A display at St. Catherine's College - really cool way of showing the periodic table by displaying the electron wave functions in glass.
Anders Sandberg
29.1K posts
Academic jack-of-all-trades.
Joined September 2009
- Literally laughed a very loud, very mad scientist laugh when I saw this. As a computer scientist, this feels utterly hilarious.BREAKING NEWS The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 #NobelPrize in Physics to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”
- This might be the new standard slide for PoliSci classes demonstrating how the Overton window can move.
- Of all the tributes to John Conway, I think XKCD really nailed it:
- It is deeply disturbing that @nytimes appear willing to reveal name of @slatestarcodex; his blog has consistently been one of the most insightful parts of the net, but as he writes he has very good reasons to protect himself and others:
- For me, the big story about #gpt3 is not that it is smart - it is dumb as a pile of rocks - but that piles of rocks can do many things we thought you needed to be smart for. Fake intelligence may be dominant over real intelligence in many domains.
- Many years back I took a cognition test as part of a psych course. Part was a set of knowledge questions that I aced... until I was asked "what is energy?" I really stumbled. Some physics memes express a deep truth. #FridayPhysicsFun
- This is a seriously vexing trolley problem. (does total view utilitarianism accept analytic continuation?)
- Just finished watching the second season of Pantheon. Wow. Just wow. Worth watching.
- Prediction: people will say o3 scoring 25.2% on FrontierMath is nothing, "after all it is not perfect." Conveniently forgetting that these problems are ridiculously hard (did 87.7% on GPQA Diamond). And some will keep on talking about stochastic parrots... like parrots.
- I like how LK-99 replication has become a kind of a live sport event in science twitter. I wish this was more common.
- I'm a XKCD.
- This is a nice atlas of theories of consciousness. Relative to your own view, there will be some weird ones.
- Many like to say intelligence is not a single thing or a reification of assumptions, IQ is terribly flawed, and the concept has been/is used for bad causes. But so is poverty. So is wealth. So is power. So is inequality. Many important and predictive "things" are like that.













