Not as many as on HN. "Influencers" have agendas and the stream of income, or other self-interest. HN always comes off as a monolith, on any subject. Counter-arguments get ignored and downvoted to oblivion.
I’m spending a lot of time on LinkedIn because my team is hiring and, boy oh boy, LinkedIn is terminally infested with AI influencers. It’s a hot mess.
Dark matter is a pseudo-scientific variant of the "God of the gaps". Rather of acknowledging an obvious (default) assumption that the laws of Universe (including all "constants") depend on local conditions, the community prefers spending inordinate amounts of money on nebulous ideas.
We do have a pretty substansive evidence that dark matter exists: from the cosmic background radiation, gravitational lensing, galaxy formation simulations, galaxy rotation curves, etc.
Why is it so hard for people to believe that there are some particles that are not interacting with electromagnetism that we haven't detected directly yet? It's not even a precedent, the neutrino is just like that.
I guess the name "dark" matter was a mistake because it implies something weird, when in fact it just means whatever this is, doesn't have electric (or chromo) charge.
I agree with you. "Dark Matter" (and "Dark Energy") are colorful (colorless?) names that I think helped these theories diffuse into the popular consciousness at a time when popular interest in science was at a high-water mark (remember when "chaos theory" was fashionable?). As I mentioned in another comment recently (it feels like a "Dark Matter" or "Dark Energy" headline trends on HN almost every day), this coded these theories as "exotic" or "weird" as you say, and invited speculation about Dark Matter and even an urge to overturn it among laypeople who equated "exotic" with "tendentious." But, as you suggest, personally I don't regard Dark Matter as all that exotic. We already know about some species of "dark matter": the neutrino is one, and before that there was the neutron. Oh, well. I suppose there will be another episode on HN in a day or so.
Yeah, but it might've tamped down any perceived controversy even among laypeople, which would've saved many priceless electrons being spent debating the issue on the internet.
We have concrete evidence that either a) a new type of matter and energy exists, or b) our theories need to be modified in some way.
The orbit of planets in our solar system have hinted at missing matter several times -- one time it lead to the discovery of a new planet (Uranus or Neptune, IIRC); one time it lead to the discovery of General Relativity.
Until we either detect dark matter/energy, or develop a theory that accurately predicts the behaviour we're attributing to dark matter we cannot say one way or the other which is the correct approach.
It could also be that we are not accurately modelling EM/SR/GR effects at a large scale, such as how they are warped by the different stars orbiting the arms of the galaxies. Or that when we extend QED/QCD to accelerating reference frames (general relativity) that dark matter won't be needed, just like how QED was formulated by extending electromagnetism/QM to special relativity (non-accelerating reference frames).
"We have concrete evidence that either a) a new type of matter and energy exists, or b) our theories need to be modified in some way."
a new type of matter is a modification to our theories
"Until we either detect dark matter/energy, or develop a theory that accurately predicts the behaviour we're attributing to dark matter we cannot say one way or the other which is the correct approach."
"We" the general public isn't in the business of saying one way or the other is the correct approach, and scientists aren't, either. Scientists conduct experiments and propose theories in whatever lines of inquiry interest them, subject to the constraints of getting somebody to pay for it. Many scientists have been interested in refining the theory of Dark Matter and subjecting those refinements to experimental tests, partly because the theory has withstood and only grown stronger by those refinements and tests. That's a success by any measure, and that success is partly why public funding agencies have been willing to pay for it. Like anybody else, they try to pick winners.
It could also be that we are not accurately modelling EM/SR/GR effects at a large scale, such as how they are warped by the different stars orbiting the arms of the galaxies. Or that when we extend QED/QCD to accelerating reference frames (general relativity) that dark matter won't be needed, just like how QED was formulated by extending electromagnetism/QM to special relativity (non-accelerating reference frames).
Not trying to be a mindless skeptic but your “why is it so hard” question seems bizarre to me. It seems quite understandable that it’s hard for people to believe there’s a particle responsible for a significant percentage of all matter in the universe that we have no direct evidence of and the only reason it’s believed to exist at all is because a lot of otherwise well-understood equations and observations require it to exist.
If people understood that the last 200 years of science has shown that we are still utterly ignorant about the underpinnings of the universe, they might accept it better.
But we are not very well educated so yeah, they will doubt it for no good reason other than "it doesn't feel right"
"If people understood that the last 200 years of science has shown that we are still utterly ignorant about the underpinnings of the universe"
That's a bit of an exaggeration, don't you think?
"But we are not very well educated so yeah, they will doubt it for no good reason other than "it doesn't feel right"
That's also an exaggeration. Laypersons are under no more obligation to understand the details of the scientific professions than scientists are to understand the details of, say, the legal profession. A healthy skepticism within the general public is harmless and even helpful if it maintains an interest in science. I would just gently urge people not to veer from skepticism into dogmatism.
"the only reason it’s believed to exist at all is because a lot of otherwise well-understood equations and observations require it to exist."
I mean...those are pretty good reasons. If a particular theory successfully predicts more out of "a lot" of observations than any other competing theory does, and is a smaller departure from "a lot" of existing theory than any other competing theory is, would you choose to spend your career researching those competing theories?
> a shocking experience for anyone who still holds reductionist views on life.
As far as I understood he doesn't state that life cannot be explained by physics. But that it might be more productive to choose a more high level view.
Makes sense. If a set of physical laws allows life at all, life will maintain its own set of rules (related to reproduction, goal-directed behavior and so on) regardless of low level "implementation details" that are dependent on particulars of the physical laws.
I don't think that there's a contradiction. "Ingress of platonic forms" is observationally indistinguishable from a selection effect: "Universes that don't admit realization of certain platonic forms are unobservable because they have no observers."
For example, a static zero-dimensional universe. There's no pi, no Chaitin's constant, no nothing. Or, in other words, there's no processes or objects in there that we can describe as "ingress of platonic forms" (and no observers to notice that).
I do like his ideas (and I wrote similar things about platonic forms elsewhere), but it's not a solid refutation of physicalism. It's an attractive framework, but as almost everything in philosophy it can easily be challenged.
A physicalist can say "Physical processes that follow a certain equation trivially have properties corresponding to the properties of the equation. So what? I can measure physical process and I can think about the equation (thinking is a physical process too), but why should I postulate independent existence of a/the platonic form of the equation?"
The fact that my subjective experiences undeniably exist makes me reject physicalism, but I can't prove their existence to anyone else and I can't use their existence as a solid basis for some philosophical view. After all it's just one bit of information. Or zero bits? I wouldn't have noticed my own absence.
But the equation is a platonic form! Otherwise, you will be introducing a third concept, which is unnecessary b/c it has no advantage over the traditional notion of "platonic form".
> It's an attractive framework, but as almost everything in philosophy it can easily be challenged.
Michael is aware of it. He insists that every speculation has to be experimentally tested. But no experiment of this kind will constitute a "proof" - someone can always "challenge" it. This is no different from a physical theory: every interpretation of QM is challenged by someone. :-)
>patterns that are useful and guide events in the physical world but are not themselves explained, set, or modifiable by the laws of physics. This includes things like facts about prime numbers...
which if fair enough. Prime numbers exist and you find them by doing calculations but he goes on to:
>...this position is unpopular with philosophers of mind because it is fundamentally a dualist theory (by emphasizing causes that are not to be found in physical events)
which seems iffy. As mentioned we find primes by calculation which can be done by physical events.
I think human reasoning tends to get in a bit of a muddle with this because the idea of "non-physical space of truths which we discover" is not an especially good mental model for stuff we could in principle calculate.
That said I figure stuff we could calculates exists even if we haven't done the calculations yet because someone else could have done so, and stuff that could be calculated includes simulations of other worlds.
In technology in general, this is a typical state of affairs. No one knows how electric current works, which doesn't stop anyone from using electric devices. In programming... it depends. You can run some simulation of a complex system no one understands (like the ecosystem, financial system) and get something interesting. Sometimes it agrees with reality, sometimes it doesn't. :-)
An impressive achievement indeed. That's exactly what one'd expect from LLM.
If someone wants to see/hear what real music is, listen to this, just to get a reference point. This will make you cry. Literally.
For anyone else tempted to give in to their baser instincts, don't waste your time on the links, it's two very short piano performances. They're good, but it's statistically extremely unlikely that you will shed even a single tear.
I am generally in favour of throwing shade on LLM "creativity", at least thus far, but this is an uncomfortably strained flex. Literally.
I think the "literally cry" thing is a zoomer thing. I watch a lot of YouTube music video channels and the "this made me cry" thing is a meme that shows up with extreme frequency. I don't think we should take it any more seriously than we do "laugh out loud" when the actual response is usually more like a quick exhale.
Please listen to the above pieces once a day (it will take only 4 minutes) for 10 days. Then, while speaking about music, you will sound pretensious to your friends. Please try.
(I can send more. This will include jazz certainly. And Beatles... and others. You have to put some effort into it, it will pay off).
I've been studying music for 10 years, I'm not some 12 year old who's only ever heard pop.
Classical music isn't special superior form of art, and people who try to paint it as such tend to be elitists who want to have something to hold over other people to make them feel superior. Kind of like how people latch on to wine to try and seem sophisticated (ironically, wine snobbery has its origin with kings and chieftains of conquered territories trying to fit in with their Roman oppressors, but at least they were cognizant of why they were doing it, unlike modern wine snobs). There's plenty of metal that's far more technical and complex than typical classical music, but you don't see metalheads going around telling people to listen to "real" music.
What's special about classical music is merely that it's a literate form of music. It has an underlying "text" (the score) that everyone agrees on, which represents a somewhat abstracted 'blueprint' of the overall work to be performed. A metal piece doesn't really have that: you can transcribe it after the fact to score notation or tablature, but the result is merely one listener's opinion of how that piece "goes". Jazz music has its "lead sheets" but these are intentionally simplified and/or otherwise changed wrt. the source material taken from the "Great American Songbook" rep (which is far closer to the classical tradition than any kind of modern "pop").
This means that classical music, more than other traditions, is a natural target for both broader academic study as well as automated generation by AI's trained on some sort of existing repertoire.
I didn't study classical, but I was watching some YouTube channel by someone with graduate degree in classical. He offhand mentioned that many of the "compositions" of guys like Chopin were actually improvisations that were later transcribed. I've heard similar tales of Bach, especially his ability to improvise complex fugues on the spot as a sort of party trick.
I just mean to say, I don't think there is a clear divide between a classical mentality for composition and a modern mentality. It is just we study classical hundreds of years after the fact and that academization of the music has lent a particular view to it. If we study metal in a hundred years the same way we study classical (or jazz) it may seem just as rigid.
You're right that improvisation was historically very relevant in classical music and that this tradition was mostly lost starting somewhere in the mid-to-late 19th century as the view on how pieces should be performed became a lot more rigid. It still survives in places, such as among organists, and there are many attempts to revive it. But the fact that it is a matter of academic scholarship and study is not that closely related: there are lots of period-contemporary treatises and 'method' books that discuss exactly how pieces should be improvised and/or performed, often in great detail and depth. You can't possibly have that unless people are very much familiar with the practice of writing their music down on paper. That's what 'literate' means basically, it really is as simple as that. It's also something that other music traditions tend to not focus on to anything near the same extent.
I don't see much difference in that compared to now. I mean, do a search on Jazz composition/improvisation and you are bound to find numerous descriptions of the Barry Harris approach (among others). There is a large existing cannon of methods for jazz improvisation that informs all students of the form. The same is true, just less formal in pop song writing. If you watch enough producer videos for pop and commercial (ads, tv, movies) you will find there is a set of methods for those genres.
As I explained in another response, I see the literate nature of classical music as related more to the transmission of knowledge from master to novice and much less in the process of composition. In the past, music was written down for study. Today music is recorded and studied directly. I have no doubt this has consequences on the student, but I don't think it has as much consequence on the process of composition itself.
I'm not sure how "a set of methods" talked about by producers of commercial music can possibly be conflated with a continued tradition of ongoing scholarship and study that dates back some 500 years or more. Obviously anyone who creates music has some idea in her mind of how she does this, but it makes a rather massive difference whether actual in-depth scholarship is involved or not. It's very hard to do real study and scholarship without writing music down at some point, and being able to listen to a recorded track is not really the same thing.
The Barry Harris approach to jazz BTW is very much informed by what we know about the way classical improvisation worked, so even though it's transmitted by video there is in fact a link to the scholarly tradition. (The style is of course different, so these aren't quite the same thing! But not that far either.)
Yes, and one of my points was: if metal becomes as important to musical history (over a similar time span) as classical romantic music or jazz it will get the same treatment.
I'm arguing that reasoning "classical music is important because it is written" is backwards. It is written and studied because people think it is important. The degree that the formalisms are applied is directly related to how important the elites in the academies think the music is. Please don't mistake that claim with me suggesting pop music or metal are in fact as important as classical or jazz. I'm just pointing out that nascent formalisms for those genres obviously exist.
But my main point is, just because classical music has been deemed important enough by the academy to write it down, study it and enforce its strict reproduction, that does not imply that it is easier for an AI to learn the genre or reproduce it effectively. I have no doubt that just like millions of humans, multi-modal AIs will be able to use the vast library of recorded music in all genres to easily reproduce those genres compositions perfectly well. There is no privilege to classical just because the historical context meant it was committed to paper rather than record.
> the reasoning "classical music is important because it is written" is backwards.
This is of course silly; there are important traditions of broadly non-literate music, and modern popular music (with its huge variety of "genres", including metal, EDM etc.) clearly qualifies. I have only argued here that classical music being written makes it special/unusual, in a way that's legitimately compelling to some. (Including academic elites, and people looking for stuff to train an AI on.)
Do note that classical music being "written down" is not something that has happened "after the fact": the written form is how the pieces are published to begin with! (There's an interesting contrast here with 'folk' tunes, that spread orally in many subtle variants and are only written down afterwards.) Now, it is also true that performance practice can add a lot, historically; you don't have to reproduce strictly what's written. But the abstract "blueprint" to what you're performing is given by the written piece.
> I have no doubt that just like millions of humans, multi-modal AIs will be able to use the vast library of recorded music
Training an AI on recorded music is really really hard. They have to learn about how the acoustics of every single instrument works and this overwhelms the information that we actually care about, of how a piece of music goes. The difference there is absolutely clear, and quite massive.
I’m not sure how useful that framing is because improvisation is effectively composition in real time. By writing down an impromptu or something that was played on the spot it becomes composition when it’s crystallized in this way.
Chopin predates audio recording, so it’s not as if someone recorded his performance and then transcribed it like people do today with jazz solos. I’m assuming that Chopin was the one to transcribe and publish after he had a good idea because few would have the recall to do so accurately.
Sometimes compositions are generated spontaneously by the composer (one pass) and sometimes they require extensive labor and refinement.
It’s not to say that classical music doesn’t also include improvisation, and I agree that there’s not a clear divide between classical mentality and modern sensibilties. Although today, the composition (if not scored) ends up taking it’s final form as an audio recording. More and more the composition exists untranscribed in the DAW session.
What I'm getting at is that the literate quality of the music as a defining principle (or differentiator) is lessened if the actual practice was improvisation that preceded it being written down. If a composer improvised the music first and wrote it down second, then it is hard to claim that his writing it down was a significant differentiator in it's composition. This is compared to modern music that is improvised, developed than recorded (and often not written down).
The argument against my point would be, but the people learning the music (i.e. studying it) later started with the written music and went from there. And that is a differentiator for their own development as composers. That would be compared to modern musicians studying modern pop music where they start with a recording and go from there.
My point is that the differentiation is in the contemporary study of music and less in the method of composition.
> Have you _met_ a metalhead? :) saying that as one myself (less now, used to play in bands and stuff), this is one of the snobbiest group music-wise!
Like when we were 15, yeah sure, everything sucked, Opeth rules, Mayhem is tru Black Metal! etc. Though later on only my really immature friends kept those opinions. But I think this goes for any niche subculture that people use to define themselves. I too am an old metalhead, still practicing! Dress like a 15 year old, crank the volume and bang your fucking head!!! \m/(>.<)\m/ ;-)
I see metalheads casting shade on subgenres of metal they're not into and overhyped bands moreso than entire other genres of music. I remember a lot of conversations about how Cradle of Filth was poseur black metal for high school kids back in the day, for example.
Pursuing AGI? What method do they use to pursue something that no one knows what it is? They will keep saying they are pursuing AGI as long as there's a buyer for their BS.
As a math major, I scored a perfect 100 on my Linear Algebra exam in 1974. However, just two days later, I couldn't recall a single thing.
A few years ago, with ample free time, I decided to refresh my (nonexistent) memory by watching online linear algebra lectures from various professors. I was surprised by their poor quality. They lacked motivation and intuition. Khan Academy offered no improvement. Then, someone recommended Linear Algebra Done Right (LADR). I read it three times, and by the third iteration, I finally began to appreciate the beauty of the theory. Linear algebra is a purely algebraic theory; visual aids are of limited help. In short, if you have the time, I recommend reading LADR. Otherwise, don't bother.
I don't know whether LADR is good for someone who is new to linear algebra. I've seen it recommended so many times, so ~12 years ago when I was living in Beijing I bought two copies (one in English for me, and one in Chinese in case I needed to ask a colleague for help).
It took me time to study each page, to understand the examples, and then to attempt the exercises. It seemed very beautiful.
Then one day I came to a part I couldn't understand: I didn't see how something Axler said followed from the earlier stuff on the page actually followed. I scratched my head for a couple of hours, which is much longer than I'd spent on any previous page.
Eventually I asked a colleague for help. I showed him the page. He asked me to explain what I didn't understand. I started to explain what I knew, and how I didn't understand how this thing followed. As I was explaining it, that part suddenly clicked.
But I got stuck a few more times and didn't persevere.
I wonder whether it would have been better for me to have studied some numerical approach to linear algebra (like Strang's videos) first, rather than going straight into a book that's so abstract and proof-based.
I suppose it depends on your mathematical background.
(Your comment made me think about those folks who were once fit and muscular, then years later they are out of shape, and then they decide to get in shape say how easy it was to get back in shape. They don't realize that part of what made it easy is that they were once in shape, and they still more muscle cells or whatever.)
Very true. But the same applies to teaching. Mathematicians don't know where even to begin - for some of them, it's all too obvious. But the same happens with any subject. Someone proposes a certain design - but after many (20... 30... 40) years in business, you feel the design won't ever work, and try to explain, and fail because you don't know where to begin.
I got a B in my linear algebra course which was basically only numerical. I’d have gotten an A but the professor thought mountains of homework was teaching and I refused to do it all. Suffice it to say I aced every test and all the homework I actually did. None of it helped in understanding and like the grandparent I remembered none of it at the end and turned to LADR.
I don’t think any of that numerical approach helped when I read LADR. LADR isn’t about “doing the work” it’s about “doing the work to understand”. Similar to your experience I remember reading the first chapter and then among the first chapter questions I saw questions that looked like they had no basis whatsoever in what I thought I had just learned. Then, eventually, it clicked. That’s, frankly, the only way it works with Axler, so if you want it, you’ve got to do it.
My advice is to not waste time with the numerical approach and just do it.
I had a professor who used to say “being a student is suffering” but he used it to justify a bunch of bullshit. In this case, though, I’d agree with him. LADR is suffering d followed by satisfaction (and rinse and repeat).
For me, the main solution was to apply it to another problem that uses Linear Algebra as Application, which in my case was Introductory Quantum Course and implementing BLAS using Rust and C. That way you keep thinking and using this info. Otherwise, information in vacuum seems to abstract to care about.
For me, it was introductory quantum mechanics (QM) books, you can go with MIT online course from Barton Zwiebach and online course from BLIS (This is for Rust/C implementation of BLAS). If you fall in love with QM and go for more rigorous formulation of its mathematical structure, you can follow it up with An Introduction to Hilbert Space by N. Young, which was the book used in my next semester for Hilbert Space Course.
Hilbert Space is the mathematical framework to describe QM systems.
You might enjoy "Thirty-three Miniatures" (2010) by Jiřì Matoušek. It's a collection of short applications of Linear Algebra in geometry, combinatorics and CS.
Not yet, but now I will, just out of curiosity.
There's a problem with mathematicians teaching the subject. After all, the youtube lectures were also given by mathematicians. In attempt to make things "accessible", they de-emphasize the algebraic part of the subject and replace it with... I don't know what. The common theme is to consider only R^n. That's not what it's about.
Maybe Math Academy course is different though.
That's not a "mathematician" thing, it's a US thing. US universities, for some reason, insist on teaching mathematics twice, once with lots of handwaving and then at some point you get to do a "proof-based course".
In Europe (at least in certain countries, can't speak to all of them), maths lectures will typically be abstract and proof-based from day 1 - at least for maths majors (but frequently for CS and physics students too). Other majors, such as economics and maybe engineering, may get their own lectures that tend to be more hand-wavey because they don't necessarily need the axioms of real numbers to take a derivative here and there.
My linear algebra course was algebra and proof based to the extent that maybe a little bit more geometric intuition would have helped.
3blue1brown's linear algebra series is very different from what GP is talking about.
If you think linear algebra is something geometric, like "a 3x3 transform matrix is rotation and scaling; an eigenvector is something after transformation and parallel to its old self..." you will be surprised at how little LADR talks about these.
On the contrary, the most important part (imo) of 3b1b is that it helps you intuitively get these geometric interpretations.
Not as many as on HN. "Influencers" have agendas and the stream of income, or other self-interest. HN always comes off as a monolith, on any subject. Counter-arguments get ignored and downvoted to oblivion.