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Then that is a category error because you are assuming people on HN need to act like philosophers 24/7.

Yes, one might call these… evolutionary algorithms…

I never said anything like that, but if you're making a simplistic appeal to information theory then I rest my case.

Jesus, I took 4 years of Electrical Engineering and at no point did any professor make this brilliant analogy. It would have helped many students, including myself.

That's not fair. To most users this would not be an obvious thing to do, unlike software/scientific/analytic uses of LLMs.

So it's not a matter of inability but rather awareness and know-how.

Then secondly, humans learn to write intuitively and heuristically (for example "paragraphs should align sentence subjects with an identifiable flow of conceptual main characters/actors" is an entire chapter of expert writing advice traditionally taught at the undergrad level). The act and teaching the act are different beasts. The way to specify would have no objective, clear best practice to do so: Even an English teacher or a language expert would be challenged to come up with a concise list of instructions to set up an LLM to output something of sufficient quality.

One plausible reason I thought of that we may not understand neural nets is that by their nature their power grows with ever-more complex connections and weights.

So it is like the opposite of logical systems, in that the very design of neural net architecture is a mess of parameter "spaghetti code" which renders the entire thing a metaphorical encrypted black box. The more powerful an AI/AGI the more this would be the case, and this is analogous a complexity curve.

And so any effort to make sense of such black box computation would be like trying to reverse entropy, analogous to trying to recover information lost in waste heat. And that could be one fundamental barrier to understanding both human and artificial brains alike, relative to their internal complexity.

(Just thinking aloud my handwavy pet theory recently, I am not an expert and could be totally mistaken on this)

No it's because they think they're saving the world.

Is this what the prompt means by proof strength gap, or is that something else entirely? (Sorry not a mathematician.)

Your comment is clever but plainly unkind. If you truly care about philosophy you would say something more constructive. It is in no comparison to my explicit criticisms, whatever you may disagree with about them.

My general opinion is the same: saying "philosophy > math", and variations thereof, is generally an uneducated, absurd, stupid, unwise comment. I won't mince words with that. Nor am I being paid to write a proper article as to why such a view is deeply misled. It's an online forum.

I'm not going to waste my brain cells trying to prove a negative that my comment doesn't have fallacies, but I will say that I meant every word of what I wrote while on my phone commenting casually in an online forum, not for a research paper and perhaps what is more likely is that you don't realize that commonsense context and/or have not fathomed / fill-in-the-blanks as to actual valid reasons as to why I said those things that to you seem to be fallacies.

For example if you knew about STEM-elitism, it is not many mental steps to "philosophy-elitism" of the sort of sentiment "Philosophy >_hard Math". Why exactly does omitting this explication make my opinion a fallacy? It doesn't. It's an online forum with people handwaving their opinions, just as the people above me were already doing.

Why is refusal to carefully and patiently explain the wrongness of prestige theater, "physics envy"-type conversations an example of not being well-versed in philosophy?

1. I never claimed philosophy was easier. The previous commenter blankly claimed the opposite on the basis that they are a teacher. I am making a simple meta-observation that if they get to do that, then I get to claim I was literally born with philosophical tendencies in that such an ad hominem is entirely transparent except to the teacher. This argument itself is an example of rigorous, critical argumentation. If they get to use an ad hominem, then they break the rules of good faith argumentation, hence the whole illustrative point about people having philosophical personality traits.

2. The fact that you completely failed to read this exchange context carefully, such casual prejudice toward the argument from authority ("I am a teacher, take it from me, philosophy > math blah blah blah"), also raises doubt in the quality of actually existing philosophy education. It is a lot more like court philosopher behavior than any regard for close reading and actual research-level rigor.

3a. There's an objective, rational argument as to why philosophy is "hard" (emphasis on the quotes). A lot of it has to do with the fact that it is about speculatively complex questions. See for example Noam Chomsky's elaboration on this, he generally philosophy as a field as having deflationary characteristic in relation to scientific progress.

3b. What this also means is that "hardness" is not a good measure at all of a human discipline being actually a good discipline--astrology can also be very "hard", so can Derrida, etc. Simply writing a good piece of fiction is also cognitively hard. But where is this nuance, I ask you, in the OP comments? I do not see it. Where is the impact of philosophy, then?

All of these ought to part and parcel of students who actually learned philosophy well. The fact that multiple top comments do not evince this level of learning, at least on a tech social media forum, says a lot and it should trouble you.

(Having written all this, I think there is a further elaboration on 3a that makes the question/issue much more interesting, but it does not excuse the attitude of philosophy-chauvinism which is well known as thing in academia, analogous to how math/physics has their share of hardness chauvinists over other disciplines, ad infinitum.)

As a counterargument, it is a bad degree if philosophy led you to jump a foregone conclusion that "AI will surely render knowledge specialization by humans useless".

It is literally very badly taught if four years of such an undergrad degree program creates such students with lack of technical background to evaluate AI. It is like vibe coding except the soft sciences departments were already doing it all along. And I suspect it is part of the way philosophy as a program has to work, it is essentially pre-scientific so students that specialize in philosophy, of either the analytic or continental kind, don't actually do enough scientific research and/or some kind of real-world moral and social testing to balance that out. In that sense philosophy as an institution is medieval and for society to go back to that way due to AI would be an intellectual regression.

Basically the mistake here was to conflate the purpose of the university with philosophy, they are very different things. A philosocratic university would be incredibly problematic for humanity. Truth and knowledge in isolation, under a philosophical quarantine, was precisely one of things that thinkers of the scientific revolution like Noam Chomsky warned against.

I was born a philosopher, people were telling me to study philosophy when I was in high school. But instead my formal education choices took a more circuitous route that included the fine arts, physics, electrical engineering, computer engineering, and eventually theoretical computer science.

However even I can see that philosophy as a field is flawed and generic advice to tell students to go philosophy is incredibly problematic. As someone with philosophical tendencies this is incredibly obvious to me but and I must suggest that those who keep endorsing philosophy as a professional discipline for "success reasons" are putting forth a deeply prejudiced argument due to certain blinders.

For example as soon as you claimed "philosophy is harder than math", then I cannot take this line of argument seriously. The entire statement is a bad and unphilosophical statement. Anyone with an intuition for good philosophy, who is well read and has the wisdom of life experience, who is scientifically literate, should have known that before saying it. It actually offends me. It is intellectually insulting.

But then how is analytic philosophy a philosophy.

Sorry, what's the significance of finiteness? The upper bound on an NFA is exponential steps of state transition splitting, thus P ⊆ NP ⊆ EXP, the class of exponential time algorithms.

You are being too patient. Reading this, just look at their contradictory behavior, one one hand they thrice called you lazy, curious, and upset (all ad hominems, attacks on motive), meanwhile they outwardly frame themselves as a steward of science institutional literacy/legitimacy and passive-aggressively "shoulding" everyone else, twisting that expressing any critique is just failing to use "information". There's two reasons someone will act this way, either they are afraid of the antivaxxers (certainly, a serious problem) and think a hostile approach works (it does not), or they have vested interests in the current institutional/bureaucratic order -- which goes back to the problem you were trying to point out. It's the 21st century version of scientism.

Well that's the basis of rationalism. Many important truths don't depend on the details of someone's state or someone's life history. To require it is to commit an ad hominem and destroys rationalism.

For example whether to drink alcohol is entirely unsafe at any level, according to the WHO. Expressing this as common knowledge is a counterexample of the popular heuristic to "listen to people's context".

Communicative empathy is still a heuristic, it is not an absolute rule. There are times when the message really is more important than how it is being conveyed. And actually people who run out of spoons know that all too well.

Why can't it be the other way around, you don't know that I am out of spoons too and rather than talk about why I am out spoons I should not be expected to validate other people's vibes or spoonfeed them... And so forth.

As an exhausted person the issue is not being given advice. It is being given wrong, ignorant, or inappropriate advice.

I don't understand your argument, why precisely is contemporary app development thought to be so simple that it is not even worth thorough property testing, let alone FV? Isn't that attitude (on the part of the industry as a whole) a type of self-fulfilling prophecy?

See, that's the thing. If you are saying Law of Excluded Middle matters for justification of using proof by contradiction, then we are suddenly really talking about the justification or not of classical versus non classical logics. That's kind of the author's point in the last paragraph of his article, that there's a metamathematical thing going on even if the student cannot quite articulate it. The real problem is not LEM's place in propositional logic but the cognitive move of hypothetical reasoning. Even the article leaves the question open ended.

To make this less abstract, note that in your own example you used a proof by contradiction to justify the technique of proof by contradiction. That is inherently problematic.

It's interesting that even a child can do it, but actually explaining it clearly gets confusing. One problem is that as soon as you use "Suppose A then following steps S we get not A", but a hidden, implied premise is the stipulation that the world you are reasoning about already has certain consistency properties. This premise is what trips people (students like me) up because it is not part of the rules of algebra, geometry, etc.

This is not Apple's fault and it is just the beginning of AI. Unlike every other software/algorithm/program known to mankind, AI based on neural networks threatens to extract exponentially the entire humanity's supply of computational capacity. Moore's Law hit a fundamental snag in the last decade (e.g. Dennard scaling) and cannot and likely will not keep up. This then would be the worst case scenario with serious long term consequences far beyond the price of consumer goods.

I honestly have no idea what you are actually talking about. Government printing capital? What does that even mean? And patterns are meaningless, what is the mechanism and the underlying relationship? Whatever you heard stock analysts say they don't sound they know engineering or science.

Yeah I keep reading comments about "semiconductor boom/bust cycles", but they ignore that Moore/Dennard Laws were in a totally different regime back then, and they ignore the external factor of AI. So I just don't understand what those comments are alluding to.

Unfortunately, somebody doesn't understand the concept of structural incentives.

Also, do not reply to me any further, your sarcasm is not welcome. It is incredibly rude.

Having to buy fancy headphones to solve a social problem is what makes it a class issue. That's the subtle error in the typical response.

The exact answer to that requires using the cognitive capacity of empathy.

What is Gofct and does robotics industry generally just have had a slower adoption of ML because of the realtime domain requirements, I'm just curious and wondering aloud here.

Exponentially would make it computationally intractable by definition, and is the proposal suggestion that having simultaneous sensors can be used to reconstruct more information than the conventional way of using a handheld single sensor? Is that plausible?