I’ve heard this a few times. Could you elaborate why? Surely at that point, less you are hired to a very senior role, you are going to get a very small equity % and a lot of the capitalisation growth has already been priced in? In exchange it is far less risky.
Do you just go for the market salary and treat the equity as a minor plus?
> I stopped reading his Substack because he was always trying to find a negative.
It’s a bit much, isn’t it? I think he’s just trying to counter the fairly dominant AI is the future of everything and in less than a year’s time it’ll be omniscient and we’ll all be living under it as our new God view though.
I’ve read the book under review and would recommend it.
Philosophy has always appealed to me but disappointed because it never seems to settle on answers. There’s a bit in the book where Kleene (I think?) is advising young academic philosophers to go into logic instead as at least there they’ll get answers.
Someone in the book describes philosophy’s truth value as less like scientific inquiry and more like poetry done in logical argument. That seemed like a potentially valuable way of looking at it.
I think this is the wrong conclusion. The issue is that "from no premises, come no conclusions" and philosophy has no internal mechanism to treat any premises as axiomatic. (Whereas, eg., the sciences treat empiricism, causes, experimentation, universal regularities, etc. all as axioms).
Science "has no answers" either if you deny its premises.
So all systems of "answers" are just systems where we find some set of propositions so nearly certain that we take them as axioms and hence believe what follows.
You can, and indeed should, do this with philosophy too. If you find that science has answers, then just take its premises as axiomatic -- and throw away all philosophy which denies them.
That arguments can be advanced against those premises has no epistemic status. Arguments can be advanced against any arguments. And move to "deny the premieses" is always available.
Sceptics regard this as interesting and important. It isnt. Knowledge, truth, belief, reality etc. are not set by what has arguments. The hidden premise to this scepticism is that "cognition & arugmentation are the foundation of knowledge & reality" -- deny this, and the whole manic schizophrenic enterprise disappears in a puff.
Philosophy’s real problem is that it spun off all its useful and productive branches. Science used to be part of philosophy; now it’s a separate discipline. Theology and psychology were branches of (meta)physics, and now they’re separate fields. Computer science has split from logic. Math is its own thing. Grammar split from logic ages ago. There’s very little left for philosophy outside unproductive questions of epistemology (“Are we brains in jars on a shelf?”) or ethical debates. All the real fruit now lies elsewhere.
I think this bares little relationship to research philosophy. Social epistemology, the logic of imagination, hyperinstensionality, computational theories of cognition, physical church-turing thesis, philosophy of physics, of mind, of...
There is a significant amount of question-answering going on.
That these answers come to be fundamental to other disciplines is the success of philosophy, and obvious. Those other disciplines are where philosophical premeses are taken as certain.
«In 1889, Charles H. Duell was the Commissioner of US patent office. He is widely quoted as having stated that the patent office would soon shrink in size, and eventually close, because…
“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”»
Does it not leave inaccessible vast swathes of philosophy where, almost by definition, science cannot contribute answers? Such as the nature of numbers and other metaphysical things.
I haven’t heard of the areas you mention in a sibling comment, so I’ll look them up. Do you find that you need to refocus attention to areas where scientific premises are useful as axioms so that progress can be made?
“From its earliest origins in ancient Greece, Western philosophy has gained its identity through a contrast with sophistry. If sophistry is non-rational, cynical, manipulative, then philosophy represents a rejection of it, by committing itself to rational, disinterested persuasion.”
The point of philosophy is to ask better questions, specifically questions that do not mystify the problem and thus perpetuate it. It's is not and has never been about answers. - love, a philospher
I have been doing the Math for ML course and would recommend.
I have UK A level math but not Further Math, so up to basic calculus. But I forgot most of it and so Math Academy has me going through a lot of the Math Foundation units along the way.
I was initially put off by the monthly price, as it is quite steep. The clincher is that about a year before starting Math Academy I had gone through the Open University’s MST124/125 textbooks (covering the same stuff as Foundations). Except even after a year I’d already forgotten most of it.
Math Academy learning feels much more robust, since it includes spaced reviews and regular tests. I record things in Anki but it’s useful to have regular practice questions too. I also use ChatGPT to spell out things and find it works well at this level.
Some things I’d like Math Academy to have:
- ability to skip lessons (I don’t want to spend ages going over symbolic integration again)
- a reference page to track unlocked material, maybe with Anki integration
- fewer multiple choice questions and more in depth problems
- proof-based math. I’m told this is coming but the degree-level courses have missed their estimated due dates.
I will definitely finish Math for ML and then do linear algebra and multivariate calculus. You’d still need a good textbook to do them rigorously, but I think Math Academy sets you up well.
Hi, I'm Alex, curriculum director at Math Academy.
Thanks for your comments. In response to the things you'd like us to have:
"ability to skip lessons" - we plan on introducing "mini-diagnostics" sometime soon, hopefully within the next few months. This will allow students to "place out" of certain content they know. The primary diagnostic assessment will have done most of the grunt work here, but mini-diagnostics can be used for fine-tuning the knowledge frontier.
"a reference page to track unlocked material" - This is an interesting idea that we can discuss.
"fewer multiple choice questions" - We're actively introducing "Free Response" across the entire curriculum. Complete coverage across all courses will likely take several months, maybe over one year. Many of our lower-grade students should be seeing lots of free-response questions already.
"more in-depth problems" - we have multipart problems in most courses. We plan to add many more. Introducing "challenge problems" into the curriculum is also something we have planned for the near future.
"proof-based math" - We plan on launching our "Methods of Proof" course within the next 6-8 weeks. This course is designed to introduce students to all fundamental concepts related to proof building: sets, logic, functions, relations, cardinality, proof by induction, direct proofs, counterexample, contrapositive, contradiction, and trivial and vacuous proofs, to name a few. Most of the content is already ready. We have a few technical challenges to overcome before it can be launched due to our new "proof" question format, but we have a clear idea of how these challenges are to be resolved, so 6-8 weeks is certainly realistic.
Reform the police, demilitarize the police, deescalation for police, stop police violence, accountability for police, teach cops to be kind, etc... Of course they're not "critic proof" - someone motivated to twist words will find a way. But they'll have to twist words, whereas now they just use their plain, literal, unambiguous meaning.
But there's a good reason why defund/abolish the police is sticking around - because a significant part of the activists do mean it [1] (ACAB didn't come from nowhere), and the moderate faction that doesn't mean it literally is unwilling to part from the radical faction that does.
Anyone supporting the moderate faction is in a thorny position - do they think the moderates will grow a spine and stand up to the radicals once they've achieved their goals, or will they continue to meekly let the radicals set the agenda?
[1] Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police [..] There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo. - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
Do you just go for the market salary and treat the equity as a minor plus?