> Obviously the models will improve
Says who? The Hot Hand Fallacy Division?
Says who? The Hot Hand Fallacy Division?
(a) the initial, intuitive belief that basketball players who had made several shots in a row were more likely to make the next one (b) the analytical analysis that disproved a, which no doubt stemmed from the belief that every shot must be totally independent of its context, disregarding the human factors at play (c) the revised analysis that found that the analysis in b was flawed, and there actually was such a thing as a "hot hand."
You know we're not talking about sports, right?
HN is wild.
Anyway, the lesson of the hot hand fallacy is that sometimes intuitive predictions turn out to be right, despite the best efforts of low-context contrarians. But I don't think that was your point.
You are the only one who is confused.
> It’s pretty rational
No, that's why it's a fallacy.
What about Moore's law? Observing trends and predicting what might happen isn't a particularly new idea. You're not the only one, but I find it odd when people toss around the fallacy argument when a trend isn't pointing their way in an argument. I'm sure you use past trends to inform many of your thoughts each day.
Anyway, the point stands. The fallacy is believing with certainty that something will happen because of past events. That doesn't mean prediction is futile. Might want to re-read your wikipedia pages to better understand!
Why do you think this? We know how the sun works, how much nuclear fuel it has, and what life stages a star goes through as it uses up fuel, and how that life cycle changes based on size. We know the sun will stop shining, depending on your definition of that, in about 10 billion years. We know these things from studying THOUSANDS of other suns in various parts of their life cycle. We can make predictions on stars we observe, and watch them come true, which is the only valid judgement of a theory or model.
You not knowing something (like statistics) doesn't mean nobody knows it.
We have well understood theories about how we think the sun works based on observations of other suns, yes. But that's all.
You're muddying the waters willingly. This is intellectually dishonest.
Categorically it's the same problem. I just don't give any more credence to "centuries of data on orbital mechanics" for the purpose of this discussion about the the epistemological understanding of whether the sun will continue to exist or not at some specified point in time in the future.
Is it more likely based on track record/history that we'll still have a sun in 50 years than improved LLMs? Uh likely yes. I never argued one was more or less likely than the other. I only argued that the same logical reasoning/argument is used to come to the conclusion that we'll have a sun in the future as it is to deduce that LLMs will probably improve.
So unless you call epistemology dishonest, I'm not being dishonest. I'm pointing out something that people commonly glaze over in their practical day to day lives. I pointed it out because someone challenged my argument that LLMs will improve by saying essentially "well we don't know that". Of fucking course we don't. But we don't know that in the same way we don't know that the sun will rise tomorrow. That's all I'm saying. You're just missing the nuance and I don't know why you're resorting to calling it intellectually dishonest.
Yes it was called the Cold War.
Little tiny suns, but all those H-bombs (and reactors like the NIF and Z-pinch) verified quite a lot of the fundamentally identical physics.
For all we know there's something important we haven't observed about the sun's ability to consume its available fuel (whatever that mass is) and what happens to the exhaust products that could cause the sun to cool far sooner than we think. Who knows /shrug... not that I don't hope we've got it right in our understanding.
This by itself should be enough to pass the test of:
>> Have we experimentally recreated a sun and verified any of the theoretical models we have?
in the affirmative.
I mean, it's not like science requires 1:1 scale models.
> (or gravity for that matter)
Neither cheese, which is a similar non-sequitur.
[0] Including the fun fact that the sun is a "cold" fusion reactor, in the sense that it's primarily driven by quantum mechanical rather than high-energy ("thermo-nuclear") effects.
I'm not sure if this was first noted before or after the muon-catalysed fusion research.
Physics: the only place where someone looks at ten million K and goes "huh, that's cold".
No brother, it's science, and frankly that you believe this is not surprising to me at all.
Philosophy is great and all, but Newton gives you raw numbers that are then verified by reality. I'm going to rely on that instead of untestable breathless "but ACTUALLY" from people who provide no actionable insight into the universe.
Philosophy -> Math -> Physics -> Chemistry -> etc.
Everything to the right depends on, or is an application of, the discipline to the left. "Science" starts at physics.
Just because there is no proof for the opposite yet doesn't mean the original hypothesis is true.