Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Will the recent return of inequality outweigh its long-term decline?

  Why is social inequality increasing in the 21st Century?

  In the long run, is inequality rising?

  Daniel Waldenström. When we look back over the whole of the last century, the answer is no. With the introduction of democracy, redistribution, the shocks of wars and other economic crises, the 20th Century has been an era of strong equalisation in western societies. However, if we consider the last four decades there is more of a debate with larger differences across countries. The 80s were a global low in inequality reduction. But since then there has only been a mild increase in most European countries with a larger increase in the United States.

• Netanyahu's ceasefire doublespeak: Dovish with U.S., hawkish with negotiators

  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Secretary of State Tony Blinken on Monday that he's committed to getting a Gaza hostage and ceasefire agreement, but Israeli officials say he has refused to give his own negotiators enough space to make a deal.

• Israeli settlers are seizing Palestinian land under cover of war - they hope permanently

  Last week, Israel's domestic intelligence chief Ronen Bar wrote to ministers warning that Jewish extremists in the West Bank were carrying out acts of "terror" against Palestinians and causing "indescribable damage" to the country.
  ...
  Extremists in Israel's government boast that these changes will prevent an independent Palestinian state from ever being created.

• Exclusive: the papers that most heavily cite retracted studies

  Data from giant project show how withdrawn research propagates through the literature.

• A Test for Life Versus Non-Life

  In a new book, physicist Sara Walker argues that assembly theory can explain what life is, and even help scientists create new forms of it.

  Assembly theory, as they call it, looks at everything in the universe in terms of how it was assembled from smaller parts. Life, the scientists argue, emerges when the universe hits on a way to make exceptionally intricate things.
  ...
  The scientists suggested that the cutoff of 15 they discovered in their experiments might be evidence of a threshold for life. Ordinary chemistry could assemble molecules only through a limited number of steps, whereas life could carry it much further.
  ...
  But some biologists criticized the paper's sweeping claims and obscure language. "How did this nonsense get past peer review?" Rosemary Redfield, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia, asked on X.

  Technical details published in Nature: Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution.

• Blood test has a 90 percent accuracy rate in determining whether memory loss is due to Alzheimer's

  The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that a p-tau217 blood test can determine whether memory loss is caused by Alzheimer's about 91 percent of the time, compared to 73 percent accuracy for specialists and 61 percent for primary care doctors.

• I, for one, will mourn Twitter

  Jonn Elledge, New Statesman

  But since Elon Musk acquired it, possibly by accident, back in 2022, the voices of racist, misogynistic or homophobic trolls have become louder and more prominent. Moderation policies have been weakened; banned accounts belonging to the likes of Andrew Tate or Alex Jones reinstated. Misinformation abounds, and the loss of reputable advertisers has made noticeably less reputable ones more visible.

  Similarly Sam Harris has left X/Twitter.
  I wonder when other Musk/Twitter fans like Tyler Cowen. will see the light.
  

• Insider Trading by Other Means

  The basic idea is that insiders conceal their suspicious trades by publicly reporting them (as they are required to do) in ways that confuse or discourage investigators. We develop a taxonomy of concealment strategies, complete with suggestive examples. We then empirically test our taxonomy using a database of essentially all stock trades since 1992. We find that insiders who trade using the subterfuges we describe outperform the market by up to 20% on average.

• Delay of gratification and adult outcomes: The Marshmallow Test does not reliably predict adult functioning.

  Yet another psychology study bites the dust.