Doomcrypt

“The tiger that rips men open is following his nature; the real criminal is the man who unmuzzles him and launches him on society.” Joseph de Maistre

The craziest thing about Newsom's $100 million wildlife bridge is that it will allow cougars, an apex predator, direct access into a suburban neighborhood filled with pets, children, and the elderly. It's like the radical environmentalist version of The Purge.

this new claude update is crazy

"I think more lurkers should become posters"

The position of mathematical physics within broader physics research reveals something important. For non-specialists who might be thinking “doesn’t all physics use math?” mathematical physics is much narrower than that. Working physicists use a combination of approximations, kludges, and visualizations to produce useful results. Mathematical physics, by contrast, is a kind of janitorial effort that runs behind and tries to axiomatize and rigorously derive well-accepted physics results. It is a niche field and doesn’t get much funding. The lesson is this: logical rigor is not what moves knowledge forward. It is a part of the suite of criticism that applies evolutionary pressure to theories, but not even that big a part. Progress comes from arational intuition, from flights of fancy, from communion with the divine. “But isn’t that highly unreliable?” Of course. The vast majority of claimed inspired insights are bunk. Most information processing happens not within minds but between them. Divine inspiration is highly unreliable, but still much better than random chance. Memetic selection fills the gap. Deductive reasoning can only produce minor refinements to existing paradigms. We need mystics. And we cannot trust mystics. Only evolution (markets) solve this problem.