Replacing programmers with AI coding isn’t working out so well. I’m hearing stories of consultant programmers being called in to quietly rewrite vibe code disasters that were the CEO’s personal pet project, because the code cannot be fixed in place.
"AI" removes the people who stood between the CEO and the code. It's the perfect anti-productivity tool.
yeah, 3b1b animations can take you through all of undergrad math in probably a month if it all existed and you used anki
We could bottle this arrogance and sell it as an emetic.
And besides, we all know that mathematics videos peaked with the Angle Dance.
Fun fact: The plain vanilla physics major at MIT requires three semesters of quantum mechanics. And that's not including the quantum topics included in the statistical physics course, or the experiments in the lab course that also depend upon it.
Grad school is another year or so of quantum on top of that, of course.
(MIT OpenCourseWare actually has fairly extensive coverage of all three semesters: 8.04, 8.05 and 8.06. Zwiebach was among the best lecturers in the department back in my day, too.)
Langan himself has ~~showed up~~ graced the comment section with his benevolent presence!
The CTMU is not conjectural, but a lock. So as much as I'd like to humbly efface myself in an outpouring of false modesty, I'll merely point out that arguing with the CTMU amounts to undermining one's own argumentation, whatever it may be. People have been trying to get over on the CTMU for the last 35 or so years, and not one has ever gotten to first base. This was not an accident. If you think you see a mistake or critical inadequacy, the mistake and the inadequacy are almost certainly yours.
The discussion in the comments has continued in a low-key way. Now they're making excuses for why the nutbar is incomprehensible:
To understand why Chris thinks this way, it's important to remember that he had never been acculturated into the norms of the modern intellectual elite...
Langan has been "working" on the CTMU since the 1990s. People have been born since then and have had time to learn how to talk like academics.
It's fun to stand on the shoulders of giants... and having the standard stuff down cold is the best way to convince experts that when you do have a zany idea, it might be worth considering.
And here's Ben Goertzel, formerly MIRI's director of research:
I find myself mentally comparing Langan to Eliezer Yudkowsky, another high-IQ maverick who has personally avoided the academic establishment, while developing his own deep and idiosyncratic view of the universe. Both Langan and Yudkowsky have the habit of introducing a lot of novel vocabulary for describing their ideas, though they have different styles of doing so (Langan likes inventing new words; Yudkowsky prefers assigning new meanings to commonplace phrases, e.g. “Friendly AI” or any of the zillion other “defined terms” commonplace on the Less Wrong blog/network he founded). [...] Langan’s style is very clear and elegant, in some places beautiful, but doesn’t do the reader any favors — you really have to read each sentence and absorb it fully before going on to the next.
zoom and enhance
Langan’s style is very clear and elegant
Typical Langan, for reference:
In the CTMU, the self-inclusion process is known as conspansion and occurs at the distributed, Lorentz-invariant conspansion rate c, a time-space conversion factor already familiar as the speed of light in vacuo (conspansion consists of two alternative phases accounting for the wave and particle properties of matter and affording a logical explanation for accelerating cosmic expansion).
Goertzel is also co-editor of a book called Evidence for Psi — he's a Cosmist who believes in psychic powers.
Back in 2009, Yud asked who he should do a "bloggingheads" dialog with. Two people suggested Langan.
And one suggested Scott Adams.
Intelligent design theory involves probabilistic judgments such as "irreducible complexity", the idea that life is too complex and well-organized to have been produced randomly by undirected evolution. Such probabilistic judgments rely on either a causal model (e.g. a model of how evolution would work and what structures it could create), or some global model that yields probabilities more directly.
No, they rely upon numbers extracted from up a creationist's colon.
There is a duality between cosmic expansion and atom shrinkage.
Hey now, the atom just got out of a cold swimming pool.
Chris is actually very pleasant to talk to if (like me) it does not bother you that he acts like he is much smarter than you.
Of course, I'm talking about a ~90% White America becoming ~50% White in around 60 years, a cataclysmic demographic upheaval which violates every conceivable standard of national sovereignty along with the will and interests of the US majority, and thus cannot have happened by accident.
LessWrong has swallowed the "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe" hook, line and sinker, so yeah, zero crank filter.
https://awful.systems/post/1246648