Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Sleeping Woke: Cancel Culture and Simulated Religion

  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.

• Tetlock and the Taliban

  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.

• How AlphaZero Learns Chess

  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."

• Are We on the Verge of Chatting with Whales?

  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.

• There is no shortage of US truck drivers

  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.

• Where electric cars could help save coal

  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."

• Can't Keep a Great City Down: What the 2020 Census Tells Us About New York

  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.

• Surveyed academics explain why they remain in academia:
  • More than 20 percent chose the sunk-cost problem: "I've invested so much."
  • Almost 25 percent chose the "It's my identity" option.
  • The largest number of responses, nearly 45 percent selected "What else can I do?"
  • Perhaps the most-telling response: Not even 10 percent said they stay in academe because "My work matters".
• The Vox Formula: Telling Privileged People What They Already Believe

  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.

Some recent links related to Covid-19.

• Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
  • Ivermectin doesn't reduce mortality in COVID a significant amount (let's say d > 0.3) in the absence of comorbid parasites: 85-90% confidence
  • Fraud and data processing errors are of similar magnitude to p-hacking and methodological problems in explaining bad studies (95% confidence interval for fraud: between >1% and 5% as important as methodological problems; 95% confidence interval for data processing errors: between 5% and 100% as important)
  • Probably "Trust Science" is not the right way to reach proponents of pseudoscientific medicine: ???% confidence
• Have we been thinking about the pandemic wrong? The effect of population structure on transmission

  I conclude that we should try to find data about the characteristics of the networks on which the virus is spreading and make sure that we have such data when the next pandemic hits so that modeling can properly take population structure into account.
  ...
  I have argued that, while there are solid theoretical reasons to think that ultimately the dynamic of the epidemic depended on people's behavior, there is also strong evidence that the effective reproduction number sometimes underwent large fluctuations that could not be explained by changes in people's behavior. The cyclical nature of the epidemic has often been noted, but except for the vague claim that respiratory infections are "seasonal" (which is true but doesn't actually explain much), nobody has really tried to explain it. In this post, I have proposed that population structure could be part of the explanation, because real populations are not homogeneous mixing.

• Fresh look at pandemic origins points straight to food market in Wuhan, scientist says

  "I co-signed that letter in Science suggesting that the lab leak needs to be investigated, which I still believe and that it should be," Worobey told CNN. "But in the meantime, holy smokes -- is there a lot of evidence against it and in favor of natural origin."

  For further details see the article in Science magazine Dissecting the early COVID-19 cases in Wuhan.

• Is COVID-19 here to stay?

  A team of biologists explains what it means for a virus to become endemic.

  The virus that causes COVID-19 is often associated with superspreading events, in which many people are infected all at once, typically by a single infected individual. In fact, our own work has shown that just 2% of the people infected with COVID-19 carry 90% of the virus that is circulating in a community. These important "supercarriers" have a disproportionately large impact on infecting others, and if they aren't tracked down before they spread the virus to the next person, they will continue to sustain the epidemic. We currently don't have a nationwide screening program geared toward identifying these individuals.

  Finally, asymptomatically infected people account for roughly half of all infections of COVID-19. This, when coupled with a broad range of time in which people can be infectious - two days before and 10 days after symptoms appear - affords many opportunities for virus transmission, since people who don't know they are sick generally take few measures to isolate from others.

• Here's Why Rapid COVID Tests Are So Expensive and Hard to Find

  The answer appears to be a confounding combination of overzealous regulation and anemic government support - issues that have characterized America's testing response from the beginning of the pandemic.

  Companies trying to get the Food and Drug Administration's approval for rapid COVID-19 tests describe an arbitrary, opaque process that meanders on, sometimes long after their products have been approved in other countries that prioritize accessibility and affordability over perfect accuracy.

• Singapore will stop covering the medical bills of unvaccinated COVID-19 patients

  "Currently, unvaccinated persons make up a sizeable majority of those who require intensive inpatient care, and disproportionately contribute to the strain on our healthcare resources," it said in a statement.