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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 i…

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 t…

> 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 sayi…

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.you…

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 b…

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.

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?

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 …

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 bet…

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 …

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 in…

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…

You can change the LLama 3 system prompt to coax the right answer. Shame it doesn't work out of the box though.

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 d…

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 keywor…

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=uLC0…

I highly recommend the audiobook of Paradise Lost read by Anton Lesser.

I had a Book of Kells colouring book when I was a child, I really loved it. Such beautiful designs.

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 …

> 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 freed…

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 h…

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 t…

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 b…

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 deterministi…