[bachbach]

I, and many other nerds sound like that to other people when we talk of X or Y - having ideas and the ability to communicate them effectively is hard - especially when it is not just an idea - but a shift in perspective.

I feel strongly about this because I was trying to explain a possible implication of optogenetics to somebody this morning and suspect I came off sounding like a crazy person :)

What Musk is doing is making the familiar alien, trying to see from an external perspective holistically - which makes for results which are closer to something out of Ghost in the Shell than the everyday banality - and yet the banal world - when all the pieces fit together from a higher perspective really does possess an extraordinary big picture. Like the termites in the hill or Charles Darwin's understanding of how something normal (sex, reproduction rates and selection) really leads to something extraordinary.

Anybody looking through the macroscope will sound maladjusted until their beliefs ignored or become widely accepted. Think of that doctor who tried to get his coworkers to wash their hands. We have a hard time distinguishing between those and Coco the Clown. Our prior is 'if you don't sound like my internal monologue you must not be an ally and so be subject to suspicion'.

The other side to this - groups like Scientology take advantage of anybody who lowers their wards.

[petermcneeley]

I have always assumed that if I explain something to someone and they dont get it then I need to do a better job at explaining it. Its like the difference between a magician and a scientist.

A Magician takes the trivial and shrouds it in confusion till one is astonished by the reveal. A scientist deconstructs the reveal into the simple and trivial.

I loath the magician.

[bachbach]

Well, there is simple and correct and simple and wrong.

The Copernican description of reality is simple and correct and threw away complex but incomplete models.

I'm sure you've noticed that people frequently create complex models for something, but it is only later it gets reduced to something easier to understand.

Probably this is because the elegant model is difficult to reach on the first pass, so the more circuitousness paths are taken first - your thoughts?

[petermcneeley]

Interesting, have you read this? https://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.ht...

[bachbach]

Yes, it's interesting.

Not appreciating the mental scaffolding that takes you to the next point is a serious problem. Developmental economics and artificial intelligence - the scaffolding is neglected.

In developmental economics we only thought we knew how we got rich. Regressive planning (working backwards) failed because we are unaware of most of our past, even the recent past - we had a false consciousness about what actually took place. What we have is a bunch of just-so stories for grown ups and this is normal for humans in everything.

Neuroscientists say this is feature of how our memory works.

AI is similar because of Moravec's Paradox. People have been going around saying that more intelligent machines will come and replace physical labour for some time but the opposite is true. The paradoxical results of Moravec's Paradox occur because again we are unaware of the scaffolding required to replicate an artificial cerebellum system aka a brain/nerves/muscles - a body that knows how to move.

If you watch the most recent videos of walking computers you'll notice we are heavily implying we need very effective computer algorithms and vast quantities of data to produce a robot that can walk across the floor.

There is something wrong with that picture. I wonder if sea slugs brute forced traveling across the ocean floor with their supercomputers (now lost to us!).

[petermcneeley]

A slug doesnt need a supercomputer because a slug is working more like this thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44