theory, practice, epistemology

Benefits of hanging around Twitter for years:I vaguely remembered a thread involving Dennis Gustafsson (Teardown) about ray-marching volume textures and the early-z test.This is now relevant for my SDF renderer. I found the thread! (from 3.5 yrs ago!)https://t.co/hjDcUxwhzm— Mike Turitzin (@miketuritzin) April 17, 2024

This exciting paper shows AI design of materials, robotic synthesis. 10s of new compounds in 17 days.But did they?This paper has very serious problems in materials characterisation. In my view it should never have got near publication. Hold on tight let's take a look 😱 https://t.co/zfUOQIEvtz— Robert Palgrave (@Robert_Palgrave) November 30, 2023

Oh, this is incredible.Some real world proof that even basic knowledge of how intuition works can help when picking at the expertise of others! https://t.co/vQhDW4KxAb— Cedric Chin (@ejames_c) January 1, 2024

For those who sit between science and tech, it’s hard not to notice the proliferation of new initiatives launched in the last two years, aimed at making major improvements in the life sciences especially.

“nancy cartwright”

Buffalo Grid - Buffalo Grid

I’m trying to stress to my students that one of the most important techniques in discovering a proof is to just *try things*, and I hope that if anything I’m teaching sticks, it’s this.— Daniel Litt (@littmath) October 13, 2022

3,994 votes and 295 comments so far on Reddit

“I just love that the insight is: focus on computing the answer (the correctly rounded result), not the thing that historically been tangled up with the answer (the real number).”

“This film and all of us who worked on it are a product of our time. We learned VFX from Video Copilot. We learned shot design from Every Frame A Painting. The Martial Club (fight choreo) are youtubers with no formal training, and learned everything from watching HK movies.”

“In the workshop on the creative scientific process at NYU, we discussed how to search for new questions (particularly by finding contradictions), how to use anthropomorphisms and interdisciplinary thinking to generate new ideas, and how hypotheses can be a liability.🧵of 🧵's ⬇️”

It began as a whim: talk to a physicist, $50 per 20 minutes. But those ‘crackpots’ taught me something about my subject

Science education usually starts with teaching students different tools and techniques, methods for conducting research.  This is wrong. Science education should begin with the scientific virt…

Others include "We've incrementally improved the estimate of this coefficient," "Maybe all these categories are wrong," and "We found a way to make student volunteers worse at tasks."

slatestarcodex scott alexander ground knowledge

2021: year of the Modern Science Revolution? 👩‍🔬🧪A cambrian explosion of new science funding models was driven by covid urgency, open science, frustration w/status quo. Most exciting: these models are built for translation & startup creation!🧵of new science funding models:— Judy Savitskaya (@heyjudka) December 15, 2021

In calc when teaching the 'min surface area of a can with given vol, of which soln is diameter = ht, I wrote a cat foot company telling them how much they'd save by making their cans taller. Got a letter from the marketing dept telling me a million reasons for the can's design. https://t.co/F6V2wBSjuK

super interesting way to verify claims. AllenAI developed the SciFact dataset, a collection of 1.4K expert-written scientific claims paired with evidence-containing abstracts, and annotated with labels and rationales. imagine this for all science... https://t.co/50eVdFVXnL

Richard Feynman derided “cargo cult science” that sticks to fixed systems. Innovation requires an upgrade to fluid, meta-systematic inquiry.

The reliance in psychology on verbal definitions means that psychological research is unusually moored to how humans think and communicate about categories. Psy...

The reliance in psychology on verbal definitions means that psychological research is unusually moored to how humans think and communicate about categories. Psychological concepts (e.g., intelligence; attention) are easily assumed to represent objective, definable categories with an underlying essence. Like the 'vital forces' previously thought to animate life, these assumed essences can create an illusion of understanding. We describe a pervasive tendency across psychological science to assume that essences explain phenomena by synthesizing a wide range of research lines from cognitive, cl...

There’s a programming technique where you keep a rubber duck on your desk, and when you run into a confusing bug, you try to explain it to the duck. This turns out to be surprisingly useful for resolving bugs. In research conversations, it is often very useful to have someone serve as an upgraded rubber duck. This is a support role: the rubber duck’s job is not to solve the problem, but to help their partner sort out their own thoughts. Playing this support role well is a skill, and if you’re good at it, you can add value to other researchers in a very wide range of contexts; you can be a general-purpose force multiplier. This post contains a handful of tips for how to add value this way, beyond what a literal rubber duck has to offer. FIGURE OUT THE PICTURE My partner is drawing a picture in their head. I want to accurately copy that picture into my head. This is the core of the technique: in order to build an accurate copy in my head, my partner will need to flesh out the picture in their own head. For sake of discussion, let’s say the conversation is part of a conjecture workshop. The goal is to take some fuzzy intuition and turn it into a mathematical conjecture. When playing the support role, I’m trying to build a mathematical conjecture in my head which matches the picture in my partner’s head. By asking questions to fill out my picture of the conjecture, I push my partner to translate their fuzzy intuitions into math. (We’ll use conjecture workshop examples throughout this post, but the ideas generalize beyond just math.) Some useful lines: * Can you give an example? * Can you give 2-3 examples which are as different as possible? * Can you give an anti-example, i.e. a case where this would not apply? * Here’s the picture in my head so far. Does that match what’s in your head? Am I missing anything important? * Let me repeat back what I understood from what you just said. Did I miss anything? * We’ve been using the analog

@alpha_convert In my experience w/ CS242, students definitely confuse "steps" of a single computation proof vs. actual computation steps of a program. I think this frame might help. I'll try and report back! Also, Plotkin has strong words for you. Follow the ~~~direction of discovery~~~ https://t.co/G7vNrn8qNw

This is a programming contest where everyone's code is visible all the time. The result is collaborative competition. Matlab

The history of every major galactic civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Wh…

Why are we suddenly getting so much better at Tetris? Even though far fewer people play the game now? Surprising implications for mastery in work and life.