pdonis

31 ms·

541.
by pdonis 1y ago
> if you're able to prove it It's a logical tautology, at least if we make the implications definite (i.e., "sounds bad" necessarily implies "not right", and therefore "right" necessarily impli
542.
by pdonis 1y ago
> Those aren't different claims. Yes, they are. The first claim (the one he backs away from) is A implies B, where A = "this writing is beautiful" and B is "this writing is true". The second claim is Not A impl
543.
by pdonis 1y ago
> In the first paragraph, he writes, ”I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.” But towards the end he backs away from that claim, and makes the claim I described: "[W]hile we can't safely conclude that be
544.
by pdonis 1y ago
> what does it says about the clarity of PG's essay? This seems pretty clear to me: "[W]hile we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems
545.
by pdonis 1y ago
> Are the standards for whether something “sounds bad” based on the average person’s reading or the intended audience. As pg describes it in the article, it's neither; it's based on the writer's judgment. The writer of
546.
by pdonis 1y ago
That writing that sounds bad is likely to be wrong.
547.
by pdonis 1y ago
> I understand what he is saying and it’s precisely what I am disputing. I don't see how. Your post was disputing the claim that good design, craftsmanship, beauty, etc. are signs of correctness. And that's not the claim PG
548.
by pdonis 1y ago
> It could be a hastily-written rough draft. It could be the result of effort, but written by someone who isn’t fluent in English. The article says it is ruling out both of these possibilities, as other posts elsewhere in this discussi
549.
by pdonis 1y ago
> Maybe it’s true that writing that sounds good is also more likely to be right. That's not what PG is saying in the article. He explicitly says that you can't conclude this.
550.
by pdonis 1y ago
> LLMs provide a clear counterexample to his thesis. No, they don't. His thesis is not that writing that looks good--that seems plausible and convincing, like the output that LLMs often produce--actually is. He says explicitly i
551.
by pdonis 1y ago
PG agrees that you can't conclude that beautiful writing, writing that seems plausible and convincing, actually is. Sophistry is writing (or speaking) that seems plausible and convincing, but is false. PG is not saying that's not
552.
by pdonis 1y ago
You have it backwards. PG agrees that you can't conclude from the fact that something is beautiful that it's also right--he says "we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true". What PG is saying is that i
553.
by pdonis 1y ago
1) The best way to ensure this is to make the necessities of life (I'm not sure what you mean by "basic luxuries", but let's lump those both together for now) as cheap as possible. The main reason in our actual world tha
554.
by pdonis 1y ago
It used to be that third parties would act as brokers to give vendors an incentive to be honest. For example, my parents had to do several interstate PCS moves when I was a kid while my dad was in the Navy, and each time the movers were hir
555.
by pdonis 1y ago
> If I have to move interstate ever again I'm selling everything and starting over. That's more or less what my wife and I did the last time we did an interstate move. The stuff we simply couldn't part with, I drove myse
556.
by pdonis 2y ago
> adding California-specific requirements would create a patchwork of regulations that undermines this longstanding federal framework Which is exactly what California has been doing for decades.
557.
by pdonis 2y ago
> Literally no different than how we handle suspended licenses. The article points out that 75% of people with suspended licenses continue to drive.
558.
by pdonis 2y ago
From the GP's description, they're not being social with anyone. They're on their phones.
559.
by pdonis 2y ago
> From the conclusion From what I can see, this is just a particularly obfuscatory way of saying the same thing I said in response to philipov upthread, where I described how there are different tensors in GR to model gravity and EM. I
560.
by pdonis 2y ago
> If the paper is attempting to express electromagnetism in terms of the metric tensor, then it is putting it into a form that makes it potentially compatible with gravity, which is also a metric tensor. But the metric tensor of spacet
561.
by pdonis 2y ago
I don't think so. The paper doesn't talk about gravity at all. It talks about electromagnetism.
562.
by pdonis 2y ago
> the same deal as with gravity in GR. But it can't be quite "the same deal", because gravity obeys the equivalence principle, and electromagnetism does not. (Nor do the other known fundamental interactions.) The paper d
563.
by pdonis 2y ago
Yes, but the "geometry" in question is not the geometry of spacetime, it's the geometry of spacetime plus an abstract space that's sort of "attached" to spacetime. (In the original Kaluza-Klein viewpoint, it wa
564.
by pdonis 2y ago
I agree. I think it's telling that Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy is basically entirely about how all those philosophers peddled nonsense masquerading as deep thinking. For example, here's his money quote ab
565.
by pdonis 2y ago
This is what comes of trying to define binary, all-or-nothing categories in a world of continuous variation. Any sharp boundary you try to draw between "life" and "death" is going to have exceptions. Making heavy weather
566.
by pdonis 2y ago
Since KYC is a major tool for spotting the use of assets for criminal purposes, I would not expect it to be reduced.
567.
by pdonis 2y ago
> using isospin and hypercharge is like using epicycles to describe the motion of the planets No, it isn't; those are actual quantum numbers of the electroweak interaction below the symmetry breaking energy (the other such quantum
568.
by pdonis 2y ago
> The reason people have such a visceral response to a phrase like "uphold tradition" is because so many people don't mean "I'm just doing what my family and community have taught me", they are saying &quot
569.
by pdonis 2y ago
> change them but don't change them? Change them when it makes sense to change them, bearing in mind that the way they are now has stood the test of time. > letting "the right" group of people tell us which tradition
570.
by pdonis 2y ago
"you should at least make sure that the new things you make don't net harm people or the world." How well has Y Combinator done at upholding this principle with the companies it funds?

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