Viewing profile — SurfingToad

As opposed to, you know, providing proof for your claims?

Weinstein doesn't 'believe' in peer review ...

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 …

If you think these articles qualify as 'terrible writing', you haven't read much.

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 q…

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 la…

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, …

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 th…

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 th…

Just because the sun has risen every day of your life, that doesn't mean that you can expect it to do so tomorrow.

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 desi…

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 o…

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 comp…

Locke versus Demosthenes ...

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, pla…

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…

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 r…

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 …