Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Understanding Human Decision-Making: Neuroeconomics

  We are now even beginning to see evidence that the structure of our brains, not just the activity in the brain, influences how we generate subjective values. To see how this works consider how differently each of us might view a lottery ticket that offered a 50 percent chance of winning $100. Some might be willing to trade that ticket for a sure win of $40 despite the fact that the average value of such a lottery ticket was $50 (0.5 x $100). Economists refer to that as risk aversion, and it turns out that the thickness of a tiny patch of parietal cortex does quite a good job predicting how risk averse each of us is (Gilaie-Dotan, S. et al., 2014). Indeed, it seems that changes in risk aversion as we age (we famously become more risk averse as we age) correlated better with the age-related thinning of this brain area than with age itself (Grubb et al., 2016).

• Quantum computing has a hype problem

  Quantum computing startups are all the rage, but it's unclear if they'll be able to produce anything of use in the near future.

  The only problem? Actually making a quantum computer that could do it. That depends on implementing an idea pioneered by Shor and others called quantum-error correction, a process to compensate for the fact that quantum states disappear quickly because of environmental noise (a phenomenon called "decoherence"). In 1994, scientists thought that such error correction would be easy because physics allows it. But in practice, it is extremely difficult.

• The Latecomers Guide to Crypto

  Here, a group of around fifteen cryptocurrency researchers and critics have done what the New York Times apparently won't.
  Crypto is a lot of things - including terribly explained. We're here to clear things up.
  

  On March 20, 2022, the New York Times published a 14,000-word puff piece on cryptocurrencies, both online and as an entire section of the Sunday print edition. Though its author, Kevin Roose, wrote that it aimed to be a "sober, dispassionate explanation of what crypto actually is", it was a thinly-veiled advertisement for cryptocurrency that appeared to have received little in the way of fact-checking or critical editorial scrutiny. It uncritically repeated many questionable or entirely fallacious arguments from cryptocurrency advocates, and it appears that no experts on the topic were consulted, or even anyone with a less-than-rosy view on crypto. This is grossly irresponsible.

• The Crypto Syllabus

  The Crypto Syllabus will furnish intellectual resources to help understand many of the phenomena grouped under the "crypto" label, from blockchains to NFTs to DAOs to CBDCs. It's a collaboration between The Syllabus, a knowledge curation initiative, and its sibling institution, a new non-profit called The Center for the Advancement of Infrastructural Imagination (CAII).

• WT.Social Factchecking Websites

  Web links to fact check various topics, brought to you by Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales.

• Wuhan Lab Leak: Case closed?

  Maybe not yet, but we are getting awfully close.

  There's essentially only one important remaining piece of evidence pointing to a lab leak, the fact that Covid first appeared in Wuhan, which contains a virus research lab. That's consistent with both a lab leak from a natural sample or a lab leak from gain-of-function research. All of the other so-called evidence pointing to a lab leak has been thoroughly discredited.
  ...
  First, the virus emerging in Wuhan is nowhere near as a much of a weird coincidence as one might think. Second, evidence pointing to a zoonotic origin is a bit stronger than Yglesias assumes.

• Just one drink per day can shrink your brain, study says

  On average, people at age 50 who drank a pint of beer or 6-ounce glass of wine (two alcohol units) a day in the last month had brains that appeared two years older than those who only drank a half of a beer (one unit), according to the study, which published Friday in the journal Nature.

• The 1619 Project Unrepentantly Pushes Junk History

  Nikole Hannah-Jones' new book sidesteps scholarly critics while quietly deleting previous factual errors.

  We see the same pattern in how Hannah-Jones handles the most controversial claim in the original 1619 Project. Her opening essay there declared that "one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery." In early 2020, Silverstein begrudgingly amended the passage online to read "some of the colonists" (emphasis added) after Northwestern University historian Leslie M. Harris revealed that she had cautioned Hannah-Jones against making this claim as one of the newspaper's fact-checkers, only to be ignored.

• Focused Protection From the Great Barrington Declaration Never Made Sense

  On top of this, the predictions about Focused Protection, made by the authors of the GBD, were clearly wrong. Shortly after the GBD was published, Prof Bhattacharya, who co-authored the declaration, said that Sweden was implementing Focused Protection ("what they're doing is focused protection"). Remember, the GBD predicted that Focused Protection would result in herd immunity within 3-6 months. However, after a huge number of cases and more than 8 months of a high burden, Sweden's Covid-19 figures dropped only to shortly shoot up again during the Omicron wave. The prediction of 3-6 months for herd immunity was, it appears, simply incorrect.

• The journey of humanity: Roots of inequality in the wealth of nations

  This essay explores the journey of humanity since the emergence of Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago. It analyses the critical role of Unifed Growth Theory in re-solving two fundamental mysteries that had characterized this journey: (i) The mystery of growth-why did living standards stagnate for most of human history and what led to their sudden soar 200 years ago? (ii) the mystery of inequality--what are the roots of the major surge in inequality across nations and why have these gaps widened dramatically over the past 200 years?
  ...
  The prevailing wisdom had been that living standards had risen gradually throughout history in a process that accelerated over time. However, as depicted in Figure 1, this viewpoint is a distorted and misleading depiction of human history. While the modern technological frontier does reflect gradual progress that accelerated over time, technological advancement did not improve living standards over most of human existence. The dramatic jump in living conditions in the past two centuries has been the product of a sharp disruption of an epochs of stagnation not of a process that gained momentum incrementally over the course of human history.