You don't understand anything unless you understand there are at least 3 ways.
Interpretation
Understanding requires recognizing multiple perspectives.
This quote by Marvin Minsky emphasizes the importance of looking at situations from various angles. It suggests that true understanding goes beyond a singular perspective and requires an appreciation for the complexity of ideas, problems, and solutions. By advocating for a multi-faceted approach, Minsky encourages critical thinking and open-mindedness in our quest for knowledge.
In practice
This quote can be used in discussions about problem-solving during meetings.
If you understand something in only one way, then you don't really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that's what we mean by thinking!
There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI; for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.
I think every person either inherits or eventually makes up their own idea of what they are and who they are and what caused the world to be, and it seems to me that these stories of creation myth, adopted by different cultures - most of them are less insightful than the stories made up by individual poets and writers.
I believe that everyone has to construct a mental model of what they are and where they came from and why they are as they are, and the word soul in each person is the name for that particular mish-mash of those fully formed ideas of one's nature.
If you just have a single problem to solve, then fine, go ahead and use a neural network. But if you want to do science and understand how to choose architectures, or how to go to a new problem, you have to understand what different architectures can and cannot do.
You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
We imagine that whatever is unpleasant is our duty! Is that anything like the spirit of our Lord, "I *delight* to do Thy will, O My God.
Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from the inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves. Forgive, Edward. Forgive...no one is born with anger. And when we die, the soul is freed of it. But now, here, in order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did, and why you no longer need to feel it.' She touched his hand. 'You need to forgive your father.' ~pgs 141-142
Hug the shore; let others try the deep.
The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter - 'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.
You are protected. But if you don't take risks, God will retreat and become only a subject of philosophical speculation.
We can easily become as much slaves to precaution as we can to fear. Although we can never rivet our fortune so tight as to make it impregnable, we may by our excessive prudence squeeze out of the life that we are guarding so anxiously all the adventurous quality that makes it worth living.
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