Viewing profile — pessimist

There are multiple independent observations pointing toward dark matter: 1. Galaxy rotation curves. 2. Galaxy cluster mass measurements from gravitational lenses and infrared. 3. C…

From Terry Tao's comments in the thread: "Very nice! ... actually the thing that impresses me more than the proof method is the avoidance of errors, such as making mistakes with in…

Underrated even among physicists. Among the immediate post war generation his contributions are up there with Feynman and Schwinger. To quote Freeman Dyson: "Professor Yang is, aft…

Plausible. General Relativity was concieved by an extraordinary genius, but the perihelion of mercury was measured by dozens of painstaking but otherwise unexceptional people. With…

There should be legal recourse against these companies and investors. It is pure crime to release such obviously broken software.

The standard model is 100% quantum mechanics. It's just QM as applied to fields. While undergrads start with single or few particle quantum mechanics. There is a lot of hard math a…

Killian civilians in war has been completely normalized. Even in highly visible conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine. People just shrug and move on. Political discourse has lost all sense…

The Democratic Governor of California denounced them publicly and stopped the effort. Despite Musk raising millions and campaigning viciously against the Democrats the administrati…

Yes, both parties do it. In California for example left-wing politics is openly racist and I have sympathy for even the crazy republicans here. However to defend Obama - he explict…

Fine, I don't disagree with anything you point out. However where we differ is that I believe identity politics is the trigger factor here, all the other changes you mention (loss …

Low-level corruption at the local/state level is related but its effects are different though. In fact even today low level corruption in the US is extremely low by global standard…

It turns out that when elections are fought on the basis of identity (race, religion) etc corruption is actually considered a benefit! This is because the loyalists interpret this …

Apart from Einstein, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, Bohr and Fermi are clearly ahead in depth and breadth of contribution. Post-war it's less clear, but IMO Steven Weinberg and Murray G…

This analysis in the end doesn't show what it claims to show and actually proves the reverse - US Health care spending is much larger than other countries, it eats up significant f…

My brother is dying of a grade 4 brain tumor, and I've spend countless hours poring through papers. Horrifying to realize they may be falsified. I am always sceptical of pre-clinic…

So if Sam Altman is back by tomorrow (Sunday) after being crucified on Friday, I think that means the end of the world is near.

Support is bad because outsourced everything, and the outsourcing companies are under huge pressure to cut costs and especially human costs. Everything is measured, and extra time …

Hard to say its the most appalling. Two more appalling omissions are Lisa Meitner for nuclear fission, and Chien-Shiung Wu for parity violation, since effectively others were given…

In chess we had a tiny window of a few years when humans could use the help of computers to play the world's best chess. By 2000, computers were far better than humans and the gap …

A beta that we are all helping test . Simply unbelievable that the NHTSA allows this to happen. The Tesla safety report which the company boastfully released wouldn't have counted …

ChatGPT understands what it reads. In the sense that it is actually creating a model of what it just read, and it's own output. It happens to understand English, dozens of programm…

The writer is far more knowledgeable than me, and it seems he believes there was no major decline related to the fall of Rome, the traditional "Dark Age" story is false, etc. I sho…

10x death-undercount nationwide is probably not accurate. Major states like Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala are reporting close to accurate numbers. 2-5x nationwide is likely, wi…

Agree with almost everything. Health care is collapsing around us. 10x death-undercount nationwide is probably not accurate. Major states like Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala are…