algon33

Is there one tool to rule them all, or a host for each specialty?

Your answer is somewhat helpful in the latter sort of world where OP didn't know how to read a textbook (which is unfortunately common) but not in the former sort. You seem to be venting though, which is understandable. But venting with a side of helpful content would be even better.

For instance, advising OP on how to to read a maths book (generate content yourself, check dependancies, connect things to what you know etc.) or suggest books which contain advise like this alongside their main content (I think Tao's analysis texts might do this?)

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lFxURxbyEc&list=PLiayR7yJx8...

I have some experience implementing deeprl models, statistical physics simulations, pre/post deep learning revolution AI algorithms and a couple of simple games. My degree was in theoretical physics. My interests are broad, so I'd be fine learning new stuff for a job, or working as a front end, or back end , dev, or doing ML research or designing high performance numerical simulations for SDEs or whatever.

Evolution promotes fitness enhancing functionality, so we should expect biological processes to be useful for some purpose and hence not be distributed like a random graph (e.g. Erdos Reyni graphs). Indeed, if we look at biological structures, we can find that the causal networks they form are far from random. Furthermore, there are often repeated motifs present. These motifs are quite simple and seem to map neatly onto human understandable concepts (like XOR gates or autoregulators or feedforward networks etc.)

And often, the overall graphs seem like they're tree like rather than some complicated mess of feedback loops (barring autoregulation). This kind of structure is quite modular, and hence we can leverage our understanding of component parts to understand greater and greater pieces of the organism.

There are two problems with this arguement: one, that a lot of the data used for it is not nearly exhaustive. Maybe the people examining biological circuitry stumbled on the rare areas where there are repeated sub-components. Second, even if there are repeated sub components, why should we get modularity i.e. few connections, mostly local?

The former may not be an issue if there hasn't been a lot of dedicated effort towards finding human comprehensible structure in biological circuits, which there might not have been. These things are big and complicated, with many constituent parts, and teasing out the underlying structure may require loads of computation and statistical analysis, which was hard for most of the history of biology.

The latter is not adressed in the book review, or in the comments, but the review author's work makes me it plausible to me that modularity will be common in biological systems. I don't have a good summary of that, or can clearly articulate why I'm hopeful about this. But read the rest of the work of the writer of the article if you're interested in this kind of stuff (key words: natural abstractions, interfaces, selection theorems).

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bNXdnRTpSXk9p4zmi/book-revie...

------------------------------------------ The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a massive tome written by an American reporter who lived through the eponymous era. It has a great deal of detail which I had never heard of before, and shaped my understanding of WW2. It is also quite moralising, maintaining that Nazi Germany was inevitable because of a servile German character, that the depravity of the SS was in part due to their homosexual deviancy, and a little too focused on the personalities of individuals. Admittedly, the last part is quite interesting. Why do I still recommend it? Because I think there is enough depth there, and enough of a distinction in the text between the author's theories and the facts, that you can learn a great deal from it.

For instance, the sheer stupid chance that led to him waging such terrible war. How so many men could have prevented his rise to power. He might have died a soldier in the first world war, or the French or English could have crushed his open violations of the peace treaties, or how his takeover of multiple nations was facilitated by the petty racism of British diplomats. There's also detail concering the poltical, economic and social factors that allowed this chance to exist in the first place. Like the disconnect between the German military and the Weimar Republic who they were sworn to protect, or the war-weariness of Western Europe which was partially responsible for their leaders to continually cede ground to a madman who publically outlined his plans to genocide entire peoples. ------------------------------------------ The 10,000 Year Explosion is not widely accepted by academics, but is not widely panned either. And whilst it does seem to over-play its thesis, the core idea is quite sound: evolution still applies to modern humans, and the rapid growth of the species over the past 10k years has allowed for a great deal more variation and selection to occur, and as such we should see far more changes in human biology now than throughout the average 10k period of history. The exact mutations described and the hypothesis for why they occured are, of course, more conentious. I don't have much of a general opinion, as the authors go through a wide variety of population differences like lactose intolerance, diease immunity, hearing adaptations due to language use and, yes, IQ. The depth and quality of research on these varies, so the reliability of conclusions in the book does too. ------------------------------------------ "The Dawn of Everything" covers some interesting anthropological data, but the reviews I've read paint a poor picture of the author's interpretation of what the data means. Whilst it points to an important idea, that the human transition to agriculture was not nearly as sharp or uniform as is popularly believed, I think you'd be better served by reading this page on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity and reading some of the cited papers and authors' works.

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

Non deterministic dynamics occurs in Newtonian physics as well. These things are worrying philosophically, but we can take some comfort in that the initial conditions for which these occur are "measure zero" i.e. if you were defining a probability measure over initial conditions, then the non-deterministic initial conditions would have measure zero. It doesn't sound like we have that option here though.

But in my view, this result is good news. We knew GR was unphysical anyhow. Now we've increased our understanding of how unphysical it is, potentially ruling out more replacement theories.