Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 155 posts

Re: Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters

#71

Post by nyssos »

GuB-42 wrote: post #64
karmakaze wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how I feel about dark matter. Oh this galaxy is slower than this other similar one. The first one must have less dark matter then. What can't be fit by declaring the amount of dark matter that must be present fits the data? It's unfalsifiable, just because we haven't found it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Even worse than string/M-theory which at least has math.

The dark matter theory is falsifiable. Sure we can't see dark matter (it doesn't interact electromagnetically), but we can see its effects, and it has to follow the laws of physics as we understand them today. It is actually a satisfying theory with regard to the Occam razor. We don't have to change our laws of physics to explain the abnormal rotations of galaxy, we just need "stuff" that we can't see and yet interac…

> Sure we can't see dark matter (it doesn't interact electromagnetically), but we can see its effects

Even this is granting too much: "seeing it" and "seeing its effects" are the same thing. No one has ever "directly seen", in the sense that internet DM skepticism demands, anything other than a photon.

Re: Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters

#72

Post by [deleted] »

HeatrayEnjoyer wrote: post #70
soist wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just making sure no one is confused by common computationalist sophistry and how they attribute personal characteristics to computers and software. People can have and can create experiences, computers can only execute their programmed instructions.

On what priors are you making that statement?

[deleted]

Re: Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters

#73

Post by soist »

HeatrayEnjoyer wrote: post #70
soist wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just making sure no one is confused by common computationalist sophistry and how they attribute personal characteristics to computers and software. People can have and can create experiences, computers can only execute their programmed instructions.

On what priors are you making that statement?

Rephrase your question. I don't know what you're asking.

Re: Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters

#74

Post by nyssos »

soist wrote: post #66
pharrington wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're saying the board games AlphaZero played with itself are experiences.

And I am saying they are confused because they are attributing personal characteristics to computers and software. By spelling out what computers are doing it becomes very obvious that there is nothing that can be aware of any experiences in computers as it is all simply a sequence of arithmetic operations. If you can explain which sequence of arithmetic operations corresponds to "experiences" in computers then you m…

> By spelling out what computers are doing it becomes very obvious that there is nothing that can be aware of any experiences in computers as it is all simply a sequence of arithmetic operations.

By spelling out what brains are doing it becomes very obvious that it's all simply a sequence of chemical reactions - and yet here we are, having experiences. Software will never have a human experience - but neither will a chimp, or an octopus, or a Zeta-Reticulan.

Mammalian neurons are not the only possible substrate for intelligence; if they're the only possible substrate for consciousness, then the fact that we're conscious is an inexplicable miracle.

Re: Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters

#75

Post by soist »

nyssos wrote: post #74
soist wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I am saying they are confused because they are attributing personal characteristics to computers and software. By spelling out what computers are doing it becomes very obvious that there is nothing that can be aware of any experiences in computers as it is all simply a sequence of arithmetic operations. If you can explain which sequence of arithmetic operations corresponds to "experiences" in computers then you m…

> By spelling out what computers are doing it becomes very obvious that there is nothing that can be aware of any experiences in computers as it is all simply a sequence of arithmetic operations. By spelling out what brains are doing it becomes very obvious that it's all simply a sequence of chemical reactions - and yet here we are, having experiences. Software will never have a human experience - but neither will a…

This is a common retort. You can read my other comments if you want to understand why you're not really addressing my points because I have already addressed how reductionism does not apply to living organisms but it does apply to computers.

Re: Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters

#76

Post by nyssos »

aqme28 wrote: post #34

> It only satisfies a weaker condition, i.e., using four non-zero parameters instead of four parameters. Why would that be a harder problem? In the case that you get a zero parameter, you could inflate it by some epsilon and the solution would basically be the same.

> In the case that you get a zero parameter, you could inflate it by some epsilon and the solution would basically be the same.

Not everything is continuous. Add an epsilon worth of torsion to GR and you don't get almost-GR, you get a qualitatively different theory in which potentially arbitrarily large violations of the equivalence principle are possible.

Re: Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters

#77

Post by iftheshoefitss »

nyssos wrote: post #71
GuB-42 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dark matter theory is falsifiable. Sure we can't see dark matter (it doesn't interact electromagnetically), but we can see its effects, and it has to follow the laws of physics as we understand them today. It is actually a satisfying theory with regard to the Occam razor. We don't have to change our laws of physics to explain the abnormal rotations of galaxy, we just need "stuff" that we can't see and yet interac…

> Sure we can't see dark matter (it doesn't interact electromagnetically), but we can see its effects Even this is granting too much: "seeing it" and "seeing its effects" are the same thing . No one has ever "directly seen", in the sense that internet DM skepticism demands, anything other than a photon.

[dead]

Re: Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters

#78

Post by paulpauper »

dheera wrote: post #4

I wish there was more humor on arXiv. If I could make a discovery in my own time without using company resources I would absolutely publish it in the most humorous way possible.

There is . it is called the General Math section. what is more funny than a 2 page proof of the Reiman Hypothesis?

Re: Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters

#79

Post by godelski »

visarga wrote: post #15
elijahbenizzy wrote: post #13

This is humorous (and well-written), but I think its more than that. I'm always making the joke (observation) that ML (AI) is just curve-fitting. Whether "just curve-fitting" is enough to produce something "intelligent" is, IMO, currently unanswered, largely due to differing viewpoints on the meaning of "intelligent". In this case they're demonstrating some very clean, easy-to-understand curve-fitting, but it's reall…

> Whether "just curve fitting" is enough to produce something "intelligent" is, IMO, currently unanswered Continual "curve fitting" to the real world can create intelligence. What is missing is not something inside the model. It's missing a mechanism to explore, search and expand its experience. Our current crop of LLMs ride on human experience, they have not largely participated in creating their own experiences. Th…

> Continual "curve fitting" to the real world can create intelligence.

I'm going to need a citation on this bold claim. And by that I mean in the same vein as what Carl Sagan would say

  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

Re: Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters

#80

Post by kaibee »

jampekka wrote: post #58
rocqua wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think this, but dark matter does make useful predictions, that are hard to explain otherwise. This is partially because there are two ways to detect dark-matter. The first is gravitational lensing. The second is the rotatinal speed of galaxies. There are some galaxies that need less Dark Matter to explain their rotational speed. We can then cross check whether those galaxies cause less gravitational lensing…

The problem with dark matter is that there's no (working) theory on how the dark matter is distributed. It's really easy to "explain" gravitational effects if you can postulate extra mass ad-hoc to fit the observations.

I dunno if this is the correct way of thinking about it, but I just imagine it as a particle that has mass but does not interact with other particles (except at big-bang like energy levels?). So essentially a galaxy would be full of these particles zipping around never colliding with anything. And over time, some/most of these particles would have stable orbits (as the ones in unstable orbits would have flown off by now) around the galactic core. And to an observer, it would look like a gravitational tractor ahead of the rest of the physical mass of the galaxy (which is slower because it is affected by things like friction and collisions?). And so you'd see galaxies where the arms are spinning faster than they should be?
Post reply on HN