Goertzel also fell for Christopher Langan’s CTMU.

Yep. You’ve just earned yourself a click of the “eat a bag of jerkied dick” button.

The Levi-Civita symbol is, in programming lingo, a function that takes three arguments: epsilon(i,j,k) where i, j and k are integers that label the coordinate axes. Let 0 stand for the x axis, 1 for the y and 2 for the z. Then epsilon(0,1,2) equals 1. If we swap the values of any two arguments, we flip the sign: e.g., epsilon(1,0,2) evaluates to -1. Now, swap again: epsilon(1,2,0) must change sign again, so it evaluates to 1. But the sequence 1,2,0 is just the original sequence 0,1,2 read cyclically from a different starting point. In this way, we can work out what the value of the epsilon function is for any input. When the inputs are all different, the output is either 1 or -1, depending on whether the input sequence is “in order” or “in reverse order”. Write the numbers 0, 1 and 2 around a circle. Read clockwise, and you get one output; read counterclockwise, and you get the other. If two inputs are the same, then epsilon must evaluate to zero, because, for example, epsilon(0,0,1) with the first two inputs swapped is epsilon(0,0,1) again, meaning that the output must be minus itself.

Yeah, at best, “Kurzweilian h+” will be pseudoscientific guff. I suppose that keeping the lower strata of intellectually bad elements while discarding the worst of the social ones is progress, but, I mean, it’s kind of like saying you’re into your fad diet and LLM-generated supplement regimen and then looking over at RFK and saying “but that’s totally different!”.

I’ve lost it now, but somewhere in the replies to one of those threads was a person complaining that SneerClub was too much like beating up on nerds in high school. To which I say, first, here’s my blueberry bread recipe, and a nice photo of a winter sunrise, and my Star Trek fanfiction. We all friendly now? Good. Then let me suggest, cordially, that if you are continuing to think of social dynamics in terms of high-school hierarchies and shitty '80s movies well into adulthood, that is a you problem. If I can stop living as the gender I had in high school, you can stop letting your membership in a granfalloon lead you by the nose.

“e/acc is a troll ideology for upsetting EA people and scamming pmarca”

and “Kurzweilian h+” is just '90s nostalgia for people too proud to shop at Hot Topic

Yeah, there’s not much to be done about sign errors, other than practicing problems until you reach the point where you always make an even number of them.

You might not need it for this course, but cross products got easier for me once I learned my way around the Levi-Civita_symbol and the Einstein summation convention. This is covered in chapter 10 of Boas’ book; she cites Evett (1966).

Real analysis is definitely the kind of course that can benefit from an on-ramp. It’s often a student’s first encounter with proofs that involve a lot of machinery: theorem after theorem of epsilon-delta business to establish something that you didn’t doubt in the first place. I think it’s easy to get lost in the details there, particularly if care isn’t taken to explain what confusions these methods were devised to avoid.

The most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary) have decided that Jacob Coxon does not need an encyclopedia article all about him for now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jacob_Coxon

Bethany Brookshire (who’s an old pal of mine from our ScienceOnline days) reports:

People are using AI to impersonate real science journalists.

And one even got PUBLISHED.

In Science.

Caroline Williams writes on LinkedIn:

The person who was impersonating me managed to get an article published in Science, under my by-line. And they got paid for it!

I’ve seen the pitches (bad), and the email chain between editors who weren’t all that impressed, but googled me and decide to take a punt. When the article came in it was dry, clunky and badly written, but after several rounds of editing they managed to get it into a publishable state. It went online in June and was up until yesterday when it became clear they (and I) had been scammed. […] The whole thing makes me feel sick. I know from my work as an editor that the reputational damage is real. Had I pitched a story to them afterwards they would very understandably have said “Hell no!”. Who has the time to do someone else’s job? They tried “me”, “I” didn’t deliver, so no thank you.

I have no idea how many more editors out there have me on their ‘do not commission’ list because of this person’s actions. There may also be several scientists who will not want to talk to me because they’ve had a bad experience with the fake one.

More broadly, if this is a wider scam (and based on what others have told me, I think it is), it is potentially a serious issue for science journalism and journalism in general. And I’m not sure what we can do about that.

Science has retracted the fraudulent story.

Well, that at least I’m reasonably prepared to answer questions about.

Here’s a free online textbook that may be useful. I’d also recommend grabbing a copy of Mary L. Boas’ Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/we-must-create-the-shit-machine

Most participants in this forum don’t repeat the same drivel non-argument that someone else already got banned for insisting upon after all possible humor value was extracted at their expense.

There might be some way of bypassing the ATproto sign-in wall, but I don’t know and don’t care enough to figure it out. The content of the locked post is only this screenshot. Ed Zitron asks, “What is your relationship to the rationalists and effective altruists?” and Coxon replies as quoted above.

Fuck, when did icons in the WordPress plugin search screen become animated? How do I make them fucking stop? I just want to read what the fucking plugins are so I can maybe find one that works you fucking assholes.

Unsurprisingly, the Coxon dipshit who is getting all the press for quitting his cushy AI-industry job is a MIRI fanboy:

I’ve been associating with rationalists for almost a decade. Their ideas were compelling and you can’t deny their foresight. The founders of every superintelligence effort are all bound up in the rationality sphere. Sam Altman and Greg Brockman used to frequent the MIRI offices.

If MIRI was Sam Altman’s old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he can’t work in it, isn’t this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?

The way I relate to rationalists is it’s like the bizarre hypertrophied physiques on specialized athletes. In my opinion they have weirdly specialized minds that make them uniquely correct about topics removed from daily experience. These “specialized minds” can also make them off-putting to many people.

I don’t know if I’d consider myself a rationalist. I am intuitively opposed to polyamory, veganism, and consequentialist intuitions. But I certainly trust them to be correct about factual questions.

“I’m intuitively opposed to culinary traditions that people have been developing for hundreds of years, but gosh dang it, when they talk about the Machine God torturing a billion simulated copies of me unless I tithe my income to a Harry Potter fanfiction writer, I’m sold!”

Every time this dorkus is in the news, remember, he’s an absolute wanker.

Which math class?

Oh, I should say that I got “nopetopus” from the comments at Cliff Pervocracy’s place, back in the Before Times.

Hey now, it’s possible that they meant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_in_the_Shell_(2026_TV_series)

To say that our system of governance is ill-equipped for the present moment seems like an understatement. Welcome to the turning of the jackpot death spiral, the orgy of technological self-destruction and institutions of sham democracy captured by capital, the bill for all the problems we never solved coming due with interest. Sucks to be us.

It’s the regurgitation of an insular community’s bizarre beliefs, up to and including sexual fixations, back to that community for unquestioning consumption… a vore-ouboros, if you will.

Edit to add: I think there’s a concentrated lump of illustrative lesswrong in this passage:

Also especially popular these days is a ZKP of your own tastes: as almost everyone has developed kinks that put a relatively normal goblin kink to shame, people have become more anxious about unaccepting people finding out. So now you can confirm that you and your girlfriend have a CPU-cuck fetish in common without her ever finding out that you and your grandma both enjoy spankings—amazing!

Yes, “ZKP” is dropped in without elaboration or definition. But more fundamentally… why, though? This reads like someone has thought too long and yet also too superficially about kink. Why has “almost everyone” developed these bizarre new tastes? What taboos are they transgressing, what vulnerabilities are they exposing, what strictures of life are they seeking to escape? What’s the itch?! And yet look at the fetishes that are specifically named: “spankings” (literally, not figuratively older than Aristotle) and a thinly science-fictionalized kind of swinging. This isn’t a new frontier in depravity; it’s a bachelorette party for normies. The whole thing feels like a product of a mind that’s strongly confined to a narrow understanding. It unhesitatingly accepts the importance of “freaky” sex and goes out of its way to bring that into the story, but it has nothing to say about the subject it has locked upon.

Ugh. I got to the point with the cutesy redefinition of “CPU” and rode the nopetopus out of there.

Edit to add: Welp, I went back, and it got a whole lot worse.