We're going to have a meetup on Tuesday, December 9th at Google Israel's offices, Electra Tower, 98 Yigal Alon st., Tel Aviv.
This time we're going to have a social meetup! We'll be socializing and playing games.
Specifically, we look forward to playing any cool board or card game anyone will bring. By all means bring your favorite game(s) with you and teach others or find people who already like that game. But it's also fine to come empty-handed. We always end up with enough games for everyone.
We'll start the meetup at 19:00, and we'll go on as much as we like to. Feel free to come a little bit later, as there is no agenda. (We've decided to start slightly earlier this time to give us more time and accommodate people with different schedules).
We'll meet at the 29th floor of the building. If you arrive and cant find your way around, call Anatoly, who is graciously hosting us, at 054-245-1060. Email at avorobey@gmail.com also works. See you there!
I do not see how this suggestion could be positively refuted. It enjoys a status well known in academic circles and doubtless elsewhere,—that of the Remotely Conceivable Alternative, contrary to the obvious implication of the facts, incapable of proof or disproof.
-- Denys L. Page (1908-1978), History and the Homeric Iliad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 57
There is no such thing as "the shortest program for which the halting property is uncomputable". That property is computable trivially for every possible program.
The halting property is semi-decidable: if a program halts, then you can always trivially prove that it halts, you just need run it. If a program does not halt, then sometimes you can prove that it doesn't halt, and sometimes you can't prove anything.
For any programming language, there exist a length such that you can compute the halting property for all programs shorter than that. At length L_max, there will be program Bad_0, which:
You can never prove that any string S has Kolmogorov complexity K if K > L_max, as it would imply that you proved that Bad_0 doesn't halt, or at least doesn't emit any symbol which is not a prefix of S.
Since there are only finitely many strings with complexity up to L_max, we can only compute Kolmogorov complexity, for finitely many strings.
It is also easy to make up artificial languages in which Kolmogorov complexity is computable for an infinite subset of all possible strings.
If the language is Turing-complete I don't think this is possible. If you think that an arbitrary string S has complexity K, how can you prove that there exist no program shorter than K that computes S?
Computing upper bounds on on Kolmogorov Complexity is not very difficult: gzip and all the other compression algorithms do it. The difficulty is computing non-trivial lower bounds:
For all programming languages (with a self-terminating encoding), there is a trivial lower bound that doesn't depend on the string. This bound is at least one token.
But there is also a language-dependent constant L_max which is the maximum KC complexity and lower bound on KC complexity that you can compute for any string: L_max is the length of the shortest program for which the halting property is uncomputable ( * ) (which makes L_max is uncomputable as well).
This implies that you can compute the KC complexity only for a finite number of strings.
( * And doesn't provably emit any token)
There is no such thing as "the shortest program for which the halting property is uncomputable". That property is computable trivially for every possible program. What's uncomputable is always the halting problem for an infinity of programs using one common algorithm.
It is also easy to make up artificial languages in which Kolmogorov complexity is computable for an infinite subset of all possible strings.
You were probably thinking of something else: that there exists a constant L, which depends on the language and a proof system T, such that it's not possible to prove in T that any string has Kolmogorov complexity larger than L. That is true. In particular, this means that there's a limit to lower bounds we can establish, although we don't know what that limit is.
(I doubt this is original)
To help yourself do something regularly on a computer, put a direct link on your bookmarks bar.
Example: you want to keep a diary. Write it in a Google doc document and put the direct link to it in your bookmarks bar, so that one click is all it takes to open it. Not in your bookmarks somewhere else, not in a shortcut on the desktop (your browser is open all the time anyway), not a separate fancy diary-keeping software, but just one click in a place that's always in front of you. If you're like me, that'll help a lot.
Perhaps anti-intuitively, the difference in results is huge even between "one click in the bookmarks bar" and "one click to open a folder in the bookmarks bar and one click on the right link in that folder".
P.S. Alerts are also good, but this method helps where alerts aren't helpful. You want to train yourself to write a quick review of every book once you finish it. There's no way to set an alert to go off when you turn the last page in Kindle. But put a link on your bookmarks bar.
Is there a causal link between being relatively lonely and isolated during school years and (higher chance of) ending up a more intelligent, less shallow, more successful adult?
Imagine that you have a pre-school child who has socialization problems, finds it difficult to do anything in a group of other kids, to acquire friends, etc., but cognitively the kid's fine. If nothing changes, the kid is looking at being shunned or mocked as weird throughout school. You work hard on overcoming the social issues, maybe you go with the kid to a therapist, you arrange play-dates, you play-act social scenarios with them..
Then your friend comes up to have a heart-to-heart talk with you. Look, your friend says. You were a nerd at school. I was a nerd at school. We each had one or two friends at best and never hung out with popular kids. We were never part of any crowd. Instead we read books under our desks during lessons and read SF novels during the breaks and read science encyclopedias during dinner at home, and started programming at 10, and and and. Now you're working so hard to give your kid a full social life. You barely had any, are you sure now you'd rather you had it otherwise? Let me be frank. You have a smart kid. It's normal for a smart kid to be kind of lonely throughout school, and never hang out with lots of other kids, and read books instead. It builds substance. Having a lousy social life is not the failure scenario. The failure scenario is to have a very full and happy school experience and end up a ditzy adolescent. You should worry about that much much more, and distribute your efforts accordingly.
Is your friend completely asinine, or do they have a point?
We're going to have a meetup on Tuesday, December 9th at Google Israel's offices, Electra Tower, 98 Yigal Alon st., Tel Aviv.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The time above might say 6pm or 7pm or 8pm depending on how daylight savings time is processed. The meetup is at 7pm Israel Local Time.
This time we're going to have a social meetup! We'll be socializing and playing games.
Specifically, we look forward to playing any cool board or card game anyone will bring. By all means bring your favorite game(s) with you and teach others or find people who already like that game. But it's also fine to come empty-handed. We always end up with enough games for everyone.
We'll start the meetup at 19:00, and we'll go on as much as we like to. Feel free to come a little bit later, as there is no agenda. (We've decided to start slightly earlier this time to give us more time and accommodate people with different schedules).
We'll meet at the 29th floor of the building. If you arrive and cant find your way around, call Anatoly, who is graciously hosting us, at 054-245-1060. Email at avorobey@gmail.com also works. See you there!
A confusion of mine: How is epistemology a separate thing? Or is that just a flag for "We're going to go meta-level" and applied to some particular topic.
E.g. I read a bit of Kant about experience, which I suppose is metaphysics (right?) but it seems like if he's making any positive claim, the debate about the claim is going to be about the arguments for the claim, which is settled via epistemology?
Hmm, I would disagree. If you have a metaphysical claim, then arguments for or against this claim are not normally epistemological; they're just arguments.
Think of epistemology as "being meta about knowledge, all the time, and nothing else".
What does it mean to know something? How can we know something? What's the difference between "knowing" a definition and "knowing" a theorem? Are there statements such that to know them true, you need no input from the outside world at all? (Kant's analytic vs synthetic distinction). Is 2+2=4 one such? If you know something is true, but it turns out later it was false, did you actually "know" it? (many millions of words have been written on this question alone).
Now, take some metaphysical claim, and let's take an especially grand one, say "God is infinite and omnipresent" or something. You could argue for or against that claim without ever going into epistemology. You could maybe argue that the idea of God as absolute perfection more or less requires Him to be present everywhere, in the smallest atom and the remotest star, at all times because otherwise it would be short of perfection, or something like this. Or you could say that if God is present everywhere, that's the same as if He was present nowhere, because presence manifests by the difference between presence and absence.
But of course if you are a modern person and especially one inclined to scientific thinking, you would likely respond to all this "Hey, what does it even mean to say all this or for me to argue this? How would I know if God is omnipresent or not omnipresent, what would change in the world for me to perceive it? Without some sort of epistemological underpinning to this claim, what's the difference between it and a string of empty words?"
And then you would be proceeding in the tradition started by Descartes, who arguably moved the center of philosophical thinking from metaphysics to epistemology in what's called the "epistemological turn", later boosted in the 20th century by the "lingustic turn" (attributed among others to Wittgenstein).
Metaphysics: X, amirite? Epistemological turn: What does it even mean to know X? Linguistic turn: What does it even mean to say X?
Metaphysics: what's out there?
Isn't that ontology? What's the difference?
"Ontology" is firmly dedicated to "exist or doesn't exist". Metaphysics is more broadly "what's the world like?" and includes ontology as a central subfield.
Whether there is free will is a metaphysical question, but not, I think, an ontological one (at least not necessarily). "Free will" is not a thing or a category or a property, it's a claim that in some broad aspects the world is like this and not like that.
Whether such things as desires or intentions exist or are made-up fictions is an ontological question.
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