Show notes
Really enjoyed chatting with Michael Nielsen about how we recognize scientific progress. It's especially relevant for closing the RL verification loop for scientific discovery. But it's also a surprisingly mysterious and elusive question when you look at the history of human science.
Highlighted moments
Copernicus actually had to add extra epicycles. It had more epicycles in the Ptolemaic model because he had this bias that, you know, the Earth should go in a perfect circle in equal time.
“the scientific community adopted what we, in retrospect, consider the more correct interpretation before it was actually empirically or experimentally shown to be preferred.”
“computer science basically got started in the 1930s when Turing and church and so on just laid down what the theory of everything was they just said here's how computation works and then we've spent 90 odd years since then just exploring consequences of that”
“you can't speculate with a bunch of chimpanzees about what it would be like to have language”
Transcript
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