D-Machine

5 ms·

1.
by D-Machine 5d ago
HN is now heavily astroturfed or overrun by bots (or, alternately, low-quality posters now indistinguishable from the previous), and this is especially so in AI-related threads. One tell is that most comments barely exceed one or two senten
2.
by D-Machine 6d ago
Falling into deranged ideological projection is also an interesting choice - one I chose to mostly ignore. You seem to really obsess a lot about this Yarvin fellow: I tried reading his stuff once and found it intolerable. I imagine you thin
3.
by D-Machine 6d ago
> Cognitive disparity is because of compounding investment of attention and metacognition in development [...] Sure, but exclusively? There are no other factors that don't depend on effort / investment / social context? I
4.
by D-Machine 6d ago
"Abstraction ceiling" is just a way to talk about intelligence at at the tails that reveals one of the difficulties / limitations you can encounter when it comes to compressing / abstracting complex mathematical objects.
5.
by D-Machine 6d ago
> But everyone is as a kid when they learn language and everything else Also clearly false by almost all current research. > So the task is just to get people back into that mindset. Again, you have no evidence, and this is clearly wr
6.
by D-Machine 6d ago
Uh huh. A bunch of quasi-mystical bullshit to justify utterly inept garden variety intelligence denialism (it also just shifts terminology: if we accept your metaphysics, it would still be strange to propose that everyone has exactly equal
7.
by D-Machine 7d ago
IMO this would track, applied mathematics (even e.g. data science, though perhaps calling that applied math is a bit generous / insulting to more serious applied math) is in some ways more exciting now because it is far easier to surfa
8.
by D-Machine 7d ago
Find me the magical teaching method that can make anyone learn any kind of mathematics at nearly the same rate, and you have falsified the idea that anyone has mathematical limits. Given we as a society can't even figure out how to do
9.
by D-Machine 7d ago
> If a program always have the same behaviour, it's a pretty bad program This is false in far more cases than the cases where it is true, and even in the cases where you are right, you still usually want similar behaviour. > Yo
10.
by D-Machine 7d ago
Work on your reading comprehension, I made it clear that increased effort is what an abstraction ceiling feels like, but also made it clear that GP could have been talking about the effort of academic busywork. Let's also not pretend t
11.
by D-Machine 7d ago
Here I would maybe argue that the simplicity makes these kinds of tasks tedious (like doing taxes), so it also makes a lot of sense for people to want to just throw AI at it. Tedious, easy rote tasks can be much more unpleasant than engagin
12.
by D-Machine 7d ago
You clearly don't understand the meaning of the term. Grothendieck was almost certainly wrong about his gifts here, and even if not, your mathematical ability and output isn't fully explained by your ability ceiling. Honestly, the
13.
by D-Machine 7d ago
Of course, every area has similar issues. The main unique problem with (contemporary) academia is the one I mentioned: > tech and industry, where producing junk actually has real negative economic and personal consequences In academia, y
14.
by D-Machine 7d ago
Of course "burning it to the ground" is rhetoric and not meant literally. It is meant to convey though that "nice" and "gentle" solutions might not really be enough here. Yes, for the most part the fixes have t
15.
by D-Machine 7d ago
We have mountains of evidence that humans differ dramatically in cognitive potential, and more again that often effort / practice can only explain a small amount of the variance in performance in a wide variety of fields. We have basic
16.
by D-Machine 7d ago
Writing is pretty hard for a lot of people, maybe especially so if they are more non-verbal thinkers, and then doubly so again if one must write not in one's native language.
17.
by D-Machine 7d ago
AI is very bad at properly handling statements that make heavy use of vague quantifiers (e.g. "some", "most") and also commits a lot of pretty serious logical fallacies. It is also bad at handling subtle logical negation
18.
by D-Machine 7d ago
And also to think in different directions than you would have gone in isolation. Regardless, this is a great heuristic / rule that I will be sharing and keeping in mind.
19.
by D-Machine 7d ago
This feels very related to the issues re: the presence or absence of world models in LLMs. Insofar as they have world models (or "intuitions"), these would seem to have to be primarily verbal-linguistic (or symbolic, when using ma
20.
by D-Machine 7d ago
> Eh. I'm a math PhD who fled academia because it was too much for me. But I have never encountered this term "abstraction ceiling" nor did I succumb to it. This sounds a lot like you may have in fact succumbed to your abs
21.
by D-Machine 7d ago
There's an old joke about funding, goes something like: "Why you are always demanding more funding? Why can't you be more like the mathematicians, all they need is a desk, some paper, and a pencil, and a garbage can, and they
22.
by D-Machine 7d ago
This is tricky, because, in fact, hard math having an intelligence floor is one of the nastier realities of the human condition. Anyone who is even quite intelligent but has really pursued the rigorous stuff, unless they are in fact a prodi
23.
by D-Machine 7d ago
Make analysis code available. Make anonymized data available for download without people having to jump through hoops to get it. If you have highly sensitive data, release only the variables or other statistics needed to reproduce core anal
24.
by D-Machine 7d ago
> it's now widely expected that a high impact pub will make all data and code available for review, and then publicly available upon manuscript publication I am also in academia and regardless, factually this is not true at all for
25.
by D-Machine 7d ago
Yup, strongly agree with all of this, especially the RCT stuff. This has all been profoundly obvious for at least well over a decade or even two now. A consequence has been that too many serious people are driven away from academia and rese
26.
by D-Machine 7d ago
I think it is worse than that. Science is a process for resolving disagreements, ambiguity, and uncertainty, and also for discovering abstractions (patterns) among phenomena. It is social and can not be reduced to a binary / digital
27.
by D-Machine 7d ago
Science should be more like this, in current times, yes. But until much of academia is burned to the ground, or until science can be properly separated from modern academia, this will never be so. The current academic incentives are all w
28.
by D-Machine 8d ago
> "Nine times" literally means multiplied by nine Rather, "nine times larger" means multiplied by nine, and "nine times smaller" means divided by nine. This is basic and not particularly awkward, certainly n
29.
by D-Machine 11d ago
It is a good question because aphantasics that can dream normally are far less likely to engage in the sort of "aphantasia is just semantics" denalism that is largely disproven given modern science and online discourse. I.e. it is
30.
by D-Machine 11d ago
The distinction between imagination and seeing is regularly blurred, most commonly in dreams, but also on psychedelics or quasi-psychedelics (e.g. cannabis), and also in altered spiritual states (meditative practices). The two experiences a

More ›