<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;">It’s funny. <div><br></div><div>I have some sympathy to Sabine’s position, and I “like” her more than Dr. Dave, on a couple of counts. Not that any of the practical concerns raised in this thread are empty or should be dismissed. They just seem to me (for my own concerns) like lower-order matters. </div><div><br></div><div>The through-line I see in a string of videos of this kind — including another one that comes up on feeds to this one, </div><div><div style="display: block;"><div style="-webkit-user-select: all; -webkit-user-drag: element; display: inline-block;" class="apple-rich-link" draggable="true" role="link" data-url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxjatbVb7M"><a style="border-radius:10px;font-family:-apple-system, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;display:block;-webkit-user-select:none;width:300px;user-select:none;-webkit-user-modify:read-only;user-modify:read-only;overflow:hidden;text-decoration:none;" class="lp-rich-link" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxjatbVb7M" dir="ltr" role="button" draggable="false" width="300"><table style="table-layout:fixed;border-collapse:collapse;width:300px;background-color:#E5E6E9;font-family:-apple-system, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" class="lp-rich-link-emailBaseTable" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" width="300"><tbody><tr><td vertical-align="center" align="center"><img style="width:300px;filter:brightness(0.97);height:168px;" width="300" height="168" draggable="false" class="lp-rich-link-mediaImage" alt="maxresdefault.jpg" src="cid:280B3FF3-EAAE-46A5-A942-197F94BFDF88"></td></tr><tr><td vertical-align="center"><table bgcolor="#E5E6E9" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="300" style="font-family:-apple-system, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;table-layout:fixed;background-color:rgba(229, 230, 233, 1);" class="lp-rich-link-captionBar"><tbody><tr><td style="padding:8px 0px 8px 0px;" class="lp-rich-link-captionBar-textStackItem"><div style="max-width:100%;margin:0px 16px 0px 16px;overflow:hidden;" class="lp-rich-link-captionBar-textStack"><div style="word-wrap:break-word;font-weight:500;font-size:12px;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;text-align:left;" class="lp-rich-link-captionBar-textStack-topCaption-leading"><a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxjatbVb7M" style="text-decoration: none" draggable="false"><font color="#272727" style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.847059);">Science is in trouble and it worries me.</font></a></div><div style="word-wrap:break-word;font-weight:400;font-size:11px;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;text-align:left;" class="lp-rich-link-captionBar-textStack-bottomCaption-leading"><a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxjatbVb7M" style="text-decoration: none" draggable="false"><font color="#808080" style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.498039);">youtube.com</font></a></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></a></div></div> — is that there are fewer and fewer consequential _ideas_ seeming to be created in physics, and although I am not in touch with all of science, I have enough traffic in enough areas that I think something like this is true more broadly.</div><div><br></div><div>One of the symptoms of this that I have been discussing with people for some years is that, increasingly, the Nobels in physics have really been awarded for engineering. In a few cases, like the Higgs, they were for an idea many decades old, which just took a lot of time to bring within reach of measurement. Not that the Nobel matters much one way or another, but it is okay as a kind of cultural barometer. Every year they have to come up with _something_, and what they do come up with can reflect what the current sociology has on offer. </div><div><br></div><div>I am stunned to realize that the last one I paid a little attention to was 2021, and of those three, Parisi is the one who I think really matters in an idea sense (as opposed to important application domains). Even for Parisi, among the several things he has done, I think glasses stand out as the thing that brought a new idea into existence, that was really, deeply hard to have seen and then been able to develop. For the first decade or more, it looked like total voodoo (replica methods, specifically), and I say that even having used a little shred of that math to do something many years ago (localization in acoustics). Parisi could see through that house-of-mirrors and manage to develop it, for a long time when only a couple guys in the world seemed able to follow it, until more sane and understandable methods could come in and make it systematic and accessible. </div><div><br></div><div>More recently, what do we have? Engineering of entangled photons and attosecond laser pulses? Hopfield for neural nets (okay; good one; handy that he has lived to 110 or whatever it is, so that work he did as a boy could get some registration before he died). </div><div><br></div><div>In the video linked above, SH wants to conclude quickly that, since the slow-down is across the sciences, the cause is social and institutional. I think that’s too quick. My confound would be that, where there were rapid “discoveries” in lots of sciences that were still somewhat “new” in the first half of the century, the reason they came fast and thick was that many of them resembled, in what is needed to think about them, ideas that were already in place or still being discovered in physics: crucially, they were “simple” and “mechanical” in some way, and didn’t reflect essential things across the sciences that made them really new horizons. So a combination of the “low-hanging fruit”, and an argument that the discoveries aren’t conceptually so independent, is an important part, together with Sabine’s institutional claim, which is also important (IMO). </div><div><br></div><div>Re. the latter: Surely, the things I most want to do, I could never get funded, because I don’t already understand them. And the things I can get funded, I mostly don’t care about any more, because I learned from them what was significant to me. Between that difficulty, which puts my more interesting efforts in the garage, and the fact that I’m not all that promethean to begin with, I would put most, and perhaps all, of what I have ever done on a margin of Sabine’s “bullshit” category. Though I keep hoping that if I can just try one more time, I might do something that matters more…. There doesn’t need to be any game-playing in making a self-assessment like this, and I would still like to argue for a large and active field of scientific effort, even if much of it is applied and incremental. Among things people can spend their time on, this certainly seems absolutely better for human futures than endless contests of attacking neighbors and capturing land. We can admit both that important ideas are rare, and also that modest ordinary day-work is perfectly fine, if it doesn’t devolve into an unanswerable priesthood. </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>This is not to say that I think all of Sabine’s arguments are good, even though I recognize that, technically, she is far stronger than I am and knows far more hard stuff than I do. When she was on her anti-beauty kick, she used to trot out renormalization as an example of a solution that was true and ugly. But she adduced the 1930s subtraction-of-infinities version of renormalization, which to me was a strawman. It is both ugly and not the real general form. The general form is the renormalization group, which is utterly elegant. And surely she understands all this, if I do. So I don’t go for it all.</div><div><br></div><div>Instead of conservative, I wonder if some of it is just Aspbergers. I have Greta Thunberg’s voice in my ears, explaining to people that “we autistics see the world clearly, in black and white. Not like you normies, who seem to [in your distorted way] keep saying everything is gray.” </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Oddly, in the segment that Glen originally forwarded from Dr.Dave, I was aware watching it that I recognize a thing about people who are primarily science communicators in it, that before now I did not have a way to articulate. But I know a bunch of them, and I think I can say it now. They remind me of lawyers. Like they are hired advocates for some position, and the moral standing of the thing they advocate for is not their remit. Hence Dr.Dave’s (to me) handwringing that “she’s abetting the enemy”. No; the enemy acts in bad faith, One doesn’t want to PC everything down to ditchwater trying to be defensive against them. One could do that, and to some degree it works (incrementally), but at the end of the day that is less valuable than a moral stand taken by somebody on something that mattered, if the stand showed some depth. I see SH as trying to do this (and also doing her own research, which is the “put up or shut up” half of that bargain). Right or wrong in its different choices, and probably overstated much of the time, it seems okay to me.</div><div><br></div><div>Eric</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br id="lineBreakAtBeginningOfMessage"><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>On Nov 18, 2024, at 7:54, glen <gepropella@gmail.com> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div><div>Yeah, it's kinda sad. Sabine suggests someone's trying to *deduce* the generators from the phenomena? Is that a straw man? And is she making some kind of postmodernist argument that hinges on the decoupling of scales? E.g. since the generator can't be deduced [cough] from the phenomena, nothing means anything anymore?<br><br>What they're actually doing is induction, not deduction. And the end products of the induction, the generative constraints, depend fundamentally on the structure of the machine into which the data is fed. That structure is generative, part of the forward map ... deductive. But it's parameterized by the data. Even if we've plateaued in parameterizing *this* structure, all it implies is that we'll find a better structure. As Marcus and Jochen point out, it's really the same thing we've been doing for decades, if not centuries, in many disciplines.<br><br>So her rhetoric here is much like her rhetoric claiming that "Science if Failing". It's just a mish-mash of dense semantic concepts arranged to fit her conservative narrative.<br><br>On 11/17/24 08:45, Roger Critchlow wrote:<br><blockquote type="cite">Sabine is wondering about reported failures of the new generations of LLM's to scale the way the their developers expected.<br>https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbackreaction.blogspot.com%2f2024%2f11%2fai-scaling-hits-wall-rumours-say-how.html&c=E,1,0ohof8uVbmKPhWTHR2-_AGoL4rCwVbnuFeL01ra85Zt9dcttwUuvaSb7yjADkEbgbEWg8aqmWsrWEmljR0Cjz9GKANLoXKGbNu7TsYoRT6sEmMmymq7u&typo=1 <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbackreaction.blogspot.com%2f2024%2f11%2fai-scaling-hits-wall-rumours-say-how.html&c=E,1,SCXmdB5gBm48LPX6D5JgdR7uMPXLmAuG5N__SWCkM5Y-kt_WVCJCGAo9qqO2Ejsl-iyijqOfvHcE4ETfsYk7cyBtaqS_Dq95xZetlsd_WYSSihbiWJZ1RIQ,&typo=1><br>On one slide she essentially draws the typical picture of an emergent level of organization arising from an underlying reality and asserts, as every physicist knows, that you cannot deduce the underlying reality from the emergent level. Ergo, if you try to deduce physical reality from language, pictures, and videos you will inevitably hit a wall, because it can not be done.<br>So she's actually grinding two axes at once: one is AI enthusiasts who expect LLM's to discover physics, and the other is AI enthusiasts who foresee no end to the improvement of LLM's as they throw more data and compute effort at them.<br>But, of course, the usual failure of deduction runs in the opposite direction, you can't predict the emergent level from the rules of the underlying level. Do LLM's believe in particle collliders? 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