Not a perfect video by any means but I’m going to go ahead and say I no longer recommend Feynman’s books except the lectures on computation. I haven’t reviewed the books and this isn’t an anti-recommendation, just a removal of any positive recommendation. I do think she has some good criticisms about a lot of the stories in Surely You’re Joking not actually being true or being misogynist.
One interesting thing about the video is she complains a lot about Feynman having ghostwriters who aren’t disclosed well enough, not writing his own books. And I think that’s a valid complaint. But I knew Feynman didn’t personally write those books. Tons of other ghostwriting is less disclosed than this. She also complains about the lack of editing of some Feynman books based on audio recordings, but I’d rather have that than significant editing like was done for Ayn Rand Answers.
CF involves connecting ideas with goals and breaking goals down into many simple sub-goals. This makes ideas much easier to evaluate: check if it works for each sub-goal. This lets thinking be more of a flowchart method. There’s still creativity involved, but you get more guidance than unstructured thinking. Induction and MCDM are highly flawed while CF offers something that doesn’t have known dealbreaker flaws. Caring a lot about dealbreaker flaws is also something CF emphasizes more than alternatives. CF says to categorize issues as dealbreakers or not (more often called “decisive” or not) and focus on decisive issues. Instead of one vague high level goal, CF uses many small, simple, decisive, binary sub-goals which allow for much easier, faster objective evaluation. The point is to use ideas (which can be answers, theories, decisions, actions, plans, conclusions, etc) which have no decisive errors. CF rejects indecisive, quantitative reasoning about how good things are and replaces it with looking for what issues will cause failure at what (sub-)goals. CF focuses on failure not success because one error can cause failure while dozens of good traits cannot cause success (the addition of some errors can still lead to failure despite all the good traits). Also error correction correction is how evolution works and contradiction is a powerful logical tool with no equivalent positive version.
omg i was asking multiple AIs today to find typos in a draft and all of them told me typos inside quotations. i said i can’t edit that since it’s not my words and then they agreed we shouldn’t edit it. but by default they tell people to edit quoted text. ughhhh
This looks interesting to me. Maybe important. Not sure.
He says you can replace all buttons on a scientific calculator with only 2 buttons and do all the same things. The buttons are the number 1 and the function he discovered, eml:
seems curious, but also nand is primitive[1], but eml’s definition has:
exp and log (obviously)
addition/subtraction
multiplication (if you don’t count subtraction; use *-1 and + instead)
I think you could make a brute force version of this that uses patterns like (1 - p_1)(\text{expr}) + \cdots to make irrelevant factors 0 (also p_i \in \{0,1\}).
we call it not and but if and is primitive i don’t see why nand shouldn’t be; and is just not nand. ↩︎
Yeah I thought of brute forcing it with e.g. a function that adds every primitive and has separate inputs for all of them and also a coefficient for every term with its own input. Then you can zero out all primitives but the one you’re currently using.
But doing it with only 2 inputs and 3 primitive operators (according to the current standard understanding of what is primitive), and via a single fairly simple combination of them instead of using them independently, seems pretty clever, not brute force.
I think he went straight to the point and was clear about contradictions as opposed to trying to make everything agreeable. Though I don’t think that’s too rare and it’s also compatible with arrogance.
How he chose quotes and addressed them specifically rather than vaguely referring to the whole article is good.
I have some idea about all his misconceptions about CR and I don’t think any of them are bad faith.
His writing style is simple and easy to understand. Not pretentious.
I’m not sure whether without the bias of you thinking it’s good I would’ve had a positive reaction. I wouldn’t think it was bad though. I have noticed I’ve been evaluating what discussion has good style regardless of whether I agree on LW and other places.
I added Discourse embedded on my blogs. It’s read-only for now but by request I’d consider the recently-added version where you can use the forum on the blog pages instead of clicking through to the forum first.
Examples:
On curi.us I only did it for posts from 2022 and later. I didn’t want to create forum topics for all old posts.
Topics that were created manually, not via RSS feed, should now be linked properly including the multi-factor math article.
CF articles and 2022-or-later curi.us posts that didn’t already have a forum topic will get one generated when they’re loaded. So we might get a ton of new topics created shortly as some web scrapers hit them.
The first comment should’ve explained more the relevance from his linked article to your article. Given you’re a Popperian he should expect a wider background and perspective difference.
I could say Jiro assumes too much about what decisive arguments are and how a decisive-argument perspective would respond to the learned helplessness article. (I want to try to write one now.) But I think TAG also does this. TAG has some idea about what decisive means which is tightly coupled with infallibility and non-tentativeness. Personally I think its fine, or good even, so long as they will try to think according to the different perspective once its presented.
Actually, I think a difference with TAG is that Jiro is less clear about what the contradiction is that he’s bringing up. This leads to confusion given the difference in perspective and background knowledge.
