111–120 of 156 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>why life is evolvable Sorry, could you explain why you think life is not evolvable exactly? Assuming you take the existence of a single celled organism with DNA as a given (we still don't know the origin of life), evolution gets you the rest of the way rather nicely. Notably, "life" usually contains the assumption that it is evolvable as part of the definition. If the children of the organism can't adapt to the envi…
We know that life is evolvable because life exists and we know the biochemical mechanisms involved (DNA + cellular biochemistry). Evolution implies a relatively smooth path through "DNA space" from, say for example, an early single cell eukaryote to a mushroom. However the search space is enormous. Even if we account for billions of years of evolution and a trillions of evolutionary experiments each year, a simple ra…
Imagine flipping a fair coin 256 times. The particular outcome ('HTTTTHHTTTTTTTTHTHHHTHHTHTHHHHH...') is extremely difficult to replicate, but getting any outcome is very easy: just flip the coins again. In this case we also have a lot of selection bias: all the paths through DNA space that don't result in intelligent life don't result in anyone having this conversation.
Regarding the curse of dimensionality: it's a statement about the available data rapidly becoming sparse in high dimensional spaces. It doesn't really say that high dimensional spaces are necessarily sparse, it's just hard to "fill" them in with the amount of data available.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>why life is evolvable Sorry, could you explain why you think life is not evolvable exactly? Assuming you take the existence of a single celled organism with DNA as a given (we still don't know the origin of life), evolution gets you the rest of the way rather nicely. Notably, "life" usually contains the assumption that it is evolvable as part of the definition. If the children of the organism can't adapt to the envi…
We know that life is evolvable because life exists and we know the biochemical mechanisms involved (DNA + cellular biochemistry). Evolution implies a relatively smooth path through "DNA space" from, say for example, an early single cell eukaryote to a mushroom. However the search space is enormous. Even if we account for billions of years of evolution and a trillions of evolutionary experiments each year, a simple ra…
Comparing a mule with it’s parents shows how much novelty can be produced in a single generation (in this case an evolutionary dead-end of course)
>most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.
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I personally believe a lot of that stuff cannot be further studied unless we are able to divert solutions to other problems in our society first. I'm saying that we need to have things like mass quantity sustainable energy, significant automation, global unification and standards, higher minimum education levels. I'm saying that imagine 50% of the population works in blue collar general labor or semi-skilled labor fi…
The 50% of the population who are blue collar workers aren’t going to retrain as particle physicist or theoretical computer scientists one they get their UBI.
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DNA as the molecule of encoding information for heredity is also "merely" a discovery of an ancient biological system. However, it's not as though physics predicts the existence of DNA specifically, or CRISPR, yet these things are important for understanding biology, and in the case of CRISPR it's been turned into a technology that humans can use. Which is why I have a lot of complaints about the commonly held belief…
No, the elucidation of the structure of the DNA isn't just merely a discovery of an ancient biological system. It was the recognition that the structure was formed by antiparallel strands encoding information in a reversible molecular form, that represents a real level-up in human understanding of the universe. That's the whole point of that throwaway sentence at the end "It has not escaped our notice (12) that the s…
I worked in protein folding over 30 years ago at EMBL, and have loosely followed it since. I could easily have been led astray, but I was absolutely not under the impression that we can do this even close to "well enough".
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Right now, science has an emphasis on causal discovery. Showing that X is a mechanism by which Y happens. That includes finding the different X's for a Y and finding evidence for the relationship between a given X and Y. Once you know how a thing works, that doesn't necessarily make it easy to work with it. For example in quantum mechanics, a common phrase is "shut up and calculate" because the mental models are all…
> Meanwhile, maybe we get smarter and live longer. The calculations involved with many areas of modern science have already outpaced what we can do by hand, but we invented computers, so I can take the mean of a zillion numbers without much effort and spend my time elsewhere. With software being as slow as it is despite massive speedups, and even despite despite massive speedups, we really are still not good enough a…
Operating systems might be slow. Applications might be slow. SaaS might be slow.
But computation is not slow, and if you care about speed, you do computation in a context where the aforementioned issues are not issues.
Ramón Y Cajal was a contrarian when this was written, but he had great timing. In the late 19th century, it was fairly popular to believe that all the laws of physics had already been established—remaining progress would come from improvements in experimental methods. There's a famous "physics is over" quote misattributed to Lord Kelvin (actually said by Michelson, the guy who measured the speed of light). A few year…
As typical with contrarians, Ramón y Cajal said some things that held up well and others that didn't. In the same book "Advice for a Young Investigator" that this excerpt is from he also gave his view of theorists: "Basically a theorist is a lazy person masquerading as a diligent one because it is easier to fashion a theory than to discover a phenomenon"!
This is why category theory was not discovered, it was reverse engineered! The reverse engineering steps were:
3. Natural transformations
2. Functors
1. Categories
Edit: Of course, when he said theorist I think he meant people who don't experiment physically.