261–265 of 265 posts
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Maybe I’m just not pure enough but I find the whole concept of proof by counterexample to be elegant, and I don’t see why proving that something must be true is superior to proving that it can’t be false.
You mean proof by contradiction, which is something different.
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This is astonishing. How could a person go to the lengths of writing an entire book without ever looking up this sort of thing?
When I read your comment I completely give myself over to the understanding that you mean she wrote a whole and continuous book, without ever researching whether you meant a book about uncastrated male animals. Imagine my surprise when I go the radio to discuss your comment and a zoologist calls up to correct my understanding of a common English phrase.
When I was in grad school, I had the opportunity to take a course from my adviser in which he discussed his current research and some open questions. It was a relatively accessible subject area and the questions were sometimes easy enough that we could meaningfully contribute. On one particular Friday afternoon, he stated a conjecture that he hoped was true, and invited us to try to help him prove or disprove it. It…
> I learned on Monday that he had spent the entire weekend trying and failing to prove it. I, on the other hand, had put all my energy into finding a counterexample and had one within an hour. He spent an entire weekend before having the wisdom to pause, and let someone else contribute their time to finding a counter.
What actually happened was the professor posed the question in class as an open research question, which he regularly did, with no particular expectation that any students would work on it or make meaningful progress. My wife happened to sit down in her office and come up with a counterexample, which she wrote on paper and left in the professor's physical mailbox on campus fairly late in the evening. He had almost certainly already left campus for the weekend by that time. This wasn't a case of some sort of arrogance or lack of wisdom, just a case of non-instantaneous asynchronous analog communication methods.
This particular professor was extremely good at letting others contribute. As soon as the contribution actually reached him, he assessed it and used it.
> A few days earlier I had got an email from a professor in the maths department here at Imperial, expressing surprise that some of our graduate students were paying $200 per month to access models such as Sol and Fable. He said that he thought that these people were crazy. I did not immediately respond. But after meeting with Andrew I emailed the professor back and told him that in my opinion, any PhD student who wa…
Many graduate students view themselves as ethical beings, not machines that "produce meaningful output," and everybody here knows (useful) LLMs are indefensibly evil because of stolen training data and enormous environmental impact.
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Why? She went from crazy (that you sympathize with) to crazy (that you don't sympathize with). She was always crazy.
I think the crazy magnitude increased massively. If you subscribe to the horseshoe model, the change in bearing wasn't that large.
Laura Loomer is another crazy person who went from extremely crazy to just... untrustworthy but not totally crazy on Ukraine. I still think she is crazy underneath, though.