knzhou

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241.
by knzhou 7y ago
I'm sorry if you don't like it, but it's true.
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by knzhou 7y ago
I can only speak for sure about what he's said about physics. The fundamental problem with talking about highly technical things (like theories of everything) to a popular audience is that it's totally one-sided: he could spout no
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by knzhou 7y ago
PhD student in theoretical physics here. I will confirm: Weinstein is a charlatan, and all of us know it. As far as I can tell, the only people who believe in him are non-physicists who consume exclusively pop science. In other words, he&
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by knzhou 7y ago
Exactly. For example, back on February 3 we had this from Harvard epidemiologists: > “Many epidemiologists and people who are following this outbreak closely are assuming that it’s probably quite a bit more widespread than the case count
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by knzhou 7y ago
Exactly, cherry picking the most optimistic thing the most optimistic expert said two months ago is a tremendously unfair way of evaluating the field.
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by knzhou 7y ago
Okay, yeah, the mask thing absolutely blows my mind. I have absolutely no idea what their motivation for saying this is, when just about every expert in every east Asian country disagrees.
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by knzhou 7y ago
This whole mess has been a repudiation of business-as-usual politics, but it has not been a repudiation of scientific experts. Scientific experts across the world have been alarmed for months now. The only problem is that, as with any new
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by knzhou 7y ago
The WHO has been urging everybody to get prepared for 10 weeks now, while constantly giving the same good advice (test, trace, lockdown, social distance). People are pretending this is all WHO's fault because they said some wrong stuff
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by knzhou 7y ago
I don't know of anybody who's ever learned new stuff from that book. It literally zooms from addition and subtraction to fiber bundles in a few hundred pages. That's simply not enough to pick up anything but the bare intuitio
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by knzhou 7y ago
No, Serway's totally fine! But Halliday, Resnick, and Krane was written for honors freshman physics courses, so it's just kicked up a notch relative to the other intro books.
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by knzhou 7y ago
Back in the day I self-studied through MIT OCW, and found it remarkably complete. It's better in quality than what you would get at almost all universities, including MIT itself (!), because only the best lecturers tend to get immortal
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by knzhou 7y ago
It's amusing how some people are reacting on a one-month or even two-month delay. I still see people saying that there's a new disease being covered up in Wuhan, or that we need to shut down travel from China, as if they were in a
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by knzhou 7y ago
Particle physics. I'm rereading a 30 year old textbook with 10,000 citations right now.
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by knzhou 7y ago
The extent to which this is an issue depends on the field, though. In my field, you can get massively rewarded, in both soft and hard criteria, if you put effort into writing a good review paper. And many of the giants of the field have sun
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by knzhou 7y ago
This essay really gets better with age. When I first read it I was a kid who thought the advice was pointless -- I already spent all my time thinking about physics problems, what else was there to do? But focus on the good stuff got harder
256.
by knzhou 7y ago
Hmm, I agree, the answer to the question posed varies a lot between different fields. That's another aspect of these articles that I don't like: they talk about "problems with science" as a whole as if it were a monolith
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by knzhou 7y ago
As an academic I will again make the dull but necessary point: figuring out the fundamental laws of nature is hard, stagnation is the norm, and the advances of the mid-20th century were the aftershocks of the great revolutions of quantum me
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by knzhou 7y ago
According to the limited info in the article, high blood pressure counts (and accounts for 75% alone).
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by knzhou 7y ago
What's "objective" about the SAT is that, at the very least, different people are being made to take the same test. Contrast that with the essay: it looks like the same task (everybody gets 500 words), but for poor kids thi
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by knzhou 7y ago
Wow, and now it's been flagged to death. There's nothing wrong with the article, either. It's evenhanded, and Haaretz is about as mainstream as the New York Times. Is this a normal HN thing that I just haven't noticed un
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by knzhou 7y ago
This is the turning point, where I go from a technology lover to a nutcase who wraps everything in aluminum foil. At the minimum, anything that can browse the web but isn't a standard computer needs to be wrapped up.
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by knzhou 7y ago
Why is this downweighted?
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by knzhou 7y ago
As I told a couple others, you just hit the ceiling. That doesn't mean tests don't work; if you wanted to, you could have found much harder ones. (That's what I did, out of necessity. They wouldn't have given my app a se
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by knzhou 7y ago
Decreased transparency increases the advantage the test prep industry has, since they'll find a way to get them anyway.
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by knzhou 7y ago
Yes, it definitely is! It does feel a little crazy, though, when suddenly all the vocab words are like, "tergiversate" and "pulchritudinous". And then when you get them all wrong it's back to "the cat sat on th
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by knzhou 7y ago
Wow, this is a remarkable level of gaming that I never was aware of! > - Within the grammar questions, Choice (e) "None of the above" is 99% of the time NEVER the answer. > - The math questions will usually have (1) answer t
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by knzhou 7y ago
Wow, I just learned something new. These look legit and well-matched to the actual work. It does seem hard to make a "standard" decision test though, it seems each would have to be tuned to the job it was made for.
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by knzhou 7y ago
> people who talk about things they know nothing about convincingly enough for those who also know nothing about the topic. Exactly. This is what a room full of smooth talkers looks like: two top journalists agreeing on national TV that
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by knzhou 7y ago
And everything else I mentioned is correlated even more strongly.
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by knzhou 7y ago
> To people in this country, that's what leadership looks like, so if you grade based on leadership, that's what you're going to get.

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