knzhou

24 ms·

211.
by knzhou 7y ago
Physics research being the way it is, everything is worth trying if somebody really believes in it, because everything is a moonshot. I'm personally working on one right now, so I'm too busy to work on Wolfram's, but more pow
212.
by knzhou 7y ago
Well, here I am talking shit about Wolfram, but I'm a physicist. There are thousands of us spending our lives on incredibly hard problems. The only difference between Wolfram and Weinstein and the rest of us is that they're decl
213.
by knzhou 7y ago
I do agree that Mathematica is great software! Physics would be much poorer without its help.
214.
by knzhou 7y ago
I'm following his "technical introduction" here: https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/
215.
by knzhou 7y ago
Not really. It's very vague -- he is just repeatedly saying "well, you could write down X in terms of graphs in this way." But you can write down anything in terms of anything. You can write a compiler in PowerPoint because i
216.
by knzhou 7y ago
I don't see anything of substance here, besides a lot of pretty graphs. Just like Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", we have the problem that there is a vast gulf between what you need to make flashy popsci and what you
217.
by knzhou 7y ago
You're cherry-picking. Louisiana is on the low side, but Alabama, Texas, and Georgia are on the high side. In noisy and unreliable data it's always possible to pick a single data point that supports any desired conclusion. I&#x2
218.
by knzhou 7y ago
I worked for Jeremy. I still think his idea is really beautiful, and when it applies the math is airtight, but it hasn't matured into sharp predictions for real systems. There were some simulations, but even then it was messy. For exam
219.
by knzhou 7y ago
Yes, I copy-pasted that comment because this is my tenth time commenting on guzey's critiques, and I'm tired of writing new ones. I still don't think that trimming a graph in a way that doesn't even change the conclusion
220.
by knzhou 7y ago
> It doesn't make sense to apply the same prior to "the CIA planted COVID-19 in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market", because there are many such markets in China, and only one BSL-4 facility. I didn't make an error.
221.
by knzhou 7y ago
You're not even getting the direction right now. This article is about Chinese citizens trying to return to China, not leaving it.
222.
by knzhou 7y ago
Why not both? Using your exact logic three times: - there's a 97% chance the CIA planted it in the seafood market - there's a 97% chance the CIA planted it in the WIV - there's a 97% chance the WIV made it Now it's obvio
223.
by knzhou 7y ago
Now this is an interesting abuse of Bayes' theorem, because there's an extremely similar conspiracy theory going around in China of this form: it's known that CIA agents specifically visited Wuhan before the virus broke out,
224.
by knzhou 7y ago
Care to explain what this screenshot actually means?
225.
by knzhou 7y ago
There are no sources. I've personally looked into tens of claims about people being "disappeared" in China over the past few years, and literally every time the only evidence has been "they haven't tweeted for 12 ho
226.
by knzhou 7y ago
Those international flights were allowed to let countries evacuate their own citizens out. If they were banned, you would be making the exact same complaint but reversed: "China held other countries' citizens hostage in Wuhan.&quo
227.
by knzhou 7y ago
Wow. It's incredible that it doesn't even take supporting the outgroup to be accused of shilling -- these days even failing to laser focus on condemning the outgroup is enough. Reddit is having a lot more posts about America j
228.
by knzhou 7y ago
No, but the post is largely a quote of a blog post (the guy who declared UC Berkeley a failure), which is in turn a followup on a different blog post. I respect Andrew Gelman, but in this case I think he jumped to fit this into a pattern wh
229.
by knzhou 7y ago
Absolutely not. Not only do Guzey's nitpicks not refute the main point, they fail to refute even the subpoints and subsubpoints . The example cited here, where people on 5 hours of sleep actually have slightly less chance of injury
230.
by knzhou 7y ago
I'm tired of the endless posts over Why We Sleep. The book attempts to cover hundreds of studies in an accessible way, and it largely succeeds. It's certainly fluffy at times (as are all popular books, by necessity), but if you di
231.
by knzhou 7y ago
Sure, but all of these things are always interlinked. It's entirely possible that the first deviation we ever find from general relativity will come in the form of just trying to make better and better clocks, but then finding some fun
232.
by knzhou 7y ago
In the limit of weak gravity, gravitational time dilation depends only on the gravitational potential , and not at all on the local gravitational field. So going down to the center of the Earth just has the opposite effect of going up to s
233.
by knzhou 7y ago
As I said, given how information flow works, when you do it you'll think you have an excellent reason. When the time comes, you'll be hearing about something like the Yulin celebrations every single day, and in a month you'll
234.
by knzhou 7y ago
> in the developed world So what? No matter where I go, I'm still going to be ethnically Chinese. If the US expels people like me, I assume Europe, etc. will follow suit.
235.
by knzhou 7y ago
I didn't say I would be better off elsewhere, I said I wouldn't have a choice. And I don't make even 20% of a standard dev salary.
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by knzhou 7y ago
Indeed, the machine works so well that, as a US citizen, I have little confidence in being able to stay in this country in the long term. Doesn't matter if I speak out, nothing will stop it. It is amusing that the typical "skeptic
237.
by knzhou 7y ago
These are the specifics. There isn't enough there there in his theory to have anything more to criticize. That is, it's too vague to even do the zeroth-order tests physicists would use to decide whether to take it seriously. (Yo
238.
by knzhou 7y ago
Exactly, he was obviously intentionally trying to overwhelm people with jargon. That drives me crazy. Other physicists don't do this, because it serves no purpose aside from making the speaker look smart, and we have other priorities.
239.
by knzhou 7y ago
Well, let me assume you're a software engineer. Suppose that one day you heard of some smooth talker who was going around pushing their vision of an AI-powered cloud blockchain as a service, or whatever. And everything they were saying
240.
by knzhou 7y ago
The secret that is rarely revealed in pop science discussions is that theories of everything are cheap . To count as a theory of everything, you just need to come up with any mathematical structure big enough to cram the Standard Model plu

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