amoruso
Joined 12 years ago
Karma
133
Submissions
24
Member since
Dec 2
Recent submissions
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938
Comment · 3 years ago
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy"
He said it first, but I think your paraphrase is at least as good as the original formulation.
Comment · 4 years ago
Greg Egan wrote a few of those.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_(series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)
Diaspora starts in this universe but ends up somewhere else.
Comment · 6 years ago
That was funny. Laugh-out-loud funny. It read like a perfect satire of self-help pep talk advice.
Comment · 9 years ago
John Cramer has been pointing this out for years (since the 1980s I think):
"The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Nonlocality"
https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.00039
Also, Bell's inequality shows the state vector is nonlocal, and and that implies causality violation in relativity.
Third, quantum information theory has retrocausality in the form of negative entropy:
"Negative entropy in quantum information theory"
https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9610005
Too many things pointing in the same direction. This is the right way to look at it.
Comment · 9 years ago
If anyone wants to learn more about Bell's inequality, the simplest (real, no bullshit) explanation I've ever seen is by David Griffiths. You can follow it if you know the basics of calculus:
http://www.physics.umd.edu/courses/Phys270/Jenkins/Griffiths...
Comment · 10 years ago
I'll add another recommendation for Tufte's writings on the Challenger explosion. It should be required reading for all engineers. People who criticize Tufte for oversimplifying miss the point entirely. It's not about analysis, it's about communication. It's one thing for domain specialist to have a complex, multi-dimensional understanding of their specialty; extracting a relevant summary for non-experts is something else entirely. If you've ever been in a meeting where you had trouble getting your point across, you should read this. Make diagrams like Tufte does to get your point across, make more detailed ones as backups if you need to dive deep into details.
http://williamwolff.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/tufte-cha...
Comment · 10 years ago
The opposition to Galileo was not really religious or scientific. More than anything, it was political. You can't understand what happened outside the context of the religious wars of the time. His findings undermined the authority of the Catholic Church.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion
There are plenty of examples of political suppression of science in our own time. The Nazis and Communists were two extreme examples.
In our own society, religion doesn't have this kind of power any more. But there are still political pressures on researchers to be PC. I'll let you think up some examples yourself.
Comment · 10 years ago
Here's what they're talking about, for those who want a picture:
Comment · 10 years ago
It's not really ad hominem. More like constructive criticism of his rhetorical style.
Comment · 11 years ago
The article doesn't give any technical details. The website of the profiled company, Geometric Intelligence, doesn't have any technical details.
Cofounder Gary Marcus has a publication list at his academic webiste:
http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gary/marcus_pubs.html
Cofounder Zoubin Ghahramani has his research available at his academic website:
Comment · 11 years ago
Searle makes two assertions:
1) Syntax without semantics is not understanding. 2) Simulation is not duplication.
Claim 1 is a criticism of old-style Symbolic AI that was in fashion when he first formulated his argument. This is obviously right, but we're already moving past this. For example, word2vec or the recent progress in generating image descriptions with neural nets. The semantic associations are not nearly as complex as those of a human child, but we're past the point of just manipulating empty symbols.
Claim 2 is an assertion about the hard problem of consciousness. In other words, about what kinds of information processing systems would have subjective conscious experiences. No one actually has an answer for this yet, just intuitions. I can't really see why a physical instantiation of a certain process in meat should be different from a mathematically equivalent instantiation on a Turing machine. He has a different intuition. But neither one of us can prove anything, so there's nothing else to say.
Comment · 11 years ago
I'm guessing it was originally 10 km. Someone probably added a scale bar in km and then was told to change the label to US customary units.
Comment · 11 years ago
If you want a second opinion, Cosma Shalizi reviews A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram:
... a very good book, by the way.