zehaeva

The statement of the argument is classic Dualism. I am pretty sure that Dennett is setting up the scene in order to poke holes in the said argument.

It might be because you weren't in a Physics or an Engineering program.

Colleges tend to have two tracks for physics, one that's closer to high school physics, which is as you described. A collection of algebraic equations that you have to either remember or, if your professor was kind, given a crib sheet of.

The other is the "Engineering" or "Calculus" based physics track where, as you can imagine, you're taking Calc 1 and Physics 1 at the same time.

I have seen some, kinder, programs where you take Calc 1 in your first semester and start the Physics classes in your second semester.

I like the guy, but I do think he's nutty over the level of multiverse he believes in.

I'm not sure how anyone's intervention could ever withstand some of these effects.

I could foresee maybe a sun shade of some sort to help mitigate the increase in temperature, but at some point the sun is going to envelope the earth.

Also, this several billion years into the future. Anyone left wouldn't be anything you could remotely call human. Evolution hasn't stopped in humans.

I'm not sure one can, from today that is, really understand how huge of a leap was made by AI at this time.

Even going back to the closest analogue, chess, there were good chess engines for a long time prior to Kasparov loosing in 97 to deep blue. Even before Kasparov lost Chess engines were pretty good, just look at the game in 96 when Kasparov won. A grand master would still need to put some thought into how he played.

In Go however even the best engines couldn't hold a candle to a professional player, let alone someone who was the equivalent of a chess grand master. Hell, even as a lowly amateur player I was able to trounce some of the most powerful AIs at the time. Looking at some of the Pro vs AI games back in the early 2010s it's almost painful how bad they were.

It's hard to communicate just how huge of a leap this was, and just how shocking to the whole Go community. It would be like a child one day being unable to speak and the literal next day reciting Shakespeare.

The Valve Index is nearly 5 years old now. And while I love my Index, the state of the art has moved forward a lot and I am excited by the next generation Index, if it ever comes.

I don't think VR/AR is the absolute future of all computing, but it provides an exciting direction.

I'm very privacy forward with respect to my home networks. I run a home zigbee network which does everything I want it to in the home. Yes I can't turn the lights on and off from the other side of the world, but neither can anyone else.

Maybe try an eyemask? I will admit the feeling takes a little bit getting used to but I get way better sleep with it than without.

Given the recent legal cases where lawyers did use Chat GPT to do research and help write their brief did not go very well I'm not sold that on all the optimism that's here in the comments.

I assure you that I am not surprised with how much historical writing I am locked out of by not being able to read Latin. Honestly I would be willing to bet that it as much as I am locked out of from not being able to read Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Japanese, Arabic, etc. You can't think that's a serious argument for teaching Latin in primary or secondary school? If I were a western historian, sure, you should probably learn Latin, probably some flavor of ancient Greek as well.

I am referencing a Guardian article that I read nearly a decade ago[0] but he wasn't the only one to have bemoaned the "youth".

With Socrates, him being sentenced to death while for "corrupting the youth" that's a pretty naive, and incomplete, explanation, if you were to dig a little deeper you'll find that the, probably, true reasons for Socrates' trial was political[1]. You forget that the "corruption of the youth" was bound with the accusation that Socrates was denying the gods and introducing new gods[2], not, as you imply, that he was a champion of the youths themselves. For me it's difficult to take everything we know about Socrates as true given the posthumous glow up that Plato gives us. This is partly Socrates' own fault for his, as we're told, ideas that writing things down would lead to forgetfulness. Ironic honestly.

I am tempted to discuss further about Socrates' trial, how most thought that he was going to going to get off due to his ability in rhetoric and hi, basically, not defending himself was pretty shocking in and of itself.

[0]https://www.theguardian.com/education/2009/mar/17/ephebiphob.... [1]https://www.mcgill.ca/classics/files/classics/2006-7-03.pdf [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates

What does teaching Latin in schools have to do with schools, ostensibly, failing?

Are you saying that Latin is something that is useful to everyday life and because we don't teach it to our children we're depriving them of this wonderous tool?

I personally do not know Latin, but I have never run into a situation where I needed to know it.

And to analyze the idea that, "Well, it's not Latin in specific, but that we are not teaching our children to think for themselves", this too has been bayed about for the last forever, Plato complained that "children today are not learning the things that they should"

I don't know which pedagogy is the "correct" one, stuff children with, seemingly, random knowledge and watch them "blossom" or to stuff them with narrowly focused learning so that they will flourish at whatever work they are funneled into.

But I do know that teaching a dead language isn't the bellwether you think it is, unless you're trying to start a jobs program for all those unemployeed Latin tutors.

Given that my mother, grandmother, and I, were born in the States, I can definitely say that "preferred" isn't as wide spread as you think it is.

What's fun about this is that I was taught from my mother, and her mother before her, to use Butternut Squash when making "pumpkin pie" from scratch.

This "tradition" of using Butternut Squash instead goes back to the 1930s at least.

To add onto the sibling's point, the "safe following distance" has a rule of thumb of "3 seconds behind". At 65MPH, I'm assuming you're in the US, is approximately 300 feet.

I'm willing to bet that's around 10 times what you were considering as a safe following distance in your head, and probably still 5 times more than what you were picturing for the safe distance behind a brake checking AV.

I enjoy comparisons like this, but there's one small bit of math that's off,

>CGP Grey $7/mo 10m/mo $70/h

There isn't 100 minutes in an hour.

I mean, yes, things like The Arrow of Time, Entropy, our entire understanding of black holes, most of quantum mechanics.

Yeah, if information can be destroyed then a lot of physics needs to be redone.

Holy hell, talk about burying the lede here! The last sentence of the whole article is:

The new theory allows for information to be destroyed, due to a fundamental breakdown in predictability.

Are you kidding me?!

I am pretty sure that MOND has been completely ruled out[0] given some recent evidence. And by more than 5 sigma.

[0]https://bigthink.com/hard-science/dark-matter-alternative-mo...

Can't wait for the Butlerian Jihad to begin!

Flippancy aside, as others have pointed out, Spotify isn't turning a profit. Other than the tangency of blaming AI for all of our ills, this seems like a non-sequitur.

Another year and another Advent of Code that I don't have enough time in my life to do.

One year I'll actually finish!

Oh, sorry, my intent wasn't to claim he's not really a crackpot, just the the grandparent was making the claim that the reason why Lessig is a crackpot is because Lessig can not see the real issue here, which is campaign finance reform.

Anyone who has been slightly paying attention to American politics in the last decade or so would know that Lessig, of all people, is deeply aware of this issue. Lessig has been fighting and trying to make the issue of money in politics a thing for quite a long while.

If one has been actually following Lessig's career they'd know that Lessig has taken to the issue of money in politics because of his first great crusade, that of fixing Copyright for all net-denizens, and honestly the world.

I personally believe Lessig to be a smart, driven, and naive, man who has been fighting for the right things, even if no one will actually listen to him and take action on his suggestions.

You are correct, he is a bit of a crackpot.

A crackpot who ran in the 2016 presidential race to get money out of politics.

A crackpot who, in 2014, created the Mayday PAC to fund and push candidates that support campaign finance reform.

A crackpot who, in 2011, published a book entitled Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It

Yeah, he's just a dude out there theorizing how we're going to live together on the internet.

Something one should consider is that while math is surprisingly applicable, and as you correctly picked up I was making a reference to the "Unreasonable Effectiveness" quote, it is never exact.

Newton's laws are enough for us to fling rockets and robots to Mars, but they are not good enough for us to create our GPS system. And Relativity is amazingly good, but still not good enough to model black holes, dark matter, and dark energy. The breadth of equations in Quantum Mechanics are also supremely successful, and yet they don't work well in the realm of Relativity. The Standard Model doesn't know what dark matter or dark energy is.

So yes, all of this math we have is Unreasonably Effective. But it's still a model, and a model that is not 100% correct. We have gaps in our models and as we figure out better and better approximations for them we move to them.

In my first post I made a small comment about those who are Platonist "mistaking the map for the territory". This is a logical fallacy where one is confusing/conflating the semantics (in this case mathematics) with what it represents, reality.

Math, and by extension logic and any other model, or heuristic, that we use to make our way through this world is the map, it is amazingly effective. Just because a map is not the territory does not mean it's not useful.

I do agree that they can be "shown" or demonstrated, I don't think that's at argument here. And to be specific I chose the phrase Platonic World, or Platonic Realm specifically because it is the philosophical notion that ideas are real in the sense that the keyboard I am typing this message on is real, that those ideas exist independent of humans, and indeed independent of any living/sentient existence.

I called out Max Tegmark, partially because I find it humorous and, specifically because he has said that he believes that there exists a world where math is real, or maybe that the world is only math. It stems partly from his view of the multiverse. He makes an easy "punching bag" for this sort of thing.

So, yes, existence has many meaning in your example. I specifically called out one where ideas have a real existence independent of our reality or any subjects that operate within it.

Part of the reason that you're going to run into trouble with sets being universal, or foundational, rightly found in a theorem that was birthed from set theory, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem[0].

I will confess that when I took discrete in college I was seduced by set theory. I literally had the, naive, thought to myself "you could prove all of math with just sets!". As my education continued I found out, much to my chagrin, and Hiblert's[1], that I was very, very, mistaken.

This hasn't stopped everyone from trying to continue Hilbert's program, though with a bit more limited scope[2][3].

By and large, all math is undergirded by a set of axioms that have to be taken as true with no proof. Even as far back as Euclid's Elements basically starts with a set of axioms and then proceeds from there. Strange that something that is so real must have a bunch of rules given as true with no proof of their validity beyond "well, everyone can see that it's true".

In a final, ish, dig, I'll just say leave it up to Penrose to take Popper's sensible cosmology and turn it into a quasi-religious one.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_program [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo%E2%80%93Fraenkel_set_t... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_mathematics

You could brashly say that the Platonic world does exist? I must be from Missouri, show it to me! Do that and you can bring me to your, and Max Tegmark's, side. Show me a Tree that has the pure essence of tree, show me a One, show me the pure ideal of a triangle.

I do take umbrage at your insinuation that I have not actually thought "through the implications in a contemplative, meditative way over the course of several hours" on this subject. I have spent many years, and not a few semesters of college, contemplating this very subject.

Consider this, where would your platonic world go if there were no sentient beings in the universe? Would it sit there, on some "higher plane" awaiting discovery by no one? Would the pure idea of a Tree get lonely? We're very into "does a tree fall in the forest with no one to hear it does it make a sound?" territory, however I think this is extremely important when trying to decide what is Real.

Plato, a man who lived ~2,400 years ago, decided that ideas were Real with zero proof and you're just going to accept his word on this, I'm supposed to just accept this? This does strike me as extremely life-centric, for lack of a better, all encompassing, term. If all life in the universe disappeared, the universe itself does not suddenly vanish in a puff of smoke. Stars will still fuse the elements, blackholes will still gobble up matter, the earth will continue to orbit the sun until it's consumed by the sun or is disrupted by some massive interstellar traveler. But the world of ideas wouldn't exist because there would be nothing to think of them. Mathematics wouldn't exist, because there would be nothing to conceive of them.

If you assume the platonic realm exists, sure, I would grant you all of Penrose's Three Worlds, I would grant Tegmark's belief that somewhere out there is a physical Platonic realm. I'd also probably believe in a lot of other things with out evidence as well.

But, maybe I'm just from Missouri. You're gonna have to show me.

The ideas of sets being the universal foundation of math is arbitrary as any other bit of math. Which is to say all of it is arbitrary.

Just as you ask, "where in nature does one observe these weird things?" I would to ask where in nature does one find a one? or a pi? or any other number really. Where do you find a triangle? Or a coordinate? Or any of the mathematical constructs we use day to day.

Sure you can point at something triangle shaped and go "there!" but is it _really_ a triangle? Or just an approximation? Sure you can count one of something, but that's not the same as the number one. Just like you can't have pi of something.

All of math is just a model that is surprisingly applicable to the real world.

All of math is a byproduct of our brains. It doesn't exist, out there, in some Platonic World. Anyone who thinks so, I'm looking at you Max Tegmark, is mistaking the map for the territory.

I made the mistake of, admittedly accidently, throwing Starfield onto a spinning disk drive.

Load times were approximately 5-10 minutes from button click to start, any conversation that was initiated either ran through all of the audio dialogue and then ran the animations for said dialogue or did the reverse. Any time combat started the game would freeze completely and then start again.

I realized my mistake and moved Starfield over to my nvme and load times dropped to about 1 minute, and I never saw any of the other issues again. It was like I spent my whole life living in a cave staring at shadows and then found my self on the surface seeing the sun for the first time.

Now I'm imaging a small budget grad student/researcher with a budget of several hundred grand.

Maybe I'm not as familiar with the word small as I thought I as. :)

If AMD cards were half the price of Nvidia ones then sure, this would happen. The 4090 can be had for ~$1600USD and the RX 7900 for about ~$1000USD. A significant discount, however the RX 7900 is about 3/4ths as powerful as the 4090, which puts it more in the class as a 4080, which costs about as much.

As a small budget research/grad student, if the price difference isn't that big, why waste the time porting torch to it?