knzhou

48 ms·

451.
by knzhou 7y ago
I'm familiar with the applications here, and I've never found them compelling. They amount to taking things we already understand perfectly well (chemical reactions, written in terms of differential equations or visualized in term
452.
by knzhou 7y ago
Sure, and nowadays any big science project has hundreds if not millions of "spies". You, too, can dig into the data and methods of many such experiments, no matter what country you liv in.
453.
by knzhou 7y ago
Isn't that literally the claim the article posted here is making?
454.
by knzhou 7y ago
Yeah, this drives me crazy. You get this kind of response whenever anybody funds a new tokamak, or particle accelerator, or free electron laser, or petawatt laser, or whatever. There's over a hundred of these things, they aren't o
455.
by knzhou 7y ago
This point needs to be stressed. It took less than 5 years for the Soviets to figure out the nuclear bomb, despite the great novelty of the idea, the many unknowns surrounding nuclear physics at the time, the scarcity of the ingredients, an
456.
by knzhou 7y ago
Whataboutism is bad when it's responding to a statement that "X is bad". But it is the exact correct response to a statement that "X is uniquely bad". People like you forget this obvious distinction and just use
457.
by knzhou 7y ago
> I wonder if it's possible to somehow create a "consistency checker" that can check to see what claims are compatible with what other claims. Bad news: the political narratives of whatever party you don't like are
458.
by knzhou 7y ago
By survey, over a quarter of Americans are "nones" when it comes to religion. Much fewer actively take the label of athiest, but there's functionally no difference.
459.
by knzhou 7y ago
That is a catch-22, isn't it? The common definition of "winning the social media war" is to get a lot of users. That is inherently contradictory to "cultivating" a "selective group". Just as water flows do
460.
by knzhou 7y ago
"Algorithms" aren't mind controlling magic. Even if they can shift your political opinions accidentally, there are tons of people trying their hardest to do that on purpose . Your feed is filtered, so are the articles in you
461.
by knzhou 7y ago
No, not at all. That is a simple consequence of ordinary probability theory that is used in almost all interpretations of quantum mechanics. As I said, superdeterminism is much much much more radical. Here is a more appropriate analogy. S
462.
by knzhou 7y ago
Once again, the "superdeterminism" promoted here is a very very very very very different thing from either ordinary determinism or ordinary probability. You're like the 50th person to reply to me in exactly this way.
463.
by knzhou 7y ago
I must not have put this clearly, because I've gotten piled on by 50 comments, but: there is nothing wrong with trying to find a deterministic explanation for QM. Lots of people are working on that. Superdeterministism is very very
464.
by knzhou 7y ago
Yes, but in order to actually explain the results of existing experiments superdeterministically, this "implicate" order must be vast. It has to link the results of spin measurements, coin flips, radioactive decays halfway across
465.
by knzhou 7y ago
Again, what you said is textbook determinism that I and almost every scientist agrees with. Superdeterminism is much, much stranger than this (it's not just saying quantum mechanics is deterministic, which e.g. Many Worlds also does)
466.
by knzhou 7y ago
Again, it's not about randomness vs. determinism. Both are perfectly compatible with science, just as you said, and no scientist bats an eye at using either type of model. Superdeterminism is a big step beyond determinism that explici
467.
by knzhou 7y ago
Hidden variables would be cool. But there are plenty of hidden variable theories that aren't superdeterministic. My point is that if we all genuinely adopted the superdeterministic way of thinking and explaining, we wouldn't even
468.
by knzhou 7y ago
> The paper replies with the following argument: in super-determinism, statistical independence is an emergent property which holds at macro scales, so classical experiments do enjoy statistical independence. In your hypothesis - yeah, t
469.
by knzhou 7y ago
Superdeterminism is determinism, plus a radically different way of thinking about experimental results. To continue with the coin flip analogy, consider a classical world where a coin flip is perfectly deterministic, given the initial condi
470.
by knzhou 7y ago
You're not distinguishing between determinism and superdeterminism. Determinism is perfectly compatible with science, as it admits the idea of controlled and reproducible experiments. (For example, if you believe in determinism, you co
471.
by knzhou 7y ago
While I can think of exciting questions sparked by many different interpretations of quantum mechanics, I can't think of any for superdeterminism, for exactly the reasons I said -- it's scientifically dead from the start. Other
472.
by knzhou 7y ago
Terrifying revelations comes for cheap these days. Plenty of people say that the opposite of that is terrifying as well. I figure if I'm going to be terrified either way, I might as well not be!
473.
by knzhou 7y ago
While I lean the same way, the measurement problem is definitely harder than you say. If it's just entanglement with an external system, you still have to answer how that superposition ends up with you personally observing only one r
474.
by knzhou 7y ago
I've always been mystified at why people take superdeterminism as a good explanation for anything, when it actually acts as a stopsign for thought. For example, suppose I am betting with you on the outcomes of a coin toss. You call hea
475.
by knzhou 7y ago
I try to only read books that are at least a few years old, so these aren’t timely recommendations. On the list for next year: The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language Essays of Montaign Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers Higher S
476.
by knzhou 7y ago
Impostor syndrome is a real phenomenon, but contrary to what everybody studying it says, the strongest counter to it is more emphasis on objective and impersonal evaluation criteria, not less. In my experience, much of it is created by in
477.
by knzhou 7y ago
I used to be annoyed about that, but the particles we currently think of as “fundamental” could well be emergent too. So reserving the word “particle” for only fundamental ones isn’t practical.
478.
by knzhou 7y ago
This is a good article because it gives insight into how the scientific process works: nobody is "for" or "against" various dark matter hypotheses, an analysis that definitively supports either direction can be very in
479.
by knzhou 7y ago
Now that was a great example of an accessible, technically and culturally accurate article. For stuff like this, Quanta magazine is generally the world leader.
480.
by knzhou 7y ago
It's funny how experiences can differ so much -- academia really varies a lot. There's all this talk about what a PhD really means as a credential, while I've never thought about it that way. In my corner of physics, a PhD ju

More ›