Fuckin' dammit. At least it's not my old department... yet...
\begin{equation} /\!\! \curlywedge \circledcirc_{\,\smallsmile\!\smallsmile} \! \circledcirc \curlywedge \! \backslash \end{equation}
spoiler
Of course, like everyone else present at the Big Bang, I clapped and was excited and tried everything I could think of — from translating phrases to generating poems, to generating code, to asking these LLMs things I would never ask a living being.
"Like everyone else in my social circle, which I confuse with the entirety of the world, I am easily distracted by jangling keys"
Since Adam Becker apparently has a new book out that lays into TESCREAL-ism and Silicon Valley ideology, I'm going to give an anti-recommendation regarding his prior book, What Is Real?, which is about quantum mechanics. Unlike the Sequences, it's not cult shit. Instead, the ambience is more like Becker began with the physicist's typical indifference to history and philosophy, and he somehow maintained that indifference all the way through writing a book about history and philosophy. The result fairly shimmers with errors. He bungles the description of the Einstein--Podolsky--Rosen thought experiment, one of the foundational publications on quantum entanglement and a major moment in the "what is quantum physics all about?!" conversation. He just fails to report correctly what the Einstein--Podolsky--Rosen paper actually says. He makes a big deal about how "hardly any women or people who aren't white" appear in the story he's told, but there were plenty of people he could have included and just didn't — Jun Ishiwara, Hendrika Johanna van Leeuwen... — so he somehow made physics sound even more sexist and racist than it actually is. He raises a hullaballoo about how Grete Hermann's criticism of von Neumann was unjustly ignored, while not actually explaining what Grete Hermann's view of quantum mechanics was, or that she was writing about quantum entanglement before Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen! His treatment of Hermann still pisses me off every time I think about it.
The under-acknowledged Rule Zero for all this is that the Sequences were always cult shit. They were not intended to explain Solomonoff induction in the way that a textbook would, so that the reader might learn to reason about the concept. Instead, the ploy was to rig the game: Present the desired conclusion as the "simplest", pretend that "simplicity" is quantifiable, assert that scientists are insufficiently Rational(TM) because they reject the quantifiably "simplest" answer... School bad, blog posts good, tithe to MIRI.
Fuckers betraying the basic principles of a science education....
On a bulletin board in a grad-student lounge, I once saw a saying thumbtacked up: "One electron is physics. Two electrons is perturbation theory. Three or more electrons, that's chemistry."
Some thoughts of what might be helpful in that vein:
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What is a Turing machine? (Described in enough detail that one could, you know, prove theorems.)
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What is the halting problem?
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Why is Kolmogorov complexity/algorithmic information content uncomputable?
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Pursuant to the above, what's up with Solomonoff induction?
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Why is the lambda calculus not magically super-Turing?
Well, Timeless Decision Theory was, like the rest of their ideological package, an excuse to keep on believing what they wanted to believe. So how does one even tell if they stopped "taking it seriously"?
If I am ever that pompous, please just deliver me to the farm upstate