knzhou

73 ms·

721.
by knzhou 7y ago
I've talked with a bunch of cranks and my experience resonates with this article. I believe in reasoned argument and persuasion, probably to a fault, but I never managed to change any of their opinions in the slightest. One of them had
722.
by knzhou 7y ago
It hasn't become concrete enough to make sharp, striking, correct predictions. It turns out the real world is extremely messy. Complexity theory can produce specific predictions ("disease spread will follow a power law with a cr
723.
by knzhou 7y ago
I mean, do you think literally everybody was doing string theory? There have always been plenty of theorists focused on more concrete things -- string theorists are not and have not been the majority. Grad students entering even in the 90s
724.
by knzhou 7y ago
> a super unpopular position at the time (1996); pretty much the only prominent person in agreement with him was Nobel Prize Winner Phil Warren Anderson, who disagrees with him in many other respects. Ultimately many other writers came o
725.
by knzhou 7y ago
It's important to avoid conflating string theorists with all theoretical physicists. Plenty of people in particle physics either don't believe in string theory or don't think it can make useful predictions any time soon, even
726.
by knzhou 7y ago
I see tons of tweets that I’m supposed to be outraged about every day, and I don’t have a Twitter. People spread around screenshots in posts, articles, messages...
727.
by knzhou 7y ago
> The Chinese consulate in Houston put out a statement condemning the tweet. Okay, perhaps. But that could also be them jumping on a popular bandwagon. I'm just raising this doubt because I've seen, many times on sites like thi
728.
by knzhou 7y ago
How do you know? I see literally zero direct evidence for this in the linked post -- only that some people in China responded. Not everybody in China is working for the government. When analogous statements are found offensive in the US,
729.
by knzhou 7y ago
I'm always bemused to have to say this, but: nobody likes censorship because they enjoy "falling in line". People everywhere support censorship exactly to the degree that they agree with the censors. You probably didn't
730.
by knzhou 7y ago
This is exactly my point. You, an American citizen, call it "economic power being concentrated by foreign states". But Chinese citizens call it "ordinary people boycotting offensive speech". It's the NFL kneeling pr
731.
by knzhou 7y ago
The Chinese get pissed off at political statements Americans find innocuous. Europeans are angry over the dominance of American tech companies which they are unable to control. Americans are panicked at the very idea of anybody non-Western
732.
by knzhou 7y ago
> No. Speak for yourself. You simply and repeatedly omit the part about the moral dimension, and fighting against injustice, a person or nation becoming the enemy just because of what they did to others. I've been on the other side
733.
by knzhou 7y ago
See, the problem is that these slogans work for all sides. People want to group up and go out to "fight for glory" against the hated enemy. That natural instinct is what the commenter I was replying to was feeling. It's what
734.
by knzhou 7y ago
You’d do more harm than good. Your “fighting for glory” is somebody else’s “insidious foreign intervention”. Let the people speak for themselves.
735.
by knzhou 7y ago
No, because the Bayesian conditioning ends up being used twice. If you and a friend do an experiment independently, and he gets 10 and you later get 12, you might justifiably think the answer is closer to 11. But you shouldn’t publish tha
736.
by knzhou 7y ago
I promise you that explaining a technical advanced math subject is less obvious than this, and that even students that come in with the same background will strongly disagree over which books are easiest to read. Maybe it's obvious tha
737.
by knzhou 7y ago
Depends on the field. Many CS papers can be understood by undergrads because CS is a very young and very broad field; the path to the frontier in any direction is short. Theoretical physics and math are not like that. They have been buildin
738.
by knzhou 7y ago
I don't, I'm just saying that trying to make every paper accessible to undergrads (or high schoolers, or elementary schoolers, or whatever) is going to bloat their length by so much that errors become harder to check, not easier.
739.
by knzhou 7y ago
People will complain about that too. The introduction is "redundant" or "trivial". The book is a long, bloated slog. (Since what you're proposing will unavoidably increase the page count.) The author intentionally c
740.
by knzhou 7y ago
No, there is no magic formula to make hard things easy. This is the same as the classic "monads are burritos" thing. A programmer spends a week trying to understand monads, and finally it clicks when he makes an analogy with wrapp
741.
by knzhou 7y ago
Scientists and mathematicians already spend an extreme amount of energy trying to think of the shortest, cleanest possible route for people to learn their fields. The resulting documents take years to create, and are called textbooks. (At l
742.
by knzhou 7y ago
That doesn’t mean that it’s wrong, it means that you need to read more. In a lot of fields, undergraduate material doesn’t qualify you to read papers, a PhD does. If all papers actually were written to undergraduate level, many would be 500
743.
by knzhou 7y ago
Suppose I run a fake investment company that pretends to double your money, but actually just steals it. Suppose you find out all my claims are lies, and demand your money back. How would you react if I said "The absence of evidence is
744.
by knzhou 7y ago
The prior for priming effects as strong as those claimed by psychology is, obviously, extremely low. After all, the only reason everybody knows about priming is that it got lots of press coverage, because it was surprising and unexpected.
745.
by knzhou 7y ago
Priming is one of the psychology topics worst afflicted by p-hacking. Almost every prominent priming study has gone down in flames during the replication crisis. Consistent, repeated propaganda has real effects, priming doesn't.
746.
by knzhou 7y ago
Mathematica is at a disadvantage since it worries about getting everything perfectly right, i.e. it cares about branch cuts and domains. I can cook up plenty of examples engineered to have these issues, which I could do (naively) but which
747.
by knzhou 7y ago
People can get used to anything. In college I got a glance at the totally normal cartoons my little sister was watching and I was horrified -- it looked like borderline body horror to me. But she thought that the cartoon characters of my ch
748.
by knzhou 7y ago
There is no "cashing out", prestige seeking is just the result of a primitive drive. It's like asking how I'm going to "cash out" all the french fries I'm eating. I don't have any plan to, it just fee
749.
by knzhou 7y ago
Indeed, it's possible that dark matter has no interactions with itself. But also, a little bit of interaction makes the detailed galaxy stuff come out a bit better, so the jury's out on it.
750.
by knzhou 7y ago
I like to think of this kind of game like dark matter. In some theories of dark matter, there are entire "dark sectors", families of particles that only interact with each other, that harmlessly pass through you all the time. Simi

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