Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Facebook AI Director Yann LeCun on His Quest to Unleash Deep Learning and Make Machines Smarter

  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.

• Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

  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.

• Why smart people are better off with fewer friends

  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.

• What actual 'caveman' DNA says about the Paleo movement

  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."

• Vitamin D: To Screen or Not to Screen?

  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.

• Waste in Cancer Drugs Costs $3 Billion a Year, a Study Says

  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.

• Vaccines Are Profitable, So What?

  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.

• There's a big problem with Bernie Sanders's free college plan

  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.

• We've been measuring inequality wrong

  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.

• Why do we work so hard?

  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.

• The Obama Doctrine

  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.

• Science guy vs. philosophy: Why are so many smart people such idiots about philosophy?

  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.

• Conditions for life may hinge on how fast the universe is expanding

  "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."

Thoughts about the primary elections.

• Trumpism: "It's the Culture, Stupid"

  Scott Winship in the National Review

  I believe that Trumpism is being driven primarily by cultural anxiety -- by dissatisfaction with cultural change and perceived cultural decline. "Make America Great Again" is clearly about fear of national decline, but it is not primarily about economic decline. Trumps complaint is that "we never win anymore," not a narrow protest that other nations are taking away our jobs or that wages are stagnant. It taps into fears that something has gone wrong -- with our economy but also with our position on the international stage, with our values, with our families, and with the maintenance of law and order.

  Further, it could not be more obvious that Trump voters are mostly indifferent to policy. Trump's appeal is in his brash confidence, his celebrity, and his refusal to bow to the political correctness that is newly ascendant.

• Neurologist explains why it's hard to look at Ted Cruz's creepy 'unsettling' face

  I have rarely, if ever, seen a conventional smile from Senator Cruz. In a natural smile the corners of the mouth go up; these muscles we can control voluntarily as well. But muscles circling the eyes are involuntary only; they make the eyes narrow, forming crow's feet at the outside corners," he continued. "No matter the emotional coloring of Senator Cruz's outward rhetoric, his mouth typically tightens into the same straight line. If it deviates from this, the corners of his mouth bend down, not upwards.

• Inside the Republican Party's Desperate Mission to Stop Donald Trump

  Nice summary of how the Republican Party has tried and failed to stop Donald Trump.

  Should Mr. Trump clinch the presidential nomination, it would represent a rout of historic proportions for the institutional Republican Party, and could set off an internal rift unseen in either party for a half-century, since white Southerners abandoned the Democratic Party EN Masse during the civil rights movement.

• The Trump Master Persuader Index and Reading List

  Scott Adams (Dilbert author) posts on understanding Trump's rise (starting 8/13/2015)

• Why Bernie Sanders's campaign makes me worry about how he'll manage the White House

  Ezra Klein

  Sanders's "promises runs against our party's best traditions of evidence-based policy making and undermines our reputation as the party of responsible arithmetic," wrote four Democratic ex-chairs of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers. "These are numbers we would describe as deep voodoo if they came from a tax-cutting Republican," agreed Paul Krugman.

  Amidst this onslaught, Steve Randy Waldman has penned what is, I think, the best defense of Sanders. He admits that the campaign's policy proposals are sketchy and the economic projections it's circulating are fantastical. But he argues that none of that really matters.

  The president's "role is to define priorities that must later be translated into well-crafted policy details," he says. "In a democratic polity, wonks are the help."

  My worry about Sanders, watching him in this campaign, is that he isn't very interested in learning the weak points in his ideas, that he hasn't surrounded himself with people who police the limits between what they wish were true and what the best evidence says is true, that he doesn't seek out counterarguments to his instincts, that he's attracted to strategies that align with his hopes for American politics rather than what we know about American politics. And these tendencies, if they persist, can turn good values into bad policies and an inspiring candidate into a bad president.

• Economic Populism at the Primaries

  Trump and Sanders are popular not just because they're expressing people's anger but because they offer timely critiques of American capitalism.
  ...
  Trump has called for abolishing the carried-interest tax loophole for hedge-fund and private-equity managers. He's vowed to protect Social Security. He's called for restrictions on highly skilled immigrants. Most important, he's rejected free-trade ideology, suggesting that the U.S. may need to slap tariffs on Chinese goods to protect American jobs. These views put Trump at odds not only with the leadership of the Republican Party but also with the main thrust of economic thinking since the nineteen-eighties, which has been to embrace globalization.