knzhou

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61.
by knzhou 6y ago
The value is that even given this, they're much more reliable than preprints, and much much more reliable than sensational Twitter threads or public forums. They manage to filter out a tremendous amount of crap, but a sufficiently cr
62.
by knzhou 6y ago
You do realize that the whole reason we're discussing this retraction is because the scientific community did discuss its validity? So far I've seen a lot of self-correction done by the scientific and medical communities themsel
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by knzhou 6y ago
> I think other countries should take a page out of Tegnell's book and instead of trying to exorcise dissent and label opponents, admit to uncertainties in their policies. Sadly, the discourse affects the results. When everybody bel
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by knzhou 6y ago
Indeed, but that is the problem that preprints can solve. (As in, they don't solve the problem of telling what is correct, because that's just inherently hard, but they solve the problem of giving access so people can learn to t
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by knzhou 6y ago
But this isn't a case of a journal acting like a "mafia". This is a case where something bad slipped past peer review, because of the inherent limitations of peer review. The reason is that expert time and attention is intrin
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by knzhou 6y ago
Well, I recommend doing a concrete, nontrivial derivation from start to finish just to see how this approach scales. As a basic example that is typically covered in about half a page in books, try doing a full derivation of the wave equatio
67.
by knzhou 6y ago
Whenever this kind of thing happens, you get a lot of people advocating for the abolition of peer review and its replacement with Twitter or something. I simply don't understand that. Normal peer review means "we showed our work t
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by knzhou 6y ago
It seems to me that your map is far too detailed to use practically. You spell out every algebraic step, including stuff as simple as "divide both sides by T", so that deriving f = 1/T from T = 1/f takes about 10 nodes
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by knzhou 6y ago
I've taken 3000 pages of notes in a linear, bullet-point fashion, and I also keep up with education research. As far as I can tell, both in studies and in personal experience, the fiddly details of your note-taking schemes don't m
70.
by knzhou 6y ago
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the word "emergence". In pop science, it was spoken in reverent tones. Never mind that they never gave a definition of it that didn't sound trivial -- the word was dripping with meaning a
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by knzhou 6y ago
I've just decided that my weekend days are Wednesday and Saturday -- on Wednesdays in particular I get to waste as much time on HN as I want! You don't need to work 5 consecutive days every week, now you can do what works for you.
72.
by knzhou 6y ago
> There are enough Chinese pro-nationalists using YouTube And they aren’t any more nationalistic than Americans. Reporting this slogan is the equivalent of, say, an American reporting “Drumpf is Hitler” or “Hussein Obama”. These are all
73.
by knzhou 6y ago
That’s true, but it wasn’t when I posted my comment. It looks like comments just naturally get more reasonable over time... similarly, about half my comments get to negative score instantly, but most then slowly climb back up to positive ov
74.
by knzhou 6y ago
I’m all ready to bring out the pitchforks, guys, but I’m confused. Didn’t we all agree literally yesterday that Facebook not doing enough to reduce division was a moral catastrophe? Isn’t deleting what hundreds of millions of people see a
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by knzhou 6y ago
> But personally, I think that calls into question whether Facebook or anything like them should even exist. The fundamental problem with Facebook is that it serves the people, and as a rule, we are too reactive, too judgmental, too igno
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by knzhou 6y ago
This is also why I'm never particularly concerned about somebody popular being kicked off a platform. The ability to quickly go from being unknown to having millions of views, distributed using somebody else's servers, paid for by
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by knzhou 6y ago
But that’s not how it actually works. For example, it’s agreed among journalists covering social media that Facebook’s greatest crime is that it “created a genocide in Myanmar”, as you can read in an ocean of longform articles. What they me
78.
by knzhou 6y ago
True, but I would have expected at least a little visible disagreement. You never see anybody saying “wait a second, I think making the filter bubble effect a bit worse is actually worth it!” Each individual submission’s comments is just
79.
by knzhou 6y ago
The degree to which “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” is in effect here is remarkable. If Facebook literally removes anything, then HN is outraged because it’s censorship, paternalism, all that. But if Facebook does not adopt an acti
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by knzhou 6y ago
Note that IIT has been criticized [0] for being extremely gameable: it is trivial to build simple circuits that do absolutely nothing, but have more "consciousness" than all humans who have ever lived. 0: https://www.sc
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by knzhou 6y ago
> Saying things like "Consciousness is emergent" or "Consciousness is just a side effect of information processing" seems to miss the point. It sounds suspect to me too, but the reason the idea is appealing is that it
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by knzhou 6y ago
Sure, but that’s not what he did. He literally saw the word “fact” and decided he didn’t like what was going to come next. That’s downright medieval.
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by knzhou 6y ago
I know physics and I know this description is wrong. If there’s a bullshitter here, it’s you.
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by knzhou 6y ago
> my initial gut reaction to seeing any news headline with the word "Fact" in it has become to assume it has a political angle. That's not a problem with the headline, it's a problem with your state of mind. There are
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by knzhou 6y ago
Okay, now I see what you mean. They were going in the right direction, but they did mess up. Everywhere they talk about moving a particle in a loop around the other, they really should have talked about moving two particles to exchange them
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by knzhou 6y ago
I laughed at PhD comics back in undergrad, but now as a PhD student it feels wrong to read. A lot like Lego Grad Student.
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by knzhou 6y ago
But Marginal Revolution is well known for having the worst comments on the internet. Literally nothing but edgy one-sentence snark. It’s just a step above caveman grunts.
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by knzhou 6y ago
I'm a graduate student. Yes, I know about all of this -- I'm holding out hope to be one of the 0.001%. ;-) They do exist!
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by knzhou 6y ago
That's fine because basically everything's a resonance. The only particles that aren't technically resonances are those that have infinite lifetime, i.e. just the proton, electron, and photon.
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by knzhou 6y ago
Definitely. That's another type of course that I hope to avoid having to teach. The ideal course has only students that are relaxed, engaged, well-prepared, and who actually want to be there.

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