mobeets

Maybe naive but I tend to think there’s a way to attract people’s attention to good science without over-claiming. The downside of too much editorializing is that it leads some people (eg the comment I first replied to) to think the science itself must be as shallow as the headline suggests, which does everyone a disservice. In this article’s case, using words like “may” or “suggests” could have gone a long way.

This is really impressive! One thing I’ve often wanted is a way to listen to an ebook (say, while cooking), and then later be able to sit down and read from where I left off. This essentially requires the same functionality that Storyteller offers (syncing progress through an ebook and audiobook), though arguably overkill for this use case (since I could handle a more coarse alignment). In any case, is this something Storyteller would be good for? Or are there other tools for the job?

I genuinely could not tell if this was a parody/satire or not, I think because the aesthetic reminds me of how a product like this would be presented in a horror movie or something

Agreed. Also it seems like, if the actual test scores and perceived test scores were both sampled iid, the “perceived” line should just be flat, with everyone being at 50th percentile. The fact that the displayed graph deviates from 50 in a way that more resembles the empirical data makes it seem like a cherry-picked random sample

Por que no los dos? Scientific review times are up, it’s harder to find reviewers, and many reviews are AI generated anyway. Auto-generated research publications will arguably make the replication crisis worse, because there will be more slop to clog up the review system, and these papers will presumably be just as (if not more) not reproducible than human written science

Thank you for writing a much more thoughtful reply to this comment than I was drafting

Good point, this is probably the author assuming a little more context on the reader’s part. The cases where you can record from neurons in humans are very rare (basically only in treatment resistant epilepsy), and most of the work on hippocampus uses rodents

This approach implies the probability doesn’t depend on N. It only happens to be 1/2 for N=4 (the article goes into this). The trick is that you don’t know beforehand which semicircle all the points can land in, but your unwrapping step assumes you do.

Matlab is annoying for many reasons. But to me the main advantage of using Matlab over Python is the plotting.

Plotting in Python is still a pain. Notebooks help, but they still don’t let you add to a plot piece-by-piece; and 3D plots are possible but nowhere close to as simple as it is in Matlab.

One surprise of reading this thread was learning that Terry Tao is an active user of Math Overflow!

I was confused also. My guess was that maybe a “sequence” has to be 4 or more pebbles?

I totally agree but unfortunately it really is one of the fundamental laws of wikipedia. To me this becomes especially silly when editing math wiki articles, where you might be tempted to connect mathematical concepts (eg with a few lines of algebra), but writing this yourself in a wiki article is not allowed unless you can find a link to an external source making the same derivation!

I’m with you—-I think you did a good job of summarizing all the places that LLMs are super practical/useful, but agreed that for prose (as someone who considers themselves a proficient writer), it just never seems to contribute anything useful. And those who are not proficient writers, I’m sure it can be helpful, but it certainly doesn’t contribute any new ideas if you’re not providing them.