Monkeymind comments on Configurations and Amplitude - Less Wrong

26 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 April 2008 07:41AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (375)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Monkeymind 13 April 2012 09:22:40PM *  -1 points [-]

x

Comment author: Swimmer963 13 April 2012 09:45:25PM 3 points [-]

I can relate to objects, but I can't relate to abstract concepts.

Sounds like you think very literally or visually. Reminds me of Michael Faraday, one of the discoverers of magnetism, who is said to have known very little math, only basic algebra, but who invented the electric motor through experiment and his ability to understand concepts visually (with no math!) It's a different type of mind, that's all, and quite practical. I like math and find it moderately easy, but I would never be able to figure out how to make electronic circuits by playing around with them.

What is math? Well, you have three apples and you have three skyscrapers and you have three mouse droppings...what do they all have in common? Not that materials they're made of, but the fact that there are three of them. When you think the number 'three', you can imagine three of any object. It's not limited to you being able to imagine three of your fingers...I could tell you any noun right now and you could imagine three of them.

Comment author: Monkeymind 14 April 2012 01:43:35AM -1 points [-]

Thank you, yes, I can understand nouns. You point at something and give it a name. I can understand three. I can't understand how 'three' can travel. Because there is no such thing as 'a' three. I can also not understand how a three can travel in a non specific direction. I can understand how three apples can travel on a truck or through the air if I throw them. I can conceptualize these things quite easy. I can understand the 3 dimensions of LWH. I can visualize all kinds of 3 dimensional shapes. I can not visualize 4 dimensions and according to Steven Hawking, no one can.

Although I can plot a sine wave on a graph or observe it on an o-scope, I can see that these things are representative of something that is happening....an event. I can not visualize a 'wave'. I can visualize someone waving their hand in the air. I understand a wave is a disturbance through a medium. The hand disturbs air molecules. The wave does not travel the hand does.

We use math to describe waves and energy and fields. When theories use these words interchangeably as nouns and verbs, I realize that it is not only grammatically incorrect at times, it is nonsensical and so I must disregard what I am being told.

Comment author: Desrtopa 14 April 2012 01:53:09AM 2 points [-]

A word can be a noun and a verb. You can warm your feet at a fire, or fire a gun, for instance. The informational content is what's important, not the words themselves.

Sometimes, difficult to understand jargon conceals actual nonsense, but sometimes it's simply a way for people who're well versed in a subject to communicate with each other efficiently. As a rule of thumb, if people are able to successfully predict things in advance which you can't predict, or make things you can't make, then you should assume that they really do know something you don't.

Comment author: Swimmer963 14 April 2012 01:57:21AM 1 point [-]

When theories use these words interchangeably as nouns and verbs, I realize that it is not only grammatically incorrect at times, it is nonsensical and so I must disregard what I am being told.

I've read in a lot of books on quantum physics that yeah, the ways of explaining it with commonplace nouns and verbs don't make sense. But the math makes predictions anyway, so we can make a wild guess that whatever reality is like on that level, it has something that corresponds to our mathematical concepts. There are 'particles' which are a little bit like our everyday conception of the word (a small piece of matter) and a little bit not, since no commonplace 'particle' is massless. But the math only gives correct predictions if you have some particles, like photons, be massless...and it's simpler to assume that they actually exist than that we're getting the whole theory horribly wrong and somehow still getting useful predictions out of it.