91–100 of 159 posts
Funnily this aligns perfectly with the WW2 era CIA Sabotaging handbook https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/... Organizations and Conferences: 1. Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. 2. Make “speeches,” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of perso…
Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he…
Day 1: We aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of an existing industrial catalyst in a novel application that has not seen commercial usage, potentially lowering cost of production of precursors for essential medications Day 400: Having thoroughly described a universal theory of everything, we set out to build an experimental apparatus in orbit at a Lagrange point capable of detecting a universal particle which acts…
Sometimes you just want to button-mash through, rushing about carefree.
Other times, you want to go entirely stealth, wandering around, trying to find the best path, wasting an hour or more on a level you could have button-mashed in 5 minutes.
Both are fine.
This technique is called out in the CIA simple field sabotage manual.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Switch back and forth between trying and reviewing. Often it can be good to just try before reviewing, to get your feet wet. Don't spend too much time. Then when reviewing you're going to understand it more. Repeat this process. But there's some things to remember that are incredibly important - a paper doesn't *prove* something, it suggests it is *probably* right - under the conditions of the paper's settings, which…
Your bullet points explain most of the replication crisis, from my perspective.
Combine that with the publish-or-perish paradigm and I think we got significant coverage. People don't even consider diving deeper into things and are encouraged to take the route of "assume paper is correct" because that's the fastest way to push out research. But if the foundation is shaky, then everything built on it is shaky too.
Which, that's a distinction in the hard and more formal fields like math and physics. They have no issues pushing out papers that may have errors in them because the process is to attack works as hard as possible. Then whatever is left is where you build again. You definitely have people take advantage of this, like Avi Loeb publishing about aliens, but it is realistically a small price to pay. And hey, even Loeb's work still contributes. If at some point it actually is aliens, then there's work existing that can be built upon. And when it continues to not be aliens, there's existing work to build on since really his problem is more that the papers just end up concluding "and this is why we can't rule out aliens!" (-__-)
Anyways, long story short, my advice is to just remember that you, and everybody else, is a blubbering idiot and it is a absolute fucking miracle a bunch of mostly hairless apes can even communicate, let alone postulate about the cosmos. At the end of the day we're all on the same team, seeking truth. Truth matters more than our egos and if we start to forget how dumb we are then we'll only hinder our pursuit of truth.
Interesting read but the author's thoughts were all over the place.
Great explanation for what I see when I mess around with coding LLMs. The natural human instinct of “this feels complicated, let me think about it some more” is suppressed. So far all the gains from the stunning initial speed have been cancelled out later in the project, arising from the over-engineered complexity baked into the code.