Cristopher Moore: belief

Transcript context

…Right. And you're in order to do that, you're you're doing a great deal of mental modeling of the viewer. You're constantly putting yourself in their shoes. And and if I go back if I can jump back to puzzles for a little bit. Right? So so, like, when you design a puzzle, you're also constantly putting yourself in the shoes of the solver and, like, would they get this? Are they gonna see this? Is it Yes. You know, is it going to be visible but just hard enough to see that it will be a wonderful moment? And I think 1 interesting thing philosophically is I think there are both subjective and objective aspects to this. Right? So subjectively, of course, you're designing things for humans, and you as an editor and a creator are designing things for humans with, well, a certain level a certain level of literacy and familiarity with, for instance, the things that are talked about on your channel. And similarly, you know, if you're designing a puzzle, well, you're designing it for a human who has a certain a certain tolerance for search, but not much more. A again, a certain it it's like if if you're in a chess playing society, you kind of know about the knight's move. Right? So you so there are certain things that you're familiar with. And, like, there there's a there's a variant move in there's a variant rule in Sudoku, which for some reason is called disjoint groups, that for me is very headache inducing, which is that if there's a 7 in the top middle of this 3 by 3 box, There cannot be a 7 in the top middle of any of the other 3 by 3 boxes. This does not fit with my sensorium. I find it on a subjective level. I know that mathematically and logically, it's a it's a very nice extension of rows, columns, and boxes. It's sort of like a 3 or 4 dimensional extension treating the thing more like in a more hypercube y way. But I hate it because I, like, have to look over here and then look over there and then kind of painstakingly look over there. I can't scan it in the nice way I can scan rows, columns, and boxes. So that's a that's an area where subjectively, I find puzzles involving that constraint both harder and less fun. It's also the case that if I were a much more cognitively powerful creature, then I maybe I would experience just as much pleasure out of a 100 by a 100 Sudoku as I do out of 9 by nines. Right? So it's true that, you know, I mean, I'm just 2 pounds of meat with a 1 hertz processor. I can, you know, I can only handle the 9 by 9 things. Is it 2 pounds? I'm not I haven't weighed my brain. You know, on the other hand, I also I can't help but feel that there are almost mathematically objective aspects to moments. That maybe there are big moments and little moments, but that we can all agree, we can all sort of recognize them as insights. t feel that there are almost mathematically objective aspects to moments. That maybe there are big moments and little moments, but that we can all agree, we can all sort of recognize them as insights. Like, when you're designing a video, you can agree that, okay, at this point now, this concept is being like, you have a cognitive map of what concepts are being gained at each step and then used to build the next step. And maybe for some viewers, some steps would be very challenging. Others, they'd be kind of obvious, but they would all kind of understand that that's a step. So I and in the puzzle world, there's a lot of recognition that a good puzzle and a hard puzzle, these are orthogonal axes. And there are simple there are simple but beautiful puzzles. There are hard and beautiful puzzles. There's also simple boring and hard and boring. These are really very different things. And, yeah, I wish so theoretical computer science supposedly helps us figure out what problems are easy and what problems are hard and what qualitatively makes them easier or harder. What is it about their structure that makes them easy or hard? Why is this problem a smooth landscape that a greedy algorithm can just find the optimum, and this problem is a very rugged landscape. In physics, we would say a very glassy landscape where there are many local optimates, hard to navigate, blah blah blah. I've tried a little bit to formalize what it is about these moments, and I haven't succeeded. It's a little bit like public key public key cryptography where you have a function. Everyone can run the function forward. The challenge is inverting the function. And if you're given the public if you're given the private key, then inverting the function becomes very easy. But this is different. You have to find the key yourself. You have to find the insight yourself. Or there's this notion in computational complexity called computation with advice, where, again, you're given a big string of advice. Well, but, again, this is about finding the advice. I feel like it's more like the meta problem of designing an algorithm. So imagine that I show you an example of a potentially hard problem, a know, an NP hard problem. But I promise you, actually, this example is easy. I promise you this example belongs to a large subclass of problems for which there is an efficient algorithm. Now you have to go find the algorithm. Yep. That seems a little closer to this puzzle design, and maybe also a little closer to you're an intelligent entity dealing with a very structured world. You're not having to parse arbitrary images. You're parsing natural images, which through the processes of natural selection, through the structure of the built environment, which is made by systems not entirely unlike you that are building an environment that they can understand and navigate. Now your task is to, understand, navigate, predict, segment this data. What's really fascinating, right, is it's not so human solving puzzles that were invented by humans. can understand and navigate. Now your task is to, understand, navigate, predict, segment this data. What's really fascinating, right, is it's not so human solving puzzles that were invented by humans. Well, of course, that's a kind of ultimately, it's you're being communicated to by something with cognitive capacities and cognitive tastes, right, enjoyments similar to yours. And then you know you can grab onto that. What's amazing is that even the non living world and even the natural non human world has all sorts of stuff that we can grab onto.…

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