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[silverspawn]

Good thing I have access to the greatest technology ever invented, otherwise I couldn't use it for vital purposes such as this one

[silverspawn]

In case you're wondering, GPT-4 factored the number correctly. Scary stuff.

[Awaclus]

88

Sick dogwhistle.

[Snorka]

I just picked up chess.com. I knew how to play and a friend taught me a few basics to play well. Man I'm just tryna stay above 400. This game's hard.

[silverspawn]

88

Sick dogwhistle.

Cartman mussed have rubbed off on me

[silverspawn]

I just picked up chess.com. I knew how to play and a friend taught me a few basics to play well. Man I'm just tryna stay above 400. This game's hard.

It's ridiculously hard, yeah

the good news is that at 400 you don't need to do any strategy (which in chess means non-concrete plans about where to move your stuff). You only need to check after every move your opponent makes if that offers you a free piece, and before every move you make if that hangs a free piece. If you don't hang pieces and take your opponent's hanging pieces, you'll win.

[silverspawn]

mussed

There it begins; I'm already unconsciously Germanyfying my sentences

[faust]

1. Is Elon Musk a genius or an idiot? This book review says it's probably both

At this point, I don't care too much about Musk's intellect. The review tries very hard to find reasons for his success; there is a strong aversion to the simple explanation of "he got lucky" (which of course is reductive, but survivorship bias is something you have to take into account).

It does seem to confirm my main critique of Musk: that he's an asshole.

I also found to section on "is he a child of privilege?" quite funny. Oh, his dad only had a net worth in the "low double-digit millions"; there is no way he could be privileged! And "Zambia [...] had no [...] bloody conflicts" is just an objectively funny thing to say about an African country in the 1980s.

[silverspawn]

I also found to section on "is he a child of privilege?" quite funny. Oh, his dad only had a net worth in the "low double-digit millions"; there is no way he could be privileged!

Well, that's a strawman. The article's argument is that he isn't that privileged because his father didn't share the money.

[silverspawn]

So how long will I manage not to play chess now that I've done a point landing on where I want to go? 2 hours? 4 hours? a day? A week? Forever?

[faust]

I also found to section on "is he a child of privilege?" quite funny. Oh, his dad only had a net worth in the "low double-digit millions"; there is no way he could be privileged!

Well, that's a strawman. The article's argument is that he isn't that privileged because his father didn't share the money.

Yes, well I don't buy that at all. You grow up in a family with that kind of money, you're privileged, full stop.

I don't know if there are any sources on how much money Musk had available; the review only mentions Musk's own account. But even if we were to assume all that is true...

- he moved to Canada when he was 17: Not something a poor person would even be able to do.
- he took out a $100,000 loan: again, something much easier if you know you have a million-dollar fortune at your back should things go sour
- his dad invested "only" $28,000: and Musk probably knew a lot more people with money that he could ask for investments because of the social circle in which he was brought up.

[silverspawn]

Yeah I don't dispute that he was privileged. I think the reasonable claim here is that it was a "normal" kind of privilege, the kind you get by being the child of a wealthy family, and not the kind that's typical for the son of a multi-millionaire.

Maybe that's all in the "privilege" bucket, but like there is a difference between this description and being handed hundreds of thousands of dollars

[silverspawn]

So how long will I manage not to play chess now that I've done a point landing on where I want to go? 2 hours? 4 hours? a day? A week? Forever?

The answer was 4 hours

[silverspawn]

Me: is 3 games away from 1800
Me: this is bad what am I doing I just can't get myself to be productive
Me: ok that's it I'm gonna meditate
Me: shuts down computer
Me: ... let me just play one more on my phone to end on a win
Me: (gets 3 easy wins in a row and hits 1800)

OR how the universe sets all the wrong incentives

[silverspawn]

I struggle to do work lately. There's a thing the buddhists call the hungry ghost realm where you just want to do fun or rewarding stuff all the time. This is what it feels like I naturally slide into if I don't set myself hard rules for when to work. Which I used to do but I relaxed them all when I was depressed after being sick.

I need to do something drastic to get out, like not do any entertainment for a day. The problem is that in this state where you most need to do something like that, you have the least willpower to do it.

[silverspawn]

My highest rating ever was 1804, which is right now. But any game gives somewhere between +5 and +11. That means I never won a game when I was 1800+, even though I've hit it like four or five times now.

[silverspawn]

Maybe I should play a game to break that pattern

[silverspawn]

Apropos of nothing, but I think this is really sweet

[silverspawn]

I've mostly come around to having a positive emotional relationship with Grossberg's book because the content is so fantastic and relevant to my interests, but I can't help making fun of this figure:



I didn't add the red and green boxes; he actually included them like this in the book.

[silverspawn]

Well turns out all this is peanuts. Here I am making fun of Grossberg for not so subtly praising his own theory in a figure, and then I listen to a podcast with him and even though I didn't finish, he compared himself to Einstein twice and quoted someone as saying that he is the greatest thinker that person ever met.

Also, he rambles. It's crazy. The hosts asked him a question and he just went on and on and on with anecdotes about people he met. But I think that's at least partially his age. He's like 84 now.

Despite all this he really does have an insanely impressive body of work. Not just because I agree with so much of it, but the quantity is pretty astounding. His h-index is 131, which means 131 papers with at least 131 citations -- and having 131 citations is quite high! There are the same number of citations and references, obviously, and papers usually have fewer than 131 references.

[silverspawn]

Also the fact that Steven Lehar is considered this crazy fringe figure, and Grossberg this titan in the field with 83948 citations -- that fact is just plain weird, because their bodies of work are super complementary. Their emphasis and presentation are both very different, but the actual theories fit together beautifully.

It really is all about prestige and status. Even in fields that are ostensibly about something else like math, that something just matters because it's tied to status. If you prove P =/= NP and no one believes you, you have nothing. And although this counterfactual isn't really possible, if you had a false proof that everyone believed, you'd get all the fame.

[silverspawn]

guys I'm also totally like Einstein. You know, German.

[silverspawn]

And without joke, I'm an Open Individualist, like Einstein.

[faust]

It really is all about prestige and status. Even in fields that are ostensibly about something else like math, that something just matters because it's tied to status. If you prove P =/= NP and no one believes you, you have nothing. And although this counterfactual isn't really possible, if you had a false proof that everyone believed, you'd get all the fame.

I feel like I need to chime in on this. There is some truth here, but it is very hyperbolic (no pun intended) to put it like this.

First of all, probably the major proof of the 21st century so far, the proof of the Poincaré conjecture, came from Perelman, a relative outsider in mathematics. This was still acknowledged widely. There are also multple mathematical results by hobbyists that have been accepted, e.g. in plane tiling or even knot theory.

When it comes to false proofs, I don't think they stand. The thing is, multiple people will come along trying to understand the proof in order to modify it for their own problems, and eventually someone will find the problem. That said, conjectures tend to be a bigger problem. I know of multiple that are kiind of believed because they're made by big names and seem reasonable, but there's not actually a proof yet and still a whole theory has developed around assuming the conjecture is true. I've heard such e.g. in symplectic geometry, but don't know the details.

Here is a paper discussing correction culture in math, and it definitely seems like there are still problems. But I don't like the sweeping dismissal.

[faust]

And without joke, I'm an Open Individualist, like Einstein.

And I am a socialist, like Einstein!