More On Lies

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21 pointspchristensen22 comments

A modern analogy that illustrates this is a famous interview problem: you have a cake with an irregular piece cut out of it, and you have to figure out how to cut the cake into equal pieces. The smarter the person, the harder it is for them so solve this problem. People come up with all sorts of ingenious (and usually incorrect) solutions, when the obvious solution is staring them right in the face - just cut the cake horizontally.

This solution, of course, is just another implicit assumption that the irregular shape cut out of the cake is oriented vertically.

> This solution, of course, is just another implicit assumption that the irregular shape cut out of the cake is oriented vertically.

This is an excellent observation. I didn't realize this when I was writing about it.

Typically, if you describe a problem that is harder to solve the smarter the person is, there's some implicit assumption. The problem gets harder for smarter folks, because there is no general solution.

Right. Being able to see these assumptions is arguably an incredibly useful skill. More traditional intelligence coupled with ability to see such assumptions should get you much further than traditional intelligence alone.

Not to mention that it's one of the dumbest interview questions I've ever heard. Imagine serving a 4-year-old a piece of cake from the bottom (with little frosting).

I can see why smart people would have trouble with it. They would naturally assume that the interviewer was clever, and would see a mathematical solution while preserving the "cakeness", that is, the ability to carry frosting and internal structure.

Cakes have layers. It ruins them to cut them horizontally. And it is not convenient - how do you even hold the knife to do that?

It is a bad example.

A good example of this is the "flat Earth model". It took thousands of years for a thought that the Earth may not be flat to enter people's minds. Why?

The "flat Earth model" is actually a myth. I guess you've been lied to. The Earth being flat was not a prevailing view in the Middle Ages. By that point, it was well known that the Earth is round.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_mythology

I was about to make this comment. How ironic that a comment about being lied to used one of those lies as an example.

To add to that, the "Flat earth" idea was not even implicit before the middle ages - it was generally described as such in numerous religious texts. For instance, the ancient hebrews believed the earth to be a flat disc under a hemispherical sky pierced with holes that were the stars. But that's stated in the religious texts, not implicit at all.

Thumbs down for the article, I'm afraid. Possible good point, but so drowned by poor examples that it's hard to take it seriously.

Daniel

And even if it was true, the earth pretty much IS flat. It curves on the order of 8 inches to the mile. Unless you travel a lot, curvature from 1 set of stairs has more effect on your life than curvature from the earth.

This essay really makes me wish for down-arrows. It seems to me nothing more than a plug for Alan Watts's CD, and the not-exactly-earth-shattering observation that people sometimes make unwarranted assumptions. A few more examples of the kinds of these "far more dangerous lies" would have been helpful.

I really like that there are no down arrows.

As someone said above, maybe the examples are not perfect, but the point is very much valid. If you think we don't have a lot of (potentially harmful) implicit assumptions, you're making a very big one. We're not at the pinnacle of civilization right now. We're still just monkeys building things. Pretty much the same we think people 100 years ago were ... naive, to be gentle, the same we'll seem to the people 100 years into the future. Point is, any way that can help move us up faster is worth a look. I haven't listened to "that guy"'s CDs, and I may come to the conclusion that they're full of crap, but I'm going to give them a shot.

(Full disclosure: I may be slightly subjective because I spent the last weekend reading weblocks source code. But I still agree with the main ideea).

1. pg writes essay.

2. Essay is posted on hn.

3. Essay quickly becomes #1 with 100 points.

4. 200 comments. Debate ensues.

5. The "pg aftermarket" blogs their rebuttals.

6. Many pg aftermarket blogs get posted to hn.

7. Many more comments. Much more debate.

8. 3 days later, someone says, "Enough already about ..." That post gets downmodded to -10.

9. 1 month later, go to Step 1 (I hope).

...but I wouldn't say that is a bad thing. I tend to find such debates rather fun to watch and participate in.

No, definitely not a bad thing. More like a phenomenon.

Sometimes I wonder if pg planned it this way all along.

I'd argue that the phenomenon is a bad thing only to the extent that it encourages people to write articles like this. It's a mostly-unrelated, fairly uninsightful way for some guy to whore for his own belief system (everybody buy some guy's CDs!) by disguising it as a response to pg's essay.

It is not a disguise, I couldn't be more direct about it. My goal was to introduce people to an excellent (yet little known these days) author who did a very good job explaining these concepts and helping people free themselves from the bondage of their assumptions.

Do you ever read a book and find it so good you want to tell the whole world about it, yet when you try to tell people all you get are blank stares? This is it.

I guess it's a natural reaction in an age when too many people plug too much bad content. All I can say is, read the wikipedia article about him, read his essays, then make up your mind.

Do you ever read a book and find it so good you want to tell the whole world about it, yet when you try to tell people all you get are blank stares?

Yep. And then a few years later, when I re-read that same book, I realized that it just wasn't as good as I'd thought it was at that stage of my life. It was actually kinda trite. The blank starers were right all along. I only thought it was great because I was young and I was being exposed to new ideas that I already kinda agreed with for the first time.

Any of that sound familiar?

And now I just wanna travel back in time and slap my thirteen-year-old self for listening to The Dark Side Of The Moon over and over. It's not that great an album, younger-me!

Sure, but you could make this argument about anything worth talking about.

Then you remember that there are millions of other younger people out there now that are at the same stage in their lives that you were in then. Just because it's trite to you doesn't mean it'll be trite to everyone.

And I still think Dark Side of the Moon is a great album. I actually like it more now than I did as a teenager.

"And I still think Dark Side of the Moon is a great album. I actually like it more now than I did as a teenager."

lol!

I wore out 3 vinyl versions of it.

Then, I hated it when it was on CD.

Then, it was the first thing that ever went onto my ipod. I've come full circle.

Nothing else brings back more memories for me, good and bad, older and recent.

And nothing is better now for "mellow" hacking.

Sorry, I couldn't resist...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlY-JlE5ZCo

"pg aftermarket" - I love it!

I certainly hope this cycle continues, because there have been more comments that I felt were insightful in under 24 hours on this essay cycle than in most weeks on HN.

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