jayajay

No one is extrapolating that way, please re-read. All of my words are really applied to small N societies, which I made very clear to anyone reading this.

You've chained together a lot of "what if"s. The truth is, you and I have no idea how people would behave or react in such a situation.

If the probability that a person is "in on it" is P, then the probability that N people are "in on it" is P^N, which converges to 0 as N goes to infinity. For every library you use, all of the independent people providing feedback, reviews, stars, etc. would also have to be "in on the" conspiracy.

You realize that the open-source code you use has hundreds of stars on GitHub, tons of independent people providing edge case and bug feedback. For all of those people to be bad actors is unlikely. If something was malicious about it, that information would spread through the web like wildfire, and you would know about it.

This is why people are reluctant to use libraries which are not well-known or have very little usage feedback. If you do use these libraries, you will probably read the source code first.

Half (as mentioned in article) of soon-to-be parents are not fit for the job, and a significant amount choose to defer the job via abortion or adoption. This begs the question -- should the state intervene in sexual reproduction?

Should more babies be given up to the state to be distributed to people who have earned the job title of "parent"? The amount of kids living in poverty, and/or having incompetent parents is not a trivial fraction. Should it be the duty of a civilization to engineer generations; to save these children? At what point does "a child" become the responsibility/property of everyone, and not just the responsibility/property of the biological parents?

These are the hard questions that no one wants to think about.

You are right, I only mentioned bikes so as to draw a more stark contrast between the two extremes.

I'm not OP, and I am not against self-driving cars, but self-driving cars are more unstable to perturbations like malicious software, hacking, and rogue or untested updates.

Edit: E.g. you can't tell a bunch of bicycles to crash into each other, but this is a possible directive if you equip those bicycles with the ability to take instructions and carry out arbitrary motion.

I benefited from this repost.

This. People who drive automobiles for a living should start investing in new skills now.

The answers you are looking for are Nobel-worthy. I have not formally studied linguistics, but you might wanna start there. Regarding the king equation, I think "king" is actually a vector in this context, as with the other objects. If so, then it is using the vector space formalism.

That said, I definitely agree with you. An English speaker may find any of these reasonable:

1. King - man = expensive clothing 2. King - man = prince 3. King - man = queen

What is "king"? What is "-"? What is "man"?

If a king is a dressed up wealthy man, and you remove the man, you have wealthy clothes? Or, does removing the man mean degrading the king back into a boy? Or, does removing a man mean adding a woman? Wait -- what if a king is more than a dressed up wealthy man? Should we include his home? Do we need to subtract the home? How do you subtract a home? Is the king minus a man a prince if the king was a beggar when he was young? ... death of the universe ...

Like you said, there's a combinatoric explosion here. Maybe this example is akin to trying to model each and every trajectory of all 10^23 particles in a gas. It looks like these scientists are stepping back, and looking at the big picture, instead, trying to find something more akin to PV = NkT

King - man + woman actually is illuminating. Your 6 year old son might even say that's what a queen is. There is useful math here.

What is god, if not a tool to inspire questions?

I haven't heard the 'dirty hack' argument before. Perhaps we only see those things as 'dirty hacks' because of the incompleteness and inelegance of our own theories.

That's got to be the biggest waste of unethical computing power I've ever seen. It's a good proof of concept. Organic computing is the future, but this smells a bit too much like Leonardo Da Vinci.

This is why I rage quit that game after I died. Like, I gotta use my mouse? Pfft, I'm out.

Is this a bad joke about minification? Or is this a good joke about how the future will be run on true black boxes?

If the music was algorithmically generated, what methods were used?

Society = Google + O(ε)

An aerospace engineer might be able to rattle off all of the important higher order and relativistic corrections to the hydrogen atom, but when it comes to society...

Attention (see Google papers) seems like a pretty promising way of dealing with countable states. In quantum mechanics, we change the question we are asking. Instead of "which countable eigenstate are we in?", we ask "how much of our current state is in the Nth eigenstate?". We just expand our current state over the basis of interest. The coefficient of the state of interest is a continuous variable. This is what attention does for neural networks.

Postcards aren't popular, you are right. I don't think they will be anymore. Kids my age are sending snaps, and even archaic image texts. I think we are are more interested in showing our friends "I'm here, look at what's behind me", then in sending some generic, impersonal postcard which doesn't prove anything.

Yeah, the first few opening comments were crickets, everything later on was superb. Did anyone else notice how the host just didn't give a single fuck?

If, by "nobody", you mean "around 100 billion cumulative people", then I agree with you.

"Inertial frames are the reference frames upon which the laws of motion and the conservation laws are defined, yet it is still unknown what causes inertial frames to exist or if they have any deeper properties that might prove useful."

"...we must begin a more in-depth experimental program using qualified and impartial labs, plus qualified and impartial analysts."

Maybe humans don't really belong in labs in the same way that they don't belong in factories.

This is so true, I feel like I have to justify to people what I'm doing with my life and why it's important and even necessary, which I wouldn't have had to do if I stayed in my physics PhD program. It's actually rather depressing, to be honest.

There's nothing spectacular about writing code for apps which I wouldn't even use and which will probably flop within a year. But when I was a student, I felt like what I was doing was actually important. Writing apps and websites for people who will end up using time and money on them feels so unimportant in that "Oh, do you really wanna be selling sugar water for the rest of your life?" kind of way.

Mermin's special relativity book is fucking fantastic as well. His writing style is very motivated.

[ joke abut how people oversimplify the universe differently depending on their field of study ]

Honestly mate, I appreciate the conversation and your response, but this is starting to reek of quantum spirituality, which is fine, but you're presenting ideas which I can't argue against.

Regarding interpretations of quantum mechanics, the interpretation is unimportant -- the math is the same is the same is the same. If you want to think about particles as being controlled by fairies who are locked up in hidden dimensions, that's kinky and totally fine -- as long as we use the same math, I don't really care.

If your fairies end up predicting new phenomenon that exist, which are not predicted by the Born/Copenhagen interpretations, sign me up -- I'll go to wonderland. Until then, let's leave interpretations out of our conversation.

My point in bringing up boson gasses and neural networks was to show that two vastly different systems at different scales can both exhibit self-organization described by similar mathematics. I am not saying those systems are equivalent, but I am saying that self-organization is a very versatile term and that throwing it around with no context warrants more content.

> There are complex emergent properties here, which your Bose-Einstein condensate lacks. Which is also why it has not practical use beyond theoretical research.

I'm sure someone said that "doping insulators has no practical use beyond theoretical research", too.

> Unless we could change the laws of our universe, we have no way to program its behavior and is therefore not useful.

Something is useful if and only if we can "program" its behavior. Do you think this assertion is true? Would you consider an iron hammer useful? What about bone tools?

I think a really good example of this is boson gasses versus fully connected neural networks (phase only). A cold enough boson gas will undergo a phase transition where each particle falls into the ground state. A fully-connected strongly coupled random phase network will lead to each neuron having the same phase (i.e. same state). You would readily call a neuron matrix "self-organizing" or "swarmy", since it leads the EEG signals we measure, but how is that any more self-organizing or swarmy than the Bose-Einstein condensate if the math is the same?

The premise is that it isn't. That's why it seems silly to claim that this paper's statistical system is not self-organizingy or swarmy enough, and that "real" self-healing systems are "more" self-organizingy and swarmy.

> Self-organizing has a very clear definition.

Not true. The "definition" in Wikipedia is essentially saying that a complex system exhibits self-organization if there is order observed at various scales. I didn't read the paper -- but based on the abstract, it looks like there is some sort of structural phase transition at T_c = 253K (please correct me if this is wrong) which allows these molecules to energetically favor reassembly. This would classify, according to Wikipedia, as self-organization at a microscopic scale. Self-organization can be evident at some scales (but not others) in systems which are not self-similar, but you already know this, since you read the Wikipedia article.

> From biological to robotic swarms, very simple instructions can achieve amazingly complex results.

No one is denying the beauty of complex systems. That said, the versatility of the word "swarm" word is precisely what makes it trivial! One can only beg for more words. What kind of swarm? At what scale? A physicist will find behavior that can be poetically described as "swarm" in one place, and a chemist will find it in another place, and a biologist will find it in still another place, and at a different scale!

> I have a high confidence that when we actually do have a real self-healing technology, swarm will be an apt description of its nano tech.

This is meaningless! It's trivially true. Let me try it: "I have high confidence that when we actually do have a real self-healing technology, sinusoidal will be an apt description of its nano tech." You can't use those terms to describe what self-healing "should look like" since those terms are vague and non-mathematical (self-organization could be defined more mathematically).

In reality, I think you have an idea or imagination or intuition of what you think "real" self-healing technology should be, and you just aren't satisfied with what we're at right now. This -- I can accept, and I might even agree with you. But don't go around hand-waving buzzwords about what technology should look like, because there's no content there.

> As a result, the iron–ligand bonds can readily break and re-form while the iron centres still remain attached to the ligands through the stronger interaction with the pyridyl ring, which enables reversible unfolding and refolding of the chains.

"Self-organizing" and "swarm" are buzzwords in your usage. Do you consider a proton and an electron self-organizing because there exists a bound state? What do those words even mean?