Inference Review

https://inference-review.com/ but it doesn't publish frequently.

> love that there is a publication with a significantly higher reading level assumed than most pop science content Well I am not sure about that.As it happens with most pop-sci publications the quality has taken a nose-dive. For example: > A new thought experiment indicates that quantum mechanics doesn’t work without strange numbers that turn negative when squared. I am not saying is a "bad" magazine per se, all I am saying is virtuable indistiguinshable from your SciAm, New Scientist and Discover. Some good articles and plenty of fluff. The level you want is in other places like: -https://www.ams.org/notices - https://physicstoday.scitation.org/journal/pto (free access to the 73 year archive) - https://inference-review.com/issues (Ignore the 2014 crackpot articles)

As an aside, I took a History of Logic course from Krzysztof Apt (https://inference-review.com/author/krzysztof-apt/) while I was an undergrad and he was briefly at UT Austin. He is an excellent teacher and a very nice man. (He loaned me a copy of a book on Frege's logic during the course---it had been signed and given to him by the person who let him stay on their floor when he first came to the US.)

Mark is suffering from a pretty classic engineer's problem. Somebody asks what they think is a simple yes or no question, but they either don't understand the complexities of the question, or won't be able to properly understand the implications of the yes or no. For instance: are whales fish? That's a simple yes or no question, right? http://inference-review.com/article/on-being-a-fish

I came across the site this is on through this article on Grothendieck, however, the whole site is excellent. This page (http://inference-review.com/introduction) gives an overview of what it is about.

It's difficult to understate Grothendieck's impact on modern mathematics. His work touches everything from stochastic PDE to number theory. In algebraic geometry, where he had the most impact, it is difficult to so much as think about the subject without using his ideas. His personal story is also interesting and unique. Pierre Cartier recently published an appreciation of his life and work -- Alexander Grothendieck: A Country Known Only By Name -- which is well worth the read even if you aren't a mathematician. http://inference-review.com/article/a-country-known-only-by-name

I don't think you have understood the nature of Dijkstra's work nor the genius behind it. It is different from the genius of Niklaus Wirth (simplicity of OS, Programming Language implementations) or Donald Knuth (efficiency of Algorithm implementations) in that it is at a more "meta level" bringing together the fields of Computation, Languages and Mathematics. I have already pointed out the laughable ridiculousness of your measuring Dijkstra's contributions by the amount of code written. He pioneered, defined and established great many aspects of the Computing Science field when it was still in its infancy. Here is a non-exhaustive list (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra and other sources) 1) He designed/described an ISA/Assembly Language to interface with one of the first Computers ever built (his PhD thesis named "Communication with an Automatic Computer"). 2) He designed/wrote/headed one of the first OS ever written "THE multiprogramming system" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE_multiprogramming_system 3) He designed/co-wrote one of the very first Algol 60 compilers named the "Dijkstra-Zonneveld Algol 60 compiler" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_60 4) Instrumental in establishing "Structured Programming" constructs in language design itself which we all take for granted today. 5) Instrumental in establishing Mathematical Rigour to Computer Programming via Mathematical Logic/Predicate Calculus akin to the writing of Mathematical Proofs to…

> Japan did not experience a major wave before the borders were reopened. The peaks were lower than in Europe and the US, and contact tracing never failed as badly. Japan's testing rate was described as "ultra-low … 0.2% of the population"[1][2], no one can claim to be able to compare the infection waves with any certainty, and there certainly were major waves[3]: > Japan is reporting nearly 200,000 Covid-19 cases a day—more than any other country in the world currently > The ongoing surge in cases—which is being referred to as Japan’s seventh Covid wave That was a month after a tiny reopening of the border so unless there were 6 waves in a month, you're a tad off. What there weren't were major numbers of deaths compared to some other places. I can't share your faith in Japan's general response and contact tracing (after a number of high profile incidents[4][5], and this excellent and realistic article by the Diplomat[6] goes over many of the flaws, including poor contact tracing that wouldn't work anyway[7]) but I'm going to go with a reason much more obvious for the lack of deaths, especially given what we know now[8] - less obesity, and the old in Japan are far more active than I've seen in Europe. I can't speak for the US but we know the stereotypes. Certainly, "closing" the borders did not do anything but impoverish people and cause trouble. [1] https://asiatimes.com/2020/06/japans-contact-tracing-method-is-old-but… (that article is a bit presumptuous in…

To get a comprhensive and upto date overview for the lab leak theory and its evidence I would recommend reading the following four long form articles in order (primarily to get good context on how the narriative has evolved). As background: [1] Jan 2021 - Intelligencer: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.… [2] June 2021 - Vanity Fair: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the… [3] Oct 2021 - New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-mysterious-case-of-the-… [4] Feb 2022 - Inference Review https://inference-review.com/article/thunder-out-of-china The points presented in these articles are all thoroughly well researched and balanced. IMO the points and facts raised taken in a mosiac paint a palpable picture of events. From the last articles conclusion: THE CURRENT SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been, and continues to be, a public health catastrophe—the most serious in a century. Questions about the origins of COVID-19 are, at once, matters of legal, financial, and moral concern. For the moment, researchers can do no better than to hope for an inference to the best explanation; and, for the moment, the best explanation seems to be that the virus escaped from the WIV. The WIV was the biggest transporter of viruses to Wuhan from all over Asia, including many SARS-like viruses from Laos and Yunnan. Phylogenetic analysis shows that the…

Not a mathematician, but I've kept up with this story as a non-mathematician. > For instance, imagine the proof is made of 50 lemmas. One could check the main theorem derives from the 50 lemmas. And checking each individual lemma could be left to other mathematicians. To my understanding, some mathematicians have gone ever further and checked the work themselves. Peter Scholze (a 32-year-old who won the Fields medal a couple of years ago and seems to be in the sweet spot of expertise and stamina to really audit this thing) has identified a specific result ("Corollary 3.12") that he says does not follow from the results leading up to it [1]. This is pretty weird because "Corollary" is usually reserved for things that are immediate consequences of previous results. Based on the featured article, Scholze's position hasn't changed. There is a specific objection and the two sides just...disagree. For those interested, you can look at the papers yourself if you want to. Here's the one containing the controversial result [2]. Theorem 3.11 is on p153, and the statement alone is 5 pages long. The proof is 3 lines and asserts that it's obvious from definitions and previous statements. Corollary 3.12 is on p173. As an outsider, I am amazed at Scholze's ability to work through all of this and identify a specific criticism. [1] https://inference-review.com/article/a-crisis-of-identification [2]…

The problem with that line of reasoning is you're assuming the brain is a computer, or that it merely computes. But that's just an assumption and there are many reasons a person, let alone a brain, is not a machine or a computer or an algorithm. That it is like it? Sure, in some insignificant ways, we have the ability to compute things. But is it an algorithm? No. The idea that consciousness is an algorithm or a computer or a machine is an assumption that is extremely popular among people in the tech industry because it confirms their assumptions, and it makes them feel like they have extremely transferable knowledge. "I know about computers. Let's assume the brain is a computer and consciousness is an algorithm. I can now comment on the brain and consciousness." But there is very little reason to accept that assumption. This review of Harai's Homo Deus does a great job of pointing out the dead-ends that assumption leads you to. [review](https://inference-review.com/article/godzooks#When:00:35:00Z)

Half my family grew up in the Soviet Union and tend to love Putin, so, though not the above commenter, I can definitely answer this if you're willing to take an analogy. Yes, a leader can be corrupt and dictatorial, and yes, they can strong-arm many people. To somebody with strong morals and heavily deontological beliefs, they can look at that leader and say "How could anyone support such a person?". The answer is to look at a concept like Maslow's hierarchy of needs [1] and realize that the supporters are likely pursuing an entirely different stage of needs than you. When your kids are hungry and you have to work from sun-up until sun-down to keep the family fed, and somebody makes it easier for you and your family to survive and maybe even have extra money at the end of the week, none of the moral ideologies against corruption or dictatorship really matter to you. That's why Russians give Putin such a high approval rating; they don't deny that he's corrupt, they just don't care, because their lives have improved. The same can be said of hopeful Trump supporters to a lesser extent, in fact, and linked is a fantastic analysis on that topic (the most fair and analytical one I've read) [2]. My point is: the above poster's mother wasn't apologizing for Nazis. She was likely saying that, as far as she could tell at that point in time, similar to my Russian family, her family's life had improved. I don't see how that becomes false in light of future events. [1]…

It is sad that Mathematics is often taught either as narrow examples that miss the big picture or abstract definitions which are more general but feel artificial. The best teaching often jumps back and forth between the two. Mathematics can be thought of a simulation of properties of the world inside people's brains which verify the result. Sadly, there's no shared comprehensive framework outside our brains for visualizing [1] and organizing all of it, since it's very flexible [2]. And thus most people miss out on experiencing the beauty of many results. I sometimes wonder if LaTeX augmented by context (and visualization) would help, and I wish Mathematica was open source to aid this. At the same time, we are faced with incompleteness results that put into question any formal organization of mathematics [3]. [1] https://vimeo.com/36579366 [2] www.jeremykun.com/2013/02/08/why-there-is-no-hitchhikers-guide-to-mathematics-for-programmers/ [3] http://inference-review.com/article/doing-mathematics-differently Sorry for the long rant.

Tangential comment: if you are interested in quantum mechanics then you may be interested to read about "Bohmian Mechanics". I became interested in Bohmian Mechanics after reading an email exchange between Sheldon Goldstein & Steven Weinberg [1]. It contains a few quite entertaining quotes, in particular: > And since Bohm’s equations make exactly the same > predictions as those of ordinary quantum mechanics, > it is not clear what is accomplished by adding the > complication of guiding waves, except to restore a > sense of sanity to the whole affair. Scott Aaronson has a brief introduction to Bohmian Mechanics at the end of his notes on decoherence and hidden variables [2]: > Again, the amazing thing about this theory is that it's > deterministic: specify the "actual" positions of all the > particles in the universe at any one time, and you've specified > their "actual" positions at all earlier and later times. Scott's perspective is particularly interesting because he points out some limitations of Bohmian Mechanics. To paraphrase badly, the deterministic particle trajectories obtained from Bohmian Mechanics rely upon dealing with actual particles, position, momentum, in infinite dimensional spaces. It doesn't give you deterministic behaviour in the finite dimensional spaces that computer scientists prefer. Some proponents of Bohmian Mechanics point out that the theoretical predictions of deterministic particle trajectories for the…

This blog post gets way too caught up in Gödel numbers, which are merely a technical detail (specifically how the encoding is done is irrelevant). A clever detail, but a detail nonetheless. Author gets lost in the sauce and kind of misses the forest for the trees. In class, we used Löb's Theorem[1] to prove Gödel, which is much more grokkable (and arguably even more clever). If you truly get Löb, it'll kind of blow your mind. [1] https://inference-review.com/article/loebs-theorem-and-currys-paradox

There's an article at the above site: https://inference-review.com/article/the-origins-of-python From it I learned a remarkable nugget of computing history: P.J. Plauger, well known as a C language guy (he and I were both on X3J11, the C Language Standards committee), originated the idea of using significant white space as the "signal" to the compiler to indicate statement grouping instead of using begin/end keywords or braces.

Or classes related to NP for which we also don't know the answer, such as TFNP > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TFNP "TFNP is the class of total function problems which can be solved in nondeterministic polynomial time", i.e. we don't consider decision problems (as for NP), but total functions. This class contains quite some interesting subclasses, such as PLS (solution can be found via Local Search), PPA (solution exists because of a Parity Argument), PPP (solution exists because of a Pigeonhole Principle), PPAD (solution exists because of a Directed Parity Argument), CLS, ... In interesting article which explains this topic quite well is https://inference-review.com/article/when-existence-is-inefficient

HN isn't just for 'tech news' - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. More explanation elsewhere in this thread: https://inference-review.com/article/time-travelers

Thanks for the pointer to Chaitin, his writing seems approachable: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4471-0307-3_2 https://inference-review.com/article/doing-mathematics-differently > he builds a LISP with it cool, just found these: The Limits of Mathematics---Tutorial Version : https://arxiv.org/abs/chao-dyn/9509010 An implementation of his Lisp, written to explore the above Tutorial : https://github.com/poppingtonic/chaitin-ait

Some years ago, one of those "Consciousness Studies" or "Intelligence Studies" people unveiled a new model for thinking about the brain: as an "ant farm" for mitochondria. The notion being that ant colonies work as large scale organisms, and can do some pretty complicated stuff. Well, the bigger notion is that the brain, viewed holistically, really does look like an ant farm when it's in action. I wish I could find the cite . . . oh here we go https://inference-review.com/article/the-excitable-mitochondria

Quoting from [1], section "The ABC Project" > The letter “B” was chosen because it is the first letter of the word “beginner” and because the project was meant to become a language for teaching programming to absolute beginners. [1] https://inference-review.com/article/the-origins-of-python

Conspiracy theories aside, Worebey's Science paper is not unanimously well received by the scientific community, and the data analysis was shown to be partly flawed. Here's a discussion on inference pointing to references and sources that argue against the results of the paper: https://inference-review.com/article/thunder-out-of-china It also raises eyebrows the fact that no animal has ever been found to be positive for COVID, in contrast to all of the previous SARS pandemics. EDIT: thanks everyone for correcting my assertion. No source animal was found.

Interesting response and counter-response: https://inference-review.com/letter/contact-tracing-is-far-from-futile

The whole situation is in my opinion much more complicated. Here are some texts from the internet concerning this: David Michael Roberts - A Crisis of Identification: https://inference-review.com/article/a-crisis-of-identification Two Quora posts: https://www.quora.com/Did-Peter-Scholze-and-Jakob-Stix-really-find-a-s… https://www.quora.com/What-do-you-think-about-Stix-and-Scholze-coming-… Also relevant: https://thehighergeometer.wordpress.com/2019/01/18/taylor-dupuy-on-moc…

Well, let's just go to the source. Here's one of the articles in question: https://inference-review.com/article/evolution-a-theory-in-crisis-revi… I don't have time to read it right now and form a judgment, but if anyone else here does I think that'd the most useful/productive way of figuring out if the article has any basis.

>A Science Journal Funded by Peter Thiel Dismisses Climate Change and Evolution Look out the window, this planet is intelligent design. So is mars and the rest of the solar system with signs of life, the rest is possibly empty. Sure the actual article on evolution[1] is just plain wrong, but so are the idiots who worship evolution unquestionably. Can we instead start talking about why specific alternatives to evolution are wrong, rather than the religious fundamentalism of believing evolution this title implies. [1] https://inference-review.com/article/evolution-a-theory-in-crisis-revi…

Here's an article on IUT that shows that progress is being made: http://inference-review.com/article/fukugen

For those unwilling to click through, I.F. is Ivan Fesenko. Among other things, he wrote this article about Mochizuki's work: http://inference-review.com/article/fukugen

A layter version (this pdf is cited as [34]) http://inference-review.com/article/a-country-known-only-by-name

I'd never heard of this magazine before, but it has quite a bit of interesting stuff in it. For example, a philosophy of mathematics piece by Gregory Chaitin (known for developing algorithmic information theory): http://inference-review.com/article/doing-mathematics-differently