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Imo the counter-argument is that in principle you can research and understand the mechanics of climate change or medicine. You just don't have the free time and/or the motivation. With AI that changes - you could spend your entire life trying in vain to understand its reasoning.

It reminds me of how some religious people say that science is effectively no different to religion because we all take expert opinions on faith. But the difference is that there is a well-defined pathway to understanding, if you wish to do so.

There's an argument for improving communication and collaboration between empirical sciences and humanities. But it's false to claim that serious philosophers cannot or do not have sufficient grounding in mathematics and physics. Two immediate examples that spring to mind are Tim Maudlin and Jeremy Butterfield.

Reminds me of how Stephen Hawking says "philosophy is dead" whilst simultaneously engaging in philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism

It's only been saved as that URL for the last two years.

You mentioned that you took up CrossFit after starting creatine. Did your previous fit phases include lifting heavy weights?

I mean, it's not as clear as "slowing down", which is basically what it is.

Adapted into a TV series with Ben Whishaw and Ambika Mod:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Going_to_Hurt_(TV_seri...

Imo it depends on the type of change required. If it involves churning out 1000 line of new boilerplate, an LLM will win every time. If it means tracing a subtle edge-case bug and carefully planning a deep one-line change in a 100k codebase that leaves all other behaviour unaffected, I would still expect an experienced dev who's deeply familiar with the code to do it at least as fast and more correctly first time.

To be fair, I personally only said that I'd like a label that indicates whether an app has "had thought put into it". That could involve e.g. another human reviewing the code and architecture and giving it a stamp.

It's possible to code thoughtfully with LLMs, but the process strongly encourages superficial signing-off on its activities.

I'd love a label like that which tells me when an app has had thought put into it

I asked Claude and it showed me various examples of other words that may well be preceded with "an", such as heroic, habitual, and hereditary. It's to do with how strongly the "h" is pronounced.

Trivially false. Let P be the set of maths problems and I be the interesting subset of P. If I is finite, then there exists an element x belonging to P\I whose description is minimal among P\I. Then x is interesting. QED.

It's bad faith to assume someone didn't read your message.

Yes, this is an exception to the rule in British English, although possibly old-fashioned and becoming obsolete. Some British people put "an" before any word starting with "h" and longer than three syllables.

EDIT I'm wrong here - I don't think anyone ever says "an Halloween celebration" for example. But I was sure there were other "h" counterexamples than historic.

I wonder if you're reading too far into one example. Hume's original example was of the sun rising every day - nothing to do with sentience or arguably even complexity. The chicken/farmer example is one that Russell came up with to make it easier to imagine.

I'm no expert, but my understanding is that modern neuroscience has moved away from the idea that specific areas of the brain control specific behaviours.

The idea of the brain having a primitive layer and more refined layers is much more than ten years old [0]. The new finding here is that distinct layers have different progenitor cells.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain

I'm pretty sure that I don't worship some sort of God, unless perhaps you substantially dilute the meaning of the word "worship".

Judaism evolved out of earlier Canaanite polytheistic beliefs with a pantheon of deities, some of whom had malevolent or destructive aspects. As the Israelites transitioned to monotheism, Yahweh - previously one of many gods - took dominance and absorbed personas and aspects of the other gods. The written texts continued to refer to other deities ("El" and "Elohim") but reframed them as other names for the same god. That feels to me a more satisfying explanation for the "fear" of god in the Torah.

That's Russell rather than Hume, and I don't see how it links to complexity.

Could you cite your reference to Hume here please? I'm not aware of him linking complexity to regularity.

Is there a difference between worshipping something and simply thinking positively about it, in your mind?

Yes, vaguely related. Dirac is not wondering why measurement itself works, but why mathematical reasoning applies so effectively to the measurement results.

I think it's valid to be surprised that all observations of a physical phenomena up until this point have obeyed a beautiful and (relatively) simple mathematical relationship, without even thinking about predicting the future.

This is probably a reference to Hume's problem of induction, i.e. that observing a regularity in the past cannot justify assuming that it will hold in the future. It's vaguely related to the article, but talking about "time windows" and "Mathers" muddles the point.

I loved seeing "Le Vent du Nord" at Cambridge Folk Festival 2023, they'd probably make a decent Eurovision entry.

Fair, but I think potential international sabotage of transport systems in a wartime context is interesting. Even if speculative at this point.

International politics is intellectually stimulating.

In which case what do they gain here?

Don't you think those groups would have claimed responsibility by now?