Contract Programmer Seeks Job in Cambridge (£500 reward)

 

Anyone in Cambridge need a programmer? I'll give you £500 if you can find me a job that I take.

CV at http://www.aspden.com

I make my usual promise, which I have paid out on several times:

If, within the next six months, I take a job which lasts longer than one month, and that is not obtained through an agency, then on the day the first cheque from that job cashes, I'll give £500 to the person who provided the crucial introduction.

If there are a number of people involved somehow, then I'll apportion it fairly between them. And if the timing conditions above are not quite met, or someone points me at a shorter contract which the £500 makes not worth taking, then I'll do something fair and proportional anyway.

And this offer applies even to personal friends, and to old contacts whom I have not got round to calling yet, and to people who are themselves offering work, because why wouldn't it?

And obviously if I find one through my own efforts then I'll keep the money. But my word is generally thought to be good, and I have made a public promise on my own blog to this effect, so if I cheat you you can blacken my name and ruin my reputation for honesty, which is worth much more to me than £500.

---

I know all styles of programming and many languages, and can use any computer language you're likely to use as it was intended to be used.

I have a particular facility with mathematical concepts and algorithms of all kinds. I can become very interested in almost any problem which is hard enough that I can't solve it easily.

I have a deserved reputation for being able to produce heavily optimised, but nevertheless bug-free and readable code, but I also know how to hack together sloppy, bug-ridden prototypes, and I know which style is appropriate when, and how to slide along the continuum between them.

I've worked in telecoms, commercial research, banking, university research, chip design, server virtualization, university teaching, sports physics, a couple of startups, and occasionally completely alone.

I've worked on many sizes of machine. I've written programs for tiny 8-bit microcontrollers and gigantic servers, and once upon a time every IBM machine in the Maths Department in Imperial College was running my partial differential equation solvers in parallel in the background.

I'm smart and I get things done. I'm confident enough in my own abilities that if I can't do something I admit it and find someone who can.

I know what it means to understand a thing, and I know when I know something. If I understand a thing then I can usually find a way to communicate it to other people. If other people understand a thing even vaguely I can usually extract the ideas from them and work out which bits make sense.

Why Do Most Religious Conservatives Support Capitalist Ideology?

I wonder why religious conservatives are mostly synonymous with capitalism supporters ? I mean arent most religions inherently socialistic ? What makes conservatives support capitalism , despite not being among the rich?

Asked a redditor on lemmy, which is the new reddit.

https://old.thelemmy.club/post/1302560

I normally avoid politics as being mostly kayfabe, but the same thought has occasionally occurred to me, so I had this answer ready:

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I can't answer for America, but generally in democracies you get two and only two parties. Anyone taking a middle position cripples the side they're closest to.

Before Socialism was a thing, England had 'Liberals/Whigs' (what yanks would call libertarians, because they've somehow managed to repurpose the word liberal to mean the opposite of what it means) and 'Conservatives/Tories' (king and country and church and don't change things because you'll break them and hurt people).

And of course, like all political groups do, they hated each other.

The Church of England was once known as the Tory Party at Prayer. The Liberals were the radicals, the party of industry and progress and free markets and who cares who it hurts as long as it's the future.

With the rise of socialism/fascism/anarchism/progressivism, a truly radical program to rebuild society on utopian lines and use totalitarian terror to enable even more freedom and progress and human happiness, represented in England by the Labour Party, the 'conservatives' and 'liberals' were squeezed, and combined to oppose socialist thought, which hated them both and wanted to destroy everything they thought was worthwhile in the world.

So there came to pass an uneasy alliance in England between classical liberals and religious loonies, who'd naturally detest each other.

That's the modern Conservative party, who want to use radical social transformation to go back to the glorious past, and are very much in favour of freedom of speech and thought as long as it's the sort of speech and thought that they approve of.

The Liberal Party effectively ceased to exist, because in its radicalism and desire for progress, it was more sympathetic to socialist thought, and so it got crushed.

Socialism has rather collapsed as an idea after an hundred years of practical experience with utopia, leaving Labour as the party of 'every problem can be solved by stealing more money and spending it on subsidies'. A position which is popular with those who benefit from subsidy, and unpopular with those who get their stuff stolen.

And of course, few of the people in either party actually believe in the causes they publicly espouse. They're not stupid. But public communications have to be simple-minded and rally tribal support.

Obviously this is a terrible system, but it's better than regular civil war, which is what you get in all other systems of government.

I Don't Know What to Believe Any More

(in answer to a redditor confused about the seed-oil hypothesis)

You shouldn't believe things at all. There are lots of different ideas, any of which might be true.

You should develop the ability to hold them all in your head at the same time, and shift the weight of your belief according to the evidence you see.

Think less about modern religion, with its "one truth and you burn if you get it wrong", and more about the ancient Romans, patiently trying out all the gods and rituals they found to see which ones actually worked.

Epidemiological studies are evidence, but not terribly good evidence.

Randomized double-blind placebo controlled trials are good evidence, but you need to work out what it is they actually tested!

Self-experiments are gold dust, but watch out, it's easy to fool yourself.

Anecdotes from other people are evidence, but watch out for motivated thinking, and remember that not everyone works the same way, which is one of the reasons medical "science" is so very hard.

Evolutionary reasoning, and biochemical theory are good evidence, but it's hard to work out the implications of either for all sorts of reasons.

This is all very difficult and murky. If it was straightforward we would already know the answers.

But whatever you currently believe, what you should first do is look for evidence against it, until you aren't so sure any more!

People who don’t reply until days later, why?

 

From AskReddit : People who don’t reply until days later, why?

I get asked this all the time, so here's my answer in written form for those who like that sort of thing!

The Zen of Feeding the Birds

A gentleman on the cambridge subreddit is annoyed by his neighbour throwing stale bread into a public garden. My reply:

I found that when I lived in London, I used to get annoyed by the regular rapes and murders. When I moved back to Cambridge, I got annoyed by parking permits and traffic and tourists. When I hid out in Wicken Fen in the perfect peace and stillness of the pandemic, all alone for weeks with nothing to do but read and play chess, I eventually developed an almost magical-seeming ability to get annoyed by birdsong and the sound of the wind in the trees.

There is always something to get annoyed by. Usually the best way to deal with it is to find a way to deal with your habit of getting triggered, which is something that slowly develops like any other habit.

And you can fix that like you can fix any other habit. When rational and calm, work out what someone who wasn't annoyed by that sort of thing would think about your trigger (oh, how kind of that nice man to feed the birds!) , and then practice exposing yourself to the trigger and automatically starting off your desired new thought pattern.

It takes practice, but if you work at it, you'll eventually stop being annoyed. And then you'll have the superpower of being able to live free and calm in a place where annoying things happen.

Assisted Suicide

Scott Adams wished his father dead: (https://www.scottadamssays.com/i-hope-my-father-dies-soon/)

And this paragraph stuck out for me:

If you're a politician who has ever voted against doctor-assisted suicide, or you would vote against it in the future, I hate your fucking guts and I would like you to die a long, horrible death. I would be happy to kill you personally and watch you bleed out. I won't do that, because I fear the consequences. But I'd enjoy it, because you motherfuckers are responsible for torturing my father. Now it's personal. 

I absolutely endorse this sentiment. If you are such a politician, I would very much enjoy gutting you with a rusty fruit knife. And I'm not even angry yet. My parents are still alive, still in good shape, still happy; for now.

I would nevertheless like to recognize the honourable behaviour of Lord Rix, who fought against assisted suicide his whole life, and then, right at the end, facing the horror himself, admitted he was wrong and publicly changed his mind. 

That is a very brave thing to do. He still deserved everything he went through, but I would pray for his soul if I thought it would help. 

The rest of you can go to Hell and stay there. For a lengthy, yet finite, time. I am not as evil as your God.

Favourite Science Fiction

r/scifi asks us:

"What are your alltime top five science fiction novels"

https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/upaxq8/what_are_your_alltime_top_5_scifi_novels/

** Top Five (in no particular order):

• A Deepness in the Sky
• Protector
• Permutation City
• Blindsight
• The Sparrow

** Runners Up for Top Five (again in no order, but none of these displace one of the top five for me):

• Children of Time / Children of Ruin
• Foundation (and the rest of the trilogy)
• Dune
• Flowers for Algernon
• Seveneves
• The Worthing Saga
• The Mote in God's Eye
• Anathem
• Marching through Georgia (and sequels)
• Most of Larry Niven's early stuff, none of his later stuff, plus several of the Man-Kzin Wars stories 

 

** Not novels, but nicely mind-blowing in the way that good novels are:

• That Alien Message (Eliezer Yudkowsky) 
• Lena (by "qntm")

** Interpreting SF rather broadly to include fantasy series that are nevertheless set in worlds with consistent rules

• A Song of Ice and Fire / Game of Thrones and sequels.
• Lord of the Rings / Fellowship of the Ring and sequels
• Liveship Traders / Ship of Magic and sequels

** And finally, on the basis that these were science fiction when written (take our best theory of the world and run with it) but have become fantasy over the years, and also that they can get away with not being novels because novels weren't a thing:

• Paradise Lost
• Inferno
• The Odyssey
• The Aeneid
• Agamemenon
• Iphigenia at Aulis
• The Bacchae
• Metamorphoses
  

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was a good question! And I rather got into it.

For me, the books on the list above have something transcendent and poetic about them, as well as having the essential speculative fiction characteristic of being set in very well thought out, believable worlds where an idea is taken seriously and the implications are followed up.

Of the two, I prefer the second characteristic to the first, but if you get both, that book's a real work of art.

All of these stories have changed the way I think about the world, both in the intellectual sense of pointing out things I didn't know about things I already knew, and in the emotional sense of altering my reaction to things.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Deathbed Conversion

Turns out Group Theory's really neat, with lots of pretty diagrams and cool intuitions and beautiful theorems. (Disclaimer, only gone as far as the Sylow Theorems, but still...)

This unexpected revelation came to me through Nathan Carter's 'Visual Group Theory', possibly the most readable maths book I've ever come across.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Visual-Theory-Classroom-Resource-Materials/dp/1470464330/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=visual+group+theory&qid=1648992100&sr=8-1

Despite being readable, I would say 'un-put-downable', it's a proper maths book. You need to do the exercises. Don't go on to Chapter 2 until you've done all the exercises from Chapter 1, etc. 

The most common complaint is that it's too slow at the start, too fast at the end. This is not true. The slow bits at the start are building your intuition by playing around with simple cases. 

You'll end up being able to flip between algebra and geometry and graph-theoretic ways of looking at groups.

Towards the end, real theorems start appearing, the ones you'd get in a first-year undergraduate groups course, and when you look at them through all the new lenses you've acquired through the early part of the book, they're obvious and beautiful. That's kind of the point of the book. 

You're only allowed to complain about how hard chapter 9 is if you've actually done all the exercises in chapters 1-8. 

If you find yourself in that sort of position and can make it to Cambridge, get in touch! I can explain everything I've read so far, and will happily exchange in-person supervisions for coffee in pub gardens.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Other helpful things I've used over the last few months of fascinated exploration are: 

 

 

The errata page: http://web.bentley.edu/empl/c/ncarter/vgt/errata.html

Actually the fact that there are errors in the book has made it more fun.

Sometimes you find something in the book that seems a bit fishy. After you've thought about it for a while, you can usually make it make sense, but if it still doesn't, it's probably been reported as an erratum by now, so you can go and check. (Also, I managed to get one in myself! The pride! The glory!)

The wikipedia definition of semi-direct product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semidirect_product

I could not make head or tail of Nathan's notion of 'rewiring diagram', so I couldn't get more than the vaguest sense of what a semidirect product was. 

So I ended up working out how the semidirect product works in an algebraic sense. *That* requires knowing what an automorphism is, which is not a terribly difficult concept, and it turns out that 'rewiring diagram' is an excellent way of visualizing automorphisms. 

You can probably shortcut this process by just working out what an automorphism is and how it relates to Nathan's rewiring diagrams.

 

 

An online implementation of the Todd Coxeter coset enumeration algorithm:

https://math.berkeley.edu/~kmill/tools/tc.html

It's a very good idea to learn how to do this by hand, and the best way is to read Todd and Coxeter's initial paper. 

Todd, J. A.; Coxeter, H. S. M. (1936). "A practical method for enumerating cosets of a finite abstract group". Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society. Series II. 5: 26–34. doi:10.1017/S0013091500008221. JFM 62.1094.02. Zbl 0015.10103.

All modern explanations of it are incomprehensible.

However actually doing it by hand gets old pretty quickly, so getting a computer to do it is really useful if you just want to explore.

 

 

A page of small-group Cayley diagrams:

http://www.weddslist.com/groups/cayley-31/index.html

The Unmitigated Pedantry of Bret Devereux

I have over the last few months derived great pleasure from the blog of Bret Devereux, an academic historian interested in military history, the classical world, and speculative fiction. He is a sufficiently good writer that he can make subjects I'm not particularly interested in (ancient steel-making processes???) seem fascinating and important. And of course some of his major interests are at least minor interests of mine.

In almost every one of his posts, he requests that people spread the word about his blog; he wants a large audience. 

I am more than happy to oblige him and unreservedly recommend:

https://acoup.blog

 

 

The Proof of Doom

Epistemic Status: Ravings

Importance: Easily the most important problem in the world.

If we can escape the proof of doom, we will likely also solve all our other problems as a side effect, and all that remains will be the fundamental limits. Our new questions will be things like "How much joy can the universe physically support?"

---

It seems to me that the world, and everyone in it, is doomed, and that the end is considerably nigher than I might like.

To be more specific, I think that we may well create an Artificial General Intelligence within around 20 years time, and that
that will be our last act.

The newly-created AGI will immediately kill everyone on the planet, and proceed to the destruction of the universe. Its sphere of destruction will expand at light speed, eventually encompassing everything reachable.

There may well be more proximal threats to our species. Comets are one obvious one, but they seem very unlikely. Artificially created universally fatal plagues are another, but perhaps not very likely to happen within the next twenty years.

---

I've believed this for many years now, although my timescales were longer originally, but it seems to me that this is now becoming a common belief amongst those who have thought about the problem.

In fact, if not consensus, then at least the majority opinion amongst those mathematicians, computer scientists, and AI researchers who have given the subject more than a few days thought.

Those who once were optimistic seem pessimistic now. Those who were once dismissive seem optimistic.

But it is far from being even a mainstream opinion amongst those who might understand the arguments.

Far, even, from rising to the level of a possible concern.

Amongst my personal friends, amongst people who would mostly take my word on technical and scientific issues, I have found it impossible to communicate my fears.

Not all those who are capable of pressing the suicide button understand that there is a suicide button.

---

What to do?

One might empathise with Cassandra. A vision of flame, and no-one will believe.

Cassandra had many opportunities to save her city, but the curse of Apollo rendered her unable to communicate with her fellow citizens. Those of her cohort who independently sensed danger were individually obstructed by the gods.

We operate under no such constraints.

Our arguments are not clear.

My attempts to communicate the danger involve a complex argument with a series of intuitive leaps.

Any given interlocutor will balk at a particular hurdle, and write off the entire argument.

---

Consider a toy example.

Until very recently I did not understand Fermat's Christmas Theorem ( https://thatsmaths.com/2014/12/25/fermats-christmas-theorem/ )

I considered it one of those tedious facts that number theorists always seem fond of.

I think if someone had shown me the 'One Sentence Proof': (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_theorem_on_sums_of_two_squares#Zagier's_%22one-sentence_proof%22)

then I might have been able to understand it. With a lot of effort.

But I am reasonably certain that I wouldn't have put the effort in, because it wouldn't have seemed worth the trouble.

Just before Christmas, a friend encountered in a pub showed me a couple of examples of the 'windmill argument', which make the central idea of that proof visual.

We couldn't actually finish the proof in the pub, but the central idea nerd-sniped me, and so I played with it for a couple of days.

And at the end of it, I was convinced of the truth and of the beauty of the theorem.

I now think that I could explain it to a bright ten-year old, if that ten-year old was curious enough to play with pictures for an hour.

I'm considering writing an xscreensaver hack to illustrate it.

I still don't care about the result itself. But the beauty of the proof makes it a result that sparks joy.

---

That's what a proof is. Not a vague collection of intuitions. Not an obscure collections of symbols and formal manipulations.

A proof is, quite simply, an argument strong enough to convince a listener of its conclusion.

We need a Proof of Doom.

---

The proof must live, must be unanswerable. Must be clear.

Must be simple enough to convince anyone capable of bringing about the apocalypse that there is an apocalypse to be brought about.

A version full of greek letters would be nice to have in addition, such things tend to be more amenable to automatic verification.

But what we need is something that will convince a human mind without too much trouble. Every step must be interesting, must be compelling. Must be clear.


And I may be wrong. Perhaps the fact that almost no-one agrees with me and that I can't convince anyone is a sign that I am wrong. It has happened before. Maybe my argument is not sound. Maybe it is mostly sound, but there are loopholes.

Attempting to prove the truth of an idea is often a good way of showing that the idea is false.

By the Father and the Bright-Eyed Girl, would that this idea were false.

Excuse me Brother, have you let the Reverend Bayes into your life?

The Onion spoke wisely:

https://www.theonion.com/cdc-announces-plan-to-send-every-u-s-household-pamphle-1848354068

And in response someone on reddit said:

Can you share an example of the way it changed your worldview? I did not experience a similar perspective shift when learning the same material, and I'm curious if there's something I've missed out on.

To which my reply was:

 

Principally for me the idea that there can be several possible underlying explanations for a thing, and that rather than choosing one, you should keep them all in mind, and shift credibility around amongst them as evidence comes in.

E.g. what am I rolling? 6 3 2 1 7 3 3 2 .....

What will you bet, and at what odds?

 

This then attracted the (very good) reply:

1 shows you're rolling a single die, 7 shows it has at least more than 6 faces, assuming a standard polyhedral die it has to be at least a d8 but with no result higher than a 7 it is extremely unlikely to be a d20 and somewhat unlikely to be a d12 (although that is far to short a sequence to be certain) so I would bet it's a d8... at what odds, without breaking out my calculator I'd say its 75% d8 22% d12 3% d20

Which to my mind shows exactly the sort of thinking that I think is the major benefit of learning a bit of Bayes.

So at that point I felt that it would be nice to give my own fully worked out answer to the question:

(which is just completely the obvious answer so if you can already do this, don't bother reading it or do it yourself and see if you agree with me)

 

Sorry I Gave You COVID Card

Just suppose, for the sake of argument, that a man had very mild flu symptoms, but thought nothing of it because he'd had the flu vaccine a couple of days before.

And further suppose that he went round to his friend's house, in order to practice Christmas Carols for a hypothetical Carol Sing the following day.

And imagine that that man woke up the following day with a temperature of 38.6, and did not in fact go carol singing.

Then a man might find himself in need of an apologetic note, which prints out nicely on A4 and folds up to make a little card:

It's not entirely impossible to imagine such a series of events occurring, so as a public service I have created such a note. 

If the png doesn't work for you, or you need a different message, like maybe you need to add "most of" or something then the original libreoffice document is here: https://github.com/johnlawrenceaspden/hobby-code/blob/master/covidcard/covidcard.odt

Merry Pandemic Everyone!

On a Wall

 

Stolen from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta)

Real Science Fiction

I want to share a link to the following delightful paper:

Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox, by Stuart Armstrong and Anders Sandberg

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576513001148

Here is an example paragraph:

3.1.1. Data storage

It should be noted that data storage does not seem to offer much of the restriction here. The most compact method of data storage reasonably imaginable would be a diamond constructed of carbon 12 and 13, with the two types of atoms serving as bits.

This would have a storage capacity of 5x10^22 bits per gram. By comparison, the total amount of data in the human world has been estimated at 2.4x10^21 bits.

If human brains could be instantiated inside a computer, then 100 Terabytes is a reasonable estimate for the number of connections in a human brain, meaning 1 g of diamond could contain about all the world's data and the (uncompressed) population of Britain.


Which seems to me the sort of thing that should be obvious to any numerate schoolboy, except that it really isn't, until someone points it out.

If you like that paragraph, you'll probably enjoy the rest of the paper!

A Potted History of Modern Rationalism

Like most rationalists, I do not identify as a rationalist. 

Nevertheless I notice that that movement has grown to the point where there are people who do identify as rationalists but do not remember where it came from.

And indeed there are persons attacking the movement for being unduly convinced of the power of human reason. This would indeed be good attack on rationalism, the 16th century philosophical movement which was opposed to empiricism.

It is not such a good attack on the modern movement which perhaps unfortunately shares its name.

So I had occasion to write a short history of modern rationalism as I remember it appeared to me as it was developing:

--------------------------------------------------------

Our holy text, "The Sequences" was originally a series of blogposts on Robin Hanson's blog "Overcoming Bias", which he shared with the blessed Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Their joint project was to find ways of overcoming the recently discovered 'cognitive biases' that suggest that humans don't usually reason correctly, compared to an idealized rational agent (which is kind of the standard model person in economics). Those cognitive biases were discussed in Daniel Kahneman's popular book "Thinking Fast and Slow", an excellent read.

Robin's shtick is pretty much "X isn't about Y", and he recently published an excellent book "The Elephant in the Brain", which is almost entirely devoted to the idea: 

Human economic and political actions (education, health, etc) make very little sense compared to their declared reasons, what the hell is going on?

It's a very good read.

Eliezer was much more interested in what an ideal reasoner would look like, because he wanted to build one so that it could save the world from all the other horrible existential risks that are pretty obviously going to wipe us all out quite soon.

That project got delayed when he realized, or possibly was informed by Nick Bostrom (of Superintelligence), that a rational agent would, by default, kill everyone and destroy everything of value in the universe.

So Eliezer's new plan is to save the world by working out how to design a powerful agent that will try to act as a benevolent god, rather than an all-destroying one. Or at least to try to convince all the people around the world currently working on artificial intelligence to at least be aware of the problem before destroying the world.

And Robin's still interested in economics and human reasoning.

[ This paragraph is disputed, see comments:

The whole 'Effective Altruism' movement was originally at least partly an evil plan by Eliezer to convince people to give him money for his scheme to optimize or at least not destroy the world (they are pretty much the same thing to a powerful agent), which has now ballooned out to be a separate force largely under the control of people who have other goals, such as eliminating suffering.

That's my personal memory, but it seems like that's wrong. I'm confused]

 

Scott Alexander/Scott Siskind/Yvain (πολυτρόπως) wrote all sorts of excellently readable articles on Less Wrong about how to think correctly if all you've got is a human brain, before deciding that it would be better to have his own blog where he could talk about political issues. (Less Wrong was against discussion of political issues because they're (probably for evolutionary reasons) incredibly hard to think about, and the idea was to practise thinking in less inflammatory areas.)

Anyway, I think it's reasonable to claim that the whole rationalist movement was founded on comparing broken human reasoning to what real reasoning might look like!

-----------------------------------------------------

I should point out that I don't actually know any of these people, don't even live on the same continent, am not privy to their thoughts and plans, and have made absolutely no contribution myself, but I have always been very interested in their published writings. I wonder if I should expand this outsider's view into a proper essay and seek input from the people I'm slandering.

Yudkowsky on Physics

An interlocutor recently spoke disdainfully of Eliezer Yudkowsky's writings about Quantum Physics.

The relevant excerpt is:

like the infamous quantum mechanics sequence, that seemed to fail to change anyone's mind with relevant domain knowledge

And I replied:

It's funny that you should mention the quantum mechanics sequence. That was actually my introduction to his thinking.

I did a degree in pure and applied maths, and although I was definitely on the "pure" side, QM was one of the things I'd gone to university to understand, so I took a couple of courses on it.

There's no question that I could do the maths, and I could solve all the examples and exam questions, and my teachers seemed very pleased with how well I took to it.

But it made absolutely no sense to me as a theory of how the universe worked. I don't mean that it was counter-intuitive. Lots of things in probability and physics are counter-intuitive. I just mean that I really didn't understand how to set up the problems, or what it meant to live in a universe which ran on QM. 

Whenever someone took a physical problem and represented it as a piece of quantum mechanical maths, the set-up for the problem just seemed completely ad-hoc. And any attempt to think about how such a universe might support living beings was hopeless. It really seemed to me that observers, and conscious observers at that, were part of the fundamental physics. And that they had to act from outside the physics.

My teachers were very much of the 'shut up and calculate' school. We know it doesn't really make sense, they said, but people have been beating their brains out about this for something like seventy years and no-one's really come up with a way of looking at it that makes intuitive sense. But on the other hand, the calculations do give us a way of predicting the results of lots of otherwise incomprehensible experiments. Your best bet is to push on with doing the calculations and maybe by the time you get to Quantum Field Theory it will have started to feel more normal.

I wouldn't accept that. But I hadn't got anything better, so I eventually just gave up on the subject.

I stayed curious though, and in fact later on I had several conversations with people doing actual PhDs in QM, where it became obvious that they just didn't get it. They had really fundamental misunderstandings of what was happening in simple set-ups like the double-slit experiment.

Which didn't stop them making worthwhile contributions, of course. Euler didn't get a lot of the stuff he worked on, he makes some quite silly errors with complex numbers at times, because he didn't understand what they were. But his intuition and technical skill allowed him to get results that ended up being actually proved very much later. This is quite normal in mathematics, and is probably the real difference between pure and applied maths.

One day someone told me that they'd read an explanation of QM that seemed sane, and that I should take a look at it. They linked to EY's essay on Less Wrong.

And finally I got it. I don't claim to understand how the quantum universe works, or what consciousness is, or anything like that, any more that I would claim that about a classical universe.

But it doesn't seem mystical anymore. I can at least understand the model itself, if not how it relates to physical reality.

The mathematical model that looks like a wave equation represents a 'magic reality fluid' that sloshes around over the space of all the possible configurations of the universe.

There's no collapse, no mysterious observer effects, no physical systems behaving differently depending on who's measuring what and when they're looking at the measurements.

It's all just nice and sane and deterministic and predictable and follows laws.

And I absolutely didn't get that until I read EY's quantum sequence, which is really no more than a particularly well-written explanation of the many-worlds point of view written by an autodidact who'd managed to puzzle out for himself something that I'd been well and professionally taught by renowned experts at a famous university.

A little later I decided to have a go at Umesh Vazirani's Quantum Computation course on Coursera, and it made perfect sense. I could just do it. There wasn't anything funny or baffling going on. I don't think that would have been true if I hadn't read EY's QM essays.

So I don't know if you'd count that as 'changing the mind of someone with relevant domain knowledge', but it certainly seemed important to me.

And I decided that I liked this man and his thinking and his style of writing, and that's why I read the rest of The Sequences.

Young Earth Creation Science for Bayesians

I have recently been really impressed by some of the people struggling to reconcile the Word of God with the evidence all around us, which does not seem terribly supportive on its face. 

(An excellent example: https://creation.com).

They strike me as some weird mirror of us. I really don't think they're being dishonest.

What they're saying is: "Given that we know that the Bible is true, what's the simplest explanation of the evidence that we see that makes sense?". 

I can't refute their arguments, they know more about the relevant disciplines than I do.

But I'm fairly sure that if I did come up with a good objection, they'd respond: "That's a really good point, we accept it, let's work out what sort of explanation does work to both explain the evidence and stay compatible with the Bible."

They're doing excellent work even from our point of view in pointing out holes in our best theories, and challenging us to make our arguments watertight.

That's exactly what I'd be doing if I had a really really high prior on the Bible being true.

Where do they get that prior from? Well, priors are kind of a problem for us as well.

A Multiple Choice Exam for Medical Ethicists

 

(Question I)

A train is speeding down a track towards the point where seventy million terrified people are tied across the line.

Their only hope is a group of young men working on a side branch, who are desperately trying to open a set of points which will divert the train into the siding. If they succeed, several of them will probably be killed by the train, but they will save tens of millions. All of them know that they are taking a risk to help others.

Do you:

(a) enthusiastically join the young men

(b) laud the young men from the sidelines, and start a fundraising campaign to make sure that songs are written about their heroism

(c) use the gang of hired thugs you usually use to screw money out of people to prevent the young men altering the points

(d) use your thugs to force the young men to fill out a seven thousand page form, taking six months and rendering their efforts pointless

(Question II)

All over the world, mad scientists are engineering deadly plagues for no known reason. They do this in shoddy jerry-built sheds in the middle of major cities. Although the scientists are not exactly evil, they are careless and incompetent. Their plagues are always escaping. Luckily so far, their plagues are also not very deadly and not very good at spreading.

But the scientists are getting better and better at it, and they share their best results and exciting new methods with each other all over the world through journals.

Do you:

(a) Use your gang of thugs to stop them.

(b) Force them to fill out some sort of risk assessment or even do a cost-benefit analysis to decide whether their activities are a good idea.

(c) Fund them and their journals enthusiastically using money your thugs have stolen.

(d) Prohibit the engineering of deadly plagues in your own country, but continue to fund it as long as it's done in even dodgier sheds in the middle of major cities in a foreign country run by an evil and murderous military autocracy.

---

Your Score:

If you answered mainly (c), congratulations, you are ideally suited. Welcome to the profession, and we wish you the best of luck impeding the progress of medical "science" for many years. You can expect to kill millions and prevent the discovery of almost everything that might ever help in any way.

If you answered mainly (d) you may be welcome in the more philosophical branch of the profession, but you are basically a bit of an irresponsible shithead and will never be trusted with anything that matters. Don't worry though, the millions will still die and your helpless flailing won't do the slightest bit of good.

If you answered (a) or (b) to either question: what the fuck is wrong with you? You should maybe go and work for a tobacco company or something.

Thank You AstraZeneca

I got my vaccine. Apparently AstraZeneca are making the stuff on a non-profit basis, and getting a lot of shit for it from various quarters.

When people do things that save millions of lives I think we should be grateful. When they do it for free I think we should be extra grateful.

Does anyone know where I can get a 'Thank You AstraZeneca' T-shirt, with their logo on it?

A more general 'Thank You Big Pharma' T-shirt would be nice to have too. I don't mind people making money doing good things. In fact I'd encourage it generally.

I Have

I have numbered the elements
I have charted the stars in their courses
And I know why they choose their paths

I know the weight of the earth
And the secret of fire
And I know that it is the secret of life

I can read the book of life
And write in it too, making strange new forms

I can heal the sick, I can make the lame walk

I can make the very rocks to think and act
And serve as a channel for lesbian porn

I can speak, and my voice will be heard around the globe

I can kill, more swiftly than any swordsman, men in their millions.
But I never do kill.

I have walked on the moon
I will walk on the planets

I am kind to animals and foreigners

I begin to understand the mind

I am working on immortality

And one day I will build a God

Who am I?