So what are the potential ramifications of this event and why?
1,189 karma · joined September 5, 2012
He proceeds just as deliberately when doing mathematics. Wang was shocked when he first witnessed it. “I have this math competition experience, that as a mathematician you have to be clever, you have to be fast,” he said. “But June is the opposite. … If you talk to him for five minutes about some calculus problem, you’d think this guy wouldn’t pass a qualifying exam. He’s very slow.” So slow, in fact, that at first Wang thought they were wasting a lot of time on easy problems they already understood. But then he realized that Huh was learning even seemingly simple concepts in a much deeper way — and in precisely the way that would later prove useful.
Having gone through the American education system, I felt like I was in a factory being evaluated as a potential end product. Steamroll through as much material as quickly as possible. Optimize behavioral patterns for the next performance metric. Rinse and repeat. Is this really the best system we can come up with? Can the pace of mathematical and scientific advancement be optimized by steamrollers? I wonder how much potential we've missed as a society because the education system has been trying to force everyone through the same hole, and destroying intellectual curiosity in the process.
Personally, my experience with this educational system turned me off from "math." It was only much later in life when I learnt that the mindless algorithms that I had to personally execute for years on end to get into university could barely be considered math at all. Only then could I begin to appreciate how elegant real math could be. And I doubt I'm alone in my experience.
The understanding of gravity had a tectonic shift about a century ago. Imagine if scientists declared that Newton's model of gravity was the final word, and that it was heretical to question it. These things are called theories, not facts, for a reason.
Such things happen all the time in the history of science. As another example, think about the phrase "subatomic particle" and the sequence of mistakes that must have occurred to arrive at such wording.
Paradoxically, instead of the history of science inspiring humility, it seems to encourage arrogance among some. Is the ego a friend or enemy of scientific advancement?
I wonder if the person to whom I was originally responding finds your dogmatism as objectionable as dogmatism of a traditionally religious nature.
Are you a software developer? Imagine that, for testing purposes, you want to test a particular state T in a simulation app that you believe can only occur organically after a large period of time.
Do you start the test simulation at a hypothetical t0 and wait to reach the desired state? Or do you simply bootstrap the simulation so that it starts in state T.
Well, you do the latter of course. So do the events at t0 need to occur for you to observe state T?
The inferior tier is one where an explanation can be proven false with the limited tools of the 2022 version of humanity. Perhaps some religions' explanations fall into this category, but not all.
If you are as rational as you arrogantly imply, then the obvious answers to these are no.
Are you equally appalled when you come across average people talking about these theories as if they are facts? I wonder.
Each of us was born into this world through a randomized process that was not created by humankind: the genes you were born with, the environment you were given before you could manage your own affairs, the accumulation of genetic mutations over the course of countless millennia that resulted in who you are today. This is the opportunity you were born with.
To think that we can compensate for this random process with any level of precision is to wage war with nature, and I'd bet that nature will win.
It is an admirable goal, and certainly we can take steps to reduce inequality of opportunity. But true equality of opportunity, or anything close to it, is unattainable in this universe.
And would it be safe to assume that low-emission energy has much lower ROI, in a traditional sense, than fossil fuels? If so, I double down on my above predictions about triggers for meaningful change.
But that's life, isn't it? We're only capable of optimizing towards a finite distance in the future. If that weren't the case, we would be gods, not humans. And we certainly wouldn't be in this mess, or perhaps any mess, in the first place.
And studies have shown that people become unhappy when confronted with people who have significantly more than them - simply put, envy.
Therefore, one can easily argue that if economic growth is coupled to ever-increasing inequality, it actually begins to reduce overall human happiness after a point -- and if you "read the room" around the world, I'm pretty sure humanity has passed that point.
Just take a look at how society is structured today, where a 1% difference in achievement at some arbitrarily determined age can lead to a difference in expected lifetime income that is orders of magnitude larger. And that's not to mention the kind of personal wealth that, due to the properties of exponential growth, cannot help but grow, regardless of the competence of its owner.
Die-hard capitalists argue that this is the best economic system that we've ever had, but our sample size is very limited. We've only been trying this out for a minute fraction of humanity's existence, and the effects of this system have not reached a steady state. If the past few decades are any indication, capitalism has made the world worse off in many ways. It enabled our ancestors to leave us with many major unsolved problems, with blissful ignorance - issues that are given token acknowledgement in economics classes as "externalities," a term that doesn't even begin capture how important they really are for humanity's future.
I posit that overall human happiness plotted against economic inequality is maximized somewhere in between strictly enforced equality and the extreme levels of inequality that we see today. It doesn't take a genius to see it, but no one really talks about the middle. Perhaps sanity is too boring for this generation.
That being said, with non-blockchain data storage, one could create backups, so that if all the live running data stores were somehow destroyed, one could recover to some previous point in history with the redundant copies.
I'm trying to understand whether this, or any other sort of failure recovery, is possible with blockchain technology.
1) Is it resilient to catastrophic failure? Does there exist an N < 100 such that if there is an EMP, a computer virus, or some other anomaly that wipes the data from more than N% of the nodes, the block chain enters an irrecoverable failure state?
2) How scalable is it? Sure, it might work for a very small % of the world's transactions, but could it ever handle the sort of load that is taken on by say, Visa credit cards worldwide, while still allowing transactions to complete in a "reasonable" amount of time (that the average person would tolerate)? If not, what is the upper limit of requests per second while maintaining some sufficient upper bound for transaction time?
Feel free to be completely hand wavy. This is just a thought exercise for now.
"historically, a code modification like the one you've requested has taken 5n units of time. After refactoring, such a change will take n units of time."
You wouldn't perform an A/B test to prove your claim. The managers would simply have to trust you for the reputable engineer that you are, and hopefully observe substantially increased velocity after the refactoring.