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| ▲ | emodendroket 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Does anyone say "we don't know if Einstein could do this because we were really close or because he was really smart?" It turns out my reading is somewhat topical. I've been reading Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and of the things he takes great pains to argue (I was not quite anticipating how much I'd be trying to recall my high school science classes to make sense of his account of various experiments) is that the development toward the atomic bomb was more or less inexorable and if at any point someone said "this is too far; let's stop here" there would be others to take his place. So, maybe, to answer your question. |
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| ▲ | twoodfin 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It’s been a while since I read it, but I recall Rhodes’ point being that once the fundamentals of fission in heavy elements were validated, making a working bomb was no longer primarily a question of science, but one of engineering. |
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| ▲ | bmacho 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Does anyone say "we don't know if Einstein could do this because we were really close or because he was really smart? Yes. It is certainly a question if Einstein is one of the smartest guy ever lived or all of his discoveries were already in the Zeitgeist, and would have been discovered by someone else in ~5 years. |
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| ▲ | cyberax 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Both can be true? Einstein was smart and put several disjointed things together. It's amazing that one person could do so much, from explaining the Brownian motion to explaining the photoeffect. But I think that all these would have happened within _years_ anyway. |
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| ▲ | echoangle 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > Does anyone say "we don't know if Einstein could do this because we were really close or because he was really smart?" Kind of, how long would it have realistically taken for someone else (also really smart) to come up with the same thing if Einstein wouldn't have been there? |
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| ▲ | pegasus 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | But you're not actually questioning whether he was "really smart". Which was what GP was questioning. Sure, you can try to quantify the level of smarts, but you can't still call it a "stochastic parrot" anymore, just like you won't respond to Einstein's achievements, "Ah well, in the end I'm still not sure he's actually smart, like I am for example. Could just be that he's just dumbly but systematically going through all options, working it out step by step, nothing I couldn't achieve (or even better, program a computer to do) if I'd put my mind to it." I personally doubt that this would work. I don't think these systems can achieve truly ground-breaking, paradigm-shifting work. The homeworld of these systems is the corpus of text on which it was trained, in the same way as ours is physical reality. Their access to this reality is always secondary, already distorted by the imperfections of human knowledge. | |
| ▲ | jaggederest 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well, we know many watershed moments in history were more a matter of situation than the specific person - an individual genius might move things by a decade or two, but in general the difference is marginal. True bolt-out-of-the-blue developments are uncommon, though all the more impressive for that fact, I think. |
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