Today seems to be another day on which archive dot fuh just refuses to load. Anyone able to see it?
A related issue that I doubt they've ever thought through: In statistical mechanics, the probability densities are defined on phase space, meaning that they're functions not just of position, but also momentum. They wouldn't be the first to get confused about this, helped along by oversimplified illustrations of "high entropy" and "low entropy" states that ignore the momentum part. But when you're reinventing a subject, it helps to avoid students' misconceptions about it.
Another problem: They claim to derive the idea of pressure by having proved that the number density (particles per volume) is the same on both sides of the partition. But this is only the right condition for equilibrium if the temperatures are equal on both sides. This is what happens when you don't check your revolutionary new method against the ideal gas law....
The fact that the naive continuous version of the Shannon entropy (just replacing the sum with an integral) can go negative is one reason why statistical physicists will tell you not to do that. Or, more precisely: That's a trick which only works when patched up by an idea imported from quantum mechanics.
Hourglasses work by inverse Weeping Angels rules, doncha know?
I should also have mentioned the part where they say that the entropy of the "uniform distribution over (0,x)" is the base-2 logarithm of x. This is, of course, a negative number for any x they care about (0 < x < 1), and more strongly negative the smaller x becomes.
Argh. These people just don't know any math and never call each other out for not knowing any math, and now I have to read MIT OpenCourseWare to scrub the feeling out of my brain.
A lesswrong attempts to explain physics using Information Theory!. This irritates me.
If we instead have a lot of particles in our first box, we might describe it as a box full of gas. If we connect this to another box and forget where the particles are, we would expect to find half in the first box and half in the second box. This means we can explain why gases expand to fill space without reference to anything except information theory.
No, you can't, because you're still presuming that gases do expand, i.e., that merely connecting two containers is enough to mix their contents. Otherwise, you're saying that if you fill one bottle with orange juice and another with vodka, and then forget which is which, you've made a screwdriver.
Then it gets weird and confused, talking about a box divided in two parts, with green particles on one side and pink ones on the other.
We might expect the partition to move some, but not all, of the way over, when we forget as much as possible.
Forgetting where things are doesn't give you psychoflexitive powers!
And from the comments:
My current understanding is that QM is not-at-all needed to make sense of stat mech.
No. If you don't incorporate quantum mechanics (or at the very least take some results of quantum mechanics as valid), you will get statistical mechanics very wrong rather quickly. Your results for the thermal properties of gases will get worse the more you calculate. You'll convince yourself that magnets are impossible. Etc.
For all that Yud has been praising the Feynman books ever since HPMOR at least, he doesn't seem to have inspired his fans to actually read the Lectures on Physics.
oh lordy, there's a whole post
Why did evolution give most males so much testosterone instead of making low-T nerds? Obviously testosterone makes you horny and buff.
"Compared to me, 78% of the human male population are low-T betas" —Hbomberguy
Are people in rich countries happier on average than people in poor countries? (According to GPT-4, the academic consensus is that it does, but I'm not sure it's representing it correctly.)
His complaint seriously backfired here, because it makes working on a chalkboard sound epic. The act of rubbing one rock against another becomes ascendance into the highest realms of thought? That's fuckin' alchemy, bro.
Too lazy even to make a "keikaku means nonconsensual" joke. Tsk, tsk.
spoiler: it's just a shell script that repeats "Anta baka?!"
Dan Olson's In Search of a Flat Earth is most definitely not just an hour of dunking on flat-Earthers.
It pivots to discussing QAnon at 37:30.
From the comments:
"Fun and interesting"?