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gwern comments on Rationality quotes: September 2010 - Less Wrong
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That seems like the extreme case of "you don't really understand something until you can explain it to somebody else", which I'm sure somebody other than me must have said a long time ago.
Yep.
"Epigrams in Programming", by Alan J. Perlis; ACM's SIGPLAN publication, September, 1982
Of course, machine learning algorithms render this obsolete. You don't have to understand something to program it, just have a vague understanding of how that understanding might come about.
Arguably, that's still understanding. 'Now I know that natural language parsing is in this family of parametric functions which my ML algorithm can handle, with the coefficients given by minimizing the divergence from a bazillion word corpus...&etc.'
If that could work, that would be equivalent to having a Level 3 understanding of how to regenerate the required knowledge -- hardly a shortcut!
No, you have to have a certain understanding of how that understanding might come about.