dotsam

5 ms·

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by dotsam 2y ago
Relatedly, David Deutsch's "Simple refutation of the ‘Bayesian’ philosophy of science" > By ‘Bayesian’ philosophy of science I mean the position that (1) the objective of science is, or should be, to increase our ‘credence
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by dotsam 2y ago
You don't keep searching until a point of "statistical confirmation". This implies you have arrived at an infallible truth. Instead you look for ways you could be wrong , and try to correct any errors you find. For instance,
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by dotsam 2y ago
> It is trivial to prove otherwise - AlphaZero move 37. After 4,000 years of gameplay (yes, it is that old!) we still didn't get this level of insight in its strategy. Are you saying that AlphaZero contains knowledge that we can&#x2
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by dotsam 2y ago
This article doesn't do a good job of getting at the main points of Valiant's book Educability, in my view. You can see some of them in e.g. this talk he gave here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4fIoLGjFtM He m
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by dotsam 2y ago
Here are some things that I think about often from that book. * Problems are inevitable, but problems are soluble * All evils are the result of insufficient knowledge * Knowledge being the result of trial and error, and there being no such
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by dotsam 2y ago
Does this come down to the fact that you don't like the topic of his book? As you have said elsewhere that you're not going to criticize someone for wanting to make money.
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by dotsam 2y ago
What makes you think his promotion of the book was particulary motivated by making money rather than any other reason an author might promote their book?
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by dotsam 2y ago
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. Has an exceptionally high density of good ideas. The first time I read it, I didn't love it and only engaged with it superficially. But gradually I began thinking about it more and came back
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by dotsam 2y ago
Me too. I’ve been impressed with some essays I’ve listened to via Open AI TTS. Much better than the librivox ones I’ve occasionally suffered through, and it’s only going to get better.
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by dotsam 2y ago
David Deutsch opposes this view in his 'It from Qubit': https://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/wp-content/ItFromQubit.pdf > [the view Deutsch opposes] entails giving up on explanation in science. It is in the ver
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by dotsam 2y ago
I recently read Deep Utopia and I found it frustratingly disjointed and inelegant. I kept expecting a big reveal, or a drawing together of the various threads into an unexpected insight, which never came. I agree with the review by Steve Ju
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by dotsam 2y ago
Sad news. I aspire to be as intellectually acute in old age as Dennett was. His recent autobiography was engaging, although somewhat too indulgent at times. I admire how he created a life and a world-view that worked so well for him.
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by dotsam 2y ago
You can change the LLama 3 system prompt to coax the right answer. Shame it doesn't work out of the box though.
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by dotsam 2y ago
Tegmark’s institution is the Future of Life Institute, this is the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute. Tegmark’s institute is well-funded, apparently largely due to a big crypto donation from Vitalik Buterin. https://www.politic
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by dotsam 3y ago
A tool for searching transcripts from a selection of videos featuring David Deutsch. The transcripts were AI-generated using whisper, and may contain some errors. Search for keywords using the search bar, and then click on a result to see t
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Interactive transcripts of physicist David Deutsch(deutsch-transcripts.s3-website.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com)
1 points by dotsam 3y ago|1 comments
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by dotsam 3y ago
Here is a video of a discussion between Richard Dawkins and Denis Noble (who wrote the linked article, and who was Dawkins' doctoral examiner): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLC0akD1WOE
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by dotsam 3y ago
I highly recommend the audiobook of Paradise Lost read by Anton Lesser.
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by dotsam 3y ago
I had a Book of Kells colouring book when I was a child, I really loved it. Such beautiful designs.
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by dotsam 3y ago
I have played around with the OCR on my mac, and have been very impressed. It has been consistently better than tesseract for my purposes. However, when creating a PDF from images using Preview and exporting using ‘Embed Text’ option to OCR
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by dotsam 3y ago
> Certain interpretations (e.g., the "Many Worlds" interpretation of QM) are more conducive to this possibility than others. > Generally, "free will" is simply stated as "the freedom to do otherwise". In
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by dotsam 3y ago
Then you have n free and conscious agents! And yes, if their simulated environments were identical, then the copies would all make identical decisions (all the copies would still have the same conscious experiences of free will that you and
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by dotsam 3y ago
How do you predict what the full simulation will do, before you run it for the first time? If it is computationally irreducible, then you can't predict the outcome - the only way to know what will happen is to run the computation and s
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by dotsam 3y ago
Stephen Wolfram's discussion of free will in his book A New Kind of Science is the most relevant: https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p750--the-phenomenon-of-f... Daniel Dennett's book Consciousness Explained
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by dotsam 3y ago
I find the idea of computational irreducibility useful for rescuing a type of free will in a fully determined world. Computationally irreducible programs are perfectly deterministic, yet you can't predict the output before you run them
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by dotsam 3y ago
Scientific knowledge, like all knowledge, is fallible. All we can hope to do is correct errors and generate better explanations. There is no "ultimate truth" or airtight reliable outlook at which we can stop and say we know everyt
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by dotsam 3y ago
They are baguettes. They’re eating at the Copper Kettle and these look like their ‘breakfast baguettes’
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by dotsam 3y ago
What objective values are you judging it by? You made a relative value judgement in your comment: > At the time, given the lack of offer and the standards they had, sure, the books were great.
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by dotsam 3y ago
> From today's perspective, it's boring, it's not insightful and the style is excruciatingly dated From your perspective. From my perspective, Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education are exceptional. Fresh, engaging and
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by dotsam 3y ago
> Stating there is no free will does mean we can predict everything you'll do You can only predict it after you've run the simulation once, and after you have let the simulated person do what they want to for the first time.

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