Who is upvoting this mystical nonsense? This article could be boiled down to "I assert - with no evidence - that there is a soul."
And why is down-voting disabled?
Readit Newsjonbronson commented on AI Will Never Be Conscious, but It Exudes Our Consciousness louison.substack.com/p/ai... · Posted by u/louison11
jonbronson commented on “Clean Code, Horrible Performance” Discussion github.com/unclebob/cmura... · Posted by u/rinesh
The ITK experience
you just sent shivers down my spine
jonbronson commented on Chinese spy balloon shot down over US theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/jimnotgym
Not shortsighted in the least. The president’s responsibility is to safeguard the country and its citizens. He failed to do so. What if next time it’s a long range bomber from China or Russia? Ignore them as well? And if it was an EMP instead of a trial run? China is not an ally nor a friendly competitor. The US has outsourced most strategic sourcing to China, eg drugs. Stupidity coupled with weakness is dangerous. Pay attention to history. Somewhere Santayana is saying “I told you so”.
You do realize military and intelligence leaders are the ones that made the recommendation not to shoot it down immediately, right? It's a bit of a political cheap shot to try and lay the blame on the sitting President. Unless he were to say, ignore the advice of those leaders, which the article makes clear he didn't.
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When people withhold answers to reasonable questions in order to probe for some hidden or more "real" intent of the asker. This is a ubiquitous problem polluting sites like Stack Overflow, but can also happen within an org. Always start with the simple answer first, and go from there.
I have a lot of background in programming language theory and mathematical foundations, which is sort of one half of the topic that's explored in this post. Two thoughts:
1. Rewriting systems are very useful tools. One of the things I learned from this post was about the existence of FullEquationalProof [1], which I think is pretty darn neat and super useful.
2. This post is imbued with a latent metaphysics that is somewhat common in formal mathematics and will invariably come out at relevant meetings/conferences after a few glasses of wine. Not this instantiation in particular, but a generally similar sort of metaphysics. I've always gotten church vibes from that sort of thing. (I never "got" church.)
I never got the "emergent properties have special aesthetic and nearly spiritual significance" or "everything is just an <insert structure here>" cognitive confusion that so many mathematicians (especially formalists) seem to have.
But the way that it happens does make sense. Intellectual curiosity is a valid work selection strategy and sometimes invention/discovery requires a leap of faith. Developing a predisposition to spiritual thought patterns while doing work that requires a leap of faith makes sense, I guess, but it's something I warn young mathematicians to guard against.
But then, I'm also not allergic to fava beans. Maybe math-as-spirituality and believing beans are evil are also just useful tools.
[1] https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/FindEquationalPro...
> But I ultimately think of mathematics as a just an invented tool whose only reason for existence is to solve concrete problems.
This might be the source of disconnect. I frequently encounter this perspective and worry there's a fundamental problem with how mathematics is taught if so many people walk away believing this. Whether or not humans ever mastered mathematics, what is and isn't mathematically true would not change. Humans can create notation and formalisms, but they do not invent the truths those mathematics represent.
jonbronson commented on How imaginary numbers were invented [video] youtube.com/watch?v=cUzkl... · Posted by u/peter_d_sherman
Pure math concepts like complex numbers are not naturally existing, just waiting for us to find them, they're human-defined tools to describe things. Like new words, they're invented. They wouldn't be there without us, as they are, for the most part, artifacts of our cognition.
That's self-evidently untrue. The properties that make a circle would be true regardless of whether a human ever set eyes on a perfect circle. Us identifying those properties is an act of discovery via research. Codifying those mathematical truths into a written notation is the only component of the process that could really be called invention.
This isn't a study that shows that people's faces indicate their political leanings.
It's a study which shows that pictures that people select to represent themselves publicly have features that indicate political leaning.
That's a really good observation to note. The prior embedded in their image data is their own bias of what is a "good" representation of themselves.
jonbronson commented on Research software code is likely to remain a tangled mess shape-of-code.coding-guid... · Posted by u/hacksilver
I worked at a productive computing research institute for a number of a years. I cannot count the number of times I found research teams duplicating critical algorithms. Research Scientists not only pay the price of the spaghetti nature of the code, they pay it over and over again by not sharing and improving on what has already been built by previous research groups.
The software industry has its own share of problems, but from what I've seen the research community is still largely operating on an outdated software model that shuns open collaboration out of fear of being "scooped".
jonbronson commented on Can’t Get You Out of My Head [video] youtube.com/watch?v=MHFrh... · Posted by u/emre
The total runtime of all six episodes is approximately 8 hours.
Oh thanks for the clarification! That was not immediately obvious to me, though in hindsight it does say Part 1. I agree, that is quite the time investment. Like any mini-series, the first segment really needs to nail it to keep the viewer coming back. I share some of your sentiments.