"A final obstacle that stops us from filling each other’s buckets with wisdom: it might kill us.
If you’re on a Mac, you can open up a program called Terminal and, with just a few lines of code, ruin your computer. You’re not supposed to screw around in there unless you really know what you’re doing.
The human brain does not have Terminal, for good reason. If you could muck around with your own source code, you could suddenly make your lungs stop working, or destroy your ability to see blue, or get yourself sexually attracted to birds. That’s why you have to wall it off, so that neither you nor anyone else can break your brain."
I like this idea - reminds me of hearing of sci-fi stories where even cursory communication with aliens is catastroohic because they share knowledge we are not meant to know and destroy ourselves because of it.
And the comment of someone(?) on TV being bad for children because it gives them answers to questions they wouldn't have asked.
Talk is cheap, but maybe we should be a little careful, and most of all careful of what we listen to.
>If you’re on a Mac, you can open up a program called Terminal and, with just a few lines of code, ruin your computer. You’re not supposed to screw around in there unless you really know what you’re doing.
This is what they told us in computer class back then to make sure we don't learn anything wortwhile. Reading it on HN of all place makes me very sad.
Why is the only way to learn something worthwhile about a computer to poke blindly at the terminal? Experimentation is a healthy component of learning, but that doesn't make it the only component of learning. Preferably, you at least learn enough about the computer beforehand to know what you risk messing up and roughly how long it might take to get back to the previous state so you can experiment more than once. At that point you "really know what you're doing".
GP is right in that "fear of screwing up" is a huge blocker in learning computers. It's really hard to screw anything up so badly that you can't recover by reinstalling the OS / factory-resetting the device, worst-case losing some data and a few hours of your time.
But with brains, well, every such screw up would be debilitating or fatal to the person whose brain sits at the other end of your REPL.
Just a thought - I'm realising that I internalised this fear with computers, having been raised with this idea that they are "easy to screw up, better not to look inside". It was fair when we had a computer room and a family computer, but since you can buy a second hand laptop for less than 50$, and as you said can solve most issues very easily, it is not warranted at all.
The fear was much more real back then. I too grew up with a family computer, but I was the only one being able to both break it and then fix it afterwards... Fortunately, there was nothing that couldn't be fixed by reinstalling the OS, and I quickly picked up on the advice to have separate "System" and "Data" partitions, so you don't lose anything important if you need to wipe the OS.
Reading this makes me realize how incredibly lucky I was to grow up in the eight bit days. When we got our first family computer, a ZX Spectrum, one of the first things I learned is that it was 100% impossible to break the thing just by pressing keys on the keyboard. Just unplug, restart, and the whole tiny system is loaded from ROM. That gave me the freedom to explore fearlessly what the system could do, and what I could do to it.
Edit: I'm sure by now somebody has found a way to thrash the system so hard that it somehow causes irreversible hardware damage just by running software; but I guess that would have to be the result of considerable, purposeful effort from somebody who knew exactly what they were doing.
Fair, but it's still a good analogy, especially for less technically inclined.
If our brains were easy to interface with or scramble remotely, it would become way too easy for one to kill or severely mess up themselves or others, possibly at scale.
With computers, especially today, almost anything can be fixed by a reboot and maybe a rollback. But can you imagine having a REPL to your own brain and accidentally screwing something up? Say, disabling higher functions, or launching an infinitely recursive function, and then losing connection? You can't exactly reboot your brain.
This also reminds me of the McCollough effect [1] which can affect your perception of colorless gratings for an unexpectedly substantial amount of time afterwards just by starting at some images.
This is also the reason why self-improvement, changing any behaviors no matter if it's about procrastination, sports or mental health takes so long and is so tiresome.
If the brain could be changed easily it would be very unstable and humanity might have died out very fast.
It's really amazing to me how instinctive behavior works and what that reveals about how the brain works. Like an instinctive behaivor would need an instinctive pathway from stimulus to processing to motor response. In order for such a thing to work properly there must be hardcoded protocols along that entire path - i.e. not learnt.
There may be some limited local learning along the way, for instance the input pipeline may learn to tune out some defects or noise.
Another interesting point is that our conscious minds can interact in some limited ways with our instincts, it can be influenced by being put in a certain emotional state, and it can to some extent suppress or override the natural response, e.g. not flinching away from pain. Thus at the boundaries the conscious mind must also speak these common protocols. Then it follows that reinforcement learning in the brain is quite limited in where it happens.
I read somewhere that some believe consciousness to have arisen from paradoxical wants (i.e. not dropping something hot to accomplish a task).
I just remembered hearing on joe rogan maybe 10 years ago about delta wave (?) training, where someone would have their delta waves monitored while watching a movie for example. When the waves got outside optimal range the movie would begin to stutter and buffer until the waves got back into optimal range. It was said to be efficient - and it's effectively training your subconcious.
The effects kept going after the training, and you made no conscious effort to change the waves, the discomfort from the stuttering was driving the brain to lower delta waves.
This is all from a JRE podcast years back, so I'm probably wrong, but I think the logic was that this could be applied to other subconcious processes (like regulating your heartbeat to stay in some optimal value, or the serotonin levels in the brain), and that the effects were not conscious. Kind of setting a new normal for yourself.
Opening up the "case" requires disconnecting the "computer" from "power". Since we haven't figured how to get "the power" going again once it's off this analogy is kind of worthless.
Hey, this was a good blog post. During the first section, I came up with a bunch of objections, and then by the end he had addressed them all (that is not to say resolved them). And, it was fun. Thumbs up to the author.
All that leaves me is this observation:
> Computer people have a good word for this kind of thing: lossy compression. You simply can’t fit a thought into a sound wave. Something’s gotta go, and what goes is its ineffable essence, its deep meaning. You have to hope that the other person can reconstruct that essence with whatever they have lying around in their head. Often, they can’t.
According to Tolstoy, the role of art is to reconstruct that lost data. That "[a]rt is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them."
So, maybe try writing an opera about how studying at Oxford is a waste of time. Hope that helps.
I liked the analogy I picked up somewhere (I don't remember where, maybe I synthesized it from some of Eliezer's writings), that words are handles, pointers to associations[0] - both factual and emotional ones - and poetry, specifically, is an art of using words to pull those emotional associations in a very calculated way, effectively executing code in your readers' brain to achieve the desired effect.
--
[0] - Today we'd say "tokens stand for their embeddings in the latent space". Funny how those old articles about pointers to areas in concept-space, fuzzy boundaries, associations, etc. suddenly map pretty much perfectly, 1:1, to how LLMs and other generative transformer models work.
William Yeats: "Education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire."
Issue is, academic research is so focused on getting dollars from federal or corporate grants, filling the bucket is the norm. The dispassion within academia is heartbreaking.
It's a reaction to the system within which we live. We must have money to survive and thrive, and thus the vocation to which one devotes oneself is, at the very least partially, driven by the need to feed, clothe, shelter, and entertain oneself. Passion is a luxury for the well provisioned or the uniquely ascetic.
Consider: How many of us would be writing software for a living if it paid like a fry cook?
It's cheaper/easier now to survive than any other time in history. The other thing that should be driving innovation/education is that knowledge is cheaper now than any other time in history. The combination of these two things should be driving innovation at an unparalleled pace. We're probably just behind the curve here and we are likely to see another massive explosion of innovation.
> It's cheaper/easier now to survive than any other time in history.
Just "survive" is too low a point to be interesting. You need way more than just surviving to have spare time and capacity to learn and innovate. And that level, at least in the western world, now comes with absurdly high costs of living (driven by the insanity of the real estate market), so even the "middle class" is mostly stuck running in a hamster wheel.
Running on the hamster wheel is a choice people make. If you wanted to you could live in a LCOL city and work remotely. People want to live in HCOL cities and in bigger fancier houses than they need, they drive bigger fancier cars than they need to, they take fancier vacations than they need to. Obviously this isn't true for everyone but through the middle and upper middle class, it certainly is true.
Plato also has Socrates dismiss the education as filling a bucket metaphor in the Republic. Of course, his solution was trippier (all knowledge is just the remembrance of the Soul's flight to realm of Ideas).
As a counterpoint to the introduction, my postgraduate degree at Oxford is the best thing I have ever done. The professors were engaged. Classes were very good and my social life has never been as interesting since. Don’t listen to this man.
And as a third point between these two, a close friend is finishing a postgraduate degree at Oxford and would agree with “The professors were checked out, the classes were bad, and I felt isolated and alienated” but still feels as though it was worthwhile.
Education is what you get out of it. Especially at the university level. If you are really engaged and trying to find new things it will be a wild ride. If you are there to just 'get the degree' you will find it dull, boring and a chore. What crystalized this thought for me was a few years ago. I had a class that started with 20 people in a corp env and optional. At first all 20 showed. By the last class there was 4. Most had checked out when they realized that you had to do the course work and be engaged (2-3 hours of study per week for 8 weeks). We even made accommodations for those who fell behind as long as they tried. I found being engaged into the coursework is not the norm.
Well, if I could send a short message to myself 15 years back in time, I'd tell myself that - specifically, tell myself that professors and TAs seem disengaged or dumb mostly because they're being forced to teach outside of their direct area of research or expertise, and those same scholars will be thrilled and super-engaged if you approach them to learn about their research. Something I learned just as I was leaving the university.
(That, and investment tips, obviously.)
However, very much like the article claims, I feel that me 15 years ago wouldn't be truly moved and convinced by this message. Hell, I'm sure I must've read or heard that advice many times in my early university time - but I never stopped to actually process it.
> seem disengaged or dumb mostly because they're being forced to teach outside of their direct area of research or expertise
It depends on the people. I had a great fun teaching at the university as a PhD student, because I loved to teach. I obviously liked to teach what I was working on, but also very much other areas. The main reason being that I only truly understood them when teaching - it is by far (for me at least) the bast way to really learn something.
I have two anecdotes now. They have reached the threshold of "actual data". One datum is a five star, the other is a 1 star.
This means with some unusually high level of certainty, that the experience is actually only mildly/moderately good.
Also, the correct approach is to heed the author's every other word. But when I attempt to do that, the statements make little sense, like "can't the through ears" or "You reach brain the".
There is also the fact that I’m not an American and think Americans are used to being taught and treated a way during university which is fundamentally at odd with how Europeans universities work.
Plus I guess moving to England if you have never been exposed to anything else than the standard American friendliness and uber positiveness might feel alienating.
It's not a compression issue. You have some state in your head (which is crosslinked to other state) and you are trying to get someone else to have the same schemas in their head. But you don't really know what's already in their head.
At least in 1:1 conversation you can use an interactive, iterative process which has a higher probability of success (in the article's example: the author spoke to someone and then got a question back indicating a complete lack of understanding). Still pretty terrible, but the best we have got.
I agree it's not lossy-compression that's the problem here.. I think instead it's usually better phrased in terms of 'aliasing'. You can think of using a better (more care, attention and listener-adaptation) method for producing words in your mind as literally an anti-aliasing strategy, which should result in a 'better' resulting signal in the reciever.
This was very much in line with my own thinking, or at least that is what I suspect and can’t know for sure.
With the recent AI buzz I got to think, maybe the keep from the story are higher level concepts that exist only after the underlaying layers have been trained and can therefore not be adressed before.
I find hearing about other people's experiences extremely useful.
What I don't find useful is when people just tell me what to do.
Instead of telling me not to go to Oxford, tell me about the things that surprised you at Oxford. I can make up my own mind about going, and the most effective thing you can do to help me decide is to tell me what it was like for you, without assuming it will be the same for me.
Exactly. Your experience does not have to be the same as mine, especially with overtly broad statements. It’s no different than someone saying “Don’t visit city $C. It sucks!”. I mean, it’s a _whole_ city, are you sure _all_ of it sucks? Maybe you were unlucky in your experiences and I don’t have to be.
Now, if you tell me “Don’t visit restaurant $R in city $C, I got food poisoning and the service was awful” then I will probably avoid that place.
It should really be “If you go to Oxford for graduate studies, in department $D, under professor $P then you will probably have a bad time for the following reasons…”
> I would sit across from them in the dining hall, plates full of chicken tenders and french fries, and explain that postgraduate education in the UK is largely a way of extracting money from foreign students. Professors over there are checked out, classes are bad, and the whole place is pervaded with this sense of isolation and alienation, like everyone is behind a plate of glass.
There is a common hesitancy from accepting wisdom because of ego: they didn't think of it themselves. In addition, wisdom given too freely is seen as low value because the receiver didn't have to earn it and so it doesn't seem scarce enough. Also, the impression between madness, foolishness, and wisdom is hazier and more easily confused for those with less life experience to draw from. Charisma, along with ethos and pathos, are ultimately more effective than logos.
If committing to some career or education investment in time and treasure, then it's worth carefully considering the need and financial advantage for that particular outcome and working back how to get there most efficiently. It's unwise to earn an MBA or PhD simply because you can, because you might not need it or there maybe a net economic disincentive to having it.
I was having a conversation about this over the past weekend. I, and the other person, come from poor countries and now live in a rich one. We think it's important to give back. But sometimes it can feel like a non-trained person trying to save someone who's drowning, and they just drag you down with them. Then it hit me: you can't change someone's life, anymore than you can change someone's mind. The best you can do is be there for them when they are ready to ask for help.
I think about the same question all the time. Instead of can't change, I think human mind is more of a slippery slope of ideas, an overton window. If you try to transmit an idea that is on the far end of that slope, it would appear no exchange has taken place. But that slope is different among a population. If you managed to transmit the same idea to a bunch of people, some will get what you are trying to convey. I believe ideas are better broadcasted and people do change, albeit slowly.
I love this article, but I’d like to add that it is in fact possible to reach the “keep” as the author has called it through emotion.
Emotion is very important to memory and steering thoughts as many studies have shown. [0]
For example: Advertisers, sales people, politicians, coaches, military leaders, charismatic leaders, etc. all use emotion to change minds, create memories and influence behavior.
For an interesting look at the power of this approach, see the documentary “Century of the Self” by the BBC. It’s very interesting and perhaps even eye opening.
It's an accelerated way, kind of grapnel hooking over the castle walls and ninja-ing your way down to the castle treasury. However, it's still difficult to make such attempts stick long-term, and the impact is unpredictable on an individual level. If not for that, advertising would've zombified us all long ago.
Yea. Things we enjoy like cooked dishes that have wide appeal still say nothing if you are going to like that food. The only way for you to really know it to try it. Taste is highly objective.
Now, if the person before me eats a bite and falls to the ground dead, I'm going to skip lunch for that day.
Think you meant "taste is highly subjective" instead of "objective". Unless I misinterpreted your point completely. I find it slightly confusing either way
If you’re on a Mac, you can open up a program called Terminal and, with just a few lines of code, ruin your computer. You’re not supposed to screw around in there unless you really know what you’re doing.
The human brain does not have Terminal, for good reason. If you could muck around with your own source code, you could suddenly make your lungs stop working, or destroy your ability to see blue, or get yourself sexually attracted to birds. That’s why you have to wall it off, so that neither you nor anyone else can break your brain."
I like this idea - reminds me of hearing of sci-fi stories where even cursory communication with aliens is catastroohic because they share knowledge we are not meant to know and destroy ourselves because of it.
And the comment of someone(?) on TV being bad for children because it gives them answers to questions they wouldn't have asked.
Talk is cheap, but maybe we should be a little careful, and most of all careful of what we listen to.