includes an interesting discussion of how Legrange took seriously Biship Berkeley's criticism of calculus and how he worked towards modern rigorous calculus
> After all, philosophy advertises itself as a home to critical thinking. Some of my professors said that I was too critical, which may seem prima facie absurd. It turned out that they were right, in a way. I was too critical of and for my profession.
I think that puts the finger on the issue.
- Any form of philosophical discussion needs to start from some shared background assumptions.
- The academics who spent their life and work solving problems based on these assumptions would not be pleased to have these assumptions challenged: just as a Christian theologian would not be pleased if a student suddenly turned round and said, actually, the Muslims are right.
I've been looking for a way to play chess/go with a generalist LLM. It wouldn't matter if the moves are bad (I like winning), but being able to chat on unrelated topics while playing the game would take the experience to the next level.
Perhaps that is the real danger. Everyone except a small elite who (rightly) feel they understand how LLMs work would simply give up serious thinking and accept whatever "majority" opinion is in their little social media bubble. We wouldn't have the patience to really engage with genuinely different viewpoints any more.
I recall some Chinese language discussion about the experience of studying abroad in the Anglophone world in the early 20th century and the early 21st century. Paradoxically, even if you are a university student, it may now be harder to break out of the bubble and make friends with non-Chinese/East Asians than before. In the early 20th century, you'd probably be one of the few non-White students and had to break out of your comfort zone. Now if you are Chinese, there'd be people from a similar background virtually anywhere you study in the West, and it is almost unnatural to make a deliberate effort to break out of that.
I have been hyping up Hacker News for people who are not otherwise into tech/engineering: so here's version (a minor tweak of https://jsomers.net/hn/) that filters out the tech content.
The filter is not perfect, but there are lots non-technical gems that you wouldn't readily find elsewhere:
Yes, when I got to that part, I was unsure whether you actually need 350 logic gates to implement Conway's Game of Life. It feels like that cannot be the minimum number. But presumably other mechanisms already exist where we can automatically whittle down the number of logic gates necessary given a desired truth table.
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