Douglas_Knight comments on Correlated decision making: a complete theory - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 26 September 2009 11:47AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (22)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 29 September 2009 02:34:35AM 1 point [-]

This reads to me like macho bragging.

Both math and crypto contain errors. Are they the result of sloppiness? the kind of sloppiness Stuart Armstrong attributes to mathematicians?

I don't know much about crypto. LF is said to be repeatedly wrong (in crypto? in another field?). That must constitute a kind of sloppiness. Is it correlated with other kinds of sloppiness?

i see two kinds of sloppiness I see attributed in this thread to mathematicians: (1) that detectable by copyediting; (2) focusing on the hard parts and trusting the easy parts to take care of themselves. (2) can lead to (1). There's a third kind of sloppiness common in senior mathematicians: they supply the proof, but refuse to give the statement. Much of the difference is probably material that mathematicians include that people in CS simply omit. (is crypto published in conferences?)

Comment author: Wei_Dai 29 September 2009 03:00:34AM 0 points [-]

Both math and crypto contain errors. Are they the result of sloppiness? the kind of sloppiness Stuart Armstrong attributes to mathematicians?

According to Stuart, in math there are often errors where "beginning will be true, the middle completely wrong, and the conclusion correct". I was saying that this kind of error doesn't seem to occur often in crypto, and trying to figure out why, with no bragging intended. Do you have another hypothesis, besides the one I gave?

LF is said to be repeatedly wrong (in crypto? in another field?).

What is LF?

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 29 September 2009 03:15:25AM 0 points [-]

My working hypothesis is that math and crypto are very similar, this kind of error occurs frequently, and you just don't notice. What little crypto I know could be called complexity theory. I've read very little and heard it mainly orally. I've experienced this kind of error, certainly in oral complexity theory and I think in oral crypto. Of course, there's a difference when people are trying to reconstruct proofs that are stamped by authority.

I thought it possible you were talking about the person LF.