How much do you worry about age 40? Is that just based on your father? Conway passed 40 before Marcello was born.
Douglas_Knight3
I claim that relative configuration spaces are standard examples of abstract configuration spaces in undergraduate physics classes. I’m not sure where it falls in the curriculum, but Noether’s theorem is known to all physicists. I’m not sure exactly how they phrase that theorem, but symplectic reduction is a version that says that there’s a general procedure for producing relative configuration spaces from symmetries.
Maybe I’m overstating these generalities, but I think the claim that relative configuration spaces are unknown to most physicists is absurd.
This post seems to me to be based on a mathematical error, namely the claim that energy is not local on momentum space.
The hamiltonian formalism is symmetric in position and momentum. Electrostatic potential energy is local on momentum space in a similar way to how kinetic or magnetic potential energy is local on position space.
Eliezer, you seem awfully close to Shalizi’s paradox. Could you address it?
why would a non-friendly AI not use those innovations to trade, instead of war?
The comparative advantage analysis ignores the opportunity cost of not killing and seizing property. Between humans, the usual reason it’s not worth killing is that it destroys human capital, usually the most valuable possession. But an AI or an emulation might be better off seizing all CPU time than trading with others.
Once the limiting resource is not the number of hours in a day, the situation is very different. Trade might still make sense, but it might not.
Shalizi usually makes more sense than this
a sign to give it more consideration.
Your response seems to be that Shalizi assumes an ideal observer, while you assume an observer-in-the-system. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but often you assume an ideal observer, and statistical mechanics is able to function with some kind of ideal observer. If you can build a model with an ideal observer, you should!
In particular, when you say that knowledge of particles makes something colder, makes it possible to extract work, you’ve gone back to the ideal observer.
More tangentially: I guess the point of statistical mechanics is that there may (ergodicity) be only a few possible robust measurements, like temperature, and a real observer can draw the same conclusions from such measurements as an ideal observer. I’m annoyed that no one ever spelled that out to me and Shalizi sounds like he’s annoyed by Bayesians who don’t spell out their models. At the very least, a straw man gives you a chance to say “here’s how my model differs.”
Boris: There’s a small amount of subtlety in actually doing step 1.
Isn’t it simply impossible? That doesn’t interfere with your claim that such a Turing machine exists, but step 1 claims that it’s computable.
TGGP: at the very least, it’s well-documented that he defused a couple of coups.
My understanding is that GW decided he’d get more pages in the history books if he declined the crown. George III agreed: “if he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”
I expect most physicists have never heard of relative configuration spaces as such.
huh? Don’t undergrads do abstract configuration spaces in classical mechanics? Surely all physicists have heard of symplectic reduction and Noether’s theorem?
war-gaming
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t look to the military as a role-model often enough.
michael vassar, You’ve quietly slid from engineers to programmers. Other kinds of engineers need a lot more money to make it a hobby. Maybe they make up for it with less variation in ability, but I doubt it. Even if you didn’t mean to talk about other engineers, their situation needs explaining.
flip a coin, see how you feel about the result, and act on that feeling
It’s more amusing if you get the outside input from other people. (but it’s biased)
...and I go on to learn that people in political science departments cite Derida.
Political science is the department where it would be most interesting to know what’s going on because it has methodological pluralism while seeming to have a single topic, while, say, English departments seem to have gotten methodological variety out of crisis of topic.
Julian Morrison, the conclusion I draw from your histogram is that monkey/octopus intelligence is easy to reach from dog, but not useful in most niches. Beyond that, it’s hard to reason for anthropic reasons. It could be that there’s a bottleneck getting past monkeys, but I’d guess that niches for which post-monkey intelligence is useful are extremely rare, but have increasing returns to intelligence and thus have intelligence take-off.
It’s particularly annoying that nobody gave me an answer, because the answer turns out to be simple
The answer you give might be the simple answer to the question you asked, but I have trouble figuring out what you were suggesting in the first place (even given the answer!). Figuring out the question, the confusion, so that it’s possible to supply the simple answer is really hard.
Similarly, I’m skeptical of your claim that your calculus text failed an easy chance to communicate insight. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with textbooks, where I eventually figure it out, perhaps from another source, come back and can’t see what was wrong with the book. If there is something worthy of indignation for its not being shared, why don’t you share it?
Let me try, and likely fail, to communicate mathematical insight: matrices are evil. Moving to matrices involves choosing a basis. Usually, as in Scott’s example, you just want a direct sum decomposition; it’s more natural, and it doesn’t clutter the problem with unnecessary entries or indices.
Yvain and Lee Corbin, I tend to agree with Eric Schwitzgebel (which is how I found the Galton paper) that the difference in claims of visualizing ability is due to changing norms, not changing abilities. He’s too quick to discount the possibility of real change, but professed inability of scientists in Galton’s day is striking. I don’t think that demographic has been adequately surveyed today, but I don’t think they’re as different from the general public as they were 50 or 100 years ago.
In particular, I don’t think there was an early psychologist who couldn’t visualize, as I wouldn’t expect that to be so early as to have such a widespread affect on the scientists Galton knew. That is, I doubt a psychologist would have an impact on non-psychologists’ self-assessment.
Also, I think people overrate the importance of visualization to navigation, blindfold chess, and other things where it seems intuitively important.
paper linked above: “How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Visual Imagery” (2002), Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9, no. 5-6, 35-53.
his eloquence was hardly unique among his competitors.
Are you sure he had any competitors?
Surely, his eloquence was not unique among similarly qualified academics, but probably few of them tried to get into the popular field. Maybe you need connections to get on the magazine circuit, but I suspect that the normal course of things are that the connections drag the scientist into writing. From there on, I imagine they’re judged by their communication skills, not their content or connections. Also, Gould started when he was fairly young and energetic, as contrasted with, say, Lewis Thomas, who retired to writing when he was at an age Gould barely reached.
I find the response to Barkley Rosser’s non sequitors disturbing. Sure, if he wants to pattern-match “gene’s eye view” and start arguing about group selection, by all means argue about it, but don’t accept his claim that it is relevant to this post! And punctuated equilibrium? Would it make a difference to any of this if Gould were an important theorist?
I don’t think most people feel more ashamed of knowing a little than knowing nothing; they just don’t try. But, Eliezer’s shame reminds me of the story where Feynman is having trouble learning something, and his wife tells him to read like a beginner again. I believe it is a common speculation that people avoid learning new things to avoid feeling like a beginner.