"In no case may a prize amount be divided between more than three persons." [1]
Sad state of affairs to expect a reward for brilliance and to have science bottlenecked by a merchant of death. Just the fact that the merchant of death gives "peace prizes" should have made the entire affair laughable a long time ago. Perhaps it's time to move on from this ancient and limited understanding of appraisal, awards.
I'm in no position to ever receive a Nobel prize, but I'm fairly certain I am moral enough to reject such a grandstanding award coming from such a troubled tradition. Yes, I just virtue-signalled calling immoral every recipient of the Nobel Prize, mostly out of sheer distaste for the ceremony, but also thinking of the terrible inefficiency which has plagued science and research in the last 122 years. How many discoveries were missed because following the course to unveil them was not "Nobel-worthy". How many scientists had their careers ruined for pursuing the Nobel award without being granted anything. Just the fact that only 1.8% of the Nobel Prize in Physics were awarded to women [2] shows the entire thing as the charade it is, no other context needed.
We detached this flamewar tangent from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953091. Can you please not do this? Your post broke several of the site guidelines, including "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
Edit: you've unfortunately been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed, and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of what they're battling for or against. I've banned this account accordingly. For past explanations on this point see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
yet 95% of the prison inmates are male. There are obvious differences on the extreme ends of the spectrum between males and females and the nobel price only considers extremes to begin with.
Your [2] source only mentions statistics since 2012. It's disingenuous to think this could spread down to 1901 if you wish to use the 1.8% as a point to argue.
Society was very different a hundred years ago. Women's access to education amongst other things has improved severely over time, and we do have seen an increase in female Nobel laureates compared to the earlier days.
Sure, it doesn't spread down to 1901, but the uptick started around 1970s [1].
Anyway, my main rant was about the inefficiency of giving awards to "lone geniuses", at most three, of expecting said "lone wolves" to exist in the first place, and then comes the discussion if the wolves are male or not. Unfortunately it got derailed into talking about pseudoscientific scalars such as IQ and sex binaries.
Most Nobel winners get their prizes during their 60s-70s. It means that people who graduated in the 1970s are just starting to get their Nobels.
And the trend of aging winners continues as research become more complex and specialized and therefore requires more experience. The time between theory and the practical discovery (Nobel prizes are only for the latter) increase as experiments become more complex too. So much that it may become difficult for theorists to get a Nobel in their lifetime. That LK99 thing, if real, is more the exception than the rule.
True. That's why we probably need another mechanism for incentivizing high-risk/high-reward/multi-decennial research. Perhaps, even if LK99 is not real, something interesting will mutate out of it: some kind of platform merging arXiv, Twitch, Patreon, making the researchers to be more transparent, more willing to share partial results, failures, and even be rewarded to fail. Some time ago had this "fail database" in mind, where one would upload all the data of the experiments that didn't work. I see there is a "FailCon" [1].
The other replies to this are making terrible arguments. The actual strongest case is that the Nobel prize is only given to extremely old people, which means it reflects the gender ratio of the field a few decades ago and not the current one.
Of course, they did give Donna Strickland a prize for the first paper she published as a grad student.
Your arguments aren't unique by a long shot; you're simply witnessing two seperate people who have been discussing technical matters since pre-WWW Usenet days observing there are hackers who have been making those arguments for 40+ years.
I can't speak for Don but for my part they got dull 35+ years back.
I'm sure you can find a rebuttal or reinforcement, whichever you need, elsewhere.
All of a sudden it seems the commenters have started name-calling and stereotyping the poster (realjhol) without any evidence or links to dispute his statements. Maybe replying in good faith would be a more helpful discussion, with links to support/deny his arguments?
I've read his posting history. It's quite clear what kind of a person he is, especially from the patterns and subjects of all his heavily downvoted and flagged posts. As if that wasn't already obvious from his recent sexist posts. But go read them yourself and carry the water for his bigotry if you like, it'll just say a lot about yourself too. Like Elon Musk and his flashing "X", some people just desperately want you to know they're assholes.
Regardless if LK-99 is truly a Room-Temperature Superconductor or not, only 112 years passed since Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered superconductivity on April 8, 1911, 4 PM [1] [2]: resistance not futile, but "practically zero". The first loaf of sliced bread was sold commercially on July 7, 1928 [3]. The rate of progress is astonishing.
We are ridiculously far from physical limits in our current artificial computers (both theoretical [1], and practical [2]). For more technical details see Jim Keller: [3] [4] [5].
[2] The ~12 watts computer inside each living human adult skull (and perhaps each eukaryote cell [6]) is still the state-of-the-art, for quite some time.
[6] Our computers aren't yet able of polycomputation, where the computation topology, data, and functions depend on the observer, instead of computation in a passive implementation, once done forever set in s̶t̶o̶n̶e̶ silicon, 2023, Michael Levin, Agency, Attractors, & Observer-Dependent Computation in Biology & Beyond, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whZRH7IGAq0
Physical limits don't matter much when economic limits (transistor cost) are reached much earlier. What matters is not transistors per chip area (Moore's law) but FLOP/s per chip cost. Also FLOP per chip power draw.
Economic limits are imaginary, secondhand effects of the ideological goggles one's society decides to wear at a certain time for arbitrary reasons. USA during the Manhattan Project knew of no economic limits, i.e. they could arbitrarily push them according to the greater goal; China today, for instance, knows no economic limits. But yes, today, in the "Western" world a speech such as "we choose to get 160 zetaflops (10^21) [1] under your desk in 10 years because it is hard" [2] would be unimaginable, also because you can count on the fingers of an amputated arm how many politicians know what a FLOP is.
Interestingly enough, penny pushing also destroys capitalism, see The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America―and How to Undo His Legacy [1].
Until a synthetic agent will be here we can only guess. The current best guesses seem to have to do with the free energy principle, active inference, Markov blankets [1]. It might be just that simple: it's what happens when some proton gradient reduces ferredoxin [2]. Also related [3].
[1] On-going series of lectures, "Physics as Information Processing" - Chris Fields
[2] "How does chemistry come alive?" - Nick Lane, Alkaline hydrothermal vents at 18:44, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmvS7tgvy6U TL;DW at 52:00 "How does chemistry come alive? It happens when a focused, sustained environmental disequilibrium of H2, CO2, and pH across a porous structure that lowers kinetic barriers to reaction continuously forms organics that bind and self-organize into protocells with protometabolism generating catalytic nucleotides which promote protocell growth through positive feedbacks, favouring physical interactions with amino acids, a nascent genetic code where RNA sequences are selected if they promote protocell growth so genetic information has meaning from the beginning"
An "everything app" is just an operating system. There is nothing to picture, we've been having them since the 1950s [1].
We could imagine some new way of operating over systems: for instance the Alan Kay original meaning of object-orientedness [2], or instead of a compiled binary to have some stable diffusion model + large language model which hallucinates the OS on the go [3].
But that's not what the quantifiably greediest person on the planet has in mind, by "everything app" they just mean "everything must be controlled by me, not by you".
Thank you for the read. The idea of an OS supplanted by an AI is fascinating.
> "everything must be controlled by me, not by you"
Right, the end goal I had in mind for "the everything app" is the control of the software (including communication), the data and the payment system by the same company.
Few companies have achieved that outside of China. I'm thinking, Apple, Google, Samsung in Korea maybe?
And no one I know personally is fully tied to one ecosystem. My friends only use the individual services they need. Becoming WeChat will not happen.
Even the idea of Twitter growing into a Google size company seems completely unrealistic. Meta struggles with achieving this and right now they're more popular than Twitter.
It's in the first paragraph of the linked article [1]. They were called "loans" in the government-speak of the post-2008 crash, but if you look at the semantics, they were just risk-free bailouts.
[1] "the U.S. Secretary of Energy will be giving details about the first loans to come out of the government’s $25 billion program to help auto manufacturers. Ford got a $5.9 billion loan, but Tesla Motors, Silicon Valley’s electric car manufacturer, is receiving $465 million from the program"
Just avoiding the inevitable I suppose: June 22, 2023, "Ford agrees to $9.2 billion US government loan" [1].
That's the joke in the end: there are no companies (and there is no government), just a bunch of chaebols [2], at least South Koreans don't lie to themselves.
Can I, just a random citizen, get a loan from the government for not even billions or hundreds of millions but let's say $100,000? I will of course repay "in due course, at the appropriate juncture, in the fullness of time" [1], at 0% interest.
There is nothing loan-like in government "loans" (of 2008, or of 2021, see the PPP heist [2]) almost by definition: no interest, no shares changing hands, not even a share buyback restriction (how most of the government loans are spent anyway).
Watched 1978, Blue Collar [1] recently, given also the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike, and was thinking on the forced master-slave dialectic [2] between the union representative and the worker, the proliferation of middle-management, the micro-dictatorship of the foreperson, and how to solve this vicious cycle. As for the democratic societies at large, the only long-term viable solution seems to be sortition [3]: don't elect leaders, union reps, forepersons based on perceived or real qualities, instead randomly select and also, perhaps more important, randomly cull; both random moment in time and random individual.
If I have one sociological curiosity is this: how much better (in pure KPIs) an organization/society would be if its leaders would be randomly cut from power, sine ira, studio, vel ratio [4]. Given a wide and deep enough structure of power, the individual good (in an extra-moral sense) has a diminishing impact, while the individual bad gets only amplified as power increases. The meta-principles of the structure ought to control this asymmetry and random selection/culling seems, weirdly enough, the most fair, perhaps even the most efficient.
[1] "Three workers try to steal from the local union, they instead discover corruption and decide to use this information for blackmail", https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077248
As I see it random selection means every leader will pillage as much money for themselves as possible as quickly as possible. More so than right now since there's some risk of them losing power (current or future) over it right now.
Not quite. Corruption is the side-effect of interpersonal relationships. Once the cluster of the organization's/society's leaders are random, and with a sufficiently aggressive random culling function, there is no ground anymore for fostering interpersonal relationships. Take it one step further and replace judges, prosecutors, lawyers in the same manner with a random retribution function. Now you have a third level of metastable phase control just through randomness.
The current bar is so low, so artificially kept low (just on one dimension, around 800 millions of people are starving [1] while around 1 billion are obese [2]), almost anything would be an improvement, especially dispersing power through randomness.
There was a trend in the paper blogs, the diaries of 1930s [1], probably when they were at peak, of authors whining about authorship, perhaps due to an esprit du mal of the epoch: to whom does one write for? And the answers were usually, (i) one writes for the others of today to obtain worldly benefits, which is gauche in the eyes of the diary writer, (ii) one writes for the others of tomorrow, which is somewhat more acceptable, (iii) one writes for oneself, which is the pure form of the art.
However, a fourth option appears today: one writes for the language models. The language models will always care about your blog.
Excuse me, is it "duct" or "duck" tape?
I mean sure, "duct tape" and "duck tape" are both fine. "Duct tape" is the more common name today. The older name is "duck tape" after the duck cloth under the adhesive.
As an aside: If you care about such things, make sure to read up on how today's common version became popular. A 51-year-old woman named Vesta Stoudt, mother of 8, mailed her idea for a better ammunition box seal to the president (who approved production) after her bosses didn't do anything with the suggestion.
"I suggested we use a strong cloth tape to close seams, and make tab of same. It worked fine, I showed it to different government inspectors they said it was all right, but I could never get them to change tape." Vesta Stoudt to President Roosevelt, February 10, 1943 [1]. History is full of "never get them to change" stories, probably one of the more famous is Napoleon's dismissal of the steam engine, although the story is a bit more complicated, "Fulton (and his design) failed at the worst possible time" [2]. As we found out recently, submarines are hard.
And on a completely unrelated note, one of the greater stories of quasi-forgotten sacrifice of a mother for her son is the story of a woman in 1850s travelling around 2,000 kilometres by foot, by horse, by any means to get her son enrolled into university, dying shortly after: her name was Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, her son's name was Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev [3], that Mendeleev.
Sad state of affairs to expect a reward for brilliance and to have science bottlenecked by a merchant of death. Just the fact that the merchant of death gives "peace prizes" should have made the entire affair laughable a long time ago. Perhaps it's time to move on from this ancient and limited understanding of appraisal, awards.
I'm in no position to ever receive a Nobel prize, but I'm fairly certain I am moral enough to reject such a grandstanding award coming from such a troubled tradition. Yes, I just virtue-signalled calling immoral every recipient of the Nobel Prize, mostly out of sheer distaste for the ceremony, but also thinking of the terrible inefficiency which has plagued science and research in the last 122 years. How many discoveries were missed because following the course to unveil them was not "Nobel-worthy". How many scientists had their careers ruined for pursuing the Nobel award without being granted anything. Just the fact that only 1.8% of the Nobel Prize in Physics were awarded to women [2] shows the entire thing as the charade it is, no other context needed.
[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/frequently-asked-questions/#:~:te...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_Nobel_laureates