5,522 karma · joined September 2, 2019
Physics StackExchange: https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/83398/knzhou
Personal website: https://knzhou.github.io
So far I've seen a lot of self-correction done by the scientific and medical communities themselves. There hasn't been a single example of a nontrivial story broken by a guy delivering spittle-flecked rants on Youtube. The ranters, however, are very good at taking credit for what actual scientists did.
Sadly, the discourse affects the results. When everybody believes a lockdown will work, it does. When about half the population isn't sure about it, it just wastes money.
It would be great to have some countries go all-in in one strategy and others all-in in another, and compare results later -- but when people talk, you end up with lots of countries effectively doing something in the middle, without the advantages of either extreme but essentially all of the costs.
In my opinion, the best option for everybody who's serious about this is to read a lot of papers, until you become "well-calibrated", i.e. when you have a good handle on the overall chances a preprint is true, vs. a Twitter thread, vs. a paper in a top-tier journal. This has to be learned from experience. Reform doesn't change the fact that you need to do this -- it just adds yet another venue, either more or less reliable than the previous ones, that you also need to become calibrated on.
Furthermore, this excessive mathematical structure hides the physical assumptions that really drive the validity of these equations. A real string doesn't actually obey the wave equation perfectly. The reason has to do with physical aspects of the string itself, not minutiae in the mathematical derivation of the wave equation. I can't think of an example where progress in physics was stalled because somebody tried to divide both sides of an equation by T and failed...
Normal peer review means "we showed our work to about 2 people who know what they're talking about and they thought it was okay."
Preprints mean "nobody who knows what they're talking about has looked at this carefully yet, but we think it's okay."
Viral Twitter threads mean "here's my opinion, which hasn't been shown to anybody who actually knows what they're talking about, but which has been selected for maximum public response."
Of course, in all cases, real credibility only comes once a paper has been looked over by hundreds of people who know what they're talking about. Yes, showing something to only 2 experts (who themselves are very busy, and are powerless to directly verify many of the paper's claims) is not a perfect initial quality cut -- but no cut at all is worse.
If you really believe in the power of Twitter, take a long, hard look at the sensational, outrageous tweets you've liked. Go look at a sample of 100 old threads and see how many actually held up. The accuracy rate will not even be comparable to the Lancet's.
Education research tells us that what you actually want to do is the exact opposite: chunk as much as possible. You should learn algebra separately, and then use your preexisting knowledge of algebra to group f = 1/T and T = 1/f into one conceptual node. If you need 10 nodes every time something that basic is done, then your map will contain a vast amount of redundancy and be too large to use to get anywhere...
As far as I can tell, both in studies and in personal experience, the fiddly details of your note-taking schemes don't matter. The only thing that matters is attempting to integrate the information into a cohesive whole, which takes intentional thought.
With linear notes, there's a failure mode where links that should be made aren't; you can even walk around believing outright contradictions without noticing. But with a web, there's an equally bad failure mode where your knowledge gets diffuse and unstructured (instead of "X causes Y if Z", you get "X, Y, and Z are related. But... was Z the thing that caused X? Wait, but then what was Y for?").
Both of these reflect a failure to aggregate and chunk the information into hard tools, but no productivity system can magically fix that; it always takes time.
I went to college and studied physics. I learned how the behavior of many atoms leads to thermodynamics and the properties of materials. I learned how elementary quantum mechanics leads to atomic physics and chemistry. I learned how the strong force gives rise to nuclei. I learned how the Standard Model produces everything on this list. I learned how, at each layer, the correspondence was fiendishly subtle, but the work of thousands of physicists over decades had built the bridges.
At the end of it, I was still dissatisfied, because I hadn't learned what emergence was. I'd see crackpots presenting their personal theories of everything, declaring that they knew what no physicist ever could, because their model had emergence. They knew about it, and we didn't. But I still didn't know what it was.
Then I dug deeper and it became obvious. Emergence is a beautiful idea that has always been present, in some form or another, in every field of science. It is so well-developed in some fields, such as particle physics, that it has become a suite of quantitative methods with incredible accuracy. I had been learning it the entire time, and now use it every day without a second thought. Meanwhile, "emergence" is a brand name. It's a specific word passed down over generations of pop science used to convey mystique. It's a tool some charlatans use to pretend they know more than they do.
No offense meant to the article, but I often hear people say they're most excited about some substanceless theory because it "has emergence", and this is part of why.
And they aren’t any more nationalistic than Americans. Reporting this slogan is the equivalent of, say, an American reporting “Drumpf is Hitler” or “Hussein Obama”. These are all dumb slogans which are spammed just to get a political reaction. Different people get offended about different things, that’s just something you have to deal with in a big community.
The fundamental problem with Facebook is that it serves the people, and as a rule, we are too reactive, too judgmental, too ignorant, too emotional, too irrational, and too hateful. If you want to find something bad on Facebook, you will succeed, because everybody is there, and this is just how we are. Turn back the clock and you'll find ethnic hatred spread through private Whatsapp messages, bullying on Myspace, ignorance in chain email, disingenuous appeals to emotion in yellow journalism, and hysteria in a mob whipping itself into a lynching frenzy in a literal public square. The platforms have changed hundreds of times, the people have not.
What amazes me is that critics of social media don't see this -- despite their vaunted liberal arts degrees, they act as if Zuckerberg invented human flaws in 2004, and pretend that he has the power to get rid of them with a technological solution. Destroy Facebook tomorrow, and the people will just move somewhere else. The exact same problems will reappear, because the people are the same.
The only practical way to stop this is to employ an army of censors to read private conversations and delete the ones deemed bad. But of course this is also horrible and dystopian. So, as always, it’s trivial to write a scathing critique of Facebook no matter what they do.
The problem is that hate doesn’t need an algorithm to amplify it; it can just amplify itself, as it has throughout all of human history. The problem isn’t the algorithm, it’s the people. And you can’t just “fix” people.
Which is it, guys? How can you simultaneously be outraged that Facebook is imposing any restrictions on speech at all, and horrified that it isn’t actively molding user behavior on a massive scale?
There’s an amusing comment from a Facebook employee downthread asking: if division is caused by showing people opposing political opinions, should we try to stop that to reduce division, or should we do nothing, to avoid forming filter bubbles? Predictably, every single reply condemns him as evil for not realizing one of the options is obviously right, but they’re split exactly 50/50 on what that right course of action is.
It sounds suspect to me too, but the reason the idea is appealing is that it's worked fantastically for hundreds of similar phenomena. To vastly oversimplify thousands of years of philosophy, for most of human history the default position has been that every idea had to be reified into some metaphysical essence.
What is the essence that makes a dog a dog? That makes bread nourishing but rocks not? That makes rocks solid? That makes fire hot? That makes falling objects seek Earth? Again and again, we've found simple physical explanations for these puzzles, that once were regarded as just as inexplicable as consciousness. Indeed, consciousness is now the last essence that survives, and that's why some bet it'll go the same way as all the rest. "But this one is different", indeed, and every single time so far that argument has been wrong.
That's not a problem with the headline, it's a problem with your state of mind. There are actual facts at play here, and real experts with good intentions.
If you think the whole world is partisan politics and facts don't matter, good for you, but please don't pollute the information pool for the rest of us.