ly3xqhl8g9

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Jul 23

https://github.com/ly3xqhl8g9

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Comment · 3 years ago

Not to worry. I will not comment anymore. Please delete my account.

Comment · 3 years ago

True. That's why we probably need another mechanism for incentivizing high-risk/high-reward/multi-decennial research. Perhaps, even if LK99 is not real, something interesting will mutate out of it: some kind of platform merging arXiv, Twitch, Patreon, making the researchers to be more transparent, more willing to share partial results, failures, and even be rewarded to fail. Some time ago had this "fail database" in mind, where one would upload all the data of the experiments that didn't work. I see there is a "FailCon" [1].

[1] http://thefailcon.com/about.html

Comment · 3 years ago

Sure, it doesn't spread down to 1901, but the uptick started around 1970s [1].

Anyway, my main rant was about the inefficiency of giving awards to "lone geniuses", at most three, of expecting said "lone wolves" to exist in the first place, and then comes the discussion if the wolves are male or not. Unfortunately it got derailed into talking about pseudoscientific scalars such as IQ and sex binaries.

[1] "large scale changes began around the 1970s", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_STEM_fields

Comment · 3 years ago

"In no case may a prize amount be divided between more than three persons." [1]

Sad state of affairs to expect a reward for brilliance and to have science bottlenecked by a merchant of death. Just the fact that the merchant of death gives "peace prizes" should have made the entire affair laughable a long time ago. Perhaps it's time to move on from this ancient and limited understanding of appraisal, awards.

I'm in no position to ever receive a Nobel prize, but I'm fairly certain I am moral enough to reject such a grandstanding award coming from such a troubled tradition. Yes, I just virtue-signalled calling immoral every recipient of the Nobel Prize, mostly out of sheer distaste for the ceremony, but also thinking of the terrible inefficiency which has plagued science and research in the last 122 years. How many discoveries were missed because following the course to unveil them was not "Nobel-worthy". How many scientists had their careers ruined for pursuing the Nobel award without being granted anything. Just the fact that only 1.8% of the Nobel Prize in Physics were awarded to women [2] shows the entire thing as the charade it is, no other context needed.

[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/frequently-asked-questions/#:~:te...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_Nobel_laureates

Comment · 3 years ago

Interestingly enough, penny pushing also destroys capitalism, see The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America―and How to Undo His Legacy [1].

[1] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Man-Who-Broke-Cap...

Comment · 3 years ago

Regardless if LK-99 is truly a Room-Temperature Superconductor or not, only 112 years passed since Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered superconductivity on April 8, 1911, 4 PM [1] [2]: resistance not futile, but "practically zero". The first loaf of sliced bread was sold commercially on July 7, 1928 [3]. The rate of progress is astonishing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heike_Kamerlingh_Onnes#Superco...

[2] 2010, "The discovery of superconductivity", https://www.ilorentz.org/history/cold/DelftKes_HKO_PT.pdf

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Frederick_Rohwedder

Comment · 3 years ago

There is no use in synthesizing (C6H6O·CH2O)n [1] (or LK-99, to be actual, real or not) that is not cost effective.

It's precisely this penny pusher rhetoric which in the end will make China win, deservedly so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakelite

Comment · 3 years ago

Economic limits are imaginary, secondhand effects of the ideological goggles one's society decides to wear at a certain time for arbitrary reasons. USA during the Manhattan Project knew of no economic limits, i.e. they could arbitrarily push them according to the greater goal; China today, for instance, knows no economic limits. But yes, today, in the "Western" world a speech such as "we choose to get 160 zetaflops (10^21) [1] under your desk in 10 years because it is hard" [2] would be unimaginable, also because you can count on the fingers of an amputated arm how many politicians know what a FLOP is.

[1] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/04/26/a-per...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon

Comment · 3 years ago

We are ridiculously far from physical limits in our current artificial computers (both theoretical [1], and practical [2]). For more technical details see Jim Keller: [3] [4] [5].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation

[2] The ~12 watts computer inside each living human adult skull (and perhaps each eukaryote cell [6]) is still the state-of-the-art, for quite some time.

[3] 2021, Jim Keller: The Secret to Moore's Law, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x17jIKQf9hE

[4] 2019, Jim Keller: Moore’s Law is Not Dead, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc

[5] 2023, Change w/ Jim Keller, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzgyksS5pX8

[6] Our computers aren't yet able of polycomputation, where the computation topology, data, and functions depend on the observer, instead of computation in a passive implementation, once done forever set in s̶t̶o̶n̶e̶ silicon, 2023, Michael Levin, Agency, Attractors, & Observer-Dependent Computation in Biology & Beyond, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whZRH7IGAq0

Comment · 3 years ago

"I am the publisher now."

Comment · 3 years ago

Until a synthetic agent will be here we can only guess. The current best guesses seem to have to do with the free energy principle, active inference, Markov blankets [1]. It might be just that simple: it's what happens when some proton gradient reduces ferredoxin [2]. Also related [3].

[1] On-going series of lectures, "Physics as Information Processing" - Chris Fields

Lecture 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpOrRw4EhTo

Lecture 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkWIqpxWRM4

Lecture 3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOZp_XNYijQ

[2] "How does chemistry come alive?" - Nick Lane, Alkaline hydrothermal vents at 18:44, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmvS7tgvy6U TL;DW at 52:00 "How does chemistry come alive? It happens when a focused, sustained environmental disequilibrium of H2, CO2, and pH across a porous structure that lowers kinetic barriers to reaction continuously forms organics that bind and self-organize into protocells with protometabolism generating catalytic nucleotides which promote protocell growth through positive feedbacks, favouring physical interactions with amino acids, a nascent genetic code where RNA sequences are selected if they promote protocell growth so genetic information has meaning from the beginning"

[3] "Origins of the RNA-Protein World – Lost in Translation?" - John Sutherland, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSjIDStlZg8