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As researchers age, they produce less disruptive work

nautil.us

141–150 of 157 posts

Re: As researchers age, they produce less disruptive work

#141

>>> It was the Nobel laureate and quantum physicist Max Planck who wrote that “science advances one funeral at a time” (which is actually a somewhat artful translation of his original statement, in German) about revered gatekeepers and their nostalgia for insights past that keep leaps in scientific understanding from happening. Turns out, he may have been right. Or he may have been wrong. I think it was Paul Feyerabe…

A sufficiently obstinate person in a position of power can block any progress in a certain direction for a long, long time. Ancel Keys is known for really hating the "sugar is problematic" theory and sinking careers of younger nutritional scientists who dared touch it for decades. Sen. Richard Shelby was a huge hater of the "orbital fuel depot" concept and it only started being developed further once he retired and d…

Sure, isolated anecdotes. Shelby was a lawyer. Orbital fuel depot sounds like an engineering problem.

Re: As researchers age, they produce less disruptive work

#142
post #140

Given that (at least to my understanding) forced retirement at a given age is illegal in the US, could we maybe put a duration on tenure to try and increase the number of "up and coming" people in research?

Academia already underpays highly skilled people. Worsening long-term prospects for people in the area would just make more bright people quit sciences and go right into finance or other bullshit careers that pay more but are near zero-sum or net negative for humanity at large.

I was thinking like 35 years of tenure? That would take you from 30-65 or 35 to 70. There used to be forced retirement at 70 for academics so it's not without precedent.

Re: As researchers age, they produce less disruptive work

#143
post #58

I prefer the full quote by Douglas Adams. I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented…

I feel this more and more as I age. Especially after having children. I used to be a "tech guy" (like most people here probably) and was excited about new technology. Now my main feeling when something disruptive (like AI currently) comes up is: "why the hell do people need to rock the boat". The thing is, I'm perfectly happy living my life as I have been living so far, concentrating on doing stuff with my children a…

I believe it is possible to "upload" the knowledge from future reformulations of LLM's.

Right now most of the weights are in the FFN neural nets, but I believe we can reformulate LLM's or distill them into a format where each token/character represents either a matrix or a geometric algebra multivector. If each weight becomes token/character associated, it means we could write mindless reaction speed games: have a 2D projection of token/word/concept multivector/matrix coordinates. Let the 2D projection smoothly evolve a grand tour through the space of projections, possibly only including new dimensions if user performance on the explored dimensions suffices. 95% of the tokens/words could be rendered at their correct positions, while say 5% is at their incorrect positions. So the user sees a subset of the character/word/tokens rendered, and since they are individually placed at a correct position 95% of the time, it allows a user to learn peripherally, the user just needs to click those tokens intentionally disturbed from their true positions. Consider the hypothetical scenario that eventually all coordinates are explored and hypothetically the user scores highly (perhaps 100% or 90%) then we could say that at least the high dimensional coordinates are properly uploaded. Now you could randomly render bigrams (the new matrix coordinates being the matrix product / the new multivector coordinates being the geometric product). Next we could hypothesize that with sufficient training the user can predict the correct position of bigrams (meaning the user brain is performing the same or similar computation). From this the likelihood could be computed, and so a user would start predicting the same next tokens the model would. It wouldn't be blind belief more like a user associating the claims with what the reaction speed game insinuates. Imagine having trained on random cyrillic characters and suddenly you understand the Greek ingredients on some food packaging. There is a lot of hypothesis here, but none of the steps seem impossible to me.

It would mean both kids and adults could sync up with what LLM's claim (without blindly believing in it, but when it helps predict a lot of things around you people may lean and trust more on it, so that danger is not entirely moot), and having an LLM acquaintance in your brain to consult.

Re: As researchers age, they produce less disruptive work

#145

>>> It was the Nobel laureate and quantum physicist Max Planck who wrote that “science advances one funeral at a time” (which is actually a somewhat artful translation of his original statement, in German) about revered gatekeepers and their nostalgia for insights past that keep leaps in scientific understanding from happening. Turns out, he may have been right. Or he may have been wrong. I think it was Paul Feyerabe…

You can't teach an old scientist new tricks; because they know all the tricks.

Only most of the tricks. ;-)

But every few years I learn a new technique, and I'm sure we're not done coming up with more.

Re: As researchers age, they produce less disruptive work

#146
post #62

I prefer the full quote by Douglas Adams. I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented…

Folks! This is a quip from a novelist! Take it with a grain of salt. It has to be punchy, not accurate.

It's possible that Adams was expanding on an Alan Kay quote "Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born"

Re: As researchers age, they produce less disruptive work

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah shared “did you this weeks X” is lame, but it was social glue for a long time.

I think about this all the time . The trend towards personalization in media and software comes at the cost of a loss of a shared social experience we can use to relate to each other.

yeah but do we really need some trash reality-TV for a "shared social experience"? most of TV's programming was garbage anyway and contributed to a lot of what was/is wrong with the society

Re: As researchers age, they produce less disruptive work

#148
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still haven't come across things that see against the natural order. So many people these days spend hours watching short-form videos spray endlessly from a screen while they stare dumbly at it. They aren't even picking which videos to watch, just letting the algorithm do it. Every time I see someone doing that, I just absolutely cannot relate to what's going on in their head at all. I'm certainly not above watch…

Ha, that’s the thing that gets me too. Also people watching mashed up YouTube clip compilations - these seem obviously designed for addiction. The other thing is watching the videos in public with the tinny speakers blaring. Judging by reactions on the trains, this is socially acceptable to most people now ???

I find it really hard to relate to people who do that. I never want people to see/hear what I am doing on my phone or computer, especially if it's something dumb or time-wasting. And to broadcast that into the world in a public space?? its crazy how different people are

Re: As researchers age, they produce less disruptive work

#149

I prefer the full quote by Douglas Adams. I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented…

I disagree with > 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. > 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. > 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things. My experience is rather that earl…

You might find the hypothesis more convincing if you replace technology (something you clearly care about and are up to date with) with something that's not generally your thing but which changes dynamically, like maybe music, fashion, or architecture

Re: As researchers age, they produce less disruptive work

#150
post #58

I prefer the full quote by Douglas Adams. I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented…

I feel this more and more as I age. Especially after having children. I used to be a "tech guy" (like most people here probably) and was excited about new technology. Now my main feeling when something disruptive (like AI currently) comes up is: "why the hell do people need to rock the boat". The thing is, I'm perfectly happy living my life as I have been living so far, concentrating on doing stuff with my children a…

Wow, what a classic boomer sentiment. A strong sense of entitlement, the unwillingness to learn new things, the desire for the world to remain static, and the rage against the new. This post might be checking all the boxes.
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