Michael Nielsen
@michael_nielsen
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Searching for the numinous 🇦🇺 🇨🇦, home in 🇺🇸 Research @AsteraInstitute https://t.co/maezekzRUb
Berkeley
Joined July 2008
A meta-thread of some of my favourite Twitter threads!.
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Bill Gates is setting up factories to manufacture 7 leading vaccine candidates before we know which is best & safest; we can test the vaccines in parallel, and then throw away all but the factory for the best vaccine. May save many months. Just extraordinary.
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Brian Eno on the design specs for the Windows 95 startup chime:
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This whole article is incredibly interesting:
There are crystal structures that simply won't form anymore, even though they did a few decades ago. Real life Ice-9? Could make an incredible sci-fi book.
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Simone de Beauvoir, asked about her extremely hard-working, highly disciplined creative habits, which involve:. 2-3 months of vacation per year. Starting work at 10am, and going until 1pm, then taking a four hour break for friends. She does work in the evening, but she also
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I love this fact: average walking speed increases predictably as city size increases, roughly as N^{0.1}, where N is city population.
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Since reading this 6 months ago, I've come to think it's half a dozen of the best paragraphs I've ever read on how to get much, much better at anything: (by @autotrnslucence )
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Twitter has made a huge positive impact on my life. Lots of people complain about it, so I wanted to write some notes about how I use it. Love to hear others' strategies too.
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One of my favourite letters, insightful & humane, from Richard Feynman to a former student who was having a rough time. I was reflecting on it as an argument in favour of scope insensitivity, or even in favour of smaller problems:
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One rather strange event of the past ten days: like ~600,000 Australians, much of my retirement savings is with a superannuation (think 401-k) firm called Unisuper. Unisuper uses Google Cloud to store their data. Well, ~10 days ago, Google Cloud *accidentally* *deleted* *their*.
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The use of spaced repetition memory systems has changed my life over the past couple of years. Here's a few things I've found helpful:.
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Curious: have you found ChatGPT useful in doing professional work? . If so, what kinds of prompts and answers have been helpful? Detailed examples greatly appreciated! Broader answer also appreciated. Not in theory, but where you've really *done it*, in your work. Thanks!.
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Douglas Adams, pithily summing up 90+% of commentary on ChatGPT:
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Please recommend an obscure book you absolutely love!.
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I wonder what postmortem @Penn is doing, given their past mistake: "UPenn told me that they’d had a meeting and concluded that I was not of faculty quality. When I told them I was leaving, they laughed at me and said, ‘BioNTech doesn’t even have a website.’".
Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, Penn’s historic mRNA vaccine research team, win 2023 @NobelPrize in Medicine #nobelprize.
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Amazing news: polio type 3 has just been declared eradicated. The WHO declared polio type 2 eradicated in 2015. That leaves polio type 1. There have been 206 cases of polio in 2019, worldwide:
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I went looking for the original source of the Einstein quote "Imagination is more important than knowledge". I thought it'd take 30 secs, just out of curiosity. But then I discovered this incredible interview in "The Saturday Evening Post". Here's a tiny excerpt. The whole
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(I have a tremendous amount of admiration for this, and many of his other efforts, & general thoughtfulness. But I must admit, I do get a chuckle out of all the "Bill has decades of experience with viruses!" Windows and MS-DOS jokes.).
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ChatGPT, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, AI Dungeon - when used for creative purposes, all have a dreamlike quality. Their logic needs to be checked and corrected by humans. It's quite a shock to me: AI turns out to be great at dreaming, and needs human for the logic!.
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The rise of "No Religion" in the US. This is the graph that has most surprised me this year. Via @wesyang
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Can someone at Twitter anonymously explain to a reporter why the pornbots are being allowed to proliferate? . (I presume it's because Elon thinks it's funny?).
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This is an incredible essay:
A well-known philosopher of physics writes about his experiences with schizophrenia over the last several decades.
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@PopulismUpdates Everyone reading this tweet overlapped with the last Civil War Widow (who died in December 2020, after Covid!)
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This quote from David Foster Wallace has bothered me ever since I first read it. I think because it contains a bad error, but nonetheless points at something very important
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Incredible chart. Take mortality statistics & subtract infectious disease. You see: (a) in the twentieth century we largely defeated infectious disease in the US (arguably the biggest achievement of 20C); and (b) little else we did in medicine affected mortality. via @patrickc
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What are the most unusually ambitious books ever written? Interested along any axis of ambition, but especially unusual axes.
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A large enough solar storm *will* take down the biggest high-voltage transformers, the backbone of the grid; replacing them turns out to be incredibly difficult, likely to take months if done under the best of circumstantces (there is *no* reserve, unaccountably - it's a few.
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A barista once told me she liked people who order decaf because "you know they're the ones who really like the taste of coffee for coffee's sake". I love this kind of thing, a tiny viewquake from someone thoughtful, delivered with no fanfare during the minutiae of everyday life.
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The determinant of a matrix is how much the matrix expands or contracts space. More precisely: it's the volume of the parallelepiped spanned by the columns of the matrix. (Ditto the rows.) This, btw, is why det 0 => non-invertible: one or more spatial dimensions has collapsed.
Anyone wanna suggest the best way to think naturally about a determinant?.
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One of my favourite athletes is Steph Curry - he's redefined basketball, & has so much fun on court. Late last year, ESPN invited him on show to play a memory game: they'd show him a clip of him playing, freeze frame it, then ask him what happened next.
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GPT-3 clears up a question I've wondered about for years:
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Telegram is an app for notifying you that your friends have joined Telegram, is that right?.
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Fascinating, someone using memory systems with their kid: . Reminds me of Agassi and the Polgars. Not sure what to make of it. via @gwern
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Hofstadter on what Goedel, Escher, Bach was actually about:
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This is a very good post. In California ~2% of the population has been vaccinated, but we have enough vaccine for ~9% of the population. If done in the elderly as fast as possible - no red tape! - deaths would drop by > half(!!!) We have the vaccine to do this _today_, but aren't.
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One of the funniest things I know is that the CVS Specialty Pharmacy Website *does* *not* work. This is a 90 billion $ company, keep in mind. The primary function of this website seems to be: to fill orders for prescription drugs. It's a very simple storefront: you just say a
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Peter Norvig has just put his book (+code) "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" on GitHub: This is a very beautiful book in the good old-fashioned AI tradition. via @abecedarius.
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New essay from @patrickc and myself, arguing that science has suffered from greatly diminishing returns over the past century:
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Intellectually, it feels collectively like having Nobel laureates in all disciplines hanging out in the tea room just down the hall. I can pop in whenever I like, hear them noodling, occasionally contribute myself.
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One of my favourite quotes, from Michael Atiyah. I've struggled a fair bit with the idea that research is goal- or problem-oriented. Many people take this for granted, but for me creative work is intuitive & exploratory. I usually don't know what I'm doing until it's nearly done
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The distribution of location for letters in English words: Suggests so many questions!
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It's peculiar to see some people *only* interested in exploring what ChatGPT does poorly. Like being handed a hammer for the first time, and complaining that it's a bad way to plant roses, do the dishes, sew clothing, [. ]. Maybe try it out with some nails, see what it can do?.
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What’s the most wonderful textbook you’ve ever read?.
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John von Neumann and Enrico Fermi on the trouble with using four parameters to fit your data, as relayed by Freeman Dyson. I think of this story & smile whenever I hear about a 17 zillion parameter neural net, & wonder what they would have said
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Without the sunk cost fallacy I'm not sure I'd ever have finished anything 😀.
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Really enjoying this work on neural networks grokking. The network quickly learns to perfectly memorize all results - but does terribly outside the training set. Then, much (much!) later it suddenly learns to generalize!
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Just to be clear, when I said "throw away" the factory I was speaking figuratively. I'm sure the space will be used, and may even be repurposed for vaccine production. But there will still have been billions in sunk costs.
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@anammostarac Just remember: comedy is now legal on Twitter:
Comedy is now legal on Twitter.
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I continue to marvel that predict-the-next-word/token, with enough data and parameters, turns out to capture so much of human thought.
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What are your favourite tweet-length mathematical proofs?. Here's a couple of mine.
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Issuing "rm -rf /*" on ~100 billion in assets is. well, it must have been an interesting moment when they realized internally.
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Spent an enjoyable few hours digging into GPT-3, trying to better understand how it works, what the limits are, how it may be improved. The paper is here:
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Google/Alphabet's 2018 revenue was 137 billion. It boggles my mind just how many clicks on ads this (or the ad component) is. When visiting friends at Google I can't help but think: "Hmm, let's see, that 'free' lunch must have cost ~10^4 clicks, that table was another 10^4. ".
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One of the weirdest phrases in common use in Silicon Valley: "deep dive". As far I can tell it means: "I read a few articles, maybe one or two books, and now confuse myself for someone who knows something about this subject".
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@nearcyan Sounds like you’re confusing posing a question badly with people not knowing an answer.
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This is amazing, and very beautiful:
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Pretty sure the real reason SF people are moving to NYC / Miami is so they can get up at noon for 9am meetings.
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Twitter's not so close emotionally (at least, the online component, for me), but there's still something I value immensely: many people I follow are unapologetically optimistic and idealistic, always working to make the world better. I find that infectious and buoying.
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Interesting to think how different the world would be if great UI/UX people designed things like the tax code, immigration law, the DMV, etc. So many professional services seem to be about adding a layer of good UI/UX over the top of bad.
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Ever struck by the astounding value for money of good books. Often: someone works for decades becoming the greatest expert in history on some subject, and then you get to engage with them for many hours (or tens or hundreds of hours, esp with rereads) on that subject.
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Geoff Hinton quits Google so he can talk freely about AI risks. Says a part of him now regrets his life's work
“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that. But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
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Everything Sabine says here is true and interesting. but here's some additional context on exponentials. There's a few:. 1. Looking back over the last few years of BP's (very helpful!) Statistical Review of World Energy, renewables are typically growing maybe 15% per year
Everyone who thinks the world could just stop using fossil fuels on the snap of a finger should have a look at this chart. More than 80% of the world's energy supply presently comes from oil, gas, and coal, and that number has barely changed in the past decade. Of course we will
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I absolutely loathe the steps Musk has taken to move serious conversation off this platform (deprioritizing external links, and censoring entire platforms for serious writing). It's a huge own goal. I've no doubt it's part of the reason so many scientists left.
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New essay, joint with @andy_matuschak: "Quantum Computing for the Very Curious". It's a technically detailed explanation of the basic elements of quantum computing:
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Just coming back from 10 days in Buenos Aires. It has me very reflective about "Great Cities". They feel qualitatively different than anywhere else, somehow. It's not just population, but rather some sense that the city is infinite - a city neverending, not just in size, but.
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What are some books, videos, articles, papers, and essays you've revisited over and over, perhaps for many years?.
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The good news is that while the percentage of extraordinary books is small, the absolute number is large, enough to keep you busy reading for decades. The mathematician Littlewood (IIRC) said that as he got older he decided to only listen to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven - life was.
Something I taught 12 yo: There's a second component of reading that many people don't realize exists: searching for the good books. There are a huge number of books and only a small percentage of them are really good, so reading means searching.
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What are some examples of marvellous projects human beings have undertaken that took ~ a century or more?.
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I will unabashedly say this at the outset: my Twitter feed is filled with wonder and surprise and delight.
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I suspect no-one deserves the Economics Nobel more than Satoshi. It tickles me enormously that she/he/they(/it?) remain anonymous.
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@collision I love @gordonbrander's bio: "Everything around me was someone's lifework.". "The world is a museum of passion projects" is wonderfully put!.
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What are the classics of the "Science of Science" or "Meta Science"? If you were teaching a class on the subject, what would go in the syllabus?.
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Gordon Moore's famous 1965 paper remains astonishing: RIP:
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You gotta be kidding.
I meant it when I said the future was going to be made right here in America. Companies like GM and Ford are building more electric vehicles here at home than ever before.
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Perhaps the most beautiful thing I've ever seen done with a sword:.
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In research, both problem finding and problem solving are important. Surprisingly often, problem finding is more important than problem solving.
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I try to use Twitter as a "yes, and. " medium, riffing off others. I nearly always ignore disagreement, and try to very rarely disagree myself. It's too much like jamming with Yo-Yo Ma and pausing to point out he got a note wrong.
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Schroedinger wrote a famous book “What is Life?”. I’ve been spending a lot of time understanding quantum phase transitions, cell biology, and chemistry. Gradually realizing I don’t understand very well: “What is matter?”.
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When I first read Donella Meadows' "Places to Intervene in a System" I thought it was interesting, but not much more than that. I now view it as foundational; Meadows' main contribution wasn't her list of suggestions, it was the posing of the question itself. That posing is one.
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