Yep! Honestly it was just a random rabbit hole - I recently read Lee Smolin's Time Reborn (highly recommend btw, super fascinating read) and was curious as to what his more recent work was about, which lead me to come across The Autodidactic Universe paper. With the AI hype train full steam ahead, the paper felt newly relevant, especially as it seems that we're starting to hit plateaus for model intelligence and looking to other areas (e.g. world models) for further advancement in the field
The bigger issue here (imvho) is that financial institutions / systems / companies accept (maybe even invite) / tolerate a small degree of fraud as it's "good" for the system.
In more detail: Chomsky is/was not concerned with the models themselves, but rather with the distinction between statistical modelling in general, and "clean slate" models in particular on the one hand, and structural models discovered through human insight on the other.
With "clean slate" I mean models that start with as little linguistically informed structure as possible. E.g., Norvig mentions hybrid models: these can start out as classical rule based models, whose probabilities are then learnt. A random neural network would be as clean as possible.
The final outcome is affected by the final 10%, you can even call it 1%, for which the semi-corrupt or "communistiquesque" countries never (seemingly) have the will or sheer talent for.
In China you don't criticise the dictatorship and don't be a Muslim and your quality of life improves every year and you get many cool products and services. In the USA they are disappearing people at random and they are banning the import of products and services from the places that are producing them (mostly China).
The US disappeared a local business owner down the street from me in a sleepy suburb because he happened to be walking to his business one morning while brown.
ICE/BP was looking for someone else, but saw another brown person while waiting, and took the opportunity to grab him, too.
He was imprisoned for more than a month and shuffled around the country before anyone bothered to look at his identification or acknowledge their validity.
Are you aware of what's going on in the US right now?
NYT: Those Deported to El Salvador Were Shackled, Beaten, and Sexually Assaulted[1]
And if you're saying to yourself, "what do I have to worry about, I'm not brown", well, do you have kids who you don't want to have abducted and zip-tied naked in the middle of the night by paramilitaries using grenades and rappelling from helicopters into your home[2][3]?
> Neighbors like Eboni Watson say they ducked for cover as they heard several flash bangs.
> "They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other," Watson said. "That's all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where's the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, 'fuck them kids.'"
> “It was heartbreaking to watch,” she said. “Even if you’re not a mother, seeing kids coming out buck naked and taken from their mothers, it was horrible.”
> "They just treated us like we were nothing," Fisher said.
The level of cope... The US and the west in general is on a much more dire trajectory than China (which is facing its own demons, no doubt about that)
There is not much left of communism in China besides the name, it's more akin to a government steered economy, which arguably is very similar to what the west had when we moved at our peak speed, albeit more authoritarian. They still have what we mostly lost: a long term historical view of geopolitic.
It's most accurate to say that China is still run by folks who are committed communists. These planners, by virtue of their decades of experience, understand the social value of markets and broad based technological growth, and want to wield those even better than liberal planners.
Yeah but then again most people think "if it's not capitalism it's communism", there is a whole spectrum and China definitely does not belong in the communist part of the spectrum anymore. It's a mix of authoritarian socialism and state capitalism, you can add many other words to the mix but communism isn't at the top of it anymore
New things deserve new definitions, we have to get out of the ww2 lingo where everyone is a nazi, a fascist, a communist or a capitalist, it's overly simplistic and muddies the water. 2025 China is completely different than 2000 China which itself is completely different than 1980 China.
I hesitate to link directly to a single podcast dealer, but if you search for Dave Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly's podcast with Stripe brothers, there's some alpha in there.
It's touched on in chemistry, generally under the field of materials science. After all that's the bastard child of physics and chemistry that semiconductors fall under.
I say "generally" because obviously physical chemistry and inorganic chemistry also overlap with it a bit at the edges.
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