includes considerable nonspecific shit-talking of assigned EA enemies, including - horrors! - Timnit Gebru talking about the social issues of the actually-existing AI-industrial complex. also it’s not a CASTLE it’s a MANOR HOUSE, you fools, you rubes,
Why did 3.6 million people watch this hour long video dunking on flat earthers? Because the topic of people believing crazy things is fun and interesting.
Dan Olson’s In Search of a Flat Earth is most definitely not just an hour of dunking on flat-Earthers.
It pivots to discussing QAnon at 37:30.
From the comments:
This just went from 0 to 100 real quick.
Lord, the cry of pure anguish I gave out in response to that line…
Props to the Qanon guy’s kid for standing up to him and saying “nobody’s gonna help you” when he kidnapped them, that must have been terrifying
Occasionally rewatch this while dealing with the loss of my own parents to conspiracy lunacy. Even tried using this video to pull them back from the edge. Ended up precipitating cutting contact with them, something that has done wonders for my mental health. I have since realised they were deeper in than I thought, and were never going to listen to their child, and unlikely to listen to people they actually might have respected the opinions of.
The person I used to consider my father now believes that viruses aren’t real and is getting deep into transphobia and Putin worship. He is likely to already be a holocaust denier. There is no bottom to the conspiracy theory abyss and few ever seem to find their way back from the depths.
Thank you for crushing that last bit of remaining hope I didn’t even know I had.
It’s honestly kind of chilling to see him effectively spending half an hour predicting the Jan 6th riot.
I wandered over somehow from RationalWiki, which I had known of since the science-blogging days of yore, and found it more congenial to my tastes than other subreddits. E.g., it was friendlier to excursions into the wonky and erudite than r/badphilosophy, and generally had a justifiably low tolerance for superficial politeness while maintaining a level of empathy for serious matters.
Are people in rich countries happier on average than people in poor countries? (According to GPT-4, the academic consensus is that it does, but I’m not sure it’s representing it correctly.)
If we instead have a lot of particles in our first box, we might describe it as a box full of gas. If we connect this to another box and forget where the particles are, we would expect to find half in the first box and half in the second box. This means we can explain why gases expand to fill space without reference to anything except information theory.
No, you can’t, because you’re still presuming that gases do expand, i.e., that merely connecting two containers is enough to mix their contents. Otherwise, you’re saying that if you fill one bottle with orange juice and another with vodka, and then forget which is which, you’ve made a screwdriver.
Then it gets weird and confused, talking about a box divided in two parts, with green particles on one side and pink ones on the other.
We might expect the partition to move some, but not all, of the way over, when we forget as much as possible.
Forgetting where things are doesn’t give you psychoflexitive powers!
And from the comments:
My current understanding is that QM is not-at-all needed to make sense of stat mech.
No. If you don’t incorporate quantum mechanics (or at the very least take some results of quantum mechanics as valid), you will get statistical mechanics very wrong rather quickly. Your results for the thermal properties of gases will get worse the more you calculate. You’ll convince yourself that magnets are impossible. Etc.
For all that Yud has been praising the Feynman books ever since HPMOR at least, he doesn’t seem to have inspired his fans to actually read the Lectures on Physics.
Hourglasses work by inverse Weeping Angels rules, doncha know?
I should also have mentioned the part where they say that the entropy of the “uniform distribution over (0,x)” is the base-2 logarithm of x. This is, of course, a negative number for any x they care about (0 < x < 1), and more strongly negative the smaller x becomes.
Argh. These people just don’t know any math and never call each other out for not knowing any math, and now I have to read MIT OpenCourseWare to scrub the feeling out of my brain.
The fact that the naive continuous version of the Shannon entropy (just replacing the sum with an integral) can go negative is one reason why statistical physicists will tell you not to do that. Or, more precisely: That’s a trick which only works when patched up by an idea imported from quantum mechanics.
Another problem: They claim to derive the idea of pressure by having proved that the number density (particles per volume) is the same on both sides of the partition. But this is only the right condition for equilibrium if the temperatures are equal on both sides. This is what happens when you don’t check your revolutionary new method against the ideal gas law…
A related issue that I doubt they’ve ever thought through: In statistical mechanics, the probability densities are defined on phase space, meaning that they’re functions not just of position, but also momentum. They wouldn’t be the first to get confused about this, helped along by oversimplified illustrations of “high entropy” and “low entropy” states that ignore the momentum part. But when you’re reinventing a subject, it helps to avoid students’ misconceptions about it.
Wikipedia’s coverage of math and science topics is… uneven, but that article looks to be on the decent side. It’s good enough that if you say you got absolutely nothing from it, I’d be inclined to blame your study skills before I blamed the article. And guess what? Pressing the lever to get nuggets of extruded math-substitute product will not help you develop those study skills.
Those nitpicks are something you can ask it to clarify! Wikipedia doesn’t do that. If you are looking for something specific and it’s not in the Wikipedia article - tough luck, have fun digging through different articles or book excerpts to piece the missing pieces together.
Huh. Too bad he and I will probably never meet; this sounds like an instance where my ability to be incredibly abrasive could be used for good. (Or at least for comedy.)
The biggest, if rarely used, use case is education - they’re an infinitely patient tutor that can explain things in many ways and give you endless examples.
A while back, I set myself the project of figuring out how much of the MIT undergrad physics curriculum could be taught from free online books. The answer, so far, is more than I had anticipated but much less than what we deserve. But working on that, along with a few other conversations, has got me to wondering. We’ve seen...
18+ Honor Levy is the latest from Dimes Square. Truly breathtaking text production.
holy shit, it’s Ready Player One for race scientists...
e/acc founder Based Beff Jezos' startup Extropic tries pivot to quantum computing. Twitter handle still has "AI" in it (twitter.com)
18+ in which even the high minded chuds of Unherd don't buy EA's pitch (archive.ph)
original link: unherd.com/…/how-effective-is-william-macaskills-…
Why are our enemies so pathetic and stupid when we're so handsome and smart? (forum.effectivealtruism.org)
includes considerable nonspecific shit-talking of assigned EA enemies, including - horrors! - Timnit Gebru talking about the social issues of the actually-existing AI-industrial complex. also it’s not a CASTLE it’s a MANOR HOUSE, you fools, you rubes,
testosterone and IQ: from the LessWrong School of Taking 4chan Memes and Just Running With Them (www.lesswrong.com)
dude has another banger today too, again from the bitter 4chan incel memepool but in bigger words: www.lesswrong.com/posts/…/lukehmiles-s-shortform#…
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 28 April 2024
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!...
Generating (often non-con) porn is the new crypto mining (www.pcgamer.com)
An AI company has been generating porn with gamers’ idle GPU time in exchange for Fortnite skins and Roblox gift cards...
An AI beauty pageant? Miss me with that Miss AI. (www.forbes.com)
18+ You have activated the Falsifiability trap card - LLMs as tutors = lol (awful.systems)
User @theneverfox has posed a challenge when trying to argue that… wait, what?...
Techbro develops AI-powered sex toy to “save the world” (www.404media.co)
Teledildonics and eugenics: what more could you ask for?
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 21 April 2024
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!...
"Not all AI content is spam, but I think right now all spam is AI content." (www.theregister.com)
18+ Vaccinations in Book Form?
A while back, I set myself the project of figuring out how much of the MIT undergrad physics curriculum could be taught from free online books. The answer, so far, is more than I had anticipated but much less than what we deserve. But working on that, along with a few other conversations, has got me to wondering. We’ve seen...