knzhou

23 ms·

91.
by knzhou 6y ago
Yeah. In this case it's fine, but in general it can lead to confusion. For some weird reason, condensed matter physicists keep giving their quasiparticles the same names particle physicists give their particle particles, even though th
92.
by knzhou 6y ago
No, Quanta is fine -- you're making a subtle error, which is in fact common even in graduate textbooks. There are two distinct things going on here: formally "swapping" the arguments in the wavefunction, and physically moving
93.
by knzhou 6y ago
I was lucky to spend my childhood and college years in peer groups where cheating was incomprehensible. Nobody would cheat in a math competition, for instance. That would just be a loud, lame declaration of stupidity. When I went to the oth
94.
by knzhou 6y ago
Gilbert Strang's linear algebra course blew my mind back in high school, and I still use insights from it every day. Strang has a particular lecturing style where he approaches every topic several times, often beginning many lectures b
95.
by knzhou 6y ago
Neat! Still, I wouldn't say the Planck distribution is noticeably better. The reason the other 4 distributions appear to have the peak too low is because they're doing a tradeoff: they do that to better fit the values of the left
96.
by knzhou 6y ago
I've seen this blow up in several places now, but there seriously is nothing to this paper. Essentially all they're pointing out is that the set of atomic transition energies (1) is positive, (2) has a smooth distribution, (3) goe
97.
by knzhou 6y ago
These options are so soft that they really are equivalent to doing nothing. Sick people have always been told to stay home; trips abroad and on ships might cause visible clusters early on, but they're a drop in the bucket later when th
98.
by knzhou 6y ago
We could argue about code smells all day, but ignoring that, I think there's only one essential point made in the post. It claims that without a lockdown, things would be just fine, because people would automatically isolate themselves
99.
by knzhou 6y ago
These arguments were indeed used 30 years ago, but shortly after the USSR fell apart, the American Superconducting Supercollider was defunded midway through construction. The US was satisfied to become 2nd to Europe in this field then, I do
100.
by knzhou 6y ago
Perhaps counterintuitively, it makes little difference. At the energies we're considering, the mass-energy of the particles being collided is completely negligible. Switching to colliding protons and antiprotons does change the details
101.
by knzhou 6y ago
When the original paper about planet 9 being a black hole came out a year ago, everybody thought it was a cool-sounding but just completely wild idea -- both physicists and pop science articles. Not impossible by any means, but not within t
102.
by knzhou 6y ago
Nima-Arkani Hamed likes to point out that particle colliders aren't getting more expensive at all, in relative terms. The price tags are going up for just the same reason that you can't buy a loaf of bread for a nickel anymore,
103.
by knzhou 6y ago
The actual timeline for this is that when the first critiques of LIGO's analysis came out, there was a good reply from LIGO and a productive scientific discussion, at the end of which Sabine indicated she was satisfied. That was months
104.
by knzhou 6y ago
But visible light can't get through us at all. Does that prove that we aren't empty space? The whole point is that this criterion is incredibly ambiguous.
105.
by knzhou 6y ago
That’s not a useful comparison though. You want to compare cases now to cases when lockdown or similar measures were imposed. Otherwise a country that wastes 2 months doing nothing and then takes action far too late just gets put in the “lo
106.
by knzhou 6y ago
No, that's just how flu season works. The numbers in the US are also higher this year, and it normally ranges within a factor of ~4 from year to year depending on the dominant strains in circulation. [0] It's completely implausibl
107.
by knzhou 6y ago
I recently argued [0] why this is a great thing in academia especially. Getting cutting-edge information out of papers alone is extremely difficult. Asking experts is ideal, but not everybody can do that. Lecture notes, blog posts, StackExc
108.
by knzhou 6y ago
> So I gather that he's espousing a view that states that quarantines and lockdowns are terrible and ineffective, and encouraging people to ignore them and freely associate. > I understand that you believe the expression of that
109.
by knzhou 6y ago
No, because at the time the statement was made, most of the known cases were directly linked to a single wildlife market. (Also keep in mind that this announcement is within 2 weeks of discovering the virus, sequencing its genome, inventing
110.
by knzhou 6y ago
Nobody is talking about banning people like Didier Raoult. If you can't tell the difference between a professor and a guy who gives spittle-flecked rants about the lizard people, this discussion will not be productive. For example, we
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by knzhou 6y ago
> now comes the classic counter-argument: that the evils of disinformation possess a virality that makes them spread far more easily than the truth, being that truth is nuanced and difficult to acquire whereas bad information is seductiv
112.
by knzhou 6y ago
What forums are you talking about? Radio, mail, TV, and newspapers still have audiences of hundreds of millions. Internet forums are in decline, but those have always had completely negligible public reach (as in, down by more than 2 orders
113.
by knzhou 6y ago
I feel like we're going in circles here. Even if every single site and app coordinated to kick off David Icke, he would end up, at worst, as silenced as the average American in the year 2000. It just doesn't seem all that bad to m
114.
by knzhou 6y ago
Interesting, do you have further reading on this to recommend?
115.
by knzhou 6y ago
Because, as I said a couple comments ago, the degree of one-to-many communication available to people has been continuously skyrocketing for decades, and currently stands at levels far beyond any seen in history. Even the heaviest possible
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by knzhou 6y ago
Maybe legalistically it is, but my point is that it's like the NYT and radio and print in the sense that these are all routes for one-to-many communication. Restricting one route of one-to-many communication isn't the end of the w
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by knzhou 6y ago
So you're arguing that once the public knows the truth... then the public will know the truth? Does sound like a rather weak claim, doesn't it?
118.
by knzhou 6y ago
Who said that? The range of bullshit information you can find at a moment's whim remains extremely high, in fact higher than it ever has been in history.
119.
by knzhou 6y ago
This slope isn't nearly as slippery as you're saying. If YouTube began issuing a million times more bans, it might approach the quality of an average newspaper in terms of accuracy. Would we be living in a dystopia at that point?
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by knzhou 6y ago
There really is no need for hysteria here. If YouTube began issuing a million times more bans, it might approach the quality of an average newspaper in terms of accuracy. Would we be living in a dystopia at that point? No, we'd be livi

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