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Home — hermiene.net is a personal blog at hermiene.net about philosophy, culture and writing. Since 2011, 40 different Hacker News readers have linked it 56 times, most often “The Relativity of Wrong (1988)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- The Relativity of Wrong (1988)16 people · 30 mentions · first linked 2019-11-29
- The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2011-04-27
- I Have No Mouth and I Must Screem by Harlan Ellison3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-01-27
- Size and Shape2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-08-27
- Mr. X by Carl Sagan (insights through cannabis)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-04-29
What Hacker News says?
> because things like this are not naturally equal. Really? Seems to me like no one has the singular line on reality, and everyone's perceptions are uniquely and contextually their own. Wrong is relative: https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html But it seems certain that we're all wrong about something. The brain does not contain enough bits to accurately represent reality.
Comment linking /essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
on “The Llama 4 herd”Submitted The Relativity of Wrong (1988) as a story · 100 points
HN discussionhttp://hermiene.net/short-stories/i_have_no_mouth.html
Comment linking /short-stories/i_have_no_mouth.html
on “Introducing OpenAI”Submitted The Relativity of Wrong (1989) as a story · 27 points
HN discussion> I'm sure that is the same reason why many once people believed the earth was flat, or that the earth was at the center of the universe. Observably at the time, the earth was flat, and then you got better ways to observe it, and it was spherical. Then you got even better ways, and now it's an oblate spheroid. That doesn't negate the science used before, but it gets more correct each iteration. Asimov described this…
Comment linking /essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
on “Heart-disease risk soars after Covid, even with a mild case”Submitted The Relativity of Wrong (1989) as a story · 17 points
HN discussionLegalizing weed didn't do that. There's always been an opinion (argument?) that driving high is fine. Carl Sagan even discusses it in Mr. X (1969): > I have mentioned that in the cannabis experience there is a part of your mind that remains a dispassionate observer, who is able to take you down in a hurry if need be. I have on a few occasions been forced to drive in heavy traffic when high. I’ve negotiated it with n…
Comment linking /essays-trans/mr_x.html
on “California Bill to Decriminalize Psychedelics Is Approved by Senate”Submitted The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov as a story · 14 points
HN discussionI think you're missing the core component. We care __WHY__ the theorem is true. To be honest, the __IF__ part matters a lot less. The thing is that the underlying reasoning (the logic) is what provides real insights. This is how we recognize other problems that are similar or even identical. The steps in between are just as important, and often more important. I'll give an example from physics. (If you're unsatisfie…
Comment linking /essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
on “The cultural divide between mathematics and AI”Submitted The Relativity of Wrong, by Isaac Asimov as a story · 13 points
HN discussion> The fact that we have figured out how to translate language into something a computer can "understand" should thrill linguists. I think they are really excited by this. There seems no deficiency of linguists using these machines. But I think it is important to distinguish the ability to understand language and translate it. Enough that you yourself put quotes around "understanding". This can often be a challenge f…
Comment linking /essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
on “Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)”Submitted Mr. X by Carl Sagan (insights through cannabis) as a story · 10 points
HN discussion> Accuracy and precision is useful. If Maslow's hierarchy of needs is neither, I question how useful it truly is. https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
Comment linking /essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
on “Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for social sciences”Submitted Is Google Making Us Stupid? (2008) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionPeople seem to miss this a lot, yet we could claim every single thing is "undefined". Even physics is undefined. There's no grand theory of everything. But we still have some really good models. Our models now are a lot better than they were 100 years ago and even more than the 100 years before that and so on. I abhor people who make the claim that words they didn't spend the time to understand are meaningless simpl…
Comment linking /literature/essays/relativity-of-wrong
on “Simple circuits can create complex behaviors”Submitted A Very Interesting Personal Website as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSee: https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html We aren't talking about the difference between electricity and gas. We are talking about the difference between a fast cellular network and slightly faster cellular network.
Comment linking /essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
on “Pentagon official: FCC decision on 5G threatens GPS, national security”Submitted I Have No Mouth and I Must Screem by Harlan Ellison as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat link omits some parts of the essay. Complete version here: http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
Comment linking /essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
on “What a Newfound Kingdom Means for the Tree of Life”Submitted Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI'm a researcher who's made one of the best face generators. I'd like to address your questions and discuss a larger more critical point. I too have ethical concerns. There are upsides though. It is a powerful tool for image and video editing (for swapping, you still need a generator on the backbone)[0]. It is a powerful tool for compression and upsampling (your generative model __is__ a compression of (a subset of)…
Comment linking /essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
on “Deep Live Cam: Real-time face swapping and one-click video deepfake tool”Submitted The Relativity of Wrong (Isaac Asimov) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAs a ML researcher and a degree holding physicist, I'm really hesitant to use the words "understanding" and "describing" (much less hesitant) around these models. I don't find the language helpful and think it's mostly hateful tbh. The reason we use math in physics is because of its specificity. The same reason coding is so hard [0,1]. I think people aren't giving themselves enough credit here for how much they (you…
Comment linking /essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
on “Qwen VLo: From “Understanding” the World to “Depicting” It”Submitted Isaac Asimov: The Modern Demonology as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Pure vision will never be enough because it does not contain information Say it louder for those in the back! But actually there's more to this that makes the problem even harder! Lack of sensors is just the beginning. There's well known results in physics that: You cannot create causal models through observation alone. This is a real pain point for these vision world models and most people I talk to (including a…
Comment linking /essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
on “We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube”Submitted Size and Shape as a story · 1 points
HN discussion(I apologize, this is a bit long and a bit disorganized) > As merely a programmer I hope you don't see my comment as placing myself as "better than thou". We have different skillsets, that's all. > You mentioned challenging your assumptions. How often does a researcher change their guarantees? I'm not quite sure how to answer this tbh. Because I don't know what you mean. I'll reference Andrew Gelman on this one[0],…
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on “A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine”Submitted Men Are Different as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Everybody in the history of humans has said the latest technology is the best model for how a brain works. There used to be a piston model for the brain. Is this the same mistake as in "The Relativity of Wrong" [1]? > people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proven to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about out modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong.…
Comment linking /essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
on “An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience”Submitted The Median Isn't The Message as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
