31–40 of 156 posts
Why come up with new ideas and solve hard problems when you can just be the User for X and become a unicorn based no nothing but smoke, mirrors and clever accounting like WeWork?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This book tries to argue that we've got as close to objective truth about the universe as we'll ever do: https://www.amazon.com/End-Science-Knowledge-Twilight-Scient... and that most remaining science is just find of filling in the tiny bits. I personally don't expect anything that will change with respect to backwards time travel or faster than light travel.
Why are time machines and Starship Enterprises a good standard of scientific progress? Why not immorality, sentient computers, and stuff like that, which is equally science-fictiony but possible?
For the first two, we'd need to have a radically different physics than the current model, while the last two, they seem like reasonable extrapolations from modern technology.
Why come up with new ideas and solve hard problems when you can just be the User for X and become a unicorn based no nothing but smoke, mirrors and clever accounting like WeWork?
" Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are time machines and Starship Enterprises a good standard of scientific progress? Why not immorality, sentient computers, and stuff like that, which is equally science-fictiony but possible?
I just said time machines and faster than light travel are unlikely to ever occur; I do think life extension and AGI are not technically impossible, but rather inevitable (my training is in biology, and I work on machine learning). For the first two, we'd need to have a radically different physics than the current model, while the last two, they seem like reasonable extrapolations from modern technology.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This book tries to argue that we've got as close to objective truth about the universe as we'll ever do: https://www.amazon.com/End-Science-Knowledge-Twilight-Scient... and that most remaining science is just find of filling in the tiny bits. I personally don't expect anything that will change with respect to backwards time travel or faster than light travel.
Why are time machines and Starship Enterprises a good standard of scientific progress? Why not immorality, sentient computers, and stuff like that, which is equally science-fictiony but possible?
I think there's a noteworthy distinction between science and its applications. In my mind, science is about understanding the world, whereas fields like engineering/medicine are about their practical applications.
I do think that there's a tremendous amount of progress that could be made in sciences like Biology, Psychology etc. But I would draw a distinction between the things that fundamentally change the way we understand the world, vs building really cool toys that we would love to have.
Impressive how timeless this is. I would say the great problem of science right now is integrating all of the knowledge there is. It's time scientists stopped publishing dumb weakly connected PDFs, and start switching to a GitHub like pull request model. We could build a single strongly typed peer-reviewed repo of all of the world's scientific information, complete with definitions, experiment protocols and data, and…
Having such a repo would be great, but IMO we'd still need those dumb PDFs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are time machines and Starship Enterprises a good standard of scientific progress? Why not immorality, sentient computers, and stuff like that, which is equally science-fictiony but possible?
I just said time machines and faster than light travel are unlikely to ever occur; I do think life extension and AGI are not technically impossible, but rather inevitable (my training is in biology, and I work on machine learning). For the first two, we'd need to have a radically different physics than the current model, while the last two, they seem like reasonable extrapolations from modern technology.
Who knows, maybe we'll find that we actually are living in a simulation and then figure out how to hack the matrix. The idea of "travel" and "time" would become obsolete then; you'd just poke new values for your wave function into the simulation's RAM.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just said time machines and faster than light travel are unlikely to ever occur; I do think life extension and AGI are not technically impossible, but rather inevitable (my training is in biology, and I work on machine learning). For the first two, we'd need to have a radically different physics than the current model, while the last two, they seem like reasonable extrapolations from modern technology.
A radically different paradigm of physics would result in technologies that can't be imagined in the present paradigm of physics. For example nobody had even remotely guessed that transistors were possible until well in to the development of solid state theory.
(based on my understanding of transistors, the first ones were conceived before the theory for them existed, and the first ones were built around the same time the quantum theory for them was expressed).
One of the great Spanish thinkers, criminally underrated in Anglo countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_Ram%C3%B3n_y_Cajal
I'd rather say he's criminally underrated in Spain. It is definitely easier to hear casually about Ramon y Cajal in "anglo countries" than in Spain. For example, I have spent my childhood in the spanish state, and I first heard about Ramon y Cajal during the first conference that I attended, in Switzerland, from a lovely presentation by an English professor. One of the dramatically few spanish first-rate scientists,…
Science, in general, is criminally underrated in Spain, but Ramón y Cajal is literally the household name.