Wednesday, November 23, 2011

3 Reasons to Write Plainly

My friend showed me an essay he wrote for his college application, and I thought it sounded like flowery BS. So this is what I emailed him.

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You should write more plainly for three reasons:

  1. People have bad reading comprehension. People read things and "get the gist" - but it's a pathetically vague gist.

    (Readers have no idea how bad their understanding is. They'll think they've understood something they've read, but fail to answer a simple test question about it.)

  2. Readers get bored easily. The more bored they get, the more they skim, and the less they understand.

    If you want to be understood, don't wrap your message in a bouquet of flowery words. They won't unwrap it, they'll ignore it.

  3. It's already hard enough to get people to understand your concepts.

    Only a few things are easy for everyone to think about: Concrete statements about people, animals, food, war, sex, morality, personality, games, and landscapes. Almost every other concrete thing, and almost every abstract thing, is hard to think about.

    So when you're writing about easy things like sex, you can say fancy things like "I am the east, and Juliet is the sun."

    And when you're writing about hard things like the theory of relativity, you have to say plain things like "Mass dents spacetime the way a bowling ball would dent a bedsheet."

    Most things you'll write about are like the theory of relativity, and not like sex.
So don't write a hard slab of beef jerky that your readers have to chomp on with all their might.




Process your ideas into Gerber weenies.

Friday, February 25, 2011

You can have as much as you want

You like M&Ms, right? So consider this fascinating state of affairs: You can have as many M&Ms as you want.

The fascinating part isn't that you can have nice things -- it's that for some nice things, you can have as much as you want. You can keep eating M&Ms until you completely extinguish your desire to eat more M&Ms, and eat more M&Ms the instant your hunger is rekindled.

If you want to appreciate the luxury of modern life, forget about how awesome our airplanes and cell phones are. Instead, just focus on all the luxuries that are available and affordable to you in unlimited quantities.

  • You can eat as many calories as you want.
  • You can eat as many different kinds of foods as you want.
  • You can have as many pillows and cushions as you want.
  • You can read as many books as you want.
  • You can watch as many movies as you want.
  • You can watch as much porn as you want.
  • You can listen to as many varieties of music as you want.
  • You can take a shower for as long as you want.
  • You can drink as much of any beverage as you want.
  • You can get as drunk as you want.
  • You can make your house as hot or cold as you want.
  • You can light your house as brightly as you want.
  • You can plug in as many electrical appliances as you want.
  • You can drive to as many places as you want.
  • You can learn as many skills as you want.
  • You can talk with as many different people as you want.
If you want to know what the future will be like, just think of everything you like, and imagine having as much as you want!

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Searle's Chinese Room: Slow Motion Intelligence

Imagine if the only books ever written were children's books. People would think books in general were a joke. I think the situation with computers and algorithms today is similar: people don't understand the ridiculous potential power of an algorithm because they only have experience with the "children's algorithms" that are running on their PC today.

Take John Searle's famous Chinese room thought experiment, which goes like this:
A man who doesn't speak Chinese is alone in a room with a big book of rules. The rule book gives detailed procedures for how to write a response in Chinese to any question written in Chinese.

An interlocutor standing outside the room writes a question in Chinese on a strip of paper and slips it under the door. To the man inside, the paper is full of meaningless squiggles. But by painstakingly following the syntactic rules in the rule book, he is able to put together a string of Chinese characters that reply to the interlocutor in perfect Chinese.

Searle claims it's obvious that nothing in the room has a "real understanding" of Chinese, neither the man nor the book. Therefore Searle concludes that "real understanding" is not something a computer could ever have, since a computer is just a rule-following system like the man and the book in the Chinese room.

Searle's Chinese room is a great thought experiment, but it's ultimately a non-insight. I just don't buy that nothing in the room has a "real understanding" of Chinese. Want to know what really understands Chinese? It's quite simply the "rule book".

You have to realize that the "rule book" is not a "rule children's book". You can be sure it has a lot more pages than any actual book could have. Maybe it doesn't have as many pages as a human has neurons (100 billion), but it could easily be a million-pager like the code for Microsoft Word.

And you can be sure the person in the room would be flipping among the pages of instructions a lot slower then the firing rate of neurons. Considering that brains have billions of neurons all firing up to 100 times each second, we're looking at a trillion-fold speed difference between these two language-processing systems.

If you watched an actual Chinese speaker with their brain slowed by a factor of a trillion, you'd see slow and soulless neuron-level computation. When you compare that to watching a man flipping around in a rule book, the Chinese room doesn't necessarily seem like the more mechanical system.

Both systems get their soul back when you zoom out. Imagine zooming out on the Chinese room enough that you can watch a million book-flipping years pass while the interlocutor is waiting for a yes-or-no answer. If you watch that process on fast-forward, you'll see a chamber full of incredibly complex and inscrutable machinery, which is exactly what a Chinese speaker's head is.

The Chinese room is supposed to persuade you that a system made out of mere pages can't "really understand" language. But it doesn't address why a system made out of mere neurons shouldn't have the same limitation. To me it seems clear that the two systems have similar architectures and possess similar powers of understanding.