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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 12th, 2023

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  • Hasok Chang, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, wrote a wonderful book Is Water H2O? In it he traces the historical and philosophical twists and turns to get from water to H2O. Along the way, he reckons with and treats seriously competing theories other than what emerged as the winner.

    In the end, he doesn’t disagree with the role of H2O in water. Rather, he shows how the process of scientific theory making is benefited from a pluralistic view through s repetitive process of challenge and theory adjustment.

    I mainly made the comment because we shouldn’t always assume what we were shown in high school captures the deeper process of insight creation.

    He deals with the weekly emergent qualities like surface tension. We might be able to say that surface tension is one property of wetness even.

    But I also think that water is one of the few phenomena that seems to actually have a strongly emergent qualities. Which is to say, there’s qualities that are in water that are not explainable by the properties of its component parts.

    Ultimately, one of Chang’s goals it to contextualize and not reduce these scientific concepts for greater insights.

    To be more accurate, I don’t think it’s wrong to say that water is more than just H2O. To get gestalt, we should say water is something other than the sum of its parts, H2O.












  • I think DeGroots work in the 30s and 40s shows otherwise. Grandmasters know rather quickly what they were going to do in general as they orient to the board state. Then they explore a small set of moves and explode them into a few moves into the future and pick the best candidate. Finally, they spend time verifying their selection.

    They have good memories, for sure, but for real game states. This is a quote from Herb Simon, an important early researcher in psychology and computer science:

    The most extensive work to date on perception in chess is that done by De Groot. In his search for differences between masters and weaker players, de Groot was unable to find any gross differences in the statistics of their thought processes: the number of moves considered, search heuristics, depth of search, and so on. Masters search through about the same number of possibilities as weaker players-perhaps even fewer, almost certainly not more-but they are very good at coming up with the “right” moves for further consideration, whereas weaker players spend considerable time analyzing the consequences of bad moves.

    De Groot did, however, find an intriguing difference between masters and weaker players in his short-term memory experiments. Masters showed a remarkable ability to reconstruct a chess position almost perfectly after viewing it for only 5 sec. There was a sharp drop off in this ability for players below the master level. This result could not be attributed to the masters’ generally superior memory ability, for when chess positions were constructed by placing the same numbers of pieces randomly on the board, the masters could then do no better in reconstructing them than weaker players, Hence, the masters appear to be constrained by the same severe short-term memory limits as everyone else, and their superior performance with “meaningful’ positions must lie in their ability to perceive structure in such positions and encode them in chunks.








  • I like cruising. There’s nothing like a state highway in the US that’s popular enough to be well maintained, but not so popular that it’s crowded and in the suburbs. They whisk you past some amazing sights and pieces of Americana that are quickly fading.

    As for commuting, anything more than 20 minutes one way is either hell or a trip needing some level of planning between walking to the fridge and sending man to the moon.