roystgnr
1yr ago
Theorem provers do all of the evaluation work ... for those specific results which have been painstakingly translated into the theorem prover's language, which to a first order approximation is zero percent of the new and interesting results.
Training a transformer AI on MetaMath (or on Coq results, whatever large database has both complete proofs and adequately verbose comments), combined with the verifier itself, might be enough at this point to create a "math-paper to formal-proof" translator. Skimming through comments I see a lot of links back to the papers which originally published each theorem, which certainly ought to qualify as "adequately verbose" even if the database comments themselves are fairly terse.
Doing creative work would of course be more interesting ... if we could only define what's "interesting". 378+135=513 is a theorem among infinite others, but nobody cares about it. We tend to like math if it eventually has endpoints with real-world applications, and it's a bit hard to put that into an evaluable loss function. We also tend to like theorems if they're more general, and if they're short to state but long to prove, and if they're on the shortest path to proving other theorems, and maybe there's something to those criteria that could be quantified well enough to point a Neural Net Monte Carlo Tree Search in the right direction?
roystgnr
1yr ago
The biggest contribution might even be "asked one question answered by a PhD student" rather than the other way around. My first original math discovery as a grad student turned out to be an idea that was published before I was born, but was just esoteric enough that I hadn't heard of it. My third was something that I got beaten to, because I didn't realize the problem was that interesting (I thought it was just another test case for my second) and I blabbed about it at a conference to someone who turned out to be 10% closer to it than I was but who just hadn't considered using his research on my question before.
I eventually learned to run more by my advisor. Having someone who's been in a field a few decades to tell you what's more or less worth working on is invaluable. Even just having someone who knows what to look for and where to look can be useful. I taught a student once who invented a numerical method I'd never seen before, one with just the right mix of "tricky enough that it might have been missed" and "valuable enough that it ought to be published", but by this point I knew which book to pull off the shelf and which chapter to hunt through to find the prior discovery without having to spend days on the literature search.
roystgnr
1yr ago
Doesn't count as "figured out" until we make a robot heart that doesn't suck. Making a working pump isn't hard, but making one that won't clot blood and won't trigger immune rejection (and won't limit mobility and won't fail to deliver enough O2 when you exercise and won't be too big and won't ever break and...) seems to be much harder.
roystgnr
1yr ago
because it is reinforced
If you want an explanation, you can't just give one for why it is reinforced (modern popularity alone would explain that), but rather why it was enforced initially, back when it wasn't popular. You can't use "Democrat campaigns" or "critical theorists" to explain why Republicans outvoted Democrats in favor of the Republican-introduced Nineteenth Amendment before critical theory was developed, "tropes" is a category of explanation not an explanation, and "capitalism" just goes where the money is, so especially in a pre-"long tail" world it was another trailing indicator of popularity, not a leading indicator.
On the other hand, you seem to have given a pretty good explanation by accident:
... Charles Darwin’s wife, who raised like 8 kids and three of them wound up being amazing scientists. And Darwin’s wife was trained to be a homemaker, so when he fell sick and despondent (as he often did) he was taken care of.
We have four amazing scientists directly credited to Emma Darwin ... and yet I struggle to justify using the word "credited" to describe a paragraph where she still doesn't merit being directly named! With the status of homemakers that low, is it any wonder that people in search of status (to some extent, pretty much everybody even a little neurotypical) look for it elsewhere? The anesthesiologist might end up less contributory to and even more forgotten by history, but at least in the meantime she gets a title (edit: and an excuse to keep her surname with it) and a white coat and a big paycheck and deference from patients and underlings.
roystgnr
1yr ago
Now you don't have that youth and fertility (since you "wasted" it on a bad match) and you don't have the wealth and security to compensate.
And now I feel stupid, for not mentioning that myself. It's not far off from what a then-girlfriend specifically told me was the reason for her high-intensity education+career trajectory: not having her economic future out of her control.
There is a solution to this, but it's a more feminist alimony/spousal support systems
Is there? Alimony can't fix status issues. Even in a world where "taking care of high-status man" and especially "taking care of successful kids" aren't given nearly the status they deserve, "dumped by high-status man, plus the state ruled that you can't take care of yourself without his ongoing compelled assistance" is irreparably worse.
Alimony is already good enough to handle most economic security issues ensuing from divorce ... but in my ex's case being divorced wasn't the concern, having a husband unexpectedly disabled/burned-out/whatever was. IIRC (though it was long ago so I may be completely misremembering here) her parents had fallen into that trap, with her mother suddenly having to start a mid-life career when her father had health problems, and even if it had worked out okay for them in the end, she thought it would be much safer to get a head start while she still had slack in her life.
roystgnr
1yr ago
People tend to gain weight as they get older, at around 1-2 pound /year, up until around 60.
Closer to 1 pound/year on average, IIRC. Not that that's not bad enough.
Though, I'd love to know for sure whether "tend" in this sentence is a law of nature or just another modern abnormality. One of the most astonishing claims from that Slime Mold Time Mold series was:
Common wisdom today tells us that we get heavier as we get older. But historically, this wasn’t true. In the past, most people got slightly leaner as they got older. Those Civil War veterans we mentioned above had an average BMI of 23.2 in their 40s and 22.9 in their 60’s. In their 40’s, 3.7% were obese, compared to 2.9% in their 60s. We see the same pattern in data from 1976-1980: people in their 60s had slightly lower BMIs and were slightly less likely to be obese than people in their 40s (See the table below). It isn’t until the 1980s that we start to see this trend reverse.
roystgnr
1yr ago
It can't have been much more than a decade ago. I'm failing to find it too, but I did find a 2005 paper where Everett still says "if I am correct that the Piraha˜ cannot count (something that will require much more experimentation to determine)".
He also recounts his wife attempting to teach counting to eager Piraha students over eight months of daily classes without success. If it turns out that their adults are so hopelessly innumerate but their children can learn then that's got to be one of the most amazing facts (whether about brain plasticity or Sapir-Whorf, either way) I've ever heard.
roystgnr
1yr ago
Sapir-Whorf has some ugly ties to the Nazi's
... and the plan is to ameliorate that with a damnatio memoriae on an ethnically Jewish scientist?
I'm not trying to shoot the messenger, thank you for the information ... but I do really hate it every time I see a bit of evidence for the conspiracy theory that modern anti-racism is hopelessly infiltrated by 4chan trolls.
roystgnr
1yr ago
Did he confuse Mormons and Mennonites?
roystgnr
1yr ago
It's often been said that the epistemological danger of the internet is how easily it lets you find a "bubble" of purely like-minded thinkers within which you can hide from real challenges to your views, where you only see opposing tribe members via cherry-picked examples intended to incite your mockery or outrage. In the physical world, on the other hand, you are pressed to learn to live alongside and be able to discuss your views with classmates and coworkers and neighbors and so on, people who have been selected by processes other than ideological conformity, and who are thus bound to include some people who disagree with you for intelligent reasons. And so, I'm sure many of us here have wished at one time or another that the internet could work more like the real world in that respect.
What I'm getting at is: whoever was holding the Cursed Monkey's Paw while poorly phrasing that wish should go ahead and fess up; we'll forgive you.
roystgnr
1yr ago
The education sector isn't entitled to a fixed percentage of the overall economy.
No, but to the extent it provides services via humans rather than automation, it is subject to Baumol's cost disease. Ironically, the education you can afford in a country where most talented would-be-educators don't have any better options may be greater, at the same adjusted dollars-per-student price, than the education you can afford in a country where that education really pays off in other sectors of the economy. GDP isn't a good unit against which to compare this, but neither are dollars adjusted by a PPP basket which weighs mass-produced consumer goods along with skilled man-hours.
On the other hand, that's about as much of a steelman as I can come up with before noticing that the education sector may be to blame for this themselves. "Students work on computers at their own pace, teachers are on hand to work with students who are having problems the automated lessons can't handle" was how a few of my best classes were handled, experimentally, decades ago, and it's a tragedy that the closest most kids can get today is "Make a Khan Academy account, then hope you have time for it on top of whatever superannuated one-size-fits-all busywork your teachers assign instead". I'm not sure what happened over those decades, but I don't think that whole "software" thing turned out to be just a fad in the rest of the economy, so I have a suspicion that the possibility of teaching more students better even with fewer teachers was treated as a threat to unionized teachers rather than an opportunity for the kids.
roystgnr
1yr ago
There used to be a very useful subreddit dgu (defensive gun use)
roystgnr
1yr ago
Feedings continually interrupting sleep are a form of torture, and that was the first few months of each baby.
From maybe 9-months-old onward has been net fun, but I think the bigger tradeoff is the growing senses of connection and meaning vs the reduction of individual freedom. More and more family member needs and schedules mean less and less opportunity to do adventurous things on a whim ... but now everything we do as a family, I get to experience empathetically from all their perspectives at once, along with the dual experience of watching how the activities change them, and the additional motivation from that has me actually getting off my butt and doing interesting things no less often than I did when it was simpler 20 years ago.
Fellow dad here; my wife had it ... not better or worse, but definitely different. She felt a bond with the newborns that I didn't fully match until they started talking, but on the other hand every pregnancy was exhausted suffering for her.
roystgnr
1yr ago
And yet, if any series were to race-swap a minority character, especially if to replace them with a white character, this would presumably be seen as blatant erasure and grounds to protest and boycott whatever media company did it.
Well, you don't need a media company to do that anymore, just a GPU cluster. But that might still be grounds to get your Twitter account suspended? I'd like to hope that Twitter doesn't actually have a "making the Little Mermaid a redhead is evil" policy, rather that people who gloat over a redhead Little Mermaid are just also likely to commit violations of some serious policy as well ... but I'm not optimistic.
roystgnr
1yr ago
He's mostly correct. It annoys me to see tech leaders hauled before Congress to get lectured about what a nice platform they have except for all that excessive free speech, and how bad it would be for something to happen to it if they don't fix the excesses themselves ... but isn't essentially the story behind the Hays Code? The Comics Code? The Hollywood Blacklist?? I suspect that most current "supporters" of free speech are just fair-weather friends who would be more than happy to reverse their support and double their zeal, if only they were the ones in charge.
But the other reason I have that sad suspicion about much of the right is simple induction from the sad certainty about the reversal much of the left has already made. It was so much nicer when I innocently assumed that everybody opposed the Hollywood Blacklist because we were all actually pro-free-speech and anti-blacklist, not pro-Communist. To be fair to the right, their future betrayal is still merely hypothetical. Maybe it's not just wishful thinking to imagine that some actually learned something.
"Surely it is better that the immoral learn morality through adversity than that the moral forget morality in prosperity."
Isaac Asimov character, "Robots and Empire"
roystgnr
1yr ago
you are the government! You decide who staff the NPR and PBS and whatever!
This was called the Spoils System, which (as Wikipedia will helpfully tell you) was fought and eliminated in the US for being a hotbed of cronyism and nepotism. If this process also incidentally eliminated the electorate's ability to put any kind of break on bureaucratic sclerosis or culture drift, well, it's a short encyclopedia article, no room to mention everything.
roystgnr
1yr ago
The lefts desire seems to be to want to censor 50% of the population maybe more.
Maybe, but it's hard to draw parallels: in the past censoring "the population" never really came up. You only needed to censor the tiny fraction of the population that had a chance of getting published/produced, and if you managed that then why would anyone else grab for that brass ring while expecting to be squelched if they ever caught it? Only with the internet is everybody halfway to being their own publisher and censorship needing to be more extensive.
We were also at war with communists at the time. Actual shooting war almost the entire time.
When the systematic blacklist started in 1947? Am I forgetting a shooting war? We hadn't even seen the Berlin Blockade yet, much less the Korean War etc.. In hindsight we really were riddled with Soviet spies, but hindsight's 20/20, and IIRC McCarthy never found more than a handful of the actual threats. Also note the distinction here between "communists" (any of the marks who fell for Marx) and Communists (the few specific organizations paying lip service to Marx who we ended up in conflict with); allow equivocation to that extent and the "fighting Nazis" types can justify censoring just about anyone too.
HUAC's communism-in-Hollywood report was 1938, but while the Soviets were screwing over their own citizens and Poland at that time, they would be US Allies during the intervening years.
And it’s an I’ll ideology that’s has proven itself to be disastrous to mankind.
Sure, but there's that 20/20 hindsight again. In the 1930s we were still happy to give out a Pulitzer for getting suckered into Holodomor denial.
We all agree with murdering and censoring Hitler.
Executing after a trial, sure. Censoring, definitely not. Whatever direction the next Hitler comes from, the last thing we need is for him to be able to justify an "oh I'm so persecuted" act publicly, spread censorable material privately instead, and chuckle at the irony of nobody being able to really properly rebut his arguments because they'd have to be able to admit to acquiring the contraband themselves first. Or worse, the censorship might actually work ... and then a few generations down the road, when we've actually forgotten the arguments we thought were so dangerous, we could innocently reinvent them ourselves under a different name after having lost all immunity to them.
I think relocating migrants is fair and appropriate to the point of being effectively a win-win
Indeed, it ought to be a win-win-win. E.g. Texas says it's having to do too much for illegal immigrants, many immigrants at the Texas border would rather go to e.g. New York but can't easily get there on their own, and New York says even illegal immigrants are making their new communities stronger; with every marginal immigrant relocated everybody should be happy!
If the reaction had been "thanks, that was nice of you to help them immigrate a little further", maybe rubbed it in a little with "I'm sure they'll be more welcome and have more opportunities here anyways" or "we appreciate the economic help", then I'd think Texas looked pretty foolish to make a big deal out of it. Instead too many reactions have been more reminiscent of the "AAAAAAH! MY FINGERS! MY PRECIOUS FINGERS!” metaphor (last few paragraphs of the linked post).
roystgnr
1yr ago
A lot of DMs expect players to actually come up with a motivational speech (or whatever) for their character to say, rather than rolling a die. But I think that's unreasonable.
How about "prior to rolling a die"? The role-playing is what makes TTRPGs better than computer games! If I'm DMing for my 10 year old, I'm not expecting a soliloquy that would sway royalty, but an argument that's especially good for a 10 year old might be worth a bonus to the subsequent Charisma roll, and one that's clearly just phoned in might be worth a penalty.
For young kids (this happened when one was 6, IIRC?) I've even gone so far as to say "make a Wisdom check" upon hearing a course of action that was likely to get the party killed, and when it passed I took that as an excuse to recount every line of reasoning that character would understand about why they're endangering themselves, though the final decision was out of my hands still. A bit of a cheat, I admit, since even a failure would have raised the question of "wait, why did daddy just ask for that" and so would have been a huge clue itself...
Nobody's yet given me the opposite problem. It turns out that the same sort of player who will min-max a low-Wis barbarian is also the same sort of player who will happily charge recklessly into danger rather than try to employ higher player wisdom. Not sure if that was intentional role-playing or a lack of higher player wisdom, but it was at least consistent and fun!
roystgnr
1yr ago
Cage was well cast in The Family Man for just that reason, IMO.
roystgnr
1yr ago
The Onion had a fairly representative debate between pro-war and anti-war factions in the wake of 9/11:
"We Must Retaliate With Blind Rage" vs. "We Must Retaliate With Measured, Focused Rage"
That entire issue was brilliant.
roystgnr
1yr ago
real, bittersweet wistfulness nostalgia, not 'remember AT-STs'
To be fair to the SW sequels, I feel like The Force Awakens did manage to get this right at one point, with the relationship between Han and Leia. They missed each other, they clearly still love each other ... and they've long since realized that they just can't live with each other, despite having tried their best. We get nostalgia for the cutesy cocky "love-hate relationship" development from the original trilogy, but this time in a new bittersweet realistic light.
Based on the rest of the script I have to wonder if this was an accident, if the writers were just trying to make it (unnecessarily even more) obvious that General Leia is a Strong Woman Who Don't Need No Man, but whether intentionally or not their execution there was excellent.
roystgnr
1yr ago
Do you have a citation for "willingly", in the informed-consent sense? I could certainly imagine that "we're going to dump you on an island with no facilities, but when they promptly boot you off you'll be a thousand miles closer to big NE cities where you'd like to be" was a deal that you could get endless numbers of migrants to sign up for, but I've not yet seen any reporting suggesting that that was how the offer was actually stated.
I have seen strong suggestions to the contrary, "Migrants Flown to Martha’s Vineyard by DeSantis Say They Were Misled" and "Migrants were promised jobs, free housing before being taken to Martha's Vineyard" and such. If that reporting is correct, IMHO "the residents of Martha's Vineyard aren't willing to personally assist migrants more than briefly, but they're still much better people than governors willing to deceive migrants for political gain" would be a pretty solid steelman.
The NY Times article finally mentions on paragraph 28 that its headline claim is disputed, though, so I'm not going to stand behind that until the dispute shakes out. This quote in USA Today, in particular: "They were handed red folders with what proved to be fake documents promising jobs and housing [...] Garcia said." ... why on Earth does that need to be qualified with "Garcia said"? We have high-bandwidth internet encircling the globe and three separate reporters collaborating on this story didn't think to so much as ask for a cellphone photo?
If.
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