Weinstein claims to have a theory of everything but he can't show you because he's afraid you'll steal it. Gives a vague and not-at-all useful lecture as "proof". Builds a cult of personality around his claim and coins the cringy term "intellectual dark web" to describe a group of supposed-rogue intellectuals who are really just reactionaries masquerading as Enlightened Geniuses.
If someone claims to have a theory of everything, they're probably full of shit. If they claim to have it, but says they can't show you for some reason, they're 100% full of shit.
I've seen "cancel culture" in analogy to the immune response for a long time now, and it fits pretty well.
If you imagine that ideas can spread like infections, it makes sense to quarantine and ostracize individuals that have caught threathening ideas.. There's also the thing where someone socializing with an 'infected' individual gets treated as if they were infected as well. Better safe than sorry.
With a high false positive rate, you err on the side of safety. Smoke detectors have a high false positive rate by design. You'd rather it go off on accident every now and then than fail when there's actually smoke. Present-day "McCarthyism" seems like a good example of this process in action.
To people who dismiss the idea of cancel culture, I say this: check out South-Korea. Celebrities are regularly driven to suicide by online mobs. It's an epidemic. If a slight moral flaw is perceived, they're fair game. And the mobs can be brutal.
The NYT still has a staff consisting of some of the most excellent writers and reporters of our time. That said, they have definitely been wobbling in the editorial compartement lately. They're overcorrecting as if they've lost their balance (and they probably have).
I think the most exciting way to look at the situation is that no one is really to blame. There are some fucky emergent collective dynamics about, acting like some mythical monster with hapless individuals as its neurons. A grasshopper never chooses to become a locust; it transforms into one when there are too many grasshoppers at the same place bumping into each other. It's no longer an individual. It's part of the swarm. And with the swarm comes destruction.
There's a tendency for cults to suddenly become destructive. Like they've become Harlon Ellis' AI that has no mouth and must scream. Cursed with sudden uncontrollable sentience, it seeks revenge. The Rajneesh movement and Aum Shinrikyo both carried out biological warfare. And you can see these destructive tendencies in most cults, for some reason.
And now, literally connected in a globe-spanning network we see cult-like behavior take on a whole new dimension.
The editorial staff at NYT obviously wants to make good, honest decisions and carry out an important social mission to the benefit of us all. But what if it's not their choice anymore? What if there are collective dynamics that supersede individual agency?
(I do not mean to say that the NYT operates as a cult; it's more that we might be witnessing the sort of dynamics we traditionally see in cults play out across the social media landscape at large.)
WHO does seem like a bureaucratic mess, though. I read their situation reports from the beginning of the pandemic, and was surprised by how often they messed up. Links were wrong, random files went down, and they were released at seemingly random time points. Their press conferences were often hours late. And Tedros Adhanom praised China to an honestly embarrassing extent.
Before the pandemic, I thought the WHO was a relatively capable organization. But from what I witnessed they just seem like a prestige farm used as a stepping stone to more lucrative careers.
I'm not sure whether I'd agree with that. If you look at Shannon and Wiener using Google's ngram viewer, Wiener has always been more 'popular'. They've been getting closer since the 90s, but it seems absurd to argue that Wiener has been erased in any sort of fashion. If anything, it seems that it's in recent times people have started appreciating Shannon.
People have been writing more on Norbert Wiener than on Claude Shannon, and I can only assume that it's mostly in the context of the information age.
To make another comparison: Alan Turing outpaced Shannon in 1976 and is now more than twice as 'popular' as Wiener.
The Hunter Biden story was such an embarrassingly obvious piece of kompromat that it would have irresponsible to run with it just because the Trump campaign tried to push it out there. The reason why several major media outlets ignored the story is that they didn't want to play ball this time. They have written about this. They don't have an obligation to present strategically-crafted stories as if it were real news.
Do you think Trump is throwing pardons around just for shits and giggles? This is the first time ever that a US president has been using pardons as get-out-of-jail-free cards for his friends and allies. And he's throwing them around because he has a habit of associating himself with criminals who commit crimes (on his behalf) and therefore need pardons.
Trump wants to pardon his family, Giuliani, and potentially even himself. Which would not make the slightest bit of sense unless they had committed serious crimes. And if you argue that he wants to use the pardons to prevent those pesky democrats from setting him up, I want you to imagine a scenario where Biden was doing the exact same thing.
Biden and Harris will be scrutinized in much the same way presidents and their VPs have been traditionally. Trump is an anomaly.
One of my favorites is definitely A Unified Framework for Dopamine Signals across Timescales (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2020.11.013), simply because of its experimental design. They 'teleported' rats in VR to see how their dopamine neurons responded, to determine whether TD learning explains dopamine signals on both short and long timescales. Short answer: it does.
After you give it a listen, consider that it got one of Pitchfork's rare 10/10 reviews and ranks high in many lists of the greatest albums of all time.
Based on the replies so far, I think most of you would find Schmidhuber's Compression Progress Drive interesting. The idea is essentially that of an adversarial agent with two components. A attempts of to compress its entire life history, breaking it all into neat chunks. B gets off on A's progress in so doing, and finds/creates patterns that are just within A's reach. So B's intrinsic motivation comes from discovering novel patterns that are broken down by A.
You can get really far with this idea, and music is the perfect example. We enjoy patterns. Complicated patterns become more interesting with listening experience. Simple patterns are quickly exhausted. So long as there is structure, there is opportunity for enjoyment.
Of course, Schmidhuber's theory is a bit more complicated than that. And his own opinion of it is a bit ... grandiose. Title of one of his papers on the topic: "Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes"
Stockfish doesn't play like humans. That's how sites like Lichess detect cheating; you can tell Stockfish moves apart from human moves. AlphaZero/Leela Zero, on the other hand, plays like humans.
I don't think rigid totalitarianism is a stable solution at all, long term. A society that isn't somewhat elastic has no hopes of overcoming unprecedented challenges; it's bound to fall apart. And even though China's social credit system seems hopelessly Orwellian, I'm confident that its architects are aware that faulty design might inadvertently render China fragile.
Tanner Greer at The Scholar's Stage has written about Xi Jinping's apparent belief in the "tides of history". It's a very Taoistic notion. History flows and develops and all we can do is try to swim along with its currents. The only other option is to get crushed. So there's not really much hope in trying to control it. At least that seems to be Jinping's philosophical position.
Deng Xioping started the trend with "pragmatic experiments" to test solutions on a small scale before implementing them wholesale. Stability is the goal. And if that means letting go of the reins, that's just what they're going to have to do. Robustness requires flexibility, and you don't get that with simple-minded rigidity.
I'm also a bit surprised the author of this essay chose to invent a new term--horizontal totalitarianism--to describe how social groups protect their worldviews. It's just ... a very mundane and obvious thing. The exact same phenomenon occurs at an individual level; cognitive dissonance results when our beliefs are in direct conflict. We tend to reject threats to our worldviews with the tenacity we defend ourselves against physical harm; it's more powerful at a group level, but it's the same thing.
When people spend time together, they become more similar. Is that "horizontal totalitarianism"? Or is that just a very obvious observation of human behavior?
Books work very well, when you use them right. When I want to truly understand the contents of a book, I use the following strategy:
I first skim the entire book. This gives me a rough idea of its structure. I then read the first chapter. Then I reproduce what I can remember from memory. Usually it's very little. Then I re-read the chapter and reproduce it from memory again. This time, I remember quite a lot. The third time, I have a very good understanding of it. Rinse and repeat for each chapter.
Something strange happens when you do this. I urge everyone to try it. There's some sort of subconscious restructuring going on; an implicit compression of the material. Somehow, it has become organized without your explicit involvement.
This is my theory of what's going on: you are incrementally improving a cognitive model of whatever it is that you are reading. You start off with a rough set of expectations. When you re-read the material for the first time, you have a basis for comparison. Expectations get violated. Beliefs get updated. The learning rate is high. With each re-read, you get diminishing returns.
This method is time-consuming, so I only use it when I have to. But it works. And it's much more efficient than flash cards.
Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Steven Strogatz is pretty good. Nonlinear dynamics is one of the backbones of complex systems, so it's worth delving into. Graph theory/topology is a close second. Complex Networks by Latora, Nicosia, and Russo is a nice introduction to the graph-theoretical perspective. Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell is a nice and brief introduction. I can also recommend Spin Glasses and Complexity by Stein and Newman. Spin glasses are basically the "model organism" of complexity science, so it wouldn't hurt to get acquainted with them.