He has a lot of excerpts and some full stories on his website, so one way to start might be browsing there.
I think my favorite novels of his that I've read were Zendegi and Incandescence.
I think I speak for everyone here when I say, "Ew."
xcancel link, since nitter.net is kaput.
New diet villain just dropped. Believe or disbelieve this specific one, "fat" or even "polyunsaturated fat" increasingly looks like a failure as a natural category. Only finer-grained concepts like "linoleic acid" are useful for carving reality at the joints.
Reply:
This systematic review and meta-analysis doesn't seem to indicate that linoleic acid is unusually bad for all-cause mortality or cardiovascular disease events.
Yud writes back:
And is there another meta-analysis showing the opposite? I kinda just don't trust those anymore, unless somebody I trust vouches for the meta-analysis.
Ah, yes, the argumentum ad other-sources-must-exist-somewhere-um.
Since I don't think that one professor's uploads can furnish hundreds of billions of tokens... yeah, that sounds exceedingly implausible.
Today seems to be another day on which archive dot fuh just refuses to load. Anyone able to see it?
New top-level thread for complaining about the worst/weirdest Wikipedia article in one's field of specialization?
I wonder how much Rationalists have mucked up Wikipedia over the years just by being loud and persistent on topics where actual expertise would be necessary to push back.
More from the "super-recursive algorithm" page:
Traditional Turing machines with a write-only output tape cannot edit their previous outputs; generalized Turing machines, according to Jürgen Schmidhuber, can edit their output tape as well as their work tape.
... the Hell?
I'm not sure what that page is trying to say, but it sounds like someone got Turing machines confused with pushdown automata.
I think that's it — it's the one Timnit Gebru linked to back in February which prompted the old!SneerClub discussion I mentioned, and Molly White's newsletter links to the same place.
A link to what?
(The link in the Substack post is to the Wikipedia page for the Crooks result, disguising — intentionally or not — the fact that the writer is just smashing together science words.)
Yud loves to go on about how the map is not the territory, to the extent that his cult followers think he coined the phrase, but he is remarkably terrible at understanding which is which. Or, to be a little more precise, he is actively uninterested in appreciating that the question of what to file under "map" versus "territory" is one of the big questions that separate the different interpretations of quantum mechanics. He has his desired answer, and he argues for it by assertion.
He's also just ignorant about the math. Stepping back from the details of what he gets wrong, there are bigger-picture problems. For example, he points to a complex number and says that it can't be a probability because it's complex. True, but so what? The Fourier transform of a sequence of real numbers will generally have complex values. Just because one way of expressing information uses complex numbers doesn't mean that every perspective on the problem has to. And, in fact, what he tries to do with two complex numbers — one amplitude for each path in an interferometer — you can actually do with three real numbers. They can even be probabilities, say, the probability of getting the "yes" outcome in each of three yes/no measurements. The quantumness comes in when you consider how the probabilities assigned to the outcomes of different experiments all fit together. If probabilities are, as Yud wants, always part of the "map", and a wavefunction is mathematically equivalent to a set of probabilities satisfying some constraint, then a wavefunction belongs in the "map", too. You can of course argue that some probabilities are "territory"; that's an argument which smart people have been having back and forth for decades. But that's not what Yud does. Instead, through a flavor swirl of malice and incompetence, he ends up being too much a hypocrite to "steelman" the many other narratives about quantum mechanics.
"I dig a pony ... Well, you can penetrate any place you go / Yes, you can penetrate any place you go / I told you so"
I'd disagree with the media analysis in "What Was The Nerd?" at a few points. For example, Marty McFly isn't a bullied nerd. George McFly is. Marty plays in a band and has a hot girlfriend. He's the non-nerd side of his interactions with Doc Brown, where he's the less intellectual, and with George, where he's the more cool. Likewise, Chicago in Ferris Bueller's Day Off isn't an "urban hellscape". It's the fun place to go when you want to ditch the burbs and take in some urban pleasures (a parade, an art gallery...).