Adam Brown: belief

Transcript context

…What makes General Relativity so beautiful? I think general relativity is really an extraordinary story. It's pretty unusual in the history of physics that you, to first approximation, just have one guy who sits down and thinks really, really hard with lots of thought experiments about jumping up and down in elevators and beetles moving on the surface of planets and all the rest of it, and at the end of that time writes down a theory that completely reconceptualizes nature's most familiar force and also speaks not just to that, but speaks to the origin and fate of the universe and almost immediately achieves decisive experimental confirmation in the orbits of astronomical observations or the orbits of planets and the deflections of lights during eclipses and stuff like that. It's a pretty beautiful theory, and it completely changed our idea of gravity from being a force to just being an artifact of the curvature of spacetime, actually. So this is actually a good point to chat about your actual day job. So there's these open debates about the kind of reasoning that these LLMs do. Does it correspond to true reasoning, or is it something more procedural? And it sometimes gets into a definition game. But this is maybe a good way to test our intuitions here. The kind of thing that Einstein was doing, where you start off with some thought experiments, you start off with some seeming conceptual inconsistencies in existing models, and you trace them through to some beautiful unified theory at the end, and you make incredibly productive use of these intuition pumps, that kind of reasoning. How far are our AIs from that?…

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