Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses

·Dwarkesh Patel··

Really enjoyed chatting with Michael Nielsen about how we recognize scientific progress.It’s especially relevant for closing the RL verification loop for scientific discovery.But it’s also a surprisingly mysterious and elusive question when you look at the history of human science.We approach this question stories like Einstein (who claimed that he hadn't even heard of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment, which is supposed to have motivated special relativity, until after he had come up with ...

Read full article →

Related Articles

Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters
amrrs · Hacker News · 3d ago
ProgramBench: Can language models rebuild programs from scratch?
jonbaer · Hacker News · 1d ago
ZAYA1-8B matches DeepSeek-R1 on math with less than 1B active parameters
steveharing1 · Hacker News · 1d ago
OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors
donsupreme · Hacker News · 6d ago
A couple million lines of Haskell: Production engineering at Mercury
unignorant · Hacker News · 6d ago