It is a massive failure of science communication that so many educated people don't understand how enormously successful the "hard" sciences are. From particle physics up to the scale of molecular biology, empiricism just works

Oh, wow, I'm actually earlier than I had thought.

e.g.

Excited to share our  #ICML2024 paper "Grokking Group Multiplication with Cosets" with some lovely co-authors who aren't on Bluesky! We reverse engineered neural networks that perfectly learned to multiply elements of the symmetric groups S5 & S6
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Here it is. For some reason my copy-paste isn't working with this pdf. It's from page 6
jmc.stanford.edu/artificial-i...

Most people have an impoverished understanding of what computation is. I don't think it's degrading to suggest that our minds are in some way computational, I'm in awe of what computation can achieve and how fundamental it appears to be to the universe

Case in point, a recent post on bsky.app . There cannot be a mechanistic account of what humans do, because then we would just be machines. We would no longer be special, no longer worthwhile. It's unthinkable