SurfingToad

11 ms·

1.
by SurfingToad 6y ago
As opposed to, you know, providing proof for your claims?
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by SurfingToad 6y ago
Weinstein doesn't 'believe' in peer review ...
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by SurfingToad 6y ago
Weinstein claims to have a theory of everything but he can't show you because he's afraid you'll steal it. Gives a vague and not-at-all useful lecture as "proof". Builds a cult of personality around his claim and co
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by SurfingToad 6y ago
If you think these articles qualify as 'terrible writing', you haven't read much.
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by SurfingToad 6y ago
I've seen "cancel culture" in analogy to the immune response for a long time now, and it fits pretty well. If you imagine that ideas can spread like infections, it makes sense to quarantine and ostracize individuals that have
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by SurfingToad 6y ago
The NYT still has a staff consisting of some of the most excellent writers and reporters of our time. That said, they have definitely been wobbling in the editorial compartement lately. They're overcorrecting as if they've lost th
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by SurfingToad 6y ago
WHO does seem like a bureaucratic mess, though. I read their situation reports from the beginning of the pandemic, and was surprised by how often they messed up. Links were wrong, random files went down, and they were released at seemingly
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by SurfingToad 6y ago
I'm not sure whether I'd agree with that. If you look at Shannon and Wiener using Google's ngram viewer, Wiener has always been more 'popular'. They've been getting closer since the 90s, but it seems absurd to
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by SurfingToad 6y ago
The Hunter Biden story was such an embarrassingly obvious piece of kompromat that it would have irresponsible to run with it just because the Trump campaign tried to push it out there. The reason why several major media outlets ignored the
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by SurfingToad 6y ago
Just because the sun has risen every day of your life, that doesn't mean that you can expect it to do so tomorrow.
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by SurfingToad 6y ago
One of my favorites is definitely A Unified Framework for Dopamine Signals across Timescales ( https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2020.11.013 ), simply because of its experimental design. They 'teleported' rats in
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by SurfingToad 6y ago
I think most people would put Trout Mask Replica in this category. For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CeLjmIW5wk After you give it a listen, consider that it got one of Pitchfork's rare 10/10 reviews
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by SurfingToad 6y ago
Based on the replies so far, I think most of you would find Schmidhuber's Compression Progress Drive interesting. The idea is essentially that of an adversarial agent with two components. A attempts of to compress its entire life histo
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by SurfingToad 6y ago
Locke versus Demosthenes ...
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by SurfingToad 6y ago
Stockfish doesn't play like humans. That's how sites like Lichess detect cheating; you can tell Stockfish moves apart from human moves. AlphaZero/Leela Zero, on the other hand, plays like humans.
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by SurfingToad 6y ago
I don't think rigid totalitarianism is a stable solution at all, long term. A society that isn't somewhat elastic has no hopes of overcoming unprecedented challenges; it's bound to fall apart. And even though China's soc
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by SurfingToad 6y ago
Books work very well, when you use them right. When I want to truly understand the contents of a book, I use the following strategy: I first skim the entire book. This gives me a rough idea of its structure. I then read the first chapter. T
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by SurfingToad 6y ago
Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Steven Strogatz is pretty good. Nonlinear dynamics is one of the backbones of complex systems, so it's worth delving into. Graph theory/topology is a close second. Complex Networks by Latora, Nicosi