awanderingmind

I do agree with that.

I have had zero real-life interaction with the rationalist space beyond exchanging some emails with people and reading numerous blog posts, reading lesswrong, and stuff like that, but this post seems to lean too far into drawing a conclusion about a very non-homogeneous group of people based on a few individuals that seem to be mentally unwell.

While I have become less enthusiastic about rationalism (in the sense of this post, not in the sense of the philosophical tradition) over time, the space seems to consist mostly of nerdy people who try really hard to reason properly. Sure, they sometimes come to absurd conclusions, but in general they have interesting perspectives and analyses. Without data on the percentage of people who reach the cult-like status referenced in the post, it seems premature to deride the entire enterprise; in any sufficiently large population group you will have that type of behavior.

On the other hand the point about them being related in spirit to the various 'self-improvement', 'New Age', or whatever movements in California surely isn't WRONG, but it feels a bit... underdeveloped? I'm sure there are loads of connections, simply because the movement seems to be centered (in meatspace, anyway) in California. A more scholarly analysis explicitly drawing the connections would be more useful (and interesting!) than an ad hominem comparison to Scientology and the Manson family(!).

What types of engineering software do you work on?

    Many mathematicians dismissed the function. It was an anomaly, they said — the work of a pedant, mathematically useless.

This is low-key hilarious given how much of mathematics seems like pedantry to an outsider.

This is interesting, but as other commenters have noted, the general point applies more broadly than hardware versus software, or UK versus the US - if you're only trying to optimise for income, 'go work in the US and/or the financial industry' is solid advice for many people, and the macroeconomic incentives driving this are not easy to shift. I also make much less than my counterparts in the US - but here in South Africa moving to the UK to work in the finance industry is considered a major win for many people, because the salaries are better and is considered higher 'prestige' for some reason.

Eleven years ago during my MSc. in theoretical physics I was writing Fortran code to solve scattering equations to serve as input into quantum field theory calculations. Since then I've worked for a bunch of startups, alternating between writing boring backend services and doing 'data science' that is often no more complicated than linear regression or writing SQL queries. The continual hype, toxic positivity, and unhinged growth expectations has made me essentially tap out mentally. I also consider this a 'waste of my talent' (not that I was ever really a great physicist!), but as I get older I am no longer sure what would have satisfied me in that regard (is this bad or good? - I honestly don't know). More money would be nice I guess. I typically get bored/frustrated and change companies every few years - I'm currently 3 years in at a fintech (elixir backend).

Here is an example of that sort of thing, using gradient descent as a starting point: https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0611451. It is technically about spherical codes rather than the kissing problem specifically, but they are closely related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_code

I wholeheartedly agree.

Fortuitously the author of the posted article also has a series on the Higgs mechanism (with the math, but still including some simplifications): https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...

I haven't read the other two, but I'll second 'Quarks and Leptons'. I do believe it's Halzen though, rather than Halzel...

There is a lesson in here... I can recommend playing to the end. The contrast to the frenetic pace of the game is like an epiphany.

As I said, I'd rather not start a flame war ;)

Well, assuming I agree with your premise (I'm not sure I do), what percentage of all the companies in the world does Elon run?

I can also assure you that Julii exist at e.g. Tesla, which employees over 100000 people.

I don't want to start an Elon flame war, but from what I've read I would be sceptical of attributing his business success to technical acumen (which is not to deny that SpaceX builds very cool and impressive rockets, or that the businesses he own employ very smart and motivated people).

Fantastic, hilarious, and too relatable.

Perhaps I am becoming overly cynical as I approach middle age, but it seems to me that this phenomenon exists because the people who have the ultimate decision making powers in businesses are business people. Businesses exist to serve the egos and goals of the people who run them - from their perspective things like technical competence and honesty are often secondary to achieving business outcomes or impressing upper management (it is telling that these are somehow different things). Julius is clearly better at this than the sad programmers who merely know how to code.

I would dearly love to believe that an alternative is possible, but there seem to be powerful incentives pushing the world towards this scenario. For many of us the best we can hope for is a work place that is not too dysfunctional, that respects your personal boundaries while paying an ok salary. I count myself fortunate to work at such a place, while dreaming of other things.

Haha thanks

This was a great read, thanks. OP, readers might benefit from having it explicitly mentioned that while the pseudocode is in Python, actual Python code will likely not benefit from such an approach because of how memory is fragmented in the standard Python implementation - e.g. this discussion: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49786441/python-get-proc...

I am tempted to actually test this (i.e. see if there's a speedup in Python), but I don't have the time right now.

> [...]this article shows that our anxiety at the perceived lack of formalism is justified, but we must remember that anxiety is a feeling -- and the proper response to that feeling is curiosity, not avoidance.

Beautiful sentiment, also in other areas of life, thank you.

Ah missed that, thank you.

This is cute, but I don't understand why it's on the arXiv. It's only two pages long, of which almost half is a picture and the bibliography, and as far as I can see contains nothing novel. I love Baez's blog(s) (https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/ and https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/), and it seems this would have been better served posted there as a post. Am I missing something?

update: I consulted my copy of 'The Sleepwalkers' again, and I see that Martianus Capella is listed twice in the index.

Koestler claims that Martianus Capella's system, wherein Venus and Mercury orbit around the Sun, while the rest of the planets orbit around the Earth, is originally due to Herakleides (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclides_Ponticus, not to be confused with Heraclitus), a 4th century BC Greek philosopher. But I see that wikipedia links to an article [1] by Eastwood from 1992 that claims this to be a complete misattribution lacking any evidence. Link for the interested: https://adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1992JHA....23..233E.

[1] Eastwood, B.S., 1992. Heraclides and heliocentrism: Texts, diagrams, and interpretations. Journal for the History of Astronomy, 23(4), pp.233-260.

For anyone interested in the topic of Copernicus' heliocentrism, I can recommend Arthur Koestler's 'The Sleepwalkers': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleepwalkers:_A_History_of....

While it does contain some speculation that is, in my opinion, poorly grounded, overall it is very informative and does a good job of dispelling some of the oversimplified narratives that are told about e.g. Galileo's persecution by the Church. (Of course since this is HN I can't wait to hear somebody tell me about some oversimplified narratives due to Koestler!)

It's also just very written and full of amazing anecdotes - e.g. about how Kepler's mother was accused of witchcraft(!)

Thank you for this, I agree.

As a South African, this is good news (it would have been nice if the payment was higher and more people at McKinsey were held accountable). Unfortunately we are unlikely to see accountability locally for whoever actually paid this bribe. The background is that this was part of the program of State Capture enabled by our former president (Jacob Zuma) and a very dubious family from India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gupta_family. Our country was basically sold to the highest bidder - people speak of 'ten lost years'.

I agree strongly - if I worked at an organisation where the linked article was the 'necessary' way of communicating I would look for a job at a less dysfunctional company. The context of the article seems to be a workplace with a sense of hierarchy that is inimical to honesty if it threatens insecure managers' egos or social standing.

The end of an era perhaps, but not 'the end' - another commenter has already mentioned Moravec's paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

It will be interesting if/when these models start proving major open problems, e.g. the Riemann Hypothesis. The sociological impact on the mathematical community would certainly be acute, and likely lead to a seismic shift in the understanding of what research-level mathematics is 'for'. This discussion already appears to be in progress. As an outsider I have no idea what the timeline is for such things (2 years? 10? 100?).

On the plus side, AlphaProof has the benefit over ordinary LLMs in their current form in that it does not pollute our common epistemological well, and its output is eminently interrogable (if you know Lean at last).

I've never really experienced that from his writing, and I am definitely not an Ayn Rand fan. I'm also pretty sure he's not interested in creating a movement that could have 'adherents'... I suppose I could be wrong on that. But on the contrary, I find his writing to be often quite life-affirming - he seems to delight in deep focus on various interesting topics.

The worst I can say is that I find his predictions around AI (i.e. the scaling laws) to be concerning.

edit: having now read the linked interview, I can provide a clearly non-misanthropic quote, in response to the interviewer asking gwern what kind of role he hopes to play in people's lives:

  I would like people to go away having not just been entertained or gotten some useful information, but be better people, in however slight a sense. To have an aspiration that web pages could be better, that the Internet could be better: “You too could go out and read stuff! You too could have your thoughts and compile your thoughts into essays, too! You could do all this!”

That was an interesting (and short!) read. Most of what he wrote is applicable to ML/AI today. A direct link to the pdf for those too lazy to click twice: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1056774

That's really cool, something to be proud of :)

I agree it's not great, but it seems to be more of a request? I can view the page by closing the popup, without the need to disable my adblocker.

That was a lovely read, thank you. I particularly enjoyed the analogy between 'a poorly-written computer program' (i.e. one with a lot of duplication due to inadequate abstraction), and the importance of using the appropriate mathematical machinery to reduce the complexity/length of a proof. It brings the the Curry–Howard isomorphism to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspon...

I don't know, but I reckon he would have been unimpressed.