Imagine Isaac Newton (and/or Gottfried Leibniz) saying, "Today we're announcing the availability of new mathematical tools -- contact our marketing specialists now!"
The linked article isn't about mathematics, technology or human knowledge. It's about marketing. It can only exist in a kind of late-stage capitalism where enshittification is either present or imminent.
And I have to say ... Stephen Wolfram's compulsion to name things after himself, then offer them for sale, reminds me of ... someone else. Someone even more shamelessly self-promoting.
Newton didn't call his baby "Newton-tech", he called it Fluxions. Leibniz called his creation Calculus. It didn't occur to either of them to name their work after themselves. That would have been embarrassing and unseemly. But ... those were different times.
Imagine Jonas Salk naming his creation Salk-tech, then offering it for sale, at a time when 50,000 people were stricken with Polio every year. What a missed opportunity! What a sucker! (Salk gave his vaccine away, refusing the very idea of a patent.)
Right now it's hard to tell, but there's more to life than grabbing a brass ring.
I like a lot of Stephen Wolfram's work, but we must also recognize the questionable assumptions he made in many of his commercial projects.
There is a difference between cashing-in and selling-out... but often fame destroys peoples scientific working window by shifting focus to conventional mundane problems better left to an MBA.
I live in a country where guaranteed health care is part of the constitution. It was a controversial idea at one time, but proved lucrative in reducing costs.
Isaac Newton purchased the only known portrait of the man who accused him of plagiarism, and essentially erased the guy from history books. Newton also traded barbs with Robert Hooke of all people when he found time away from his alleged womanizing. Notably, this still happens in academia daily, as unproductive powerful people have lots of time to formalize and leverage grad student work with credible publishing platforms.
The hapless and unscrupulous have always existed, where the successful simply leverage both of their predictable behavior. =3
'I live in a country where guaranteed health care is part of the constitution.'
In the light of ' Almost half of the 6 million people needing treatment from the NHS in England have had no further care at all since joining a hospital waiting list, new data reveals. Previously unseen NHS England figures show that 2.99 million of the 6.23 million patients (48%) awaiting care have not had either their first appointment with a specialist or a diagnostic test since being referred by a GP.'
- Assuming it's successful in its goal, can your country tell Britain how to do it? Please!
Over a human lifetime, the immediate economic decisions do change macroeconomic postures. For example, consider variable costs of dental services for braces, fillings, crowns, root canals, extraction, bone loss, dentures, and supporting pharmaceuticals/radiology. Then consider a one-time standard fixed cost of volume discounted cosmetic titanium implants with a crown. People would look great, have better heart health, and suffer less treatments over time.
Rationally, the more expensive option ends up several times less expensive than a sequence of bodges. Yet no politician in the world could make that happen due to initial costs, regulatory capture, and rent-seeking economic policy. Note, GDP would contract slightly as cost savings compounded, and quality of life improved.
In general, one could run integrated education, emergency care, and disease control diagnostics like assembly lines. Routing patients though 24h virtual sorting for specialist site clinics on fixed service rotation.
Some have already imagined efficient hip and knee replacement services that make sense in other contexts:
the historically underfunded NHS took a massive hit to its funding at the start of the credit crunch, and then again in covid. neither cut was restored, whilst patient numbers have steadily risen (UK needs population growth to fuel property prices to avoid recession - 20% of gdp is construction).
people are dying because hospitals cant afford to operate. getting deals on volume purchases is irrelevant
>people are dying because hospitals cant afford to operate
In general, around 24% of health care costs are spent in the final year of life. It is also legal here for folks to request a painless early exit from palliative and end-of-life care, but depends on individuals faith and philosophical stance.
1. How many local kids do you personally know made it into medical school?
2. Is your national debt and %debt to GDP ratio growing?
3. Is your middle class job market in growth?
If the answer is 0, yes, and no... than the core problems may become more clear. Best of luck =3
Currency requires trade to generate tax revenue, and is like holding a bucket of water with a hole in the bottom.
Folks could nationalize gold reserves >1oz like the US did to exit the depression, publish holding-company investment owners, tax investment properties at 6% of assessed value every year, and pass a right-of-first-sale to citizens regardless of bid amount on residential zoned estates like Singapore.
One may wager any such actions are unlikely from the hapless. =3
This idea suffers from a number of practical obstacles:
One, in a sufficiently advanced field of study, an idea's originator may be the only person able to imagine an experimental test. I doubt that many physicists would have immediately thought that Mercury's unexplained orbital precession would serve to either support or falsify Einstein's General Relativity -- but Einstein certainly could. Same with deflected starlight paths during a solar eclipse (both these effects were instrumental in validating GR).
Two, scientists are supposed to be the harshest critics of their own ideas, on the lookout for a contradicting observation. This was once part of a scientist's training -- I assume this is still the case.
Three, the falsifiability criterion. If an experimental proposal doesn't include the possibility of a conclusive falsification, it's not, strictly speaking, a scientific idea. So an idea's originator either has (and publishes) a falsifying criterion, or he doesn't have a legitimate basis for a scientific experiment.
Here's an example. Imagine if the development of the transistor relied on random experimentation with no preferred outcome. In the event, the inventors at Bell Labs knew exactly what they wanted to achieve -- the project was very focused from the outset.
Another example. Jonas Salk (polio vaccine) knew exactly what he wanted to achieve, his wasn't a random journey in a forest of Pyrex glassware. It's hard to imagine Salk's result arising from an aimless stochastic exploration.
So it seems science relies on people's integrity, not avoidance of any particular focus. If integrity can't be relied on, perhaps we should abandon the people, not the methods.
> So it seems science relies on people's integrity, not avoidance of any particular focus.
Science relies on replication. And any real gain society gets that comes from science is a form of replication in itself.
Integrity can't be relied on. But then, complete reliability is not necessary, just enough to make replication work.
And also, science is in a crisis due to the lack (or really large delay) of practical use. We actually don't have any other institution that ensures replication happens.
>> So it seems science relies on people's integrity, not avoidance of any particular focus.
> Science relies on replication.
If that were true, then extraterrestrials would be real, because people repeatedly report sightings. The fact that most such sightings are misinterpretations of natural phenomena would be swept away by the sheer number of events, i.e. by replication, not interpretation.
> And also, science is in a crisis due to the lack (or really large delay) of practical use.
That's not a crisis in science, because science doesn't care whether an idea can be applied, only whether it can be verified, whether it resists falsification.
When Maxwell constructed his electromagnetic theory, it had no practical application -- none whatever. But much of modern technology relies to a greater or lesser degree on Maxwell's work, 175 years later. Because of Maxwell's theory with no practical application, Einstein regarded him as a scientist on a par with Newton.
Richard Feynman correctly called science "The pleasure of finding things out," with no consideration given to science's applications, if any. Science is judged, not based on its utility, but on its accuracy.
Science asks, "Is this true?" It doesn't ask, "How can we sell this?" That's not science, that's marketing.
Wait ... our brains are composed of molecules, and we think with our brains. That makes it a question of scale or organization, not principle.
This may sound kind of woo-woo, but many people are asking that question -- where do we draw the line between thinking and simple biological existence?
One idea is something called panpsychism, the idea that all matter is conscious, and our brains are only a very concentrated form. Easy to say, not so easy to prove -- but certainly the simplest explanation. In this connection, remember Occam's razor.
Philosophers describe consciousness as their "hard problem" -- what is it? Not just what it is, but where is it located, or not located. At the moment we know next to nothing about this question, even what kind of question to ask.
Consider the octopus -- it has islands of brain cells scattered around its body, and if you cut off an octopus arm, the arm will try to crawl back toward the ... umm ... rest of the octopus. Weird but true. Seeing this, one must ask where to draw the line between brain and body, between neurology and physiology.
Readers should be aware the New Scientist regularly publishes articles that ... aren't remotely scientific. In this case, one clue is the presence of the word "mind," which, notwithstanding its colorful history, isn't accepted as a scientific topic.
The reason? The mind is not part of nature, and scientific theories must refer to some aspect of the natural world. If we were to accept the mind as science, then in fairness we would have to accept religion, philosophy and similar non-corporeal entities as science. So far we've resisted efforts to do that.
Some may object that psychology studies the mind, and experimental psychology is widely accepted as science. That's true -- there's plenty of science in psychology, some of it very good. But the many scientists in psychology study something that cannot itself be regarded as a basis for scientific theory.
This means psychology can do science, but it cannot be science. It's the same with astrology, a favorite undergraduate science topic by students learning statistical methods. But only the seriously confused will mistake an astrology study, however well-designed, for proof that astrology is a scientific theory.
People have the right to use the word "science" any way they please. So the only reality check is an educated observer. The fact that New Scientist has the title it does, and publishes the articles it does, stands as proof that there aren't nearly enough educated observers.
> I doubt anyone could make a reply to this comment that would make me feel any better about it.
You may be right, but just to have said it : the Fast Fourier Transform requires complex numbers. One can write a version that avoids complex numbers, but (a) its ugliness gives away what's missing, and (b) it's significantly slower in execution.
On this general topic, guess how distant the horizon (the "vanishing point") is, across open water, assuming clear weather and a six-foot-tall observer standing on a beach? The answer is a mere six miles.
Next curious fact -- the two towers of the Golden Gate Bridge are perfectly vertical, but the top of one tower is 4.6 cm (1.8 inches) farther away from the other, compared to the bottom of the towers -- because there is a small angular tilt between the towers. Guess why ...
Okay, it's because the towers are independently vertical with respect the center of the earth, are horizontally separated by 4,200 feet, and each tower is 746 feet tall. These dimensions assure that the towers have a distinct angle with respect to each other. It's a small difference, but it's not zero.
I thought about these things (and many others) during my four-year solo around-the-world sail (https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/).
This true story moves us because it resembles much of human history, in which clever but powerless people struggle against morons -- morons who somehow gain control over a modern industrial state, then use that power to punish innocents who dare to assert simple human rights.
People in Moscow, in Gaza, in Tehran, in Minneapolis, are all saying, "How can I rise above this? -- where's my balloon?"
> Man, you really went ahead and tried to compare Minneapolis with Teharan.
It would help if you could spell "Tehran". Then notice that in either place you can be killed for annoying authority figures, without due process or recourse.
> This is got me laughing out loud.
I suspect that by 2028 you won't be laughing quite so loudly -- or at all.
A much simpler remedy is to plug a computer into the TV, then program the computer to show the desired / appropriate content. This would be much simpler than trying to design a remote control meant to circumvent a TV manufacturer's extreme dedication to removing a consumer's control over their TV.
This remedy only requires a Raspberry Pi and an HDMI cable. Also, disconnect the TV from the Internet.
The linked article isn't about mathematics, technology or human knowledge. It's about marketing. It can only exist in a kind of late-stage capitalism where enshittification is either present or imminent.
And I have to say ... Stephen Wolfram's compulsion to name things after himself, then offer them for sale, reminds me of ... someone else. Someone even more shamelessly self-promoting.
Newton didn't call his baby "Newton-tech", he called it Fluxions. Leibniz called his creation Calculus. It didn't occur to either of them to name their work after themselves. That would have been embarrassing and unseemly. But ... those were different times.
Imagine Jonas Salk naming his creation Salk-tech, then offering it for sale, at a time when 50,000 people were stricken with Polio every year. What a missed opportunity! What a sucker! (Salk gave his vaccine away, refusing the very idea of a patent.)
Right now it's hard to tell, but there's more to life than grabbing a brass ring.
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