Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
The Inevitable Singularity Questions
Spectrum: You've already
expressed your disagreement
with many of the ideas associated with the
Singularity movement.
I’m interested in your thoughts about its sociology.
How do you account for its popularity in Silicon Valley?
LeCun: It's difficult to say. I'm kind of puzzled by that phenomenon.
As Neil Gershenfeld has noted, the first part of a sigmoid looks a lot
like an exponential. It's another way of saying that what currently
looks like exponential progress is very likely to hit some
limit--physical, economical, societal--then go through an
inflection point, and then saturate.
I'm an optimist, but I'm also a realist.
There are people that you'd expect to hype the Singularity, like Ray Kurzweil. He's a futurist. He likes to have this positivist view of the future. He sells a lot of books this way. But he has not contributed anything to the science of AI, as far as I can tell. He's sold products based on technology, some of which were somewhat innovative, but nothing conceptually new. And certainly he has never written papers that taught the world anything on how to make progress in AI.
Robert H. Frank
Frank describes how, in a world increasingly dominated by winner-take-all markets, chance opportunities and trivial initial advantages often translate into much larger ones--and enormous income differences--over time; how false beliefs about luck persist, despite compelling evidence against them; and how myths about personal success and luck shape individual and political choices in harmful ways.
First, they find that people who live in more densely populated areas tend to report less satisfaction with their life overall. "The higher the population density of the immediate environment, the less happy" the survey respondents said they were. Second, they find that the more social interactions with close friends a person has, the greater their self-reported happiness.
But there was one big exception. For more intelligent people, these correlations were diminished or even reversed.
"The effect of population density on life satisfaction was therefore more
than twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals,"
they found. And "more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied
with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently."
...
I posed this question to Carol Graham, a Brookings Institution researcher
who studies the economics of happiness. "The findings in here suggest
(and it is no surprise) that those with more intelligence and the
capacity to use it ... are less likely to spend so much time socializing
because they are focused on some other longer term objective," she said.
But even as the "caveman" diet rose to become the most Googled diet in 2013 and 2014, evolutionary biologists, with much less advertisement, were using advanced DNA techniques, sometimes on ancient bones, to suggest that the original Paleo premise may be off the mark: In fact, it seems, we have evolved.
Over the last year alone, prominent scientific journals have published
evidence of genetic shifts in humans over the last 10,000 years --
apparently in response humankind's transition to agriculture.
...
"There's evidence that there's been a lot more selection and genetic
change in the last five to 10,000 years than previously thought," he said.
"This is a challenge to the Paleo diet claims -- including mine and
Boyd Eaton's over the years."
It's hard to avoid the hype and just examine the actual scientific evidence without any bias. The United States Preventive Services Task Force has tried to do just that. It recently evaluated screening for vitamin D deficiency and concluded that the current evidence is insufficient to recommend either for or against screening. Predictably, their announcement has already led to misunderstandings and protests.
The federal Medicare program and private health insurers waste nearly $3 billion every year buying cancer medicines that are thrown out because many drug makers distribute the drugs only in vials that hold too much for most patients, a group of cancer researchers has found.
The expensive drugs are usually injected by nurses working in doctors' offices and hospitals who carefully measure the amount needed for a particular patient and then, because of safety concerns, discard the rest.
But then a couple things happened to turn the vaccine market around
in recent years. Global demand, particularly in developing countries,
shot up. Since 2000, the Gavi Alliance has provided vaccination
for 500 million children in poor countries, preventing an estimated
7 million deaths. GlaxoSmithKline reported that 80 percent of the
vaccine doses they manufactured in 2013 went to developing countries.
...
So while the vaccine industry is likely more profitable now than in
the 1970s or 1980s, this is the result of global market forces, not
a reason to skip a child's vaccinations: Pharmaceutical companies
need incentives to keep producing vaccines, because regardless of
profits the economic and social benefits of vaccination are huge--in
lives and the billions of dollars saved. A study released last year
estimated that fully immunizing babies resulted in $10 saved for
every dollar spent, about $69 billion total. "Vaccines are one of
the most cost-effective interventions we have," says Halsey.
Sanders's own summary of his College for All Act makes it pretty clear
that the act would not, in practice, eliminate college tuition.
What it would do instead is offer federal matching funds on a 2-to-1
basis to states that want to increase higher education spending in
order to eliminate tuition
...
On most issues -- including both extension of insurance coverage and
funding of public higher education -- the proximate barrier to more
progressive policy is in the statehouse or the House of Representatives,
not the White House.
First, spending inequality -- what we should really care about -- is far smaller than wealth inequality. This is true no matter the age cohort you consider.
To be clear, spending power remains extremely unequal.
...
The facts revealed in our study should change views. Inequality,
properly measured, is extremely high, but is far lower than generally
believed. The reason is that our fiscal system, properly measured,
is highly progressive. And, via our high marginal taxes, we are
providing significant incentives to Americans to work less and earn
less than they might otherwise.
Finally, traditional static measures of inequality, fiscal progressivity and work disincentives that a) focus on immediate incomes and net taxes rather than lifetime spending and lifetime net taxes and b) lump the old together with the young create highly distorted pictures of all three issues.
Our jobs have become prisons from which we don't want to escape
When John Maynard Keynes mused in 1930 that, a century hence, society might be so rich that the hours worked by each person could be cut to ten or 15 a week, he was not hallucinating, just extrapolating. The working week was shrinking fast. Average hours worked dropped from 60 at the turn of the century to 40 by the 1950s.
The problem is not that overworked professionals are all miserable.
The problem is that they are not.
...
There are downsides to this life. It does not allow us much time
with newborn children or family members who are ill; or to develop
hobbies, side-interests or the pleasures of particular, leisurely
rituals -- or anything, indeed, that is not intimately connected
with professional success. But the inadmissible truth is that the
eclipsing of life's other complications is part of the reward.
It is a cognitive and emotional relief to immerse oneself in something all-consuming while other difficulties float by. The complexities of intellectual puzzles are nothing to those of emotional ones. Work is a wonderful refuge.
Superb Jeffrey Goldberg long interview of Barack Obama in which he
talks through his hardest decisions about America's role in the world.
IMO, too bad he wasn't able to do what he thought was right
until he no longer had to worry about running for office.
Olivia Goldhill
And Nye--arguably America's favorite "edutainer"--is not the only popular scientist saying "meh" to the entire centuries-old discipline. Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson has claimed philosophy is not "a productive contributor to our understanding of the natural world"; while theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking declared that "philosophy is dead."
It's shocking that such brilliant scientists could be quite so ignorant, but unfortunately their views on philosophy are not uncommon.
The author attacks Bill Nye and other prominent scientists for being ignorant about philosophy. But none of the scientists claim otherwise. Their point is that scientists do not need to know anything about philosophy to do good science.
"In dense environments, you have many explosions, and you're too close to them," says cosmologist and theoretical physicist Raul Jimenez of the University of Barcelona in Spain and an author on the new study. "It's best to be in the outskirts, or in regions that have not been highly populated by small galaxies--and that's exactly where the Milky Way is."