This was it. This was the moment, his defining moment. Damaged, memories incomplete, but alive, thinking, self-aware. Feeling. He had tried to cheat death, and he had won. For now. For the moment… and the moment was up. How much did existing mean to him? Was life as something nonhuman better than annihilation? He’d always imagined being revived in some human-like form. Something that walked on two legs. Storybook world was the future. Storybooks had won. Castles and Ye Old Cottages. Flying, magic ponies. That was the future of Mankind, forever and ever.
The same author has, according to my professor, alluded to being criticized by his colleagues for making the cover of the book four tastefully presented puppies because they thought it wasn’t serious enough
Okay I had to google this and it did not disappoint:
In need once again of melodic/dopaminergic academic motivation music, I return to Eternal Sonata soundtrack and remember that one of the boss themes is called “I Bet My Belief”
[paranoid whisper] the Bayesians … they're everywhere
Three and a half years later, I still wonder about this
And then on the same soundtrack, for those occasions when no amount of data can overcome a difference in priors: “Your Truth Is My False”
In need once again of melodic/dopaminergic academic motivation music, I return to Eternal Sonata soundtrack and remember that one of the boss themes is called “I Bet My Belief”
[paranoid whisper] the Bayesians … they're everywhere
Three and a half years later, I still wonder about this
Three university undergraduates independently
annotated each sentence in the corpus. More
specifically, annotators have provided binary ‘labels’
for each sentence indicating whether or not
they (the annotator) believe it was intended by the
author ironically (or not). This annotation was
provided via a custom-built browser-based annotation
tool, shown in Figure 1.
I think someone posted this a few weeks ago, and I finally got around to writing up some thoughts about it. The tl;dr of the post is this:
Blockchains attempt to solve coordination problems by having a distributed network act in lieu of a trusted 3rd party to enforce rules.
But the real issue with using trusted 3rd parties to solve coordination problems is the governance of those enforcing bodies (i.e., rule setting, not rule enforcement).
Blockchains don’t solve this issue. If you solve the real issue, then what do you need a blockchain for anyway?
My objection is that this proves too much, but before I get into that, let me just trash on cryptocurrencies for a sec:
Bitcoin has never been a great currency, except for buying drugs, and now it’s worse. It’s also not a great store of value w/the insane volatility and how the price is tied to the health of a bunch of skeevy exchanges.
On the plus side, it looks like cryptocurrencies are in the process of providing great first-hand lessons on the motivation for financial regulation.
I’ve mentioned my ambivalent feelings about utopian cryptopunk types before, and that applies here as well. On the one hand, I think that some people (e.g., the ethereum folks) are doing some interesting work that might end up being really important. On the other hand… let me start by saying that the “governance” problem has a lot of similarities to the AI value-alignment problem. You’re trying to write a computer program that you only get one chance to write, and it needs to somehow accurately model squishy human wants and value judgements into the indefinite future, and if you screw it up, you’re boned. EY can be criticized for a lot of things, but the judgement that this problem is hard is not one of them. With the cryptocurrency folks, it sort of seems like they looked at it and said “yeah, i could probably do that with like 100 lines of javascript”. I anticipate ever-increasing hilarity as larger and larger amounts of money get attached to unpatchable programs written by morons.
Ok, with that said, let me get back to my criticism of the linked post. I think it basically works out mutatis mutandis as a criticism of public-key crypto:
The real problem is the governance of a trusted 3rd party to manage keys, not the more limited problem of negotiating secret keys when you already have an authenticated public key for the other party.
If you can solve the governance problem for key management, you might as well just trust them completely and not fuck around with public key crypto anyway.
And this just doesn’t ring true. It is true that “just” building a software ecosystem that enables the distribution and authentication of public keys is an absurdly complex and messy undertaking. It also turns out to be way the fuck easier and require far less trust than “just” fixing the governance problem for a centralized omnipotent key-management system. And a lot of the bits and pieces that have been added over the years to improve things have been more cryptographic technical solutions designed to limit the implications of various breaches of trust:
Perfect forward secrecy (meaning that past sessions are not compromised if your long-term key is compromised)
Certificate pinning (to limit the ill-effects of shitty certificate authorities)
Certificate transparency (which incidentally is another example of “big append-only public ledger”)
I think eliminating human judgement and the politicking that goes with that from “the problem of governance” is a pipe dream (or it’s AI-complete at the very least), but cryptographic primitives can (and do) play a valuable role as building blocks for solving governance problems (e.g., by providing transparency, by authenticating connections between actions and keys, by providing key-sharing schemes, etc.). You can’t get something out of nothing, but you may be able to bootstrap smaller amounts of trust into larger structures. Is the future BTC or ETH? I’m going to guess no. But I think there’s going to be some interesting stuff to pick out of the wreckage.
@itsbenedict left a comment saying the explanation in this one didn’t make sense to him, and in retrospect I realize it could make a lot more sense with some edits, so I may do that later today. This won’t affect anything plot-relevant or thematic and you’re free to read it now, it just might be less comprehensible in a certain part than it will be later.
I’ve edited the chapter, and I think the relevant part makes a lot more sense now. (If you didn’t see the pre-edit version, you really didn’t miss anything significant, trust me.)
Remove almost all undergrad E+M and replace it with numerics classes.
You want a “math methods” class in solving bullshit PDEs and 3D volume integrals? Great! I hear the applied math department runs service classes for that. Furthermore, no one actually solves PDEs that way anymore. People throw them at Mathematica or solve them numerically. Nobody is going to be trapped on a desert island with no cell signal, a gun to their head unless they can solve terrible boundary value problems for dielectrics in capacitors.
You want an overview of the state of physics 150-75 years ago? Then why isn’t nuclear a required class? Metropolis algorithm is nearly old enough now anyway.
You want a weeder class to get rid of people in the degree to prove how smart they are? Make them write an implicit restart Lanczos or something.
“But E+M is important! They won’t see spherical harmonics otherwise! How will we teach Quantum?” Holy shit! You can’t teach them spherical harmonics in Quantum?? They’re really not that complicated, and besides, the E+M presentation is always “Here’re some bullshit solutions to this bullshit PDE we derived using separation of variables. Group theory? No, this isn’t a math class. Be able to rederive Bessel’s equation for the exam.”
“Students in my lab need to be able to deal with circuits!” Then make that part of a lab class. Not everyone is going to be an experimentalist. Almost every grad student I know writes code, though.
All the good stuff in E+M you can fold into relativity and quantum anyway. More numerics also means more time to teach real statistics, another area completely neglected by undergrad physics degrees.
i don’t know much about physics but i endorse this post. people get a fucked up view of PDEs and think that writing down an explicit analytic solution is a good idea. even if writing down an analytic solution were possible, it wouldn’t be desirable. the resulting expression would be intractably complicated. a reasonable/useful/interesting goal is to either do numerics or prove qualitative(ish) shit about the solution.
Wait… what? Do physics undergrads get the impression that you solve PDEs analytically? Does… does no one tell them that they’re almost all unsolvable?
I mean I guess if I wasn’t a math major and my only encounter with the subject was my diffeqs class I might have though the same thing…
Still though. That’s messed up.
At least in my case I learned about perturbation theory in a core class, so my impression was “yeah, almost all PDEs are unsolvable, so in practice we hope they’re close enough to solvable ones to be amenable to some approximation technique like perturbation theory.”
Then in my final year I took numerics, as an elective, and finally learned about the other thing you can do. If I hadn’t arbitrarily decided to take that class (misleadingly named “Scientific Computing”), and had instead been a more “responsible” physics major and taken the Thermal elective, well, who even knows what would have happened?
