“I don’t know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream.” ― Vincent Van Gogh
being a woman isn’t about the body you were born with or your feelings or your brain it’s about being haunted by this quote from margaret atwood for your entire life
“What I realized was that a lot of the engineers who work in AI felt that you could reduce the whole world to a function.
That life, human life, was just optimizing. And that the world could be simulated in a computer.
This is almost religious because I think that there are people who have the kind of thinking where they look at their life as a game.
Where they say: “Okay. I’m optimizing for money, and how many minutes do I have to do this.”
I tweeted out the other day: “Those people who think that we live in a computer simulation are the kinds of people who are most likely to be simulations.”
A lot of people approach life like an engineering problem. For them, I could imagine that they could see their whole life being in a computer.
But if you go into the humanities or the East Coast, there are a lot of people who don’t think like a computer.
They live life through experience and only things that happen actually matter. (…)
A lot of the papers that you see by the engineers say: “We’ll just define fairness as accuracy,” or something like that.
And this is what I call reductionist, because fairness is really complex, and it’s always contextual.
My concern is the stuff that we have, which is efficiency, productivity — that’s the stuff that makes us obese, creates climate change, income inequality.
The problems that we have today are caused by the tools that we created.
But I think there’s a lot of people who believe that more efficiency and productivity will fix everything.
I think right now there’s a lot of power in the hands of the reductionists.
And I would put economists and neoclassic economics in this, which is just reducing everything to just measuring GDP. (…)
If you go to places like MIT, the engineers have all the power, all the money, and everything looks like an engineering problem.
And we’ve made liberal arts sort of this sideshow.
I think that we need the historians, social scientists, anthropologists, qualitative people involved in asking the questions: why are we here, what are we doing?”
Source: Recode Decode — MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito on the problem with tech people who want to solve problems
Yesterday was hard.
I'm in some courses all this week, and I don't understand anything that 3 of the 4 speakers say. And I've just met the new PhD student of the department, and he's really smart and he's understanding most of the things. And on top of that my advisor is asking me to finish a big amount of writing. I feel really stupid and discouraged.
So, list of positive things to take into account this week:
- All of the courses are about PDEs and not Dynamical systems (which is my research topic). It's normal to not understand most of them.
- It is a great opportunity to see how people of other topics work, and what are they interests. You don't need to understand everything perfectly. Let go and enjoy.
- I learned a lot from yesterday's poster session, and from other students.
- Next year I would have a very smart PhD partner from who I could learn a lot.
- I am a slow-learner when understanding new topics, and that is okay. I could have other qualities that make me a good mathematician.
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my favorite Millennial Thing™ is when a group of us are standing around and talking and someone asks a question that no one knows the answer to and suddenly it’s a race to get out your phone and google it and be the first to know, and then someone starts reading the Wikipedia article about the thing aloud to everyone else, and what started as a casual conversation is now A Learning Opportunity and we all walk away a little more knowledgeable about a random topic
Like, Boomers hate when we do that, but I think it’s one of the best things about us.
So long as we have internet or a cell signal, all of the world’s collective knowledge is at our fingertips, and damned if we aren’t going to use it.
Small and angry.PhD student. Mathematics. Slow person. Side blog, follow with @talrg.
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