What an incredible life Freeman Dyson had. The next time you have an hour free, I'd urge you to watch this autobiographical lecture he gave in 2011, "On living through four revolutions". In it, he describes his experience witnessing and participating in (1) the development of space travel, (2) nuclear energy, (3) molecular biology & the genome, and (4) computers. In addition to being absolutely fascinating and insightful, this talk does a fantastic job of showing off his wonderfully dry sense of humor!
Freeman Dyson Has Died
201–210 of 267 posts
Re: Freeman Dyson Has Died
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>the ridiculously hot summers in Australasia > Are no hotter than many other years, decades ago. Well there is a whole damn Wikipedia article about the subject if you are into reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_Australia And yeah, the summers are ridiculously hot and are actually hotter than many other years, decades ago, and keep getting hotter. One outlier from the 1970s doesn't invalidate th…
>Well there is a whole damn Wikipedia article about the subject Wikipedia is not science. >And yeah, the summers are ridiculously hot and are actually hotter than many other years, decades ago, and keep getting hotter Repeating it won't make it so. >Bull Look at the data for yourself. >Please go argue with the thousands of people whose work the distilled news articles and Wikipedia articles are based on. Why? What po…
> Wikipedia is not science.
That Wikipedia article has 158 sources cited. You? Zero.
> Repeating it won't make it so.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/acorn-sat/#tabs=ACORN%E2%...
I mean, you can go trawl through the data yourself. The graph is in the last expandable fold. The page describes the data collection practices, peer review, the entire god damn thing right there. But you know what? You don't care. Because it's gonna be another bullshit thing, one after another---oh that's not real data. That's not science. That's fake news, lalalala, you don't wanna hear it, and on and on and on.
> Why? What possible benefit would that have
Well TBH trolls like you have a net negative effect on the entire discourse and the culture here. I generally don't think it's good for the culture for people to engage trolls, but egad, I stepped on a landmine and here we are. It's not good when the community has to spell it out in black and white, but what I am basically saying is, stop embarrassing yourself and don't bother commenting if you can't offer anything positive. You haven't offered one goddamn source or citation, just your feelings. Please spare us!
Re: Freeman Dyson Has Died
#203“It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an observer is again involved in the description of events. Between lies the level of mole…
Lucretius, some 2000 years ago, based on a completely different kind of atomism, believed something very similar. Free will was due to random events on the atomic level, what he called clinamen (the swerve).
"The Swerve" is a great name for my punk band.
Re: Freeman Dyson Has Died
#204I really feel like it's worth having this discussion: the black bar for Freeman Dyson, but not for Katherine Johnson who died earlier this week. At the time I thought it was likely because she wasn't _directly_ involved in computing and tried to write it off, but Freeman seems to be as related to the page as her. I bring it up because it really does speak to how a community decides who they want to include or not. Un…
just as one factoid to add, in addition to Freeman Dyson being extremely notable, his daughter, Esther, has been a well-known tech industry persona for a long time, and is probably acquainted with most everybody who is anybody out there, so... personal connection?
Re: Freeman Dyson Has Died
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
I interpret his point being less about denying that some people will be harmed by global warming but that most (or 'all') people will be. I agree with what I think Dyson believed: that it's NOT obvious that global warming is net-negative (long term). Another ice age would be pretty terrible too.
Global warming is a net negative for all people if the rate of change exceeds the rate at which we can adapt our society. That shows up in our economy as a cost, and when costs exceed revenue, society runs into trouble regardless of whether the atmosphere is 15% more conducive to plant growth. The most obvious cost is the threat to densely populated real estate along coasts as sea level rises. You have to build sea w…
How much would you spend (or spend to convince the government to spend) to keep your billions-of-dollars-worth-of-real-estate viable?
Building sea walls is a trivial cost compared to moving (and giving up the real estate to the sea). Ask the Netherlands - 26% of the country is below sea level - up to (or down to) 6.7m below.
Re: Freeman Dyson Has Died
#206Freeman Dyson - Scientific bad-ass.
James Dyson - Vacuum cleaner bad-ass.
source: https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/diumi/has_anyone...
Re: Freeman Dyson Has Died
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
His point has been debunked time and time again. "Better" is a definition for the organisms that may inhabit a certain environment. Under no reasonable time frame for human existence is his claim even close to valid.
His point has been debunked time and time again. ... by arguments that themselves are subject to debunking. You've used a thought-terminating phrase here. The fact is, we've been coming out of an ice age for the past several millennia, and life has generally gotten better as a result. The rate at which that process happens is very important, though. If Dyson did overlook any important counterpoints, that seems like a…
Yeah, he's overlooking the entire field of climate science and all the associated environmental sciences that predict to an amazing level of detail the impact of climate change in each and every imaginable location in the planet.
We know exactly what the Arctic is going to look like and its impacts. We have known and are observing the melting of glaciers in the Alps, Andes and Himalayas to catastrophic effects in downstream environments.
Anything is subject to debunking if you're unwilling to look at the most sophisticated evidence available. Unfortunately, there is no model that will tell you that a 4 degree increase in average temperature won't end most of human society as we know it.
Re: Freeman Dyson Has Died
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
That quote is mindblowing. I don't think I've ever heard an argument for free will on a sub-atomic level. It never crossed my mind that that was a position someone could conceivably hold. But it's weirdly comforting- it almost feels religious- and I'm now thinking about how that would affect emergence.
I don't know where I first heard that view, but I've long thought it was the only one that was plausible - where else could free will come from? is it supposed to sneak into physics somehow at a higher level?
> where else could free will come from?
The more we know about the brain and mind, the less hiding room is left for free will and we haven't found it yet. It's looking pretty likely that free will just doesn't exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Libe...
Re: Freeman Dyson Has Died
#209“It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an observer is again involved in the description of events. Between lies the level of mole…
I thought the observer effect of particle physics fell out of favor. This author gives a pretty persuasive argument that, at least from a theoretical physics point of view, consciousness does not create the universe. https://www.paulanlee.com/2017/04/14/consciousness-and-the-m...
It has, at least if you mean the hypothesis that the wave function is collapsed by consciousness. This doesn't rule out theories of panpsychism and panprotopsychism (or even rule those theories in?), but I don't find the arguments in favor of them convincing. I think it's plausible, but I'm skeptical. I'm also skeptical that quantum mechanics plays an important role in consciousness (beyond the role it plays in the rest of biology, and everything else in the universe), though I think that's more plausible.
Dyson was a brilliant person, but I disagree with his quote there. I think we may develop a deep theory of consciousness (including solving "the hard problem") within the next century which will put some of these debates to rest.
Re: Freeman Dyson Has Died
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Well there is a whole damn Wikipedia article about the subject Wikipedia is not science. >And yeah, the summers are ridiculously hot and are actually hotter than many other years, decades ago, and keep getting hotter Repeating it won't make it so. >Bull Look at the data for yourself. >Please go argue with the thousands of people whose work the distilled news articles and Wikipedia articles are based on. Why? What po…
> Wikipedia is not science. That Wikipedia article has 158 sources cited. You? Zero . > Repeating it won't make it so. http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/acorn-sat/#tabs=ACORN%E2%... I mean, you can go trawl through the data yourself. The graph is in the last expandable fold. The page describes the data collection practices, peer review, the entire god damn thing right there. But you know what? You don't care. Becaus…
Freeman Dyson did speak out against climate alarmism. He provides some insightful counterpoints to the prevailing APW narrative, particularly about taking models on faith & the provisional nature of science. Given he was directly involved with some of the initial climate models, it's an interesting take on how models of complex nonlinear systems often oversimplify reality with assumptions. It seems like good general wisdom re: models in any domain exhibiting similar complexity & nonlinearity.