• @blakestaceyA
    link
    English
    38
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    Sneers from r/physics! First up, this comment by napqe:

    I’m sorry, but this is like awarding the nobel prize for literature to Xerox/HP/Brother for “improvements to printing”.

    And in the same thread, from GustapheOfficial:

    Last year’s prize was too relevant, they had to stagger the physics by a year.

    We also have this by M1st_:

    What’s next? Someone gets a Nobel prize for another algorithm that numerically solves differential equations??

    Finally, we’ve the title of this thread, by TheSkells:

    Yeah, “physics”

  • @khalid_salad
    link
    English
    362 months ago

    So Geoffrey Hinton is a total dork.

    Hopefully, [this Nobel Prize] will make me more credible when I say these things really do understand what they’re saying. [There] is a whole school of linguistics that comes from Chomsky that thinks it’s nonsense to say these things understand language. That school is wrong. Neural nets are much better at processing language than anything produced by the Chomsky school of linguistics.

    • @V0ldek
      link
      English
      322 months ago

      Neural nets are much better at processing language than anything produced by the Chomsky school of linguistics.

      Hey mate, did you get your PhD or a fucking Nobel in linguistics by any chance? No? Just talking about shit you apparently have no idea about?

      I didn’t even know you could be a crank about linguistics, that’s pretty amazing. What other otherwise really boring fields are you going to tackle, geodesy?

        • @khalid_salad
          link
          English
          232 months ago

          Everybody knows that all languages derive from ULTRAFRENCH.

        • @acausal_masochist
          link
          English
          182 months ago

          You give me a word, any word, and I show you how the root of that word is Greek.

            • @bitofhope
              link
              English
              202 months ago

              PIE was just people wanting to eventually speak Greek but they had yet to figure out how, so they were just working backwards little by little trying to make their language more like Greek.

        • @V0ldek
          link
          English
          12
          edit-2
          2 months ago

          like people thinking that all languages come from turkish

          This is amazing, I fucking love this. People striving to create the lowest stakes possible conspiracy. I struggle to think of something that would have less impact on the world no matter it were true or false.

          A shadowy cabal of powerful people guarding the secret of “actually, it was [rolls die] Turkish people who invented [rolls another die] language!”

            • @V0ldek
              link
              English
              62 months ago

              Okay sure, but this is comical. A Turkish nationalist will be a Turkish nationalist with or without this idea. It’s the equivalent of saying that Turkish people have naturally less odorous farts and thus TURKIYE SHALL RULE THE WORLD!

              • @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
                link
                fedilink
                English
                132 months ago

                okay but this idea was kinda central to modern turkish nationalism. see, kurds are not distinct people, they just speak turkish but wrong (heard anything similar recently?) also this is part of the reason why standard turkish is actual common language in turkey

                • flere-imsaho
                  link
                  English
                  31 month ago

                  oh, it’s like russia’s idea of ukrainian and belarussian. fucking orphans of the empires…

          • @Soyweiser
            link
            English
            92 months ago

            Funny you say that, as it was the Dutch who invented dice.

      • @Soyweiser
        link
        English
        212 months ago

        Hey mate, did you get your PhD or a fucking Nobel in linguistics by any chance?

        Early onset Nobel disease.

        • @V0ldek
          link
          English
          192 months ago

          A popular meme on social media makes a series of allegations about the musical tune pitch A=432Hz and A=440Hz, including that the latter was a standard imposed by the Nazis to manipulate their enemies.

          spittake

          Multiple experts told Reuters these allegations are unfounded.

          NO WAY

          Thanks Reuters.

          • @selfA
            link
            English
            162 months ago

            since 1953 all music has been tuned to 440Hz. This frequency has NO SCIENTIFIC RELATIONSHIP with our universe and actually causes the brain to become agitated.

            fuck yes, this is the random all-caps crankery I get out of bed for! I love the idea that 440hz agitates the brain, but not in a scientific way (at least not for our universe?)

            • @selfA
              link
              English
              232 months ago

              since 1969 all computers have been running Unix. This operating system has NO SCIENTIFIC RELATIONSHIP with our universe and actually causes the brain to become agitated.

              • @V0ldek
                link
                English
                122 months ago

                This operating system has NO SCIENTIFIC RELATIONSHIP with our universe and actually causes the brain to become agitated.

                This but about Windows and unironically.

              • @bitofhope
                link
                English
                122 months ago

                I like my music the way I like my CPUs, 432 Hz.

            • @misterbngo
              link
              English
              13
              edit-2
              2 months ago

              This reminds me of when I was planning out a tubular bells project. there is an amount of crankery around various notes and I came across a series of videos about the various Cs and their use in healing or chakra alignment.

              When i went to buy some tuning forks I noted some more weird mysticism, but hey at least they produced a nice set of C notes.

    • David GerardOPMA
      link
      English
      272 months ago

      efficient move, getting the Nobel disease in before the Nobel itself

  • @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    362 months ago

    nobel committee went full on ai-brained this year, nobel prize in chemistry is for alphafold. they had three good years in a row, had to do something stupid ig

    • @froztbyte
      link
      English
      132 months ago

      lol that’s gonna age like milk

      • @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        14
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        i mean they still can give nobel prize in literature to chatgpt for extruding most text in unit of time

        this is not my field, but allegedly alphafold kinda works, but it’s also not ai and more pattern matching, something that google does expertly. i still don’t think that it’s gonna be very useful even that it does solve a hard problem

    • @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      10
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      half goes to david baker, you might remember him from rosetta@home thing. the other two people are from google deepmind

      i guess it’s one of these years when chemistry nobel goes to biologists, but now with layer of ai hype on top for some weird fucking reason

  • @fubarx@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    282 months ago

    Given how much money is being wasted invested in AI, they should have given them the Economics prize.

  • @gerikson
    link
    English
    252 months ago

    Repeating a comment I made in another forum here…


    The Nobel organization is basically all about PR, and while as the nominating body they’re nominally independent, the Royal Academy of Science knows on which side their bread is buttered. Having a prize adjacent to AI in the year of our LLM 2024 is a no-brainer.

    • @o7___o7
      link
      English
      172 months ago

      Having a prize adjacent to AI in the year of our LLM 2024 is a no-brainer.

      This works on multiple levels

  • @froztbyte
    link
    English
    222 months ago

    ah yes, the dynamite guy award show, a fine institution of the ages

    • @corbin
      link
      English
      52 months ago

      Lucky 10000: this integration started decades ago. You may have heard of “computational trinitarianism” or read Baez & Stay 2009. The current big listing of correspondences is called the computational trilogy. Don’t let the Nobel committee’s foolishness blind you to the genuine connections between computer science and physics.

  • @o7___o7
    link
    English
    172 months ago

    Hinton could be the first guy to win a Nobel and an Ignobel in the same year.

    • @o7___o7
      link
      English
      112 months ago

      From your linked post:

      also from their pov the statistical approach to machine learning was defined by abandoning the attempt to externalize the meaning of text. the cliche they used to refer to this was “the meaning of a word is the context in which it occurs.”

      Not an expert by any means, but this sounds like pagerank, but for language.

      • @sc_griffith
        link
        English
        10
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        there’s a similarity in the sense that they’re both ‘content free.’ pagerank didn’t care about what was on your site, only what your page linked to and what pages linked to you

        (past tense bc it’s unclear to me whether Google even uses pagerank at this point)

        they diverge pretty significantly in one way: pagerank is an algorithm motivated by pragmatic simplifications. discarding the information of content when ranking sites is only something you would do because using content is really hard. you can take the statistical approach to semantics in the same spirit, but you don’t have to… ai true believers are necessarily treating the maxim I referred to as a philosophical claim, something that addresses the ground truth of what words are

        • @o7___o7
          link
          English
          82 months ago

          ai true believers are necessarily treating the maxim I referred to as a philosophical claim, something that addresses the ground truth of what words are

          Thanks for breaking it down, I was missing this key bit!

      • @gerikson
        link
        English
        82 months ago

        To me it sounds like post-modernism.

  • @nightsky
    link
    English
    142 months ago

    Using tools from physics to create something that is popular but unrelated to physics is enough for the nobel prize in physics?

    So, if say a physicist creates a new recipe for the world’s greatest potato casserole, and it becomes popular everywhere, and they used some physics for creating the recipe to calculate the best heat distribution or whatever, then that’s enough?

    • David GerardOPMA
      link
      English
      132 months ago

      if there’s a massive potato casserole bubble

    • @diz
      link
      English
      72 months ago

      Maybe if the potato casserole is exploded in the microwave by another physicist, on his way to start a resonance cascade…

      (i’ll see myself out).

    • @diz
      link
      English
      3
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      Using tools from physics to create something that is popular but unrelated to physics is enough for the nobel prize in physics?

      If only, it’s not even that! Neither Boltzmann machines nor Hopfield networks led to anything used in the modern spam and deepfake generating AI, nor in image recognition AI, or the like. This is the kind of stuff that struggles to get above 60% accuracy on MNIST (hand written digits).

      Hinton went on to do some different stuff based on backpropagation and gradient descent, on newer computers than those who came up with it long before him, and so he got Turing Award for that, and it’s a wee bit controversial because of the whole “people doing it before, but on worse computers, and so they didn’t get any award” thing, but at least it is for work that is on the path leading to modern AI and not for work that is part of the vast list of things that just didn’t work and it’s extremely hard to explain why you would even think they would work in the first place.

  • @diz
    link
    English
    8
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    Nobel prize in Physics for attempting to use physics in AI but it didn’t really work very well and then one of the guys working on a better more pure mathematics approach that actually worked and got the Turing Award for the latter, but that’s not what the prize is for, while the other guy did some other work, but that is not what the prize is for. AI will solve all physics!!!111

  • raktheundead
    link
    fedilink
    72 months ago

    The Nobel Prize committee really seem to be trying hard to make this the worst set of awardees ever, aren’t they? All we need is another Kissinger-esque situation for the Peace Prize and a Handke-esque situation for the Literature prize and they’ll have disgraced the Nobel Prizes permanently.

    • @bitofhope
      link
      English
      52 months ago

      I was going to suggest Vitalik Buterin for the Fake Nobel of Economics as a bit, but the coiners already beat me to it.

      So my next choices for the award would be SBF or Bored Ape Yacht Club.

    • @diz
      link
      English
      32 months ago

      Then next year Hopfield and Hinton go back to Sweden, don’t tell king of Sweden anything, king of Sweden still gives them the Nobel Prize! King of Sweden now has conditioned reflex!