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marc comments on David Deutsch: A new way to explain explanation - Less Wrong
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Comments (28)
I think that 'whilst preserving the predictions' was assumed. Otherwise what's the constraint that's making things hard?
Perhaps it's clearer when written more explicitly though.
It is assumed; it's just not clear to someone who's told that that's Deutsch's idea.
And I certainly wasn't alone in not realizing what "hard to vary" means here; Vladimir_Nesov already had a +5 comment with the term that attempted to summarize the lecture, but my comment with the fuller explanation still got modded up to 4 and some thanks. This probably wouldn't have happened if Nesov's summary, using just "hard to vary", were already clear enough.
I don't agree with your summary.
By your own admission you haven't watched the entire talk. That might make it difficult to provide a full review.
By reducing what Deutsch said to the conjunction fallacy you missed the different emphasis that both Vladimir and I found interesting. If the people that voted up your comment didn't watch the talk (which seems plausible because of the negative nature of the review) then they wouldn't appreciate the difference between what Deutsch says and what you say. Therefore they aren't agreeing with your summary, they're simply appreciating your effort.
I summarized what was important to LW readers. I skipped through the parts of the video that most LWers would have found uninteresting (people used to posit theories with unnecessary details called "myths"? who knew?) so I could get to Deutsch's new explanation of explanation which amounts to "unnecessary details are bad" (which are equivalent to "easy-to-vary" aspects).
Yes, you may have found it interesting. It still would have been nice to know the basic form of Deutsch's point before blowing ~15 minutes listening to boring stuff just to get to something that can be restated in a few sentences.
(Modding my appreciated summary down sure helps your argument though.)
I welcome anyone else to blow 20 minutes of their life to confirm my summary.
I hadn't realised that you were taking the karma ratings as indicative of agreement. I didn't vote it down before because I have tended only to use my downvote on stupid or thoughtless comments - not valid comments that disagree with what I think.
Once it became clear that you thought that the votes weren't just appreciating effort but were signalling agreement it would have been dishonest not to vote it down.
I don't think voting down indicates disagreement, nor do I believe people should use mere disagreement as a reason to vote down. My point was that you can artificially increase the merit of your point by voting down my summary so as to make it look less appreciated.