Yves Messer
1 HN recommender · recommended in 8 months, 2016–2026
1:40 · 48K views · Sep 27, 2013
A short clip from a 1973 NOVA episode in which Richard Feynman recalls his father teaching him that knowing the name of a bird in many languages tells you nothing about the bird.
Reached for whenever a thread touches on naming versus actually understanding something.
9 comments from Hacker News
If you dont mind listening to Richard himself, you can watch this pre-historic 4:3 videos on youtube; this video [LINK]
It's not that simple. LLMs are great for predicting next word, but this needs a more unsupervised approach. Ultimately, you need to know the environment of whales. Sure, you know the next probable token, and even relationships between tokens, but how do they relate to what whales are doing? , in other words what does it mean? . It reminds me of the great quote by Feynman: "look at the bird"[1]. You can know the name of a bird in many different languages, but that tells you nothing about it. If you want to understand birds, you need to look at it and see what it's doing. If we want to communicate with another species, we need to understand what they're doing, why they're communicating, and from there we can begin to infer what they're communicating. It could be simply a callsign/identification/name for each individual, it could be communicating you've found a place with food, it could be communicating about predators, who knows. There could be all sorts of interesting variation and nuance to their calls. But ultimately it's necessary to look (in the general sense of having information about what it's doing -- could be through all kinds of sensors!) at the ~~bird~~ whale :) [1] Feynman tells the as a lesson from his father. (that you can know their names and still know nothing about the birds themselves). this video Bonus related video!: [LINK]
Why do they ask about capitals? Relevant Feynman: this video And nowadays we have google for some added prosthetic knowledge. It's becoming increasingly important to grasp concepts well enough to ask the right questions, but knowing simple unrelated facts by heart becomes irrelevant. At most you have to remember that there was something to remember so you can look it up. edit: can a native speaker guide me on where to set commas correctly :) ?
Though he does admit [1] > So I had learned already that names don't constitute knowledge... That's caused me a certain trouble since because I refuse to learn the name of anything... What [my father] forgot to tell me was that the knowing the names of things is useful if you wanna talk to somebody else. I think an interview might count :) [1] this video
Totally agreed. However, I've found that learning something new without regards for the actual name for it helps me build a solid, abstract representation in the mind. But like you say, communicating these ideas becomes cumbersome when you don't speak the common language :) And here's Feynman on the same topic: this video