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The world now is in better place than it ever was. We are less violent, live longer, live healthier, minimum wage workers can have luxuries unimaginable by kings back in time. It's time to end the nihilism epidemic.


People do irrational things, especially if they are mentally unwell - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525


> at which people lose trust in these systems

Most of people do not lose trust in system as long as it confirms their biases (which they could've created in the first place).


He sold courses (great ones!) long before there was AI-gold rush. He's one of the OG players in online education and I think he deserves praise, not blame for that.


There are people that are capable of working 60+/week long term without burnout, they are very rare but do exist (I know like two or three).


I know many, though most of them are either founders, business owners or farmers. FWIW, only one person in that list is an employee.


I guess there's a subset that sustains for a known set of years - surgical residents. 60-80+ hours


Are they though? I’m seeing more and more people that used gpt4 and got substandard results get blown away with Claude code and opus once they gave it a chance. Also remember that progress has not stopped (whether it has slowed down is also controversial), so I wouldn’t make strong assumptions that ai won’t replace many devs. I hope it won’t, I really like intellectual work associated with it.


> As soon as Gödel published his first incompleteness theorem, I would have thought the entire field of mathematics would have gone full throttle on trying to find more axioms.

But why? Gödel's theorem does not depend on number of axioms but on them being recursively enumerable.


Right, Hilbert’s goal was (loosely speaking) to “find a finitely describable formal system” sufficient to “capture all truths”. When Gödel showed that can’t be done, that shouldn’t imply we just stop with the best theory we have so far and call it a day—it means there are an infinite number of more powerful theories (with necessarily longer minimal descriptions) waiting to be discovered.

In fact, both Gödel and Turing worked on this problem quite a bit. Gödel thought we might be able to find some sort of “meta-principle” that could guide us toward discovering an ever increasing hierarchy of more powerful axioms, and Turing’s work on ordinal progressions followed exactly this line of thinking as well. Feferman’s completeness theorem even showed that all arithmetical truths could be discovered via an infinite process. (Now of course this process is not finitely axiomatizable, but one can certainly extract some useful finite axioms out of it — the strength of PA after all is equivalent to the recursive iteration up to ε_0 of ‘Q_{n+1} = Q_n + Q_n is consistent’ where Q_0 is Robinson arithmetic).


Gödel's theorem shows that you need an infinite number of axioms to describe reality (given that available reality isn't finite), so any existing axiomatic system isn't enough.


Well, obviously we could simply take every true sentence of Peano arithmetic as an axiom to obtain a consistent and complete system, but if we think in that spirit, then almost every mathematician in the world is working on finding a better set of axioms (because every proof would either give us new axiom or show that something should not be included as axiom), right?


> obviously we could simply take every true sentence of Peano arithmetic as an axiom to obtain a consistent and complete system

If you’re talking about every true sentence in the language of PA, then not all such sentences are derivable via the theory of PA. If you are talking about the theorems of PA, then these are missing an infinite number of true statements in the language of PA.

Harvey Friedman’s “grand conjecture” is that virtually every theorem that working mathematicians actually publish can already be proved in Elementary Function Arithmetic (much weaker than PA in fact). So the majority of mathematicians are not pushing the boundaries of the existing foundational theories of mathematics, although there is certainly plenty of activity regardless.


In case of Ukraine one party has nukes, the biggest nuke arsenal in the world actually


I think it was meant like not (A has nukes and B has nukes) rather than (not A has nukes) and (not B has nukes). Strange wording, I felt the same way too.


That's what they meant: that's what war looks like when both parties don't have nukes. It's usually the defending party which benefits from nukes the most; and both parties having nukes makes every war a very dangerous affair (if it goes unchecked, as opposed to limited like India-Pakistan).


Thats what i meant. Unles both parties have nukes, it will become a proper war where countries are destroyed

Looking at india pakistan, and ukraine russia, its clear whether you should give your nuclear arsenal up or not


> We have multiple parts of the brain that interact in vastly different ways!

Yes, and thanks to that human brains are generalist


Only if that was a singular system, however, it is not. [0]

For example... The nerve cells in your gut may speak to the brain, and interact with it in complex ways we are only just beginning to understand, but they are separate systems that both have control over the nervous system, and other systems. [1]

General Intelligence, the psychological theory, and General Modelling, whilst sharing words, share little else.

[0] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.119673

[1] https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau9973


Whatever sensible measure you can imagine, it’s most likely very strongly correlated with gdp


At some point they diverge, otherwise we wouldn't have Karnataka and the US sitting where they are for HDI rankings.


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