> Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.

>

> The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.

What You Can’t Say https://paulgraham.com/say.html

> These scattering amplitude formulas are hard to compute, so hard that physicists almost always use approximations. They do partial calculations, cut off at a specific number of “loops,” a measure of how complicated interactions between particles are allowed to get. The more “loops” they include in their calculations, the closer they get to the real answer, and the harder, computationally, the calculation is to do.

I don’t even understand what type of solution we’re describing here, is it a formula? A program? A Lean proof?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49817680

Points: 436

# Comments: 495

The burnouts are employees who are being asked to produce 10x the output, do their own project management, design, QA, devops, customer development, work long hours to make up for the gap in how much executives think AI boosts productivity and how much it actually does, and for 0.05% equity at best.

There’s also a fundamental problem with the idea of using models and probabilities for decision making in that one has to choose a model before deducing any facts, and this leads to all sorts of post hoc rationalization. It’s basically just a culture of people with weird preferences coming up with mathy rationalizations for them.

The lack of temperament is very skewed towards the bulls who have been saying AGI is here, software engineering is solved, mathematics is solved, it’s going to destroy the white collar job market, and it’s going to kill us all for like 5 years now.

It must have been reinstated because it was off the front page for a full day and suddenly back up in the last hour.