QuantumRoar

Yes, the current understanding is that general relativity breaks down inside of black holes and, to understand how it really works, we need a quantum theory of gravity.

However, I would not call it gossip since, by your reasoning, anything could be gossip then. I understand gossip as being something unimportant but the Schwarzschild solution was a major milestone in the understanding of general relativity. Moreover, all scifi movies considering wormholes and such, can be traced back to the usual visualization of the black hole distorting space time. Pretty consequential discovery I'd say.

This is not true as often you find surprising things that are not general which ARE NOT GOSSIP. To stay with the physics theme, the Schwarzschild solution of general relativity is a very special one and I don't think anybody thinks that black holes are gossip.

And it is certainly not surprising that amateurs in general forget that F = ma is only valid if the mass does not change. The more general expression is F = dp/dt, where p is the momentum. But this, of course, is also only valid in inertial systems. It's not really important to the article but it does kind of annoy me that he uses the most special case of an expression in an argument about it being general.

He could have actually made the point about generality by comparing this expression to the most general one for the force (in a frame of reference that accelerates). That would have also shown why generality can quickly become infeasible in practice. If he knew how many approximations people make in the real world, not because they want to, but because they HAVE TO, his worldview might be a different one.

I feel like he's trying to make a point about a very specific scenario but doesn't mention it explicitly. Instead he tries to be general and therefore fails to understand that his view doesn't actually apply in general.

No. Usually you talk to your colleagues and you help each other -- especially in the same department.

If I remember correctly, there are needle-like implants with around a thousand contacts and it is quite a difficult task to get the signals out of the brain. Either you have the ADCs directly at the contacts, which means you can't get your density of contacts up, or you have the ADCs outside which will give you a nightmare of wiring. In either case the technology to actually have an interface read out individual neurons is still quite far off, as far as I know.

I'm not quite sure about all of this, so maybe someone with up to date information on the technology can help me out here?

You're mixing up programming with computer science. The former is a task that does not necessarily need any math (e.g. web development), the latter is literally math (e.g. category algebra).

Edit: clarification

The questions are actually pretty clear. The problem is that you lack a general understanding of mathematical concepts and therefore you don't know what to do with it. But that's fine and that's actually what the exam is for, i.e. only those may pass who understand these things.

>This is probably not a view shared by many here, but if math problems were to be communicated in more natural ways, far more people would be interested in the sciences.

I would argue the opposite. If more problems could be as well posed as mathematical problems, we wouldn't have people bullshitting their way through arguments that are in dire need of some scientifical rigor (see climate science, psychology, and other disciplines that are too complex to isolate phenomena completely). You can't handwave your way through a math exam and you shouldn't be able to do it in other fields of science.

I never needed to bother with a filter where I live. So everybody uses them where the water is chlorinated?

The water in the US is chlorinated (at least where I was in Washington, DC). It smells and tastes really terrible.

I strongly believe that we should not easily segregate people into a smart kind and a not-so-smart kind. Intelligence comes in many ways and the genetics and upbringing of a person will make their intelligence manifest in different ways.

Someone being good at something, does not automatically equate to a high level of intelligence or smartness but rather a high degree of familiarity with the topic. Familiarity can be acquired either through a lot of practice or from a predisposition to understand quickly, which is intelligence or smartness.

However, what can be said is that a person who is good at almost everything, necessarily has to be smart because there wouldn't be any time to practice everything in depth. Conversely, I'd never call a person smart who's good at one thing but doesn't understand anything else.

The author says that smart, successful people are cursed with over-confidence due to them knowing one thing very well. But how can you call a person smart if they do not even possess the ability to properly self-reflect. Is that not the one thing that should define smartness?

Rationalizing things away, ignoring signs that interfere with one's world-view, and being over-confident are all traits of not-so-smart people. Just because you know how to code, does not mean you are smart.

I'd say the result of this anecdote should've been that it turns out that people can be good at their jobs and be idiots at the same time.

Nope, not fake. Just another way to look at it. From the paper: "One of the deepest insights about quantum gravity that emerged in recent times is that it is expected to be holographic [1–3], meaning that there should be an equivalent description of the bulk physics using a quantum field theory with no gravity in one dimension less. One may thus seek to use holography to model the very early Universe."

I think you wanted to say: "Are we simplifying things in software development?" All of the points you have made are actually simplifications of what might be the optimal solution.

Imagine the solution space as some multidimensional space where there is somewhere an optimal solution. The dimensions include the habits of your programmers, the problem you are trying to solve, and the phase of the moon. Microservices, a special form of redundancy, continuous integration, agile development are all extreme solutions to specific problems. Solutions which are extreme in that they are somewhere in the corner of your multidimensional solution space.

They are popular because they are radical in the way they conceptualize the shape of the problem and attempt to solve it. Therefore they seem like optimal solutions at first glance when really they only apply really well to specific toy models.

Take e.g. microservices. Yes, it's really nice if you can split up your big problem into small problems and define nice and clean interfaces. But it becomes a liability if you need too much communication between the services, up until the point where you merge your microservices back together in order to take advantage of using shared memory.

Don't believe any claims that there is a categorically better way to do everything. Most often, when you see an article about something like that, it is "proved" by showing it solves a toy model very well. But actual problems are rarely like toy models. Therefore the optimal solution to an actual problem is never a definite answer from one of the "simplified corner case scenarios" but it is actually just as complex as the problem you are trying to solve.

Once you own data centers, energy consumption becomes a major consideration.

I'm not doing stuff like that but I assume the train of thought concerning the economics of energy consumption is like that: You buy new hardware and from experience you know it's going to last on average a few years. During the lifetime of your new hardware you can save some amount of money on electricity because your new hardware is more efficient than the old one. So it would make sense to hit the buy button for the new hardware when you can save money:

(Savings in electricity over the lifetime) - (Price of new hardware) > 0

I assume after a few years the savings may become significant.

You can view things like abstract concepts as information. You can create information by using energy and e.g. encode it onto a surface or encode it in a human brain. There is a minimum amount of energy necessary to store information defined by Landauer's principle for irreversible computation. So in that sense the idea of "Occam's Razor" really does exist encoded in your brain as information (a form of energy) manifested in connections between neurons or so.

I see your point. What I meant was that existence and interaction are equivalent. But I see that I didn't express myself well there.

Let us presume that existence and interaction can be separate. Let us also assume for a moment that there is a definition of 'existence' without interaction. Then a reality with a thing that exists but doesn't interact is equivalent to a reality where this thing doesn't exist. If a thing's existence and non-existence yield equivalent realities, we can always assume that it does not exist. Therefore, we can set 'it interacts' and 'it exists' to be equivalent for all practical purposes.

That's my line of thought, which of course still doesn't exclude that things can 'exist' but not 'interact'. But if you would press me, I'd ask for a definition of the word 'existence' without using any form of interaction. I wouldn't know a proper answer to that.

The kind of predictive statements that all physicists are making for quite a while now and on which all of our technological progress is founded.

If there were some other fundamental means by which reality might be modified besides the basic interactions we know, our standard model of particle physics couldn't work so well, right? So to our knowledge, interaction is the one and only thing that puts a thing into existence or not.

As a side note: that is also the reason why WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) are a candidate for dark matter. The idea is that there might exist a form of matter that only interacts very weakly and thus it is incredibly hard to confirm its existence. Furthermore these WIMPs are massive (compared to other known elementary particles), so they might be out of reach of our particle accelerators.

These kinds of predictions follow from that.