FistLast2
5mo ago
I have a super liberal friend who told me, "If Biden had dropped out earlier and they'd had a real primary, and Kamala had won, I think I would have voted for her."
FistLast2
5mo ago
As for the "they shall be gods" part, well, that's also in the Bible, famously quoted by Jesus as an unbreakable line of scripture (John 10:34-36):
This is a reference to psalm 82, one of the oldest parts of the old testament. The commonly accepted interpretation today among Christians is that it refers to human judges at the time of Moses who were called "elohim" because they judged according to the word of God. A common academic interpretation is that it's a carry over from polytheistic Cannanite religion which even had two separate characters later merged into a single God. And a third interpretation proposed by the late Michael Heiser is that it has something to do with the beings we commonly refer to as angels serving on God's divine council.
It is worth noting two things, I think. First, that the word elohim used in psalm 82 is sometimes used to refer to beings that obviously aren't Gods (e.g. spirits in sheol), and second that Jesus is using this passage as a defense of his own divinity, which he has described as something unique (the son does nothing that the father doesn't do, sent by the father, the son of man--presumably the one from Daniel, etc.). That doesn't clarify a whole lot about this passage, except to say that it's difficult to know for certain exactly how this passage would have been understood in the first or second century AD, but it has probably never been taken to mean that people actually become Gods in the afterlife.
FistLast2
5mo ago
When I was in physics grad school, which wasnt so long ago (in the last 10-20 year range), there was a professor who talked about how people said the Nazis were bad, but when they came into his house when he was a boy, they were nice and always took off their boots. I do not know of any self-professed Marxists that were in my physics department.
FistLast2
9mo ago
What part of quantum physics do you think isn’t understood? Quantum mechanics is the foundation of modern physics so much so that it seems very mundane by the time you're done with grad school. It's not only the relevant to what's going on in physics-y things like colliders and quantim computers but it's the basis of our understanding of the properties of materials, chemical reactions, MRI, transistors, and geckos' feet.
There are two pieces of quantum mechanics that don't quite mesh with other things we know about reality. The first is quantum gravity, which the physics community thought was just around the corner for decades, and which now I think most people feel we aren’t going to definitively answer until we can probe significantly higher enery scales to be certain which of the possible approaches is correct. Most people don't really expect this to change what we understand about the way quantum mechanics works (which you can derivce from classical physics plus the uncertainty principle). I fully do not believe that quantum gravity will be figured out by 2050, because it hasn't happened in the last 80 years, and we've been stuck at the "maybe string theory?" stage for about 50.
The second "missing piece" is related to decoherence and wave function collapse. It's weird the extent to which certain parts of the community think this is a solved problem by just hand-waving it all as decoherence. But a diagonal density matrix isn't the same as picking one specific outcome, and so you need something like many worlds (which actually has a significant problem in that probabilities don't emerge correctly, which is generally also ignored) to ensure everone only sees one outcome.
I don't expect this to be solved by 2050 either because A) vanishingly few people seem to care B) the answer doesn’t affect much of anything C) most hypothetical sutions are untestable even in principal (some involve non linearities or relationships between mass and collapse rate that are testable in principal, but I think most of those have been ruled out).
FistLast2
10mo ago
My response is basically "why can't you take a joke?".
What' the joke? Haha, Trump in a Pope outfit? Forget about offense, for the moment. Where is the humor even hypothetically supposed to be coming from?
FistLast2
11mo ago
At the end of the day, that's not really what matters, because nobody is going to need to solve a problem in physics with a known solution. A good portion of tests that I had as an undergraduate and in graduate school were open book, because simply knowing a formula or being able to look up a particular value wasn't sufficient to be able to answer the problem. If I want a value from NIST, I can look it up. The important part is being able to correctly engage in the type of problem solving needed to answer questions that haven’t ever been answered before.
I've had some thoughts about what it actually means to be able to do "research level" physics, which I'm still convinced no LLM can actually do. I've thought about posing a question as a top level post, but I'm not really an active enough user of this forum to do that amd don't want to become one.
Finally, I want to say that for the past 18 months, I've continually been getting solicitations on LinkedIn to solve physics problems to teain LLM's. The rate they offer isn't close to enough to make it worth it for me, even if I had any interest, but it would probably seem great to a grad student. I wouldn't be surprised if these models have been trained on more specific problems than we realize.
FistLast2
11mo ago
As someone who has worked with quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry, that's. . . really silly, and kind of not turning out to be a practical or useful way of approaching problems, despite what Richard Feynman might have thought before quantum computers were really a thing. Addirionally, any claims that quantum computers have a low enough noise floor or long enough coherence times to do any useful calculations are currently overhyped, misleading BS, and it's not clear that there's a clear path out of that.
FistLast2
11mo ago
My response to that would be tongo back to something like chemistry, which is computationally more complex than chess, less complicated than modeling a lot of other real world things, but also obeys known equations.
There are some surprisingly simple systems for which all our normal computational chemistry approximations fail and they require much more sophisticated solutions. And you can't always handwave it away to "AI will find a simpler approximation that works". How do you know? Is there a good enough approximation that "works" for factoring any large number? Why should computational scaling laws cease to apply in theory? Would, for example AI be able to solve any arbitrary NP hard problem even if we could prove P != NP?
FistLast2
11mo ago
AI doesn't change the problem of computational tractability. There are a lot of problems now where we know how to find the exact solution (to any arbitrary, finite precision) but where the solution is many orders of magnitude beyond what computers would be able to achieve in any reasonable timeframe, even assuming Moore's law. Like the exact energy spectrum of any medium sized atom in a reasonable basis set (yes, there are various approximations that can be computed which work well enough) because the problem scales factorially with the number of electrons and basis functions. There’s so much handwaving in "omniscient" where people are glossing over any serious thought about what it would actually take to achieve omniscience, and at least some of Yudkowski's arguments about the way a superintelligence could infer physics from between 1 and 3 frames of video are provably wrong if you know anything about math and physics (I wrote something about this on an SSC thread perhaps 8ish years ago).
FistLast2
11mo ago
About 3 years ago i applied for a government job where i had to take a standardized Pearson VUE test. It covered some algorithms, SQL-like questions, calculus, and statistics. I didn't take the job in the end, but they have definitely been using standardized tests for a long time.
I mean, to be fair, a month or so ago, Trump did post an AI riff on apocalypse now with an image of helicopters dropping bombs on Chicago, and he wrote, "Chicago is going to find out what it's called the department of war".
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