Physicist and dabbler in writing fantasy/science fiction.
Ben
Karma: 2,285
If this was the setup I would bet on “hard man” fitness people swearing that running with the spin to run in a little more than earth normal gravity was great for building strength and endurance and some doctor somewhere would be warning people that the fad may not be good for your long term health.
Yes, its a bit weird. I was replying because I thought (perhaps getting the wrong end of the stick) that you were confused about what the question was, not (as it seems now) pointing out that the question (in your view) is open to being confused.
In probability theory the phrase “given that” is a very important, and it is (as far as I know) always used in the way used here. [“given that X happens” means “X may or may not happen, but we are thinking about the cases where it does”, which is very different from meaning “X always happens”]
A more common use would be “What is the probability that a person is sick, given that they are visiting a doctor right now?”. This doesn’t mean “everyone in the world is visiting a doctor right now”, it means that the people who are not visiting a doctor right now exist, but we are not talking about them. Similarly, the original post’s imagined world involves cases where odd numbers are rolled, but we are talking about the set without odds. It is weird to think about how proposing a whole set of imaginary situations (odd and even rolls) then talking only about a subset of them (only evens) is NOT the same as initially proposing the smaller set of imaginary events in the first place (your D3 labelled 2,4,6).
But yes, I can definitely see how the phrase “given that”, could be interpreted the other way.
That Iran thing is weird.
If I were guessing I might say that maybe this is happening:
Right now the more trade China has with Iran the more America might make a fuss. Either complaining politically, putting tariffs, or calling on general favours and good will for it to stop. But if America starts making a fuss anyway, or burns all its good will, then their is suddenly no downside to trading with Iran. Now substitute “China” for any and all countries (for example the UK, France and Germany, who all stayed in the Iran Nuclear Deal even after the USA pulled out).
“given that all rolls were even” here means “roll a normal 6 sided dice, but throw out all of the sequences that included odd numbers.” The two are not the same, because in the case where odd numbers can be rolled, but they “kill” the sequence it makes situations involving long sequences of rolls much less likely to be included in the dataset at all.As other comments explain, this is why the paradox emerges. By stealth, the question is actually “A: How long do I have to wait for two 6s in a row, vs B: getting two 6′s, not necessarily in a row, given that I am post selecting in a way that very strongly favors short sequences of rolls”.
I suppose its the difference between the LW team taking responsibility for any text the feature shows people (which you are), and the LW team endorsing any text the feature shows (which you are not). I think this is Richard’s issue, although the importance is not obvious to me.
Could be an interesting poll question in the next LW poll.
Something like:
How often do you use LLMs?
Never used them
Messed about with one once or twice
Monthly
Weekly
Every Day
I think a reasonable-seeming metric on which humans are doubtless the winners is “energy controlled”.
Total up all the human metabolic energy, plus the output of the world’s power grids, the energy of all that petrol/gas burning in cars/boilers. If you are feeling generous you could give humans a percentage of all the metabolic energy going through farm animals.
Its a bit weird, because on the one hand its obvious that collectively humans control the planet in a way no other organism does. But, you are looking for a metric where plants and single-celled organisms are allowed to participate, and they can’t properly be said to control anything, even themselves.
I think this question is maybe logically flawed.
Say I have a shuffled deck of cards. You say the probability that the top card is the Ace of Spades is 1⁄52. I show you the top card, it is the 5 of diamonds. I then ask, knowing what you know now, what probability you should have given.
I picked a card analogy, and you picked a dice one. I think the card one is better in this case, for weird idiosyncratic reasons I give below that might just be irrelevant to the train of thought you are on.
Cards vs Dice: If we could reset the whole planet to its exact state 1 week before the election then we would I think get the same result (I don’t think quantum will mess with us in one week). What if we do a coarser grained reset? So if there was a kettle of water at 90 degrees a week before the election that kettle is reset to contain the same volume of water in the same part of my kitchen, and the water is still 90 degrees, but the individual water molecules have different momenta. For some value of “macro” the world is reset to the same macrostate but not the same microstate, it had 1 week before election day. If we imagine this experiment I still think Trump wins every (or almost every) time, given what we know now. For me to think this kind of thermal-level randomness made a difference in one week it would have to have been much closer.
In my head things that change on the coarse-grained reset feel more like unrolled dice, and things that don’t more like facedown cards. Although in detail the distinction is fuzzy: it is based on an arbitrary line between micro an macro, and it is time sensitive, because cards that are going to be shuffled in the future are in the same category as dice.
EDIT: I did as asked, and replied without reading your comments on the EA forum. Reading that I think we are actually in complete agreement, although you actually know the proper terms for the things I gestured at.
This idea (without the name) is very relevant in First Aid training.
For example, if you learn CPR from some organisations they will teach you compressions-only CPR, while others will also teach you to do the breaths. I have heard it claimed by first aid teachers that the reason for this is because doing the best possible CPR requires the breaths, but that someone who learned CPR one afternoon over a year ago and hasn’t practiced since is unlikely to do effective breaths, and that person would be better of keeping to compressions only.
In First Aid books a common attempt to solve this problem is to give sweeping commands at the beginning (often with the word “never” somewhat abused), and then give specific exceptions later. The aim is that if you will remember one thing it will hopefully be the blanket rule, not the specific exception. I think that method probably has something to recommend for it, its hard to imagine how you could remember the exception without remembering the rule it is an exception too.
[For example the Life Support book, tells you ‘never’ to give anyone medicine or drugs, as you are a First Aider, not a Doctor. It also tells you to give aspirin to someone having a heart attack if they have not taken any other drugs. I think it also recommends antihistamines for swelling insect stings.]
I find that surprising, given that so much of your writing feels kind of crisp and minimalist. Short punchy sentences. If that is how you think your mind is very unlike mine.
Much as I liked the book I think its not a good recomendation for an 11 year old. There are definitely maths-y 11 year olds who would really enjoy the subject matter once they get into it. (Stuff about formal systems and so on). But if we gave GEB to such an 11 year old I think the dozens of pages at the beginning on the history of music and Bach running around getting donations would repel most of them. (Urgh, mum tricked me into reading about classical music).
I am all for giving young people a challenge, but I think GEB is challenging on too many different fronts all at once. Its loooong. Its written somewhat in academic-ese. And the subject matter is advanced. So any 11 year old who could deal with one of that trinity also has to face the other two.
Yes, you could fix it by making the portal pay for lifting. An alternative fix would be to let gravity go through portals, so the ball feels the Earth’s gravity by the direct route and also through the portal. Which I think makes the column between the two portals zero G, with gravity returning towards normal as you move radially. This solution only deals with the steady-state though, at the moment portals appear or disappear the gravitational potential energy of objects (especially those near the portal) would step abruptly.
Its quite a fun situation to think about.
“If I’m thinking about what someone else might do and feel in situation X by analogy to what I might do and feel in situation X, and then if situation X is unpleasant than that simulation will be unpleasant, and I’ll get a generally unpleasant feeling by doing that.”
I think this is definitely true. Although, sometimes people solve that problem by just not thinking about what the other person is feeling. If the other person has ~no power, so that failing to simulate them carries ~no costs, then this option is ~free.
This kind of thing might form some kind of an explanation for Stockholm Syndrome. If you are kidnapped, and your survival potentially depends on your ability to model your kidnapper’s motivations, and you have nothing else to think about all day, then any overspill from that simulating will be maximised. (Although from the wikipedia article on Stockholm syndrome it looks like it is somewhat mythical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome)
I agree that its super unlikely to make any difference, if the LLM player is consistently building pylons in order to build assimilators that is a weakness at every level of slowdown so has little or no implications for your results.
An interesting project. One small detail that confuses me. In the first log is the entry:
"Action failed: BUILD ASSIMILATOR, Reason: No Pylon available"But, in SC2 you don’t need a pylon to build an assimilator. Perhaps something in the interface with the LLM is confused because most protos buildings do need a pylon and the exception is no accounted for correctly?
I am sure that being cited by wikipeida is very good for giving an article more exposure. There is an “altimetric” thingy on some journals that is used to help funders see what other useful impacts an article had on the world beyond citations from other articles, and it thinks wikipedia mentions are high-value (it also likes things like newspaper coverage).
I suspect that it is not that rare for the authors of a paper to go and put a link in wiki to their own paper. I have certainly seen wiki articles mention something with a cite, which, while true, feels weirdly specific.
Thank you very much, that sounds like a fascinating wider discussion. Personally, I suspect the Abraham-Minkowski question is only unusual in the sense that it is a known unknown. I think the unknown unknowns are probably much larger in scope. Although it is probably quite dependent on where exactly you draw the physics/engineering boundary.
In my post the way I cited Lubos Motl’s comment implicitly rounded it off to “Minkowski is just right” (option [6]), which is indeed his headline and emphasis. But if we are zooming in on him I should admit that his full position is a little more nuanced. My understanding is that he makes 3 points:
(1) - Option [1] is correct. (Abraham gives kinetic momentum, Minkowski the canonical momentum)
(2) - In his opinion the kinetic momentum is pointless and gross, and that true physics only concerns itself with the canonical momentum.
(3) - As a result of the kinetic momentum being worthless its basically correct to say Minkowski was “just right”(option [6]). This means that the paper proposing option [1] was a waste of time (much ado about nothing), because the difference between believing [1] and believing [6] only matters when doing kinetics, which he doesn’t care about. Finally, having decided that Minkowski was correct in the only way that he thinks matters, he goes off into a nasty side-thing about how Abraham was supposedly incompetent.So his actual position is sort of [1] and [6] at the same time (because he considers the difference between them inconsequential, as it only applies to kinetics). If he leans more on the [1] side he can consider 12.72 to be valid. But why would he bother? 12.72 is saying something about kinetics, it might as well be invalid. He doesn’t care either way.
He goes on to explicitly say that he thinks 12.72 is invalid. Although I think his logic on this is flawed. He says the glass block breaks the symmetry, which is true for the photon. However, the composite system (photon + glass block) still has translation and boost symmetry, and it is the uniform motion of the center of mass of the composite system that is at stake.
Yes, you are certainly right it is a quasiparticle. People often use the word polariton to name it (eg https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666032620300363#bib1 ).
I think you might have muddled the numbering? It looks like you have written an argument in favor of either [2] or [3] (which both hold that the momentum of the full polariton is larger than the momentum of the photonic part alone—in the cartoon of the original post whether or not the momentum “in the water” is included), then committed to [1] instead at the end. This may be my fault, as the order I numbered the arguments in the summary at the end of the post didn’t match the order they were introduced, and [2] was the first introduced. (In hindsight this was probably a bad way to structure the post, sorry about that!)
″ “passing by atoms and plucking them” is a lie to children ”—I personally dislike this kind of language. There is nothing wrong with having mental images that help you understand what is going on. If/when those images need to be discarded then I don’t think belittling them or the people who use them is helpful. In this case the “plucking” image shows that at any one time some of the excitation is in the material, which is the same thing you conclude.
[In this case I think the image is acceptably rigorous anyway, but lets not litigate that because which mental images are and are not compatible with a quantum process is a never ending rabbit hole.]
Thank you very much for reading and for your thoughts. If I am correct about the numbering muddle it is good to see more fellow [2/3]’ers.
I think the limitations to radius set by material strength only apply directly to a cylinder spinning by itself without an outer support structure. For example, I think a rotating cylinder habitat surrounded by giant ball bearings connecting it to a non-rotating outer shell can use that outer shell as a foundation, so each part of the cylinder that is “suspended” between two adjacent ball bearings is like a suspension bridge of that length, rather than the whole thing being like a suspension bridge of length equal to the total cylinder diameter. Obviously you would need really smooth, low-friction bearings for this to be a plan to consider, although they would also help with wobble. One way of reducing the friction would be a Russian doll configuration of nested cylinders where each one out was rotating less fast than the previous, which (along with bearings etc) could maybe work.
On a similar vein, you could replace the mechanical bearings with a gas or fluid, in which the cylinder is immersed. Similar advantages in damping the wobble modes and (for fluids or very high pressure gases) helping support the cylinder against its own centrifugal weight. The big downside again would be friction.