Feynman’s Razor
defenderofthebasic.substack.com
defenderofthebasic.substack.com
Instead, it's the typical kind of mistake made by writers who forget about context.
From the programmer's perspective, I speculate, the error _is_ indeed a case of something being non-existent. The code is written to fetch something from the server, the server says it's not there, and well, the application should tell the user about it.
Within the very narrow context of fetching it from the server, "doesn't exist" is correct. However, in the context of the user who's sitting there looking at the message, "doesn't exist" is simply false.
The message needs to be re-contextualized, such that it makes sense. "The message doesn't exist on the server, it exists on your computer at the moment, but just for a short while, so you better copy it".
It doesn't matter whether the user understand what a "server" is. Simply knowing that the message doesn't exist [at some place], is enough to make the whole sentence sensible.
Like if I go to a car mechanic, who just points to the whole car and say "it's gonna be replaced", it would be confusing. But if he says that "xxx is gonna be replaced", that's perfectly comprehensible, even if I don't know what xxx is.
Communication is hard.
Welcome to people.
If you think that's a sensible recommendation, it's nice to add it after the error message. But it's not an error message.
Contrary to GP I have no doubt that the original message was phrased the way it was to avoid explaining how things work, on the theory that it's bad form to explain this, because users understanding it is neither possible nor desirable. If a programmer was writing naturally, for their colleague or future self to read the message, the server and the cache would certainly make an appearance. They weren't omitted because the context was obvious but because exposing the context was considered undesirable; I think so because a more internal rather than end-user error message never looks like this.
It would have to be a different product, developed in parallel, rather than a snapshot of the past.
Then make it so the new algorithm penalizes people abusing the old/simple algorithm (and since the old algorithm is simple, it should be simpler to catch people abusing it too).
> Coca-Cola might have taken the cocaine out of their drink, but the company still needed to source coca leaves, which became more and more challenging. By 1914, the American federal government had officially restricted cocaine to medicinal use. So, as the government began debating an official import ban, Coke sent its lobbyists into the fray, pushing for a special exemption. Their fingerprints are all over the Harrison Act of 1922, which banned the import of coca leaves, but included a section permitting the use of “de-cocainized coca leaves or preparations made therefrom, or to any other preparations of coca leaves that do not contain cocaine.” Only two companies were given special permits by the act to import those coca leaves for processing — one of which was Maywood Chemical Works, of Maywood, New Jersey, whose biggest customer was the Coca-Cola company.
> This special loophole would carry over in every piece of anti-narcotics legislation that followed, including international agreements restricting the global trade in coca leaves. Over the ensuing decades, the company continued to demonstrate the lengths to which they would go to protect their supply, from supporting opposition to the traditional use of coca, to developing a secret coca farm of their own on Hawaiʻi.
https://www.eater.com/23620802/cocaine-in-coca-cola-coke-rec...
But it is written like it is bad, but I see nothing wrong with what Coca Cola did here. It was "de-cocainized coca leaves" after all.
(also, I support decriminalisation of drugs in general)
Why is it that in tech we are often told a seemingly contrary narrative -- that everything is better, or at least more profitable, when targeted to some hypothetical average person, and who cares about the diversity of individuals?
Or how these digital tools pervade spaces where everyone has to be able to use them, even if they're the type that refuses to engage with the text displayed in message boxes or technical jargon like "files" and "tabs", because they have the expertise that is more valuable to the business than the peripheral software. A greater expectation and insistence that things "just work", that the tools get out of the way instead of integrating with the user.
Maybe adjusting some straps and seat positions is more intuitive than digging for advanced options. Maybe it's significantly more difficult to surface options in digital mediums without introducing friction as a side-effect, because you're always fighting over screen real estate and screen legibility, instead of being able to just add a latch on the strap that's there when you need it and invisible when you don't.
You design a different car to win F1 races, to take a couch across town, to drive a family on a weekend trip, to win rally races, to haul a boat … but in software we don’t want to do that. We want everything to do everything because “niche” markets are too small for companies to keep growing into the stratosphere.
See also: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. (zawinski's law)
For ad driven search engine products the more you as a user flail the more ads you can be served on subsequent searches, so long as they ride the line of not driving you away entirely. A string of ten searches that fail you is bad because their product looks ineffective but two or three searches to get what you want is better for their bottom line than nailing it on your first attempt.
It’s a giant government bureaucracy, with plenty of stupid internal politics, and gross incompetency. No better or worse than any other large organization.
My direct experience is very limited, but I've heard a few decent things from people better involved than I am. I suppose "the military" is a wide thing, there must be consequential differences between, say, American bureaucrats and French field soldiers in Africa for example. The former shouldn't be as close to death, or to soldiers who are, on a daily basis.
Every other storage-related system I’ve ever used either had inscrutable gibberish like:
“Mode 5/7?” [Y]
Are you sure? [N]
Norton meanwhile had several paragraphs of text explaining what every decision meant. It explained concepts inline. It provided an explanation of the benefits and risks. It let you make an informed choice instead of just hitting Y over and over and hoping for the best.
This kind of respect for the reader / user applies to all forms of technical writing such as manuals, user interfaces, blog articles, and API docs.
Instead of trying to dumb down the text for a “lay” audience, try to educate all audiences to become more technical after having read and understood what you wrote.
[1] That is verbatim from a Hitachi SAN array that was holding all of the data for a government department. The manual helpfully explained that this option toggles between mode 5/7 being either on or off. If you choose wrong the array will erase itself and kill your cat. Or neither of those things. Who knows?
None of that is to say that I agree with the goal of engagement over conveying information.
collaborators think that they are helping minimise harm and using the leverage/finance to help a lot more people than they could otherwise help/contribute to. nobody ever woke up and said, today I will do evil things. Man does not err willingly.
Like not only do they feel the risk is too great and the payoff too little. But they also can't comprehend what would motivate anyone to act that way. Sometimes they even insist that revolutionaries must be insane or mentally deficient.
But I don't know if it's the case that people make a decision to be this way. I think it's just the default way to be, given a relatively stable life.
People won't really be able to account for why they became this way, or think of a time when they weren't this way. To them it will just be common sense, while revolutionary thought will just seem dangerous, anathema, and basically unthinkable and wasteful.
I think it's like a mental block that evolved to let us form stable social groups. And I think that certain circumstances can unblock it.
In particular I think that a person can get so traumatized by the state of affairs and things that happen to them that they have a strong reaction that causes them to give up hope for getting rewarded by the current regime. Then a person begins investing significant portions of their effort not in just surviving the current regime, but in overthrowing and changing it in a positive way. They begin to live on the hope of justice they can bring for not only themselves, but also others. They see their own lives as irrevocably altered by the trauma, and become agents for the cause of breaking that cycle. To them, the dream of a future generation not having to experience that trauma can be more motivating than thoughts of their own survival.
I believe that just like the first mode evolved to keep societal groups stable, the revolutionary mode evolved to let groups compete with each other and achieve beneficial new power structures.
Do you realize that ycomb is an incubator of startups?
Ycomb actively engages in the 'engagement and revenue creation' as S.O.P.. It's kind of their whole schtick. It's most people's schtick because that's how we feed ourselves.
How else would one frame the 'information age' except through engagement and revenue creation? Engagement = data. Data = money. Money = stuff, fun, alimony, child support, back taxes, and a drinking habit. I'm just sayin'.
The older I get the less and less patience I have with people pushing the "it's all politics", "everybody lies and manages up/down and if you don't you're a fool", or it's all about image.
While there's smallish elements of truth to each in individual cases, this just cannot be the knee jerk reaction.
Know BS when you see it then say it. It's not tough.
It must become very dangerous to be an exploiter of the human condition. Must become very dangerous for capitalists, executives, marketers, and so on.
Force and systematization/automation are required to gain power. And power is required to end capitalism.
Have a nice day!
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
People are not stupid, but they are busy, tired, lazy, or simply not that interested in the finer details. There is a balance between respecting their intellect and respecting their time.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-u...
> Q: "Do you like the idea that our picture of the world has to be based on a calculation which involves probability?"
> A: "...if I get right down to it, I don't say I like it and I don't say I don't like it. I got very highly trained over the years to be a scientist and there's a certain way you have to look at things. When I give a talk I simplify a little bit, I cheat a little bit to make it sound like I don't like it. What I mean is it's peculiar. But I never think, this is what I like and this is what I don't like, I think this is what it is and this is what it isn't. And whether I like it or I don't like it is really irrelevant and believe it or not I have extracted it out of my mind. I do not even ask myself whether I like it or I don't like it because it's a complete irrelevance."
As far as complexity and how to explain things to people without technical experience of the subject, the rabbit hole always goes deeper. Here's a nice quote from the rotation in space section of the caltech lectures:
> "We shall not use these equations in all their generality and study all their consequences, because this would take many years, and we must soon turn to other subjects. In an introductory course we can present only the fundamental laws and apply them to a very few situations of special interest."
However, humans can't help having likes and dislikes but I think the trick is to save that for other areas of interest - e.g., art or music or people or activities that you like for entirely subjective reasons.
Cool! Someone noticed me!
:-)
(I find this noteworthy because I've been putting all this effort into writing a series of blog posts about the scientific method and I've gotten very little feedback on that. But this little throwaway comment, that gets attention! Life is funny sometimes.)
Otherwise if someone wants to follow up with you about a comment, there is no way to do so without spamming a public comment reply.
Contact info!
Nowadays that's even harder to do since HN shadowbans new accounts for a while. You write a comment and you are surprised that nobody replies. It's because nobody but yourself can see it.
Which, ironically, contributes to the issue disussed here.
I'm also using a rather new account, let's see if this msg actually is visible now.
Apple's hide my email or DDG's email services are good for that imo.
> I'm also using a rather new account, let's see if this msg actually is visible now.
Take a guess ;)
Try it now.
I feel the example given in the article is bad because it isn't useful to either person, and jargon doesn't improve or lessen it. It's simply a poor explanation, which makes the argument weak.
In some cases I think it's possible to do this and satisfy both groups but it's harder and takes more words (which is important in a media context at least). That said I imagine there's a spectrum here and you can usually find suitable middle ground.
Maybe it should be even less descriptive.
"This message will soon no longer be available. Make sure you copy the contents of the message before you discard if you want to use them later."
Talking about the cache doesn't help the user. Really the solution is to add a button at the end of the message that says "save message contents to device." Then the message is clear and easily actionable.
A driver does not need to know the reason for a detour. All that matters is whether the alternative route is clearly indicated.
It’s also important to know what action can’t be done. “The message can’t be saved” from “The message can’t be viewed anymore” which hints that it may have been properly saved.
Please don’t bring back the fashion of dialog boxes just showing “Error in the system”. Or even “Error 1521”, which, although nowadays it would help for a perfect StackOverflow search, is still annoying.
I think it'd be a fun follow-up and talk a quanta article, and some PhD in the topic, and walk through why it does (or does not) pass this razor.
I think one very simple but important thing they do is they don't shy away from mentioning the technical terms. I just opened a random one and in the first paragraph they say the word "Hamiltonian cycle", and explain it. The explanation is probably super simplified, but that's fine, it's (1) an anchor for the curious layperson to read more/Google it (2) it's a marker for the expert, he immediately knows what they're talking about, and doesn't have to try to reconstruct it/guess
What’s the point of conveying root causes to the user? In this case the error tells you what you need to know: copy the message. Send it again if you want.
The point of communication isn’t always education. This isn’t a razor. It doesn’t do anything to help you consider audience. It will lead you to bad conclusions.
I dunno, I had no idea what the original message was trying to convey; it wasn't until I read lisper's comment that I got what was going on.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40607307
[2] https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/04/16/why-the-higgs-field...
I think things like Feynman’s “little arrows” descriptions in QED only muddied and added to the mystique and mysticism of the physics he loved.
Which is interesting because his written lectures[1], though, in their breadth and complexity require effort, seem as if they are intended for experts while being approachable to ”the layperson“.
My only real complaint about those lectures is that even when I understood I rarely felt I had actionable tools for that new knowledge.
The best descriptions of physics I feel that can sufficiently inform “the layperson” are ones that implements the physics in code[2], or through numerical methods.
It’s difficult to articulate, but two aspects are:
The amount of times I have only confused people more by trying to explain even modular arithmetic by calling on the clock analogy.
And the fact that the little “clock hands” are a complete abstraction from both the physics being described and the mathematical models that describe that physics. ~“Quantum physics is just about adding clocks?”
> I can't think of a more simple metaphor for the exponential of a complex phase, exp(i omega t).
As I noted in the gp I think code implementations or numerical methods should be the goal.
The solution to the confusion about referencing clocks when talking about modular arithmetic was just to write down a complete numerical example, ie all natural numbers mod 6 up to 10, and use that as the abstraction for further discussion: negatives, reals, periodicity, infinities, applications, et al.
I’m 100% with Feynman on this one. I loved the book because of the intuition it gave me about quantum physics. He even has this amazing analogy for how to teach arithmetic without numbers. Now, you could absolutely claim that he fails in his analogies (I’m not among the .1% of people if not less who can debate that), but I can still say claim confidently that math is not the goal. Abstraction is not intuition.
If you plot a function, you can observe many properties easily, for instance where does it cross the axes? Is it symmetrical? How quickly does it grow?
However there are also many properties that are easier to observe algebraically. For example if you plot x^n you can see if n is odd or even, but you can’t see what value n has because x^10 looks very much like x^12. But if you have the algebraic representation you can read it off.
The issue with Feynman’s clocks is that he only provides the geometric explanation (what physicists would call “intuition”), and not the algebraic explanation.
This only helps two kinds of people: 1) people not capable of understanding the algebra, 2) people who already know the algebra and want to develop intuition.
For the third group of 3) people are capable of understanding the algebra but haven’t learned it yet, only talking about clocks is a bit dizzying.
There's no requirement to do opaque algebra before approaching intuition.
Feynman invented Feynman Diagrams, which are a major contribution to Physics because they avoid algebra, and physicists are certainly capable of algebra.
Those people are perfectly capable of taking any other textbook. What value is there in another book that explains the subject in the same exact way?
Besides, almost all of those people will have a much easier time picking the other textbook if they read the intuitive explanation first.
That's not Feynman's fault!
I think it’s okay to be explain complex numbers. I think it’s just best to additionally explain why. That is, show why (real, imaginary) is a better numerical system than the more broadly taught (x,y) of the 2 dimensional space being explored.
As for the Euler identity I suppose you could include that when explaining why we use the exp() function, which is because it plays nicer with integration and derivation than other numerical representations.
I want the analogies to be representative of the work rather than my own mental model of it.
It's possible to be a great teacher without being an expert on given subject matter. And it's possible to have the most expertise but be inscrutable.
In the case of this quote, Feynman wasn't talking about expertise at all, but about explaining a thing with enough relevant details to be understood. Without those, a layman would not understand either.
From my experience “experts” who are unable to explain well typically have an incomplete understanding.
Language and knowledge are linked to a degree.
Personally I have had subject I thought I was an expert an and when I went to explain them I realized the shortcomings of my understanding. Later when I was truly an expert my ability to explain them improved.
You also have to give yourself permission to step several tiers back and think about how to distill "next pieces" into what they know.
I also find myself handwaving away a whole lot of edge cases or rigor away in order to have a bite-sized step that will help the student make progress.
> Personally I have had subject I thought I was an expert an and when I went to explain them I realized the shortcomings of my understanding. Later when I was truly an expert my ability to explain them improved.
Conversely, I find every time I've done this exercise of stepping back and breaking it down for someone else, my knowledge has deepened.
Look at the ABC Conjecture catastrophe.
Actual students were considerably more mixed. Obviously individuals vary so if I post how most of his students were totally lost in class, they'll post how one student went on to win a Nobel prize and say gotcha.
Feynman was a world class second type teacher. If you already know how to work with physics equations and solve problems, then Feynman's lectures will improve your understanding considerably. The simplification process he does, gives you a grand understanding of the theory.
Due to this, much of Feynman's pedagogy is not suitable for the first type of teaching. And should not be used as such.
For a first draft, they are incredible.
Small changes creeping up into something stupid is a common thing as well when everyone just does a tiny isolated part.
> In philosophy, a razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate ("shave off") unlikely explanations for a phenomenon, or avoid unnecessary actions.
I'd say maybe the rule here allows one to eliminate the useless parts of an explanation, thus simplifying the process of coming up with explanations for complicated things.
A razor is when you have a large number of potential explanations and want a simple rule to check if it worth further scrutiny. Occam's razor is the most famous, it says that the simplest explanation is probably the right one, Hanlon's razor is another one, it says that stupidity is more likely than malice.
Here it is just a guideline "don't dumb down", but there is no simple rule that tells if a message is dumb or not. For example, in the topic of science, a razor could be "numbers without error bars are dumb". It only takes a few seconds to see or not to see error bars, so you can quickly drop the ones without to focus on those that have.
Occam's Razor takes a pile of explanations and discards all those with extra assumptions or components. Feynman's discards all those that don't convey anything to an expert. I once told my son that any good story involves surprise, a relatable character, and some mention of a giant talking carrot. All of those are razors. (Some razors might be more useful than others...)
> "This message has been deleted from the mail server, but Outlook still has it in its temporary cache on this device. You can copy the message contents, or discard it from the cache, at which point it will be permanently deleted."
can be understood. Even if the first sentence looks like a technical garbage, the second gives the clear instructions. And I don't believe that the first sentence is a complete nonsense to a layman. It can be understood as "message is halfway through the process of the deletion".
The last part of this quote is often forgotten.
I don't believe Feynman ever meant to overconstrain and corrupt information based on (likely incorrect) assumptions about his audience. There's no need to "dumb down" anything ever, not even for children.
The information is either there or it isn't regardless of who can comprehend it. Losslessness is non-negotiable. The real problem is how you present that information, not whether you should leave it out. The only time you should leave something out is if it has little to no relation to the rest of what you're trying to say.
> This message has been deleted from the mail server, but Outlook still has it in its temporary cache on this device. You can copy the message contents, or discard it from the cache, at which point it will be permanently deleted.
Oh yeah also let's solve the "puzzle" from the middle of the blog post in Microsoft-y language everyone is familiar with by now.
"This message was deleted due to your organization's retention policy, spam filter, or administrator. It temporarily remains on this device, but is at risk of being lost forever. Do you want to save a copy?"
I believe in the real world Outlook doesn't even bother and has you and your message eat shit. If it was deleted it will never tell you about a cached copy and to the layperson it's just gone. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and indecision only makes communication harder.
This is so wrong that I can't imagine you actually meant it in the way that it quite obviously reads like.
When my 3-year old just saw is favorite toy fall from the sofa because he put it in an .. unstable position, then obviously it won't help if I explain the theory of relativity to him, cause ultimately it was gravity causing the mess. It won't help either to "dumb it down" by only explaining Newton's mechanics. What he actually needs to understand is that things fall down. Why exactly can be explained later. Much later. When he goes to university perhaps, if he chooses to and still wants to know.
You might not like this, but full detail physics explanations are usually irrelevant to everyday life. I try to explain in terms of what's necessary to accomplish a goal, not what's necessary to fully understand.
e.g. "if you tip things over close to the edge it will end up on the floor, so don't do that"
As a side note, kids often put stuff in precarious places because they can't reach anywhere better.
Anyway, the exceptions would be when the goal involves fully and arbitrarily defined contexts such as code or law. You can't assume much to get on with a task before being given a full explanation.
Cache is a variable. Server is a function. Anyone who graduated high school should know that much.
Hopefully we’ll start to move away from 1900s ignorant business machines euphemisms for applied physics