I've found the AI Village amusing when I can catch glimpses of it, but I wasn't aware of a regular digest. Is https://theaidigest.org/village/blog what you are referring to?
These posts always leave me feeling a little melancholy that my life doesn't seem to have that many challenges where thinking faster/better/harder/sooner would actually help.
Most of my waking hours are spent on my job, where cognitive performance is not at all the bottleneck. (I honestly believe that if you made me 1.5x "better at thinking", this would not give a consistent boost in output as valued by the business. I'm a software engineer.) I have some intellectual spare-time hobbies, but the most demanding of them is Japanese studying, which is more about volume, exposure, and spaced repetition than clever strategies. I am intrigued by making myself more productive in my programming side projects, but I think the biggest force multiplier for me there is learning how to leverage AI agents more effectively. (Besides the raw time savings, rapid iteration speed can also lessen the need for thinking of the right solution the first time around.)
I can easily see how this would be an important skill for someone doing novel academic-ish research, however. And I wish some of the examples were about that, instead of Thinking Physics and video games!
It's interesting to compare this to the other curated posts I got in my inbox over the last week, What is malevolence? and How will we update about scheming. Both of those (especially the former) I bounced off of due to length. But this one I stuck with for quite a while, before I started skimming in the worksheet section.
I think the instinct to apply a length filter before sending a post to many peoples' inboxes is a good one. I just wish it were more consistently applied :)
Finding non-equilibrium quantum states would be evidence of pilot wave theory since they're only possible in a pilot wave theory.
If you can find non-equilibrium quantum states, they are distinguishable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_non-equilibrium
(Seems pretty unlikely we'd ever be able to definitively say a state was non-equilibrium instead of some other weirdness, though.)
I can help confirm that your blind assumption is false. Source: my undergrad research was with a couple of the people who have tried hardest, which led to me learning a lot about the problem. (Ward Struyve and Samuel Colin.) The problem goes back to Bell and has been the subject of a dedicated subfield of quantum foundations scholars ever since.
This many years distant, I can't give a fair summary of the actual state of things. But a possibly unfair summary based on vague recollections is: it seems like the kind of situation where specialists have something that kind of works, but people outside the field don't find it fully satisfying. (Even people in closely adjacent fields, i.e. other quantum foundations people.) For example, one route I recall abandons using position as the hidden variable, which makes one question what the point was in the first place, since we no longer recover a simple manifest image where there is a "real" notion of particles with positions. And I don't know whether the math fully worked out all the way up to the complexities of the standard model weakly coupled to gravity. (As opposed to, e.g., only working with spin-1/2 particles, or something.)
Now I want to go re-read some of Ward's papers...
This is great, until Spotify is ready this will be the best way to share on social media.
May I suggest adding lyrics, either in the description or as closed captions or both?
If you are willing to share, can you say more about what got you into this line of investigation, and what you were hoping to get out of it?
For my part, I don't feel like I have many issues/baggage/trauma, so while some of the "fundamental debugging" techniques discussed around here (like IFS or meditation) seem kind of interesting, I don't feel too compelled to dive in. Whereas, techniques like TYCS or jhana meditation seem more intriguing, as potential "power ups" from a baseline-fine state.
So I'm wondering if your baseline is more like mine, and you ended up finding fundamental debugging valuable anyway.
It seems we have very different abilities to understand Holtman's work and find it intuitive. That's fair enough! Are you willing to at least engage with my minimal-time-investment challenge?
Echoing what others have said here, this article was quite well-written. It felt well suited for people who do not know much about the field, with good analogies, recaps of foundational concepts, and links to various fun events not everyone will have caught (e.g. DeepThink switching to Chinese, or Golden Gate Claude). But it did that without being grating toward those of us who have been following along and for which much of this was review, which is especially impressive.
You might want to consider pitching this, or your future writing, around to larger outlets than LessWrong! I imagine your writing would be a perfect fit for detail-loving places like Quanta or Asterisk, but maybe larger online outlets (The Verge? Andandtech?? I don't know what people read these days) would be interested.