What’s the point of randomization if you can easily tell the difference between a bright bulb and a dim one?
iDante
Karma: 425
Case: person who organized mass murder was put under trial by an outside group and executed.
Yet I hold that it was entirely ethically correct and proper.
Henry Kissinger organized mass murder.
For what its worth, I’m a physics/cs major and I wish I’d seen this article two years ago so I wouldn’t have wasted my credits on two philosophy classes.
No, because the claim on the front page is backed up by evidence. It’s not just pulled out of one person’s limited experiences. It IS offensive to negatively stereotype a group of people without evidence.
The author’s great “problems” of science are the same way. A broad generalization is made from limited experience, then no actual investigation is performed. Bold assertions are provided in place of careful statistics. The conclusion, “the biggest problem in science is management,” is utterly unconvincing.
I should have said “That’s offensive and untrue, and the rest of the post comes off similarly.”
What I’ve learned after years in the field is that what most scientists really want to do is prove how smart they are
What I’ve learned after years of being a decent human being is that most scientists are regular people who don’t appreciate being insulted. I’m a scientist, my parents are scientists, my best friends, my teachers, my sister, my uncle, aunt, and two cousins are scientists.
what most scientists really want to do is prove how smart they are
That’s offensive, and the rest of the post comes off similarly.
In response to fubarobfusco: there is a major difference between “fuck you!” and “I’ve been personally offended by you. Here’s why.”
The author hasn’t posed any scientific problems. Instead, they have made sweeping generalizations based off of their bad experiences in one field.
This referee cannot recommend the article for publication.
It covers very similar material as the first two parts of Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, since for a long time there was little distinction between philosophy and natural philosophy. I’ve only read parts of Russell’s book but Lindberg does a better job.
We also read Mott Greene’s Natural Knowledge in Preclassical Antiquity, which was also excellent but much more specialized. I found its discussion of Hesiod’s volcanos fascinating.
The rest of the books focused on later stuffsies.
I read The Beginnings of Western Science for a class. It’s excellent and I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of science.
Maybe I am downvoted to hell for expressing this, but I think that this post is pointless.
The entire purpose of AI (or at least one of the major ones) is to systematize human intelligence. Difficulty comes from the fact that intelligence starts at 0 (a rock is about as unintelligent as possible) and then climbs up to human level. Beyond that we’re not too sure. As evidenced by the lack of human-level AI out in the world, we humans don’t ourselves understand every step along the way from 0 to us. We’re still smart though, because we don’t have to. We evolved intelligence and we don’t even understand it.
1) We don’t understand human rationality well enough to systematize it completely.
Okay, so lets limit our scope a little. I’ll take your example: a system for investigating a question (btw, don’t guess at solutions first.). Lets say the question is “should I focus my studies more on physics or computer science?” Presumably a system ought to involve modeling futures and checking utilities. Now what if the question is “given any natural number N, are there N consecutive composite numbers?” (it’s yes). Well now my system for the previous question is useless. Of course I can add a rule to the top of my question system “If it’s about math then do mathy stuff, if it’s about life do utility stuff.” With mathy stuff and utility stuff defined below. This brings me to the main point. We already know that if it’s about math then we should do mathy stuff. We do that step without the help of the system. Humans share a huge body of knowledge that sets us above the rocks.
2) Our evolved intelligence is good enough to get us through almost all problems we face in the real world.
Unless we’re artificial intelligence programmers, we don’t need to specify our system in almost all cases. It’s built-in. However, there are some breaks in the system. We evolved for hunter-gatherer savanna tribes n stuff, so presumably we should update our nearly-complete evolved intelligence with some modern thoughts that must be learned. Cognitive biases, for example, should be taken into account in our decisions. But in a systematic account of investigating a question, “check cognitive biases” would be one entry out of a very big number of entries, most of which are shared between humans. It’d get lost in the mess, even though it’s very important. So now we update our system for investigating questions to make the signal stand out. “To solve a question, do what you’d normally do, but remember cognitive biases.” Why not be breve and just “remember cognitive biases.” Maybe just remember a thousand tips to supplement your intelligence...?
How do you come up with good intuitive guesses? Use your intuition. How do you determine whether or not a guess might be wrong? Check if it’s wrong or not. How do you examine a question analytically? Analyze it. How do you resolve confusion? Think about it until you aren’t confused anymore. These answers are supposed to be vague and unhelpful because anything more would be long long long and useless useless useless.
So be specific. What exact subproblems do you want systematized? When solving a physics problem it can be useful to make a list of things like “check extreme cases, check boundary values, check symmetry.” New students may benefit, but once they’re a few years in this process becomes natural.
I guess what I’m trying to say is one thousand tips + an evolved brain does make a system. The tips just serve to modernize it. Sorry this was very long and rambling, but I just took a test and I’m brain-whacked.
Whoa. I didn’t have this geometric point of view down so I didn’t understand at first what you meant, but now that I’ve thought about it for a few minutes it makes sense.
The prevalent intuitive meaning of correlation coefficient (at least the one I learned in the watered-down statistics-for-physics-students class) is “a measure of how well two variables correlate. 1 is well, 0 is not at all, −1 is backwards correlation.” Hence, the first thing I thought of was that image. Many people who need to use this coefficient won’t have taken linear algebra and it’ll be a complication for them to learn that it’s “the inner product of two random variablesies, so 0 means lots of correlation, pi means the opposite direction, and pi/2 means no correlation.” Or maybe you use degrees, idk.
I like it, thanks for making this thread :D
I don’t think correlation coefficient is the cosine of the angle between them. In this picture you can see that the middle row has 1 or −1 and yet different angles. Instead I think it’s a measure of how well they correlate with each other. Maybe I’m crazy-wrong though. Edit: For only two variables you might be right, but I don’t see correlation coefficients reported between just two variables.
I often see the entire covariance matrix reported, not just the correlation coefficient. This matrix has some handy properties. Its eigenstuff contains all the information about the arrows in this picture.
I thought that A Short History of Nearly Everything was interesting and well worth the time.
They did. Look up Thales, Aristotle, Democritus, and Archimedes just for a start. Particularly Archimedes.
You might want to try the the subreddit, but I think most people are satisfied with the open threads and IRC.
I’m not a physicist and it could be obviously wrong for some reason I’m missing
Good start. I know how tempting it is to talk about crackpot physical theories, believe you me I do, but you’ve gotta contain yourself. Seriously, you’re embarrassing me, and I’m not even you.
Since you failed #37, among others, I’ll help you out. Your theory predicts that what we call gravity depends not on mass but on something like solid angle, which is a measure of how big one object appears from another. If we’re talkin bout heaven here objects are spherical, so solid angle (and thus your theoretical force) depends only on the size of the object (radius) and distance. Guess what? It turns out that gravity actually depends on something called mass and energy. Newtonian gravity is linear in mass, but your theory is not (you can work out the relationship between proton count and surface area of a nucleus or something along those lines, tee hee). This linearity has been experimentally verified.
Anyway, does your theory have anything to say about this or this? Nope! It turns out gravity isn’t as simple as pushing and pulling. Time and energy and fahoosalah are involved too. You might know about these things if you take physics courses.
LessWrong is partly about learning how to be wrong. You’re wrong. LessWrong teaches to acknowledge when you don’t understand something, to listen to the knowledge of those who do, and to not post silly crackpot theories that don’t even. 0⁄10 will not think about again.
Magnetic Rag is my favorite too :D
Thanks for the recommendations!
Thank you. I really like the first few you posted, and I’ll check out the rest.
Don’t know why you had a downvote...
Genius by James Gleick is excellent. It’s a pretty dense biography, but well worth it.
I’m a little confused by this question. In my experience, atomic theory always refers to atoms. I think you’re really asking whether quarks and such are divisible. I’m confident that there is no substructure to elementary particles, but I won’t give a number.