LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Peter J. Bowler suggests that evolution by natural selection is this in his book "Darwin Deleted" - given that in real life, there was an "eclipse of Darwinism", he suggests that without Darwin, various non-Darwinian theories of evolution would have been developed further, and evolution by natural selection would have come rather late

Gemini may just be wrong about the mold claim. According to Wikipedia, Ernest Duchesne was curing guinea pigs of typhoid in 1897.

The nickname was "Cornell of the West." Stanford was modeled after Cornell.

Maybe Galois with group theory? He died in 1832, but his work was only published in 1846, upon which it kicked off the development of group theory, e.g. with Cayley's 1854 paper defining a group. Claude writes that there was not much progress in the intervening years:

The period between Galois' death in 1832 and the publication of his manuscripts in 1846 did see some developments in the theory of permutations and algebraic equations, which were important precursors to group theory. However, there wasn't much direct progress on what we would now recognize as group theory.

Some notable developments in this period:

1. Cauchy's work on permutations in the 1840s further developed the idea of permutation groups, which he had first explored in the 1820s. However, Cauchy did not develop the abstract group concept.

2. Plücker's 1835 work on geometric transformations and his introduction of homogeneous coordinates laid some groundwork for the later application of group theory to geometry.

3. Eisenstein's work on cyclotomy and cubic reciprocity in the 1840s involved ideas related to permutations and roots of unity, which would later be interpreted in terms of group theory.

4. Abel's work on elliptic functions and the insolubility of the quintic equation, while published earlier, continued to be influential in this period and provided important context for Galois' ideas.

However, none of these developments directly anticipated Galois' fundamental insights about the structure of solutions to polynomial equations and the corresponding groups of permutations. The abstract concept of a group and the idea of studying groups in their own right, independent of their application to equations, did not really emerge until after Galois' work became known.

So while the 1832-1846 period saw some important algebraic developments, it seems fair to say that Galois' ideas on group theory were not significantly advanced or paralleled during this time. The relative lack of progress in these 14 years supports the view of Galois' work as a singular and ahead-of-its-time discovery.

I was down voting this particular post because I perceived it as mostly ideological and making few arguments, only stating strongly that government action will be bad. I found the author's replies in the comments much more nuanced and would not have down-voted if I'd perceived the original post to be of the same quality.

Alcoholics are encouraged not to talk passed Liquor Stores. Basically, physical availability is the biggest lever - keep your phone / laptop in a different room when you don't absolutely need them!

In many important tasks in the modern economy, it isn't possible to replace on expert with any number of average humans. A large fraction of average humans aren't experts. 

A large fraction of human brains are stacking shelves or driving cars or playing computer games or relaxing etc. Given a list of important tasks in the computer supply chain, most humans, most of the time, are simply not making any attempt at all to solve them. 

And of course a few percent of the modern economy is actively trying to blow each other up. 

You can play the same game in the other direction. Given a cold source, you can run your chips hot, and use a steam engine to recapture some of the heat. 

The Landauer limit still applies. 

>But GPT4 isn't good at explicit matrix multiplication either.

So it is also very inefficient. 

Probably a software problem. 

yup, sorry for missing that, thanks!