kirkules

The back of the envelope computations are shockingly shallow and meaningless.

(20 Questions, from the intro) Trying to think of a thing for the game is not a search over a set of known things. Just saying the possibility set has size 2^N doesn't mean that choosing something in the set consists of processing the set. But even if that were the case, and if you do consider each of 2^N options, the consideration process itself is not trivial and probably varies wildly.

(English typing) Touch typists do not (only) simply convert an existing/known string to a sequence of hand actions by mapping character to action. There are whole words and sequences that become units/tokens from the standpoint of muscle memory and processing (this will be relevant to the rubik's cube topic as well). When i type, there's a sort of planning and queueing of actions, but also there's monitoring of actions that allows fast error correction with pressing delete a number of times or holding it and costly determining when the error has been reached, and resuming afterward. Of course the process likely varies from person to person, but there's such a host of other things going on that should count as part of the information processed in this simple behavior that the example and numbers used in the paper for it are utterly useless even as estimates.

(Rubik's cube blind speed solving) Again we see reference to the entire possibility space (from the perspective of possible configurations of the puzzle). But solvers do not identify the configuration they encounter with reference to the space, nor do they search the space for it. They look for patterns and ignore what they cannot use for the strategy they have practiced. The cuber often does not commit to memory the whole configuration, but will often convert it to a custom and bespoke mnemonic. It's just utter nonsense to refer to the number of possible configurations, it has nothing directly to do with what the human is doing.

If I memorize a 30 word passage, i have not "processed the set of possible 30 word passages".

I was a TA and instructor for several programming classes, usually in Java, with which I was moderately experienced but not an expert.

My students would frequently ask how to accomplish something, how syntax or keywords worked on q deeper level, whether there was a stl class for a purpose, or what caused an error, etc, that I didn't know about already. I didn't hide my ignorance even a little bit, but Idid help them find an answer. In lecture settings, if it wasn't too much of a digression, I'd demonstrate finding the answer. In one on one help, or one on group help, I'd lead them through finding the answer themselves. My students had a lot of respect for me as an authority on the language and still listened to my advice and came to me with questions frequently.

This is kinda important across all fields, but especially in programming, you don't need to know the right answer by rote so much as you need to be able to seek and identify the right answer with some independence using existing resources.

I'm reminded of a high school programming class where a project partner named variables with the most crude and lewd words he could imagine. Not that I was prudish, but he unsurprisingly never remembered what "butts" was for and somehow never figured out why he kept getting confused by his own code.

Agree, looking for the multi upvote button

I mean can't you just have the input signal to the light be a disjunction of signals? So it's on if the camera is on OR if some programmatic signal says turn it on?

I don't see why they should be mutually exclusive

I'm thinking you misinterpreted the comment you responded to? I read it as saying that you don't necessarily have to have employment linked healthcare just because you have at-will employment.

The "inexplicably" being a commentary on the wisdom/sanity/compassion of linking healthcare to employment, rather than a claim that the parent comment had made an inexplicable leap of logic

I can remember a number of instances of having to dive into design docs to ascertain how a few systems interacted with each other.

I bet a lot of the time it might be good enough to just have a "here's the set of options we went with" version of a design proposal/doc as documentation

Do you have, offhand, any names or references to point me toward why you think fish and lizards can make rapid common sense deductions about man made objects they couldn't have seen in their evolutionary histories?

Also, separately, I'm only assuming but it seems the reason you think these deductions are different from hard wired answers if that their evolutionary lineage can't have had to make similar deductions. If that's your reasoning, it makes me wonder if you're using a systematic description of decisions and of the requisite data and reasoning systems to make those decisions, which would be interesting to me.

Some adjectives stack, like "terribly".

Though maybe there's some kind of strong enough diminishing effect on emphasis value such that any number of "terribly"s still has bounded effect XD

It's weird to me for "ease factor" to be an intrinsic property of a card/thing to learn at all. I study things like Chinese characters with Anki and it's not but just rote memorization, there are systems and structures of knowledge for each card's content to be integrated into. For Chinese characters (as with many other things) there's history, etymology, deconstruction into components, personal mnemonics and associations, literary context and references, etc., all of which affects how easy it is for me to learn any one card's content. Usually i do not initially know much for a given card, but other cards and external learning will make any given card easier over time than it initially was.

And the set of external factors for any card is not fixed; there's no "true ease factor" for a card, because the set of external factors i will probably encounter is not a fixed (determinism aside) property of a card. It depends on me and my changing state.

You're imagining something you think is what it's like to be a crab, or what you think it's like to have more legs, etc., but why do you have any confidence that's what it actually is like?

The existence of "The dress", which is seen by different people or the same person in different states of mind as white/gold or blue/black, and other such illusions, would seem to invalidate your perspective.

Or if that's not persuasive, just consider different software versions, different video drivers, etc. running on the same hardware.

Or consider that if you believe a tumor in your visual cortex could meaningfully change color perception in your model, then why wouldn't a difference in cortex structure have some effect too? I'm willing to bet no two humans have ever had or probably will ever have the same arrangement of visual cortex neurons and other relevant brain biology. Do you think you know enough to say any such variation is irrelevant?

Sure, an LLM based tool may happily double down on a wrong position, and articulately address a student's concerns in doing so, possibly hallucinating convincing evidence.

100% agree with this attitude. A human whose attention is directed at you who uses their eyes for input will turn their eyes to you. The eyes are not just signalers, but the person actually needs to turn them to you to direct their attention to you, in some sense, so this is a good indicator that they have done so.

No, it's the most... Hobby... Mathematician