- chermiGreat response to his repeated and polite requests for you to just say something concrete.
- Can you just lay down exactly what mean in your apparently genius statement that went over our silly heads. "Life is decreasing entropy". I pointed a very direct counterexample that showed your definition needed refinement at the very least. So, one last chance to educate the commoners. What do you actually mean?
You were asked to make a distinction, the opportunity to provide some specificity to your fundamentally flawed You came back with snarkiness and
Yes, intimately familiar with England's work. My physics PhD was in statistical mechanics + biophysics.
Perhaps you don't know how thermo works? Your definition at the very least should define the environment to even be worth consideration. As is, I can either take it face value. In which case it's wrong. Or I can try to get a refined definition out of you, giving you the benefit of the doubt you know what you're talking about. Your attitude and answers don't give me confidence.
This is physics. Define things. We can't read minds.
- Interesting that 3 names I recognized as physicists from stat mech adjacent fields. They continue to punch above their expectations (as sampled by general dismissal of physicists in AI/ML on HN and reddit).
- Your point about being both an investment and an expectation is important. It's a kind of perverse system. I have no idea how to solve it and I haven't heard any answer besides build more housing. I'll take that as the best answer until I hear more ideas. But even that is untenable because everyone who already owns a home blocks new builds. I don't understand why either in most cases given new development typically raises value of proximal real estate.
- What? A liquid solidifying is life?
- Where does he say this?
- People are impressed by his interviews because he puts a lot of effort into researching the topic before the interview. This is a positive feedback loop.
- Customer service.
- Nope. Nvda still getting the revenue.
- Damn. I mean it's was expected I guess. Anyway, back to my Chinese esp32 since they've been better for a while anyway.
- Lol the second I saw the antigravity release I thought "there's no way I'm using that, they will kill it within a year". Looks like they're trying to kill it at birth.
- Walks are magical. But also this reads partially like you got sent to a reeducation camp lol.
- "except through the inference" is carrying a lot of weight there. That's pretty physical.
- Did you read the paper? Or even the intro? If a model has predictive power, it's capturing something, end of story. What you do with it, popsci spins it, how you interpret it has nothing to do with whether or not it's useful. That's your projection. Everything you are saying it doesn't do as if it's an argument against the paper happens to overlap perfectly with the things it never claimed to do.
- "Unfortunately, we didn't ban the loom to save the weavers. Now anyone can have more than one shirt!"
- Don't do drugs that cause them?
- Lost me at "The main theme of biology in twentieth-century is an attempt to reduce biological phenomena to the behavior of molecules". Maybe the theme of biophysics in the 80s-2000s, but certainly not all of biology. Evolution? The central dogma? The cell + DNA+ evolution is what I'd put as the main themes. At least toward the end of century in biophysics the ideas of emergence and hierarchy can be found in any biology or biophysics textbook.
Having done it myself, I really hate the apparently irresistible pull to set up a straw man of your field in the abstract/intro then saying your minor results resolve it. I guess it's part of science now, but I wish it could at least be confined to job talks(1).
Continuing "We argue here that "hierarchy" is a critical level of biological organization". Welcome to the club. Again, any biology/biophysics textbook worth its salt from the 90s on (conservatively) would include probably by page 50 a picture/discussion of the multiple scales involved and probably even mention hierarchical organization explicitly.
It's just hard to take seriously. What is he actually trying to prove/show? Searching Google scholar Im prematurely concluding he applied existing clustering methods (clustering was very sexy in statistical physics right around 2010) and found some modularity across scales. You couldn't throw a rock 10 feet in a physics/biophysics department around that time without finding someone doing some clustering study to show some modular/hierarchical structure in some biological or otherwise "complex" system (trade networks in his case).
Bah I think I'm just in a bad mood lol don't mind me.
Edit- I just noticed he threw in spontaneous. I don't understand what that adds to the description besides making it sound more complicated.
(1) Which reminds me of one job talk I sat in (physics department) where the speaker tried to pass off levinthal's "paradox" of protein folding as unresolved until he graced the field with his brilliance. Maybe he thought no one in the department knew anything about proteins? I was almost impressed by the boldness.
- Thanks!
- I mean, it's as irrational as any belief held with absolute certainty. I hold all such beliefs to the same standard.
- Do you mean that there may be some harm in "hiding" from children their intelligence? I can see that maybe at early ages, but certainly they'll eventually catch on with grades and such? I don't know when different parts of personality manifest, maybe some child psychologist can chime in. But my hunch is that maybe not saying anything until grade 2-3 could potentially help. Above all, I think the key is to tell them that it's trying hard that leads to getting what you want. Obviously that's a bit of a lie, but I think acceptable until a later age.