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shokwave comments on Some rationality tweets - Less Wrong
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Comments (75)
I like this one. It works equally well against people who tend to eat the tree first and look down on fruit-eaters later, and against people who eat the low-hanging fruit and sit down, contented.
Why eat the tree at all? A live tree will continue to bear fruit. The quote seems to promote immediate use of the closest available resources over patience with higher payoff.
Metaphorical trees are possible to swallow whole, and will thrive in the environment of the metaphorical human stomach, so eating the tree means automatic benefits from all future fruit.
You have tortured this metaphor so hard that you have passed infinite negative utils and come back out on the positive infinity side.
The human brain represents utilons using a fixed-length integer field?
No, but this metaphor has utility occupying a discrete subset of the projective real line isomorphic to a cyclic group.
You win. :-)
I think the only real way to WIN is for us to torture this metaphor-utility metaphor until IT comes back out on the positive infinite side.
Very good!
I, on the other hand, dislike it. Low hanging fruit is a useful and fairly accurate metaphor. This is taking the metaphor and torturing it. It sounds witty, but I don't think it really gets across anything important, nor easily.
Don't look now, but the rest of the comments on the grandparent are also torturing the poor thing. Thankfully, metaphors don't have moral significance.
What is this trying to say?
Reap the easy rewards first, but don't stop there.
The incorrect view that high difficulty entails high reward (and conversely low difficulty entails low reward), when in reality reward and difficulty are not strongly correlated.
As per Peter's comment below.