panda-giddiness

A reference for those curious:

- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/us/politics/trump-musk-do...

Essentially all of the theory research (specifically, lattice QCD calculations) since the previous white paper in 2020 have been conducted blinded, and at any rate, the deadline to be included in the theory average has already passed. It would take an act of extraordinary brashness to fudge the numbers now.

Well, then don't read it! While that's the most campy distillation of the premise, the writing is anything but. George R.R. Martin himself declared Tregillis "a major new talent".

Since the article doesn't mention it: Ian Tregillis (the first author of the paper and staff scientist at Los Alamos) also moonlights as a sci-fi/fantasy author. Personally I found The Milkweed Triptych a more compelling read than A Song of Ice and Fire, and it also has the benefit of being finished! (Here's a one sentence hook: WWII, except with English wizards fighting Nazi X-Men.)

> If it's 11:55, you would usually mentally subtract and conclude: the meeting is in 5 minutes. But the most probable estimate given the available information is actually 4'30"!

Admittedly I'm being a bit pedantic, but this isn't true. The expectation value might be 4'30", but the time is as likely to be 4'59" as 4'30"; assuming it's 4'30" will simply minimize your expected error.

You might as well have written that mathematicians should stop doing mathematics. If every mathematician were to work full time on formalizing theorems in proof assistants, then no living mathematician would ever do original research again -- there is simply too much that would need to be translated to software. And to what end? It's not as if people suspect that the foundations of mathematics are on the verge of toppling.

> Code is easy to share, easy to collaborate on [...] collaboration is so easy that publishing your 1/2 done work will often prompt others to do some of the tedious stuff

Here's an experiment anyone can try at home: pick a random article from the mathematics arxiv [1]. Now rewrite the main theorem from that paper in Lean [2]. Did you find this task "easy"? Would you go out of your way to finish the "tedious" stuff?

> even horrible code is far better at documenting what it does than what you are describing

The "documentation" is provided by talking to other researchers in the field. If you don't understand some portion of a proof, you talk to someone about it. That is a far more efficient use of time than writing code for things that are (relatively) obviously true. (No shade on anyone who wants to write proofs in Lean, though.)

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[1] https://arxiv.org/list/math/new

[2] https://lean-lang.org/theorem_proving_in_lean4/dependent_typ...

> the big benefit is parallel computing at a massive scale

The problem with this line of reasoning is that, even though a quantum system might have many possible states, we only observe a single one of those states at the time of measurement. If you could somehow prepare a quantum system such that it encoded the N equally-likely solutions to your classical problem, you would still need to rerun that experiment (on average) N times to get the correct answer.

Broadly speaking, quantum computing exploits the fact that states are entangled (and therefore correlated). By tweaking the circuit, you can make it so that incorrect solutions interfere destructively while the correct solution interferes constructively, making it more likely that you will measure the correct answer. (Of course this is all probabilistic, hence the need for quantum error correction.) But developing quantum algorithms is easier said than done, and there's no reason to think a priori that all classical problems can be recast in this manner.

From the New York Times: "How Polarized Politics Led South Korea to a Plunge Into Martial Law" [1]

> From the start [...] Mr. Yoon faced two obstacles.

> The opposition Democratic Party held on to its majority in the National Assembly and then expanded it in parliamentary elections in April, making him the first South Korean leader in decades to never have a majority in Parliament. And then there were his own dismal approval ratings.

> Mr. Yoon’s toxic relationship with opposition lawmakers — and their vehement efforts to oppose him at every turn — paralyzed his pro-business agenda for two years, hindering his efforts to cut corporate taxes, overhaul the national pension system and address housing prices.

and also

> Opposition leaders warned that Mr. Yoon was taking South Korea onto the path of “dictatorship.” In turn, members of Mr. Yoon’s party called the opposition “criminals,” and voters on the right rallied against what they called “pro-North Korean communists.”

> (Mr. Yoon echoed that language on Tuesday in his declaration of martial law, saying he was issuing it “to protect a free South Korea from the North Korean communist forces, eliminate shameless pro-North Korean and anti-state forces.”)

So basically, Mr. Yoon was unable to pass his agenda (as his party never had control of the legislative branch), and rather than continue to negotiate, he decided to impose martial law, label the opposition communists, and then ban the National Assembly from gathering (they gathered anyway).

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[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/03/world/asia/south-korea-yo...

You can, in fact, do that. It's called (aptly enough) the empirical Bayes method. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_Bayes_method

From the article (sorry for the bad link before; fixed below [1]):

> The revenue from taxes and levies on road traffic amounts to around 50 billion euros annually. Around half of this is earmarked by law via the mineral oil tax, i.e. around 25 billion euros. This means that just over a third (36%) of the earmarked revenue from road traffic covers the costs of roads and other facilities such as parking lots and the like. It is therefore clear that the public sector is heavily subsidizing road traffic.

My understanding is that these two forms of taxes add to more than 50%, but then almost half of those taxes must be reinvested elsewhere by law (i.e., not into roads), hence the 1/3 figure. But even if you ignore this reallocation of taxes, you still have a deficit of around 20 billion euros.

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[1] https://www.forschung-und-wissen.de/nachrichten/oekonomie/au...

Germany spends some 70 billion euros maintaining the road system, only about a third of which is offset by taxes on drivers [1]. If we accept that investments in roads reduce carbon emissions by 0 million tonnes per year, then that works out to NaN € per tonne -- much worse than other carbon abatement methods!

Naturally there might be other positive externalities to owning a car, but I don't own a car and therefore wouldn't be privy to them. Instead I rely almost exclusively on Germany's public transport for my daily commutes, which I find perfectly satisfactory for this purpose and significantly more convenient than parking and maintaining a car.

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[1] https://www.forschung-und-wissen.de/nachrichten/oekonomie/au...

> JS minification is fairly mechanical and comparably simple, so the inversion should be relatively easy.

Just because a task is simple doesn't mean its inverse need be. Examples:

  - multiplication / prime factorization
  - deriving / integrating
  - remembering the past / predicting the future

Code unobfuscation is clearly one of those difficult inverse problems, as it can be easily exacerbated by any of the following problems:

  - bugs
  - unused or irrelevant routines
  - incorrect implementations that incidentally give the right results

In that sense, it would be fortunate if chatGPT could give decent results at unobfuscating code, as there is no a priori expectation that it should be able to do so. It's good that you've also checked chatGPT's code unobfuscation capabilities on a more difficult problem, but I think you've only discovered an upper limit. I wouldn't consider the example in the OP to be trivial.

Not quite. From the NY Times:

> In a 5-to-4 decision, written by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, a majority of the justices held that the federal bankruptcy code does not authorize a liability shield for third parties in bankruptcy agreements. Justice Gorsuch was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

$1000/week is almost the median weekly earnings for full-time US employees ($1139/week) [1].

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf

I think in both cases the OP assumes there are 100 men and 100 women.

Case A: 1 man on birth control, 0 women on birth control.

Case B: 0 men on birth control, 99 women on birth control.

But it's hard to infer exactly what they meant because their wording/reasoning was so sloppy.

That logic doesn't make any sense unless you assume there are 100 men to every woman on earth, or alternatively, that women have 100 times more sexual partners than men. Evidence suggests otherwise.

Or put another way: you're comparing one group where 1/200 is on birth control to another group where 99/200 is on birth control. Obviously the group that has almost 100 times more people on birth control is more "efficient". That has nothing to do with sex.

But to address the issue of efficiency, I would expect male birth control is more "efficient", as women can only carry a few children at a time while men can theoretically impregnate dozens or even hundreds of women in the same period.

But I find the quibbling over efficiency to be missing the point. Male contraception offers peace of mind to some. It has nothing to do with efficiency.

I don't know about "perfectly", but we can simulate hydrogen from QCD; we just estimate the path integral directly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_QCD

That's the quote that stuck out to me, too. It's like they're insinuating that the person is lying (while elsewhere admitting they don't have evidence either way). I mean, I don't want to backseat-quarterback here, but would it have been so hard to say something like, "We have decided to take our website offline while we investigate a report that our website generated an inappropriate image of a user"?

> The real issue is that most of the net worth is equity. These unrealized gains are not taxed. In some cases, a lot of the value is driven by speculation and not actually tied to the current profits of the company. This is why wealth taxes are brought up, or at least changes to capital gains taxes.

Of course, equity is still useful. One can borrow money using the assets as collateral, and rather than paying taxes on the (borrowed) money, one instead pays a comparatively small interest to the bank. Moreover, those unrealized gains never need be taxed so long as they are never converted to cash. The capital gains on the assets are then reset when the owner dies (the so-called "buy, borrow, die" strategy [1]).

I would venture that this is a massive loophole in the tax system that ought to be patched-out.

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[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...

I think it was clear that @sedatk was referring to the 1% that separates him from other human beings, not the 99% that separates him from trees.

"Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation" -Feynman

That said, I'm not sure that he actually held contempt for math. It's fairly essential for theoretical physics.

"Special Counsel Obtained Trump’s Direct Messages on Twitter"

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/15/us/politics/trump-twitter...

Just express it as an n-state Turing machine and see if it halts within BB(n) steps. /s

Tegmark proposes no such thing; indeed, he may as well be proposing the exact opposite of what you claimed. He is essentially suggesting that all mathematical structures are "real", which would explain why the universe exists at all -- presumably because it is also a mathematical structure.

> I agree that there is a significant sliver of a philosophical problem which remains stubborn (how precisely does physical activity produce qualia)

But that "sliver" of a problem is known as the hard problem of consciousness for a reason [1], which is exactly the sort of problem neuroscience can only address in a limited capacity. Understanding how nerves propagate a signal to produce a sensory input (an "easy" problem of consciousness) doesn't inform us as to why certain physical mechanisms result in conscious experience (or more fundamentally what it even means to have a conscious experience).

To return to the topic at hand, a stochastic parrot generates grammatical, sensible language without understanding its underlying meaning. Of course, you can debate what it means to understand something; but for a person to vocalize an idea they understand, they must first somehow consciously process that idea. This is firmly a hard problem to which neuroscience offers limited guidance.

Of course, I'd agree that human beings aren't stochastic parrots -- if human beings were stochastic parrots, then what would it even mean to understand something? But I doubt you could use neuroscience to ascertain whether large language models are or aren't stochastic parrots. Indeed, depending on your definition of "understanding", consciousness might not even be a prerequisite, making the comparison to neuroscience moot.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

And also walking is not required for AGI.

Interpret entropy as "how unlikely is this state to occur by random chance?", with lower entropy corresponding to less likelihood.

If you throw a bunch of carbon, oxygen, and other organic compounds into a vat, you're vastly less likely to get a fully formed human being than, well, a disorganized pile of matter. Usually you wouldn't consider the random clump of molecules more complex -- there are practically an infinite number ways to rearrange a pile into a pile. In contrast, there are many orders of magnitude fewer ways for a human being to emerge.

That said, there is a sense in which the random pile of molecules is more complex. If I want to predict the motion of every (or at least, most) of the molecules in that vat, it's easier to predict the bulk motion of a human than each molecule moving per the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution.

Similarly, it's easier to compress a static black image than continuous random noise. Notice that a static black image is more organized, more easily compressed, and less likely to occur by random chance (assuming noise is the default). Therefore, a static black image has less entropy. Whether you want to call this state more or less complex is a matter of definition.

For those curious, the assumption that the universe began in a low entropy state is known as the past hypothesis [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_hypothesis

I don't think you really groked your parent's comment. Asking why we don't see |dead> + |alive> states is like asking why we don't measure states of definite Jx when measuring Jz -- you're simply measuring in the wrong basis.

So why do we measure only states of |dead> or |alive>? I don't know; maybe it's evolutionarily advantageous (those simultaneously dead and alive beings sound quite bothersome). Regardless, it's irrelevant -- evidently we are only capable of making measurements in the basis {|dead>, |alive>}, so naturally that's all we'll ever see. Of course, that restriction by itself doesn't make the |dead> + |alive> state less real, only unobservable when you're coupled with the system.

On the contrary, I'd be perfectly content classifying our probing of gravity/acceleration indirect, too. For completeness I include gravity because it's the only other fundamental interaction we arguably directly sense (inner ear fluid and fine hairs are part of the same sensory organ, unlike our skin and the sun).

But I still suspect we would be able to sense gravity without inner ear fluid, even if only slightly. When we vigorously shake our head, the fluid flows against the hairs, so naturally the electromagnetic force and/or Pauli exclusion is mostly responsible for sensing. However, even absent any inner ear fluid, the hairs should still bend due to gravity -- I just don't know how appreciable the effect is.