Tag Archives: science

Is our solar system the most unique in the universe?

Grappling with assumptions and knowledge bias

Say you are going to visit someone, but for thought-experiment reasons you know absolutely nothing about them, not even their name or gender or anything of the like. What can you confidently say about this person you don’t even know?

Well you can confidently say that they’re human, since I did specify that they were a “person,” and since there’s no evidence aliens exist on Earth. That means they eat food and breath air and all that other stuff. But besides the most vague generalities about human nature, you cannot confidently assert *anything* about them. If I forced you to guess about their qualities, you would only be able to guess the vaguest things that are almost universal among humans, like their physical traits (probably 2 arms and 2 legs) or human universalities (probably love their family, probably like food and traveling).

The only things you can confidently say about this person would be the *common and non-unique traits* that they probably share with all other humans. Because with so little to go on, it would be illogical to assume a set of very unique traits instead.

But then I tell you this person is an American. OK, you can now assume they almost certainly speak English (though it’s not totally certain, and they could always be a baby or a mute anyway). You can assume they know at least some of the cultural touchstones of Americanism (although again, they could be a baby), like they’ve heard the Star Spangled Banner, and they know what Star Wars and Marvel Movies are. They probably know that Hollywood is famous for movies, and that Texas is famous for oil.

But can you confidently say that they are a basketball player? Do you know if they enjoy Handel, Hershel, and Bach? Can you say anything about their politics wahtsoever?

If I then tell you they’re a climatologist, you get even more details. They’re likely on the left-side of the political spectrum. They’re almost certainly well-educated (a pre-requisite for climatology), and they’re far more likely to be an office worker than a manual laborer (although I guess *someone* has to install all those temperature stations).

Now let’s say that this person you’re going to meet is my friend Dave, who’s about 25 years old. Dave is a great basketball player, but he hates watching it because “the modern game is boring.” He likes jazz renditions of famous Baroque music. He plays Minecraft fanatically, although he’s never modded it. And he is a climatologist working at a local university, but he’s also deeply religious and prays before every meal.

The less you knew about Dave, the more generic he seemed. Just a person? There’s 8 billion of those. An American? They’re also common. Even a climatologist doesn’t seem unreasonably unique or special.

But when I gave you more details about his personality, he suddenly seemed fairly out of the ordinary: he’s both sporty and sciency, he’s young but also religious, he plays a popular game sure, but he also likes an incredibly eclectic style of music.

But is Dave *actually* unique? Or does his appearance of uniqueness come from *our knowledge* of him? I’d hazard than many of you can think of people in your lives with an even more unique set of traits, compared to the very few things I’ve told you about Dave. And when I was slowly describing Dave, before you knew how unique he was, you had to fill in the blanks with guesses based on common traits. This is true of anyone we don’t know well. People seem more common as we know less about them, more unique as we know more.

For every person we’ve ever met, we have a very limited set of knowledge about them, and we fill in whatever blanks exist with the “most likely” choices. That’s why even your parents or loved ones can still surprise you, as you may not have known that they did drugs in college, or ran a local newspaper, and you had just filled in those blanks with something else before they told you.

But that means that by definition, we default to assuming everyone around us has “common” and “ordinary” sets of traits. I’d hazard a guess that every person in the world has some set of traits that makes them extremely unique or out of the ordinary, even if these are things that you’d only know if you were close friends with them.

The office worker who reads about 2 books a week: that’s very out of the ordinary. The financial analyst who’s written a dozen murder mysteries: that’s very uncommon. The American who speaks fluent Korean: this is less common in America than having written a book. But if all you knew was “office worker,” “financial analyst,” or “American,” you’d think these people were more normal and less unique than my friend Dave up there, even if they end up being as or more unique than him when you know all their traits.

Extraordinary-ness is realized as we get more and more data about a person, as we find more and more things that are clearly *outliers* to the common trends. Because until we know those things, we naturally fill in the gaps in our knowledge with the “ordinary” placeholders, the “expected” values.

And the reason I’m talking about all that is that I’m almost certain this though process underlies claims about the uniqueness of our own sun and planet.

The Fermi Paradox and the Rare Earth Hypothesis

To shift gears slightly: many people have pondered about why Earth hasn’t been visited by aliens yet. If there are billions of stars in the Universe, and the Universe has existed for billions of years, then there should have been plenty of time for alien species to evolve, become technologically advanced, and start joyriding around the galaxy. As Enrico Fermi said: “where is everyone?”

A potential answer people have caught on is that intelligent life is unbelievably uncommon, and that Earth just happened to have a very very specific set of Astronomical circumstances that made life, and intelligent life, possible. Under this “Rare Earth Hypothesis,” life may evolve around only one in a quadrillion stars, there may only be a *single* life-bearing world in our galaxy: Earth.

Our planet and solar system do seem very rare. In the search for exoplanets, we rarely find ones with lots of gas giants so *far* away from their star, most gas giants appear way closer than ours do. Our sun also isn’t a binary star (like most sun-like stars are), and it has fewer flares and superflares.

But I would contend that, like my friend Dave above, we only notice our solar system’s “uniqueness” because we know so MUCH about our Sun and so LITTLE about exoplanets and their stars. We are *assuming regularity on all the variables we don’t have data for.*

Like, let’s take one of those stars that has a Jupiter-like gas giant orbiting close to the star. Maybe some of those Jupiters have large, rocky moons with complete atmospheres, and maybe these moons can support liquid water, which could support life. That’s probably uncommon, but is it more or less uncommon than our own system having its gas giants so far away?

Our planet has a very large moon, but are there exoplanets with rarer configurations, like an Earth sized planet with 4 or more smaller moons? Or an Earth sized planet with Saturn-like rings?

And our sun has unusually few flares, but is there a planet out there with an unusually strong magnetic field and an unusually thick water atmosphere, one that can easily protect its life-bearing planet from life-killing solar flares?

For this last example, let’s imagine that life has indeed evolved on such a world, intelligent life. They, like us, might think they’re the only life in the universe. They, like us, might think that their planet is unbelievably unique, and that their specific uniquenesses are what allowed their solar system to have life.

Maybe their solar system has a large gas giant orbitting close to the star, and the gas giant’s magnetic field, combine with their own planet’s uniqueness, serves to limit the damage of stellar flars coming to their planet. The gas giant could act like a kind of “shield,” sitting between their own planet and their star, too small to dim the star’s light, but with an incredibly strong magnetic field that blocks the force of any Coronal Mass Ejections (the technical name of large stellar flares).

These people might say “well of course life only evolved on *our* planet, how common is it to have a rocky terrestrial planet outside the orbit of a gas giant? We’ve never seen that in exoplanets. And our gas giant plus or magnetic field are unusually good at protecting us from solar flares. And since essentially all stars have large solar flares, then all planets but our own get blasted to death by Coronal Mass Ejections before intelligent life can evolve.”

But they wouldn’t be right, because we on Earth would still exist. And they’d be assuming every other star out there was “normal,” that there wasn’t a rocky planet *closer to its star* than a gas giant, orbiting an unusually quiet star. And since it would be so hard to get data on *our* star, they’d see our star and assume it was just another “ordinary” lifeless system (we’d have trouble knowing our own star had planets if we didn’t orbit it, it’s difficult to see by the most common measurement techniques)

See, I think Earth only seems *rare* because of how much we know about it. Just like Dave only seems *unique* because of how much I told you about him. If I’d just given you his more common traits (he’s 25, American, plays sports), he wouldn’t seem that unique or special at all.

The jar of marbles thought experiment

Imagine for instance that there’s a jar with 100 marbles in it, each numbered 1 to 100. You pull out number 8 and, aha! This is an exceptionally unique marble! No other marble has this specific number on it, and this marble is 1 in 100, isn’t that unique?

But in this jar, ALL the marbles are unique, they’re ALL 1 in 100. They’re just unique in different ways by having different numbers on them.

Or if you prefer, let’s say the jar of marbles has 999,900 marbles that are unlabeled, and 100 marbles numbered 1 to 100. Again you pull out marble number 8 and, aha, this time it’s even MORE unique! This time it’s a 1 in a MILLION marble! No other marble has this number!

But again, the numbered marbles are ALL 1 in a million, they have different numbers on them, different “things that make them unique,” but they are all still unique.

This marble thought experiment is how I think of the rare Earth hypothesis. Yes our Earth is rare, it’s got a number on it (life), and we think most other stars in the galaxy don’t have life, we assume most of them are unnumbered. But just because we’re 1 of a kind, with our own special number ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FROM ANYONE ELSE’S, doesn’t mean that another marble with another number doesn’t exist somewhere in the Galaxy, even somewhere close by.

We assume that life can only evolve if the marble has the number 8 on it, ie if a planet and solar system have our very unique set of traits (gas giant arrangement, large moon, quiet star, etc). But we don’t have telescopes powerful enough to *see the numbers* on any other marbles out in the galaxy, so we don’t know for sure if they have life or not. We assume that they are normal, that they have all the “common” traits stars have and that they don’t have anything special on them that would make them unique or life-bearing. But we don’t know.

There could be a number 9 marble right next door to us, a planet orbiting a star with its own collection of unique traits completely different from ours, but thinking just as we do that they are the only life-bearing system in the entire galaxy, because our star doesn’t have their star’s unique traits.

And they’d be wrong. And we’d be wrong too. Just something to think about: we should be more humble when trying to argue from “uniqueness.”

Anyway I still want to post part 2 of my fusion power post, so stay tuned for that very soon.

Fusion power: hype or hopeless?

I’m going to lay my cards on the table and say this: I think it’s extremely unlike that a nuclear fusion power plant will send any energy to civilian grids in my lifetime. Having said that:

The fusion hype cycle never ends, it hibernates. In 2006, the international community came together to plan a nuclear fusion test reactor in France, called ITER. 20 years later and it still hasn’t been built (it was supposed to be completed by 2016). But ITER isn’t an actual fusion power plant, it is merely a research testing station designed to help scientists plan what an *actual fusion power plant* might look like, and solve a few of the many unsolved problems that have plagued the industry.

But ITER isn’t the only game in town. In the easy money era of pre-2022, several start-up corporations came online, claiming that *they* would have a working fusion reactor before ITER even completed building. They’d be selling to the grid by 2025 (later 2030, then 2035). Helion, Commonwealth, there were some big names with big backers, claiming unequivocally that they would crack fusion power and start selling it to the grid.

With this, the hype for fusion has come in cycles, waxing and waning as old promises are broken and new promises are made. It’s a joke that gets some people very prickly to say that “fusion power is 20 years away, and has been for 75 years,” because fusion-backers are well aware of the industry’s many many failed promises but think that “this time, things will be different.” And maybe it will be! But I’m almost certain it won’t be.

Just so we’re all on the same page: what is fusion? If you smash two atoms together, you can produce more energy than you put in. Atoms don’t like smashing together though, they naturally repel each other very effectively. The only way to overcome this barrier is to crush the atoms under incredible pressure (in stars), or heat them up to millions or billions of degrees Kelvin (here on Earth). These super-heated atoms create a “plasma,” with electrons stripped from nuclei, and the theory is that the plasma can self-perpetuate: the fusion reactions produce enough heat to keep the plasma superheated, with excess heat being used to boil water and drive a steam turbine (generating electricity).

This post is probably too late in the hype cycle. I think 2022 was the sweet spot when I saw these startup discussed commonly on social media. But I want to make a post and here’s my thesis: none of the fusion startups, nor government projects have any hope of successfully making a fusion power plant that brings power to the grid.

That’s honestly a hard claim to defend because there are actually many different *types* of fusion, and even if you conclusively argue that the ITER-type fusion reactors are basically impossible in our lifetimes, the National Ignition Lab-type fusion supporters will come out of the woodwork to say that *their* ideas are actually better and more feasible, and then you have to start the argument all over. So I’m going to try to take this in stages.

First of all: there are several different atoms you can fuse nuclei together to make energy. You can fuse any atoms lighter than Iron together and get more energy than you put in (supermassive stars do this in their cores). But the realistic scenarios of fusion here on earth focus on a few select atoms. To get the nomenclature down, Hydrogen comes in 3 isotopes: a single proton with no neutrons (normal boring hydrogen), a single proton with a single neutron (deterium aka “heavy hydrogen,” which also makes up “heavy water”), and a single proton with 2 neutrons (aka tritium). So anyway here’s how you’d do fusion here on Earth

  • Tritium-Deuterium fusion – nearly every serious fusion proposal wants to do this
  • Deuterium-Deuterium fusion – harder to do, but deuterium is extremely abundant compared to tritium
  • Something else (Deuterium-Helium3, Hyrogen-Boron, etc) – occasionally proposed when people are tired of naysayers like me pointing out how the previous two are infeasible

I’ll take these in reverse order:

Something Else (Deuterium-Helium3, Hyrogen-Boron, etc)

Using “something else” besides Tritium or Deterium for fusion is a pretty dead-on-arrival proposal in my opinion, mostly due to “Bremsstrahlung radiation” which I will directly translate to “braking radiation” because I’m not good at German.

When atoms are superheated (which is necessary if you want to get them to fuse), their nucleus and electrons separate. The negatively charged electrons whip around freely, wholly unchained to the positively charged nucleus.

But what happens when an electron and a nucleus fly past each other? Their opposite charges will interact and pull towards each other. The electron (which is WAY lighter than the nucleus) will slow down immensely, “braking” as it is pulled by the charge of the nucleus. When a charged particle slows down, it must emit energy, and so the electron emits X-ray radiation as it breaks to a near screeching halt compared to its previously unimaginable speeds.

That’s why it’s called “braking radiation.”

The thing about braking radiation is that it becomes more powerful as the atoms involved get bigger. That’s because bigger atoms have a bigger nucleus which carry a bigger charge. The Hydrogen nucleus has a measly +1 charge, it causes a tiny braking radiation on the zipping electrons. Boron nuclei have a +5 charge. They don’t cause 5 times as much braking radiation, they actually cause 25 times as much because the radiation goes up with the square of the charge.

This braking radiation produces massive amounts of X-rays, but it’s not the danger of the X-rays that is the problem, it’s the fact that they take with them all the heat of the plasma. Remember that this is happening in a fusion reactor, the reactor *must* be superheated to hundreds of millions degrees Kelvin (or Billions in the case of Boron and Helium based fusion). But the braking radiation produces so many X-rays, that they all radiate away and steal the heat from the plasma.

So if you try to do fusion with a Boron or Helium-based plasma, you need the heat from the fusion to keep the plasma hot enough to *continue fusing*. However the braking radiation will unavoidably be *cooling the plasma down faster than the fusion heats it up*. You’ll start up your fusion reactor at several billions of degrees Kelvin, only to see it rapidly cool to below-fusion temperatures, as fusion cannot keep it hot faster than braking radiation cools it down.

Fundamentally, it’s not possible on earth to do this kind of plasma fusion with Boron and Helium. The startups try to handwave this away, proposing for instance that they can heat the nuclei (so they’ll fuse) without heating the electrons (so they won’t produce braking radiation), but that’s pretty much nonsense (the two trade heat back and forth almost instantly).

Anyway that’s my two cents. Fusion that relies on elements heavy than hydrogen is impossible in the mid to near future, as there’s no reasonable way to keep the plasma hot while the braking radiation cools it down.

Deuterium-Deuterium fusion

D-D (D alone usually means “Deuterium” when talking fusion) is sometimes presented as an alternative to Tritium. But it isn’t. D-D fuses nearly 300 times more slowly than T-D (Tritium-Deterium) at the temperatures ITER and other startups are capable of reaching (a few million degrees Kelviun). That doesn’t just mean you need a power plant 300 times bigger, it realistically means D-D fusion *cannot heat the plasma faster than it cools*, meaning just like above you’d turn on your fusion reactor only to see it quickly cool as the fusion can’t sustain the temperature.

To make D-D fusion self-sustaining, you’d need temperatures of a few billion degrees Kelvin, not just a few hundred million. An order of magnitude bigger with an order of magnitude more problems keeping that plasma confined (ie not destroying the power plant) while fusion is kicking off.

No one has realistically proposed confinement methods that use known materials and keep the plasma from escaping or cooling down. There’s usually talk at this point of proposed or speculative materials, things that *might* work, but either haven’t been tested yet, haven’t been made in more than microgram quantities, or just haven’t been invented yet.

Tritium-Deuterium fusion (there’s a lot to cover)

Why then does everyone come back to T-D fusion? Why does every serious proposal use this and only this? Why is the international collaboration ITER, a collaboration between most of the world’s advanced economies, still only have plans to fuse Tritium to Deuterium? Basically it’s process of elimination. I don’t want to explain resonance states and Helium-5, but T-D fusion is the only atomic fusion that is reachable with materials that are currently under study, needing a mere 150 million degrees Kelvin to get going, unlike D-D fusion. And because both T and D have a charge of just +1, the braking radiation is marginal.

So of ALL the elements on the periodic table, and ALL the isotopes of those elements, Tritium-Deuterium is the only pair we can reasonably fuse in a controlled manner with the technology available today and for the next 100 years.

But just because it’s possible to fuse these atoms, doesn’t mean it’s possible to power the world with them.

See, fusing Tritium isn’t like putting gas in your car, Tritium is rarer than Diamonds, rarer than Gold, rarer than Platinum and Palladium and Plutonium. If Tritium is considered separately from Hydrogen, it would be one of the rarest element on Earth. There are about 25 kilograms of Tritium in the entire world. There are over 200,000,000 kg of Gold currently in human hands, and there are billions to trillions more deep within the Earth’s crust and oceans.

But to power a city like Chicago for a year would need about 275 kg of Tritium. The entire world’s supply of Tritium would power America’s 4th largest city for less than 2 months.

How are fusion advocates claiming they’ll power our cities, if the resources necessary to do so are so incredibly rare?

Well it helps to know where Tritium comes from. None of the Tritium on Earth was formed naturally. Tritium has a half-life of about 12 years, so if any of it WAS here when our planet formed 4ish billion years ago, it has long since decayed away. Instead, Earth’s Tritium was formed when Deuterium is hit with high energy radiation. Deuterium is a rare isotope of Hydrogen, so this doesn’t happen much in nature. But it DOES happen a lot in Canada, because of the CANDU fission reactors.

CANDU reactors use uranium to create power, and they moderate their energy production with Deuterated water, aka heavy water, aka water where the normal Hydrogen has been replaced by Deuterium. A CANDU reactor creates the perfect conditions for the creation of Tritium, although they consider this a biproduct that needs to be removed, not a desired effect. But again, because of the 12 year half-life, the Tritium that Canada produces quickly decays away to nothing while in storage, so there’s never been a chance to create a whole lot of it for fusion power.

So back to the question: if there isn’t enough Tritium to run a fusion reactor, how can fusion power our cities? Fusion advocates want to CREATE new Tritium, using their fusion reactors, and feed the created fusion back in to continue the process. Canada’s 25 kg of Tritium would be like a “pilot light” for a fusion reactor. Once the reactor has been turned on with a little Tritium, it can keep producing more and more Tritium as it needs, continuing the fusion process indefinitely. Deuterium by the way is relatively rare, but Earth has SO MUCH WATER that it won’t be *that* hard to get the Deuterium needed from that.

But here’s the thing: I believe it will be IMPOSSIBLE for fusion reactors to create the Tritium they need with the technology available to use within the next 100 years. I will continue this thought in my next post, because this one is getting long, but to summarize my thesis:

  • Fusing anything except Tritium and Deuterium for power will be impossible for the foreseeable future.
    • The temperatures needed are too high
    • The braking radiation will steal power from the reactor faster than power is created
  • Tritium-Deuterium fusion is the only possibility for fusion power for the foreseeable future
    • But it will be impossible to produce enough Tritium to do this for the foreseeable future

I haven’t proven that last point, but I will devote an entire post to it soon. I want to get this posted because I’ve been writing of it for a week, and it’s already very long. But stay tuned for the next post, because if I can prove that point then it will support the final bullet point of my thesis:

  • It will not be possible to power humanity with fusion for the foreseeable future.

RIP Bozo, Paul Ehrlich is dead

For those who didn’t know him, Paul Ehrlich was one of the founding fathers of the degrowth movement. A movement which has, since the time of Malthus and beyond, declared that there are Just Too Many People and they’ll all die out if we don’t kill some of them soon.

Oh the modern degrowthers aren’t quite so bloodthirsty, the recent ones say we’ll all have to have less medicine and amenities instead of food and water, but the trajectory is the same. The idea remains that earth has reached a “carrying capacity” for humanity and we all must cut back on our standard of living for good.

Like all degrowthers, Paul Ehrlich was proven wrong very quickly after he wrote his book. In 1968, he predicted that “hundreds of millions” would die of famine in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet despite the continued presence of famines (Ethiopia for instance), reality never measured up to Paul’s lofty predictions.

Nor did we avoid Paul’s predictions because we accepted his preferred interventions. The international community never sterilized as many Indian women as Paul would have liked, but despite India now being the largest nation in history by population, the people there have never been *less* food insecure.

Paul’s predictions came false for the same reason most degrowthers are wrong, he didn’t believe in markets and technology.

It may seem “lucky” that our species has continued to produce ever-more food thanks to timely inventions. Improved agriculture proved Malthus wrong. The Fritz-Haber process destroyed the expected fertilizer shortage. The Green Revolution was already proving Paul wrong while he wrote his book. But this isn’t luck at all, it’s prices.

Paul Ehrlich and Thomas Malthus aren’t the only people in the world who can see that a growing population will need more food. They aren’t the only ones who can predict this. But in a functioning market economy, prices signal a way out of such a dilemma.

When people predict there won’t be enough food, the future price of food rises, even though supply and demand *today* are unchanged. That’s why (even before the recent kerfuffle), the price of oil would rise with every rise in middle-east tensions. The *threat* of there being not enough oil in the future can raise the price of oil today.

But again, just like oil, this is a market signal that encouraged new technology. When the future price of food rises, farmers can expect to make more money, and the people who sell them their farming equipment can likewise expect a share of the profits. All these people are encouraged to invest in future food-increasing technologies, in the hopes of landing on some solution that will make them very wealthy.

And even though most of these people will be hobbyists tinkering in their backyard, never making anything of substance, some people will invent say the McCormick Reaping Machine, greatly increasing farm productivity. Or some people today will perfect modern fracking, greatly increasing oil well productivity.

In either case, it’s true that without any sort of intervention, ever growing demand will outstrip static supply. But markets provide a proven mechanism for signaling the oncoming shortage and preventing it, through the incentivization of new technology.

I’ve seen modern degrowthers admit that Paul was wrong, he was so badly wrong in 1968 that they’d look stupid if they didn’t admit this. But many ascribe his wrongness to his racialized policy proposals, he wanted Earth to have less Indians and Chinese, but thought there were the right amount of Americans, for instance.

But Paul wasn’t wrong because he was a racist. He was wrong because he was wrong. And modern, non-racially-motivated degrowthers are wrong for the exact same reason, and they cannot escape their wrongness by simply divesting themselves of Paul’s racism.

The degrowth movement is fundamentally wrong about incentives, about prices, about predictions, and about technology. Anything that can be predicted can be planned for, as I have long said. And if it can be planned for, prices create a mechanism that reward people for mitigating it. If the price of food is expected to be high, the man who can make a whole lot of it will reap many rewards. Thus the man who invents the *reaper* will reap many rewards (*chuckle*).

Despite how wrong he was, Paul Ehrlich somehow maintained his status as a professional predictor, to the point that I’ve seen newspapers claim he was “early” and not merely “wrong.” But the famines he predicted never happened, and show no sign of happening now. The modern dilemma is how to get people to stop eating until they’re fat, not how to grow enough food to feed them all. And Paul’s wrongness should serve as a wakeup call for every other half-baked predictor with a book.

Don’t predict the future by infinitely extending the present. That’s the way of fools and bozos.

College Students and Desire Paths

I blogged before about video games and desire paths, but I wanted to add something from my own work experience as well.

To reiterate, a desire path is a dirt path worn down by people trying to get from A to B in the quickest way possible. There may be a concrete path that gets from A to B, but if it winds around and is inefficient, people will make their own path instead.

I teach science, and I like to say that “students, like molecules, seek the lowest energy state.” A good teacher of wants to set up their class so that the students learn something, and then are asked to demonstrate their knowledge, with the grade being given for how well they do at demonstrating. Students aren’t necessarily there to learn however, they are often grade-focused. So they seek any way to improve their grade at no cost in energy.

When a student writes a lab report, it takes them time and effort to actually study the material, learn the chemistry behind their experiment, and explain what they did and what their results entail. It takes a lot less energy to instead laser-focus on the rubric and attempt to game the system by answering only the questions presented in the rubric without ever understanding the actual experiment.

Here’s an example: the rubric asks the students to “explain the 2-stage design of the experiment, and doing the first stage was necessary to complete the second stage.” A student may try to answer: “the experiment had a two-stage design, and doing the first stage was necessary to complete the second stage.” But they aren’t actually explaining anything, they’re just repeating the question as a statement and hoping a bored grader will let them slide on through.

This is actually made worse by the grading system my department has implemented for labs. In a classical class, lab reports are graded for accuracy and the average of all lab report grades is the grade you get for the lab class. In this new system however, labs are graded on a pass/fail system, with a 70% being all that’s necessary for a “pass.” Then the student’s grade at the end of the semester is based on how many labs they passed, and any labs they don’t pass can be resubmitted at a later date.

This 70% + pass/fail system incentivized many students to try to game the system and answer just enough so they can get a “pass,” without actually trying to do well on the entire lab report. Because what’s the incentive to put effort in when a 70% and a 100% get you the same result? Students will very clearly just give up on doing one of the 5 rubric items, because they know doing the other 4 items well gets them a pass. This often leads to students completely the class with high grades but with gaping holes in their knowledge, as they just ignored parts of the material because it was too hard and focused on acing the easier parts instead.

I’ve spoken to the department that this is a bad incentive system if we want students to learn. Student’s won’t really try to learn all the material if learning just 70% gives them the same grade as learning 100%. The department is right now *only* focused on how many students pass, and this easier system is indeed increasing student scores.

I said before that a desire path should make you rethink how your system is set up, and try to incentivize people to go in the directions they should be going, without just putting road blocks on the desire path. You can pave a newer, quicker path, or you can change where things are located so people are incentivized to walk the paved path.

The same is true for student learning, if your system incentives students to half-ass it, change the incentives. Don’t just clap that more are passing and then wonder why people are having a harder time with upper level courses later.

Stars with a Story

I wanted to tell a short story about a star I found interesting. It’s nothing like I’ve blogged about before, but I haven’t blogged in a long time and I need to write SOMETHING.

At the heart of the Crab Nebula is a little star that I will call Crabby. Its real name is PSR B0531+21, but no one’s going to remember that name so Crabby it is. Crabby is a star that exploded in 1054 AD, and the Crab Nebula is the remnants of that explosion.

What’s so special about Crabby is that we know *exactly* when it exploded, because Chinese astronomers recorded it. For almost every other supernova remnant in the galaxy we don’t have that kind of information, it’s hard to tell whether something exploded a million years ago or a *billion* years ago because we’re viewing it from so far away. So knowing the exact *year* that Crabby exploded is like knowing someone’s time of birth down to the millisecond. It gives us incredible precision that we normally don’t get in astronomy.

And that precision has let scientists come up with some wacky theories, such as the theory that Crabby is a “strange star.”

Now what’s a strange star exactly? Isn’t it a little rude to call a star “strange” in the first place? Well it requires a little bit of quantum mechanics to explain this, but read on because I promise it’s worth the read.

See, when a star normally collapses, the force of gravity becomes so great that it compactifies the matter within to a ridiculous extent. The core of a collapsing star is usually made of heavy elements like iron, and the collapse forces those atoms as close together as physically possible. There’s a simple rule in quantum mechanics: two things can’t occupy the same exact space, and this rule leads to an absolute limit of density: the density where atoms can’t get any closer together or they’d literally overlap.

Here on earth atoms aren’t usually that close together. Liquids and gases of course let atoms slosh about, but even solids on earth usually have their atoms arranged in intricate patterns with a little bit of space in between each atom. White dwarfs crush this down into the absolute limit of density, around a ton or more per cubit centimeter.

So white dwarfs like this are ultra compact objects with ultra compact structures. But gravity can do even better than a white dwarf.

See the strength of gravity depends on mass: more mass, more gravity. So what happens in the cases of a VERY massive white dwarf? Their high mass means they want to crush things down even denser, but we’ve already reached the limits of atomic density, so where else can we go?

Well remember that atoms themselves are mostly made up of empty space, there’s a lot of emptiness between the nucleus and the electrons, for example. Atoms themselves can be crushed down into just their neutrons, with each proton absorbing an electron to become a neutron. When we crush down atoms in this way, we remove all that empty space they contain, and that lets us crush the whole star down to *even greater levels of density*.

At this level we have a “neutron star,” a star so crushingly dense that it’s the size of a city with the mass of the sun. Our friend Crabby is theorized to be a neutron star. But it might possibly be even more special.

Some have theorized that Crabby is a bit too cold for its age, and how could it have lost all that heat? The answer may bring us to the fringes of theoretical physics.

See just like atoms can be crushed down into neutrons, neutrons can be crushed down further. Neutrons are made up of 3 quarks: 2 down quarks and 1 up quark. But those quarks are much smaller than the neutron itself, and between them is mostly empty space. So once again, if the gravity of the star is strong enough, a neutron star can be “crushed down,” until its neutrons are crushed into quarks.

The whole star itself can’t be crushed like this, or else it would get so small that it would become a black hole. But the core of a massive neutron star may be so dense that its neutrons are indeed crushed into quarks, releasing all that empty space within the neutrons, and leaving a quark-rich soup that resembles the instant after the big bang. We have no firm evidence of this happening, but if it happens, then such a star would be called a quark star.

And then some massive quark stars might have a final trick up their sleeves. Remember that rule from earlier, about how 2 things can’t occupy the same space? That rule is what holds each of these type of stars from crushing down too far. White dwarfs can’t let their atoms occupy the same space, it’s only when the force of gravity is *large enough to crush atoms* that a white dwarf gets crushed down into a neutron star.

Similarly, neutron stars can’t let their neutrons occupy the same space, and that’s what keeps them from crushing down further. But when gravity is strong enough to *crush neutrons*, then parts of the neutron star might devolve into a quark star.

But in a quark star, the neutrons are crushed into 2 down quarks and 1 up quark each. Now here’s the funny thing about that quantum rule I told you about: two things can’t occupy the same space right? Well that’s only true *if they’re the same type of thing*. Two neutrons can’t occupy the same space because they’re both neutrons. Same with 2 down quarks, they can’t occupy the same space either. But a down quark and an up quark? They can occupy the same space no problem.

So the neutrons are crushed into 2 down quarks and 1 up quark right? 1 down and 1 up quark can occupy roughly the same space, they can take up 1 “unit” of space together. But that second down quark? It needs to find a *different* space for itself to occupy.

But let’s bring gravity back into the picture: we’ve already seen how it can crush atoms down to neutrons, and neutrons down to quarks, can it crush these quarks even further? Well not directly, quarks are “fundamental particles,” there’s nothing they could crush down into. But there is an *indirect* form of crushing that could happen…

Remember that 1 down and 1 up quark can share the same space but that second down quark has to find a new space. If we could change that second down quark into something else, we could free up that space so gravity could crush further, but how?

Well while all the “regular” matter of our universe, stars, planets, bloggers, is all made of just up and down quarks, there’s more quarks then just them hiding in the fringes of particle physics.

The strange quark is another type of quark, different from up and down. It’s decidedly strange indeed, since it doesn’t exist anywhere in the universe except for fractions of a second at very high energies. But that’s not important, what *is* important is that *it’s another type of quark,” and just like how up and down quarks can share the same space because they’re different from each other, a strange quark *can also share that space* because it’s different from both up and down quarks.

So at the very highest limits of density, when neutrons themselves are crushed and when their quarks are crushed further, the sheer force of gravity might force those quarks to take drastic action. Half of the down quarks from the neutrons might convert into strange quarks, so that they can take up less space with the other quarks and crush the star yet further.

If this is the case, and these strange quarks do exist at the hearts of massive neutron stars, then this may the *only* place they exist for any significant length of time. Usually strange quarks decay because they’re so unstable, but at the crushing densities here, strange quarks are forced to *exist* because it’s the only way to crush down far enough under gravity. Despite being unstable, strange quarks here *can’t* decay, because gravity is forcing them to stay strange.

Now this is all very theoretical, but it begs the question: do strange stars even exist?

Maybe

And it begs another question: is Crabby a strange star?

Maybe maybe

Like I said if the neutrons are crushed into quarks and eventually strange quarks, it will only happen at the very center of the neutron star, a place we can’t observe and can only speculate about. But there is tantalizing evidence: we know exactly how old Crabby is thanks to those Chinese astronomers who recorded its explosion, and our evidence shows it to be a fair bit colder than we’d expect for a neutron star of its age, why could that be?

It’s been suggested that when neutrons are crushed into quarks and then strange quarks, that bursts of neutrinos are created which carry away much of the star’s heat into the cosmos. It *may be* that such a thing happened to Crabby, which is why it’s so cold.

This theory wouldn’t even be possible if we didn’t know how old Crabby is, if it were just another neutron star we would always have questions about if it’s actually just an older star that has had time to cool down, rather than being a young star that is unusually cold. And we owe it all to the astronomers from the past who first saw Crabby in their night sky, nearly one thousand years ago.

“Why don’t they only film the hits?”

There’s a joke from “That Mitchel and Webb Look” that I want to dissect like a frog for a moment. The video is just one minute long, but if you don’t want to watch it I can summarize it here:

  • “So for the sketches we’re filming, I’m thinking we’ll make them “hit, hit, miss, hit, miss, miss”
  • “Do we have to film all the misses as well as the hits? Why not only film the hits and use those for the show?”
  • “Well it’s a sketch comedy show, it has to be hit and miss.”

The joke doesn’t need to be explained, but I will anyway: why does a sketch comedy show have a lot of sketches that miss the mark, as well as ones that are laugh out loud funny? Isn’t it easier to just film the hits? Well obviously the writers didn’t think those misses would miss the mark, they thought those misses might be hits as well, that’s why they wrote them and filmed them. You don’t know for sure what will be a hit and what will be a miss before you release the show.

A similar pattern is discussed with venture capital investing. Venture capitalists invest in hundreds of startups on the assumption that around 90% of them will fail and make no money at all. The 10% that succeed are expected to pay for all the failures. Well then why don’t venture capitalists *only* invest in the successes and not waste money investing in the failures? Again: they don’t know for sure what will succeed or fail before investing. A huge amount of time and money goes into predicting the success or failure of startups so these VCs can try to invest wisely, but it isn’t a solved problem by any means.

And if you think this investing problem has an obvious solution, take out a personal loan and invest 50,000$ in a single startup that *you know for sure* is guaranteed to be successful. You’ll 1000x your money and be able to pay off the loan and interest easily.

But this pattern of “why not only go for the hits?” holds true in science as well. But here many people don’t seem to understand or believe it.

Governments, corporations, and charities invest billions into potentially lifesaving treatments every year. 90% of those scientific ventures will come to nothing, only a few will be successful. But you don’t know for sure which will succeed and which won’t before you try.

I think of this because I all too often see people complain about “why did we invest X number of dollars into researching such and such, when Y was invented with so much less?” A World War 2 version of this is the infamous refrain about how the project to develop a better bomb-sight for American planes costed more than the Manhattan Project which made nuclear bombs. A modern version of this complaint might be complaining that the Amyloid hypothesis in Alzheimer’s disease has received so much funding despite never curing Alzheimer’s.

In both cases though, our best foreknowledge seemed to indicate that this was the right path. Nuclear fission was completely unproven tech, the scientists themselves were pessimistic about their abilities to make a bomb out of it. When the first test of a real nuclear bomb took place, the scientists involved had a bet going for how much power the bomb would produce (with some predicting it would be a dud). *EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM* drastically underestimated the power of the bomb they had created, the most wildly optimistic predictions underestimated the bomb’s power by half.

By contrast air-power was a proven war winner when the USA started spending billions on bomb-sights. Germany’s blitzkrieg had used massive air power to help them overwhelm, surround, and destroy, other nations all across Europe. Air power could destroy the railroads and bridges that let troops move across modern battlefields, it could destroy the factories where the troop’s guns and tanks were made, and domination of the air allowed an army a far better picture of the battlefield then their enemies had. In this scenario, the allies looked at the success of German air power and believed that upping their own air power might similarly prove dividends. They never got the total success of the German blitzkrieg, but overwhelming air power was at least part of how the USA held on in the Korean war, so it wasn’t a complete waste.

Similarly, the evidence for Alzheimer’s disease has always seemed to point toward Amyloid Beta playing a key role. The evident failure of drugs targeting Amyloid Beta means there’s a lot more we have to learn, but just because the Amyloid Hypothesis is flawed doesn’t mean a competing hypothesis is automatically right. Putting billions towards the Tau or neurotransmitter hypotheses is not guaranteed to have brought success, in fact these hypotheses were studied even during the dominance of the Amyloid Hypothesis, and neither of them produced working drugs either.

People have a video-game understanding of research, as I’ve complained about before. They think that if we just put enough money towards the correct hypothesis, we’ll find what we’re looking for. But we don’t know what’s correct before we commit our money, and if our hypothesis fails, we don’t even know if we just haven’t thrown *enough* money at the problem, or if we’re chucking good money after bad. Which answer you lean to likely says more about your politics than about the quality of the research itself. Should we throw more and more money towards commercial nuclear fusion, even though that industry has never once succeed in even the most modest goals set for itself? Should we cut off the Amyloid Hypothesis, even though a century of research shows that Amyloid Beta does play a key role in Alzheimer’s disease? Everyone seems to think they already know the answer, but few are willing to prove it with evidence.

So whatever happened with Aduhelm?

Aduhelm and Leqimbi were hot news a few years ago. They are both antibodies that work as anti-Alzheimer’s disease drugs by binding to and hopefully destroying amyloid beta. The hypothesis that amyloid beta is the causative agent of Alzheimer’s, and that reducing amyloid beta will lessen the disease, is known as the Amyloid Hypothesis. And while the Amyloid Hypothesis is still the most widely supported, I wonder if the failures of Aduhelm and Leqimbi to make much of a dent to Alzheimer’s disease has damaged the hypothesis somewhat.

Because think about it, the whole job of an antibody is to help your body clear a foreign object. When antibodies bind to something, they trigger your immune system to destroy it. And this is why you get inflammation whenever you get a cut or scrape, antibodies will bind to whatever microscopic dirt and bacteria that enter your body, and your immune system flooding that area to destroy them is felt by you as inflammation.

And we know that Aduhelm and Leqimbi are working as antibodies against amyloid beta. They bind strongly to amyloid beta, they induce inflammation when given to Alzheimer’s patients (although inflammation in the brain can cause multiple side effects), and tests show that they seem to be reducing the amount of amyloid beta in the patients who take them.

Yet the prognosis for Alzheimer’s is not much better with these drugs than without them. Maybe they just aren’t destroying *enough* amyloid beta, but they are barely reducing the rate at which Alzheimer’s patients decline in mental faculty, and are not at all causing patients to improve and regain their mental state. Maybe the brain just *can’t* be fixed once it’s been damaged by amyloid beta, but you’d hope that there would at least be some improvement for patients if the Amyloid hypothesis is correct.

This has caused the field to seemingly split, with many still supporting the Amyloid hypothesis but saying these drugs don’t target amyloid beta correctly, with others now fractured in trying to study the many, many other possible causes of Alzheimer’s diesease. Tau, ApoE, neurotransmitters, there’s lots of other stuff that might cause this disease, but I want to focus on the final hail mary of the Amyloid hypothesis: that the drugs aren’t targeting amyloid beta correctly.

Because it’s honestly not the stupidest idea. One thing I learned when I researched this topic was the variety of forms and flavors that *any* protein can come in, and amyloid beta is no different.

When it’s normally synthesized, amyloid beta is an unfolded protein, called “intrinsically disordered” because it doesn’t take a defined shape. Through some unknown mechanism, multiple proteins can then cluster together to form aggregates, again of no defined shape. But these aggregates can fold into a very stable structure called a protofilament, and protofilaments can further stabilize into large, long filaments.

Each of these different structures of amyloid beta, from the monomers to the aggregates to the filaments, will have a slightly different overall shape and will bind slightly differently to antibodies. One reason given for why Aduheim causes more brain bleeds than Leqimbi is because Aduheim binds to the large filaments of amyloid beta, which are often found in the blood vessels of the brain. By siccing the body’s immune system on these large filaments, the blood vessels get caught in the crossfire, and bleeding often results.

Meanwhile other antibodies are more prone to target other forms of amyloid beta, such as the protofilaments or the amorphous aggregates.

But what amyloid beta does or what it looks like in its intrinsically disordered state is still unknown, and still very hard to study. All our techniques for studying small proteins like this require them to have a defined shape. Our instruments are like a camera, and amyloid beta is like a hummingbird flapping its wings too fast. We can’t see what those wings look like because they just look like a blur to our cameras.

So maybe we’ve been looking at the wrong forms of amyloid beta, rather than the filaments and protofilaments which are easy to extract, see, and study, maybe we should have been looking at the intrinsically disordered monomers all along, and we only studied the filaments and protofilaments because we were *able* to study them, not because they were actually important.

There’s a parable I heard in philosophy class about a drunk man looking for his keys. He keeps searching under the bright streetlight but can never seem to find them. But he’s only searching under the streetlight because *that’s where he can see*, he isn’t searching because *that’s where his keys are*.

Endlessly searching the only places you *can* search won’t necessarily bring results, you may instead need to alter your methods to search where you currently can’t. And if the Amyloid hypothesis is to be proven true, that will probably be necessary. Because right now I’ve heard nothing to write home about Aduheim and Leqimbi, many doctors won’t even proscribe them because the risk of brain bleeds is greater than the reward of very marginally slowing a patient’s mental decline, not even reversing the decline.

I no longer directly research Alzheimer’s disease, but the field is in a sad place when just 4 years ago it seemed like it was on the cusp of a breakthrough.

Sad but true, Mike Israetel is a sham

I watched this video doing a breakdown of Mike’s PhD thesis. His thesis is riddled with failures across every page. His research was shoddily done, with worthless statistics, and with technical errors littering every single paragraph that he wrote. The thesis proves that he cannot do research, cannot write research, and probably cannot *read* research either, since he misunderstands many of the papers and articles he actually cites.

This is sad to me, because as long-time readers know, I followed Israetel and took his advice seriously.

Why it matters: You may say that a thesis is just some bs he did in college, and has no bearing on his current position. But Mike Israetel’s entire brand is based around his PhD, that he is a sport *scientist* and not just a jacked dude. He mentions his PhD in his every ad and video, and so he wants viewers and customers to believe that he’s giving them *scientific advice*, which would be based on *research and testing* and not just vibes.

Yet Mike’s thesis is proof that not only can he not do research, nor write a research paper, he can’t even *read* a research paper as he misunderstands and misrepresents the papers he cites. He tells his readers that the science that *other people do* is saying something completely different than what it actually says, and that’s a big problem.

So Mike’s advice and supplements and apps aren’t actually based on science, they’re based on vibes just like every other gym bro on youtube.

Why else it matters: Some have said that Mike’s PhD program wasn’t like a “normal” program, and shouldn’t be held to the same standards. His program works closely with a lot of US olympic athletes, and it wasn’t focused on research that will help the broader public, but on learning the specific techniques to help the specific elite athletes that Mike worked with.

But if that’s the case then Mike has no business claiming that his PhD gives his knowledge applicable to anyone in his general audience. He isn’t giving advice that you, the listener should actually take, his supplements and programs won’t help you, specifically, instead they are tailored toward the special subset of people who are genuine olympic athletes, and who require a very different program to succeed than what an average 9-5er needs

Likewise, if Mike’s program wasn’t held to the standards of a “normal” PhD, then it should not have *awarded* him a PhD and he shouldn’t call himself doctor. The standards of a PhD, the reason it confers upon you the title of “Doctor” is supposed to be because it proves you have met the highest standards for science and scientific communication. That you are not only knowledgeable, but able to use and communicate your knowledge effectively to help the scientific community and educate the non-scientific community at large. But Mike’s thesis proves he just can’t do that.

He has not met the highest standards for science, and he has not even met a *high school level* standard for scientific communication. And yet he still trades on his title of “PhD,” using it as a crutch to gain legitimacy, and as a shield to deflect criticism. It matters that his thesis is worthless and that his PhD was substandard, because is means his crutch should be kicked out from under him, and his shield should be broken like the trash it is.

Finally some have said that many of these criticisms are “nitpicks.” But it matters because a PhD-level of research is supposed to be held to the highest standard of quality. You aren’t supposed to publish something without feeling certain that you can defend its integrity and its conclusions, and yet it is clear Mike’s thesis was written without any thought whatsoever. If he had even re-read his thesis once, he would not have typos and data-fails across whole swaths of it.

I have had many typos in my own blog, but these are streams-of-consciousness posts that I usually type up and publish without a second read, I’m not acting like these are high quality research publications. Mike *is* claiming that his thesis is high quality, that’s the whole reason he got a PhD for it, so it being as shoddily researched, as shoddily written, and as completely absent of a point as it is really proves that he should never have been given a PhD in the first place.

So is that the end for my following of Mike Israetel? Will I stop doing weight workouts and go back to running, since everything he says about “how to lose weight” is clearly wrong?

No.

Mike’s research is crap, and it always did skeeve me out that he leaned so hard on his “Dr” label. I’ve never bought his app or his supplements, but that doesn’t mean I can’t take his advice. Most of what he says is the same as what my *real* doctor has told me with regards to losing weight. And while his PhD is bogus it’s clear he’s taken a few undergraduate level science classes and is more knowledgeable than most of the gym bros with a youtube channel.

Ultimately his advice is probably fine on the whole. The low-level advice he gives is mostly the same as what you’ll hear from non-cranks, and the high-level advice he gives is mostly his personal opinions like any other influencer. He’s probably correct in the broad strokes that weight-lifting and caloric deficits are the best way to lose weight. And he’s probably correct that you should focus on exercises that improve your “strength” and ignore exercises that improve your “balance” unless you have an inherent balancing issue you need to improve on. He’s probably also right that the hysteria around Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs is overblown, and that if they help you lose weight you should go ahead and use them. As he says: it’s ok to save your willpower for other parts of your life.

But I have no reason to believe his specific advice around high level concepts like training to failure, periodization, muscle group activation, etc. If you don’t know what those are, then it’s a good idea to ignore what he says about them and just focus on lifting and (if you’re overweight), cutting calories.

I don’t think Mike is a complete idiot who should be ignored entirely. I think he’s a hustler like any other influencer and if the things he says work for you, then do them. But he’s not backed by science like he claims he is, so ignore any of his ramblings if they don’t work for you. Talk to your doctor instead, or an *actual* exercise scientist, although if Mike’s PhD thesis is “the norm” for that discipline, then most exercise scientists aren’t really scientists at all.

I’ve long lamented that the fitness and sports landscape is overrun by bro-science and dude-logic. It’s ruled by the kinds of shoddy science and appeals to tradition that we would normally call “old wives’ tales.” But when a jacked dude says something crazy, like “you should lie upside down to regain your breath so that your blood rushes to your lungs,” a lot of people might say “well he’s jacked, he must know *something*.”

I had thought Mike Isratel was an escape from the wider landscape, and that he was perhaps a trendsetter for actual science to creep into this mess. But it seems he’s just another grifter trying to get rich. Ah well, such is life.

What does it mean to think? 

It may surprise you to know, but I was once a philosopher.  To be more accurate, I was once a clueless college student who thought “philosophy” would be a good major.  I eventually switched to a science major, but not before I took more philosophy classes than most folks ever intend to. 

A concept that was boring back then, but relavent now, is that of the “Chinese Room.”  John Searle devised this thought experiment to prove that machines cannot actually think, even if they pass Turing Tests.  The idea goes something like this: 

Say we produce a computer program which takes in Chinese Language inputs and returns Chinese Language outputs, outputs which any speaker of Chinese can read and understand.  These outputs would be logical responses to whatever inputs are given, such that the answers would pass a Turing Test if given in Chinese.  Through these inputs and outputs, this computer can hold a conversation entirely in Chinese, and we might describe it as being “fluent” in Chinese, or even say it can “think” in Chinese. 

But a computer program is fundamentally a series of mathematical operations, “ones and zeros” as we say.  The Chinese characters which are taken in will be converted to binary numbers, and mathamatical operations will be performed on those numbers to create an output in binary numbers, which more operations will then turn from binary numbers back into Chinese characters.   

The math and conversions done by the computer must be finite in scope, because no program can be infinite.  So in theory all that math and conversions can themselves be written down as rules and functions in several (very long) books, such that any person can follow along and perform the operations themselves.  So a person could use the rules and function in these books to: 1.) take in a series of Chinese characters, 2.) convert the Chinese to binary, 3.) perform mathamatical operations to create a binary output, and 4.) convert that binary output back into Chinese. 

Now comes the “Chinese Room” experiment.  Take John Searle and place him in a room with all these books described above. John sits in this room and recieves prompts in Chinese.  He follows the rules of the books and produces an output in Chinese.  John doesn’t know Chinese himself, but he fools any speaker/reader into believing he does.  The question is: is this truly a demenstration of “intelligence” in Chinese?  John says no. 

It should be restated  that the original computer program could pass a Turing Test in Chinese, so it stands to reason that John can also pass such a test using the Chinese Room.  But John himself doesn’t know Chinese, so it’s ridiculous to say (says John) that passing this Turing Test demonstrates “intelligence.”   

One natural response is to say that “the room as a whole” knows Chinese, but John pushed back against this.  The Chinese Room only has instructions in it, it cannot take action on its own, therefore it cannot be said to “know” anything.  John doesn’t know Chinese, and only follows written instructions, the room doesn’t know Chinese, in fact it doesn’t “know” anything.  Two things which don’t know Chinese cannot add up to one thing that does, right? 

But here is where John and I differ, because while I’m certainly not the first one to argue so, I would say that the real answer to the Chinese Room problem is either that “yes, the room does know Chinese” or “it is impossible to define what “knowing” even is.” 

Let’s take John out of his Chinese Room and put him into a brain.  Let’s shrink him down to the size of a neuron, and place him in a new room hooked up to many other neurons.  John now receives chemical signals delivered from the neurons behind him.  His new room has a new set of books which tell him what mathematical operations to perform based on those signals.  And he uses that math to create new signals which he sends on to the neurons in front of him.  In this way he can act like a neuron in the dense neural network that is the brain. 

Now let’s say that our shrunken down John-neuron is actually in my brain, and he’s replaced one of my neurons.  I actually do speak Chinese.  And if John can process chemical signals as fast as a neuron can, I would be able to speak Chinese just as well as I can.  Certainly we’d still say that John doesn’t speak Chinese, and it’s hard to argue that the room as a whole speaks Chinese (it’s just  replacing a neuron after all).  But I definitely speak Chinese, and I like to think I’m intelligent.  So where then, does this intelligence come from? 

In fact every single neuron in my brain could be replaced with a John-neuron, each one of which is now a room full of mathematical rules and functions, each one of which takes in a signal, does math, and gives an input to the neurons further down the line.  And if al these John-neurons can act as fast as my neurons, they could all do the job of my brain, which contains all of my knowledge and intelligence, even though John himself (and his many rooms) know nothing about me.   

Or instead each one of my neurons could be examined in detail and turned into a mathematical operation.  “If you recieve these specific impulses, give this output.”  A neuron can only take finitely many actions, and all the actions of a neuron can be defined purely mathematically (if we believe in realism).   

Thus every single neuron of my brain could be represented mathematically, their actions forming a complete mathematical function, and yet again all these mathematical operations and functions could be written down on books to be placed in a room for John to sit in.  Sitting in that room, John would be able to take in any input and respond to it just as I would, and that includes taking in Chinese inputs and responding in Chinese.  

You may notice that I’m not really disproving John’s original premise of the Chinese Room, instead I’m just trying to point out an absurdity of it.  It is difficult to even say where knowledge begins in the first place.   

John asserts that the Chinese room is just books with instructions, it cannot be said to “know” anything.  And so if John doesn’t know Chinese, and the Room doesn’t know Chinese, then you cannot say that John-plus-the-Room knows Chinese either, where does this knowledge come from? 

But in the same sense none of my neurons “knows” anything, they are simply chemical instructions that respond to chemical inputs and create chemical outputs.  Yet surely I can be said to “know” something?  At the very least (as Decarte once said) can’t I Know that I Am? 

And replacing any neuron with a little machine doing a neuron’s job doesn’t change anything, the neural net of my brain still works so long as the neuron (from the outside) is fundementally indistinguishable from a “real” neuron, just as John’s Chinese Room (from the outside) is fundementally indistinguishable from a “real” knower of Chinese. 

So how do many things that don’t know anything sum up to something that does?  John’s Chinese Room  is really just asking this very question.  John doesn’t have an answer to this question, and neither do I.  But because John can’t answer the question, he decides that the answer is “it doesn’t,” and I don’t agree with that.   

When I first heard about the Chinese room my answer was that “obviously John *can’t* fool people into thinking he knows Chinese, if he has to do all that math and calculations to produce an output, then any speaker will realize that he isn’t answering fast enough to actually be fluent.”  My teacher responded that we should assume John can do the math and stuff arbitrarily fast.  But that answer really just brings me back to my little idea about neurons from above, if John can do stuff arbitrarily fast, then he could also take on the job of any neuron using a set of rules just as he could take on the job of a Chinese-knower. 

And so really the question just comes back to “where does knowledge begin.”  It’s an interesting question to raise, but raising the question doesn’t provide an answer.  John tries at a proof-by-contradiction by saying that the Room and John don’t know Chinese individually, so you cannot say that together they know Chinese.  I respond by saying that none of my individual neurons know Chinese, yet taken together they (meaning “I”) do indeed know Chinese.  I don’t agree that he’s created an actual contradiction here, so I don’t agree with his conclusion. 

I don’t know where knowledge comes from, but I disagree with John that his Chinese Room thought experiment disproves the idea that “knowledge” underlies the Turing Test. Maybe John is right and the Turing Test isn’t useful, but he needs more than the Chinese Room to prove that.

Ultimately this post has been a huge waste of time, like any good philosophy.  But I think wasting time is sometimes important and I hope you’d had as much fun reading this as I had writing it.  Until next time. 

Declaring victory on my Twitter prediction, conceding defeat on self-driving cars

I’ve made a few predictions over the years here, and I want to talk about two of them.

I’m declaring victory in saying that 2022 was *not* the Year Twitter Died. It was an extremely broad opinion in the left-of-center spaces that Musk was a terrible CEO, that firing so much Twitter staff would destroy the company, that it would be dead and overtaken very soon. I can concede the first one, the second two are clearly false.

The evidence from history has shown that firing most of Twitter’s staff has *not* led to mass outages, mass hacks, or the death of twitter’s infrastructure. It may seem like I’m debating a strawman, but it’s difficult to really convey the ridiculous hysteria I saw, with some claiming that Twitter would soon be dead and abandoned as newer versions of most popular browsers wouldn’t be able to access it. Likewise it was claimed that the servers would be insecure and claimed by botnets, and would thus get blocked by any sane browser protection. None of that has happened, Twitter runs just as it did in 2021. It is no less secure and it not blocked by most browsers.

Nor has the mass exodus of users really occurred. Some people think it has because they live in a bubble, but Mastodon was never going to replace Twitter and Bluesky is losing users. And regardless of your opinions on that, the numbers don’t lie.

I’ve said before that I used to be part of a community that routinely though Musk’s sky was falling. Every Tesla delay would be the moment that *finally* killed the company, every year would be when NASA *finally* kicked SpaceX to the curb, every failed Musk promise would *finally* make people stop listening to him. You’ve heard of fandoms, I was in a hatedom.

But I learned that all of that was motivated reasoning. EVs aren’t actually super easy, and that’s the reason Ford and GM utterly failed to build any. It’s not that Musk was lucky and would soon be steamrolled by the Big Boys, Musk was smart (and lucky) and the Big Boys wet their Big Boy pants and have stilled utterly failed in the EV market despite billions of dollars in free government money.

Did Musk receive free government money? Not targeted money no, any car company on earth could have benefited from the USA/California EV tax credits, it’s just that the Detroit automakers didn’t make EVs. Then they got handed targeted free money, and they still failed to make EVs.

NASA (and the ESA, and JAXA, and CNSA) haven’t managed to replicate SpaceX’s success in low-cost re-usable rockets sending thousands of satellites into orbit. So now *another* Musk property, Starlink, is the primary way that rural folk can get broadband, because Biden’s billions utterly failed to build any rural broadband.

And of course while Musk has turned most of the left against him, he has turned much of the right for him, which is generally what happens when you switch parties. And now that he’s left Trump, some of the left want to coax him back. Clearly people still listen to him even if you and I do not.

So I was very wrong 10 years ago about Elon Musk being the anti-Midas, but I learned my lesson and started stepping out of my bubble. I was right 3 years ago when I said Twitter isn’t dying, and everything I said still rings true. Big companies still use Twitter because it’s their best way to mass-blast their message to everyone in an age when TV is dying and more people block ads with their browser. The same reason people prefer Bluesky (curate your feed, never see what you don’t want to see) is the same reason Wendy’s, Barstool Sports, and Kendrick Lamar prefer Twitter. They want their message, their brand, to show up in your feed even if you don’t want to see it. It’s advertising that isn’t labeled as an ad.

So that’s what I was right about, now I’m going to write a lot *less* about what I was wrong about, because I hate being wrong.

I was wrong about how difficult it would be to get self-driving cars on all roads. In 2022 I clowned on a 2015 prediction that said self-driving cars would be on every road by 2020. Well it’s 2025, and I’ll be honest 5 years late isn’t that terrible.

At the time I thought that there was a *political-legal* barrier that would need to be overcome: how do you handle insurance of a self-driving car? No system is perfect and if there’s a defect in the LIDAR detector or just a bug in the system, a car *can* cause damage. And if it does, does Google pay the victim, or the passenger, or what? Insurance is a messy, expensive system, split into 50 different systems here in America, and I thought without some new insurance legislation (such as unifying the insurance systems or just creating more clarity regarding self-driving cars), that the companies would realize they couldn’t roll these out without massive risk and headaches.

I was wrong, I’ve now seen waymos in every city I’ve been to.

So it seems the insurance problems weren’t insurmountable, and the problem was less hard then I thought. You can read my thoughts about how hard I *thought* those problems were, but to be honest I was wrong.