Jeffrey M Epstein

I'm here to shut up and calculate. And I'm all out of calculate. 😎

Are either of you familiar with Zurek's Quantum Darwinism stuff? Can't remember if you were involved in the kerfuffle about whether or not that is just Everett last week 😂

I'd be so sad if it turned out that a collapse theory was true. So messy and unpleasant.

There's a lot of stimulating discussion in this collection. I read some of it after reading Wallace's book. I think a bunch of the essays are available elsewhere online. global.oup.com/academic/pro...

I do think the connection can be made, but I think to do it right requires more engagement with philosophy of mind than you typically see in discussions among physicists. (So for instance I think that the decision-theoretic approach of Deutsch and Wallace is not really conclusive.)

Agreed that this is the main problem. Non-unitary solutions of the MP let us make this connection by imagining, as we tend to classically, that minds ride around on physical objects. This breaks down in MW, so it remains to make the connection as convincing as the classical connection.

As a matter of fact, I *would* like junior academics who use ai to keep their mouths shut!

Saw a bus stop ad advertising some ai for business thing, and the scenario was a guy with an ice cream store asking “what were our most popular flavors this month?” Have these people not heard of excel?

my first book (2020) was about online neonazis and my second book (2024) was about christian theocrats. they gained strength, voltronned and became a government. my third book (2027) is going to be a history of notable sandwiches so i hope this means we will be governed by sandwichocracy

as a member of the canadian diaspora what aspect of canadian identity should I get weird about

"I use sonnet" "I use haiku" name one poet bro

Got it. I'm sorry for your loss. To clarify: You want a eulogy for your father that's 𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗾𝘂𝗲, sounds 𝘀𝗺𝗮𝗿𝘁, and captures the 𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗵𝗶𝗺. I get it. He wasn't just your father — he was your Dad. Here a few options I came up with:

It would be so cool if we had machines that were really good at doing exactly what we tell them to do when we give them precise instructions. Oh well, might have read too much sci-fi as a kid.

Congressman Brandon Gill @RepBrandonGill How many Americans have to get Allahu Akbar’ed before we realize Islam is a problem?

The way sitting politicians can say this stuff about Muslims while facing zero consequences is an indication of just how entrenched Islamophobia still is in our institutions and culture.

Too many “middle ground” AI arguments—“I have concerns, too, but we have to adapt”—proceed from what is to me a peculiar embrace of “inevitability” which seems to be magical thinking, a way of depoliticizing the political, of self-soothing in the face of an overwhelming challenge.

US-Israeli strike on girls' school kills at least 85 students, Iran's judiciary says At least 85 students have been killed in US-Israeli strikes that hit an Iranian girls' school in Hormozgan province, Iran's judiciary said on Saturday. Washington has not commented on the reported str...

We killed 85 schoolgirls. We are not the good guys.

Reading literature can be like that certainly, as can reading scientific writing. If I don’t understand what an LLM means by some opaque passage, it’s probably because it doesn’t mean anything at all.

In general you can’t! But I meant more that often a piece of text initially seems not to make sense, but you say “well probably the person who wrote this had some consistent thought in mind, so I should try to understand it”. With LLM generated text there was no thought, it might just be nonsense.

It’s been really disappointing to me to realize, maybe belatedly, that a lot of people just do not see the point of not doing something you think is bad if other people are probably going to do that bad thing either way.

Writing "literally fucking anything you can imagine" in my list of future predictions so everyone praises my insight when it becomes true.

Imagine waking up and your government ID has been declared invalid. It’s now illegal for you to drive, or do anything else that requires government ID. You had no warning. You can be arrested if found driving.

That’s life for trans people in Kansas now.

I don’t think most academics realise that we’re way past the ‘AI concerns me’ phase and in the middle of a full scale apocalyptic war waged by tech corporations. We must fight for our lives and for everything we hold dear. AI should be exposed, shamed, and rejected in every facet of our profession.

I think another important aspect of this is that when you engage with a text written by another human, you can rely on there being a thought process more or less like your own behind it, which is often critical for interpretation.

Yeah it’s definitely what he says he shows

I don’t yet see how he can even claim that it’s consistent to do so, given that he also claims to be working entirely within unitary QM. Discard from our consideration, sure, but that’s what Everett does. But discarding from “reality” just has to involve something other than unitary evolution.

That particular article with Preskill I think is less research paper and more two very eminent researchers speculating. Both have a ton of much more detailed, less speculative work.

Oh it's definitely that!

Yes and no. I think these careful but limited works are at least interesting, and on the other hand I do think there's a lot of work, which obviously I won't call out, that is basically just jumping on the bandwagon of combining the two buzzwords, and adds nothing of value.

Based on what I know of his other work, he's a very careful and rigorous scientist, so I feel pretty confident that whatever is in these papers (I haven't carefully read them), it is not just hype or anything like that. But in general I haven't seen much that has convinced me to hope for a lot here.