Sneers from r/physics! First up, this comment by napqe:
I’m sorry, but this is like awarding the nobel prize for literature to Xerox/HP/Brother for “improvements to printing”.
And in the same thread, from GustapheOfficial:
Last year’s prize was too relevant, they had to stagger the physics by a year.
We also have this by M1st_:
What’s next? Someone gets a Nobel prize for another algorithm that numerically solves differential equations??
Finally, we’ve the title of this thread, by TheSkells:
Yeah, “physics”
So Geoffrey Hinton is a total dork.
Hopefully, [this Nobel Prize] will make me more credible when I say these things really do understand what they’re saying. [There] is a whole school of linguistics that comes from Chomsky that thinks it’s nonsense to say these things understand language. That school is wrong. Neural nets are much better at processing language than anything produced by the Chomsky school of linguistics.
Neural nets are much better at processing language than anything produced by the Chomsky school of linguistics.
Hey mate, did you get your PhD or a fucking Nobel in linguistics by any chance? No? Just talking about shit you apparently have no idea about?
I didn’t even know you could be a crank about linguistics, that’s pretty amazing. What other otherwise really boring fields are you going to tackle, geodesy?
there’s plenty of linguistics cranks, but most of them have nationalistic tint, like people thinking that all languages come from turkish or something like that
Everybody knows that all languages derive from ULTRAFRENCH.
You give me a word, any word, and I show you how the root of that word is Greek.
𒍪𒌝𒁍
I hope that was a typo for Proto-Indo-European
PIE was just people wanting to eventually speak Greek but they had yet to figure out how, so they were just working backwards little by little trying to make their language more like Greek.
Uh-huh?
like people thinking that all languages come from turkish
This is amazing, I fucking love this. People striving to create the lowest stakes possible conspiracy. I struggle to think of something that would have less impact on the world no matter it were true or false.
A shadowy cabal of powerful people guarding the secret of “actually, it was [rolls die] Turkish people who invented [rolls another die] language!”
then think again, because it was a part of continuing series: turkish nationalism
Okay sure, but this is comical. A Turkish nationalist will be a Turkish nationalist with or without this idea. It’s the equivalent of saying that Turkish people have naturally less odorous farts and thus TURKIYE SHALL RULE THE WORLD!
okay but this idea was kinda central to modern turkish nationalism. see, kurds are not distinct people, they just speak turkish but wrong (heard anything similar recently?) also this is part of the reason why standard turkish is actual common language in turkey
oh, it’s like russia’s idea of ukrainian and belarussian. fucking orphans of the empires…
Funny you say that, as it was the Dutch who invented dice.
Hey mate, did you get your PhD or a fucking Nobel in linguistics by any chance?
Early onset Nobel disease.
I’m just waiting for him to chime in about music theory.
A popular meme on social media makes a series of allegations about the musical tune pitch A=432Hz and A=440Hz, including that the latter was a standard imposed by the Nazis to manipulate their enemies.
spittake
Multiple experts told Reuters these allegations are unfounded.
NO WAY
Thanks Reuters.
since 1953 all music has been tuned to 440Hz. This frequency has NO SCIENTIFIC RELATIONSHIP with our universe and actually causes the brain to become agitated.
fuck yes, this is the random all-caps crankery I get out of bed for! I love the idea that 440hz agitates the brain, but not in a scientific way (at least not for our universe?)
since 1969 all computers have been running Unix. This operating system has NO SCIENTIFIC RELATIONSHIP with our universe and actually causes the brain to become agitated.
I like my music the way I like my CPUs, 432 Hz.
oh what’s this doing here presses it
This operating system has NO SCIENTIFIC RELATIONSHIP with our universe and actually causes the brain to become agitated.
This but about Windows and unironically.
This reminds me of when I was planning out a tubular bells project. there is an amount of crankery around various notes and I came across a series of videos about the various Cs and their use in healing or chakra alignment.
When i went to buy some tuning forks I noted some more weird mysticism, but hey at least they produced a nice set of C notes.
seconds after 440hz tone is sounded:
it’s an old one, with roots in 80s era right wing cult/crank organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiller_Institute
efficient move, getting the Nobel disease in before the Nobel itself
nobel committee went full on ai-brained this year, nobel prize in chemistry is for alphafold. they had three good years in a row, had to do something stupid ig
lol that’s gonna age like milk
still better than peace prize for kissinger
i mean they still can give nobel prize in literature to chatgpt for extruding most text in unit of time
this is not my field, but allegedly alphafold kinda works, but it’s also not ai and more pattern matching, something that google does expertly. i still don’t think that it’s gonna be very useful even that it does solve a hard problem
half goes to david baker, you might remember him from rosetta@home thing. the other two people are from google deepmind
i guess it’s one of these years when chemistry nobel goes to biologists, but now with layer of ai hype on top for some weird fucking reason
Given how much money is being
wastedinvested in AI, they should have given them the Economics prize.deleted by creator
Repeating a comment I made in another forum here…
The Nobel organization is basically all about PR, and while as the nominating body they’re nominally independent, the Royal Academy of Science knows on which side their bread is buttered. Having a prize adjacent to AI in the year of our LLM 2024 is a no-brainer.
Having a prize adjacent to AI in the year of our LLM 2024 is a no-brainer.
This works on multiple levels
ah yes, the dynamite guy award show, a fine institution of the ages
The “everything is physics” crowd is awfully silent right now 🤔
Lucky 10000: this integration started decades ago. You may have heard of “computational trinitarianism” or read Baez & Stay 2009. The current big listing of correspondences is called the computational trilogy. Don’t let the Nobel committee’s foolishness blind you to the genuine connections between computer science and physics.
Hinton could be the first guy to win a Nobel and an Ignobel in the same year.
AI is poisoning science development. It is not necessary that everything uses AI ffs!!
it’s happening omg. check back in five years
From your linked post:
also from their pov the statistical approach to machine learning was defined by abandoning the attempt to externalize the meaning of text. the cliche they used to refer to this was “the meaning of a word is the context in which it occurs.”
Not an expert by any means, but this sounds like pagerank, but for language.
there’s a similarity in the sense that they’re both ‘content free.’ pagerank didn’t care about what was on your site, only what your page linked to and what pages linked to you
(past tense bc it’s unclear to me whether Google even uses pagerank at this point)
they diverge pretty significantly in one way: pagerank is an algorithm motivated by pragmatic simplifications. discarding the information of content when ranking sites is only something you would do because using content is really hard. you can take the statistical approach to semantics in the same spirit, but you don’t have to… ai true believers are necessarily treating the maxim I referred to as a philosophical claim, something that addresses the ground truth of what words are
ai true believers are necessarily treating the maxim I referred to as a philosophical claim, something that addresses the ground truth of what words are
Thanks for breaking it down, I was missing this key bit!
To me it sounds like post-modernism.
I understood some of those words
Using tools from physics to create something that is popular but unrelated to physics is enough for the nobel prize in physics?
So, if say a physicist creates a new recipe for the world’s greatest potato casserole, and it becomes popular everywhere, and they used some physics for creating the recipe to calculate the best heat distribution or whatever, then that’s enough?
if there’s a massive potato casserole bubble
@dgerard @nightsky when we getting pivot-to-massive-potato-casserole.com
Maybe if the potato casserole is exploded in the microwave by another physicist, on his way to start a resonance cascade…
(i’ll see myself out).
Using tools from physics to create something that is popular but unrelated to physics is enough for the nobel prize in physics?
If only, it’s not even that! Neither Boltzmann machines nor Hopfield networks led to anything used in the modern spam and deepfake generating AI, nor in image recognition AI, or the like. This is the kind of stuff that struggles to get above 60% accuracy on MNIST (hand written digits).
Hinton went on to do some different stuff based on backpropagation and gradient descent, on newer computers than those who came up with it long before him, and so he got Turing Award for that, and it’s a wee bit controversial because of the whole “people doing it before, but on worse computers, and so they didn’t get any award” thing, but at least it is for work that is on the path leading to modern AI and not for work that is part of the vast list of things that just didn’t work and it’s extremely hard to explain why you would even think they would work in the first place.
Also discussed in the Stubsack.
Hopfield is enormously influential, I don’t mind him getting a major prize at all. Physics seems weird tho.
Yada yada Chinese room
Out of curiosity, are they using any of his underlying ML techniques to analyze imaging/other data collection before using it in actual physics models?
Well, just about every data analysis technique ever invented has been applied in physics somewhere. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on applying a genetic algorithm to electron-atom scattering in particle detectors, a topic which I recall someone had already tried neural networks on.
That’s what I’m wondering. It’s not wild to give him a prize in physics if his techniques led to advancement in physics.
“CS is applied math, not applied physics” like physics isn’t just applied math to model real world data is kind of weird, especially if his particular math actually got used in physics. That’s pretty much what calculus was.
I don’t think that Donald Knuth deserves a physics prize for inventing TeX, even though TeX was a massive contribution to how we communicate physics.
Knuth should have a special Nobel Prize for Being Donald Motherfuckin’ Knuth.
He did, it’s the Turing Award.
which Hinton had already fucking won
I’m not sure how that’s the same thing.
Typesetting papers isn’t the same as developing mathematical methods that directly enable new solutions.
Providing the medium through which, to a rough approximation, all physics is discussed is, proportionally, a vastly greater contribution than any technique that only applies to a fraction of problems.
But the more salient point is that the Nobel Prize is an institution that we should, as a culture, care less about. And all the more so now, since they are getting in on the hype about an industry that is fundamentally anti-scientific.
From the linked article:
Restricting the Nobel Prize in physics to only three winners in a given year is only one of its problems, though, and Barry Barish is indicative of another. Barish gave a public talk in which he opened the presentation with a slide featuring both racist and sexist imagery.
This was a presentation about LIGO. How? Just fucking how does your INTRO to a project on GRAVITATIONAL WAVES get to be sexist and racist? Did he just casually throw in a slide saying “btw I just hate insert groups here”??
I found this description in the PhD thesis of Crystal Bennes:
Despite months of searching online and making requests for a copy of the image from those present at the talk, the image exists in description only. In a 2016 Science magazine article on the likelihood of Barish’s winning the Nobel Prize for physics in 2017 (which he eventually did), journalist Adrian Cho describes the image as ‘a man writing on a woman’s bare back and, next to her, a stage prop in the form of a cartoonish racial caricature’. On Twitter, the photograph has variously been described as featuring ‘blackface and bikini-clad girls’ and ‘a horrible racist/sexist slide featuring blackface’. Although one can easily conjure up a photograph from any of the individual descriptions, it is rather more difficult to imagine a single image which includes all of them.
Yet after spending much time attempting to source the image used by Barish, it occurred to me that, in many respects, the fact that I could not locate the image was almost more interesting than if I were able to find it. While the sexist and racist undertones of the image speak to Barish’s individual inability to comprehend its inappropriateness, the fact that I was unable to obtain a copy of the image through my professional and social networks in the physics community hints perhaps at that community’s tendency to pull together and close ranks in the face of potentially explosive press for one of the field’s leading lights. […] Eventually, after many months of emails to different people in my physics network, I was able to obtain a copy of the image. The image was provided to me on the sole condition that I did not reveal who I obtained it from.
This reminds me of the time a few years before that when Didier Sornette illustrated his conference-talk slides with mudflap women silhouettes.
