Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    A lesswrong attempts to explain physics using Information Theory!. This irritates me.

    If we instead have a lot of particles in our first box, we might describe it as a box full of gas. If we connect this to another box and forget where the particles are, we would expect to find half in the first box and half in the second box. This means we can explain why gases expand to fill space without reference to anything except information theory.

    No, you can’t, because you’re still presuming that gases do expand, i.e., that merely connecting two containers is enough to mix their contents. Otherwise, you’re saying that if you fill one bottle with orange juice and another with vodka, and then forget which is which, you’ve made a screwdriver.

    Then it gets weird and confused, talking about a box divided in two parts, with green particles on one side and pink ones on the other.

    We might expect the partition to move some, but not all, of the way over, when we forget as much as possible.

    Forgetting where things are doesn’t give you psychoflexitive powers!

    And from the comments:

    My current understanding is that QM is not-at-all needed to make sense of stat mech.

    No. If you don’t incorporate quantum mechanics (or at the very least take some results of quantum mechanics as valid), you will get statistical mechanics very wrong rather quickly. Your results for the thermal properties of gases will get worse the more you calculate. You’ll convince yourself that magnets are impossible. Etc.

    For all that Yud has been praising the Feynman books ever since HPMOR at least, he doesn’t seem to have inspired his fans to actually read the Lectures on Physics.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      Well it’s one thing to see someone tie red strings on a corkboard to try explain gases, and it’s another to see people in the comments buy into the idea. But then again, we are in the presence of acausal roboticists

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      What the heck did I just read because it appeared to be a proof that hourglasses can’t exist if you look away from them for a moment.

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        Hourglasses work by inverse Weeping Angels rules, doncha know?

        I should also have mentioned the part where they say that the entropy of the “uniform distribution over (0,x)” is the base-2 logarithm of x. This is, of course, a negative number for any x they care about (0 < x < 1), and more strongly negative the smaller x becomes.

        Argh. These people just don’t know any math and never call each other out for not knowing any math, and now I have to read MIT OpenCourseWare to scrub the feeling out of my brain.

        • aio@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          I think there is in fact a notion of continuous entropy (essentially just the Kullback-Leibler divergence from a uniform distribution) where that is actually true, and it does appear to be used in statistical mechanics (buit I am not a physicist). But there are clearly a lot of technical details which have been scrubbed away by the LW treatment.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      Another problem: They claim to derive the idea of pressure by having proved that the number density (particles per volume) is the same on both sides of the partition. But this is only the right condition for equilibrium if the temperatures are equal on both sides. This is what happens when you don’t check your revolutionary new method against the ideal gas law…

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        A related issue that I doubt they’ve ever thought through: In statistical mechanics, the probability densities are defined on phase space, meaning that they’re functions not just of position, but also momentum. They wouldn’t be the first to get confused about this, helped along by oversimplified illustrations of “high entropy” and “low entropy” states that ignore the momentum part. But when you’re reinventing a subject, it helps to avoid students’ misconceptions about it.

    • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      This is how The Sequences teaches you to think. Construct a thought experiment and use your feelings about how things “should” work to come to a conclusion.