This is the perfect time to start an AI + education project. AI today is not quite reliable enough to be a trustworthy teacher; and in the near future generic AI assistants will likely be smart enough to teach anything well (if they want to).
In the meantime, Eureka Labs faces an interesting alignment problem: Can they ensure that their AI teachers teach only true things? It will be tempting to make teachers that only seem to teach well. I hope they figure out how to navigate that!
This post is wrong. Thanks to SymplecticMan for the thought experiment demonstrating that a mixture of ideal gases follows a T3/2 law rather than my proposed 1T law. (It’s also different from Newton’s T law.)
I made a pretty but unjustified assumption — that a cooling baking sheet can be modeled as a dynamical system where each possible transition is equally likely and in which heat is transferred in fixed quanta, one at a time. This contradicted Newton’s law, and I got excited when I realized that Newton’s law was merely a first-order approximation.
My mistake was not noticing that Newton’s law is a first-order approximation to any model of cooling where heat transfer increases with temperature difference, so I had not observed any reason to favor my model over any other.
In penance I have acquired a copy of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics by de Groot and Mazur, with the intention of eventually reading it.