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.
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.
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[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.
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.