knzhou

45 ms·

391.
by knzhou 7y ago
Human behavior changes like... staying inside because of a quarantine? I fail to see any behavior change that could be more impactful than that.
392.
by knzhou 7y ago
Respectfully, who cares? In biology, nothing is an absolute. All good things have bad sides and all bad things have good sides, and that shouldn't stop us from identifying things that are generally good. Nobody giving general advice ca
393.
by knzhou 7y ago
I've seen this posted all over the internet to great acclaim, and honestly, it just feels feverish and desperate to me, grasping at tiny points as if they refute the central thesis. For example, the point that you linked to says that t
394.
by knzhou 7y ago
It would be interesting to see how this performs, compared to simpler methods, on hard cases like a missing fundamental. (If you play a sound with power at 200 Hz, 300 Hz, 400 Hz, ..., i.e. all the multiples of 100 Hz but not 100 Hz itself,
395.
by knzhou 7y ago
Exams or not, there will be no fix as long as there is zero-sum competition for a scarce good. And in this case, there is necessarily scarcity because prestige is positional: "the top schools" will necessarily always be a small fr
396.
by knzhou 7y ago
At some point, social science must switch to tighter p-value cutoffs and corrections for multiple comparisons. These are the norm in particle physics, which dealt with and resolved exactly this problem back in the 1970s.
397.
by knzhou 7y ago
There's a possibility that a discontinuity in data analysis might have an impact on fundamental physics. Many dark matter detection experiments rely on detecting an annual modulation, i.e. an excess of detection events later in the yea
398.
by knzhou 7y ago
> A home-cooked meal is not one conventionally thought of as being from items hyperlocally sourced. Exactly. To allow the category of "home-cooked meal" to exist at all, beyond professionals and a few dedicated hobbyists, we ha
399.
by knzhou 7y ago
This is just a result of people having finite time and resources. There are thousands of possible hobbies, and making home-cooked software from scratch is just one obscure one. For instance, can you make a literal home-cooked meal, withou
400.
by knzhou 7y ago
Man, that makes even less sense...
401.
by knzhou 7y ago
In this particular case it's mostly reflecting our choices of units, and the fact that changing the units can change the constants by many orders of magnitude. Benford's law comes from a distribution which is invariant under that
402.
by knzhou 7y ago
The continent that has contributed the most to global pandemics is Europe. By far.
403.
by knzhou 7y ago
I'm responding to the paper you linked, where you assert "this has happened before". The story with the Reddit link is similar: at the time of the posting, only ~6 data points actually mattered for R^2, so you would expect R^
404.
by knzhou 7y ago
Interestingly enough, it's also a decent fit for fundamental physical constants, as one can read off from a table of them. [0] 0: https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/pdf/all.pdf
405.
by knzhou 7y ago
This is a breathtakingly stupid abuse of data analysis. Which of course means it's at the top of Reddit's r/bestof, with thousands of upvotes. Let's take a look at that paper you linked. The supposedly damning point is t
406.
by knzhou 7y ago
This is an objection that could be raised against literally any clinical trial. If we knew that a treatment was effective and safe, it would indeed be immoral to withhold it from people. But we don't know that. Finding that out is th
407.
by knzhou 7y ago
This is far from the first time, so let me state this more explicitly: John Horgan is a provocateur with no knowledge of any field, whose only claim to fame is that he is so breathtakingly and publicly wrong that he gets people with real ex
408.
by knzhou 7y ago
Thanks. I have to make this point on HN just about every time Facebook ads come up. It absolutely blows my mind that something so prominent can be intentionally forgotten so quickly. I was very young in 2008 and even then I easily noticed t
409.
by knzhou 7y ago
Yes, I’m aware of that. But an algebra is a very different thing from “an algebraic structure”.
410.
by knzhou 7y ago
That’s the Clifford group , though. Is it actually related to the Clifford algebra, beyond being named after the same guy?
411.
by knzhou 7y ago
While there's a lot of value in the rationalist literature, there's also a lot of, well, words . The standard "sequences" take up nearly a million words, and the introductory fanfic ("prereq material") spans 2
412.
by knzhou 7y ago
As a scientist I have a strong aversion to getting on Twitter, and this article isn't helping. All my experience with Twitter has told me it's a concentrator for hot (i.e. wrong) takes, snarky dismissals, and sloganeering, to a gr
413.
by knzhou 7y ago
99% of experiments in fundamental physics "don't work" in this sense. All of them get published. If you got funded to build an apparatus, people are going to want to know what you saw. You can check for yourself, by looking
414.
by knzhou 7y ago
The question is always, 95th percentile of what? I'm involved with a series of physics competitions, that winnows ~5 million high schoolers down to 5. - 10% of high schoolers learn calculus well in high school - 10% of those also learn
415.
by knzhou 7y ago
> What do you do if you find yourself inside a maze? > Quit. Seriously. Go do something else. Ideally, do it today. That's it, right there. The whole article could have been replaced with just that. I've heard people express
416.
by knzhou 7y ago
This kind of thing has always seemed redundant to me. We already have a perfectly good understanding of how decoherence causes effective collapse, by making branches of the wavefunction unable to interfere with each other. This follows au
417.
by knzhou 7y ago
This was a fantastic comment, good to see misapplications of abstraction get pushback.
418.
by knzhou 7y ago
Because this wouldn't be national news if it were any country but China, and if things continue the way they're going, at best I'll get deported without cause. I know that I can't change any minds on a forum like this,
419.
by knzhou 7y ago
Yeah, per month alone it's more than I make in a year. That's sadly how big science works, China has nothing to do with that.
420.
by knzhou 7y ago
Isn't it a strange coincidence that all of America's enemies (the Axis, the USSR, now China) "spoke with one voice"? This is just the well-known outgroup homogeneity bias [0]. Everyone lives in a bubble. You don't h

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