Posts
-
The Blogging Gauntlet: May 17 - What's Your Time Travel Password?
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
As far as I know, time travel doesn’t exist. However, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing interesting to say about it. In fact, you can do a lot of theorizing about models of time travel.
Today, I made a time travel password. What I’m going to do is detail the argument for why everyone else should make one too.
***
Suppose we’re living in a world where time travel is possible, and that furthermore time travel will be invented within our lifetime. I know this is a huge assumption, but bear with me for a moment.
A world where people can transmit information to past versions of themselves is very hard to predict. The nature of that world depends on the model of time travel used, but the potential gains of time travel are huge.
However, that means the potential losses of forged future messages are also huge. If you’re in a world where time travel is possible, the strangest requests in the world can be explained away by saying the future depends on it. What makes decision making tricky is that it’s almost always done under uncertainty. Time travel removes that uncertainty, giving a perfect oracle towards achieving the best outcome. Or, if a message is forged, a perfect oracle towards achieving the worst outcome.
To prevent this, you need an authentication scheme that verifies future messages come from you. Hence, time travel passwords! In the present, you pre-commit to adding your time travel password to any message sent to a past version of you. That way, if you ever receive such a message, you can verify that message is legitimate.
Importantly, you never, under any circumstances, write down your time travel password or speak it out loud. After the password leaves your head, it’s no longer secure. As a corollary, every time travel password is one time use, and you must create a new one whenever you receive a future message.
***
There’s a very natural objection to this: isn’t time travel exceedingly unlikely? Why should I waste my time making a password for non-existent technologies?
Well, consider the following.
- Creating a time travel password takes less than a minute.
- If time travel is never invented, you lose one minute of your life.
- If time travel is invented, you prevent a large class of attacks that could be made against you.
The expected utility is vastly, vastly in favor of making a time travel password. I’ll fully admit this argument is a variant of Pascal’s mugging, which you might reject for one reason or another.
Here’s my counterargument. Yes, maybe I’m mugging you out of one minute of your time. However, the value of one minute of your time is very, very low. And even if time travel is never invented, you get to tell people you have a time travel password! How awesome is that? You can explain this very argument, or link to help increase my view counts (nod nod, wink wink).
Having a time travel password makes you a more interesting person, and that’s surely worth the one minute of time it costs you.
-
The Blogging Gauntlet: May 16 - Memorable Quotes
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
What makes a quote memorable? What makes it tick?
I don’t have a good answer for this. And furthermore, I suspect I never will. It’s one of the key troubles of life. We can recognize quality, we can have highly refined tastes, and at the same time have no idea why we have those tastes. Articulating those likes and desires is much harder than having them in first place.
The sliding scale is a fantasy. There’s no simple answers.
(Worm)
In a way, it’s like NP-Complete problems. If we’re given an explanation, we’ll understand it, but it’s incredibly difficult to find that explanation in the first place. Guess that’s why critics get to keep their jobs.
We read and hear many things. Somehow, our brains decide which input is truly memorable, and worth keeping verbatim, while the rest gets relegated to vague feelings. The strangest part to me is that for the most part, people agree on what quotes are important. Legendary movies are usually quoted in the same way.
Here’s looking at you, kid.
(Casablanca)
Yes, quality is subjective, but quality isn’t entirely subjective. If someone tried to hold up Plan 9 From Outer Space as a masterpiece of science fiction instead of a masterpiece of unintended comedy, we’d laugh them out of the room.
Future events such as these will affect you in the future.
(Plan 9 From Outer Space)
There must be some core functionality, that recognizes some idea as important, and it has to be almost the same from person to person. In the brain, we can’t be that different. Can we?
Harry was finding himself very disturbed by how reproducible human thoughts were when you reset people back to the same initial conditions and exposed them to the same stimuli.
(Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality)
So what does it? What makes a quote memorable?
I want to know, because if you understand how this works, it’s a improvement on everything I can think of. It makes your writing more interesting. It makes your speeches more persuasive. Technical explanations from research papers stick better.
I am an anti-illusionist. I trick your brain into seeing what was there all along.
(Vi Hart)
Understanding this seems key to all forms of communication, and communication underlies essentially every interaction in the world. Shouldn’t I be training that meta-skill?
She was such a potent telepath that even if I could come up with a plan, she would rip it from my mind before I could get close enough to her to implement it.
We were racing apotheosis. And we were losing.
I bet this is the sales pitch people use when trying to sell the books they’ve written on persuasion. It has to work, right? I mean, it seems self-evident. Of course, what isn’t self-evident is that they’re the best person for explaining persuasion.
Where does that leave me? It is an unfortunate truth that there isn’t enough time to understand everything, or even understand most things. Eventually, you have to choose what’s worth learning and what isn’t. Or perhaps more accurately, you don’t choose. Instead, we naturally gravitate toward our interests and circle them endlessly, never quite passing the event horizon into true clarity.
“I understand why you want, and need, the universe to be simple, to be ‘just so’. But it simply isn’t. Stop thinking you know what ‘quantum’ means. Magic isn’t a miraculous healing field, it doesn’t bind living creatures to one another. Crack a book open, one that isn’t aiming to pander. The answers are complicated. We will find every explanation eventually. As for me, I will uncover the truth on my own terms. The proper way. Or, more likely, I will not.
(Ra)
Like I said, I still don’t have any answers. The closest idea I can think of is hopelessly general, but probably still correct.
- Breathe in.
- Breathe out.
- Get a rough idea of what you need to do.
- Walk there, one step at a time.
It’s fluffy, I know. But I’ve heard a variation on this idea from several sources, so it can’t be all junk. I suppose that’s what I’ll do, and at some point, if I get there, I can write my own feel-good story, and pretend to be someone who understood what he was doing all along.
This final quote doesn’t quite fit. But, after re-reading it, I liked it too much. It’s memorable to me.
“I want to calm the storm, but the war is in your eyes.
How can I shield you from the horror and the lies?When all that once held meaning is shattered, ruined, bleeding
And the whispers in the darkness tell me we won’t survive?”“All things will end in time, this coming storm won’t linger
Why should we live as if there’s nothing more?So hold me ‘neath the thunderclouds, my heart held in your hooves,
Our love will keep the monsters from our door.”“For I know tomorrow will be a better day.
Yes, I believe tomorrow can be a better day…” -
The Blogging Gauntlet: May 15 - Harry Potter Compression Algorithms
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
Two months ago, I was at a dinner where we started talking about character alignments. To explain why lawful-vs-chaotic was a different axis from good-vs-evil, we said “Umbridge is an example of Lawful Evil, and The Joker is an example of Chaotic Evil.”
There’s nothing a good character alignment chart can’t add to.
A month after that, I was relaying a story about bigoted geniuses. A graduate student wrote a compiler which automatically inserted anti-Semitic messages into any code it compiled. This behavior was then hidden under several layers of code generation, making it especially difficult to remove the anti-Semitic messages while keeping the rest of the compiling ability intact.
In response, my friend quoted Ollivander.
He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named did great things - terrible, yes, but great.
(Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. But you knew that already, didn’t you?)
I replied with this.
In my generation, it’s assumed everyone has read the Harry Potter books. They’re just that popular. Importantly, it goes further than that. The knowledge that Harry Potter is well known is itself well known. Almost everyone knows Harry Potter, and everyone knows almost everyone knows Harry Potter.
Thus, Harry Potter can be used as a compression algorithm for conversation. If you want to explain something that’s similar to something from Harry Potter, you can cite the relevant scenario/character, and people will usually follow you. And usually, this is much shorter than explaining it for yourself. The D&D Player Handbook spends two paragraphs explaining Lawful Evil, but in that dinner we explained it in a single sentence.
***
You can apply a similar argument to anything that’s common knowledge. Memes, movie quotes, and world history are all fair game, assuming they are well known, and it is well known that they are well known.
What makes Harry Potter special is its perfect storm of length and popularity. Because it’s so long and has such a huge fandom, Harry Potter is an especially large source of concepts. If I wanted to explain test anxiety, I could quote how Hermione acts during final exams. If I wanted to explain the trope of the Enigmatic Old Wizard, I could use Dumbledore’s actions.
One of my classes this semester talked about impact evaluation. Paraphrased, the TA said, “In the ideal scenario, we would perform a study, measure results, use a Time-Turner, then don’t do the study and measure the difference between the two worlds.” This made me really happy, not just because it fit, but also because it validated my thoughts on Harry Potter compression.
(Although for the record, it doesn’t fit perfectly. Time-Turners only allow for stable time loops in canon. You wouldn’t be able to apply the study to the same group of people, because there is always only one timeline. Time-Turners would still eliminate a lot of confounding variables though.)
Now that I’ve thought about it, it seems obvious. Yes, this is how discourse works. People will use analogies to previous well known ideas to explain their points. I mean, no shit Sherlock.
Even when an idea is simple in retrospect, I still find it rewarding to think it through out loud. It elevates the idea from latent knowledge to common knowledge, and helps me identify it in other contexts. I just used a meme based off Sherlock Holmes, and I didn’t realize how much meaning I could pack into those three words until now.
(I have a lot more to write about this than I thought, so I’m stopping here. I may pick it up tomorrow, or I’ll save it from a longer post after the gauntlet is over.)