On Sun, Apr 07, 2013 at 08:03:54AM -0500, Tristan Slominski wrote: > A purpose of language is to convey how to solve problems. You need to > look for > robust solution. You must deal with that real world is inprecise. Just > transforming > problem to words causes inaccuracy. when you tell something to many > parties each of them wants to optimize something different. You again > need flexibility. > > Ondrej, have you come across Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragility > concept? The reason I ask, is because we seem to agree on what's important > in solving problems. However, robustness is a limited goal, and > antifragility seems a much more worthy one.
I did not Yes that is almost exactly what I meant. I did not have word that would fit exactly so I described it as robustness which was closest upto now. > In short, the concept can be expressed in opposition of how we usually > think of fragility. And the opposite of fragility is not robustness. > Nassim argues that we really didn't have a name for the concept, so he > called it antifragility. > fragility - quality of being easily damaged or destroyed. > robust - 1. Strong and healthy; vigorous. 2. Sturdy in construction. > Nassim argues that the opposite of easily damaged or destroyed [in face of > variability] is actually getting better [in face of variability], not just > remaining robust and unchanging. This "getting better" is what he called > antifragility. > Below is a short summary of what antifragility is. (I would also encourage > reading Nassim Taleb directly, a lot of people, perhaps myself included, > tend to misunderstand and misrepresent this concept) > > [1]http://www.edge.org/conversation/understanding-is-a-poor-substitute-for-convexity-antifragility > > On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 4:25 AM, Ondřej Bílka <[2]nel...@seznam.cz> wrote: > > On Sat, Apr 06, 2013 at 09:00:26PM -0700, David Barbour wrote: > > On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 7:10 PM, Julian Leviston > <[1][3]jul...@leviston.net> > > wrote: > > > > LISP is "perfectly" precise. It's completely unambiguous. Of > course, > > this makes it incredibly difficult to use or understand > sometimes. > > > > Ambiguity isn't necessarily a bad thing, mind. One can consider it > an > > opportunity: For live coding or conversational programming, > ambiguity > > enables a rich form of iterative refinement and conversational > programming > > styles, where the compiler/interpreter fills the gaps with > something that > > seems reasonable then the programmer edits if the results aren't > quite > > those desired. For mobile code, or portable code, ambiguity can > provide > > some flexibility for a program to adapt to its environment. One can > > consider it a form of contextual abstraction. Ambiguity could even > make a > > decent target for machine-learning, e.g. to find optimal results or > > improve system stability [1]. > > [1] > [2][4]http://awelonblue.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/stability-without-state/ > > > > IMO unambiguity is property that looks good only in the paper. > > When you look to perfect solution you will get perfect solution for > wrong problem. > > A purpose of language is to convey how to solve problems. You need to > look for > robust solution. You must deal with that real world is inprecise. Just > transforming > problem to words causes inaccuracy. when you tell something to many > parties each of them wants to optimize something different. You again > need flexibility. > > This is problem of logicians that they did not go into this direction > but direction that makes their results more and more brittle. > Until one can answer questions above along with how to choose between > contradictrary data what is more important there is no chance to get > decent AI. > > What is important is cost of knowledge. It has several important > properties, for example that in 99% of cases it is negative. > > You can easily roll dice 50 times and make 50 statements about them that > are completely unambiguous and completely useless. > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [5]fonc@vpri.org > [6]http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > > References > > Visible links > 1. > http://www.edge.org/conversation/understanding-is-a-poor-substitute-for-convexity-antifragility > 2. mailto:nel...@seznam.cz > 3. mailto:jul...@leviston.net > 4. http://awelonblue.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/stability-without-state/ > 5. mailto:fonc@vpri.org > 6. http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc -- new guy cross-connected phone lines with ac power bus. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
