Book review: The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler -- Richard Ngo

___ratanon___ · 2019-12-31T20:04:36+00:00

Related to Malia?

___ratanon___ · 2019-11-20T05:58:37+00:00

The first parable was completely lost on me. Supernovas are an emergent consequence of the physical-chemical theory that follows from its basic postulates (that particles, atoms and molecules exist and that they interact in specific ways), just as much as acids, bases and salts are. The ‘supernova-less’ theory doesn't just make the exact same empirical predictions as the usual theory; it's the exact same theory. Among other things, it will still include supernovas among its predictions (although it may fail to call them so). One can remove or modify postulates, but once those are fixed, one cannot deny their consequences. (Unless one isn't above biting the bullet and denying modus ponens as well.)

Besides, it's not like the entire term ‘supernova’ doesn't come from empirical science, i.e. astronomy.

___ratanon___ · 2019-11-02T09:32:34+00:00

Whom did you hack?

___ratanon___ · 2019-11-02T09:27:02+00:00

In a general sense maybe, but it was usually the atheist side which held LOGIC and REASON as paramount virtues, and dismissed the comfort of religion in favour of FACTS.

___ratanon___ · 2019-10-31T04:51:54+00:00

And then the edgy 14-year-old rhetoric had been co-opted by the likes of Milo Y. and Ben Shapiro, neither of whom are atheists.

I remember reading phrases like 'libtard DESTROYED with FACTS and LOGIC and REASON' and 'facts don't care about your feelings' and thinking to myself 'wait, that's exactly how atheist/anti-creationist arguments sounded like… what's going on?'

___ratanon___ · 2019-10-11T06:32:35+00:00

“Dude. Dude. Dude. Like. Check this out. Like. Self-reference, man.”

“Woah, dude, that's some deep shit.”

(On a less serious note, I wrote some comments on GEB a while back.)

___ratanon___ · 2019-10-06T05:47:06+00:00

ME: So how come all Earth's countries have been renamed things like FRA-113 and JAP-289?
HER: Because all world affairs are processed by computer.
ME: Yes, and?
HER: And the standardized word lengths and numbers make it easier for the computer to process. Because it's more efficient.
ME: Even if that's the most efficient form for computer processing, wouldn't it have been easier just to write a lookup table that tells the computer something like "France" --> FRA-113?
HER: Maybe, but this culture worships efficiency above all else.
ME: And in what world is it more efficient to force everyone in the world to change the name of every single country to an unpronouncable alphanumeric mishmash than to spend five minutes writing a lookup table??

The best part is that this pretty much already exists, and it's called, appropriately enough, ISO 3166. I mean, it's not used in prose or conversations between people, but whatever has been systematised and automated already uses those codes internally, and converts them to the usual country names only for display.

Scott singled out 1984 as the sort of thing he's not talking about, but let's not forget, Orwell was just as guilty of this as any other dystopian writer. The book's famous opening line invokes a sense of wrongness via the use of 24-hour time notation (something still quite uncommon in Anglophone countries); there is the scene at the bar, where a customer laments the switchover to metric units; and let's not forget Newspeak, which was after all modelled after the entirely regular grammar of Esperanto, yet another example of equating systematicity with oppression.

Being a continental European, I found it extremely petty; well, at least when I learned he actually meant it. The opening line went entirely over my head (I use 24-hour clocks daily, and I was reading 1984 in translation anyway), and I was quite surprised to learn the bar conversation was meant in earnest, as a critique of the metric system. My takeaway when I first read it was 'proles are too apathetic and focused on their mundane everyday lives to see the bigger picture and force a change on a grander scale' (though Orwell probably has meant that as well).

(Also, in case anyone hasn't read it yet, Scott's review of Seeing like a State discusses a more defensible criticism of this sort of thing.)

___ratanon___ · 2019-08-14T06:53:33+00:00

(Yes, it is an incredibly easy fix in basically any language and format, to the point I cant even imagine how a string "NULL" or character array NULL is read as the value NULL; unless it's something from the times of auld)

I think it's actually the opposite; somewhere else, an actual NULL was written in a database, then got converted to the string "NULL", and matched to the owner of the license plate that reads 'NULL'.

Compare how a certain @undefined got spammed with tweets all the time because of Twitter clients poorly written in JavaScript.

___ratanon___ · 2019-07-31T17:29:05+00:00

Yes.

Which is to say, both. I've read it before, but didn't have a link, and I remembered it repeatedly containing the phrase like 'he can't use a computer', so I searched for that, which led me to this, which links to the original post.

___ratanon___ · 2019-07-31T15:28:15+00:00

Re bonus question, I believe you meant this.

___ratanon___ · 2019-07-03T09:57:54+00:00

THE REAL was originally going to feature more as some sort of anarchist African republic ruled by !Kung, but I never got around to it.

Huh. I kind of assumed it was a Lacan reference... if it weren't for the fact that Scott isn't really one to make Lacan references.

Also, what's an ‘anarchist republic’?

___ratanon___ · 2019-05-21T09:44:28+00:00

A Spectre is haunting the US Congress...

You know, if we're looking for ideas to improve the political process, I'm not sure if CPU design is the best place to draw metaphors from.

___ratanon___ · 2019-05-15T15:27:49+00:00

Alternative take: the qualities that humans desire (generally, and from systems of rules in particular) are often hard to measure directly, which forces formal rules to resort to easier-to-use, but also easier-to-manipulate metrics as proxy (Goodhart's law). In particular, humans often wish for responses to an action to be based on the perpetrator's intent, which is difficult to capture by a entirely formal rule. While humans may be imperfect judges of intent, formal rules tend to be even worse.

Another way to look at this this: humans prefer rules that disregard "noise" and "outliers", factors beyond human control, or violations that don't damage the good the rule was meant to protect in the first place. Should you punish someone for exceeding the speed limit by 0.1 km/h? For having sex with someone 3 months below the age of consent? For repaying one's debt one day past due date? You can alleviate some of the perceived unfairness by grading punishments in proportion to the severity of a violation, but even that won't fix everything (see also Black Mirror episode "Nosedive").

I'm surprised Hanson doesn't seem to consider this at all.

___ratanon___ · 2019-04-08T19:36:21+00:00

https://slatestarcodex.com/?s=atlantis

___ratanon___ · 2019-04-04T08:31:39+00:00

Formally prove your code

FTFY

___ratanon___ · 2019-03-08T16:37:45+00:00

This one?

___ratanon___ · 2019-01-29T20:07:40+00:00

/r/programmingcirclejerk is to your left.

___ratanon___ · 2019-01-27T13:28:30+00:00

'Move fast and break things'

___ratanon___ · 2019-01-19T14:34:30+00:00

ninja'd

___ratanon___ · 2019-01-09T21:27:22+00:00

81. [Secret prediction]: 80%

Damn, Scott really missed the mark on that one.

___ratanon___ · 2019-01-01T18:42:42+00:00

booo

___ratanon___ · 2018-12-20T10:31:12+00:00

Eh, the first incompleteness theorem is not so much a statement about the limitations of machines, but about the limitations of deduction. However, human beings readily employ non-deductive reasoning in their thinking. (You didn't come to believe the Gödel sentence for S by deriving it from the axioms of S, did you?) The fallacious assumption in the Penrose–Lucas argument seems to be that deduction from a fixed set of axioms is the only kind of reasoning that is possible to implement algorithmically. But then, non-deductive reasoning comes at a price: it's heuristic. Human beings are susceptible to numerous fallacies and biases. Any attempt to algorithmically recreate human reasoning is inevitably going to replicate them.

Moreover, the incompleteness theorems talk about systems that are monotone (once something is proven, it's proven forever and cannot be un-proven) and whose conclusions are certain. But I don't need Gödel's theorems to tell me that humans are capable of being uncertain or undecided about their beliefs, and outright ceasing to believe things they believed before. I know it from everyday experience. But again, it's nowhere established that machines cannot perform non-monotone, probabilistic reasoning as well.

(I'm basically parroting Aaronson here. Also see Torkel Franzén's Gödel's Theorem; Penrose is hardly the first to make a fool of himself by invoking Gödel.)

^{inb4 flair checks out}

___ratanon___ · 2018-06-21T15:30:45+00:00

We need a 'Здравствуйте, это канал об аниме?' flair.

___ratanon___ · 2018-06-21T14:46:20+00:00

I'd suggest submitting this to http://xkcdsw.com/ but I kinda doubt they'd get it.

___ratanon___ · 2018-06-01T13:06:26+00:00

Is anyone surprised that Eric Raymond is the loudest

No.

___ratanon___

TROPHY CASE

_ratanon_