nyan_sandwich, you're really good at delving into the cthonian labyrinths of post-x-rationalist thought, learning something new, and distilling from it an essence potable to merely human minds. It's to provoke another round of that skill usage that I bring up this tweet:
"Simplicity" refers to a universal prior, not to a coded/compressed language you make out of your past experiences, that's coding theory.
Any chance of a nyan_sandwich post on the differences between universal priors and optimal codes?
we'll see. I'd have to develop a thorough understanding and see a need for a post, and decide that writing was a good idea...
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean is a book about very big ocean waves-- the science, the danger (mostly to ships), and the surfers.
Really big waves weren't scientifically verified until about ten years ago-- part of the problem was that even though sailors had been reporting huge waves, scientists had a theory that big waves (maybe over 80', though I don't have a sharp dividing line) required very rare conditions. Once satellite surveillance for waves was possible, it turned out that big waves were fairly common, and might explain why a ship or two per week disappears.
Russell Wynn: "The way the radar system works, the very big ones are difficult to measure," he said. When behemoth waves appeared in the satellite data, the space agencies considered these readings to be errors, and they were automatically deleted. "They give you missing value code instead, which is really annoying. We shout at them for that."
The reason I'm posting this is that I've become very skeptical about any theory which claims that something which is well-attested and physically possible is actually not happening.