The wikipedia side-effect page says that the rate of seizures is between 0.01-0.1%, for comparison about 0.68% of the population has epilepsy, so I'm skeptical this ought to be such a concern. Am I reading these numbers incorrectly?

I can definitely believe the anxiety bit. It is a stimulant, and anxiety & depression are very very correlated.

How did Einstein and Heisenberg go so wrong?

I don't know about Heisenberg, but a common answer for Einstein is the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, which took the best minds of the day, and freed them from practical concerns about justifying their research interests or talking to outside researchers, apparently causing them to be increasingly less productive & out of touch from the rest of their respective fields.

From Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman

When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get an idea for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.

Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!

Hamming also writes about the IAS

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore?

The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn’t the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren’t good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.

And notes a similar effect of nobel prizes on academics' work

But let me say why age seems to have the effect it does. In the first place if you do some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work. You may find yourself as I saw Brattain when he got a Nobel Prize. The day the prize was announced we all assembled in Arnold Auditorium; all 3 winners [Shockley, Bardeen, & Brattain] got up and made speeches. The third one, Brattain, practically with tears in his eyes, said, “I know about this Nobel-Prize effect and I am not going to let it affect me; I am going to remain good old Walter Brattain.” Well, I said to myself, “That is nice.” But in a few weeks I saw it was affecting him. Now he could only work on great problems.

and he attributes the decline in Shannon's career to a similar effect from getting tenure & a blank check from MIT

Shannon, I believe, ruined himself. In fact when he left Bell Labs [for MIT, which offered him tenure + a blank check], I said, “That’s the end of Shannon’s scientific career.” I received a lot of flak from my friends who said that Shannon was just as smart as ever. I said, “Yes, he’ll be just as smart, but that’s the end of his scientific career”, and I truly believe it was.

Of course, as we see above, he also attributes Shannon's decline to not being willing to work on smaller problems. These two problems could exacerbate each other, so they're not entirely incompatible.

I had a class in college about the history of the atomic bomb. Our text book was Rhodes, and most of the stuff we learned about was the different competing theories of atoms, the experimental methods & math used to distinguish between them, math behind atomic chain reactions, and the scientists who did those things. It was great! Our tests were basically physics tests.

I’d like more history like that, and I’d like marginal movements in that direction in math class. For example, something like Radical Real Analysis but for everything.

Obviously schools won’t do this well, but they won’t do anything well. Any change they make nowadays will be oriented toward making the least common denominator happy, if I understand the current fad among teachers nowadays.

The much more interesting question is how could this be done well, and the more useful is why the current fad & how can it be changed, so saying something like “teach more history in math!” can be expected to go well.

I agree, and we do see some american companies doing the same thing.

Re: open sourcing. My guess why they open source more is for verification purposes. Chinese labs have an earned reputation for scams. So a lab that announces a closed source chat site, to investors, could very well be a claude or openai or llama or gemini wrapper. However, a lab that releases the weights of their model, and “shows their work” by giving a detailed writeup of how they managed to train the model while staying under their reported costs is significantly more likely to be legitimate.

This is true, but I read amitlevy49's comment as having an implicit "and therefore anyone who wants that kind of natural drive should take bupropion". I probably should've given more information in my response.

FYI (cc @Gram_Stone) the 2023 course website has (poor quality edit:nevermind I was accessing them wrong) video lectures.

Edit 2: For future (or present) folks, I've also downloaded local mp4s of the slideshow versions of the videos here, and can share privately with those who dm, in case you want them too or the site goes down.

Not really, the hypothesis is that John has depression, and of all the antidepressants, bupropion is the best (if it works for you).

A few points:

1. All of these things sound obviously awesome and fun to do
2. Cooking is imo another class of wizardry
3. Have you tried the antidepressant bupropion? Ask David for the pitch

Because of 1, I think the difficulty you'll find building (or finding) this community is not whether or not what you're saying "resonates" with people, but whether they have the expertise, energy, or agency to put in their share of the work.

The boring hypothesis here is the model was actually trained on the id-location-from-picture task, and wasn’t trained on the id-object-location-in-pixel-art task, and pixel art is surprisingly nontrivial for models to wrap their heads around when they’re still trying to understand real world pictures.