Progress isn't inevitable because the government can stop it sometimes. Nuclear power is regulated to be forty times safer than natural gas (the safest natural gas) (the factor of forty is ignoring the additional climate costs), and that's why we don't have abundant nuclear power.
But there are still people playing chess professionally because playing well is not enough. (You have to entertain an audience, which is only possible by "just playing well" if you're human)
There are plenty of good scientists and engineers who do psychedelics. If what you say were true, I think at least one of them would have figured out what the sense data is caused by in the environment and have set up a demo such that they can reliably react to a signal sent by a skeptical tester who turns the demo device's power switch off and on, in order to provide evidence to skeptics of their superior perception ability.
Related and interesting, there are some common visual patterns across many hallucinogenic experiences, “form constants”. Possibly related somehow to the organization of our visual system.
It blew my mind when I learned these exist, and especially when I learned there has been apparently little research into them. Maybe more informed minds than I have determined there’s nothing to learn from them, but it seems like there would be insights to gain about how we see.
Openai employees had extreme leverage because they were (or at least appeared, by the number of signatures on the letter) united. They could just leave for another company (Microsoft or other) where they would not be at all controlled by AI safety people.
Openai investors had only the leverage of "we won't invest more and you're running an operating loss", they did not actually have a case in court. The investment contract they signed stated "view your investment as a donation" and "this investment confers no fiduciary duties from the board".
The board had the leverage of "you employees and investors value your stock holdings, and if the company fails, those stock holdings to to zero".
The resolution I think was (could be wrong) just to initially reduce the size of the board to three. So it isn't completely guaranteed which side won the battle for control: it's not impossible that the AI safety people might still control the board. Maybe one or both of the new board members is secretly convinced by the AI safety movement.
The battle for public opinion is a different battle, and it looks extremely likely that the AI safety people lost that battle. Maybe it was still worth it for them, if they did in fact win or at least stalemate the battle for control of openai.
The expansion of the universe is accelerating. At some point, the number of galaxies in the visible universe will stop growing and the light received from distant galaxies will grow more and more redshifted. However, it's possible that the redshifting will accelerate faster than our technological ability to detect more and more redshifted light.
I think we can fight back against this to some extent. The most distant galaxies are fading due to increasing redshift. If we build larger and larger radio telescopes then we should be able to continue seeing them at longer wavelengths. If in a billion years we manage to colonize a substantial chunk of our galaxy then maybe we could build a gigantic radio telescope out of many small collectors spread out over several light years.
The universe is likely infinite. The part we can observe is finite, and growing smaller.
Outside of our observable universe is probably just more universe. We're stuck in a bubble within that universe due to the speed of light and cosmic expansion. The expansion of the universe is accelerating and that expansion continually pushes more of the universe outside of our local bubble. Relative to our reference point, some parts of the universe are moving away faster than the speed of light.
Supposing you had some sort of mechanism to travel across the entire universe, when you get to what we on Earth would see as the 'edge' of the observable universe, you could see past the boundary to another section of the universe as big as this one. If you could communicate back to earth, you'd effectively increase the size of our observable universe by half.
But while we're still trapped by the speed of light, we can never see beyond the edge of the universe. An edge which grows closer and closer, faster and faster with every passing second.
No matter how big your sensor is, you can't detect photons that don't exist. Once an object passes beyond the boundary of our observable universe, it effectively ceases to exist for us. No photon from that object will ever reach us again.
There may be other cool tricks that we haven't thought of too. No reason that we need to make things bigger and colonize the galaxy if we figure out something neat that is smaller instead! eg: Maybe we figure out that we can accelerate small telescopes to some significant fraction of the speed of light for an observation. Or perhaps we find some other neat physical phenomena to manipulate incoming light.
The cool thing about scientific and engineering progress is that we can't know what we will discover and develop. 200 years ago, we started having electric lamps. In just 100 years time, we have gone from computers being fringe and folly to them being integrated into places they don't even need to be for sheer convenience. Assuming humanity makes it another 100 years and continues to advance technologically, things we only dream of today could easily be so common-place that people can't imagine living in the current dark-ages of technology.
Also, 100 years is a cosmic blip! If we are thinking ahead to the point where we can't see things in the universe that we can see today, humanity itself will likely not be recognizable from our current vantage point... assuming it exists at all.
Based on today a knowledge of the universe, even if humans colonize the entire universe, you would eventually lose contact with humans in certain areas and therefore their knowledge.
I felt like humans were doomed after watching it, despite the vast scales discussed.
Nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light (we think), but the universe can expand faster than the speed of light. There are probably already objects we can't see and at some point in the far far future we will only be able to see objects in our own galaxy no matter how good our telescopes become.
When I learned that the universe is not constantly expanding/compressing with multiple big bang restarts, I was kind of saddened at the fact it's not. Not sure why, but I liked that idea. Maybe the never endingness about it?? The coldness of everything eventually being so far apart and all stars will eventually burn out and just be a dark place is just meh for an ending. Much more anti-climatic that way
Not everyone says the universe comes to a final end. Hindus and Buddhists believe in cycles, and Abrahamic religions believe in eternal heaven. Even scientists wouldn't all say that the universe conclusively comes to an end. It's one religion of many. You don't have to believe that one!
A complication is that the employees who work in the nursing homes are likely to bring covid in if it is spreading in the community and the community is acting normally (eg parties are happening). Not to say that your plan wouldn't be overall better (I'm not sure), but just saying it would likely result in more death.
A)11.36 million acres refers to the land leased for either fuel or non-fuel minerals. So if you wanted to compare the size of the royalties to the annual fees for the land, you would need to figure out what percentage of the land was used for fuel versus non-fuel mining.
B) The $165 is per 20 acres, not per acre. "In FY 2022, the BLM collected a total of almost
$94 million in fees associated with nearly 489,100 active mining claims on Federal lands"
In the EU, debit cards (with EU-capped interchange, and no debt mechanism) are the majority, and there's nothing that points toward that limiting low-income populations' access to banking or card networks.
Can't speak here for entire EU, only France, but opening a bank account or getting a basic debit card requires no minimum proof of income, and typically have no fees associated. No financial barrier to entry for any population segment.
It is not all that difficult to select or find an interesting scientific questions for which a Yes, a No, or even a Maybe is publishable and interesting. Two on my highest impact studies have been fun “No” studies—-
1. No, there is minimal or no numerical matching between populations of neurons in retina (ganglion cells) and populations of principal neurons in their CNS target (the thalamus). That demolished the plausible/attractive numerical matching hypothesis. I was trying valiantly to support it ;-)
2. No, there is no strong coupling of volumes of different brain regions due to “developmental constraints” in brain growth patterns.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23011133/
That idea just struck me as silly from an evolutionary and comparative perspective. We were happy to call it into doubt.
I suspect many of the comments are being made by damn fine programmers who know right from wrong ;-) a la Dijkstra. But in biology and clinical research, defining right and wrong is an ill-defined problem with lots of barely tangible and invisible confounders.
We should still demand well designed, implemented, and analyzed experimental or observational data sets.
However, that alone is not nearly enough to ensure meaningful and generalizable results. The meta-analyses were supposed to help at this level for clinical trials but have been gamed by bad actors with career objective that don’t consider patient outcomes even a bit.
Highlighting the problem is a huge step forward and it looks like AI may provide some near-future help along with more complete data release requirements.
If you have done biology—-
Hot. Wet. Mess. But beautiful.
> That doesn't mean you're a bad scientist, just an unlucky one. But it does mean you can't get tenure.
That sounds like a really easy problem to solve. Just treat valid science as important regardless of the results. The results shouldn't matter unless they've been replicated and verified anyway.
We should reward quality work, not simply the number of research papers (since it's easy to churn out trash) or what the results are (because until they are verified they could be faked).
Peer review is a joke. Too often it's a rubber stamp because there's no accountability for journals that fail to do the job. Unless peer review means something, the standard should change so that published papers only count if they're independently replicated and verified.
A) at the time this was written, Scott lived in the Midwest
B) Scott worked at a hospital at the time, which selects a bit against those who are creationists. In my opinion, probably 40% of the nurses in such a hospital would be creationist, but maybe Scott disagrees with me about that assessment
C) in terms of socialization outside of work, Scott is not an extrovert, so I can imagine arbitrary levels of selection and that it is plausible he did have 0 creationist social acquaintances (maybe the quote is only even talking about his social acquaintances, not his work ones)
I would suspect that as an introvert he just doesn't realize what his social circle really holds, even lightly.
Lots of it doesn't come up, and the "higher in the US money/power structure you get the more you learn to be quiet".
Another is to remember that many people may be technically creationists (the protestant church they go to is young-earth) but they just don't ever think about it at all.
