knzhou

46 ms·

421.
by knzhou 7y ago
I don't disagree with this, but what I don't understand is the nationalist outrage. Suppose a professor slacked off on their job by taking a long vacation in France. That would be wrong and deserving of punishment -- but it wouldn
422.
by knzhou 7y ago
No, my point is that it is extremely common to take money from two sources, or even more! Nobody batted an eye at this, and in fact even today nobody bats an eye, unless one of the sources is in China. In that case it becomes "luring t
423.
by knzhou 7y ago
Again, as I said, not being clear about everything to your funding sources is definitely bad. But the specific outrage doesn't make sense. What does it mean to have a "conflict of interest" and a "financial incentive&quo
424.
by knzhou 7y ago
As I said, he should have been clear with his funding sources. But that's not where the outrage in this thread is coming from -- everybody here is pissed off at the very idea of scientific collaboration crossing national borders. There
425.
by knzhou 7y ago
I completely agree with you: collaboration is no crime in science. Obviously, we will both be downvoted to invisibility, because this site's users are fervent nationalists, not scientists.
426.
by knzhou 7y ago
Of course the guy should have disclosed everything to his funding sources, but from a scientist's viewpoint, the shock and outrage is confusing. Prominent scientists travel between institutions all the time, managing multiple groups --
427.
by knzhou 7y ago
Tired light is a very natural and intuitive hypothesis, it just doesn't work when you try to make it match up quantitatively.
428.
by knzhou 7y ago
Hold up, this is a different thing than what [1] and [2] are responding to.
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by knzhou 7y ago
> But as you note, even though humans are basically black boxes we can ask them questions in order to find out how they came to a particular conclusion. No, you can't. If somebody treats you with suspicion, it's because of a co
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by knzhou 7y ago
Sure, but no matter what, you can't derive an "ought" from an "is". At the end of the day we merely tell these algorithms what is the case. No matter what goes on inside, they cannot output moral prescriptions.
431.
by knzhou 7y ago
The article calls machine learning "conservative" because it only tells us what is, and not what should be. I don't think that's a useful framing. It's more accurate to say that, like all statistical techniques, mac
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by knzhou 7y ago
From the standpoint of particle physics, these aren’t that exciting. Though you would never know it from the article, the electric fields in these things are about the same as the fields in existing accelerators, because they’re both limite
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by knzhou 7y ago
Thanks, I do appreciate the even-handed moderation here!
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by knzhou 7y ago
Honestly, I've been on a lot of online forums, and Hacker News is by far the most combative and jingoistic I've ever seen.
435.
by knzhou 7y ago
Honestly, that just sounds like the usual rules for academic funding, phrased in a conspiratorial way. Would you also call NSF funding "a coordinated, calculated, and deliberate effort run by the American government"? Is science g
436.
by knzhou 7y ago
Your typical research doesn't lead to billions in licensing fees. 99% of research produces nothing of direct monetary value at all, and research that does is generally done in startups or pharma/biotech companies, where the rules
437.
by knzhou 7y ago
How this usually works is that samples are relevant to specific experiments. For example, maybe you're testing how some particular genetic modification affects how cancer cells behave in response to some drug, or whatever. These vials
438.
by knzhou 7y ago
The line between IP theft and literally just learning things gets very blurred in the sciences. Under some people's vague standards, I commit IP theft every time I take notes in a lecture, or apply knowledge I've learned elsewhere
439.
by knzhou 7y ago
I had the exact same problem as you — and really, it’s not a problem at all! It’s one of the greatest things the internet’s given us. Just remember that material is material. Fundamentally, all of these courses are pointing you towards the
440.
by knzhou 7y ago
Whenever you hear about science being a "cabal", you have to remember that there's a huge survivorship bias. At any moment in science, there are a few dominant hypotheses, which seem to work pretty well, and hundreds of alt
441.
by knzhou 7y ago
Despite what you may hear in breathless news articles, there was no point at which a substantial number of physicists believed (1), (2), (4), (5), (6), or (7). In some cases it was basically 99% against. People weren't rushing to &quot
442.
by knzhou 7y ago
My graduate classes were 100% homework-based almost without exception. When you're doing hard enough physics, it doesn't make sense to demand people do anything nontrivial in an hour, like in a typical exam. Real problems take at
443.
by knzhou 7y ago
Rules aren't made to make people miserable, they're made to keep things running for everybody involved.
444.
by knzhou 7y ago
Usually, delays lead to logistical difficulties. Until every copy of an assignment is submitted, you can't release solutions, assign grades, talk about the problems in lectures or recitations, or really give any feedback whatsoever. I&
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by knzhou 7y ago
That’s not any different. Now how late are you allowed to submit? 5 PM? Sometime at night? Midnight? How many people are allowed to submit late? What if word gets out that everybody is allowed to? You get the exact same problem, except that
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by knzhou 7y ago
> For example, my assignments are now largely due at midnight, at a very particular second: submit a nanosecond late at your own penalty. From the instructor's point of view, there's no winning here -- there will always be a cu
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by knzhou 7y ago
Ah, sorry, I misunderstood you. I was mostly reacting because I remember reading that blog post when it came out and thinking it was a neat idea, and now I'm recoiling in horror at how terrible it sounds.
448.
by knzhou 7y ago
> General relativity doesn’t help anyone throw a basketball better, but that’s not what it’s for. Yes, of course! And as a physicist, I don't ask basketball players to use general relativity. But I'm responding to a post claimi
449.
by knzhou 7y ago
> Knowing that you can model reaction networks using categorical concepts may not provide new insights IF you have no deep familiarity with those concepts—but if you do, then knowing there is a "symmetric monoidal functor from the c
450.
by knzhou 7y ago
You mean this idea? > A moral person is someone who cooperates with other moral people, and who refuses to cooperate with immoral people. It's just so naive. A slightly cleaned up version of ordinary tribalism: " we are good a

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