5·
4 hours agoThe idea that AI will be a boon for searching the mathematical literature is undermined somewhat by how it shits the bed there too.
- 38 Posts
- 1.11K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 27th, 2023
You are not logged in. If you use a Fediverse account that is able to follow users, you can follow this user.
I also found this Reddit comment that lays into Sokal and Bricmont’s treatment of Lacan, but not having read Lacan, I can’t vouch for it:
I’ll just note the sneerability of how Sokal contributed to sex pest Krauss’ War on Science book, right alongside Jordan Peterson, who has said plenty of things as batshit as Sokal accused Lacan of being.
Here’s a written review of that book which covers its problems fairly well, I think. (Which indirectly reminded me that last year I wrote a blog post about how Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense wasn’t such hot stuff. I guess I hadn’t shared that here before.)
Good catch; thanks. I think I had too many awful.system tabs open at once.
Highlight the space just after the abstract of my own most recent arXiv preprint for a surprise. :-)
Last week, we learned that area transphobe Sabine Hossenfelder is using her arXiv-posting privileges to shill Eric Weinstein’s bullshit. I have poked around the places where I’d expect to find technical discussion of a physics preprint, and I’ve come up with nothing. The Stubsack thread, as superficial as it was, has been the most substantive conversation about her post’s actual content.
NeurIPS is one of the big conferences for machine learning. Having your work accepted there is purportedly equivalent to getting a paper published in a top-notch journal in physics (a field that holds big conferences but treats journals as more the venues of record). Today I learned that NeurIPS endorses peer reviewers asking questions to chatbots during the review process. On their FAQ page for reviewers, they include the question
I often use LLMs to help me understand concepts and draft my writing. Can I use LLMs during the review process?
And their response is not shut the fuck up, the worms have reached your brain and we will have to operate. You know, the bare minimum that any decent person would ask for.
You can use resources (e.g. publications on Google Scholar, Wikipedia articles, interactions with LLMs and/or human experts without sharing the paper submissions) to enhance your understanding of certain concepts and to check the grammaticality and phrasing of your written review. Please exercise caution in these cases so you do not accidentally leak confidential information in the process.
“Yeah, go ahead, ask ‘Grok is this true’, but pretty please don’t use the exact words from the paper you are reviewing. We are confident that the same people who turn to a machine to paraphrase their own writing will do so by hand first this time.”
Please remember that you are responsible for the quality and accuracy of your submitted review regardless of any tools, resources, or other help you used to construct the final review.
“Having positioned yourself at the outlet pipe of the bullshit fountain and opened your mouth, please imbibe responsibly.”
Far be it for me to suggest that NeurIPS taking an actually ethical stance about bullshit-fountain technology would call into question the presentations being made there and thus imperil their funding stream. But, I mean, if the shoe fits…
Google seems to have turned off the -ai in search on iPhone (Safari browser)and overrides it to return an AI-generated result now. Anyone got a fucking workaround on this bc I do not want to see that shit
something something Ed Zitron really needs an editldr
That’s a ghastly amount of money to burn, particularly when it comes to children’s education.
Sometimes they file reports against regulars, accusing them of “ableism” for being anti-slop-machine. That’s also entertaining.
Disclaimer: abstract above, content and main ideas are human-written; the full text below is written with significant help of AI but is human-verified as well as by other AIs.
“Oh, that pizza sauce recipe that calls for glue? It’s totally OK, I checked it out with MechaHitler.”
The trouble is that the overlap between the circles for “stuff I am excited enough to talk about” and “stuff that anybody would subscribe to a podcast for” is about the size of a rice grain.
Nope, not a clue.
Dang, maybe I should get in on that. I already own a microphone and everything.
In using xcancel to look up Eric Weinstein’s bonkers rants on Xitter, I exposed myself to Sabine Hossenfelder’s comment section. The drivel, the fawning, the people asking chatbots about quantum gravity… It hurts, it hurts.
I am going to scrub my brain with Oliver Byrne’s edition of Euclid.
Eric “I will come to Harvard and espouse Numberwang Racism if you deign to invite me” Weinstein:
Invite me back to Harvard as the co-founder of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project in the @HarvardEcon department and I will give a talk on how this really works. You don’t have to pay me a cent if you video it.
I’ll cover:
The need to fire Claudine Gay.
The need to end activist studies depts.
University Bioweapon research
String Theory
CPI Cost of Living
Evolutionary theory applied to Humans
Low Dimensional Geometry
NSF STEM Shortage Panics
DEI hiring against merit
Epstein and Science
Cognitive abilities expectations in Geographicly widely separated populations.
Rain, rain, go away, barkle down another day
taking a bad paper too seriously
Hossenfelder starts her “Summary” section thusly:
I have shown here how the assumption that matter and geometry have the same fundamental origin requires the time evolution of a quantum state to differ from the Schrödinger equation.
This conclusion is unwarranted. It follows, not from the given assumption, but from the overcomplicated way that assumption is implemented and the kludges built on top of that. Here is how Hossenfelder introduces her central assumption:
What I am assuming here is then that in the to-be-found underlying theory, geometry carries the same information as the particles because they are the same. […] Concretely, I will take this idea to imply that we have a fundamental quantum theory in which particles and their geometry are one and the same quantum state.
Taking this at face value, the quantum state of a universe containing gravitating matter is just a single ray in a Hilbert space. As cosmic time rolls on, that ray rotates. This unitary evolution of the state vector is the evolution both of the matter and of the geometry. There is, by assumption, no distinction between them. But Hossenfelder hacks one in! She says that the Hilbert space must factor into the tensor product of a Hilbert space for matter and a Hilbert space for geometry. And then she says that the only allowed states are tensor products of two copies of the same vector (up to a unitary that we could define away). If matter and geometry were truly the same, there would be no such factorization. We would not have to avoid generating entanglement between the two factors by breaking quantum mechanics, as Hossenfelder does, simply because there would not be two spaces to tango.
I am skeptical of this whole approach on multiple levels, but even granting the basic premise, it’s a bad implementation of that premise. She doesn’t have a model; she has a pathological “fix” to a problem of her own making.
deleted by creator