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#5566·Dennis HackethalOP, about 5 hours agoI would consider that a problem with the explanation, not with the HTV comparison. It's exactly the kind of arbitrariness that HTV is supposed to expose.
Yes but if the program is an accurate representation/use of HTV, then the program should expose it. The program asks the user for variations in service of exposing it. But that doesn’t work in this case. I think that’s a problem.
I think the program does expose it, given inputs that reflect the user's genuine understanding of the explanations.
If I genuinely regard “axial tilt while I wear one green hat,” “axial tilt while I wear two green hats,” etc. as distinct working variations of the axial-tilt explanation, then I've told the program that the hat count is part of the explanation and can be varied freely. In that case, I think it's completely fair for HTV to judge the explanation easier to vary.
If I instead understand the hat as an irrelevant fact that has nothing to do with the axial-tilt explanation, then I shouldn't submit changes in my hat count as variations of that explanation in the first place.
The program can't accept my judgment that these are genuine variations and then independently override that judgment because it “knows” they're actually irrelevant. Doing that would require the program itself to understand what is doing explanatory work. That's precisely the part I'm outsourcing to the user.
So I don't think this example shows that the program fails to expose easy-to-varyness. It shows that the result depends on which changes the user genuinely judges to be variations of the explanation—which is the same point I made in #5553 and #5555.