paragonal
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Specifically, I would love to see a better argument for it being ahead of Helion (if it is actually ahead, which would be a surprise and a major update for me).
I agree with Jeffrey Heninger's response to your comment. Here is a (somewhat polemical) video which illustrates the challenges for Helion's unusual D-He3 approach compared to the standard D-T approach which CFS follows. It illustrates some of Jeffrey's points and makes other claims like Helion's current operational poc reactor Trenta being far from adequate for scaling to a productive reactor when considering safety and regulatory demands (though I haven't looked into whether CFS might be affected by this just the same).
For example, the way scientific experiments work, your p-value either passes the (arbitrary) threshold, or it doesn't, so you either reject the null, or fail to reject the null, a binary outcome.
Ritualistic hypothesis testing with significance thresholds is mostly used in the social sciences, psychology and medicine and not so much in the hard sciences (although arbitrary thresholds like 5 sigma are used in physics to claim the discovery of new elementary particles they rarely show up in physics papers). Since it requires deliberate effort to get into the mindset of the null ritual I don't think that technical and scientific-minded people just start thinking like this.
I think that the simple explanation... (read more)
Unfortunately, what I would call the bailey is quite common on Lesswrong. It doesn't take much digging to find quotes like this in the Sequences and beyond:
This is a shocking notion; it implies that all our twins in the other worlds— all the different versions of ourselves that are constantly split off, [...]
Thanks, I see we already had a similar argument in the past.
I think there's a bit of motte and bailey going on with the MWI. The controversy and philosophical questions are about multiple branches / worlds / versions of persons being ontological units. When we try to make things rigorous, only the wave function of the universe remains as a coherent ontological concept. But if we don't have a clear way from the latter to the former, we can't really say clear things about the parts which are philosophically interesting.
I’m reluctant to engage with extraordinarily contrived scenarios in which magical 2nd-law-of-thermodynamics-violating contraptions cause “branches” to interfere.
Agreed. Roland Omnes tries to calculate how big the measurement apparatus of Wigner needs to be in order to measure his friend and gets 10 to the power of 10E18 degrees of freedom ("The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics", section 7.8).
But if we are going to engage with those scenarios anyway, then we should never have referred to them as “branches” in the first place, ...
Well, that's one of the problems of the MWI: how do we know when we should speak of branches? Decoherence works very well for all practical purposes but it is a continuous process so there isn't a point in time where a single branch actually splits into two. How can we claim ontology here?
I'm not an expert but I would say that I have a decent understanding of how things work on a technical level. Since you are asking very general questions, I'm going to give quite general thoughts.
(1) The central innovation of the blockchain is the proof-of-work mechanism. It is is an ingenious idea which tackles a specific problem (finding consensus between possibly adversarial parties in a global setting without an external source of trust).
(2) Since Bitcoin has made the blockchain popular, everybody wants to have the specific problem it allegedly solves but almost nobody does.
(3) Proof-of-work has a certain empirical track record. This is mostly for cryptocurrencies and in the regime where the... (read more)
Rick Beato has a video about people losing their absolute pitch with age (it seems to happen to everyone eventually). There are a lot of anecdata by people who have experienced this both in the video and in the comments.
Some report that after experiencing a shift in their absolute pitch, all music sounds wrong. Some of them adapted somehow (it's unclear to me how much development of relative abilities was involved) and others report not having noticed that their absolute pitch has shifted. Some report that only after they've lost their absolute pitch completely, they were able to develop certain relative pitch abilities.
Overall, people's reported experiences in the comments vary a lot. I wouldn't draw strong conclusions from them. In any case, I find it fascinating to read about these perceptions.
I am quite skeptical that hearing like a person with absolute pitch can be learned because it seems to be somewhat incompatible with relative pitch.
People with absolute pitch report that if a piece of music is played with a slightly lower or higher pitch, it sounds out of tune. If this feeling stays throughout the piece this means that the person doesn't hear relatively. So even if a relative pitch person would learn to name played notes absolutely, I don't think the hearing experience would be the same.
So I think you can't have both absolute pitch and relative pitch in the full sense. (I do think that you can improve at naming played notes, singing notes correctly without a reference note from outside your body, etc.)
Thanks for this pointer. I might check it out when their website is up again.
Shouldn't this be weighted against the good things people do if they are peer-pressured? I think there's value in not conforming but if all cultures have peer-pressure there needs to be a careful analysis of the pros and cons instead of simply strifing for immunity from it.
My first thought here aren't autists but psychopaths.