Physicist 🇳🇱 Anglophile 🇬🇧 Fellow at @ConjectureInst · Founder of @OxfordPopper DMs not monitored.
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Joined May 2016
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youtu.be/ogK8yb77E7c?si=kkjt…
Lovely video. I’m honoured to have colleagues like these.
Sam retweeted
“I don’t have to beg for mathematicians to make progress.”
Le physicien Gabriele Carcassi (@UMich) : je bloquais souvent sur des aspects mathématiques techniques en topologie et l'IA me sort désormais d'affaire en 2 minutes ; il me fallait supplier des mathématiciens pendant des mois, maintenant un seul interlocuteur IA me suffit !
Sam retweeted
Taking Children Seriously rightly holds that raising children without coercion is possible and desirable. I argue that fixating on “You shall not coerce” can be corrosive. Better to seek fun as a family, solve problems together, and care—with noncoercion as a by-product.
Beyond Avoiding Coercion
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @CABedardPhysics
CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
00:48 What is Taking Children Seriously?
01:54 Between neglect and control
03:01 Helping a child explore safely
04:14 When avoiding coercion becomes self-condemnation
08:07 Good parenting goes beyond avoiding coercion
09:09 Have fun and solve problems as a family
11:32 Children choosing to contribute
12:26 Q&A: responsibility and helping others
14:57 Q&A: where is the boundary of coercion?
18:31 Q&A: resources and solving family problems
Sam retweeted
The Pythagoreans said, “All is number.”
Conjecture Institute Fellow @Sam_kuyp updates it for the quantum age:
All is q-number.
By taking quantum mechanics seriously as a fundamental theory of Nature, Sam's views differ from the mainstream in at least four ways.
👇
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Learn more about Conjecture Institute Fellow @Sam_kuyp's personal story and physics research:
conjectureinstitute.org/arti…
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The Pattern (abbreviated version of a chapter of my planned book Irrationality): daviddeutsch.org.uk/wp-conte…
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Is it known what was the main technical innovation enabling the rise of drones? Of all the technology strands this one has the least narrative behind it. It’s just, all of a sudden there were drones.
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It does not matter in the least where a theory ‘comes from’.
What does matter is how that theory can be tested, and what would lead us to abandon it.
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @Ray_S_Percival
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“Sobbing and useless is a million times better than dead. A billion times. Thank you for choosing sobbing and useless over dead.”
It’s always bothered me that the Boston Globe took down this article because every time I see a story like this I want to post it: web.archive.org/web/20210504…
Sam retweeted
Universal Heat Engines & Universal Constructors
Conjecture Institute Senior Scientist Chiara Marletto with Fellow @maria__violaris:
In quantum thermodynamics, something that's missing is the fact that we haven't thought of a theory of a universal programmable heat engine.
This would be an upgrade on the way in which people were thinking about heat engines in the old days of classical thermodynamics.
But it seems to me that this would be an essential step to then tackle some of these questions about efficiency and about what you can do with different
inputs.
Now, it would be a much nicer way of addressing the these questions if we based them on the theory of a universal programmable machine that can be used as a heat engine, which I see as a special case of what a universal constructor is.
A thermodynamic machine is a special case of this universal constructor, where you're only programming the universal constructor to perform thermodynamic transformations.
The study of these machines would really be based on the theory of these programmable constructors.
And so the fact that we don't have that yet is a stumbling block on the progress of the field.
If anything, knowing that a solution exists is a reason to seek alternative routes. It's less fun to search in vain!
Within walking distance of my home. I could hear the march from my living room, faintly at first, then louder.
The same aggressive chants and displays I remember from Montréal, now in Amsterdam. There’s something oddly intimidating about how inescapable they are.
Sam retweeted
In 2010, when the Nobel Peace Prize went to the jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, Navi Pillay, then the UN’s top human rights official, stayed away from the ceremony in Oslo. Beijing was pressing governments and institutions to boycott it, and according to Foreign Policy, she gave in. Liu never walked free. He died of liver cancer in 2017 in a hospital in Shenyang, still under guard, after the regime refused to let him go abroad for treatment.
Now the same committee is giving Pillay the same prize. I think it’s fair to expect that anyone with a shred of decency will do for her ceremony what she did for Liu’s: stay away.
BREAKING NEWS
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the 2026 #NobelPeacePrize to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay for her efforts to promote peace and international law.
#NobelPrize
Sam retweeted
Remembering the Things That Fade
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @Sam_kuyp
CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
02:56 Why the things we learn fade
05:49 The forgetting curve
08:24 How spaced review strengthens memory
10:40 Spaced repetition software
12:43 A French vocabulary flashcard
14:33 Declarative and procedural knowledge
16:25 Learning poems and mathematical proofs
19:01 Make short cards for small pieces of knowledge
23:39 Make cards that work for you
25:04 Keep learning fun
26:05 Q&A: using AI to create and change cards
28:31 Q&A: using AI to find gaps in knowledge
30:00 Q&A: rereading, context, and changing memories
32:43 Q&A: music practice and error correction
34:34 Q&A: software choices and AI voice tools
Sam retweeted
This year's uber-grotesque of a Peace Prize winner was chosen from a field of 287 candidates. How'd the Nobel committee explain such a brazen piece of complicity with anti-Jewish malignancy, human rights abuses, cruelty and dictatorship?
The way they all do, of course, with dishonest, pseudo-pacifist references to international law and peace.
My @Telegraph column this week
The Nobel Peace Prize is now totally discredited telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10…
Sam retweeted
It is sickening that the USA is now lifting sanctions on Russian fuel, and transparently ridiculous to blame Ukraine for the spike in prices that obviously began with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Putin is murdering innocent Ukrainian civilians every day. The Ukrainians are fighting for their lives. And yet the White House is apparently determined to force American drivers to bankroll Putin’s slaughter. It won’t work and I doubt it will make much difference to the price of fuel.
If we want Russian oil and gas back on the world market then let’s end this war - with a free, sovereign and independent Ukraine.
Sam retweeted
The question of genocide in Gaza is not just a matter of “semantics,” as many are now claiming, quietly backpedaling from their earlier confident assertions. It is not a borderline case, or a matter of interpretation, or an issue on which reasonable people can differ.
It is an obscene lie, contradicted by everything we know about Israel’s conduct during the war (which is not to absolve the IDF of war crimes). Here are 76 retired senior military leaders and legal experts flatly rejecting the genocide allegation:
“Israel has not committed genocide but rather set a high bar for how to conduct urban warfare against an enemy who will stop at nothing, including the death of its own civilians.”
The fact that the rector of my own university wanted to prohibit questioning the “Gaza genocide,” as though it were the equivalent of flat-earthism or climate denialism, still fills me with disbelief and rage. One day it will become clear who are the real flat-earthers here.
jinsa.org/open-letter-from-m…
