point was that it doesn't matter whether you're right or wrong. It only matters that you have a visceral opinion. If you believe something or care about something strongly, it gets you to engage. If it turns out that you're objectively wrong, the clash will focus your attention and you'll learn. Just having an opinion, just caring, will bring out a better game. This is how I interpret PG's post on taste. Having good taste is wonderful. But having taste, even bad taste, is better than not caring at all.
- r0naa 11y ago
  Did you get any better as a result of following his advice?
- vacri 11y ago
  > If you believe something or care about something strongly, it gets you to engage. If it turns out that you're objectively wrong, the clash will focus your attention and you'll learn. Centuries of religion argue against this; instead, people tend to make up a ton of story to 'smooth over the cracks'. I agree that people are better at things they are interested in, but it's just not true that having a strong opinion makes you better at it. Check out the 'autism vaccers' as another counter-example.
- solve 11y ago
  Sounds like some of the worst advice I've ever heard.
  - delish 11y ago
    Yes! You're doing it!
  - adwn 11y ago
    I agree. There are already too many people in this world with strong opinions on topics they don't fully understand. We certainly do not need even more of them.
    - deciplex 11y ago
      Uh, you're both really missing the important part: > If it turns out that you're objectively wrong, the clash will focus your attention and you'll learn. Yeah, if you have a bunch of ill-informed wrong opinions and, out of some stubborn ignorance, you refuse to update them when the conflicting evidence comes crashing in all around you, then you will be a stupid person. However, if you have a bunch of wrong opinions which you then turn into right opinions after reality keeps kicking you in the ass, then you are on the road to being a smart person. But if you're apathetic, you won't even notice reality kicking you in the ass. Reality won't even bother with you. You're right that having wrong opinions as a steady state is worse than having no opinion, but the whole point of GP was not to be in a steady state in the first place.
mlpinit 11y ago
"In math and engineering, recursion, especially, is a big win. Inductive proofs are wonderfully short. In software, a problem that can be solved by recursion is nearly always best solved that way." I don't make use of recursion very often but this statement doesn't sound right to me. Actually the opposite seems right. If you read the chapter on recursion from Concrete Mathematics (I'm thinking about the The Tower of Hanoi, Lines in the Plane and The Josephus Problem here, it seems obvious that a closed form is much faster, simpler and according to the blog post more beautiful. Does anybody with more extensive knowledge on the topic care to comment on this?
- sirsar 11y ago
  I find inductive proofs tend to leave me hanging - I become convinced that the conclusion is true, but I still have no intuition as to why. For example, Wikipedia's proof [0] that sum of 0..n == n(n+1)/2 is convincing, but unenlightening. There are proofs which seem much more "elegant" to me, for example, pairing (1+n) == (2+n-1) == (3+n-2) ... (n/2 + (n/2 + 1)) [1], or constructing triangles [also 1]. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_induction#Example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_induction#Example [1] http://betterexplained.com/articles/techniques-for-adding-the-numbers-1-to-100/ http://betterexplained.com/articles/techniques-for-adding-th...
  - mlpinit 11y ago
    The book I mentioned above, Concrete Mathematics, talks about how to develop an intuition when it comes to induction. One of the advice mentioned is to always start with smallest cases possible because that makes the problem easier to understand. I suppose the more you practice the better your intuition becomes.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- btilly 11y ago
  If you're trying to prove a result, odds are that you will get there faster and easier with recursion. Once you really understand it, you can use a closed form. Likewise there are many categories of problems that are easy to write down recursive solutions to, but good solutions will take work.

70 points by misframer 11y ago

Jun8 11y ago

It's amazing how close pg's ideas in this essay are to those of David Deutsch's in his Beginning of Infinity, e.g. on the topic of why flowers are beautiful to humans as well as insects (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMiP2SM8Tpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMiP2SM8Tpk).

nicklovescode 11y ago
I was happy to see someone else bring up that book as well. I did not imagine someone else or make a connection

melling 11y ago

I wish I'd known 20 years ago how important design was going to be. Getting my 10,000 hours of design isn't going to be easy. I started this course a few days ago on Udacity: https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-the-design-of-everyday-things--design101 https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-the-design-of-everyd... And I'm using this subredit to learn how to draw: http://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals http://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals

quizotic 11y ago

Back when I was a 16 year old mediocre chess player, the captain of our high school team took me aside, set up a position and asked "Do you like white or black?" I looked at the board and said "I don't know." And channeling a Yoda then decades in the future, he said "That is why you lose." His name was Matthew Looks, and his point was that it doesn't matter whether you're right or wrong. It only matters that you have a visceral opinion. If you believe something or care about something strongly, it gets you to engage. If it turns out that you're objectively wrong, the clash will focus your attention and you'll learn. Just having an opinion, just caring, will bring out a better game. This is how I interpret PG's post on taste. Having good taste is wonderful. But having taste, even bad taste, is better than not caring at all.

r0naa 11y ago
Did you get any better as a result of following his advice?
vacri 11y ago
> If you believe something or care about something strongly, it gets you to engage. If it turns out that you're objectively wrong, the clash will focus your attention and you'll learn. Centuries of religion argue against this; instead, people tend to make up a ton of story to 'smooth over the cracks'. I agree that people are better at things they are interested in, but it's just not true that having a strong opinion makes you better at it. Check out the 'autism vaccers' as another counter-example.
solve 11y ago
Sounds like some of the worst advice I've ever heard.
- delish 11y ago
  Yes! You're doing it!
- adwn 11y ago
  I agree. There are already too many people in this world with strong opinions on topics they don't fully understand. We certainly do not need even more of them.
  - deciplex 11y ago
    Uh, you're both really missing the important part: > If it turns out that you're objectively wrong, the clash will focus your attention and you'll learn. Yeah, if you have a bunch of ill-informed wrong opinions and, out of some stubborn ignorance, you refuse to update them when the conflicting evidence comes crashing in all around you, then you will be a stupid person. However, if you have a bunch of wrong opinions which you then turn into right opinions after reality keeps kicking you in the ass, then you are on the road to being a smart person. But if you're apathetic, you won't even notice reality kicking you in the ass. Reality won't even bother with you. You're right that having wrong opinions as a steady state is worse than having no opinion, but the whole point of GP was not to be in a steady state in the first place.

mlpinit 11y ago

"In math and engineering, recursion, especially, is a big win. Inductive proofs are wonderfully short. In software, a problem that can be solved by recursion is nearly always best solved that way." I don't make use of recursion very often but this statement doesn't sound right to me. Actually the opposite seems right. If you read the chapter on recursion from Concrete Mathematics (I'm thinking about the The Tower of Hanoi, Lines in the Plane and The Josephus Problem here, it seems obvious that a closed form is much faster, simpler and according to the blog post more beautiful. Does anybody with more extensive knowledge on the topic care to comment on this?

sirsar 11y ago
I find inductive proofs tend to leave me hanging - I become convinced that the conclusion is true, but I still have no intuition as to why. For example, Wikipedia's proof [0] that sum of 0..n == n(n+1)/2 is convincing, but unenlightening. There are proofs which seem much more "elegant" to me, for example, pairing (1+n) == (2+n-1) == (3+n-2) ... (n/2 + (n/2 + 1)) [1], or constructing triangles [also 1]. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_induction#Example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_induction#Example [1] http://betterexplained.com/articles/techniques-for-adding-the-numbers-1-to-100/ http://betterexplained.com/articles/techniques-for-adding-th...
- mlpinit 11y ago
  The book I mentioned above, Concrete Mathematics, talks about how to develop an intuition when it comes to induction. One of the advice mentioned is to always start with smallest cases possible because that makes the problem easier to understand. I suppose the more you practice the better your intuition becomes.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
btilly 11y ago
If you're trying to prove a result, odds are that you will get there faster and easier with recursion. Once you really understand it, you can use a closed form. Likewise there are many categories of problems that are easy to write down recursive solutions to, but good solutions will take work.