btilly

56 ms·

751.
by btilly 2y ago
Please provide a reference showing that NASA thinks that Starship will lose 3/4 of the fuel, and there is no way to fix it.
752.
by btilly 2y ago
Your primary reason matches what SpaceX themselves have said. You either need to be strong enough to handle the shock of inpact, or need to spread the impact over time. Building either into the rocket adds a lot of mass. Landing on a device
753.
by btilly 2y ago
From my personal observation, those whose scientific understanding I admire mostly see little value in what the philosophers have produced. Those who I see admiring the philosophers seldom demonstrate much scientific understanding. Therefor
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by btilly 2y ago
You are adding people by changing the discussion to one where the point no longer makes sense. I'm focused on how many people were needed to make the conceptual breakthrough from classical thinking to quantum thinking. I'm very ex
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by btilly 2y ago
My lengthy comment was not about value extracted in this video, it was addressing your doubts about the information in it. I personally got value from the subject of the video itself. Which we did not discuss. It really appears to me that y
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by btilly 2y ago
Anecdotally I've seen such claims, but have seen mixed results as well. I've also encountered people who clearly had an ego about how little ego they had. Yes, it was just as ridiculous as it sounds. I've never seen anything
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by btilly 2y ago
Experts who felt certain about their ideas did worse than chance, and worse than simplistic models. Experts who quantified uncertainty and tried multiple theories did better than both chance or simplistic models. Sadly, the experts who felt
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by btilly 2y ago
I'd say that Galileo spotting the phases of Venus was also a big deal.
759.
by btilly 2y ago
Your complaint is that it is hard to extract truth from her videos. However extracting truth from what you said is trivial if you believe that what she reports as fact, is fact. And what she reports as her opinion, is her opinion. If you pi
760.
by btilly 2y ago
The statement that there's more than enough, is not the statement that we should be firing them. It's a statement that we don't want more. But if we had to fire some, I'd recommend ones who are not willing to do research
761.
by btilly 2y ago
You are right. But let's reduce it down to physicists working in quantum gravity, who publish in journals that such physicists typically publish in. Give that this is Sabine's background, this is who she will be aware of. For all
762.
by btilly 2y ago
Well, if you want a simple argument from authority, John Carlos Baez's confirmation that she's right is pretty good. If you want a better one, she very rarely gets any of her facts wrong. Now let's go point by point. Is Carl
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by btilly 2y ago
I partly agree. A conceptual breakthrough always rests on a foundation to which many contributed. All of whom, in some sense, contributed. But my reading of history says that the reconceptualization that leads to intellectual breakthroughs
764.
by btilly 2y ago
You're right that these were not the only people working on the set of problems that lead to QM. Lots of people were thinking about the same problems at the same period of time. And lots more added to it later. But what key concept und
765.
by btilly 2y ago
The problem is that we need an ego to be healthy. Attempts to destroy it can wind up compromising your mental health. The first part of the solution is to be careful what's in your ego. See https://paulgraham.com/identi
766.
by btilly 2y ago
This strongly depends on what you mean by "theory of knowledge". If you mean the practical importance of self-honesty, and a historical awareness of how easily we slip into self-delusion, then I agree. See, for instance, https:&#
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by btilly 2y ago
Not exactly. She's just admitted that he isn't someone she thought of. And that's likely because she's far more aware of the contributions of physicists to this field, than the attempted contributions of non-physicists.
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by btilly 2y ago
Even if you believe that they are useful, you're also not going to wind up as a hero in the history books. And so people wind up acting in the same way. Besides, the argument that all of the bad ideas contributed to discovering the rig
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by btilly 2y ago
I am aware of no case where it clearly made an advance prediction of any behavior that later turned out to be true. I'm aware of quite a few where they managed to "predict" something we already knew. That said, they've m
770.
by btilly 2y ago
I'm not the one you're replying to, but the claim seems very reasonable to me. Fundamental breakthroughs in how to think about scientific subjects usually are created by fairly small groups of people. A lot more people are involve
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by btilly 2y ago
He is better known within physics as the author of This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics , an archive of which is at https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/TWF.html . His more current blog is available at https:
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by btilly 2y ago
Thank you for the compliment. I've been working on how to formulate that idea clearly for a while. It is a problem that goes well beyond physics. For example I believe that the same cognitive error is behind the fact that experts do si
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by btilly 2y ago
That statement is only true for a few of the things on your list.. Yes, it took a couple of decades to test the existence of neutrinos. But, for example, general relativity was successfully tested within 5 years of being published. Gravitat
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by btilly 2y ago
I think that you have half a point. You're absolutely right that just because people are paid to think about things, doesn't mean that they are making progress. And there is a lot of evidence that this is true today in the foundat
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by btilly 2y ago
The fundamental reason for this is simple. Humans are prone to cognitive dissonance. Meaning, we do absurd things to avoid painful thoughts. And anything that questions our sense of identity, is a painful thought. So if my self-image is, &q
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by btilly 2y ago
Common Lisp was the first language I'm aware of with optional typing. In theory, what you're saying is true. In practice there's a lot of pressure to ship the working prototype, and retrofitting types on it later doesn't
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by btilly 2y ago
No. It's that when people who prefer type systems go to use a popular dynamic language, they try to drag in features that they like from other languages. Very honestly, optional type systems tend to be the worst of all worlds. Because
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by btilly 2y ago
My wife. She began on a bet that there was no such thing as talent, she could learn the thing she was worst at. Wound up with everyone telling her how much talent she had. Annoyed the heck out of her. She did it by being willing to throw he
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Why physics is dying [video](youtube.com)
5 points by btilly 2y ago|1 comments
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by btilly 2y ago
Why should a company that is doing a public service for the rest of us, at their own expense, pay more than it needs to to do that service? If Cloudflare was to behave rationally, it would simply pay the troll to go away. Trolls are very go

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