The “everything is physics” crowd is awfully silent right now 🤔
Sneers from r/physics! First up, this comment by napqe:
I’m sorry, but this is like awarding the nobel prize for literature to Xerox/HP/Brother for “improvements to printing”.
And in the same thread, from GustapheOfficial:
Last year’s prize was too relevant, they had to stagger the physics by a year.
We also have this by M1st_:
What’s next? Someone gets a Nobel prize for another algorithm that numerically solves differential equations??
Finally, we’ve the title of this thread, by TheSkells:
Yeah, “physics”
So Geoffrey Hinton is a total dork.
Hopefully, [this Nobel Prize] will make me more credible when I say these things really do understand what they’re saying. [There] is a whole school of linguistics that comes from Chomsky that thinks it’s nonsense to say these things understand language. That school is wrong. Neural nets are much better at processing language than anything produced by the Chomsky school of linguistics.
Neural nets are much better at processing language than anything produced by the Chomsky school of linguistics.
Hey mate, did you get your PhD or a fucking Nobel in linguistics by any chance? No? Just talking about shit you apparently have no idea about?
I didn’t even know you could be a crank about linguistics, that’s pretty amazing. What other otherwise really boring fields are you going to tackle, geodesy?
there’s plenty of linguistics cranks, but most of them have nationalistic tint, like people thinking that all languages come from turkish or something like that
You give me a word, any word, and I show you how the root of that word is Greek.
𒍪𒌝𒁍
I hope that was a typo for Proto-Indo-European
Everybody knows that all languages derive from ULTRAFRENCH.
I’m just waiting for him to chime in about music theory.
A popular meme on social media makes a series of allegations about the musical tune pitch A=432Hz and A=440Hz, including that the latter was a standard imposed by the Nazis to manipulate their enemies.
spittake
Multiple experts told Reuters these allegations are unfounded.
NO WAY
Thanks Reuters.
since 1953 all music has been tuned to 440Hz. This frequency has NO SCIENTIFIC RELATIONSHIP with our universe and actually causes the brain to become agitated.
fuck yes, this is the random all-caps crankery I get out of bed for! I love the idea that 440hz agitates the brain, but not in a scientific way (at least not for our universe?)
since 1969 all computers have been running Unix. This operating system has NO SCIENTIFIC RELATIONSHIP with our universe and actually causes the brain to become agitated.
efficient move, getting the Nobel disease in before the Nobel itself
Also discussed in the Stubsack.
Repeating a comment I made in another forum here…
The Nobel organization is basically all about PR, and while as the nominating body they’re nominally independent, the Royal Academy of Science knows on which side their bread is buttered. Having a prize adjacent to AI in the year of our LLM 2024 is a no-brainer.
it’s happening omg. check back in five years
I understood some of those words
Hopfield is enormously influential, I don’t mind him getting a major prize at all. Physics seems weird tho.
Out of curiosity, are they using any of his underlying ML techniques to analyze imaging/other data collection before using it in actual physics models?
Well, just about every data analysis technique ever invented has been applied in physics somewhere. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on applying a genetic algorithm to electron-atom scattering in particle detectors, a topic which I recall someone had already tried neural networks on.
That’s what I’m wondering. It’s not wild to give him a prize in physics if his techniques led to advancement in physics.
“CS is applied math, not applied physics” like physics isn’t just applied math to model real world data is kind of weird, especially if his particular math actually got used in physics. That’s pretty much what calculus was.
I don’t think that Donald Knuth deserves a physics prize for inventing TeX, even though TeX was a massive contribution to how we communicate physics.
I’m not sure how that’s the same thing.
Typesetting papers isn’t the same as developing mathematical methods that directly enable new solutions.
Providing the medium through which, to a rough approximation, all physics is discussed is, proportionally, a vastly greater contribution than any technique that only applies to a fraction of problems.
But the more salient point is that the Nobel Prize is an institution that we should, as a culture, care less about. And all the more so now, since they are getting in on the hype about an industry that is fundamentally anti-scientific.
