Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
Many on the political left are now trying to make sense of it, and push back against its excesses. A rift has formed; on one side, the more traditional left arguing for liberal values. On the other, social justice activists who are concerned primarily with deconstructing systems of oppression. What makes this an extraordinary moment in history is that, while this war is raging, Wokeism is simultaneously being adopted at an astonishing speed by late-stage capitalism. In much the same way Christianity was absorbed by a declining Roman Empire, it is moving from the fringes into the very heart of power.
How a humiliating military loss proves that so much of our so-called "expertise" is fake, and the case against specialization and intellectual diversity
For all that has been said about Afghanistan, no one has noticed that this is precisely what just happened to political science. The American-led coalition had countless experts with backgrounds pertaining to every part of the mission on their side: people who had done their dissertations on topics like state building, terrorism, military-civilian relations, and gender in the military. General David Petraeus, who helped sell Obama on the troop surge that made everything in Afghanistan worse, earned a PhD from Princeton and was supposedly an expert in "counterinsurgency theory." Ashraf Ghani, the just deposed president of the country, has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia and is the co-author of a book literally called Fixing Failed States. This was his territory. It's as if Wernher von Braun had been given all the resources in the world to run a space program and had been beaten to the moon by an African witch doctor.
Meanwhile, the Taliban did not have a Western PhD among them. Their leadership was highly selected though. As Ahmed Rashid notes in his book The Taliban, in February 1999, the school that provided the leadership for the movement "had a staggering 15,000 applicants for some 400 new places making it the most popular madrassa in northern Pakistan." Yet they certainly didn't publish in or read the top political science journals. Consider this a data point in the question of whether intelligence or subject-matter expertise is more important.
AlphaZero's learning process is, to some extent, similar to that of humans.
A new paper from DeepMind, which includes a contribution from the 14th
world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik, provides strong evidence for the
existence of human-understandable concepts in AlphaZero's network,
even though AlphaZero has never seen a human game of chess.
...
Kramnik commented to Chess.com:
Secondly, I believe it is quite fascinating to discover that there
are certain patterns that AlphaZero finds meaningful, which actually
make little sense for humans. That is my impression. That actually
is a subject for further research, in fact, I was thinking that it
might easily be that we are missing some very important patterns
in chess, because after all, AlphaZero is so strong that if it
uses those patterns, I suspect they make sense. That is actually
also a very interesting and fascinating subject to understand, if
maybe our way of learning chess, of improving in chess, is actually
quite limited. We can expand it a bit with the help of AlphaZero,
of understanding how it sees chess."
An ambitious project is attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with artificial intelligence, then talk back to them.
The Israeli computer scientist, teaching at Imperial College London, England, might not seem the ideal candidate for a project involving the communication of sperm whales. But his skills as an expert in machine learning could be key to an ambitious endeavor that officially started in March 2020: an interdisciplinary group of scientists wants to use artificial intelligence (AI) to decode the language of these marine mammals. If Project CETI (for Cetacean Translation Initiative) succeeds, it would be the first time that we actually understand what animals are chatting about-and maybe we could even have a conversation with them.
The problem is retention. Many of those licensed drivers are no longer behind the wheel because they can find better working conditions and pay elsewhere. Jobs in factories, construction sites, and warehouses pay similar wages, and don't require people to work 70-hour weeks, sleep in parking lots, or wait in line for hours without pay or bathroom breaks to pick up a container at an overwhelmed port.
The real shortage is of good trucking jobs that can attract and retain workers in a tight labor market. The annual turnover of drivers at big trucking companies averaged 94% between 1995 and 2017, according to ATA statistics. That means those companies have to re-fill almost every driver position every year to replace the people who are leaving. A third of drivers quit within their first three months on the job. The problem is particularly acute for long-haul truck drivers who carry goods great distances across state lines.
The thinking is straightforward: More electric cars would mean more of a market for the lignite coal that produces most of North Dakota's electricity, and if a long-shot project to store carbon emissions in deep underground wells works out, it might even result in cleaner air as well. The thinking is straightforward: More electric cars would mean more of a market for the lignite coal that produces most of North Dakota's electricity, and if a long-shot project to store carbon emissions in deep underground wells works out, it might even result in cleaner air as well.
"EVs will be soaking up electricity," said Jason Bohrer, head of a coal trade group that has launched a statewide campaign to promote electric vehicles and charging stations along North Dakota's vast distances. "So coal power plants, our most resilient and available power plants, can continue to be online."
Results from the 2020 census confirmed that New York City's population grew significantly in the decade up to 2020, by 629,000. Spurred by a long economic boom, the city's population growth happened via natural increase, the excess of births over deaths. Contrary to the Census Bureau's pre-census population estimates, which had projected significant population drops at the end of the decade due to growing net out-migration, about the same number of people migrated to the city, either domestically or internationally, as left during the decade.
In combining that smugness with a youthful, Whiggish optimism that equates information with progress, Klein figured out how to commodify being in the know in the social media age. After all, the point is not to know things so much as it is to broadcast that you know them. And the folks at Vox realized there was a goldmine to be had if they could turn sharing a Vox article on social media into the method whereby someone signaled their identity, the way a certain kind of person used to walk around with a New Yorker magazine peeking out of her handbag. In other words, Vox capitalized on one of the mainstays of the journalism status revolution: the anxiety members of broader elite classes have about whether they are elite enough.