[HN Gopher] You can't reach the brain through the ears
___________________________________________________________________
You can't reach the brain through the ears
Author : yarapavan
Score : 103 points
Date : 2023-06-08 16:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.experimental-history.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.experimental-history.com)
| iamnotsure wrote:
| I wish people would stop spreading fake news.
| waterheater wrote:
| William Yeats: "Education is not filling a bucket but lighting a
| fire."
|
| Issue is, academic research is so focused on getting dollars from
| federal or corporate grants, filling the bucket is the norm. The
| dispassion within academia is heartbreaking.
| rjbwork wrote:
| >The dispassion within academia is heartbreaking.
|
| It's a reaction to the system within which we live. We must
| have money to survive and thrive, and thus the vocation to
| which one devotes oneself is, at the very least partially,
| driven by the need to feed, clothe, shelter, and entertain
| oneself. Passion is a luxury for the well provisioned or the
| uniquely ascetic.
|
| Consider: How many of us would be writing software for a living
| if it paid like a fry cook?
| rednerrus wrote:
| It's cheaper/easier now to survive than any other time in
| history. The other thing that should be driving
| innovation/education is that knowledge is cheaper now than
| any other time in history. The combination of these two
| things should be driving innovation at an unparalleled pace.
| We're probably just behind the curve here and we are likely
| to see another massive explosion of innovation.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _It 's cheaper/easier now to survive than any other time
| in history._
|
| Just "survive" is too low a point to be interesting. You
| need _way_ more than just _surviving_ to have spare time
| and capacity to learn and innovate. And that level, at
| least in the western world, now comes with absurdly high
| costs of living (driven by the insanity of the real estate
| market), so even the "middle class" is mostly stuck
| running in a hamster wheel.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Plato also has Socrates dismiss the education as filling a
| bucket metaphor in the Republic. Of course, his solution was
| trippier (all knowledge is just the remembrance of the Soul's
| flight to realm of Ideas).
| [deleted]
| gumby wrote:
| It's not a compression issue. You have some state in your head
| (which is crosslinked to other state) and you are trying to get
| someone else to have the same schemas in _their_ head. But you
| don 't really know what's already in their head.
|
| At least in 1:1 conversation you can use an interactive,
| iterative process which has a higher probability of success (in
| the article's example: the author spoke to someone and then got a
| question back indicating a complete lack of understanding). Still
| pretty terrible, but the best we have got.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| As a counterpoint to the introduction, my postgraduate degree at
| Oxford is the best thing I have ever done. The professors were
| engaged. Classes were very good and my social life has never been
| as interesting since. Don't listen to this man.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I have two anecdotes now. They have reached the threshold of
| "actual data". One datum is a five star, the other is a 1 star.
|
| This means with some unusually high level of certainty, that
| the experience is actually only mildly/moderately good.
|
| Also, the correct approach is to heed the author's _every
| other_ word. But when I attempt to do that, the statements make
| little sense, like "can't the through ears" or "You reach
| brain the".
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| There is also the fact that I'm not an American and think
| Americans are used to being taught and treated a way during
| university which is fundamentally at odd with how Europeans
| universities work.
|
| Plus I guess moving to England if you have never been exposed
| to anything else than the standard American friendliness and
| uber positiveness might feel alienating.
| kfrane wrote:
| Nobody will, at least if there's any truth in this article
| sctb wrote:
| And as a third point between these two, a close friend is
| finishing a postgraduate degree at Oxford and would agree with
| "The professors were checked out, the classes were bad, and I
| felt isolated and alienated" but still feels as though it was
| worthwhile.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Education is what you get out of it. Especially at the
| university level. If you are really engaged and trying to
| find new things it will be a wild ride. If you are there to
| just 'get the degree' you will find it dull, boring and a
| chore. What crystalized this thought for me was a few years
| ago. I had a class that started with 20 people in a corp env
| and optional. At first all 20 showed. By the last class there
| was 4. Most had checked out when they realized that you _had_
| to do the course work and be engaged (2-3 hours of study per
| week for 8 weeks). We even made accommodations for those who
| fell behind as long as they tried. I found being engaged into
| the coursework is not the norm.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Well, if I could send a short message to myself 15 years
| back in time, I'd tell myself that - specifically, tell
| myself that professors and TAs seem disengaged or _dumb_
| mostly because they 're being forced to teach outside of
| their direct area of research or expertise, and those same
| scholars will be thrilled and super-engaged if you approach
| them to learn about their research. Something I learned
| just as I was leaving the university.
|
| (That, and investment tips, obviously.)
|
| However, very much like the article claims, I feel that me
| 15 years ago wouldn't be _truly_ moved and convinced by
| this message. Hell, I 'm sure I must've read or heard that
| advice many times in my early university time - but I never
| stopped to actually process it.
| born-jre wrote:
| that was good one.
|
| i wanted to send this to a couple of people of then I realize the
| meta irony of that.
|
| edit: donot know why this reminds of song "Ooh La La - the Face"
|
| > Poor young grandson, there's nothing I can say You'll have to
| learn, just like me And that's the hardest way, ooh la la
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiTVLVEFEMc
| nielsbot wrote:
| My personal tl;dr for this is: "People can't get a joke by you
| explaining it to them, they have to experience getting it for
| themselves."
|
| I lot of experience is just like this.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Yea. Things we enjoy like cooked dishes that have wide appeal
| still say nothing if you are going to like that food. The only
| way for you to really know it to try it. Taste is highly
| objective.
|
| Now, if the person before me eats a bite and falls to the
| ground dead, I'm going to skip lunch for that day.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Think you meant "taste is highly subjective" instead of
| "objective". Unless I misinterpreted your point completely. I
| find it slightly confusing either way
| pixl97 wrote:
| No, you are correct, I flipped objective/subjective.
| dmbche wrote:
| "A final obstacle that stops us from filling each other's buckets
| with wisdom: it might kill us.
|
| If you're on a Mac, you can open up a program called Terminal
| and, with just a few lines of code, ruin your computer. You're
| not supposed to screw around in there unless you really know what
| you're doing.
|
| The human brain does not have Terminal, for good reason. If you
| could muck around with your own source code, you could suddenly
| make your lungs stop working, or destroy your ability to see
| blue, or get yourself sexually attracted to birds. That's why you
| have to wall it off, so that neither you nor anyone else can
| break your brain."
|
| I like this idea - reminds me of hearing of sci-fi stories where
| even cursory communication with aliens is catastroohic because
| they share knowledge we are not meant to know and destroy
| ourselves because of it.
|
| And the comment of someone(?) on TV being bad for children
| because it gives them answers to questions they wouldn't have
| asked.
|
| Talk is cheap, but maybe we should be a little careful, and most
| of all careful of what we listen to.
| im3w1l wrote:
| It's really amazing to me how instinctive behavior works and
| what that reveals about how the brain works. Like an
| instinctive behaivor would need an instinctive pathway from
| stimulus to processing to motor response. In order for such a
| thing to work properly there must be hardcoded protocols along
| that entire path - i.e. not learnt. There may be some limited
| local learning along the way, for instance the input pipeline
| may learn to tune out some defects or noise. Another
| interesting point is that our conscious minds can interact in
| some limited ways with our instincts, it can be influenced by
| being put in a certain emotional state, and it can to some
| extent suppress or override the natural response, e.g. not
| flinching away from pain. Thus at the boundaries the conscious
| mind must also speak these common protocols. Then it follows
| that reinforcement learning in the brain is quite limited in
| where it happens.
| dmbche wrote:
| I read somewhere that some believe consciousness to have
| arisen from paradoxical wants (i.e. not dropping something
| hot to accomplish a task).
|
| I just remembered hearing on joe rogan maybe 10 years ago
| about delta wave (?) training, where someone would have their
| delta waves monitored while watching a movie for example.
| When the waves got outside optimal range the movie would
| begin to stutter and buffer until the waves got back into
| optimal range. It was said to be efficient - and it's
| effectively training your subconcious.
|
| This might also interest you
| https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-
| will...
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| It seems like, if was making you aware of a problem and
| then having you deliberately deal with it, it was training
| your conscious.
| dmbche wrote:
| The effects kept going after the training, and you made
| no conscious effort to change the waves, the discomfort
| from the stuttering was driving the brain to lower delta
| waves.
|
| This is all from a JRE podcast years back, so I'm
| probably wrong, but I think the logic was that this could
| be applied to other subconcious processes (like
| regulating your heartbeat to stay in some optimal value,
| or the serotonin levels in the brain), and that the
| effects were not conscious. Kind of setting a new normal
| for yourself.
| JackMorgan wrote:
| This looks like a commercial product of the same idea
| https://sens.ai/store/headset/
| dmbche wrote:
| Yes, I think it was a guy from there. Probably a scam -
| would be neat though!
|
| Thanks for the link
| [deleted]
| fzeindl wrote:
| This is also the reason why self-improvement, changing any
| behaviors no matter if it's about procrastination, sports or
| mental health takes so long and is so tiresome.
|
| If the brain could be changed easily it would be very unstable
| and humanity might have died out very fast.
| joebiden2 wrote:
| > The human brain does not have Terminal (sic)
|
| It has, and lots of people are accustomed to it :)
| elesiuta wrote:
| > "or destroy your ability to see blue"
|
| This also reminds me of the McCollough effect [1] which can
| affect your perception of colorless gratings for an
| unexpectedly substantial amount of time afterwards just by
| starting at some images.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollough_effect
| joelfried wrote:
| If you haven't read it, the book you haven't realized you're
| looking for is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| I'd say Lexicon by Max Barry is even more applicable
| dmbche wrote:
| Will do, thank you!
| qawwads wrote:
| >If you're on a Mac, you can open up a program called Terminal
| and, with just a few lines of code, ruin your computer. You're
| not supposed to screw around in there unless you really know
| what you're doing.
|
| This is what they told us in computer class back then to make
| sure we don't learn anything wortwhile. Reading it on HN of all
| place makes me very sad.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Why is the only way to learn something worthwhile about a
| computer to poke blindly at the terminal? Experimentation is
| a healthy component of learning, but that doesn't make it the
| only component of learning. Preferably, you at least learn
| enough about the computer beforehand to know what you risk
| messing up and roughly how long it might take to get back to
| the previous state so you can experiment more than once. At
| that point you "really know what you're doing".
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| GP is right in that "fear of screwing up" is a _huge_
| blocker in learning computers. It 's really hard to screw
| anything up so badly that you can't recover by reinstalling
| the OS / factory-resetting the device, worst-case losing
| some data and a few hours of your time.
|
| But with brains, well, every such screw up would be
| debilitating or fatal to the person whose brain sits at the
| other end of your REPL.
| dmbche wrote:
| Just a thought - I'm realising that I internalised this
| fear with computers, having been raised with this idea
| that they are "easy to screw up, better not to look
| inside". It was fair when we had a computer room and a
| family computer, but since you can buy a second hand
| laptop for less than 50$, and as you said can solve most
| issues very easily, it is not warranted at all.
|
| Edit: I'm fine now, I used to be on Arch btw
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The fear was much more real back then. I too grew up with
| a family computer, but I was the only one being able to
| both break it and then fix it afterwards... Fortunately,
| there was nothing that couldn't be fixed by reinstalling
| the OS, and I quickly picked up on the advice to have
| separate "System" and "Data" partitions, so you don't
| lose anything important if you need to wipe the OS.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Fair, but it's still a good analogy, especially for less
| technically inclined.
|
| If our brains were easy to interface with or scramble
| remotely, it would become way too easy for one to kill or
| severely mess up themselves or others, possibly at scale.
|
| With computers, especially today, almost anything can be
| fixed by a reboot and maybe a rollback. But can you imagine
| having a REPL to your own brain and accidentally screwing
| something up? Say, disabling higher functions, or launching
| an infinitely recursive function, and then losing connection?
| You can't exactly reboot your brain.
| nico wrote:
| We do have "Terminal access" to our minds
|
| It just requires either taking some sort of substance or a lot
| of practice with something like meditation, yoga or holotropic
| breathing
|
| So it is pretty walled off as it requires either a special key
| or brute force, but it is not inaccessible
| LibertyBeta wrote:
| I feel like we should make a comment here about you're not in
| the sudor's wheel.
| aorloff wrote:
| If a poweruser doesn't put themselves in wheel,
| -\\_(tsu)_/- ?
| rednerrus wrote:
| Physical access is root access.
| colonelpopcorn wrote:
| Opening up the "case" requires disconnecting the
| "computer" from "power". Since we haven't figured how to
| get "the power" going again once it's off this analogy is
| kind of worthless.
| dmbche wrote:
| Or maybe that you can only interact with everything in
| bash, so not the most fine grained control.
|
| Or if instead of text all you had were emojis.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Hey, this was a good blog post. During the first section, I came
| up with a bunch of objections, and then by the end he had
| addressed them all (that is not to say resolved them). And, it
| was fun. Thumbs up to the author.
|
| All that leaves me is this observation:
|
| > Computer people have a good word for this kind of thing: lossy
| compression. You simply can't fit a thought into a sound wave.
| Something's gotta go, and what goes is its ineffable essence, its
| deep meaning. You have to hope that the other person can
| reconstruct that essence with whatever they have lying around in
| their head. Often, they can't.
|
| According to Tolstoy, the role of art is to reconstruct that lost
| data. That "[a]rt is a human activity consisting in this, that
| one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on
| to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people
| are infected by these feelings and also experience them."
|
| So, maybe try writing an opera about how studying at Oxford is a
| waste of time. Hope that helps.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I liked the analogy I picked up _somewhere_ (I don 't remember
| where, maybe I synthesized it from some of Eliezer's writings),
| that words are handles, pointers to associations[0] - both
| factual and emotional ones - and poetry, specifically, is an
| art of using words to pull those emotional associations in a
| very calculated way, effectively executing code in your
| readers' brain to achieve the desired effect.
|
| --
|
| [0] - Today we'd say "tokens stand for their embeddings in the
| latent space". Funny how those old articles about pointers to
| areas in concept-space, fuzzy boundaries, associations, etc.
| suddenly map pretty much perfectly, 1:1, to how LLMs and other
| generative transformer models work.
| firstlink wrote:
| This one does the rounds on HN periodically: "You can't tell
| people anything" http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-
| tell-people-an....
| jwilk wrote:
| 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35282293 (183
| comments)
|
| 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28775517 (94
| comments)
|
| 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23617188 (193
| comments)
|
| 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384703 (66
| comments)
| newaccount74 wrote:
| I find hearing about other people's experiences extremely useful.
|
| What I don't find useful is when people just tell me what to do.
|
| Instead of telling me not to go to Oxford, tell me about the
| things that surprised you at Oxford. I can make up my own mind
| about going, and the most effective thing you can do to help me
| decide is to tell me what it was like for you, without assuming
| it will be the same for me.
| elteto wrote:
| Exactly. Your experience does not have to be the same as mine,
| especially with overtly broad statements. It's no different
| than someone saying "Don't visit city $C. It sucks!". I mean,
| it's a _whole_ city, are you sure _all_ of it sucks? Maybe you
| were unlucky in your experiences and I don't have to be.
|
| Now, if you tell me "Don't visit restaurant $R in city $C, I
| got food poisoning and the service was awful" then I will
| probably avoid that place.
|
| It should really be "If you go to Oxford for graduate studies,
| in department $D, under professor $P then you will probably
| have a bad time for the following reasons..."
| smnrchrds wrote:
| Which is exactly what he did, to no avail:
|
| > _I would sit across from them in the dining hall, plates
| full of chicken tenders and french fries, and explain that
| postgraduate education in the UK is largely a way of
| extracting money from foreign students. Professors over there
| are checked out, classes are bad, and the whole place is
| pervaded with this sense of isolation and alienation, like
| everyone is behind a plate of glass._
| pxeger1 wrote:
| If we could communicate emotions effectively through speech
| alone, we wouldn't have invented art.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| We invented art as a mating ritual.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| We kind of do - that's what poetry is, for example. One could
| do even better - but it quickly becomes obvious just how much
| shared context you need.
| nadermx wrote:
| "Newton turned in her dissertation and then peaced out. Newton,
| if you're out there: respect"
|
| A true pioneer
| jschveibinz wrote:
| I love this article, but I'd like to add that it is in fact
| possible to reach the "keep" as the author has called it through
| emotion.
|
| Emotion is very important to memory and steering thoughts as many
| studies have shown. [0]
|
| For example: Advertisers, sales people, politicians, coaches,
| military leaders, charismatic leaders, etc. all use emotion to
| change minds, create memories and influence behavior.
|
| For an interesting look at the power of this approach, see the
| documentary "Century of the Self" by the BBC. It's very
| interesting and perhaps even eye opening.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's an accelerated way, kind of grapnel hooking over the
| castle walls and ninja-ing your way down to the castle
| treasury. However, it's still difficult to make such attempts
| _stick_ long-term, and the impact is unpredictable on an
| individual level. If not for that, advertising would 've
| zombified us all long ago.
| macgyverismo wrote:
| This was very much in line with my own thinking, or at least that
| is what I suspect and can't know for sure.
|
| With the recent AI buzz I got to think, maybe the keep from the
| story are higher level concepts that exist only after the
| underlaying layers have been trained and can therefore not be
| adressed before.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-06-09 23:02 UTC)