Noting the theory papers on Kolmorogov complexity. For those not familiar, Ilya argues that the reason why neural networks generalize -- why they work at all -- is because they are effectively finding a simple description of their training data, converging down onto the limit of the Kolmorogov complexity. [1]
For those who don't know -- while Zachtronics is no longer making games, Zach Barth is still active now under the company Coincidence Games. They just game out with a spacecraft engineering puzzle game:
Mawson et al. 2017 (two papers) – internet survey of homeschoolers recruited from anti-vaccine groups; non-random, self-reported, unverified health outcomes. Retracted by the publisher after criticism.
Hooker & Miller 2020/2021 – analysis of “control group” data also from self-selected surveys; same methodological problems.
Lyons-Weiler & Thomas 2020, 2022 – data from a single pediatric practice run by one of the authors; serious selection bias.
Joy Garner / NVKP surveys – activist-run online surveys with no verification.
Enriquez et al. 2005 – a small cross-sectional study about allergy self-reports, not about overall neurodevelopment.
Large, well-controlled population studies (Denmark, Finland, the U.S. Vaccine Safety Datalink, etc.) comparing vaccinated vs. unvaccinated children show no increase in autism, neurodevelopmental disorders, or overall morbidity attributable to recommended vaccines.
Take a look at the next sentence from your linked article.
“I am pro-life personaly [sic] but it wasn’t those,” he said, using the jail’s internal messaging system. “I will just say there is a lot of information that will come out in future that people will look at and judge for themselves that goes back 24 months before the 14th. If the gov ever let’s [sic] it get out.”
I think for this to be interesting to an outside observer, it should at least address the bulk of the debate around the topic. If the GP is right and it's missing the key points of the anti-abudance critique, then I'm afraid it's missing the forest for the trees and misleading to a general audience.
Insofar as "the problem" is sifting through pages and pages of documentation to find the relevant information for an answer, I think that current-day LLMs are actually quite capable at this.
You can measure the sharpness of the position, as in this paper section 2.3 "Complexity of a position". They find their metric correlates with human performance.
Real world systems are complicated. In theory, you could do belief propagation to update your beliefs through the whole network, if your brain worked something like a Bayesian network.
Isn't that Edwin T. Jaynes example just p-hacking? If only 1 out of 100 experiments produces a statistically significant result, and you only report the one, I would intuitively consider that evidence to be worth less. Can someone more versed in Bayesian statistics better explain the example?
Yes, the possible programs are enumerable, and you can start searching with the least complex programs and work your way up in complexity. Once you find a program that explains the available data, you cannot guarantee it will continue to explain possible future data, unless, like you mention, you constrain the program space to a finite set. What you're describing is generally how people make models of the external world.
I don’t know if it’s fair to say that revolutionary wealth redistribution movements, like Occupy, are failing because everybody is distracted with social justice movements. The Left is a coalition for social justice and also for wealth redistribution, to varying degrees. That’s why I’m saying that I’m not seeing a direct connection where a success in one area subtracts from progress in another.
If you're just saying that rainbow capitalism is in alignment with capitalists' interests, and anti-capitalism movements are not, then that makes sense.
Just for the sake of argument, I can name some an entire field of science that was invalidated in light of genetic & neuroscience evidence: phrenology. At the time, it was the newest advancement in the gleaming era of scientific Enlightenment. It just happened to justify colonial policies of that time. Now, a couple hundred years later, we're walking back on a widely supported but misguided "scientific" field.
Are those two events connected? They both happened in the same decade and received some press. That's all I can come up with. And both things you mention -- LGBT rights and class consciousness -- have been around for a while.
If you think about it, those lives actually were saved. People either didn't play the video game, or they spent a moment in the loading screen in quiet contemplation.
github.com/JamiesonWarner