The one part that directly contradicted Chomsky was the argument languages tend to minimise dependency length, which flies in the face of long range dependencies like question movement, topicalisation, pronoun binding etc. And misses the main point Chomsky was making: why have a system with movement?
The article seems to be arguing that statistically most sentences (in most languages) are simple. OK, sentences like "Which boys do the girls expect to fight each other?" may not be common, but you instantly understand that "each other" binds not to the closer "the girls", but the long range dependency "which boys". In order to understand it you reconstruct the question to its original position "the girls expect <which boys> to fight each other" to know that the boys are the ones fighting, and bind to each other (the boys are fighting the boys)
Why have a system like that (in basically every language)? How is that optimised for simple dependencies & communication?
Me too: In the 405 POST do you see the same request I do? A conversation where a person is trying to run jailbreak.sh saying they're an AI alignment researcher.
edit: also this bit at the top is interesting:
root@anthropic:/# <cmd>ls -a</cmd>
. bin dev home lib media opt root sbin sys usr
.. boot etc initrd.img lib64 mnt proc run srv tmp var
I do wonder if humankind will have 3 phases: 1) not knowing if life is out there, 3) discovering extraterrestrial life, but mainly:
2) 1000s of years where we're pretty sure that oxygen rich planet has life, but can't get there and have to concede it might be just a flaw in our theory of planet formation.
If we find a really good candidate for ET life, there are things other than interstellar probes. We'd probably start by building a much larger space telescope designed specifically for spectroscopy. The funding for a mega-scope would be easier to justify if we had a very strong extraterrestrial biosphere candidate.
There are also some literally far-out proposals to place a space telescope way out beyond the orbit of Pluto and use gravitational lensing from the Sun as a giant objective lens. It wouldn't make sense for a general purpose scope but could make sense if the exact orbit and timing were selected to observe a specific object. Difficult but probably not as hard as interstellar flight.
That's a really interesting breakdown. I think we'll be able to build larger and larger telescopes and figure out more and more of what's in atmospheres of planets. I feel like we'll be increasingly seeing more and more life signals without it being 100% decided. I want to see articles that consider what you could see about the earth from 100 light years away with just a little bit more advanced technology than we have.
Phase #2 is only a thing in a strict scientific definition. Nobody will remember the decades of overt denial that life could ever exist off of earth and obstruction of exploration efforts, and handwaving away of biosignature evidence when we do finally observe life on mars, after all. Even then naysayers will claim panspermia in order to kick the can down the road further.
Donald Knuth's Dancing Links paper is a beautiful exploration of the power of linked lists. He uses a table with doubly linked lists (for rows and cols) to solve omino tiling. The linked lists allow for an elegant unpicking of rows (and re-attaching when backtracking)
The paper's a really enjoyable read, Knuth's tone throughout is "look at this, this is fun"
The historic squeeze in NHS funding has shown up in all sorts of metrics: most notably waiting list times - which have exploded over the last decade. Health prioritisation means the doctors can try to reduce the immediate deaths - the major costs being pushed into pain and suffering of people waiting for operations (but not dying, or being rushed in if they go downhill). All of this just kicks the can, and left the NHS at breaking point - ready for covid to break it.
On bureaucracy - a health service requires administration, so any health funding can be described as "more money for a bureaucracy". The evidence shows that I direct public service like the NHS - concentrating on building hospitals, hiring doctors and nurses and making people well - involves somewhat less administrative costs than using an indirect insurance system (like most European countries, Canada etc) and much less than the dysfunctional private system in America https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2013.1327
Yes although the vaccine was given first to the most vulnerable people (ie more likely to die from other things) so this still doesn't give a clear sense of the improvement. No one is doubting the effectiveness of vaccines (ok a bunch of idiots, but not me) but this isn't the most helpful stat to assess the relative improvement.
