Just to TL:DR my comment above: to get a PhD is many times easier than to “accomplish groundbreaking work”, so if the former is an issue, you will never do the latter.
shminux
Karma: 16,911
There have been undergrad and grad students who had solved an open math problem before they got their PhD, but for them getting a PhD was not even a question they consider, it’s just something that naturally happens. It’s not about credentialism, it’s about being smart enough, creative enough and hard-working enough to outdo the rest of the very crowded field in a particular area. If you are all that, writing up a PhD thesis is a minor step. And if you are not all that, why pick a field like math to begin with?
Take the https://mensa.dk/iqtest/ and it will give you the ballpark of your intelligence level. It does not correlate with your success in life, but if you get under 120, you are likely to have a hard time competing for a job in STEM academia.
If causation is understood in terms of counterfactuals — X would have happened if Y had happened — then there is still a difference between cause and effect. A model of a world implies models of hypothetical, counterfactual worlds.
Yes, indeed, in terms of counterfactuals there is. But counterfactuals are in the map (well, to be fair a map is a tiny part of the territory in the agent’s brain). Which was my original point: causality is in the map.
And yet, there is some underlying physical process which drives our ability to model the world with the idea that things cause other things and we might reasonably point to it and say it is the real causality, i.e. the aspect of existence that we perceive as change.
Hmm. Imagine the world as fully deterministic. Then there is no “real causality” to speak of, everything is set in stone, and there is no difference between cause and effect. The “underlying physical process which drives our ability to model the world with the idea that things cause other things” are essential in being an embedded agent, since agency equals a perceived world optimization, which requires, in turn, predictability (from the inside the world), but I don’t think anyone has a good handle on what “predictability from inside the world” may look like. Off hand, it means that there is a subset of the world that runs a coarse-grained simulation of the world, but how do you recognize such a simulation without already knowing what you are looking for? Anyway, this is a bit of a tangent.
TL;DR: Causality is an abstraction, a feature of our models of the world, not of the world itself, and sometimes it is useful, but other times not so much. Notice when it’s not useful and use other models.
The looks can be changed a lot with some judicial makeup. Consider watching some youtube videos on contouring, and trying it out, either by yourself or with some professional help. See if you notice any change in how others see you and relate to you.
Then I’m guessing that you are explicitly or implicitly a moral realist...
JK Rowling isn’t even dead yet, and beliefs that would have put her at the liberal edge of the feminist movement thirty years ago are now earning widespread condemnation.
If you think that cancel culture is progress in morality, the future will judge you harshly, if acausally.
Right, never mind, for a moment what your discourse style is. Disengaging.
Determinism is defined in terms of inevitability, ie. lack of possible alternatives. We do not regard the future as undetermined just because it has not happened yet.
I don’t argue with that, in fact, the statement above makes my point: there is no difference between an as-yet-unknown to you (but predetermined) digit of pi and anything else that is not yet known to you, like the way a coin lands when you flip it.
The paradox only arises if you ignore the view I’ve been presenting. The 98,765th digit of π is a random digit in the same way that a 98,765th reading of rand() is. Until you do some work to measure it, it’s not determined.
By “good” I mean (as always) “fitting the available observations and producing accurate predictions”. In the OP’s case of the 98,765th digit of π, the model is that “A randomly picked digit is uniformly distributed” and it is a “good” (i.e. accurate) one.
I’ve read the post a couple of times over, and I still don’t have an intuitive understanding of why one would subtract potential energy from kinetic, despite having done graduate work in general relativity. Yes, extremizing action comes from the stationary phase approximation of the path integral, and yes, following a path with “low potential energy” makes you arrive to the destination younger, just like moving faster does (yet arriving at the same instant as those moving slower), but first, it’s not obvious why the former is so, and second, why it would matter in non-gravitational physics, especially in classical mechanics. I would like to see an intuitive argument where the difference between kinetic and potential energies makes sense.
Your definition of “intuitive” is unlikely to match that of most participants here.
Maybe think of the insects and other organisms that would greatly overwhelm human suffering as one big utility monster.
Let me suggest a simpler “thought experiment”:
There is a gun loaded as per Russian roulette rules, pointed at your head. Should you pull the trigger to find out “the truth” about its chamber?
My contention is that your other examples are no different.
CompSci and Programming: less that 100 years old. Math: over 3000 years old. Let’s see if you get to redesign your programming languages in 3000 years.
Not sure who claims this innate egalitarianism, human groups nearly always naturally develop a hierarchy if one is not imposed on them.
Following Scott Aaronson’s The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine, section 2 being a required reading for an aspired rationalist, it makes sense to count multiple identical copies having the same value as a single one, since they add no new information to the world after the original. In this approach the original will not notice any difference after taking the box, and neither would the simulation, so there is no benefit in not taking the boxes, since the original will be a million dollar poorer.