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Philip Ball Profile picture
@philipcball
Jan 24, 2020 • 3 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
This sounds interesting and important, and also infuriating in what it exposes. The only way to ensure "truly free markets, ones which are not sabotaged by their most powerful participants", is by "robust regulation."
theguardian.com/books/2020/jan…
Put another way: those who clamor for "deregulated markets" basically want the freedom to undermine the very basis on which free markets supposedly achieve their efficiency - because that would damage the profit margins of financial institutions.
So what we're left with is economists mathematizing a fantasy (nothing new there), while chancers like Javid reap financial and political profit.

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More from @philipcball

Philip Ball Profile picture
Mar 11
I was asked this question today: As a materialist, why am I sceptical that, if a simulation of the human body were possible down to the atomic scale, it would not show genuine consciousness? Articulating the answer is not easy. (1/n)
It's tempting to offer the answer that simulating black holes does not produce a singularity, and simulating water does not make the circuits wet. But I'm not sure that quite works here, where we might assume that the property in question (consciousness) is not inherently...
...tied to the substrate (as in water's wetness) but is just about patterns of information. (Of course, we *could* suggest that there is a substrate specificity to consciousness, but we don't know that.) We could compare the case of quantum-computer simulations that... (3/n)
Read 7 tweets
Philip Ball Profile picture
Feb 5
I figured it might not be a bad idea to post a little thread on what my book How Life Works does and doesn't do...
how-life-works.philipball.co.uk
Several reviews have focused (approvingly!) on the takedown of gene-centric narratives of life. That is absolutely a part of the book, but only a part (there's only one chapter directly about genes). Some might say: "But biologists don't think that way any more!"
To which, yes and no. It depends, of course, on which biologists you ask: developmental biologists have rarely if ever really thought this way, for example. And specialist discourse in genetics has of course long moved past the "one gene-one protein/phenotype" picture...
Read 13 tweets
Philip Ball Profile picture
Aug 24, 2023
Atoms are not mostly empty space. I'd agree with pretty much everything here - and I think its main message could be retained even if we acknowledge the need for simplifications in early learning about the atom. However!!...
aeon.co/essays/why-the…
...it remains the case that nucleons can be considered to have a well defined and finite size, and electrons can be considered point-like particles. So how do we help school kids navigate that in a pre-quantum syllabus? I'm not sure there are easy answers...
It may be that the best we can do there is to say that the electron gets smeared out, perhaps like the way a drop of ink becomes dispersed throughout the glass of water. That of course is not really right, but how to do better?
Read 6 tweets
Philip Ball Profile picture
Jun 30, 2023
This is a great thread by Jim on current positions on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. I even agree with most of it! Inevitably, I'll add some comments... (1/n)
Of course, the choices of interpretation are not limited to these four. There's the coherent histories view, the relational view, QBism, and more. It can admittedly be hard sometimes to figure out how they're distinguished. But we're not spoilt for choice! (2/n)
I think today one can have a "Copenhagenish" view without accepting Bohr's rather arbitrary division of the classical and quantum regimes. This, to my mind, would entail adding nothing extra to the existing formalism except recognizing that measurement is no longer... (3/n)
Read 15 tweets
Philip Ball Profile picture
Jun 24, 2023
A useful look at what some of the leading figures in AI are thinking about the dangers.

However...

newstatesman.com/long-reads/202…
I'm quite taken aback at some of the simplistic comments Hinton makes. He seems to feel that the only thing separating deep-learning AI from the human mind is a matter of scale. I can't fathom this conviction that somehow all intelligence must be heading towards ours.
"He rejected LeCun’s belief that you have to “act on” the world physically in order to understand it, which current AI models cannot do. (“That’s awfully tough on astrophysicists. They can’t act on black holes.”)" Good god. The clue is in the name...
Read 14 tweets
Philip Ball Profile picture
Jun 3, 2023
I'm naturally inclined to agree with this leader, but I do think it needs a bit of nuancing. The initial govt response was shambolic and slow, but *was* guided by the "herd immunity" thinking of some chief scientists - which was flawed. So the inquiry...
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
... also needs to ask how that position came about. I don't want to exonerate the abysmal way Johnson handled it, but at first it wasn't just govt ignoring "the science". Later it was a different story, for sure.
bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00…
Also: "Claiming the pandemic was due to a one-off laboratory mistake... is to fail to face up to the fact that human-induced ecological destruction is the real risk." That doesn't necessarily follow. One can do both. Which is not to deny that for some, the lab-leak theory...
Read 5 tweets

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