Inaugural post

[injygo]

This is a post intended to lessen the activation energy necessary for me to post. Note that I'm still figuring out tags, comments, notifications, etc.

To help me figure out the comment system, please leave a brief comment about exactly one of the following:

• your favorite animal
• the last book you fell in love with and why
• your opinion of eliezer yudkowsky
• whether you love the color of the sky

Comments

[injygo]

I still don't understand what the misunderstanding is. How does science really work, such that the scenario in "that alien message" is not plausible?

The model of learning-about-physics I'm getting from "This Alien Message" is like this:
1. The intelligence receives some kind of data.
2. The intelligence wonders what it means, and constructs several theories, which may be far-fetched or complicated.
3. The intelligence receives further data, which supports or rules out various parts of theories.
4. Goto 2
Is your objection that this is unlike the way science works in our civilization? Or that there would not be enough data for the intelligence to consider relativity as a theory?

[thirqual]

The misunderstanding is in both how much and what information is contained in the data, how far you can make progress with it, and finally how one comes up/discards theories. The assumption is that the intelligence will come up with a specific model (General Relativity) as an hypothesis from the data. This is incorrect, the 3 snapshots of the fall of the apple (or the single one of the blade of grass) are grossly insufficent for this: there is no perceptible difference between the results of Newtonian mechanics and General Relativity on those pictures, and, very importantly, there is no basis in that data to build a relativistic model (specifically, which did not emerge from observations of falling bodies -no measurements precise enough to do so at the time-, but from issues in understanding the interactions between moving bodies and electromagnetism - there is *nothing* about the second in those data).

This is very important. It's not just a misunderstanding by Eliezer about the resolution of the data, but also about how you build theories from experimental data.

(I would have little objection* to a statement such as "given knowledge of the state of physics in the 1880s, the intelligence will come up with, at the very least a set of experiments to perform to resolve issues with Newtonian mechanics and, possibly, the first bricks of relativity)

*on those grounds