westoncb

63 ms·

571.
by westoncb 8y ago
I've been trying to get some feedback on a related idea for making 'view-independent program models', which could be rendered with alternate syntaxes (or even richer visual augmentation than strictly text). The main idea is t
572.
by westoncb 8y ago
True. I hesitated to use that as an example because of the potential for confusion—but to clarify, I just meant that the motor skills are an example of another thing being involved beyond a clear representation somewhere, not that they are
573.
by westoncb 8y ago
I think what's maybe misleading here is that while there may be an accurate representation of a bicycle somewhere in someone's brain, that does not mean they're able to consciously access it and, e.g., recreate it through a
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by westoncb 8y ago
I have a strong distaste for science popularizations that misrepresent results to make things seem more fun or exciting or whatever—but this isn't that. This is more a presentation of a physicist's worldview, giving some backgroun
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by westoncb 8y ago
Hmm... It's not from Aeon, and the author is a practicing theoretical physicist who also does work in history and philosophy of science—so about as well-suited to the topic at hand as you could get.
576.
by westoncb 8y ago
Interesting—though I'm not convinced that the IBM approach to generalizing computation would have led us to general purpose computers as we know them now. Sure, it was more general than what had come before, allowing some parameteriz
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by westoncb 8y ago
First off, thanks for the comment—pretty interesting stuff. One thing continues to bother me though. > My point is that machine arithmetic preceded machine data storage. > The concept of algorithms dates back to at least the 9th centu
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by westoncb 8y ago
> ... in history, there is rarely a single “correct reading”, but rather many interpretations that at time reinforce and at times weaken each other. As I was reading the GP's interpretation of these historical events, it occurred to
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by westoncb 8y ago
I spent a couple years developing some software for doing text editing in a new way, not quite in any of the categories mentioned. The specific piece of hardware I was aiming to use at the time was the Microsoft Kinect—but the main goal was
580.
by westoncb 8y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong adamnemecek, but it sounds to me like you're referring to something like how we don't need to read Newton's Principia in order to pick up the essential ideas from Newtonian Mechanics—by participat
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by westoncb 8y ago
Hmm, I mostly agree with you. To be clear though, I'm not talking about plot summaries. More like it accretes into shared cultural wisdom and values.
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by westoncb 8y ago
What about insights into human nature or how to live well? I agree that if your motivation for reading is the experience that will occur in your mind while reading, there can be no substitute; but if we're talking about value-conferrin
583.
by westoncb 8y ago
That's an interesting (and valid, imo) point. My guess is that on Twitter the prominent experts are less interesting because: 1. They're already speaking from a position of superiority in a certain sense, whereas on HN you're
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by westoncb 8y ago
Just to ensure we're talking about the same thing, I'm referring to 'Cognitive Science' not 'Cognitivist Science,' which sounds more like a branch of philosophy. I think that's the main disconnect in what
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by westoncb 8y ago
> Also, the author seems to be a bit on the Freud-is-dead wagon There is very good reason from that. The contemporary dominant paradigms covering the theoretical ground once dominated by e.g. Freud and Jung can be found under the heading
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by westoncb 8y ago
That's a direction I've been thinking about too!
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by westoncb 8y ago
> If you are offering employee #1 market pay, why would you give them 10% equity? So that they care about the company on a similar level to the founders, and feel a real sense of ownership, dedication, and responsibility. I've been
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by westoncb 8y ago
> Once you have one solution you can find others by applying the transformation. Interesting. That sounds like roughly the inverse of what I was trying to describe: using the transformations to generate rather than analyze. That's p
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by westoncb 8y ago
I've been wondering for a long time how it is that symmetry groups are used in science, and I was thinking about it some more while looking at this. Is the idea that when analyzing some natural phenomenon there's a bunch of comple
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by westoncb 8y ago
That's pretty cool—congrats. Especially interesting for me to see, because it's the kind of tool and business model that interests me. One thing I wonder though is how it can be sustainable using the one time cost model. I suppose
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by westoncb 8y ago
I think that's the difficulty a lot of people have with this: it seems to them like their idea might be one of those "one in a million". Part of the difficultly for me has been realizing that the it's not just a rare, go
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by westoncb 8y ago
> The wavefunction is the simplest construct that explains our experimental results (it appears in every interpretation), so it's simplest to assume it just is what's really happening. You are addressing a straw man. I never sa
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by westoncb 8y ago
> Treating the wavefunction as physically real is perfectly reasonable. What's your justification for that? I remember Arthur Eddington pointing out that it could be interpreted as modeling our limited knowledge of a quantum system
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by westoncb 8y ago
Interestingly, that was the only one I categorized differently from the authors—I could find a meaning for it. It's not an aphorism in the same way as the others (I'm not clear on whether that was the point, or just whether the st
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by westoncb 8y ago
I'm not going to purchase the PDF, but this sounds problematic already: > More precisely, I will claim that 1) according to quantum field theory, the most fundamental objects of matter are quantum fields and not particles, and show
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by westoncb 8y ago
That does sound pretty close to what I had in mind. Are i and j from your example associated with orthogonal axes in a plane?
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by westoncb 8y ago
Hmm. I only see 'intrinsic curvature' used when there is a potential confusion about whether it's intrinsic or extrinsic (otherwise it's just 'curvature'). And if that is the case, so that there is an embedding
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by westoncb 8y ago
But none of that is related to my key point: multiplication by unitary values is significantly different depending on which axis the unit comes from (real vs imaginary), hence my usage of 'asymmetric'. In the last part of my first
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by westoncb 8y ago
Sure, I guess that's a consequence of general rotational symmetry. The main thing I was pointing out were the different geometric behaviors of multiplication by real vs imaginary units—not so much the difference between negative and po
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by westoncb 8y ago
I think there's definitely something to your suggestion here. For instance, there is no result to sqrt(-1) on the real line, but it becomes possible in the complex plane because you have an additional degree of freedom. One qualifier I

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