Some self-Googling just revealed that Floornight was apparently recommended a while ago on something called the “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Podcast,” in an episode mostly consisting of a reading of a My Little Pony / 1984 crossover.
o_o
Several people (su3su2u1, bartlebyshop and eka-mark) have responded to my post about quantum mechanics being linear by noting that once you get beyond the kinds of problems you see in a first-semester QM class, things can often stop being linear.
I am sure you are all right about this (though my experience of QM is mostly from, yes, a first-semester undergrad class so everything else I’ve absorbed randomly, rarely, incompletely, and badly). Thanks for the correction.
I think some version of my broader point still stands, though – quantum mechanics is hard, but it’s not uniquely hard. Mathematical ecology is hard too, and subject to more messy complications that go beyond the difficulty of solving the equations themselves.
I had the feeling, and still do, that the guy quoted in the article was using sort of a rhetorical trick: “everyone thinks of quantum mechanics as the hardest thing ever –> but some scientists understand quantum mechanics –> clearly we can solve anything less hard than The Hardest Thing Ever by applying science to it, yay science!” But it was just a brief quote with no context, so for all I know he meant something more sensible by it.
Quantum mechanics is a linear theory and is not a good model for most of the challenges faced by mathematical modelers of anything besides fundamental physics
This is unfortunate because it QM is “hard” in a number of related ways – counter-intuitive, philosophically confounding, requires math at least a little more abstract than Newtonian physics – and people get the kinds of hardness confused
If you have any kind of grand plan to engineer anything biological, try studying fluid mechanics first. The basic equations of mathematical biology (e.g. replicator equation, Hodgkin-Huxley equations) are nonlinear. Fluid mechanics is an example of a very well-studied, not too “messy” (all physics, no biology) problem which is extremely hard and complicated solely because it is nonlinear.
Learn about turbulent cascades, enstrophy conservation, Reynolds averaging, Large Eddy Simulation, Stokes flow, the Inverse Scattering Transform, the giant bestiary of non-dimensional numbers, and all of our other myriad ways at fumbling towards understanding of a problem that has no single “good” entry point. Imagine that almost all real problems are like that, and QM is an atypical special case. Welcome to the desert ocean (?) of the the real. Good luck.
Okay this article may have its flaws but man is it full of stunning anecdotes
We could genetically engineer lions into herbivores, he suggested, or drone-drop in-vitro meat whenever artificial intelligence detects a carnivore’s hunger, or reengineer “ecosystems from the ground up, so that all the evolutionarily stable equilibriums that happen within an ecosystem are actually things that we consider ethical.“A world in which the lion might lie down with the zebra. What about hubris? I asked. Emilsson demurred. “Food chains are not as complex as, say, quantum systems and a lot of other things we’re trying to get a handle on.”
Okay this bit is also great
That night, there was a party. Alumni were invited. Networking was encouraged. Post-its proliferated; one, by the beer cooler, read Slightly addictive. Slightly mind-altering. Another, a few feet to the right, over a double stack of bound copies of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: Very addictive. Very mind-altering.
The Harper’s article just mentioned isn’t very good journalism (the author has sort of this “I don’t get any of this, and am not willing to put in any work to try to get it” attitude, which does not seem like my picture of what a journalist is supposed to do), but it does provide another possible entry point if you’re confused about what I’m talking about half the time.
So, like, maybe check it out if you’re still confused about who “Big Yud” is or why I find him and his circles fascinating?
“Alrighty,” Yudkowsky said, signed, continued. “Have you actually read Methods of Rationality at all?” he asked me. “I take it not.” (I’d been found out.) “I don’t know what sort of a deadline you’re on, but you might consider taking a look at that.” (I had taken a look, and hated the little I’d managed.)
I have read the last two posts and am kind of confused by this comment. One of the reasons I read Scott’s blog is that he realizes that human science (including social and medical science) are difficult and usually the harder you look at an issue, the more complicated and confusing it looks. The “Beware The Man of One Study” post struck me as almost superfluous, as it’s a restatement of something that had been implicit in all the lit reviews he does on the blog.
I guess you could say he would be getting closer to my views if he was starting to say “because this all makes it hard to get anything out of social science, we should social science less, and trust our immediate experience of other people more to compensate,” but he doesn’t seem to be saying this. He just says he’s not preaching “radical skepticism” but he doesn’t know what the answer is.
Nope. Is there anything in particular that makes it worth seeking it out?
is eliezer yudkowsky the distilled essence of everything that makes it embarassing to be a nerd, or is he missing something
oh, right, too many girlfriends