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Cake day: November 25th, 2023

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  • FWIW, I think he’s wrong in the causation here. During the heyday of the British Empire history was one of the high status subjects to study, and they wrote it in very plain language. Physics on the other hand was seen as mostly pointless philosophy, and in the early 19th century astronomy was a field so low in status that it was dominated by women.

    I would say the causation is money giving the field status, and lack of money hollowing out status. Low status makes the untrained think they can do it as well as the trained. You had to study history and master it’s language to make a career as a colonial administrator, therefore the field was high status. As soon as money starts really flowing into physics, the status goes up, even surpassing chemistry which had been the highest status (and thus also manliest) science.

    If one wants to look at the decline of status of academia, I recommend as a starting point Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, that goes a fair bit into the post war status of academia versus business men.

    I think the humanities were merely the weak point in lowering the status of academia in favour of the business men.
















  • The ideas are in general good.

    I think the long term cost argument could be strengthen by saying something about DeepSeeks claims to run much cheaper. If there is anything to say about that, I have not kept track.

    The ML/LLM split argument might benefit from being beefed up. I saw a funny post on Tumblr (so good luck finding that again) about pigeons being taught to identify cancer cells (a thing, according to the post, I haven’t verified) and how while that is a thing you wouldn’t leap to putting a pigeon in charge of checking CVs and recommending hires. The post was funnier, but it got to the critical point of what statistical relationships reasonably can be used for and what it can’t, which becomes obvious when it is a pigeon instead of a machine. Ah well, you can beef it up in a later post or maybe you intended to link an already existing one. There is a value in being consise instead of rambling like I am doing here.