Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Everyone wants your email address. Think twice before sharing it.

  To advertisers, web publishers and app makers, your email is important not just for contacting you. It acts as a digital breadcrumb for companies to link your activity across sites and apps to serve you relevant ads.
  ...
  There are simpler ways for websites and apps to track your web activity through your email address. An email could contain your first and last name, and assuming you've used it for some time, data brokers have already compiled a comprehensive profile on your interests based on your browsing activity. A website or an app can upload your email address into an ad broker's database to match your identity with a profile containing enough insights to serve you targeted ads.

• 70% of drugs advertised on TV are of "low therapeutic value," study finds

  Ads often tout new, pricey drugs that are not much better than old, cheaper ones.

• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data

  Eugene Wigner's article "https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf" examines why so much of physics can be neatly explained with simple mathematical formulas ... . Meanwhile, sciences that involve human beings rather than elementary particles have proven more resistant to elegant mathematics. Economists suffer from physics envy over their inability to neatly model human behavior. An informal, incomplete grammar of the English language runs over 1,700 pages. Perhaps when it comes to natural language processing and related fields, we're doomed to complex theories that will never have the elegance of physics equations. But if that's so, we should stop acting as if our goal is to author extremely elegant theories, and instead embrace complexity and make use of the best ally we have: the unreasonable effectiveness of data.

• The End of Programming

  Communications of the ACM, January 2023

  I believe the conventional idea of "writing a program" is headed for extinction, and indeed, for all but very specialized applications, most software, as we know it, will be replaced by AI systems that are trained rather than programmed.
  ...
  I am talking about replacing the entire concept of writing programs with training models. In the future, CS students are not going to need to learn such mundane skills as how to add a node to a binary tree or code in C++. That kind of education will be antiquated, like teaching engineering students how to use a slide rule.

• Scialabba on American Inequality

  The intolerable inequalities we take for granted.

  So let's interrogate some of our beliefs about political morality with the eyes of our descendants. Two four-letter words lie at the heart of contemporary America's public morality: "free" and "fair." "It's a free country" is every American's boast; "I only want a fair shake" is every American's plea. I doubt I need to remind many Commonweal readers of the more flagrant forms of unfairness in our national life-that one American child in five lives below or near the poverty line; that somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of our economy's productivity gains since 1980 have gone to the top 10 percent of the income distribution; that the top twenty-five hedge-fund managers earn more than all the nation's kindergarten teachers combined; that 100,000 Americans will die for lack of health care over the next ten years in order to give a large tax cut to Americans with incomes above a half-million dollars; and so on and so on, down the long and shameful catalog. You all read the newspapers. Our twenty-third-century descendants may ask-they will ask-how we could have tolerated such unfairness; but they won't ask how we could have believed such inequalities to be fair, because we don't, most of us, believe them to be fair. Let's instead consider a different question: whether our present-day ideals of fairness and freedom, even if we lived up to them, would satisfy our descendants.

• Is There Hope for Marriage?

  On Big Romance and other myths of the modern age.

  In practical terms, households formed on this model can work together both economically and socially on the common business of living, whether the work is agricultural, artisanal, knowledge-based, or a mix of all these. At the very least, such households offer women a sane, healthful, and rewarding alternative to the exploitative, medicated, disembodied, sexually libertine excesses of hypermodernity. And more broadly, moving beyond Big Romance toward a more practical conception of marriage is a crucial first step toward sustainable human societies.

• Should we care about people who need never exist?

  How do you value a life not yet lived? I don't get the repugnant conclusion.

  When couched in these terms, even savage cuts in the quality of life could be justified by a sufficient increase in the quantity. We might be forced to conclude that a threadbare world is better than a comfortable one if enough extra people get to experience it.

  This is one version of what Parfit dubbed the "repugnant conclusion". He imagined a world where people had lives that were barely worth living (a life of "muzak and potatoes" as he put it). If the population was sufficiently large (and in a philosophical thought experiment, the only limit on a population's size is the philosopher's imagination) such a world could be morally preferable to one where a smaller population enjoyed lives of joy and abundance.