Interview with Freeman Dyson

https://www.52-insights.com/freeman-dyson-i-kept-quiet-for-30-years-so-maybe-its-time-to-speak-interview-science/

by dedalus • 8 years ago

86 44 8 years ago

Wow, what a toxic website. As soon as you open it it'll show you a modal asking for money and to sign up for their newsletter.

superflyguy• 8 years ago

On sites like this I "sign up" a bunch of times with sarcastic made up email addresses at their domain like calmdownneedysiteletmecheckitoutfirst@theirdomain.com.

superkuh• 8 years ago

Turn off javascript. It works just fine and doesn't bug you. This is the best way to surf by default.

But, more back on topic, it seems to me that despite the headline picked suggesting something very controversial, nothing in Dyson's intereview really was.

re: evolution and natural selection vs. random drift, it's not like this are opposing concepts. They're mutually complementary.

re: climate, he's not wrong about humans not understanding how big climate changes (ie: ice ages) worked or what they were caused by. It's not a huge step to suggest that that inability to understand or create predictive models of past climate records suggests current extrapolations may not be very predictive.

No reasons to get everyone riled up like this HN thread has been. Read the article and you'll see it's all very nuanced and not him just saying "EVOLUTION IS WRONG." or "CLIMATE CHANGE ISN'T HAPPENING.".

Arubis• 8 years ago

I want to read this, but only after someone goes through and puts all the commas back in.

jeremyjh• 8 years ago

I agree, I don't know why you are getting down voted. Writing this sloppy is too distracting to be worthwhile.

stuntkite• 8 years ago

This was a neat interview with a guy who is living history. I have never been to this website before, I don't know how they got this interview, but they should hire a copy editor. This thing read like a LiveJournal post.

roryisok• 8 years ago

Really interesting to learn the Dyson sphere is just a misunderstanding!

ebbv• 8 years ago

TL;DR - Guy who inspired a couple of interesting sci-fi ideas is speaking out on topics he knows nothing about. Shockingly, his uninformed opinion disagrees with people who are informed on the subjects.

convolvatron• 8 years ago

guy had an interesting speculation (derived from someone elses work) about dynamics of genetic evolution in small populations, and a general concern that there isn't enough science to figure out whats going to happen after the drastic rampup of atmospheric carbon. recommends planting lots of trees.

doesn't make for an adequately clickbaity headline though

gwern• 8 years ago

The problem is, 'genetic drift' is not remotely controversial. Even Kimura's strong claim that drift is responsible for most genetic changes is a respectable position, and the debate is a rather pedestrian one of 'exactly how much change is drift versus selection' (like in the nature-nurture debate, the expert consensus has settled down to a centrist 'both do a lot and how exactly much of each depends on a lot of details and context'). Hard to see why Dyson thinks it's so exciting or a dangerous heresy. I was expecting more when he brought up Darwin...

dang• 8 years ago

This breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you not to post shallow dismissals to Hacker News. And also not to snark.

You have a long history of breaking the HN guidelines and we've warned you and asked you to stop repeatedly. If you can't or won't stop, we'll eventually ban you, so could you please re-read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use this site as intended?

archgoon2• 8 years ago

pokemongoaway3• 8 years ago

Why such desperation for consensus?

ItsMe0000015• 8 years ago

Before I start: My comment is not about the person, I don't know anything about him, only about one specific section in the linked article. Also, I'm making this a question rather than a strong opinionated statement, because I am in no position to provide the latter. That means I'm ready to stand corrected and post my observation for discussion.

I skipped to where I thought I see something about something "sciency", and I found the section when you skip to

Just to clarify here for our readers, obviously, you’re poking holes in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution but you’re saying it only tells the story up to a certain point...

I don't understand what he is talking about. I mean, where is that "controversy"? I can only see what's in that article, I don't know what else he may have said or written elsewhere. I only took biology classes on edX the last few years (the most important one was [0]), and nothing he says in that section is "controversial". Genetic drift and small populations are part of the teaching, if you go to edX's course "Nature, in Code: Biology in JavaScript" [1] you even get to simulate just that numerically, population bottlenecks, genetic drift, and more. I recognize everything he said from the courses I took, or from lecture videos on Youtube (by biologists and geneticists, specifically, e.g. this one: [2] - very funny guy too).

Going only by what I see in that article, in that section, I can only assume he is making a mistake in declaring some imagined and made-up "controversy" where none exists.

What am I missing?

To me his statements are like somebody trying to defend their "controversial" point of view that the earth is on a course around the sun, making very defensive statements because they think, for whatever reason, they are saying something incredibly controversial.

[0] https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-biology-secret-life-...

[1] https://www.edx.org/course/nature-code-biology-javascript-ep...

[2] https://www.gresham.ac.uk/professors-and-speakers/professor-...

pokemongoaway3• 8 years ago

So much controversy in theories of evolution. All thinkers can benefit from this feeling that "we're over these solved problems." Get to the root of the problems by looking at the various paradigms before one went mainstream and trampled the rest - and stop trying to jump to the same conclusions the mainstream did.

ItsMe0000015• 8 years ago

Given that I was at least somewhat specific, I have no idea what you are trying to convey, and/or what your point is, unfortunately...? Yeah, I noticed that the article isn't (specific) either.

mnl3• 8 years ago

He's been a very accomplished theoretical physicist* (a mathematician actually) and an inquisitive mind. He also has met literally everybody, he's living History of 20th century Physics and more. You just can't ignore this kind of figures if you're interested in Science.

When Freeman talks I always listen, even when he's wrong he still has a point: don't underestimate him, even at 94.

(*We're still using quite a bit of his QFT formalism... laid down almost 70 years ago now.)

ItsMe0000015• 8 years ago

Let me quote from my own very first paragraph:

My comment is not about the person... only about one specific section in the linked article.

I don't see why anything you say should influence my opinion about what I wrote, when that is all I comment on? Do all his accomplishments mean he can say whatever he wants and I can't say anything? I admit I don't understand your response, given that I already limited the scope of my comment myself right from the start.

p1esk7• 8 years ago

To me, the main controversy is that evolution seems to work too well. Almost as if some "intelligent designer" guided it.

heurist4• 8 years ago

No, that's just how existence works. Systems that perpetuate themselves are more likely to continue existing. Systems that don't perpetuate themselves stop existing. No intelligence required.

ItsMe0000015• 8 years ago

But "intelligent designs" work less well!

The only ever work for very specific things. On a larger scale there again is no design anywhere, see for example the economic principles, the "invisible hand". As soon as humans tried to "design" such larger systems it all fell apart (communism - in which I grew up).

No single entity can manage the complexity, unless that entity is the universe ("it models itself") - at which point we have a useless tautology.

heurist4• 8 years ago

Neutral theory is controversial in that it is unproven (or was when I last read about it 6 years ago). It is still a legitimate topic of research.

reidacdc• 8 years ago

It seems that the "heretical" parts are milder than I was expecting, though still outside the mainstream.

On evolution, he says that Darwin got it right "up to a point", and asserts that selection is only an effective mechanism if you have large populations, but that small populations are often key turning points, and for small populations, "random drift" is more important. It's said to have some explanatory power in addressing why there is a variety of e.g. beetle species inhabiting a given ecological niche, instead of a single super-optimized beetle species. He's got a couple of authors he likes on this point.

On climate change, his position here is that since we don't understand how the ice ages started or stopped, then we don't really understand climate. Further, he says if we planted "all the wasteland over the globe" with trees, it'd be enough of a carbon sink to absorb the increased atmospheric content.

I am not really equipped to defend either the scientific mainstream or Dyson's views, but hopefully this is a useful summary.

emilga• 8 years ago

why there is a variety of e.g. beetle species inhabiting a given ecological niche, instead of a single super-optimized beetle species.

Are there really two or more beetle species occupying the same ecological niche, though? It would violate the competitive exclusion principle [0], and a quick google search doesn't return any results. (Also, the articles doesn't specifically mention niches.)

I thought the large variety of niches, each of which requires different kinds of specialization, is why there's such a diversity of beetles. (Different niches requiring different types of camouflage, different jaw-shapes, different digestive enzymes, different temperature tolerances, etc.)

It doesn't really make sense to expect a single "super-optimized" beetle, if, for examples, being able to eat food A and food B requires fundamentally different jaw-shapes.

Of course, random mutations in the genome is what makes different phenotypes possible in the first place, but (according to my layman's understanding of biology) this is already acknowledged.

And Dyson's example about a Peacock's feathers is famously explained by sexual selection.

I really like Dyson's talk about living through four revolutions, though. [1] (Space Technology, Nuclear Energy, Genomics, and the Computer Revolution.) He's a super interesting guy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principl...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq4p2qbE684

archgoon2• 8 years ago

There seems to be a bit of lack of knowledge about Freeman Dyson.

Freeman Dyson is the person responsible for legitimization and adoption of Feynmann diagrams, via proof of equivalence with Schwinger's methods. Feynmann didn't care about why his methods worked, Dyson did. Think a brilliant hacker (Feynmann) who basically points to a working system in a new programming language and says "Look it works. What more do you want? Clearly this is because of my awesome new language." and another engineer (Dyson) trying to get him to document the damn thing, explain how it works in terms of previous programming paradigms, and then discovers failure modes in the process. As usual, the engineer who did the documentation gets a bit of short shrift of the glory.

Now, this of course does not mean that he's right about this issue; but please do do not disregard his honesty or truly tremendous contributions to human knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson

nafizh• 8 years ago

"Certainly, one of the risks that we’re taking is the development of artificial intelligence and the artificial intelligence people also are now, I would say exaggerating the dangers and pretending to be more dangerous than they really are, but that remains to be seen."

I work in the intersection of AI and another discipline. Unlike some people (e.g. Elon Musk), he actually knows what he is talking about.

B1FF_PSUVM• 8 years ago

"The important invention in a way for the human species was grandparents. Grandparents were the beginning of culture when we could sit around the cave fire and the grandparents would sing songs to the children and the parents would be out hunting so having three generations was what made us what we are."

That's a sharp observation. Sharper yet what it leaves unsaid about the present.

Interview with Freeman Dyson

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