Richard Hamming provided a (formalist) response to Wigner's argument about the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in this 1980 paper, which was helpfully expanded upon by Derek Abbott in 2013. The core point is that despite the appearances, mathematized science answers comparatively little about the world, and that both the mathematics we use and the phenomena we apply those mathematics to are probably parochial to our cognitive processes. Mathematics is, in this view, a powerful tool rather than the underlying truth of the universe, and we shouldn't be surprised it managed to drive a few nails really well.
I wonder if Gell-Mann amnesia might be more historically contingent than people assume.
When Crichton coined the term in 2002, (scientific) information was a lot less accessible, because the internet was more niche, and social media did not exist. Traditional media (including print) was also a much larger field than today, in part because you couldn't just check twitter to learn about current events. People had no independent means of fact-checking a claim made in their dailies. Journalists, in turn, had access to much sparser resources on any given topic and much less oversight for accuracy.
I suspect that the press was generally less accurate in Crichton's time than today. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal survived because they were top-tier newspapers, more accurate than the rest of the press. They could rely on this reputation to survive the broader press crisis. But the many mid-size newspapers were less accurate and simply didn't survive.
I do not think you are necessarily wrong in general, but this is part of a much larger class of concerns about "lock-in" and path dependency after ASI is achieved. I mean, it's supposed to be "the last invention" : a lot of arrangements will be hard or impossible to change after ASI is achieved, including political arrangements. I think that's why the field of alignment as a whole is concerned about making sure things are right before ASI is achieved. Murderbots being on the table against political opposition counts as a form of misalignment.
I think you are just wrong about swarming. Revolutions do not work by zerg rushing since... the invention... (read more)
I really like the comparison to Intelsat. The best examples of institutions working well are usually those we do not know about because... working well is boring! But what do you think we should learn from the failure of the Baruch Plan, which also aimed at international control of a strategic technology (nuclear energy), and failed because the race dynamics it was supposed to prevent had already started? Seems like the race to AGI is already on between the US and China.
No problem at all!
Small point of terminology: "partial pressure" only makes sense in multi-species mixtures, but most refrigerants are single-species. The correct terms are 1) pressure as a descriptive term for the state of the refrigerant and 2) vapor pressure specifically for the equilibrium condition at a given temperature.
regarding your questions:
Trying to understand refrigeration through statistical mechanics (i.e. what happens to each molecule), as you are trying here is going to be a bit tricky. Refrigeration is really best explained by classical thermodynamics, using properties of the fluid like enthalpy, pressure, entropy, etc. which themselves can be understood using statistical mechanics. As a matter of fact, the vapor-compression cycle was invented before Boltzmann's theory.
Two significant mistakes in your diagram:
Epistemic status: quite confident.
Futarchy is bound to fail because conditional decision markets are structurally incapable of estimating causal policy effects once their outputs are acted upon. Traders must price contracts based on welfare conditional on approval, not welfare caused by approval. As a result, decision markets systematically reward traders for exploiting non-causal correlations between policy adoption and latent welfare fundamentals. We can expect futarchy markets to endogenously generate such correlations. Policies that signal strong fundamentals are favored even if causally harmful, while policies that signal weakness are disfavored even if causally beneficial. This effect persists under full rationality, common knowledge, and perfect supporting institutions (welfare metric, courts, legislatures, etc.).
This bias is worst... (read 3522 more words →)
It can be dangerous at the symbolic level, in that political legitimacy needs to pretend to rest on something even if it is in practice circular. This is an is-ought gap problem: the government is legitimate because you obey the government without resistance (descriptive), and you obey the government without resistance because it is legitimate (normative). This second part is, yes, dependent on what one thinks about what makes the government legitimate. Embracing the circularity is unstable. A totalitarian state and a democracy would both be legitimate as long as people don't protest. But what if people do protest? You need an idea that will pull citizens to obey the government by... (read more)