Richie O'Farrell

@ToKTeacher @nivi Have you seen the prompt? That doesn’t seem like an accurate description of what happened in this case.

@nivi I don’t like to prophesy but I imagine in a decade or less kids and mathematicians using LLMs to help will regard them as people presently do pocket calculators. Not as “solving the problem” (only people do that) - but as just helping with laborious mechanical calculation.

When AI solves a new mathematical problem, it’s not magic. The solution was already in the algorithmic scope of the model—someone just had to press the right button.

Dorset is a nice place

@lorintbc @lewis_goodall The Palestinians, who famously accepted the Jews after WW2. Incredible stuff here.

Incredible interview by @lewis_goodall in which Akhmed Yakoob compares himself to Nelson Mandela because he has fought "Jewish apartheid" and suggests Goodall has "Zionist" puppet masters. Could Yakoob end up a major power broker in Britain's second city after today's local elections?

@MiguelDelaney @calax12 That’s always been true. Success requires investment. Success in a competitive field requires more investment. You seem to be suggesting that the sport is now less exciting for it. I don’t think any football fans I know would agree. The quality is just much higher.

the absolute crucial point is that the game SHOULDN'T be so dictated by wealth. That's why it shouldn't be so difficult. Again, this is only a recent development. And you can still spend money badly. The point is you need a certain level of money to win. It isn't a guarantee but it is a minimum requirement.

Palace's win an inevitable aberration, then. Can't be denied that Southampton-Leeds United would have been quite an event with so much meaning to it Instead the final again between two of football's modern powers, one that was recently punished for breaching Premier League rules, the other still the subject of an investigation that now stretches back over seven years - the club insist on their innocence.

@MiguelDelaney @calax12 Why should it not be that difficult? It’s a hugely competitive sport watched by billions. Naturally winning it is going to be difficult, and that will favour wealthier clubs. But look at the gap between United and City. It isn’t explained by spending.

which is a recent development that I have written about a lot. And the Leicester exception proves the point. It shouldn't be that difficult for an outsider to win the title. It didn't used to be in the past. There were a lot of examples of clubs coming up and quickly winning the title, from Ipswich Town to Liverpool to Leeds

@MiguelDelaney @calax12 City have won lots, sure; but almost every year it’s been down to the wire. If your argument is that the premier league is a less competitive league now, you should look at how many points separate Chelsea and Nottingham forest. Leicester never happened either, of course.

City are about to win their seventh title in nine years. No club with a revenue of below 400m has won the Champions League in 13 years. Only one non-Bayern club has won the Bundesliga since 2012, where as recently as the 2000s Wolfsburg and Stuttgart were winning it. West Ham were the wealthiest club in the Europa Conference by far. It holds up very, very robustly

@MiguelDelaney @calax12 Palace won it last year. Spurs are about to get relegated. West Ham won a Europa. One of Forest or Villa will probably win it this year. The ‘top 6’ have not comprised the actual top 6 for about ten years. Just doesn’t hold up under a moment’s scrutiny.

@calax12 an issue that has got much worse over the past two decades.

Way to put down the smartest people you know

@dela3499 Have you read this article? It’s about the evolution of sentences: worksinprogress.co/issue/the-logi…

Made this to visualize the length of my sentences: words-per-sentence.netlify.app

@s8mb Makes a lot of sense. The housing crisis is driven by expensive houses, not by things that make houses expensive

The Campaign to Protect Rural England contends that the housing crisis is driven by high rents, not building too few houses.

Today I came across the astonishing fact that Vladimir Nabokov was obsessed with butterfly genitalia – to the point that he developed serious hypotheses about butterfly evolution, one of which has been corroborated by DNA sequencing

@pwlot That nothing gets wet in a simulation of a rainstorm is besides the point; the functionalist claim is that minds are importantly unlike rainstorms, and consciousness unlike rain. A better comparison is whether, in a simulation of a person in a rainstorm, anything would *feel* wet

Functionalism brags that “causal structure matters,” then throws away the actual physics doing the causing. Digital computation is always physically realized too, but it is engineered precisely to suppress substrate-specific detail and preserve abstract state transitions across many media. Brains are not like that. Their causal powers are inseparable from physics, chemistry, timing, morphology, and organization interacting across levels at once, including everything the body does in tandem. Digital computation is designed to keep layers relatively separable. Brains are not. And what we care about w.r.t. brains is not that they are organic, biological or mushy, but the *causal work* their do. Substitute consciousness with some other physical phenomenon, say an ocean. A digital simulation can preserve abstract structure, dynamics, even functional relations. But it does not become wet, saline, massive, or hydrodynamically forceful. It does not inherit the causal powers of an actual ocean. So why does functionalism suddenly sound acceptable only when the target is consciousness? In every other case it reads like hogwash about simulations magically becoming the thing simulated. And this is not just throwing out the causal baby with the causal bathwater. It is throwing out the causal baby with the causal ocean: a combinatorial explosion of possible interactions on the order of 10^24 and beyond, vastly exceeding the number of stars in the observable universe, interactions that can never, ever, even in principle occur, because the simulation does not share the causal signature of the thing simulated.

Many public discussions center around trends and statistics that are not real at all. For over a decade, there was widespread public discourse about the causes of high and rising maternal mortality in the US. But, as I've written about before , CDC analyses showed that the apparent rise from 2003 to 2017 was due to a change in measurement ourworldindata.org/rise-us-matern… , when a pregnancy checkbox was added to death certificates, which flowed directly into maternal mortality counts in most cases. Rather than mortality rising, the rate had been stable. Many deaths had been previously missed, and many other countries were undercounting maternal deaths. This isn't an isolated case. - People often cite the IHME's estimate of childhood height having fallen in the UK over the past decade. Looking at the data sources, it missed one of the key sources of data on height - a national dataset measuring the height and weight of almost all schoolchildren in the UK, which showed no decline (that data wasn't publicly available until an FOIA request) - and instead the IHME estimates were likely extrapolated based on a global model and smaller, less reliable surveys. neilobrien.co.uk/p/honey-we-did… - I often hear claims about disruptive science having declined over time based on a highly influential paper in Nature. nature.com/articles/s4158… But the key results were affected by a coding bug, which would have showed a decline simply due to this artefact arxiv.org/abs/2402.14583 - The idea that interstate migration in the US has collapsed has led to lots of concern about dynamism and unemployment. But recently, it's been shown that much of the apparent decline was a statistical artefact of how the survey filled in missing responses, causing it to systematically overcount non-movers. Correcting this shows only a very slight decline over time link.springer.com/article/10.100… - The dramatic rise in autism diagnoses, which has spurred lots of commentary about pesticide use and vaccines, actually reflects changes in how autism was defined. In the 1960s, autism described severely disabled, mostly nonverbal children: if a child was verbal or succeeding at school, they were excluded from the diagnosis by definition. The criteria then widened across successive editions of the DSM. Alongside it, it became much easier to get assessed, from requiring a specialist with months-long waiting lists to something that could be done in a few appointments. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25922345/ -- I think this is a persistent problem of people undervaluing data quality and measurement. It may sound dull or academic to care about these issues, but numbers and statistics are a big part of public discussions. They can be the premise of debates that can go on for years and sometimes even decades, and mislead people about social and policy interventions to fix them. So before spending time arguing about the causes and consequences of a trend or statistic and what should be done about it, it's worth digging into the data to see if it supports the premise at all. I suspect there are many other discussions affected by this too. Are there others I've missed?

Just in case you’re having a bad day, remember this is how they weigh koalas 😍

they finally solved greed!

@pgodfreysmith @SMcfarnell Seems to beg the question. The fact that, eg oscillations, would be difficult to replicate in hardware does not matter if substrate independence is true, and the fact that this is how nature likes to compute does not mean this is the only feasible implementation.

This article previews some parts of it, though tomorrow will have a lot more detail. The IAI one is now paywalled, but I can send pre-prints and I will post one soon. 3/ iai.tv/articles/studi…

Tomorrow at @Columbia I give the 2026 Nagel Lecture (named after Ernest N, a wise mid-20th century NYC philosopher, rather than Thomas N, equally NYC and equally wise). A mind-body talk. Link for RSVP below. IRL only. 1/

@_DKatal_ @JackTFaller @lfg_uk @angryaboutbikes Go in peace

@Richie_OFarrell @JackTFaller @lfg_uk @angryaboutbikes Poke fun all you like. I’ve spent years actively engaging in precisely these things happening in the real world to real people on behalf of a tenants union. If you don’t own property then you are completely cucked here, arguing for your own impoverishment. Cattle mindset

@_DKatal_ @JackTFaller @lfg_uk @angryaboutbikes Ahh, so developers can predict which areas prices will rise or fall, over 10-30 year time horizons – makes sense. Yes, I do own property, actually, and I especially enjoy raising rents and evicting tenants, because I am evil and greedy and bad, like a cartoon character

@Richie_OFarrell @JackTFaller @lfg_uk @angryaboutbikes They’ve been falling on a UK wide average *just* but increasing still by +5% pa in the NE and NW. Developers DO hoard land. You don’t know what you’re talking about and I can’t see why your instinct is to defend landlords and property developers here. Do you own property?

@_DKatal_ @JackTFaller @lfg_uk @angryaboutbikes Because when you adjust for the costs of holding capital idle, construction, opportunity costs, and risk, trying to time the market is a terrible strategy. Real house prices have also been falling, and haven’t beaten inflation by enough for this to be worth it if they could do it

@Richie_OFarrell @JackTFaller @lfg_uk @angryaboutbikes Property prices increase over time, sometimes, and in the uk often, faster than inflation. Why develop and sell the properties today for £200k per unit when they can wait 10 years and sell for £400k per unit?

@_DKatal_ @JackTFaller @lfg_uk @angryaboutbikes What is the incentive for a developer to wait 30 years? It is most profitable for them to complete as quickly as possible, so they can sell it, hence why it doesn’t happen.

@Richie_OFarrell @JackTFaller @lfg_uk @angryaboutbikes Completions when it is most profitable for them. Which could be in 30 years if they like. In either case, this is not a supply side issue, it is the result of rent increases in aggregate from greedy landlords making housing a more lucrative investment. Compare with W. Europe