Sure but this was prompted by the absurdly self-congratulatory "city on a hill" comment which shows how out of touch the West is with critical thought from the global south.
As originally used, the city on a hill comment was about aspirations, not achievements. IOW, the US was aspiring to be the city on the hill, not that it was.
And then JumpCrissCross's comment says that the US has stopped even aspiring to be the city on the hill.
It's a comment saying the US has fallen. How is that absurdly self-congratulatory?
There's different ways to define "related", here what does Quanta explicitly claim is "related", plausibly without looking maybe they meant historically related but not conceptually related.
Tbf I was maybe a bit indignant over this sentence from TFA:
>The proof _relies_ on ideas imported from the world of string theory. Its techniques are wholly unfamiliar to the mathematicians who have dedicated their careers to classifying polynomials.
They should have said "differential geometry", unless you count Kontsevich himself as a string theorist (maybe he does. I don't know)
From the paper, sec3.1.2:
While historically prevalent in the mirror symmetry and Gromov-Witten literature, the complex
analytic or formal analogues of an F-bundle will not be useful for constructing birational invariants
directly
Later on, however:
One largely unexplored aspect of Gromov-Witten theory is its algebraic flexibility..
I guess we can't really not credit the string theorists if Kontsevich can be so inspired by them :)
I feel like statins are harder to accept than vaccines. With vaccines we can say it is just training our existing immune system to recognize and fight something. So how would you straightforwardly explain statins to a scientifically literate adult so they can make an informed decision. But part of that means honestly acknowledging whatever scientific unknowns and uncertainties there are in this area of human biology.
It seems acc-escape is measuring how hard the pianist is exerting their fingers/arms, which plausibly indirectly affects the coordination and style of sound that they play, hence the appearance of a different timbre.
So I think this "talking point" of "LLMs are just Markov chains" is as bad, analogously, as "Your amazing invention that passes the Turing Test is justa giant LUT". Or "Your C++ program is justa FSM". It is all technically true, but it is being used subtly to dismiss/delegitimize something, instead of communicate a scientifically insightful idea. How is this different than "Humans are just collections of cells". True except we're are a very interesting type of collection! LLMs are a very interesting type of Markov chain! Haskell/Java/Ruby programs are a very interesting type of FSM! Etc. The talking point by itself is just reductionism, of which we've seen and heard variants of during other scientific revolutions.
Also, this Markov chain has size O(T^K), exponential in the token length of the context window, which is a beyond astronomically large object
Anecdotal but my dad had Parkinson's and prior poor dental history, so this interests me. My own teeth are better but no means perfect; based on this I'll have to pay scrupulous attention to hygiene and checkups, just in case.
I studied at Berkeley and Princeton (big classes vs small classes), I find your view to be fundamentally flawed. You presuppose that meritocracy is an inherently fair value system implementation, while many critics and philosophers reject this assumption; in the next breath you delegitimize social justice issues subtly framed as "identity politics", needless to say many other critics and philosophers do not share this talking point either.
Essentially, Oxford researchers—institutionalists—are on the worst perch to evaluate institutions because they don't have a deep understanding of cross-societal differences and inevitably end up using their position to ad hominem and rationalize their own insider-ish biases. That's a tough ideological shell to crack through if the goal is to maintain an objective discussion.
As to the matter, the real issue is that Oxford/Cambridge is a different system than the US big universities. The people who apply to Oxbridge are from UK-related nations where they can study for an IB or an A levels. So for example the miscomparison that "A levels are harder than SAT/AP" is because it fundamentally misunderstands the historical aims of American education philosophy and very different social formations of the 20th century. This is a better approach to explain why UK/European universities are the way they are versus the (previously) leading ring of STEM universities in the US.
Take as another example the PhD system. The American system is different, they prefer non-Masters students direct from undergrad. The European PhD is only 3 years! By one metric that sounds insanely short and not enough time to develop a PhD-level mind. By another metric, yet another systemic difference, with differing rationales and intentions.
More deeply, if we really are to reject identity politics, then a class-based critique would demolish the notion of university education as a filtration system for all societies. Second if Oxbridge are so good then why is all the world's research still essentially American with some satellite results coming out of Europe and perhaps (very cautiously) China? A response that decouples education from research is itself an assumption, one that the American academic philosophy in practice does not agree with. American academia prioritizes research, then teaching, then community service. In other words, decoupling “education” from “research” is itself a pedagogical-philosophy assumption, one the American/British/European academic systems nevertheless still has various problematizable, elitist mindsets about.
So there's a much broader social, political, and historical/class analysis to be made rather than this kind of wonkism of foolish comparisons, and I'm rather miffed that supposedly world-class researchers are still not cognizant of this. Sometimes we are too close to critically think about our own habitus fairly.
Or, before making graphs and charts, read some Paulo Freire.
There is no such thing as "the European PhD". A PhD in the UK nominally takes 3 or 4 years, depending on the program. In Finland, it's nominally 4 years (but typically longer), and that assumes that you already have a Master's. It used to be longer, but Finnish universities moved to shorter "American-style" PhDs, because politicians wanted people to graduate faster.
There is such a thing conceptually as distinct from how American PhDs are selected and developed. I've alluded to this already without elaborating in full on it.
My point was that there several major university traditions in Europe. The differences between them are almost as significant as the difference between any particular European tradition and the American tradition.
The UK is a particularly poor example of how things are done in Europe. In many aspects (such as whether the primary university degree is Bachelor's or Master's) it's closer to the US than the average continental European country.
You edited your comment after I started writing mine. Your idea that the US is still responsible for an exceptionally large fraction of academic research sounds like a leftover from the 20th century. European universities needed a couple of generations to recover from WW2, but since ~20 years ago, there have not been any significant qualitative or quantitative differences between the research output in the US and Europe. (China may also have crossed the threshold recently, but it's too early to say.)
At least not in the fields I'm qualified to judge (computer science, bioinformatics, genomics). There are obviously major differences in both directions in individual topics, but that's because both blocks are pretty small. Neither has enough researchers to cover every subfield and every topic.
American universities fill most of the top positions in university rankings, but that's mostly because the concept of "top institutions" is more relevant in American culture. (That's another aspect where the British tradition is closer to the US than continental Europe.) In many European countries, all proper universities are seen as more or less equivalent as far as education is concerned. Some universities employ more top researchers than others, but that doesn't impact their reputation as educational institutions as much as in the US or the UK.
The problem with this view is that it actively obscures the central role that neoliberalization of academic institutions plays in these formations of quality. So I'll give a logical argument: the US remains the most powerful nation on Earth, and it "in-sources" the world's talent to maintain and reproduce its scientific and technological leadership. Inasmuch as political conditions are changing, European neoliberalized academia shall change and develop as well.
Pointedly, I don't define results or leadership as "research output". I mean who was responsible for Crispr? For LLMs? All roads lead to Rome; but today, empires also change shape and form.
The US has had to share its scientific leadership for some time already, and China is now seriously challenging its technological leadership. It continues to attract foreign academic talent, mostly because its academic salaries are less competitive against industry salaries than in other developed countries. Because Americans are less likely to pursue academic careers, it's often easier for foreign academics to find opportunities in the US than in other countries.
Who was responsible for CRISPR is good question (I'm less familiar with the advances leading to LLMs). There was a series of incremental advances building on each other from at least Japan, Netherlands, Spain, Germany, the US, France, Sweden, and Lithuania. And the Nobel prize was shared between an American researcher working in the US and a French researcher working in Sweden (and later in Germany).
You're either blithely (in fact, stupidly given electoral results this past decade) assuming everyone shares your normative goals and values, or you just asked ChatGPT to write you a "kritik" like some kid in a school debate league.
Edited: I think what's really going on is that you've internalized oppression so as to be so cynical and toxically jealous that someone else online can actually blithely/stupidly say what they think on a Sunday afternoon. Because you're professional working at a university, and you can't just do that and speak out. Noam Chomsky famously described this behavior amongst his peers.
I'm Asian American and LGBT+, and I was privileged by an advanced formal education. So, yes, I literally have a different set of values and goals than you. So you should just try to read it in good faith, I have made no such assumption rather my comment laid out those issues for you to think about. Unless you are doing the old "rules of rational discussion are for me, not for thee"? Surely you're not that sort of antiintellectual reactionary.
And to the other possibility, you're just writing an insult, so the problem there is you and your emotional regulation, and you are responsible for that.
Going back, it's quite the opposite, when the other commenter framed "identity politics" and "meritocracy", they were committing the very error you have ignorantly accused me of. Thus you are just engaging in projection. Not to mention the ("kritik" conservative's dogwshistle).
Thus, the fact that you are lacking in critical thinking skills today does not excuse you from such intellectually prejudiced remarks.
And finally, your reference to "electoral results" tells me you didn't read through my comment, and are pigeonholing me as one type of left-American Democrat or another, of which I have provided enough commentary in the original comment that I could not be one.
So as much as you were trying to suggest the problem is on my end, the problem is with you and your narrowminded (and frankly, one with a racist tenor because surely you would not have said that comment to my face) reply,
eli_gottlieb. It's too bad you're actually a postdoc, if I were an evil SJW or Democrat (or whatever politics it was you were insinuating) I'd be cancelling you through your own institution or something.
If you are a conservative, further discussion is going to be pointless. If you are Bernie/AOC/other leftist then I'll chalk it up to you basically misreading what I wrote.
Wow, you think Bernie and AOC are the limits of the spectrum at that end?
> So as much as you were trying to suggest the problem is on my end, the problem is with you and your narrowminded (and frankly, one with a racist tenor because surely you would not have said that comment to my face) reply, eli_gottlieb. It's too bad you're actually a postdoc, if I were an evil SJW or Democrat (or whatever politics it was you were insinuating) I'd be cancelling you through your own institution or something.
Oh yeah, you're asking ChatGPT for kritiks. Fuck off.
> Second if Oxbridge are so good then why is all the world's research still essentially American with some satellite results coming out of Europe and perhaps (very cautiously) China?
I'm an amateur cook, my immediate question was how much the vibration and heating will affect vegetable and meat oxidation and cell damage on the cut surface.
Could this improve the texture and flavor of certain foods? Like make garlic taste even more garlicky? Or could it cause an apple slice to brown faster? Can it be used to slice cooked fish as if it were sashimi? Etc.
If a site like SeriousEats does a product review I hope they focus on qualitative taste, and possibilities for enhancing cooking techniques, not merely saving time/effort to do something.
This is such a unfair interpretation, it's a false equivalence argument. "OS X added Terminal and throwing out HIG for a UNIX-y UI" is a moot point.
It's not about loyalty, it's about Apple's own coherence and vision as a creative-technology company, and a bunch of sophisticated users offering a critique of it over time. Read it that way and it makes a lot more sense.
Beneath the Apple "fandom" or any fandom there are valid reasons why they came to be (the quality of the product), and we ought to elevate that than call customers naive for not adopting the very corporate cynicism that is a result of anticompetitive economics.
reply