As someone who finds chess problems interesting (I'm bad at them), they're really a third sort of thing. In that good chess problems are rarely taken from live play, they're a specific sort of thing which follows its own logic.
Good ones are never randomly generated, however. Also, the skill doesn't fully transfer in either direction between live play and solving chess problems. Definitely not reconstructing the prior state of the board, since there's nothing there to reconstruct.
So yes, everything Hikaru was saying there makes sense to me, but I don't think your last sentence follows from it. Good chess problems come from good chess problem authors (interestingly this included Vladimir Nabokov), they aren't random, but they rarely come from games, and tickle a different part of the brain from live play.
Dang, it's a serious problem when discussions like this result in any serious attempts to engage from one side getting flagged to death.
That's what happens here, and on any news involving the Gaza War, for quite some time. To someone who doesn't use [showdead] this creates an impression of partiality in this community which is not borne out by reality.
Which makes Hacker News appear complicit in supporting that point of view.
If you're going to keep overriding the flag mechanism and letting these posts hit the front page, you need to disable flagging of individual posts except by you or another moderator (if there is one?) after manual review. The status quo is unfair.
> I see that many people are confused [...] by my take that math talent isn't primarily a matter of genes
Speaking only for myself, I'm not confused at all. Rather I vigorously disagree with this statement, and think that stumping for this counterfactual premise leads to cruel behavior towards children (in particular) who plainly do not have what it takes to learn, for example and in particular, algebra.
> In other words: the people who run the mathematical 100m in under a second don't think it's because of their genes.
This is not their subject of expertise, and they are simply wrong. Why? Simpson's Paradox, ironically.
I think you really are confused. You are mistakenly equating "non-primarily genetic" with "easily teachable".
The story is much more complex than "if it's not genetic then everybody should get it". It's quite cruel to assume that if you don't get math today you'll never get it, and there are tons of documented counter-examples of kids who didn't get it at all who end up becoming way above average.
If you think that Descartes, Newton, Einstein, Feynman, Grothendieck (to just cite a few) are all equally misled on their own account because of Simpson's Paradox, which statistical result will to bring to the table to justify that YOU are right?
By the way, Stanislas Dehaene, one of the leading researchers on the neuroscience of mathematical cognition, is also on my side.
When you write a comment here, you're talking not simply (or even primarily) to the person you're responding to, but also to the rest of the community. Have you considered what value there might be, or not be, in a comment like this?
We are extraordinarily fortunate to be taken seriously enough as a community for the primary sources on stories like this to come talk to us directly. I'd ask, as a neighbor of yours in this community, that you not (rhetorically) chase those people away.
That's a fair ask, that post was not one of my better moments. As much as I dislike the rhetorical tactic wielded with "everyone who doesn't agree with me is simply confused", a one-sentence tell off does nothing to counter it, and just makes me look like a jerk. Which I was.
The evidence of your confusion is that you cited one sentence in their comment but ignored the next sentence which provide the justification in abstract for that sentence. Therefore your basic reading comprehension skills are confused. It easier to disagree vigorously but when you do that it clouds your analytic ability to follow the actual arguments given in that way.
It's a matter of the definition. The general factor of intelligence, which is measured through various somewhat lossy proxies like IQ tests, is exactly the degree to which someone exceeds expectation on all cognitive tasks (or vice versa).
The interesting finding is that this universal correlation is strong, real, and durable. Of course people in general have cognitive domains where they function better or worse than their g factor indicates, and that's before we get into the fact that intellectual task performance is strongly predicated on knowledge and practice, which is difficult to control for outside of tests designed (successfully, I must add) to do so.
Simpson's Paradox[0] is the reason people are so easily seduced by the tempting, but dead wrong, illusion that humans are in any sense equal in their innate capacity for anything.
Because it turns out that, in the NBA, height does not correspond with ability! This of course makes sense, because all the players are filtered by being NBA professional basketballers. A shorter player simply has more exceptional ability in another dimension, be that dodging reflex, ability to visualize and then hit a ball trajectory from the three point line, and so on. Conversely, a very tall player is inherently useful for blocking, and doesn't have to be as objectively good at basketball in order to be a valuable teammate.
Despite this lack of correlation, when you look at an NBA team you see a bunch of very tall fellows indeed. Simpson's Paradox.
We see the same thing in intellectual pursuits. "I'm not nearly as smart as the smartest programmer I know, but I get promoted at work so I must be doing something right. Therefore anyone could do this, they just have to work hard like I did". Nope. You've already been selected into "professional programmer", this logic doesn't work.
Exactly. Just as we also see the sun rise each morning.
That, however, does not imply one predicts that the sun will forever rise each morning. In fact, we know that at some point the sun will no longer rise in the morning. But we see the sun rise each morning, and we see a new cambrian idea or core technology every 5-10 years.
> I'm not the one conflating anything here.
That's fair. Conflation implies intent. Whereas you are just confused.
My point is that there’s no guarantee this tech explosion will continue. Your logic appears to be “it has, so it will, until it doesn’t”, which… okay? All of your comments so far feel like you’re disagreeing with me just because you feel like being argumentative rather than because you have something useful to say.
Kerosene can be used to make a thermobaric bomb in the right conditions. It’s just just trickier to actually do than detonating TNT. Notably, TNT can certainly help accomplish making a thermobaric bomb.
Either way, the cargo capacity by weight for a 747 is still the same.
It would be one hell of a show. Like a tactical nuke, probably.
Edit: did the math because I was curious. A fully fueled 747 contains approximately 9 trillion joules of energy worth of fuel (not counting any payload, or the energy in its aluminum fuselage - which would be significant). A ton of TNT equivalent is 4.181 gigajoules. So the fuel load of a 747, if properly detonated, would be “equivalent” to a 2KT nuclear bomb.
A 747 has a maximum payload capacity of an additional 100-120 tons.
There's a lot of middle ground here. I suspect what's most accurate is "let's push the booster out of envelope a bit, if we get really nice numbers we'll go for the chopsticks landing, otherwise it's into the drink".
In other words, they were optimistic enough to think that another upright landing was within the realm of possibility, while also deliberately doing things which made that outcome less likely, to get the data they need.
If that's true, I wouldn't characterize it as a second attempt at a chopstick land, that would just be a stretch goal. Who knows if it is, but it's consistent with how SpaceX operates.
No, but I'm neither omniscient nor able to see into the future. It's not clear to me that the sentence you're referring to had been posted 18 hours ago, and in any case, I hadn't seen it.
So to compare Dostoevsky to Kipling is high praise!
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