Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
What if a movement designed to do the maximum good for the most people actually helped a few people get very rich?
One method at the center of effective altruism (EA) urges its followers
to make as much money as possible, so that they can devote a large part
of their riches to helping humanity: an idea called "Earn to give."
...
Not only does 'earn to give' ignore the problems at the heart of the
prevailing economic system, it supercharges capitalism. It hints that
capitalism isn't only the
best
way to live, or the
only
way to live,
but also a
just
way to live.
...
A conversation between MacAskill and Bankman-Fried is credited with
propelling the FTX founder into his subsequent career in trading,
and then cryptocurrency. MacAskill also worked for Bankman-Fried's
charitable enterprises. After FTX's collapse, MacAskill tweeted that
he "will have much to reflect on" if it turns out FTX misused funds.
Computing systems that appear to generate brain-like activity may be the result of researchers guiding them to a specific outcome.
"What this suggests is that in order to obtain a result with grid cells, the researchers training the models needed to bake in those results with specific, biologically implausible implementation choices," says Rylan Schaeffer, a former senior research associate at MIT.
Without those constraints, the MIT team found that very few neural networks generated grid-cell-like activity, suggesting that these models do not necessarily generate useful predictions of how the brain works.
If national conservatism means anything, it means fighting and winning the culture war. When you know that the majority of ordinary people really aren't woke and therefore it's relatively easy to peel them away from the left by pointing out the lunacies that the people on the left want them to believe: that there are 53 genders, that it's actually anti-racism systematically to discriminate against people on the basis of race, and so on ... It's the 2020s, and in the 2020s politics is about culture and that's how you get voters to turn away from the left."
Peter Beinart
Ben-Gvir is different because Israel is different. In France, the US, Italy, and India, right-wing leaders are seeking-to varying degrees-to create ethnocracies, states that define themselves as belonging to a dominant ethnic, religious, or racial group. Their centrist opponents-to varying degrees-support legal equality for all citizens. This divide creates deep ideological polarization. But Israel is not deeply ideologically polarized. It's already an ethnocracy and no major political party wants to change that. That's what sets Ben-Gvir apart from figures like Trump and Le Pen: His rivalry with his centrist foes may be politically fierce, but it's not a contest over the basic definition of the state.
Researchers say there is a growing body of evidence these viruses interfere with each other's spread.
Untangling such interference hasn’t been easy given the number of respiratory viruses—coronaviruses, rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, RSV, and influenza are just among the best known—and the many infections that escape notice. Recent advances in technology, however, make it easier to detect infections in people and study how multiple viruses behave in the lab, in cell cultures or stem cell–derived tissues known as organoids. Increasingly, researchers are fingering a cause: chemical messengers that infected people produce called, fittingly, interferons.
The experts at Good Judgment weigh in on the coming year.
The Washington Post
When you search for a product on Amazon, you may not realize that most of what you see at first is advertising. Amazon is betraying your trust in its results to make an extra buck.
NOT!
Web3 is Going Just Great is a project to track some examples of how things in the blockchains/crypto/web3 technology space aren't actually going as well as its proponents might like you to believe. The timeline tracks events in cryptocurrency and blockchain-based technologies, dating back to the beginning of 2021.
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