gammadens (u/gammadens)

gammadens commented on Superdeterminism may help us overcome the current crisis in physics nautil.us/issue/83/intell... · Posted by u/dnetesn

knzhou · 5 years ago

I tried to argue against superdeterminism the last time this came up and got a pile of downvotes because people mixed it up with determinism. And I see this is happening all over again in the comments below.

I'm not even going to try this time, I'm just going to say to everybody reading this: superdeterminism is not at all the same thing as determinism. It is a far stronger assumption with far far more unintuitive consequences for our understanding of nature. If you're reading this and just thinking "superdeterminism is okay because there's no free will", then you've been suckered by this article into believing a massive oversimplification.

gammadens · 5 years ago

I see the difference between determinism and superdeterminism but it's unclear to me why, if you accept the former, why you might not accept the latter.

I think it's worth thinking through and delineating superdeterminism to its utmost limits even if I wouldn't necessarily say I find it compelling.

I do wonder why the authors are so quick to reject nonreductionism though, as nonreductionism seems fairly reasonable to me. Maybe I have a different idea of nonreductionism, but it seems to me that rejecting nonreductionism is akin to accepting Laplace's demon which as far as I understand has been disproved. Basically, at some point the information in a system supercedes that of any system that might represent it faithfully, in part because of measurement effects -- there's a lot of parallels with QM issues.

gammadens commented on Alcoholics Anonymous vs. other approaches: the evidence is now in nytimes.com/2020/03/11/up... · Posted by u/pseudolus

dang · 5 years ago

So far the comments have been about people's prior experiences with the topic (which is great), or prior opinions about the topic (which is ok). But the more interesting story is being overlooked: this is heavy-duty new research that overturns previous conclusions, including the prior expectations of at least one of the lead authors. It would be good to discuss the specifics of the article and the new study.

gammadens · 5 years ago

This meta-analysis isn't ground breaking. What has been known for awhile is that AA works very well for some, but not at all for others. This has always been the dilemma with AA in research as well as clinically. It won't affect treatment because no one was ever discouraged from trying it at least in my experience.

gammadens commented on Zoom In: Speculative claims about neural circuits distill.pub/2020/circuits... · Posted by u/dsr12

gammadens · 5 years ago

There's an entire literature on very closely related concepts and issues -- many of the same issues arguably -- in the psychological test and measurement literature. There it's discussed tn terms of internal and external validity but interpretation is at its core and the scenario (and often models, at some level) are very similar. There you are trying to discriminate between psychologically relevant states, or outcomes, or variables, based on inputs in the form of responses to items (inputs). Focus is on articulating how to interpret test items an model structural features vis a vis inputs and outputs.

The literature on this is too hard to summarize in a post, but basically in turns into an empirical-scientific question, of making predictions about model features and testing these predictions scientifically.

gammadens commented on I have seen things muratbuffalo.blogspot.com... · Posted by u/ingve

blowski · 6 years ago

The “I am old” trope is just so uninteresting. To me, it’s a sort of humblebrag - because I’m older than you, my opinions are more valuable.

There are infinite things I don’t understand, some because I’m too young, some too old, but mostly just because I haven’t yet gone down that path in life. For what it’s worth, I was born in 1982.

gammadens · 6 years ago

Ageism cuts in both directions and it's one of the few forms of prejudice society still tolerates for some reason.

Imagine this guy's post if you substitute "too old" with "black" or "female" (or "male"). It would be cut down quickly and yet here we are expected to laugh at things.

What I hate about ageism most of all is it makes it impossible to have any kind of discussion about the real merits and demerits of things if there's some kind of new versus established nature to it. In certain circles, there seems to be a false, pervasive assumption that what's new and popular among the young is better, and that uptake is just inhibited by creaky old folks; in other circles there seems to be an assumption that's what's old and established among the older crowd is that way because it's superior.

The reality is that some established products are established because they are so great; and other products are great because they address limitations of existing products. But once you bring age of critics or advocates into the mix, it's all over because someone starts slyly looking at their pals over their shoulder and dismissing the discourse as due to youth or age.

I've been on both sides of this, as someone the same age as the author, and it's infuriating. There are products that my generation grew that I never adopted because of concerns, and now it's the young trendy thing to do to abandon them. There are new products that are overhyped imho because they solve problems that never really existed, but the wheel gets reinvented anyway because of the constant need for people to brand themselves as innovators. On the other hand, there are new products that finally exist that I wish everyone would take up, but don't because of old products that should have never become as popular as they did, or because of the vagaries of network effects, fads, and so on.

So this person doesn't get Facebook Stories or whatever the hell it is. Fine. Is there anything wrong with that? No. Can't we talk about that? Why does it have to become about age, even if he's doing it through self-deprecating (humblebragging?) humor?

gammadens commented on Is it time to nationalise the pharmaceutical industry? bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m... · Posted by u/DanBC

gammadens · 6 years ago

My personal feeling about this, like a lot of things in the US at the moment is that the required approach requires cutting across current paradigms.

More competition is required, which to my mind suggests introducing public pharmaceuticals, but also deregulating drugs in general.

gammadens commented on Fibs, Lies, and Benchmarks (2019) wingolog.org/archives/201... · Posted by u/kgwxd

0xff00ffee · 6 years ago

I've encountered this lazy trope for over 30 years working with performance analysis.

It always comes from one direction: engineering.

Benchmarks have multiple audiences and multiple uses. What servers one customer (perhaps a microarchitect tuning a pipeline) does not serve another (a company building a product that has to choose a particular component) nor another (a professor looking at historical trends).

Of course if you try to turn a screw with a hammer it's not going to work, so choose the right benchmark for your analysis.

gammadens · 6 years ago

I agree, but I also think a comprehensive set of standard benchmarks can be useful to get an overall sense of how language instantiations perform and how things change. It's fairly clear that in general some language implementations are much slower across the board than others, even if for many other comparisons the distinctions are fine or depend on domain.

My overall sense is that there's been a pull back from general benchmarking compared to say, 15 years ago, and it's unfortunate, because it leaves the benchmarking to developers of languages, compilers, and whatnot. This provides an opportunity to show of the best-case scenarios for the languages, but also for them to hide the areas of weakness -- and those hidden areas are often the mine traps for those deciding whether to invest resources in a new language.

Having a standard, comprehensive set of problems helps address this "hiding." I also think there's value in naive benchmark programs as well as "expert" tuned ones: not everyone is going to optimize every single scenario in every language.

The one thing I've never seen implemented well is some measure of "ergonomics" or "high-level" versus "low-level" aspects of a language, which also seems important to me. Some of that is going to be subjective but some of it not.

gammadens commented on Relating natural language aptitude to differences in learning programming nature.com/articles/s4159... · Posted by u/mooreds

skybrian · 6 years ago

I wonder if this predicts any better than a generic IQ test?

The idea behind IQ is that lots of different cognitive tasks are correlated.

gammadens · 6 years ago

From their supplementary table this looks like a general cognitive ability effect, although they don't seem to have included the range of measures that are typically included in general cognitive ability measures.

The short answer is that it's difficult to say from their results, and they don't explicitly test that, but it looks like it.

gammadens commented on UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay edition.cnn.com/2020/02/2... · Posted by u/anoplus

raverbashing · 6 years ago

> a PhD is sold as a key step for a well-paying and fulfilling career where you can make a difference

Yes, it is sold as such. But the appeal is fading fast.

Academia nowadays is something between a Beauty Pageant and the Hunger Games where people struggle with underpayment for years for maybe one day getting the famed tenured position.

gammadens · 6 years ago

Tenured positions aren't all they're cracked up to be either.

gammadens commented on UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay edition.cnn.com/2020/02/2... · Posted by u/anoplus

asdff · 6 years ago

Then they take half of said external grant funding as overhead.

gammadens · 6 years ago

Indirect funds on grants need to be eliminated in my opinion. The GOP is a disaster at the moment in my opinion but introducing bills to eliminate them is one of the things they've done right. Indirect funds distort the purpose of grants and give perverse incentives to university administration and other funding sources.

gammadens commented on I have the coronavirus – So far, it isn't that bad washingtonpost.com/outloo... · Posted by u/throwaway9980

scarmig · 6 years ago

"So far" is doing a bit of work, but ignoring that...

We know that COVID-19 has a high mortality rate (and a high rate of requiring ICU care). "High" doesn't mean 50% or higher; it means high compared to influenza or high compared to the capacity the US health system is intended to handle.

This article shouldn't be reassuring. Read this line in particular:

If I were at home with similar symptoms, I probably would have gone to work as usual.

That should scare the fuck out of you.

gammadens · 6 years ago

Surprised how long he was asymptomatic. That is concerning to me.