I guess you don’t understand chaos theory.
21.04.2025 23:00
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I guess you don’t understand chaos theory.
Robin Hanson has this proposal for a generalists’ dept. IIRC, the criteria for tenure in that dept would be to have produced work that’s good enough to get tenure in two separate departments (eg, physics and philosophy; econ and history; CS and law; etc.).
Not really. Because there wasn’t ever really a corresponding “normal science” period within a Kuhnian paradigm. In general, philosophy doesn’t really do “normal science”. Perspectives are always constantly shifting.
Thanks! I’m glad it’s getting recognized. It’s interesting that the school teacher doesn’t just call Turing a genius or anything… indeed he criticizes the methods for cumbersomeness and unsoundness. But it’s very interesting Turing insisted on understanding things his own way, despite these issues.
Turing's high school teacher (from B. Jack Copeland's biography of Turing). More evidence for @davidbessis.bsky.social's hypothesis: great mathematicians got great by continuously reconstructing everything they were taught, for themselves. This is why Turing invented "the Turing machine" at age 23.
is there more to it than just “Idris Elba”?
The way he and Denzel play off each other is absolutely electric. I can watch those scenes where they go at each other a thousand times without ever getting bored.
Reacher said nothing.
Makes sense if status is given as a reward for, and constitutes a signal of, real value/real strengths. So people who seek status *directly* are less likely to be seeking/possessing the real underlying thing (intelligence, humor, beauty, knowledge etc.). Correspondingly, we downgrade their status.
In advance of the Oscars tonight: a lot of comedy heroes let you down. They become unfunny/bitter/closed minded. Conan is the exception. He has grown & evolved & is funnier than he’s ever been. He’s also an extremely kind and lovely human. Just a sincere post to say: Conan rules.
One performance of Gene Hackman’s that’s slept on is that in Crimson Tide. The way he and Denzel Washington play off each other is A+.
Agreed. In particular, I've tried DR extensively on topics I know a lot about; I don't see it as anywhere close to a fundamental breakthrough. Often, reading parts of a good textbook or a good review article clearly beats the output of DR. It's just somewhat useful to get a grip on some new topic.
I think vanilla acquired the connotation of plainness because of the fake vanilla that mass market vanilla ice cream is flavored with. Real vanilla definitely has a rich and complex flavor profile.
TC shouldn’t touch a superhero movie with a ten foot pole. He should be auteur-maxxing: just keep working with visionary directors and fresh and original scripts.
UK research universities are very good, second only to the US imho? especially relative to the amount of funding they receive and raise.
Comedy.
London is arguably the best city in the world.
Premier League.
I disagree with this as a generic. Ask your Indian or Chinese students and they will tell you how hard the pathway to citizenship is for them (relative to say Canada or UK or even Germany). They can sometimes be stuck for decades without a green card. (Yes, it’s easier through marriage or family.)
Well there are usually 3-4 townies, so they think they have a shot.
Yeah, and what's more, their summary of philosophical rationalism is wrong. Intuition was a key epistemological tool for the historical rationalists: Descartes took it to be much more reliable than sense-experience. Second, connecting historical rationalism with SV rationalism is wrong.
Common octopus
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So basically vindicating the old Soviet joke?
A Soviet citizen is on a flight to the US. The American next to him asks him what brings you to the US.
“I’m here to study your excellent propaganda.”
“What propaganda?”
“Exactly!”
I chalked it up to intelligence or genius or talent; mediocrites like myself had to slave away at my calcs. Now I'm thinking, they were indeed working very hard. But they were working hard in their minds to develop clearer and sharper mental models, which then allowed them crack open nuts easily.
Another insight I had from reading @davidbessis.bsky.social's book. It always puzzled me that the best mathematical minds I knew of did not spend a great deal of time at their desks, slaving away over calculations. They spent a lot of time wandering around, sitting in cafes, chatting with folks...
Not sure how I’m going to improve it, but the book gives me confidence and motivation to attempt it. Normally I might have just been like hey that’s just aging. But now I’m like don’t accept counterintuitive things as just the way things are; try to rejigger your intuitions to better fit the world.
Simple example: I recently heard someone mention 2008 and then say something about “6 years ago, in 2019.” So some part of me was surprised that 2019 and not 2008 was not around 5-6 years ago. This made me think I need to improve the way I think about my own subjective experience of time.
@davidbessis.bsky.social has written a fascinating book. One important lesson I’m trying to learn from it is to pay really close attention to when a fact or observation is surprising in any way. And to then ask: What about my mental model can be improved to make the fact more obvious & intuitive?
For me reading Randall Collins and getting a sense of the possibility of *microsociology* was eye opening. Like there was a very intermediate scale between psychology and dynamics of societies and one can find all kinds of interesting generalizations there.
That’s an interesting observation. However, many would argue that there are humans with similar styles of prose such as every writer of bureaucratese or apathetic high school students.
Also, her paper with Geroch proving that given initial data there’s a unique globally hyperbolic development according EFEs was non-constructive and relied on Zorn’s lemma and hence the axiom of choice😅. Very unusual for a physics theorem to use hardcore set theoretic assumptions.
