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The Relativity of Wrong (1989)
I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 33 posts.
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Nicotine (2016)
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
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There’s no such thing as a tree phylogenetically (2021)
Dendronization – Evolving into a tree-like morphology. (In the style of “carcinization”.) From ‘dendro’, the ancient Greek root for tree.
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[109] Data Falsificada (Part 1): “Clusterfake”
This is the introduction to a four-part series of posts detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino. In 2021, we and a team o…
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Bicycle
Interactive article explaining the physics of a bicycle.
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The Dunning-Kruger effect is autocorrelation
Do unskilled people actually underestimate their incompetence?
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Why Not Mars
It's slow, expensive, the engineering is mostly port-a-potty chemistry, and the best-case outcome is that thirty years from now we’ll get to watch someone remotely operate a soil scoop from Mars instead of Pasadena
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The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
The story of the infamous disappearance of an Airbus A330 over the Atlantic, and the fundamentally human mistakes which led to the tragedy.
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The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
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GPT-2 as step toward general intelligence (2019)
A machine learning researcher writes me in response to yesterday’s post, saying:I still think GPT-2 is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you bac…
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The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)
An allegory against complacency about aging and death.
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The rise and fall of peer review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
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My Left Kidney
...
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Feynman’s Maze-Running Story
Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor cues’.
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I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is
The plane crashed and nobody checked the bodies
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GPT-4 and professional benchmarks: the wrong answer to the wrong question
OpenAI may have tested on the training data. Besides, human benchmarks are meaningless for bots.
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Report on an Unidentified Space Station (1982)
By good luck we have been able to make an emergency landing on this uninhabited space station. There have been no casualties. We all count ourselves fortunate to have found safe haven at a moment when the expedition was clearly set on disaster.
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A mathematical formalization of dimensional analysis (2012)
Mathematicians study a variety of different mathematical structures, but perhaps the structures that are most commonly associated with mathematics are the number systems, such as the integers $late…
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The Dome: A simple violation of determinism in Newtonian mechanics (2005)
John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh PA 15260. Homepage: www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton This page is available at www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/goodies
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Cargo airships could be big
A capital-intensive, high-risk way to revolutionize global commerce
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I changed my mind about nuclear waste
I’ve feared it. I’ve protested it. Now I’m hugging it
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Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring
Just days after we celebrated my wife’s 40th birthday, she came down with COVID, meaning she’s been isolating and I’ve been spending almost all my time dealing with our kids. But …
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Science is a strong-link problem
OR: How to eat fewer asparagus beetles