Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes March 2013 - Less Wrong

9 Post author: Jayson_Virissimo 02 March 2013 10:45AM

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 March 2013 07:42:55AM 12 points [-]

You can't possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It's a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we've been building them for 100 years, it's very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works – it's even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential.

-- Freeman Dyson

Comment author: shminux 02 March 2013 08:52:56AM *  16 points [-]

But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential.

No, the trial was.

Comment author: Neotenic 04 March 2013 02:58:12AM 5 points [-]

The error was epiphenomenal.

Comment author: B_For_Bandana 02 March 2013 07:43:23PM *  6 points [-]

The error was essential in the sense that it was an inevitable outcome of an essential process. Similarly you might say, "exhaling carbon dioxide is not essential for survival; what you really need is to turn food into energy." But if I was prevented from exhaling CO2, I would quickly run into problems.

Comment author: wedrifid 04 March 2013 08:47:45AM *  7 points [-]

The error was essential in the sense that it was an inevitable outcome of an essential process. Similarly you might say, "exhaling carbon dioxide is not essential for survival; what you really need is to turn food into energy." But if I was prevented from exhaling CO2, I would quickly run into problems.

Bad analogy. If I don't get rid of waste products I will die. If I don't make a mistake I will... succeed more quickly and be unrealistically lucky. That's entirely different.

To say the error is essential is a mistake. The error is inevitable, not essential.

Comment author: shminux 02 March 2013 09:12:24PM 6 points [-]

In terms of control systems, trial is the forward path and error is the feedback, so let's agree that both are needed for success...

Comment author: B_For_Bandana 02 March 2013 10:16:15PM 1 point [-]

Yup, agreed.

Comment author: gwern 25 March 2013 04:39:31PM 1 point [-]

Source: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.02/dyson_pr.html

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