CurtMonash

Why do you think David Brin's Transparent Society proposals can't work?

A large fraction of the problems assigned in the Ross Program were of the form "Prove or disprove, and salvage if possible." The rest were usually a calculation, meant to motivate a general proposition you would encounter soon after.

I first heard that kind of story about a thesis defense at Princeton. The twist was that they had been short one person to judge it, so they roped in a professor who was available at that moment ... and he found a counterexample on the fly.

The professor was John Milnor.

No scale at which it really took off. Village-wide stuff requires a bit of politics, and anyhow there are donors out there for capital equipment and even a bit of organizing help. Factory-level stuff -- well, the product idea isn't the hardest part of a new business, is it? Etc.

I recall predecessors to this idea from the 1970s, which probably implies I heard about them from Futurist Magazine and/or the book Small is Beautiful. It has always been suggested that engineers could do something worthwhile by inventing very simple yet useful things that could realistically be made in poor/underresourced countries or villages.

My grandfather told me that it was deemed time to stop drinking when you couldn't see over the pile of coasters.

Clinton, Bush 43, and Trump were all born within a 2 month period in 1946.

JFK, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush 41 all served in fairly junior roles in WW2, even if Reagan just made training films and so on. LBJ pretended to serve in the same war. (He went out on one bombing mission as some kind of observer and was awarded a Silver Star, after which he stopped bothering the military and went back to his real career.)

Partially correct. But the massive investments of capital, environmental resources, etc. are in some cases specific to modern AI, and some of the objections are specific to those. Ditto the overlapping issue of global intellectual property appropriation. (Much of what LLMs do is refactor what people posted on the web for free.)

There are clearly coherent "moral" arguments to be made against mainsteam AI, in areas such as resource consumption, capitalist power, and so on. Some are correct; others, while in my opinion unpersuasive, are at least coherent.

But the article places more stress on arguments of the sort "It's evil to use AI because it doesn't work very well", and those don't seem very logical to me. Oh, SOME arguments of that kind make sense, e.g. in the area of autonomous weapons, but the author didn't focus on extreme cases such as those.

I first encountered it in the 1981 James Clavell novel Noble House. The character using it was a well-educated Hong Kong gangster, or something similar to that.

(The plot of the book revolves around massive favors that a certain character is obligated to fulfill. At one point it is argued that "the ask" for one of them, while greatly annoying, could instead have been worse yet.)

For a mainstream boss example I nominate the Lonely Giant in Elder Scrolls Online.

There also are plenty of cute-animal mobs that weren't going to bother you unless you started something. An example that still stands out for me is the first set of sleeping bears in LOTRO.

Lovely man. I wanted him to be my adviser, but he was on leave my second year of grad school, and I changed direction greatly.

When I visited Japan as a tourist in 1979, I asked him in advance to write me a generic letter of recommendation. It was full-page, handwritten. It opened every door that needed opening. He was also nice enough to exaggerated the importance of my thesis when talking about it with my parents. ;)

He told me once that as a teenager he pursued both math and piano. When he had to pick one, he obviously picked math.

His wife becoming a significant politician surprised me. I just recall her bringing sushi she'd presumably made to a math department party at Harvard. She seemed perfectly nice, but didn't talk much. I don't know how good her English was or wasn't at the time.

My first thought on seeing the headline was: Charlie on the M. T. A.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdymgQmdK_A

I type em dashes as double hyphens. Sometimes the software resolves them to a true em dash, but sometimes not.

I never use hyphens where em dashes would be correct.

I do have issues determining when a two-word phrase should or shouldn't be hyphenated. It surely doesn't help that I grew up in a bilingual English/German household, so that my first instinct is often to reject either option, and fully concatenate the two words instead.

(Whether that last comma is appropriate opens a whole other set of punctuation issues ... and yes, I do tend to deliberately misuse ellipses for effect.)

My English professor criticized me for allegedly excessive use of em dashes in 1973.

Once I started self-publishing in the 1990s, I disregarded her opinion.

ab and (-a)(-b) can each be quickly proved to be the additive inverse of (-a)b. So they equal each other. No intermediate theorems are really needed.

I was one of several math grad students who started at Harvard at age 16 or 17 aroud the same time. Ofer Gabber and Ran Donagi went on to conventional academic math careers. I took a less straightforward career path.

But I was offered an assistant professorship at the Kellogg School of Business at age 21, and have often wondered whether I should perhaps have taken that, or else the research position I was offered at RAND.

I was told that a book published in honor of Oscar Zariski's 80th birthday included a paper by Oscar Zariski, either proving or at least making progress on a longstanding conjecture by Oscar Zariski.

I was in the relevant department at the time (Harvard math), but I wasn't much of an algebraic geometer, so I took that at face value without probing for details.

Socrates had a skeptical view of written language, preferring oral communication and philosophical inquiry. This perspective is primarily presented through the writings of his student, Plato, particularly in the dialogue Phaedrus.

I confirmed that from my own memory via a Google AI summary, quoted verbatim above. Of course, I would never have learned it in the first place had somebody not written it down.

I stopped reading early, when the article said that in the 1970s one big relational database did everything.

In fact, relational databases did nothing in the 1970s. They didn't even exist yet in commercial form.

My first prediction as an analyst from 1982 onwards was that "index-based" DBMS would take over from linked-list DBMS and flat files. (That was meant to cover both inverted-list and relational systems; I expected inverted-list DBMS to outperform relational ones for longer than they did.)

I'd completely forgotten that one!!

I just recall the (non-mathematical) poem about the haircut.

Certainly that section generally comes more to mind these days in the age of LLMs ..

Robert Heinlein's "... And he built a crooked house" is both hilarious and mathematical, although perhaps in different parts of the same story.

https://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/CrookedHouse.pdf

Like many classic science fiction "novels", including Foundation, Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos is really a collection of linked novellas.

The last one has the hero and heroine recruiting the spirit of Lobachevsky to help them recover their daughter from non-Euclidean hell.

Mathematical fiction is tough, because of the problems with "mathematical counterfactuals". Why not go with mathematical poetry instead? There are nice sections of same in the Clifton Fadiman anthologies. The first of these is also from The Space Child's Mother Goose. (All from memory, so please pardon any errors.)

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Three jolly sailors from Blandon-on-Tyne

Went to sea in a bottle by Klein

They found the view exceedingly dull

For the sea was entirely contained in the hull.

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There was a young lady named Bright

Who traveled much faster than light

She departed one day

In a relative way

And returned the previous night.

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There once was a fencer named Fisk

Whose movements were agile and brisk

So quick was his action

The Lorentz contraction

Diminished his sword to a disk.

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(There's also a bawdy version of that somewhere, referring to a different "sword".)

I'd push back. Starship Troopers can be argued to be about political science or the like, but there's nothing about the reasoning that's inherently mathematical.

Where I'm more on the fence are about works that rely strongly on mathematical physics, like Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, or the parts of Pohl's Gateway series that most explicitly refer to black holes. I'd still say those are not "mathematical fiction", but at least it's close.

That's where I'd start. If memory serves, Fantasia Mathematica was the first/best one.

And at least one of the recommended works -- The Devil and Simon Flagg -- is anthologize there.

There's a simple constructive proof using high-school level thinking. ... Two different reals have different decimal expansions. Go out far enough that they differ. Since this is about intuition, let's just assume the larger one is positive and irrational, and thus has an infinitely long expansion. Since the truncation has a finitely long decimal expansion, it's rational. And it's between the two original reals. Q.E.D. ... A full proof for all cases can be built similarly.

My first step would be to note that 13,857 is divisible by 7 if and only if 1385 is. But yes, my second step would be a lot like yours, in my case subtracting from 1400.

A standard problem with dev tools is that they're obsolete before they're ever mature.

What is mean is that by the time NewTool that fills a gap doing X really well catches up with the YZ that older tools have long experience handling, EvenNewerTool handles E better than NewTool does.

I don't have any knowledge of the specifics here, but at first guess I doubt something security-focused would be an exception to that rule.

And of course:

What's purple and commutes?

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An Abelian grape