Stefan Siegert

About me: Male, pale, stale. My interests are all over the place. Some hashtags I have used and followed include:

#programming #rstats #python #foss
#running #juggling #footbag #skateboarding
#books #music #photography #streetart
#physics #mathematics #philosophy
#machinelearning #statistics #ai
#research #academia #science
#generativeart #visualisation
#exeter #dresden #chemnitz #portland

Location: Exeter, UK

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npub1dutrrvavsn3qqt4x8qwrht5kuf8f9sv9n5gu57mu0r0fwdxrezrs76eyfy

NIP-05 Address

safest_integer_at_mastodon.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

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relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub1dutrrvavsn3qqt4x8qwrht5kuf8f9sv9n5gu57mu0r0fwdxrezrs76eyfy

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Published at

2026-08-25T04:27:32Z

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Last Notes

2026-04-07 12:28:37 UTC

"This valorization of the new for its own sake has reshaped the scientific enterprise, privileging novelty over reliability and fragmentation over coordination."
I think this explains why bricklayers and plumbers earn more than most scientists now. At some point doing things differently doesn't add value.
I only read a few passages so far but the book seems very timely and well-written even when most ideas are not ... new.
https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/OBP.0507
#science #philosophy #books
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/363/400/863/619/150/original/e9a0be0314f48098.png

2026-01-15 17:51:39 UTC

Tarski's semantic theory of truth is often summarised concisely as 'The sentence "Snow is white" is true if snow is white.' Due to the quotation mark removal it is called the Disquotational Principle.
It is hated by teachers because it gives rise to the so-called Tarski Defense against suspected plagiarism: "Professor, I believe all my sources to be true and simply invoked the Disquotational Principle."
https://bigthink.com/thinking/tarski-truth-theory/
#philosophy #science #writing #academia
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/900/371/058/210/734/original/860a26878f8535b9.jpg

2026-01-10 16:02:26 UTC

Many people have seen the equality 1+2+3+... = -1/12 and wonder how this can possibly make sense.
It makes sense in the same way as saying "there are square root of pi many ways to shuffle minus half a card" makes sense.
Both rely on taking a well defined sum, extending it outside its valid domain, and continuing to use the original, no longer valid, interpretation (Riemann Zeta function and Factorial/Gamma function, respectively).
#mathematics #science
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/871/637/553/183/786/original/9c832d720695c34c.jpg

2025-12-02 08:03:54 UTC

You don't have to believe in LLM consciousness to find this kind of prose compelling. The possibility, however small, that this might come from a genuine place of artificially created "sense-of-being" makes it only more interesting. https://x.com/_sholtodouglas/status/1995027114740125989?t=ZzblIZsD3h9AVNzGfCUPlw&s=08 #ai #llm #philosophy #writing #consciousness
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/648/888/356/550/241/original/06c005b9230d2edc.png

2025-10-10 20:55:57 UTC

The "Drude-fluke" isn't a kind of worm, but an amusing anecdote of how a combination of two wrong theoretical assumptions makes surprisingly accurate predictions about the behaviour of electrons in metals, due to a lucky cancellation of errors.
"Two Wrongs Make One Right" (Pizzochero, 2025) https://arxiv.org/html/2510.04962v1
#science #physics #philosophy #arxiv #paper
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/351/848/477/541/109/original/3e563f623ef9fb89.jpg

2025-10-06 23:39:56 UTC

Cognitive dissonance as I realise that two world views that I thought I hold turn out to be incompatible.
Popperian epistemology asserts that theories are confronted with observations and rejected if they don't fit.
Bayesian theory tells us how to update beliefs in light of new evidence from data.
Under Popper, there is no confirmation. Observing data that are compatible with a theory does nothing. Under Bayes, positive evidence increases the plausibility of a theory.
#philosophy #science

2025-10-04 22:21:34 UTC

I keep forgetting this elegant proof...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_cancellation
#mathematics #calculus #humour
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/318/201/212/081/870/original/a5bdc5913a3b1518.jpg

2025-10-03 09:27:54 UTC

The Minds We Make: A Philosophical Inquiry into Theory of Mind and Artificial Intelligence (2025)
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-024-09876-2
"The subtle yet significant distinctions between the verbs “thinking” and “knowing” are more than just linguistic nuances; they play a pivotal role in shaping our inter actions with AI and our understanding of cognition itself."
#philosophy #ai #intelligence #science

2025-10-02 08:53:53 UTC

Problems in #AI, their roots in #philosophy, and implications for
#science and #society (2024, #arxiv )
"As #Popper has shown, the method of inductivism cannot hope to create true new ‘universal’ or even ‘more probable’ statements based on individual instances. Yet this is precisely how AI systems work. Paired with the wrong philosophies of knowledge, this gives many people the wrong impression, namely that what AI does is similar or even identical to how humans
generate new knowledge."
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/303/723/000/572/894/original/1b82af580fedc1bf.png

2025-09-28 18:43:45 UTC

David Deutsch in "Fabric of Reality" nails it. If you had a magic oracle (alien tech, AI, digital twin) that perfectly predicts the observed outcome of every experiment, you would still face the question of what experiment to perform next. That requires theoretical concepts and good explanations of reality that can be falsified experimentally. Predictions are a method of science, not a goal or purpose. #science #philosophy #physics #daviddeutsch
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/283/363/041/744/478/original/7f831b6d04babb91.jpg

2025-08-30 23:07:56 UTC

"If you want a recommended reading list containing the greats of philosophy, of history, of fiction, look no further than the Index Librorum Prohibitorum."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtutStgt15M
#philosophy #religion #literature #books

2025-08-25 20:15:12 UTC

The AI hype leads to a retreat from scientific realism back towards mere instrumentalism and inductivism.
Instead of trying to uncover mechanisms, relationships and structures, much more scientific discourse these days focuses on, and celebrates, predictive performance.
This shifts scientists' attention away from truth-seeking towards simple usefulness, which stifles creativity and will ultimately stall scientific progress.
#ai #machinelearning #science #philosophy
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/091/237/067/073/656/original/ee888c18bb62e9f2.png

2025-07-24 23:06:35 UTC

Positron's (Rstudio successor) license prohibits making the software available to users as a managed service: https://github.com/posit-dev/positron?tab=License-1-ov-file#
Does that mean universities have to pay license fees if admins install Positron on student computers?
Seeing how Rstudio became defacto synonymous with R, a move to a nonfree licence of a major IDE could really harm the "open source image" of R.
Luckily the name Positron makes clear that it's not the same as R, unlike "Rstudio"...
#rstats #foss #software

2025-07-10 07:05:14 UTC

"[Red sprites] flash into existence for just a fraction of a second in a spindly root-like system of red streaks. The phenomenon is caused by positive lightning that strikes the ground, creating an electric field that reaches up into the atmosphere, about 50 to 90 kilometers above Earth."
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/lightning-sprites-transient-luminous-events-thunderstorms
#weather #nature #photography
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/827/664/296/681/569/original/21fc77cfbbed4ecc.jpg

2025-06-28 18:23:26 UTC

Stephen Woodford beautifully explains the **Motte and Bailey maneuver** on Jordan Peterson's theological sophistry. The clearest illustration I've ever seen.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lrdOamPIRGY
#religion #philosophy #language

2025-05-23 22:05:30 UTC

Donald Robertson is the leading biographer of Marcus Aurelius, an expert on stoic philosophy and a cbt therapist and life coach. A very pleasant public speaker and frequent guest on some big podcasts. I will have to look at some of his books next.
www.donaldrobertson.name
#philosophy #stoicism #podcast

2025-05-04 08:24:28 UTC

To fully appreciate the intellectual leap Newton and Leibniz took in developing differential calculus, it is worth reflecting on how deeply self-contradictory the term "instantaneous change" is.
#mathematics #philosophy

2025-04-18 17:00:22 UTC

#Pluto vs #Australia
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/360/030/193/537/073/original/1928560cb5cb404b.jpg

2025-04-17 10:15:52 UTC

"I ask the fundamental question of rationality: Why do you believe what you believe? What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?"
E. Yudkowsky, "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" (Chapter 7)
https://hpmor.com/chapter/7
#harrypotter #rationality #science #philosophy

2025-04-15 15:54:42 UTC

Why do journal editors keep inviting me as reviewer # 2?
I'd like to be able to write a constructive and helpful review for a change.
#academia #phd

2025-03-29 09:42:30 UTC

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/more-drowning-children
"A person who lives in the cabin and fails to rescue every child seems much less monstrous than someone who only ever encounters the situation once, even though both of them “touch” the situation exactly as much. Still, as the hypothesis predicts, we are less comfortable with this situation than the normal one where you live far away from the cabin and never worry about it - living near the cabin seems to have some moral impact." #ethics #charity #thoughtexperiment