Three scientists and their gods

What Hacker News says

1. sriram_malharJun 2023
   I first learnt about him from a very interesting book, "Three scientists and their Gods".

   I think the chapter about him is excerpted in this Atlantic piece:

   https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/88apr/wright.ht...

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2. beardedetimJun 2023
   Three Scientists and their Gods is such a good book! Almost anything by Robert Wright has been a must buy for me ever since!
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3. AdrockJun 2023
   Fredkin’s Paradox is a powerful idea that I find myself referencing often:

   "The more equally attractive two alternatives seem, the harder it can be to choose between them—no matter that, to the same degree, the choice can only matter less."

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox

   RIP. I loved Three Scientists and Their Gods and had the privilege of seeing him speak at CMU in 2001. He was hysterical and brilliant.

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4. dedalusNov 2017
   Three Scientists and their Gods: This book foreshadows the meaning and purpose of science+tech https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/214570.Three_Scientists_...

   Scifi: The Three Body problem (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20518872-the-three-body-...) for its whole encompassing narrative about human future and some of it will be real (fusion instead of chemical fuel, pulse propulsion and other social consequences)

   Ardor: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20931250-ardor if you ever wanted to understand ancient indian philosophy. Heavy read, not recommended for fun but more as quest

   FoxTales: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/412167.Foxtales about how software was developed in the midwest free of all the fashion/hipsterism currently in vogue and building a community of users for your software

   The elements of networking style: If you ever wanted to know the politics of how networking RFCs are made: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2298785.The_Elements_of_... and design choices made to build modern day internet

   Unwritten Laws of Engineering: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13122143-unwritten-laws-... is an old and timeless way detailing what it means to engineer

   High Performance Browser Networking: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17985198-high-performanc... if you ever wanted to know what happens inside a browser

   The Computer and the Brain: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/358880.The_Computer_and_... where the master compares the machine with our brain

   The Grammatical Man: If you ever wanted to know the importance of structure and constraint in everything: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/722028.Grammatical_Man

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5. schoenJun 2023
   Memories by Paul Abrahams:

   https://paulabrahams.substack.com/p/memories-of-ed-fredkin

   In a comment, I mentioned the Three Scientists and Their Gods profile (which someone else in the comments has also mentioned) and also that Fredkin was apparently the ultimate origin of a very widespread anecdote about overfitting in machine learning:

   https://gwern.net/tank

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6. dto1138Jun 2011
   Hey, I'm not a particle physicist, but I've read a bunch of books by people who think the universe is a computer. (Three Scientists and Their Gods, A New Kind Of Science, and The Recursive Universe (this last is out of print and much better than Wolfram's newer but more turgid ANKOS.)

   I don't think the universe is a computer either, but I don't think this guy understands what that would mean anyway.

   From the article: "I just find it obvious that pretty much by definition, discrete objects are always less fundamental and less complete than the continuous ones. A discrete description of some object or phenomenon is always an approximation."

   Now the whole thrust of the "computer-universe-ism" people's argument, if I read them correctly, is that the universe is really a discrete structure, in which case a discrete model of said structure would not be ANY kind of approximation. I.e. to what are the integers (a discrete structure) a (supposedly poor) approximation? What about the two-element set {0,1} or (say) groups? (The group theory bit is a trick for the author.)

   We'd better leave these questions to be answered by empirical data---or if we need philosophers to chime in, better ones than this.

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