Welcome

Welcome to this new blog. I am planning to blog about various topics.

I will migrate my posts from medium.com/@dirknbr to here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Maxwell and Lamarckism — the value of information

The physicist Maxwell famously devised a thought experiment where he postulated that a demon could sort the atoms, hence violating the second law of thermodynamics (2TD). The 2TD states that entropy must always increase as warm and cold particles will mix. It is one of the few laws, if not the only one, that has an arrow of time. The Lamarckian (anti-Darwinian) view in biology is that an ancestor can pass on selected acquired genes/traits to its descendants, hence leading to an improvement in traits. Both of these concepts are similar in that they have an invisible hand of information that can sort and select atoms or genes. The truth is though that there is no hand but that randomness (entropy) rules. In the case of evolution, the fit survive and thrive because their random mutations bring surprise improvements.
Read more

The sovietisation of the UK Tory party

The big election at the end of 2019 under Boris Johnson gave the Tories a big boost. After the humiliation of the post (2016) referendum and loss of power under May, the Tories are back and destroyed Labour’s strongholds. Gone are the centrists and the Remainers from the party. What we have left is the Brexiteering hard right. Scrutiny and morals are gone and the Tories are now aiming for a societal shift. They want to rebuild society and institutions into a nationalist, Conservative structure. So they will weaken the (leftist) BBC, civil service, parliament, to strengthen their position. When Labour bemoaned that a trade bill would break international law, the Tories said they lacked national spirit and sided with Brussels. Any criticism of the party leader is branded as un-British. There is a new arrogance. The Tories want to align the media (Gleichschaltung) with their thinking. They think if we all were a bit more optimistic and nationalistic, everything would be better.
Read more

Is AI a science?

Artificial Intelligence is hailed as a tool and method of infinite potential. But AI in its current form does not tell us much about ourselves as humans - but science does. Current AI is engineering, it is not human discovery. AI cannot teach us about ourselves more than we know. AI is about doing whereas science is about knowing. AI is predictive while science is revealing. Science answers the why, while AI lingers on the what. AI automates existing processes in a fast way. A human (or group thereof) can always outperform AI given enough time. AI displays/copies human bias learned from human data - it doesn’t even rise above the collective view. Human knowledge grows by asking questions, AI doesn’t ask questions.
Read more