SnapDragon
23d ago
Wow, yeah. Cenk's tweet is perfect. And I remember he was similarly classy and principled after Trump's near miss. He's way to the left of me, but it's clear that he's just a fundamentally decent person. If we could only incentivize having more pundits like him, political discourse in this country would be much, much healthier.
SnapDragon
23d ago
FreedomToons' video after the Trump assassination attempt satirized this quite well. "Trump supporters are already alleging that we encouraged the brave hero who shot at him." "There is no room for political violence against the Nazi who is a living embodiment of all our trauma." It's sadly not all that far from actual rhetoric.
There are a few principled voices who unequivocally condemn political violence, for or against their side. But that's not what engages people.
SnapDragon
23d ago
Man, DC is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. How on earth did this specimen wangle that?
This isn't actually news - the comics industry has been fully captured by the progressive left for at least a decade. Look up I Am Not Starfire or Gotham High for some examples. On the Marvel side, there was The New Warriors, which had a non-binary superhero called Snowflake (twin of Safe Space), and no, this isn't a joke or satire. They were 100% serious about this release.
SnapDragon
25d ago
Agreed, I almost didn't believe what I was reading. I've been to dozens of countries, and none of them hold a candle to Japan when it comes to food quality. I can't speak about outside of Tokyo, but even the random meals I had at random (what in any other country would be "hole in the wall") restaurants were phenomenal.
SnapDragon
26d ago
In a Boltzmann Brain universe, EVERY configuration exists. So sure, there would also be versions of you with scrambled memories, but we're not talking about those - you already know you're not one of them! In statistics terms, your possibility space (based on your current observation that oh-hey-I-exist) consists of all the brains that are exactly equivalent (atom-to-atom, memory-to-memory) to "you" at this instant, and the successes consist of which ones then proceed to see order. If we exist in a physics-based universe, that probability ratio is basically 1. In a Boltzmann-Brain universe, it's basically 0. I hope this makes sense, without bringing in too much formal terminology.
SnapDragon
28d ago
Hmm, not quite sure I understand the question? If you have all your memories (including those of reading this post) but are seeing chaos, then you basically DO know you're a Boltzmann Brain. You can know for sure one way, but not the other. So in a Boltzmann Brain universe, the vast majority of "you"s would know you were in one, but some tiny fraction of "you"s would mistakenly think you weren't (matching your current experience).
SnapDragon
28d ago
Nope, not overlooking it. It's a probabilistic anthropic argument. It is true that, in a Boltzmann-Brain universe, a brain that is "you" will eventually show up paired with sensible input. But it will be vastly outnumbered by those brains that are "you" up until epsilon seconds ago, but are now seeing chaos. The fact that you're NOT currently seeing chaos is extremely strong evidence that a Boltzmann-Brain universe does not exist. (It doesn't matter if chaos and non-chaos events all happen infinitely many times. It's the proportions that matter.)
I admit, though, that I'm still open to debate. (Physicists really don't expect Boltzmann Brains to be real, but if Feynman can't come up with a knockdown argument, what chance do I have?) There are weird questions like "Is there such a thing as an instant of consciousness?" or "Is anthropic reasoning on the laws of existence even valid?" which might be relevant. But just waving at infinity isn't enough.
SnapDragon
30d ago
Eh. I find these theories extremely unconvincing. Boltzmann brains become super-exponentially less likely the more atoms are required to form them. An orderly pocket universe forming would be 10^10^"holy fuck" times less likely than an orderly brain on its own.
And there would be 10^10^"holy fuck" times more versions of you that had all the same past experiences, so were "you" in absolutely every respect, but were currently experiencing complete chaos.
SnapDragon
30d ago
In what way is he being insulting? The guy is posting crazy physics word salad, strongly indicative of some sort of mental issues (which does NOT take a doctor to Notice). @self_made_human is very very gently pointing this out. If I felt like engaging (which I don't), I would be much less polite about my disdain.
SnapDragon
30d ago
Most things are "unfalsifiable" in the strictest sense, but you can still use probabilistic techniques. The fact that the inputs coming into your brain are coherent with what your brain expects strongly indicates that it's not the case that "most" brains are Boltzmann brains.
SnapDragon
1mo ago
You say "tell yourself" as if they're lying about their motivation, but this is a perfectly accurate description of many people's reasoning...? There are only two real choices. They hate Trump, but the Dems put up a candidate that was, in their eyes, even worse. That's basically "Democrats making you".
SnapDragon
1mo ago
UB is bad enough that some people built an entire language (Rust) specifically to make it almost impossible. Sure, it has the learning curve of a cliff. Sure, the language stands in the way of doing almost anything ELSE you want to do, unless you do it in the one roundabout clunky way that the language designers permit. But the True Believers like shouting from the rooftops about how this is a Good Thing, Actually.
SnapDragon
1mo ago
I'd sure like to know solid numbers on who would preferentially vote "#3 Kamala, #2 Trump, #1 literally anyone else, surprise me". I'm guessing it's quite a bit larger than his popular vote margin.
SnapDragon
1mo ago
SnapDragon
1mo ago
Zootopia too. There's some woke messaging, but the story is a hell of a lot of fun.
SnapDragon
1mo ago
It was at least somewhat justified by the bullshit tech the aliens had. (Which very conveniently could completely control all scientific experiments but not, you know, actually KILL anyone.)
The real problem with The Dark Forest (spoiler alert) was the concept that all of humanity, working for more than a century on a problem with existential stakes, failed to come up with a theory that, uh, most people interested in cosmology already knew about in the 70s as a potential answer to the Fermi paradox. (Also, the deterrent threat at the end doesn't even really work because it would send a message out only in the plane of the ecliptic. Sigh. I wouldn't mind the bad science so much if it weren't wearing the skinsuit of Hard Sci-Fi.)
SnapDragon
1mo ago
Some managers, sales reps, and HR workers come to mind (note that I'm not saying there's no need for those roles, but I get the impression there are far too many people in them). Heck, even many coders, despite having a real thing they make, are just skating by and not making a difference to anyone's life. I would possibly include myself in that. And I'm working for a successful company - I'm sure it's a dozen times worse in, say, the government, where even the distant hand of the market can't reach you.
I'm also open to the argument that 95% of jobs are useless but it's humanly impossible to know exactly which those are, so you need to keep everyone employed. I'm not arguing from omniscience here, just from my instincts after decades of code monkeying.
SnapDragon
1mo ago
I'm in software too, and my productivity is boosted hugely by ChatGPT. However, there are caveats - I'm an experienced developer using an unfamiliar language (Rust), and my interactions consist of describing my problem, reading the code it generates, and then picking and choosing some of the ideas in the final code I write myself. My experience and judgement is not obsolete yet! If you just treat it as a personalized Stack Overflow, it's amazing.
On the other hand, in my personal time, I do use it to rapidly write one-off scripts for things like math problems and puzzles. If you don't need maintainable code, and the stakes aren't too high, it can be an extremely powerful tool that is much faster than any human. You can see the now-ruined Advent of Code leaderboards for evidence of that.
SnapDragon
1mo ago
I don't find the statement so ridiculous, unfortunately. As @ThomasdelVasto and I posted before, the corporate market may be in an irrational but metastable state. Far too much of white-collar work is just "adult daycare", and society has been built around the idea that this is how you keep people occupied. It's possible that, at some point, the whole edifice will collapse. But hey, I don't have a bird's-eye view and I could be wrong. Let's hope so!
SnapDragon
1mo ago
I hate dynamic programming, but it seems that you can't "jump ahead" when calculating prime numbers. This feels like computational irreducibility. The world in which this property exists, and the one in which it doesn't, are meaningfully different.
You can, actually. Testing whether a specific number is prime is actually pretty easy (disclaimer: there are subtleties here I won't go into), and doesn't require computing the numbers earlier than it. It's factoring a number which is apparently hard (although there are still much faster methods than iterating over the numbers before it). This is why RSA is practical: it's computationally very easy to search for 1000-digit prime numbers, but very hard to recover two of them after they've been multiplied together.
I think the rest of your questions veer more into spirituality, philosophy, and ethics than math, so I'm not sure I'm the right person to ask. I have all the spirituality of a wet fart. But I can tell you that the Collatz conjecture is not relevant when discussing the future of civilization. :)
Maths is incredibly productive on net.
Ergo, it is immensely sensible to subsidize or invest in maths as a whole. The expected value from doing so is positive. Our entire society and civilization runs on mathematical advancements.
I have no quibbles with these points! I think what you should take away is that the distribution of potential practicality is far from uniform. There are fields that we can be very, very, very sure aren't practical. If we were horribly utilitarian about things, we could easily, um, "optimize" academic math without losing out on any future scientific progress.
Also, lest my motivations be misunderstood, I'm happy that we fund pure math for its own sake. I took a degree in it. I love it. I just don't want it to be funded under false pretenses.
SnapDragon
1mo ago
That's a good question. I'm not sure of the exact reason quaternions were invented - you can indeed stumble on them just by trying to extend the complex numbers in an abstract way - but the Wikipedia article suggests they were already being used for 3D mechanics within a couple of years of invention. (BTW, "number theory" involves integers, primes, that kind of thing, not quaternions. Complex numbers do show up though.)
You could ask the same question about complex numbers too, but they originally arose from the search for an algorithm to solve cubic equations, which is a fairly practical question. That they later turned out to be essential for electronics and quantum mechanics is a case of some new applications of an already useful math concept.
No, I'm sorry, but you really don't know what you're talking about here. The field of pure mathematics is much larger and stranger than you know, and it takes years of intensive study to even reach the frontier, let alone contribute to it. Conic sections and integral transforms are high-school or early university math, and knowing them makes you as much of a pure mathematician as knowing how to change your car's oil filter makes you a CERN engineer. (And, for the record, conic sections were certainly never useless - even other people in that thread you linked called out that ridiculous claim. And non-Euclidean geometry is useful in many other realms than special relativity, like, oh, say, navigating the Earth!)
While there is zero chance of any of the math I linked above being useful, I admit that cryptography isn't the only example of surprising post-hoc utility showing up. As theoretical physics has gotten more abstract (way way beyond relativity), some previously existing high-powered math has become relevant to it. (The Yang-Mills problem, another Millennium Problem, unites some advanced math and physics.) But I absolutely defy the claim that there is a "tendency" for practical applications to show up. Another way to frame the fact that 0.01% of pure math has surprised us by being useful over the last 2,000 years is... that we're right that it's useless 99.99% of the time. I wish I had that much certainty about the other topics we discuss here!
BTW, did you not realize that @walruz was joking? What he linked is a fun Magic: The Gathering construction. If the Twin Primes conjecture is true, then the loop never ends. If it's not true, it does end, after 10^10^10^10^whatever years. It may be slightly optimistic to describe that as "paying dividends"... (Also, the construction only exists because of a card that specifically refers to primes in its rules. You can't claim that math has practical application because it's used to answer trivia questions involving that same math!)
SnapDragon
1mo ago
Hehe, I stand corrected!
There's not even a need to speculate: A rodeo clown in Texas lost his job for wearing an Obama mask. And the State Fair apologized profusely. One side of the aisle is considered out of bounds when it comes to mockery.
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