drcomputer

I wouldn't call that a danger. I would call that being human. We all have models of the world that deviate in some ways from one another, otherwise we would all have identical minds, identical environments and origins, identical heritages, identical ways of interpreting information, and identical ways of composing information into new creations.

Making an erroneous assumption or a mistake can mean that a particular sentiment is expressed "incorrectly", but that doesn't mean it's existence is useless. It may prove to be very useful eventually.

The idea that mental models can be incorrect by being compared to other mental models is a strange concept to me. It requires assumptions that can not be proven in their entirety.

How did you learn to understand what 'mundane' means?

I grew up writing poetry. I have a love of words, metaphor, literature, sentence structure, composition (in music as well). But the base form is mathematically expressible, that is the foundation of every perception to me. It's the only thing that can't mutate into something else - it can be used to express that which is not itself, but mathematics is formal structure itself. The symbols and organization are typically just decoration. It either makes sense or it doesn't, in that abstract form. I don't find that kind of unity really anywhere else. I appreciate the compliment, though.

I'm going to guess you've never had an extreme problem in communication throughout your entire existence.

For some time, for me, the grammatical structure of my sentences formed such a weak relationship to the interpretation of meaning of language, that a single word of a single sentence in a single paragraph could compose many meanings, and that doing this over and over throughout the paragraph could compose many more meanings, until all comprehension of what was intended to be expressed seemed to be completely lost. Communication had distinct dual meanings often, sometimes many, many more. The grammatical structure serves as an abstract form, then each word relationship is applied and toyed around with until associations that have nothing to do with the topic at hand are formed. I would be lost in attempting to speak back to someone. When I tried to speak, I would run off on a tangent that received blank stares at best. I was convinced people were purposefully messing with my head, but it was only the extraction of a single word from a single sentence that projected itself into my imagination and then distorted itself into a web of intricate knots that continued to build one after the other.

Some people call this telling stories. For me, it was the way I perceived my reality, even though my perception held in thought never matched my reality.

I have a habit of escaping into complex mathematics, so at least I have the illusion of intelligence (although it turns out, I am very good at complex mathematics, and this is useful). But it's very difficult, living like this. The single and the many is a real problem. You can think you know what you are talking about, but until you actually become convinced that every sentence can be interpreted completely differently by the listener, and by some form of magic I call compassion of others noticing how completely aloof I am, you manage to exist in society as member that actually contributes something. Also, when you intersect with people really frequently over short gaps that are spaced out by really long gaps of 'misunderstanding one another', then it's freaky and causality gets all tangled and you can sometimes get convinced that people can read your mind.

You may say cloud, but when I first read this article, I thought of the internet clouds, instead of water clouds. Now, this is only a small delta change between word choice. Imagine that a single sentence can be interpreted in millions of ways, and it can be continued on in conversation, in other sentences in millions of ways, and no one actually has a clue of what is being spoken about, but we all think we do. This is why I prefer to stare at my whiteboard with complex mathematics.

I don't think anyone really does it on purpose. A truly independent mind can be a terrifying thing. It can make you feel disconnected, isolated, insane, or stupid.

I have observed the flow of information through people for a long time. I find myself incredibly tired of studying this. It shows nothing of an individual's depth, their character, their individual personality. It's the shadow on the cave.

> This is the state we live in, the real question is "Are the people going to let this happen?"

I am terrified of mental manipulation. My only inclination and direction is to train my mind to be an independent blank slate. There's also an odd web that forms, the direction of information flows, word choice, word frequency, like it ping pongs in between groups of people. The form of abstract ideas, the direction of thought. These things can be studied.

Yes, the title is misleading. The software runs a simulation of the worm's brain using a software defined mapping between the 302 neurons (which I am assuming are software modeled) of C. elegans brain. The (software and hardware) reacts in a way similar to that which has been observed of C. elegans (the worm).

This brings up a question which I have often wondered - whether our consciousness is just a combinatorial explosion of the echoes of the external world - that our abilities and thoughts are predetermined by our environments. If I believed that, then perhaps I could model the human brain and say it was my own. But there is also the way humans choose to chop up the world, where the line is drawn between 'neuron' and 'neuron connection' and 'stimuli'. So, shrug.

I'm just wondering whether the model of which they base their programming problems for web apps is isomorphic (structurally preserving) to algebraic concepts.

Computer science and development in school is very different from computer science and development in the real world. You don't get to know what you have to know before you know it - that information doesn't exist in the ether of the collective consciousness anywhere. You have to draw it out from yourself.

You might not even know the words for the concepts you have to create in the real world - because they aren't defined, and it's different from pattern matching, finding invariants, optimizing around invariants, simplifying semantically and forming relational constructions. It's different from probabilistic modelling and inference. It's different from a machine doing all those things and a human reasoning on top of it, turtles all the way down (or up, rather).

If you really want to teach people, you have to be able to believe that every person has the capacity to exceed their boundaries and even perhaps demonstrate that you can exceed your own.

This is really philosophical at this point, but don't make the mistakes I've seen tons of educational institutions make. Don't define your students before they learn how to define themselves. Coding at it's core is a creative endeavor. If you want to build robots, code. If you want to build students, learn.

How is programming aptitude measured and defined?

I don't know. There always seem to be many alternate compositions of rules that can be used to define the environment while enforcing or altering the rule composition rules.

Rules can define themselves, rules used to regulate the flow of information become information.

My inspiration comes from the knowledge of my mortality, literally, not in a poetic romantic artsy way. If I am not going to give up on everything and die, then I will try my hardest in learning to live. There is nothing really that I can build that matters more than caring about my life. So, I just try to amass as much skill as I possibly can, pretty much all I do is study and try to develop skill and add more skill on top of existing skill, I relate almost everything to mathematics, computer science, logic, and code, aside from trusting a small subset of individuals with my physical presence. I hug my family and talk to my cat. That's my life. Sit at computer, code, food, sleep, exercise. Maybe it seems like I have no inspiration because there is no 'push' I need to do. I just 'do that' and 'that' is mostly, more or less, what I want my life to be. I could also say 'the world' is my inspiration but that's redundant, although much more humble, but it 'was' very hard getting my mind aligned into this particular habit sequence.

This is just in general. When I find particular projects to obsess over I have elevator speeches about them that could last decades. I get really really excited, super hyper, I like to explain why 'this tool' is the best thing in the world, and promptly forget my rant after I've finished it. I don't know 'why' I do it. I just 'want' this to be my life, because it's what I am passionate about, what clicks for me, what lights up my brain, what paints pretty pictures in my head, and what I love to think about, observe, learn about, and so on. Every explanation I could give for it in words doesn't do it justice.

> It’s the other money problem. Just as having a lot of money drives a wedge between friends, power drives a wedge between writers and their audience. It spoils all the fun. Sure, things might look the same as before. But they just won’t feel the same. But they just won’t feel the same.

How do you know how you will feel in the future? Do you read things assuming you already know what they are trying to say?

Do you think the same rules apply to an information economy?

I am in the habit of persistently deleting comments. Sometimes my disagreements are just one half of a conversation I should be having in my head, alone.

Thank you for the recommendation.

> To actually learn it, Mac Lane & Saunders "Categories for the Working Mathematician." seems to enjoy continued popularity.

This is the best way I've found so far, and I had been semi-supplementing with MacLane and Birkhoff's "Algebra", just to get a feeling for the vocabulary; bringing myself from the space I typically mathematically exist in, to the space of category theory. Nothing else really has come close in composing the correct thought direction. It is dense, but I enjoy it very much. It is very beautiful math.

Laziness is relatively defined to other people's minds. Your mind works the best when it does, and it works best with the minds it works best with, which is actually really complicated to think about. Also, persistently evaluating your mind for whether it is lazy or not has side effects on how your mind works.

Just because it doesn't fit someone else's mold doesn't make your mind lazy, and just because a bunch of minds fit together perfectly to propel one person skyward doesn't make them a genius. A bunch of geniuses arguing about progress doesn't create progress. We aren't very good at mapping our minds while using our minds to do it, but maybe we are.

I hope science one day recognizes that we can spend centuries churning our wheels without actually getting anywhere - we create the same problem we begin with by convincing ourselves we found the solution.

> Why do we have to simplify things and try to apply sweeping generalizations? The universe is complex. Things that apply one way to somethings do not apply that way to others.

The same reason we over complicate things. It's hard to select which direction to move in when both directions are ambiguously labeled.

Yea, coming from the background assumption of "everything comes from the same thing", it seems more interesting to me that we have consciousness to experience, rather than the curiosity that we age and die. Age and death are phenomena we observe of ourselves, a thing that is constantly changing yet fundamentally the same thing.

It's a philosophical quirk, but it really depends on your existential and universal (philosophies / beliefs / religions). Things you must assume, basically, in order to make meaning from what is otherwise, pure logic (structural arrangement) and pure state (instances of that structure).

The idea that aging and death are undesirable is a complex phenomena to begin with. A rock does not care that the water slowly washes it away to shape it into a new form, yet humans have very discerning opinions on the matter across all phenomena they observe. Every explanation humanity manufactures seems to have some bias.

The completion of executing the less valuable (as perceived) idea may lead to the ease in execution of the more valuable (as perceived) idea.

It's more humorous to consider maths and programs as ideas. And when I say humorous, I mean that very seriously.

I think there are ways to understand people using written language that do not translate well face to face. It's a fairly subjective evaluation, but consider the whole spectrum of human writing, rather than the tendency of conversation evoked by the contemporary internet.

Shakespeare also invented words when the ones he could not express the concepts he wanted to convey. Those words also had to be accepted and understood by those who read his literature. I think when people feel stuck between paradigms, there's something very special about that.

> How hearing it in the original pronunciation brought out the puns and rhymes.

These happen accidentally sometimes.

There is often the desire to formalize all concepts under a single, over-arching, unifying language, of which everyone learns from and adds their discoveries to, and it is perfect in clarity, unchanging in form, and eternal in elegance.

But I think that desire often stems from the fact that learning stuff is hard. It doesn't matter what you are learning, if it is foreign enough to your brain, then it's hard. It makes everything seem in vain, that there is always more to do. But, everything is interesting, because there is always more to do. Also, creativity. We don't have to be dictators or communists over our programming languages. We can be artists, scientists, mathematicians, and poets.

Both matter. Execution doesn't progress without the capacity to think well. Learning to think well doesn't progress without littering and clearing the mind of thousands of ideas. It's a careful balance of maintaining a signal in the noise.

> now it seems reasonable that maybe the nature of our military services today causes potentially more stable men and women to be more likely than ordinary to commit suicide.

Suicide is an extremely complex issue. I don't think it's fair to reason about the causes of suicide. Hearing from suicide survivors would likely permit bias to be reduced. These are not simple issues. Cause and effect are woven together with thousands of tiny little knots, when complexities like these develop.

I was about to quote this quote, but I have a different opinion here.

> I would actually go a step further with the thread title: Please don't try to teach if you can't.

The line between teaching a truth and teaching a self-enforcing belief pattern has not been drawn, and I don't know if it ever will be. You can be an amazing teacher and not even know it (by making horrible mistakes that other people learn from by observation, comparison, abstraction, and analysis). Or you can be a really amazing teacher and never admit it.

> My typical advice is to choose something that is presented with good learning tools, and maybe one that has tutorials related to a subject matter that they're interested in.

That's good advice.

Being someone who wants to build something like this: there are plenty of uses that can build on top of text that is readable or meaningful. If you can get a computer to have a random conversation with itself, then that is very interesting.

This is really cool, I had been working on something similar.

I do think it's a little 'pejorative' to try to computationally define creativity, though.

Creativity seems to involve so many levels of cognition, and it really seems like you can automate it, describe it, or define it.

But as soon as you seem to define it methodically, and think you've got it, it changes in a way you can't anticipate, but which draws you into it with this force you can't ignore or escape. It's incredibly frustrating, but it's also very human.

> Growing up in a secular society ancient religions can seem awful strange: why did people worship stone statues and sacrifice to them? Did they really believe all that effort did anything?

I don't know, do you really believe there is anything that suggests mathematics exists in reality outside of the maintenance of symbols, structure, and meaning in the mind of man?

Some things exist to teach patterns, to maintain a style of thinking. There are tons of things we don't understand about culture socially - in maintaining peace, individuality AND unity with ourselves as individuals and ourselves in society, that might have been intelligently dealt with in a very real way in cultures you consider primitive, intelligible, irrational, unscientific, archaic, and non-secular.

You can't judge a book by it's cover, so to speak. The superficial observation of ritual does not mean it serves no purpose. The meaning of things change over time, as these things are interpreted and understood by different cultures that come from different backgrounds with different ways of representing and interpreting information about the world. Math does not always represent what it says it represents. Neither do dancing statues. There are certainly TONS of things people rely on, things they assume about how existence functions, that we can't even begin to touch the tip of, because we are blinded by the complexity of our own minds.

I had thought something similar to this, that a person's internal state of 'feeling / intuition / empathy' was oriented around the combination of certain kinds of sensory / intellectual input reacting with the body, that are not cognitively consciously modeled, but abstracted and correlated against the body.

If a person can notice a correlation between body reaction and external world reaction, then their intellect may not necessarily be able to conceptualize or mode the processes that occur, but they may 'know' certain things because of the frequency of the correlation.

I tend to think this is why I am very analytically oriented - my health was often variant throughout my adolescence and adulthood, and I never could ever understand what people meant by 'gut reaction' or 'heart feeling', aside from literally being convinced it was nonsense. I've always had to intellectualize and conceptually model things, which actually makes finding socialization patterns and trends (with myself as a participant) extremely difficult. It also explains how many people learn to feel and judge the world in an origin dependent manner, with early stimuli shaping the interpretation (relations and models) of sensory percepts.

I rarely can tell the difference between my feelings, and the feelings of others. I check them logically and experimentally, which is pointless and ironic, but it makes as much sense to me as thinking that when someone is smiling at you, they are happy. It's an aggregation of data, correlated and adjusted when the theory doesn't match reality. It's not that I don't care about what people think, it's just that it's impossible to know or even hypothesize about based on external observations and judgments using a single point perspective. I have to hope that language efficiently facilitates clarity, but I've fallen into similar analytical wormholes there too. So then there's trust, or something.