Neural networks generally don't extrapolate, they interpolate
You could test that if someone were willing to define what they mean by "generally" I suppose. I think it's fairly safe to say that they work best when they're interpolating, like any model, but you can certainly ask them to extrapolate as well.
I thought not. Your "main point" is based on two logical fallacies. You might be familiar with the saying "two wrongs don't make a right." Your "reply" was a third.
It was based on solving a maths equation.
True.
There's a big and very obvious difference between "scientific research" and "mathematics".
Ehhhhh
Nobody was out there putting clocks on satellites
Technically true, but they were definitely doing experiments. The inconsistencies in Maxwell's electrodynamics and previous physics were the hot topic of late 19th century physics. To the point where various people thought resolving them would put the finishing touches on physics. Even the popular account includes the Michealson-Morely experiment.
Einstein himself says in "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" (i.e. the special relativity paper):
It is known that Maxwell’s electrodynamics—as usually understood at the
present time—when applied to moving bodies, leads to asymmetries which do
not appear to be inherent in the phenomena. Take, for example, the reciprocal electrodynamic action of a magnet and a conductor. The observable phenomenon here depends only on the relative motion of the conductor and the
magnet, whereas the customary view draws a sharp distinction between the two
cases in which either the one or the other of these bodies is in motion....
Examples of this sort, together with the unsuccessful attempts to discover
any motion of the earth relatively to the “light medium,” suggest that the
phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties
corresponding to the idea of absolute rest. They suggest rather that, as has
already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of
electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the
equations of mechanics hold good.
There were a whole bunch of relevant experiments. Lorentz reviews many of them in "On the influence of the earth's motion on luminiferous phenomena”, published in 1886.
Anyway, the author's point is not that AI can't think because it can't find the consequences of equations. Regular old numerical simulations and logic engines are pretty good at that, no AI required. His point is that AI can't think because it cannot generate ideas out of thin air, presumably the "pure reason" of ancient greek philosophy, and he uses Einstein as an example.
And as a supporting argument he used a fallacy. That's my point.
As such, they remain functional because nobody is weaponizing their state of indebtedness.
No weaponization necessary. For domestic debt, as long as your citizens keep buying bonds you're fine, and Japan's citizens keep buying bonds. If they stopped then you'd have to cut back government services. It's kind of a tax, maybe.
Foreign debt requires foreigners to keep buying your bonds. If they stop then you have to cut back not their government services, but those of your own citizens. It's not entirely unlike the sitation Saudi Arabia is in, except with debt instead of oil.
The US has the additional issue that a decent amount of that foreign debt is held by countries they have declared to be their enemies, which does add the possibility of hostile action. Most of it is held by allies they have decided to attack though, which I think in American baseball is called an "unforced error."
$207 billion over five years is one Northrop revenue.
Ah, clever. Would you also care to argue that rocks can't do arithmetic, which is what I actually said?
I'm not sure how any of that makes "it right though." It rather sounds like you're arguing against the author's apparent point that such things emerge out of whole cloth from the magic that is human intelligence.
I don't think we're having the same conversation. The OP asked about how not buying stuff decreases productivity. I explained that "productivity" in this sense is GDP / capita and not buying stuff decreases GDP. I'm not discussing social policy and certainly have not "missed the wealth gap." If you would like to discuss social policy, there are lots of Slashdot articles where such things happen.
You know, Slashdot has this great feature where messages are shown in threads. The message I relied to, for example, is shown immediately before mine. If you read the message (the one that mine is a reply to), and engage that vaunted human thinking ability, it might make more sense.
My comment was about a logical error made by someone I assume is human. I'm not sure that, plus your own apparent error, is quite the evidence for human intelligence over machine that you think it is.
Yes, that's the story you and the article author probably learned in grade school. It's not true, of course, but it certainly appeals to the lone genius personality cult cognitive bias.
Yeah, that's not much better.
Einstein, for example, conceived of relativity before any empirical evidence confirmed it.
WTF does that mean? How can you confirm something before anybody conceives of it? If we assume its just clumsy language then its just not true. Maxwell's electrodynamics were known to be in conflict with Galilean relativity (among other things) and the physics community had spent decades working on the problem including Lorentz, Lamor, Poincaire and others working out the necessary transform to replace the Galilean one. Einstein, who was a PhD student at the time, wrote a very nice paper tying it all together.
As for metaphors, or vocabularies or whatever, Einstein was notably not a fan of the metaphors that are currently most associated with general relativity.
There's also a nice little paper by some physicists where they train a small neural network (much, MUCH smaller than any LLM) on various types of observations and show that it learns symmetries of the physical system. One of their examples is learning the invariance of the spacetime interval.
Perhaps drunk too?
I doubt it. The summary (I didn't read the article, I meant it when I said "stop reading") sounds like a typical opinion piece from someone with lots of opinions and not much concern for accuracy. To pick the same example again, the Einstein myth is pretty overwhelming but this guy takes it to the next level with the "didn't like the metaphor" stuff. Is that the 2025 version of "the narrative?"
"You know, we've won awards for this crap." -- David Letterman
