I was just looking over the various people who’ve translated FFVI into English, and it was fun seeing what people did with the opening narration.

Classic 1994 Woolsey:

Long ago, the War of the Magi reduced the world to a scorched wasteland, and Magic simply ceased to exist.

1000 years have passed… Iron, gunpowder and steam engines have been rediscovered, and high technology reigns.

But there are those who would enslave the world by reviving the dread destructive force known as “Magic”.

Can it be that those in power are on the verge of repeating a senseless and deadly mistake?

Tom Slattery’s translation for the GBA version, supposed to be more accurate on the whole:

The ancient War of the Magi… When its flames at last receded, only the charred husk of a world remained. Even the power of magic was lost…

In the thousand years that followed, iron, gunpowder, and steam engines took the place of magic and life slowly returned to the barren land.

Yet there now stands one who would reawaken the magic of ages past and use its dreaded power as a means by which to conquer all the world.

Could anyone truly be foolish enough to repeat that mistake?

Unofficial translation by Sky Render, which is widely viewed as awkward although more literally “faithful” than Woolsey (not least by the translator themselves, cf. their later LP of it):

Long ago, humans battled one another, and the world became a scorched wasteland. The power of “magic” simply vanished.

1000 years have passed… Iron, gunpowder, and steam engines have been developed. Machinery has been revived to replace magic.

The great magic war faded into a legend. But the power of “magic” has been revived secretly, by the powerful military empire, run by a man who wants to rule the world.

Would this man be willing to destroy the world again for his own greed…?

(Unfortunately, Lina Darkstar never translated this part.)

I can’t tell how much of this is nostalgia, but the Woolsey version seems best to me here.  For one thing, “dread destructive force” is a good phrase (though so is Slattery’s “charred husk of a world”), and I like “high technology reins.”

Just as importantly, the Woolsey translation avoids the blunt moralizing of the other two (which I figure must have been in the original script, since it’s in two out of three translations).  The other two mention an individual villain, and finish on a note of “fuck that guy,” which fees like putting the cart before the horse – it’s like a movie that starts by telling you “there will be a bad guy in this movie, and you should hate him, because he’s evil.”

Woolsey generalizes it to an unnamed plural group, and his last sentence lacks the exasperation of the other two.  It’s not “how could this one guy possibly be so evil?”, it’s “have today’s rulers failed to learn the lessons of history?”, which is a much more interesting question.  “Can it be that those in power are on the verge of repeating a senseless and deadly mistake?” sounds like something you could easily hear in real-life political discussion; the others sound like we’re reading someone’s story outline.

The fact that trying to italicise a word that begins with ‘w’ but failing to pull my finger off the ctrl key in time has killed about 5% of all the effort posts I’ve ever written is a major quality of life drain and Tumblr needs to stop being terrible and either save your work or warn if you’re closing a tab with writing.

I have written many many words about “Bayesianism” in this space over the years, but the closest thing to a comprehensive “my position on Bayes” post to date is this one from three years ago, which I wrote when I was much newer to this stuff.  People sometimes link that post or ask me about it, which almost never happens with my other Bayes posts.  So I figure I should write a more up-to-date “position post.”

I will try to make this at least kind of comprehensive, but I will omit many details and sometimes state conclusions without the corresponding arguments.  Feel free to ask me if you want to hear more about something.

I ended up including a whole lot of preparatory exposition here – the main critiques start in section 6, although there are various critical remarks earlier.

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I have written many many words about “Bayesianism” in this space over the years, but the closest thing to a comprehensive “my position on Bayes” post to date is this one from three years ago, which I wrote when I was much newer to this stuff.  People sometimes link that post or ask me about it, which almost never happens with my other Bayes posts.  So I figure I should write a more up-to-date “position post.”

I will try to make this at least kind of comprehensive, but I will omit many details and sometimes state conclusions without the corresponding arguments.  Feel free to ask me if you want to hear more about something.

I ended up including a whole lot of preparatory exposition here – the main critiques start in section 6, although there are various critical remarks earlier.

Keep reading

The day the sky cracked open and Archangel Uriel’s machinery was revealed to the world was a humbling day for most natural scientists. Suddenly, they were confronted with the fact that their descriptions of reality were but crude caricatures of the world.

There was, however, one notable exception.

String theory, whose connection to physical reality was tenuous at best, flourished in the kabbalistic era.

“YES, THAT’S DEFINITELY ON THE RIGHT TRACK.” the archangel boomed when asked about how gravitation was implemented consistently in his machinery. “TO BE HONEST, I JUST NEVER GOT THE PURELY BOSONIC CASE TO WORK.“ He gave pause, a crowd of disheveled physicists hanging on his words.

“But none of the anomaly and tachyon-free fermionic strings give us anything resembling particle physics! We want to describe the world!” a voice called out from the crowd. Uriel looked contemplative. “THE WORLD IS EMBODIED BY THE SEPHIRAH MALKUTH WHOSE GEMATRIA IS THE PERFECT NUMBER 496. IT IS ALSO THE REAL DIMENSION OF THE LARGEST EXCEPTIONAL LIE GROUP E8.” the angel’s voice boomed, fear and anticipation sweeping over the crowd. “IF YOU WISH TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD, YOU’LL HAVE TO TACK-E-ON!”

A string is not unlike a serpent. To ascend the body of Adam Kadmon from the foot of Malkuth it needs something to bind and couple to. This kabbalistic role is played by the Kalb-Ramond B field. Including it in the calculation is like remembering the force provided by the tree itself. But not all paths are permitted and not all strings are pure enough to ascend the Pillar of Mercy. In the end, the condition in which all sicknesses are cured, all anomalies cancelled, is exactly that the theory’s gauge group have dimension 496. Thus was born the Type I, HO, and E8 x E8 Heterotic strings. To many, however, this sudden multiplicity was a problem.

The physicists returned to the Archangel with this question. Uriel smiled, “ANSWER THIS: WHY ARE THERE SO MANY FACETS OF GOD?”. Unlike before, this comment was met with a wave of puzzled faces. Uriel looked around uncomfortably. “LOOK, I DON’T WANT TO JUST SPOIL THE WHOLE THING. JUST USE YOUR BRANES.”

The theories of superstrings must be formulated in ten dimensions, in correspondence with the ten sephirot. To understand them, because of their mathematical difficulty, requires great wit. Perhaps it was no surprise that Edward Witten was the one who pierced through the veil and just really clarified everything for us mortals.

“It’s always been somewhat of a mystery why we compactify on Calabi-Yau threefolds, six dimensional manifolds, but we know the shattering of the vessels involved seven sephirot.” he spoke, standing in front of a powerpoint with exactly those words on it and the equation “6=7?”

“Essentially, what I’d like to argue today, is that to understand the relation between the unshattered vessels and our four dimensional space-time, we should regard time as an aspect of the sephirah Da’at. The nature of Da’at is the unity of the sephirot and, though it is often conflated with Keter, for these purposes we should regard it as a distinct aspect of Divinity.”

“With that in place, I think it’s clear we should view our superstring theories as being various aspects, or limits, of a unified eleven dimensional theory.” he spoke and the slide changed to a crudely drawn Tree of Life with various mathematical procedures connecting each sephirah.

At the top of the Tree sat this new mystical theory, M-theory for short, in correspondence with the sephirah Keter. It is sublime and incomprehensible to man – and yet all other sephirot or theories flow from it. Further developments, such as the equivalence between M-theory and the Matrix Model with only a time direction, would only solidify the correctness of this picture.

To descend is to distort the theory, pulling and wrapping its parts in dizzying geometric arrangements. “Each connection is still a duality! Though it may be hard to see the true equivalence of these theories it is no harder than understanding the whole of God by any of His aspects.”

The true heart and mind of the superstring theories, type IIA, takes the seat of Binah. The feminine nature of Binah can be understood from its origin from the mother theory, M-theory, wrapped on a circle – the metaphorical ‘circle of life’.

By twisting, T-dualizing, the warmth of Binah we find the fiery judgement of Gevurah. This is the type IIB theory at its strongest coupling. However, to be consistent with God’s forgiving nature, we find a highly non-trivial constraint on the type IIB string; self-duality. By S-dualizing we find, again, the type IIB string, but this time at weak coupling and in correspondence with the sephirah of Hod, the foot of Adam Kadmon, which ensures good placement when using his hand.

The relation between Netzah – the other foot of Adam Kadmon, which represents conquering and victory over one’s problems – and the subdued and steady foot of Hod, is merely a change of orientation. Similarly, when one takes an “orientifold” of the type IIB theory, one obtains the type I theory, folded across the body.

At the heart of superstring theory, and the heart of Adam Kadmon, beats supergravity. Beneath the complexity and opacity of Keter lies simple beauty; the sephirah Tiferet. This explains the role of supergravity in capturing the beauty and lessons of M-theory, converting them to all the other superstring theories. It is a splendid image – a hologram, if you will – of the foundation Yesod from which God has made the world.

Yesod is the channel through which the light above is delivered to the world, Malkuth. It is the superstructure of the world and is thus a supersymmetric quantum field theory. Thus we arrive at perhaps the most powerful discovery yet; the kabbalistic connection to the (2,0) theory of M5-branes. In fact the connection runs deeper. Yesod represents Kabbalah. Or rather, it represents our understanding of Kabbalah. The meaning of Kabbalah is that, to understand God we must understand the world, and to understand God is to know his True Name. The rest, as they say, is just commentary.

Thus to understand the (2,0) theory is to know the Shem HaMephorash.

Perhaps it is not surprising then that the (2,0) theory has no known name; no Lagrangian description. There is still hope however! Other Names can be understood as simplifications, shortenings and rearrangements, of Shem HaMephorash. Thus by studying simplifications –compactifications, if you will – of the (2,0) theory we may discover other Holy Names. Hence we derive the kabbalistic correspondence between them and superconformal field theories. The most famous of which, the N=4 super Yang-Mills, is identified with the tetragrammaton.

For a while, this ‘string-string’ correspondence generated a lot of excitement within the applied kabbalah world and the first class of sacred theories, class S, were quickly enumerated. As it turns out, understanding supersymmetric gauge theories is considerably harder than simply speaking potential names.

Though interest has waned, it is believed that strings will play a role in the end of days. We should recall the Archangel’s words: to understand the world we must include E8. What this means remains a mystery.

-Prof. Juan Maldacena, Institute for Advanced Kabbalistic Study

When I first saw this paper, I said it looked impressive, and seemed a lot more substantial than MIRI’s other work, but I never really looked at it in much detail.  In the past week I’ve been having an extended conversation with a friend about it, and that spurred me to read it more closely.  I now think it’s much less impressive than it seems at first glance.

It occurred to me that the criticisms I made to my friends might be of wider interest, so I’ll write a post about them.

Summary:

The authors state something they call the “logical induction criterion,” meant to formalize a kind of ideal inference.  To satisfy this criterion, an inference procedure only needs to have certain asymptotic properties in the infinite-time limit.  Rather than being sufficient for good inference but too strong for practical computation (as the paper suggests), the criterion is too weak for good inference: it tolerates arbitrarily bad performance for arbitrarily long times.

The easiest way to see why this is problematic in practice is to consider the criterion-satisfying procedure constructed in the paper, called LIA.  Speaking very roughly, LIA makes a countably-infinite list (in unspecified/arbitrary order) of all the “mistakes” it could possibly make, and at discrete time n, does a brute force search for a set of beliefs which avoids the first n mistakes in the list.

Depending on the ordering of the list, LIA can make an arbitrarily bad mistake for an arbitrarily long time (some mistake has to go in slot number 3^^^3, etc.)  Nonetheless, LIA can be proven to asymptotically avoid every mistake, since for every mistake there is some time N at which it begins to avoid it.  Thus, LIA enjoys a very large number of nice-sounding asymptotic properties, but it converges for very different reasons than most algorithms one is used to hearing about: rather than converging to nice properties because it moves toward them, it simply exploits the fact that these properties can only fail in countably many ways, and ticks off those ways one by one.

Thus, LIA is like an “author-bot” which generates all possible character strings in some arbitrary order, and at each step consults a panel of readers to weigh in on its best work so far.  One could argue that this bot’s “asymptotic best work” will have any aspect of writerly brilliance imaginable, but that does not mean that the bot satisfies some “ideal writing criterion,” and indeed we’d expect its output in practice to lack any aspects of writerly brilliance.  (LIA differs from author-bot in that it has an objective, if very slow, way to find its “best work so far.”  But garbage in means garbage out.)

More detail under the cut

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