I feel like you are downplaying the importance of architecture. I never read the bitter lesson, but I have always heard more as a comment on embedding knowledge into models instead of making them to just scale with data. We know algorithmic improvement is very important to scale NNs (see https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Measuring-the-Algorith...). You can't scale an architecture that has catastrophic forgetting embedded in it. It is not really a matter of tradeoffs, some are really worse in all aspects. What I agree is just that architectures that scale better with data and compute do better. And sure, you can say that smaller architectures are better for smaller problems, but then the framing with the bitter lesson makes less sense.

You can make this point about google+ though, totally panick move.

Happy to see this.

We don't really need (economically speaking) lots of philosophy majors. And maybe that's okay if people are doing philosophy majors for the knowledge, but I don't think that's the case. And if they want a good job, I think we should discourage these majors.

That doesn't mean we don't need philosophy. It's really important. But it doesn't make much difference if the people who have a degree on that work on unrelated things.

Isn't this poor data analysis, though? Correlation doesn't imply causation and all that. I think it's more plausible that people who sit at 12-person lunch table have more friends on the company, and that drives performance up, than the lunch table affecting performance. I mean, it could be any reason, but I highly doubt the lunch table is the cause of the higher or lower performance.

Also, I'm watching some lectures for a MIT underactuated robotics class (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeEqtTgDXFc). The professor says in one of the videos that the people who end up creating Boston Dynamics also took that course. From what I watched until now, nothing is explicitly programmed (by some vague definition of "explicitly programmed"), you just find some inputs that makes the dynamics of the model behave the way you want.

Almost certainly the birdlike movement is the outcome of the robot dynamics, and not some hardcoded rules. But things like avoiding hitting obstacles or estimating the distance, I think that needs to be explicitly programmed (and then used as input to the model such as "move the end effector to that position").

Did your changed perception persisted, at least a little, after your use of MDMA? Do you still have PTSD?

Also, the illegality of LSD makes it so regularly people use something else thinking it's LSD. Part of the bad problems (such as HPPD) related to LSD usage could be caused by something else. Could also explain why it seems mushrooms are safer.

But it could also be that hallucinogen usage make people weird, yeah. As you said, we don't really know yet. I'm curious and really hopeful.

>The ability to detach from self, to recognize a spectrum of truth, of perception

It sounds a lot like meditation and buddhist practice. I mean, I already hear that everywhere and there are some clinical trials with meditation too. But your narrative fits nicely. That's cool.

When I was younger I honestly thought there weren't many intelligent gay man, and that it was somehow a proof that I was never going to be really good. That was until I discovered Alan Turing was gay, and actively researched about intelligent gay people.

Role models that are like you are so important. One day a friend asked why I got excited when I discovered some guy I admired was gay, and then I realized that he doesn't understand because he has lots of people like him in any area. I know it sounds kind of tribalist in a way, but when society puts you down because you are in a certain group, it's really hard to avoid thinking you are "limited" because of who you are. After seeing lots of people like me, it's less important to me to have these role models since now I know I'm no less of a person because of who I am.

Point is, I don't think most people understand the impact of having role models that are like you, and that's why they don't "get it" when people talk about it.