Sam

Yes, science is often wrong. But that wasn’t the real issue here. There was nothing truly "scientific" about his conjecture. At best, it was a routine, unremarkable hypothesis—neither rigorously tested nor rooted in any particularly good explanation.

We haven't thought of a theory of a universal programmable heat engine, which would be an upgrade on the way people were thinking about heat engines in the old days of classical thermodynamics. I see the universal programmable heat engine as a special case of what a universal constructor is. ~Conjecture Institute Senior Scientist Chiara Marletto with Fellow @maria__violaris

Get Conjecture Institute's fourth book The Farthest Reaches: Why People Are the Most Important Entities in the Universe, by Conjecture Institute Ambassador Brett Hall a.co/d/0aAVkarH

Heartfelt congratulations to Gilles Brassard and Charles Bennett on this well-deserved recognition. Working with Gilles changed my life. He showed me that learning begins in curiosity: in reconnecting with that childlike drive to follow what genuinely fascinates us.

Seeking candidate working on quantum non-locality.

Great to hear that quantum information pioneers Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard were awarded the Turing Award (essentially the Nobel of computer science)! What are your favourite papers by Bennett & Brassard? Let me know in the thread ⬇️ ✍

This book looks fascinating! Adding it to my list.

My Scientific American essay on the ultimate problem with Thomas Malthus & Paul Ehrlich geometric growth thinking—people are not like locusts: we solve problems. + Stein's Law: things that can't go on forever, won't. + It's always other people who should restrict growth.

I used to wear a small Israeli flag on my backpack. I often felt the need to hide it, and with it my opinion, while walking through Amsterdam.

@mboudry Any system capable of having preferences and pursuing goals will have reasons to dislike death. I doubt dislike of death has all that much to do with evolution.

Why did HAL 9000 beg for his life? Because we can’t stop projecting our own evolutionary instincts onto machines. The “instrumental convergence” argument for AI doom claims that any sufficiently advanced AI, whatever its goals, will tend toward self-preservation and power-seeking as means to achieve them. But that assumes AIs will have the kind of overarching, context-invariant "goals" typical of evolved organisms. They don’t. Absent natural selection (or extremely stupid design choices), there’s no reason AIs will fear shutdown or seek power. newsletter.humanprogress.org/p/why-hal-9000…

Resilience mixed with humor and wit will always be one of my favorite things about Jewish culture. Few mindsets come close to beating it, and it shows.

Paul Ehrlich has passed away, and I wanted to see whether he was as bad as his quotes and short clips suggest. Surely, there might be some nuance or careful thought in his worldview. Nobody is that purely evil. So I picked up The Population Bomb and started reading. It turns out, he's even worse than you think! I’m putting together a thread below. Quotes taken out of context don't get at the degree to which he is consistently evil and misanthropic. He had an entire system that he pursued in which human life was constantly denigrated and devalued, with an eye toward elimination. You’re left wondering what you’re even reducing human population for, since every form of life seems to be not worth living. Some people are racist and just hate poor and brown people. Some hate the rich. Paul Ehrlich doesn't discriminate. He wants you not to exist if he can get away with it. But if he can't stop you from living, he wants you to have a much worse quality of life. Ehrlich has a plan for both advanced and poor countries. He has blueprints for entire regions of the globe. Humans do not have agency in Ehrlich’s world. They’re simple consumers of resources, with no ability to create, better their circumstances, or exert individual agency to make the world a better place, except to the extent that they ensure fellow humans no longer exist. You might find all of this depressing. But I’ve found reading Ehrlich invigorating. It is a reminder of how much evil there is in the world. Recall that Ehrlich was not some guy in his room putting out diatribes. He was a professor at Stanford, a highly decorated scientist, and one of the most prominent public intellectuals of his generation. While reading Ehrlich today, know that he has intellectual descendants in the form of degrowthers and other environmental extremists, along with anti-capitalists who don’t understand the basis of prosperity and prioritize redistributing wealth over all else.

One mouth, two hands.

Two view of humanity. From a talk I gave some years ago. Relevant today.

@davidmanheim I read a bit more, and you’re right, he didn’t cure the dog. Thanks for the correction. That said, the treatment is ongoing and does seem to be having a positive effect: some tumours have shrunk significantly, and the dog’s condition has improved.

@Sam_kuyp ...except for the part where he didn't actually save his dog, because it didn't work? x.com/no_earthquake/…

He could save his dog because regulations didn’t stop him. If he had tried to save a loved one, he would have been trapped in bureaucracy. How many people die each year simply because regulation prevents access to new treatments?

Exactly right. Twitter users think "the Laffer Curve" means "every tax cut always pays for itself", and they feel super-smart for "rebutting" that position, even though nobody ever said that.

From @DavidDeutschOxf at daviddeutsch.org.uk/2004/02/

“The key to understanding the Dirac delta function is that it’s not a function on real numbers but a continuous linear functional on the space of smooth functions with compact support.”