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Kindly comments on Stuff That Makes Stuff Happen - Less Wrong
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Comments (127)
Twice in this article, there are tables of numbers. They're clearly made-up, not measured from experiment, but I don't really understand exactly how made-up they are - are they carefully or casually cooked?
Could people instead use letters (variables), with relations like 'a > b', 'a >> b', 'a/b > c' and so on in the future? Then I could understand better what properties of the table are intentional.
In my experience, using variables instead of numbers when it's not absolutely necessary makes things ridiculously harder to understand for someone not comfortable with abstract math.
we are talking about the mathematics of causality. I would expect people to be familiar with free variables and algebra.
I for one would find explicit algebraic expessions much clearer than a bunch of meaningless numbers.
Depends what you mean by "familiar". I'd imagine anyone reading the essay can do algebra, but that they're still likely to be more comfortable when presented with specific numbers. People are weird like that - we can learn general principles from examples more easily than from having the general principles explained to us explicitly.
Exceptions abound, obviously.