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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

> We unknowingly gave particularly high rewards for metaphors with creatures.

I recall a math instructor who would occasionally refer to variables (usually represented by intimidating greek letters) as "this guy". Weirdly, the casual anthropomorphism made the math seem more approachable. Perhaps 'metaphors with creatures' has a similar effect i.e. makes a problem seem more cute/approachable.

On another note, buzzwords spread through companies partly because they make the user of the buzzword sound smart relative to peers, thus increasing status. (examples: "big data" circa 2013, "machine learning" circa 2016, "AI" circa 2023-present..).

The problem is the reputation boost is only temporary; as soon as the buzzword is overused (by others or by the same individual) it loses its value. Perhaps RLHF optimises for the best 'single answer' which may not sufficiently penalise use of buzzwords.

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A decade ago I gave a presentation on automata theory. I demonstrated writing arbitrary symbols to tape with greek letters, just like I’d learned at university. The audience was pretty confused and didn’t really grok the presentation. A genius communicator in the audience advised me to replace the greek letters with emoji… I gave the same presentation to the same demographic audience a week later and it was a smash hit, best received tech talk I’ve given. That lesson has always stuck with me.

I had a similar experience explaining logic, especially nested expressions, with cats and boxes. Also for showing syntactic versus semantic. We _can_ use cats if we wanted and retain the semantics. Also my proudest moment as a teacher was students producing a meme based on some of the discrete mathematics on graphs. They understood the point well enough to make a joke of it.

This is sortof like how Only Connect switched from using Greek letters to Egyptian hieroglyphs. I'm not sure if it was a joke or not but it was said that viewers complained that the Greek letters were "too pretentious" and obviously the hieroglyphs weren't.

I’m fairly positive the Greek alphabet mixed in Latin would measure quite poorly for legibility, if anyone did that study. Long before it’s an issue of pretentiousness

[It was also in direct reference to this comic.](https://www.overyourhead.co.uk/2011/01/rarely-connect.html)

This comic is from 2011 but Only Connect made the change in 2010.

Most human brains just aren't very good at coping with abstract concepts. It reminds me of the Wason selection task[1]. You give participants a formal logic problem to solve, "how many cards do you have to turn over to show that the rules are being followed". If the rule is "a card with a vowel on one side _must_ have an even number on the other", people do very badly making illogical assumptions. If the rule is "one side has a bar order, and the other side has the age of the person making the order. The person must be above the legal age", it makes sense and people do well, because we understand bars, drinks and the laws thereof.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task

> I recall a math instructor who would occasionally refer to variables (usually represented by intimidating greek letters) as "this guy".

I also had an instructor who was doing that! This was 20 years ago, and I totally forgot about it until I have read your comment. Can’t remember the subject, maybe propositional logic? I wonder if my instructor and your instructor have picked up this habit from the same source.

I recall my old chemistry/physics teacher doing it too - "now THIS guy, he's really greedy for electrons" and stuff like that.

Maybe they're French? They tend to do that, translating celui

My instructor for Epsilon Delta proofs and limits would always talk about "his cousin in Romania" picking the Epsilon and him picking the Delta.

i.e. forall epsilon > 0. exists delta > 0. forall d with |d| < delta. |f(x) - f(x+d)| < epsilon.

If we had a proof, no matter what epsilon his cousin from Romania picked, we could always find a new delta which would satify his cousin and let him pick the worst d in range.

This worked better than just saying "pick any epsilon", as it convayed the adversarial approach better.

Another book I read used the Devil as the one you are trying to convince, but it's nowhere near as fun as "his cousin from Romania".

I had a calc prof years ago that would say f of cow, or f of pig instead of x or g. It was more engaging trying to keep track of f of pig of cow than the single-letter func names.

He was one of those classic types; you could always catch him for a quick chat 4 minutes before class, as he lit up a cig by the front door. Back when they allowed smoking on campus, anyway.

I had a similar, really great prof, who would always ask for what the next variable would be, so we'd end up with trees and smiley faces. His point was to not make assumptions (c is always a constant etc), but it made the classes more engaging too.

And, somehow every example ended along the lines of "then you hand this to your boss, kick up your feet and have a nice glass of scotch."

They give everyone the false and very misleading impression that with One prompt all kinds of complexity minimizes. Its a bed time story for children.

Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety asserts that for a system to effectively regulate or control a complex environment, it must possess at least as much internal behavioral variety (complexity) as the environment it seeks to control.

This is what we see in nature. Massive variety. Thats a fundamental requirement of surviving all the unpredictablity in the universe.

Had a math prof in undergrad that once said, “this guy” 61 times in a 50 minute lecture!

Show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome.

Timeless, be it human or machine

Math instructor (I imagine): Look at this dude! Look at the top of his fraction! AHH! hah! hah!

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