Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Why can't anyone agree on how dangerous AI will be?

  Researchers tried to get AI optimists and pessimists on the same page. It didn't quite work.

  There are people who deeply understand advanced machine learning systems who think they will prove increasingly uncontrollable, possibly "go rogue," and threaten humanity with catastrophe or even extinction. There are other people who deeply understand how these systems work who think that we're perfectly able to control them, that their dangers do not include human extinction, and that the first group is full of hysterical alarmists.

  How do we tell who's right? I sure don't know.

  Many cited the need for robotics to reach human levels, not just software AI, and argued that doing so would be much harder. It's one thing to write code and text in a laptop; it's quite another to, as a machine, learn how to flip a pancake or clean a tile floor or any of the many other physical tasks at which humans now outperform robots.

  -----

  I surmise that those who believe AI will threaten humanity think that humans are just equivalent to a physical machine, perhaps with some special properties that can be duplicated. (And btw the same goes for those who think people do not have free will.)

  Since no one has come close to creating a living organism from physical materials, it seems to me we are a long way from understanding what is life. Until we do, I think one has to be agnostic (and not religious) about the question is AI dangerous or not. Why don't discussions about AI ever mention what, if any, are the differences between a living person and a physical machine?

• How the Washing Machine Changed the World: The Far-Reaching Impact of Household Appliances

  A wave of new household appliances transformed the nature of domestic work and the lives of women. In the early 1900s-as vividly portrayed in 1900 House -housework was a full-time job, consuming an average of 58 hours per week, according to the new NBER working paper "The Household Equipment Revolution" by economists Effrosyni Adamopoulou, Jeremy Greenwood, and Nezih Guner. But by 1975, that figure had plummeted to just 18 hours, thanks largely to the widespread adoption of labor-saving devices like washing machines, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and microwave ovens.
  ...
  According to the economists, the driving force behind this household revolution was the falling "time price" of appliances-the number of hours of work needed to afford them. As prices dropped, more and more families were able to purchase these devices, which offered significant time savings and reduced the drudgery of housework.

• Proof News

  Proof provides data-driven reporting and analysis of the most important questions of our time.

  Proof believes that journalism can increase its rigor by learning from the scientific method. Rather than focus on the outdated notion of objectivity, Proof approaches its investigations by developing a hypothesis and collecting and analyzing the best available data to test its hypothesis. It is transparent about its findings and the limitations of its work, which are presented in an "ingredients label."

• Sci-Hub

  the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers

  At this time the widest possible distribution of research papers, as well as of other scientific or educational sources, is artificially restricted by copyright laws. Such laws effectively slow down the development of science in human society. The Sci-Hub project, running from 5th September 2011, is challenging the status quo. At the moment, Sci-Hub provides access to hundreds of thousands research papers every day, effectively bypassing any paywalls and restrictions.

• Standing Together

  Standing Together is a grassroots movement mobilizing Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in pursuit of peace, equality, and social and climate justice. While the minority who benefit from the status quo of occupation and economic inequality seek to keep us divided, we know that we - the majority - have far more in common than that which sets us apart. When we stand together, we are strong enough to fundamentally alter the existing socio-political reality.

• Parrots love playing tablet games

  "Cognitive enrichment is a crucial component for parrot health and well-being, and tablet games are one method of providing this enrichment," McMahon says. "Designing apps specifically made for birds and their unique touchscreen tendencies makes this form of enrichment more accessible."
  ...
  Last year, the team showed a group of parrots how to video call one another, finding that the birds both overwhelmingly enjoyed the activity and could make the calls themselves, when given the option.

• Brilliance ratings of own field vs. brilliance rating among doctorate holders

  Joseph Bronski

  Most scientists see philosophy as unimportant. That guy arguing otherwise?
  Probably a philosophy grad.
  

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point

  Last year, 10,000 sham papers had to be retracted by academic journals, but experts think this is just the tip of the iceberg

  The startling rise in the publication of sham science papers has its roots in China, where young doctors and scientists seeking promotion were required to have published scientific papers. Shadow organisations -- known as "paper mills" -- began to supply fabricated work for publication in journals there.
  ...
  Watchdog groups -- such as Retraction Watch -- have tracked the problem and have noted retractions by journals that were forced to act on occasions when fabrications were uncovered. One study, by Nature, revealed that in 2013 there were just over 1,000 retractions. In 2022, the figure topped 4,000 before jumping to more than 10,000 last year.

• Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

  The Cambrian explosion of business ideas that the invention of internet produced a generation ago have ossified into rent seeking, buying out the competition, and funneling huge amounts of cash to shareholders.
  ...
  Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

• Consensus: AI Search Engine for Research

  Consensus is a search engine that uses AI to find insights in research papers.

• The Hidden Wiki

  The Front Page of the Dark Web -- the internet that isn't visible to search engines.

  To access darkweb sites on The Hidden Wiki, install TOR Browser

  Also see Best Dark Web Search Engines for Tor Browser.

• Which side believes in more misinformation?

  Richard Hanania

  But a 2021 paper has convinced me that liberals are the side that is overwhelmingly closer to the truth on most factual matters.

• Who Is Most Likely to Get Long COVID?

  Certain groups of people -- like women, smokers, and those who had severe COVID-19 infections -- are at a higher risk of long COVID, a review of more than 800,000 patients has found.
  ...
  Yet, researchers also found that patients who had at least two doses of the COVID vaccine had a significantly lower risk of getting long COVID down the line.
  ...
  Having other conditions -- like anxiety, depression, asthma, diabetes, and being immunocompromised -- were also connected to a higher likelihood of getting long COVID, researchers reported.

• New study shows dancing is best exercise to combat depression

  Data shows that dancing may treat depression symptoms better than SSRIs

  Australian researchers have published a study that shows that the best form of exercise to treat depression is dancing, beating out several exercises including walking or jogging, yoga, tai chi, and strength training among others. The study aimed to identify what kind of exercise would be best for treating major depressive disorder, either in tandem or compared to the prescription of psychotherapy, and antidepressants.

• Step Away From CNBC

  If you want to make money in the stock market, change this channel.

  Cramer is living proof that education (Harvard, Harvard Law), intelligence, and experience aren't sufficient to generate market-beating performance. Despite his history as a successful hedge fund manager, his picks at TheStreet.com and the CNBC Investing Club have underperformed the market by about 1.7 percent a year for 23 years, not even counting the $400 fee he charges. This calculation is based on Cramer's performance from 2000 to 2017 and 2019 to 2023. I asked CNBC media relations for data on his 2018 performance but received no response.

• Eleven: Table Tennis VR gameplay review

  Play table tennis wearing a virtual reality headeset. I haven't tried it but am told it's pretty good.

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• The Walk and Talk

  Craig Mod

  Kevin Kelly and I began talking while walking together some twelve years ago, near his home in Pacifica. Eventually, we branched out, and for these past six years have been running more "formalized" walk-and-talks across five countries with some 40+ people. We've walked-and-talked in China, Spain, England, Japan, and Thailand. These experiences are some of the best weeks of our lives.
  ...
  A walk-and-talk is a moveable salon. A small group of people walk together for a week, having casual conversations side-by-side during most of the day. In the evening the group sits down to an intense hours-long discussion centered on a daily chosen topic by those present. A moderator keeps the conversation on that day's single topic to sharpen it and make it memorable.

• The Cancer That Doctors Don't Want to Call Cancer

  A growing number of doctors are advocating what might seem like an unusual position: That low-grade prostate cancers that grow very slowly or not at all shouldn't be called cancer or carcinoma.

  The reason, they say, is that those words scare men, their families and sometimes even their doctors into seeking more aggressive treatment than patients need-leaving men with debilitating side effects-rather than pursuing a carefully monitored wait-and-see approach.

  A name change wouldn't be unprecedented. Certain other forms of thyroid, cervical and bladder cancers have been reclassified, sometimes partly to avoid scaring people about cancers that are unlikely to spread.

• Save the old Bell Labs as a new 'Museum of the Internet'

  Bell Labs, the historic headwaters of so many inventions that now define our digital age, is closing in Murray Hill, its latest owners moving to more modern headquarters in New Brunswick. The Labs should be preserved as a historic site and more. I propose that Bell Labs be opened to the public as a museum and school of the internet.

  There is no museum of the internet. Silicon Valley has its Computer History Museum. New York has museums for television and the moving image. Massachusetts boasts a charming Museum of Printing. Search Google for a museum of the internet and you'll find amusing digital artifacts but nowhere to immerse oneself in and study this immensely impactful institution in society.

• Debunking an Immigration Myth

  GovDocs to the Rescue!

  One question that routinely comes up in genealogy research: why is the family's surname different from its (presumed) original form? Most people have heard one explanation: those names were "changed at Ellis Island," altered either maliciously or ignorantly by port officials when the immigrant passed through. The charge against immigration officials, however, is provably false: no names were written down at Ellis Island, and thus no names were changed there. The names of arriving passengers were already written down on manifests required by the federal government, lists which crossed the ocean with the passengers.

  Changes were made later, by the immigrants themselves, usually during the naturalization process.

• Where can I view census records?

  After 72 years have passed, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is responsible for making census records publicly available. Records from the 1790 to 1950 censuses are currently available for genealogical research. Records from the 1950 Census were released by NARA on April 1, 2022. The 1960 records will become available in April 2032.

  Visit NARA's Census Records Web site to learn more about the availability of microfilmed and digital census records for genealogical research.

• Bill Ackman's celebrity academic wife Neri Oxman's dissertation is marred by plagiarism
  • Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, resigned after conservative activists revealed she had plagiarized.
  • The hedge fund manager and prominent Harvard donor Bill Ackman helped lead the charge against Gay.
  • BI analyzed Ackman's wife's doctoral dissertation and found numerous instances of plagiarism.

Interesting how Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution gave a pointer to what he called a programmatic tweet because it agreed with his beliefs, but failed to acknowledge the above hypocrisy of Ackman.

• Fund Comparison Tool

  Compare up to 10 items with respect to Returns, or Risk, or Fees, or Holdings.

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• If the generals are counting tunnels, it suggests things are not going well

  Tal Schneider writing about the Israel-Gaza war in The Times of Israel.

  The IDF method is frustrating and we can't keep using it, because it involves destroying infrastructure and buildings above ground in order to get to what's underneath.

  In the first stage [of the ground offensive], the IDF had a broad mandate for widespread destruction [as it sought to dismantle Hamas]. Obviously, we can't uncover tunnels in that way in Khan Younis and Rafah, so deciphering what's going on underground will have to be done another way - to reveal what's underground without destroying the buildings and infrastructure above.

  I believe the way to do it is by digging from our side toward them, while inserting smart tools - sensors, microphones and robots, anything that can penetrate the tunnels and bring us intelligence on where they're located.

  I'm talking even about some sort of underground torpedo, launching an excavation machine with explosives capabilities, at the right time. We need to change the approach - to attacking the tunnels from within.

• Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI?

  Tech bubbles come in two varieties: The ones that leave something behind, and the ones that leave nothing behind. Sometimes, it can be hard to guess what kind of bubble you're living through until it pops and you find out the hard way.
  ...
  AI is a bubble, and it's full of fraud, but that doesn't automatically mean there'll be nothing of value left behind when the bubble bursts. World-Com was a gigantic fraud and it kicked off a fiber-optic bubble, but when WorldCom cratered, it left behind a lot of fiber that's either in use today or waiting to be lit up. On balance, the world would have been better off without the WorldCom fraud, but at least something could be salvaged from the wreckage.
  ...
  Even more important, these models are expensive to run. Even if a bankrupt AI company's model and servers could be acquired for pennies on the dollar, even if the new owners could be shorn of any overhanging legal liability from looming copyright cases, even if the eye-watering salaries commanded by AI engineers collapsed, the electricity bill for each query - to power the servers and their chillers - would still make running these giant models very expensive.

  Do the potential paying customers for these large models add up to enough money to keep the servers on? That's the 13 trillion dollar question, and the answer is the difference between WorldCom and Enron, or dotcoms and cryptocurrency.

• Quantum Computing's Hard, Cold Reality Check

  Hype is everywhere, skeptics say, and practical applications are still far away.

  A fundamental challenge for today's quantum computers is that they are very prone to errors. Some have suggested that these so-called "noisy intermediate-scale quantum" (NISQ) processors could still be put to useful work. But Painter says there's growing recognition that this is unlikely and quantum error-correction schemes will be key to achieving practical quantum computers.
  ...
  In May, Matthias Troyer, a technical fellow at Microsoft who leads the company's quantum computing efforts, co-authored a paper in Communications of the ACM suggesting that the number of applications where quantum computers could provide a meaningful advantage was more limited than some might have you believe.

• 2 of the biggest failures in the driverless car industry in 2023

  Major businesses in the self-driving vehicle and tech space, including Aurora, TuSimple, and Embark Technology, lost a combined $40 billion in value between going public and October 2022. The sector's bad fortunes have only continued this year.

• Famed Bell Labs leaving historic headquarters to move to New Brunswick

  Nokia's research arm, Nokia Bell Labs, announced Monday it will leave its historic headquarters in Murray Hill over the next five years to relocate to a new tech hub being built in New Brunswick.

  The research and development company's new headquarters will be located at the HELIX innovation center in New Brunswick, according to a Nokia press release. Originally known as "The Hub," the HELIX innovation center is a large complex being built in the city's downtown on the site of the former Ferren Mall.

• Liz Magill, UPenn president, resigns after antisemitism testimony draws backlash

  Experts and advocates say the chant, "Israel, we charge you with genocide," is a typical refrain heard at pro-Palestinian rallies. Jewish and Palestinian supporters both acknowledge protesters aren't saying "We want Jewish genocide."

• Scientists Have Reported a Breakthrough In Understanding Whale Language

  Researchers have identified new elements of whale vocalizations that they propose are analogous to human speech, including vowels and pitch.

• How ideas made Derek Parfit

  David Edmonds's new biography of Derek Parfit.

  Parfit came to believe that his philosophical work was deeply important and that anything that took him away from this work must be studiously avoided. Hence, he ate the same food and wore the same clothes every day. He avoided social engagements and nonphilosophical conversation. If he could make a significant and salutary impact on the intellectual landscape, then his resolute spurning of those close to him would be worth it. In light of his philosophical achievements, Edmonds judges that Parfit's "gamble paid off."

• Wasabi, beloved on sushi, linked to "really substantial" boost in memory, Japanese study finds

  A study conducted in Japan suggests there's more to sushi than just a healthy dose of fish and seaweed. Researchers at Tohoku University found that wasabi, that spicy green condiment traditionally dabbed on the raw fish dish, improves both short- and long-term memory.

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) and exercise

  Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) has been referred to as a fertilizer for your brain.

  Low levels of BDNF have been associated with depression, anxiety, poor memory and brain degeneration as seen in conditions such as Alzheimer's and dementia.
  ...
  Don't try to learn something while exercising ... – blood flow increases to the brain post-exercise, while BDNF levels are still increased, meaning immediately after exercise is the perfect time to take in new information.

  Exercise Right’s five favourite ways to move for more BDNF
  1. Indoor rock-climbing – especially if you actively commute to the rock wall!
  2. Trail running – something with twists, turns and great views is awesome
  3. Dancing – where you’re learning new moves and also working your fitness
  4. Functional movement – wait until the after school rush has finished then go check out (and play on) your nearest playground – think monkey bars, crawling through tunnels and balancing on beams
  5. Team sports – they require you to be getting great aerobic gains by running around, whilst also working your brain in terms of strategy and quick thinking
  And I'll add table tennis which requires thinking while moving.
• Why does our balance get worse as we grow older?

  There are three main systems that provide us with the sensory information about our bodies and the surrounding environment that we need to maintain balance. These are the visual (eyes), vestibular (inner ear and semi-circular canals) and somotosensory (sensation feedback from joints in ankles, knees, spine and neck) systems. To maintain balance, our brains must rapidly and continuously integrate and then process the sensory information received from these systems, and this integration is often worse in older people who are prone to falls.

• Vinay Prasad on Cancer Screening

  Russ Roberts EconTalk podcast.

  Early detection of cancer seems like a very good idea. But it's a lot more complicated than it seems. Oncologist and epidemiologist Vinay Prasad of the University of California, San Francisco talks to EconTalk's Russ Roberts about why many tests to detect cancer do little or nothing to extend lifespan.
  ...
  And so, when that revenue is threatened, as in the recent trial called NordICC--which failed to find a benefit on colorectal cancer mortality -- a lot of people are going to be very defensive.
  ...
  If you look at all-cause mortality in all of the mammographic screening trials put together, you will find there's just no signal there. It's just not budging all-cause mortality. It looks pretty null.

• Israel's two wars

  Matthew Yglesias

  One problem, I think, is that while Israel is waging a just war in Gaza, they are in parallel waging an unjust war in the West Bank. This second war is much less spectacular, much more of a slow burn, and at the moment, is causing much less death and destruction to innocent civilians. That these two wars — one just but spectacularly deadly, one unjust but lower-key — are playing out in tandem is contributing to a confused and polarized debate over a set of issues that were already quite fraught. It also, in my view, greatly complicates the question of the right policy response for the United States of America. As a matter of pure-position taking, I think it’s easy to say that the right stance is “Hamas is bad, it is correct to make war on them, but the ongoing colonization of the West Bank is also bad and Israel ought to halt and partially reverse it.” But I don’t know that foreign countries can actually craft a policy that makes that outcome any more likely.

• Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon

  Want to really understand how large language models work? Here’s a gentle primer.

  Conventional software is created by human programmers who give computers explicit, step-by-step instructions. In contrast, ChatGPT is built on a neural network that was trained using billions of words of ordinary language.
  ...
  As a result, no one on Earth fully understands the inner workings of LLMs. Researchers are working to gain a better understanding, but this is a slow process that will take years—perhaps decades—to complete.

• archive.today

  webpage capture

  Search the archive for saved snapshots by copying and pasting the link (without the query string, that is everything after the '?' in the URL), in the blue box.

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Colonoscopies: America vs Europe

  Colonoscopies are the first-line method for preventing colorectal cancer in America -- and almost nowhere else. But do they work? We finally have a comprehensive trial, but it's left gastroenterologists with more questions than answers.

  The 18% reduction in colorectal cancer incidence was statistically significant, while the 10% reduction in colorectal cancer mortality and 1% reduction in overall mortality were not.
  ...
  One thing is clear: Screening works. If you're of the appropriate age, please get screened. If your tubes are acting funny, please get screened without delay. The best method and the level of benefit are debatable, but we know it helps. Use a stool test if you want (multitarget DNA test if you can), or a colonoscopy, or a sigmoidoscopy, or a "virtual" CT colonoscopy, or a crazy edible camera. Do one of them. Statistics show colorectal cancer is highly curable when caught early, and now that we have feisty checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapies,it's probably even better now. Just do it. Your tubes will thank you.

• A Liberal Zionist's Move to the Left on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

  Peter Beinart, once a staunch defender of Israel, is arguing for the Palestinians' right to return.

  A must read about foreign politics and the Mideast is his substack: The Beinart Notebook:

  A conversation about American foreign policy, Palestinian freedom and the Jewish people.

• The Demand for Political Misinformation is a Bigger Danger than the Supply

  If it is the case that political disinformation is at least about voter preferences as it is about politicians and social media platforms, solutions to the problem are much more complex. Modern democracies are not very good about figuring out what to do when voters get exactly what they want and what voters want is actually bad for democracy. Tweaking the law and relying upon private ordering is less than optimal, if the goal is a resolution of the problem. Rather, the focus will need to be on structural political and economic reforms.
  ...
  Social science evidence indicates that bias in evaluation of political information is roughly equal across the political spectrum. Each side is relatively more susceptible to misinformation that confirms their priors. Examples that appeal disproportionately to the left include 9/11 "trutherism", and claims that GMO foods should be banned or tightly restricted because they are supposedly more dangerous than "natural" ones.

• Great news about American wealth

  Regular Americans are getting richer.

  Basically, the 2022 numbers — which you can see summarized in the Fed’s report — tell a really encouraging story. In a nutshell:

  • Americans’ wealth is way up since before the pandemic.
  • The increase is very even across the board, with people at the bottom of the distribution gaining proportionally more than people at the top.
  • Inequality is down, including racial inequality, educational inequality, urban-rural inequality, overall wealth inequality.
  • Debt is much less of a problem.
  • There’s even some surprising good news about income as well as wealth

• Kidney Donation

  Scott Alexander of "Astral Codex Ten" fame recounts his decision and experience donating a kidney.

• BetterHelp - Privacy Not Included

  The FTC stated, "At several points in the signup process, BetterHelp promised consumers that it would not use or disclose their personal health data except for limited purposes, such as to provide counseling services. Despite these promises, BetterHelp used and revealed consumers' email addresses, IP addresses, and health questionnaire information to Facebook, Snapchat, Criteo, and Pinterest for advertising purposes, according to the FTC's complaint." The results of this enforcement action are a $7.8 million settlement paid to consumers and a ban on Betterhelp "sharing consumers' health data, including sensitive information about mental health challenges, for advertising."

• A New Idea for How to Assemble Life

  If we want to understand complex constructions, such as ourselves, assembly theory says we must account for the entire history of how such entities came to be.

  In 2021, a team led by Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow in Scotland and Sara Walker of Arizona State University proposed a very general way to identify molecules made by living systems - even those using unfamiliar chemistries. Their method, they said, simply assumes that alien life forms will produce molecules with a chemical complexity similar to that of life on Earth.

  Called assembly theory, the idea underpinning the pair's strategy has even grander aims. As laid out in a recent series of publications, it attempts to explain why apparently unlikely things, such as you and me, even exist at all. And it seeks that explanation not, in the usual manner of physics, in timeless physical laws, but in a process that imbues objects with histories and memories of what came before them. It even seeks to answer a question that has perplexed scientists and philosophers for millennia: What is life, anyway?

• Nate Silver on COVID death rates

  State partisanship and COVID vaccination rates are strongly predictive of COVID death rates even once you account for age.

• They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie?

  Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino became famous for their research into why we bend the truth. Now they've both been accused of fabricating data.

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children's Mental Well-being: Summary of the Evidence

  Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults. Such independent activities may promote mental well-being through both immediate effects, as a direct source of satisfaction, and long-term effects, by building mental characteristics that provide a foundation for dealing effectively with the stresses of life.

• Breaking Through Depression; The Balanced Brain - reviews

  Last year, research cast doubt on the dominant 'chemical imbalance' theory of depression. Now two persuasive books by scientists Philip Gold and Camilla Nord offer very different causes of the illness - though both are optimistic about our future treatment of the 'cancer of the self'.

  For some commentators, the recent downfall of the chemical imbalance theory has cast doubt on the use of existing antidepressant drugs, which were meant to restore the lost serotonin. Yet the data certainly suggests that they work better than placebos - and the authors of these two new books can explain why. For Nord, it is because antidepressant drugs help to correct the fundamental biases in someone's perceptions of the world. This change occurs incredibly quickly. People with depression are more likely to see anger, and less likely to see happiness, in neutral facial expressions - but in many patients, this tendency begins to disappear after they have taken just one antidepressant pill. Gold, meanwhile, points to studies showing that our current antidepressant pills encourage the birth of new brain cells and neural connections, which would help people to break free of the hyperactive stress response.

• Does History have a Replication Crisis?

  Replication is when you can repeat an experiment with new data or new materials and get the same result. Reproducibility is when you use exactly the same evidence as another person and still get the same result - so it has a much, much lower bar for success, which is what makes the lack of it in history all the more worrying.

  Historical myths, often based on mere misunderstanding, but occasionally on bias or fraud, spread like wildfire. People just love to share unusual and interesting facts, and history is replete with things that are both unusual and true. So much that is surprising or shocking has happened, that it can take only years or decades of familiarity with a particular niche of history in order to smell a rat. Not only do myths spread rapidly, but they survive - far longer, I suspect, than in scientific fields.

• The Reversal Curse: LLMs trained on "A is B" fail to learn "B is A"

  If a model is trained on a sentence of the form "A is B", it will not automatically generalize to the reverse direction "B is A". This is the Reversal Curse. For instance, if a model is trained on "Olaf Scholz was the ninth Chancellor of Germany", it will not automatically be able to answer the question, "Who was the ninth Chancellor of Germany?". Moreover, the likelihood of the correct answer ("Olaf Scholz") will not be higher than for a random name. Thus, models exhibit a basic failure of logical deduction and do not generalize a prevalent pattern in their training set (i.e. if "A is B'' occurs, "B is A" is more likely to occur).

• Why pain feels good

  Common sense tells us that people seek pleasure and avoid pain. But that's not always the case - various activities involve pain, including running, hot massages, tattoos, piercings and even BDSM.
  ...
  The link between pleasure and pain is deeply rooted in our biology. For a start, all pain causes the central nervous system to release endorphins - proteins which act to block pain and work in a similar way to opiates such as morphine to induce feelings of euphoria.

• A Few Unpleasant Truths (That Can Make You a Lot of Money)

  For example, here is an important investment secret that the wealthiest people in society don't want you to know: we do not actually live in a democracy, we live in an oligarchy masquerading as a democracy. The reason this is important is because market valuations are based almost entirely around the movement of capital, and capital moves differently in an oligarchy that it does in a true democracy. In a democracy, capital flows in a direction that protects the interests of the majority, but in an oligarchy, capital flows in a direction that protects the interests of the entrenched wealthy elite.

• Mastodon News from SDF Public Access UNIX System (https://sdf.org/)

  As Twitter rebrands to X and moves more towards a paid service, we anticipate that there will be new folks giving Mastodon and the Fediverse a try again. We built out a number of sites in various regions to assist with this.

      USA:    https://mastodon.sdf.org
      USA:    https://social.sdf.org    <--- a smaller SDF.ORG focused instance
      EU:     https://social.sdfeu.org
      China:  https://social.sdfcn.org
      Japan:  https://sdfjp.org
      India:  https://social.sdfin.org
  

  Additionally we've added the following alternative decentralized instances:

      https://lemmy.sdf.org      Alternative to Reddit
      https://lemmy.sdfeu.org    Alternative to Reddit  (sdfcn, sdfjp and sdfin)
      https://pixelfed.sdf.org   Alternative to Instagram
      https://toobnix.org        Alternative to Youtube
  

  While ALL of these instances are free and make no use of advertising nor the monetization of log files or user data, we do accept donations of support from the community. If you are able to, please visit https://sdf.org/support for ways that you can provide one time or regular support. Another way to help out is to become a moderator on one or more of our instances.

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• The UFO craze was created by government nepotism and incompetent journalism

  Why do these repetitive UFO stories keep coming up? The answer is Harry Reid-that's right, the Senate majority leader-who was a UFO enthusiast and reportedly good friends with Robert Bigelow, the owner of "Skinwalker Ranch" where all sorts of goblins, shades, aliens, and "dino-beavers" (I'm serious) are seen. When people talk about a secret military program to study UFOs, they are likely mainly referring to how Bigelow's company received a grant for 22 million to study wacky stuff at Skinwalker Ranch, including UFOs.
  ...
  To sum up the story as far as I understand its convoluted depths: diehard paranormal believers scored 22 million in Defense spending via what looks like nepotism from Harry Reid by submitting a grant to do bland general "aerospace research" and being the "sole bidder" for the contract. They then reportedly used that grant, according to Lacatski himself, the head of the program, to study a myriad of paranormal phenomenon at Skinwalker Ranch including-you may have guessed it by now-dino-beavers. Viola! That's how there was a "government-funded program to study UFOs."

• Facts don't change minds: a case for the virtues of propaganda

  A better understanding of propaganda and how to use it as an educational tool could advance the world in a positive way.

  Numerous studies have shown that, due to a myriad of cognitive biases such as belief perseverance and confirmation bias, facts unfortunately do not change people's minds. Propaganda, on the other hand, works very well on this front, something we see clearly from how people and groups have used it over the past century.

• Ranked-choice voting (RCV)

  A ranked-choice voting system (RCV) is an electoral system in which voters rank candidates by preference on their ballots. If a candidate wins a majority of first-preference votes, he or she is declared the winner. If no candidate wins a majority of first-preference votes, the candidate with the fewest first-preference votes is eliminated. First-preference votes cast for the failed candidate are eliminated, and second-preference choices on these ballots are then elevated to first-preference. A new tally is conducted to determine whether any candidate has won a majority of the adjusted votes. The process is repeated until a candidate wins an outright majority.

• This Is Why You're Still Single

  You're Single Because You're Not Even Trying
  It is reasonable for a quarter of singles to not want a relationship for whatever reason. What is not so reasonable is for the vast majority of those who do want one to not be making any attempt at finding one.
  

  Other reasons given with long explanations are:

  • You're Single Because Dating Apps Suck
  • You’re Single Because You Are The Fourth Child and Do Not Know How to Ask
  • You’re Single Because Dating Apps Suck
  • You’re Single Because You Didn’t Make a Date Me Doc
  • You’re Single Because the Dating Market Is Not In Equilibrium
  • You’re Single Because You’re Asking the Wrong Questions
  • You’re Single Because You Suck at Relationships
  • You’re Single Because You Decided You Were Poly
  • You’re Single Because You Didn’t Take Their Good Advice

• What Happens to All the Stuff We Return?

  Online merchants changed the way we shop-and made "reverse logistics" into a booming new industry.

  Most online shoppers assume that items they return go back into regular inventory, to be sold again at full price. That rarely happens.
  ...
  A century ago, the average return rate at Penney's was probably something like two per cent; before Internet shopping truly took hold, retail returns had risen to more like eight or ten per cent. Returns to online retailers now average close to twenty per cent, and returns of apparel are often double that.

• Artificial Intelligence and Aesthetic Judgment

  Generative AIs produce creative outputs in the style of human expression. We argue that encounters with the outputs of modern generative AI models are mediated by the same kinds of aesthetic judgments that organize our interactions with artwork. The interpretation procedure we use on art we find in museums is not an innate human faculty, but one developed over history by disciplines such as art history and art criticism to fulfill certain social functions. This gives us pause when considering our reactions to generative AI, how we should approach this new medium, and why generative AI seems to incite so much fear about the future. We naturally inherit a conundrum of causal inference from the history of art: a work can be read as a symptom of the cultural conditions that influenced its creation while simultaneously being framed as a timeless, seemingly acausal distillation of an eternal human condition. In this essay, we focus on an unresolved tension when we bring this dilemma to bear in the context of generative AI: are we looking for proof that generated media reflects something about the conditions that created it or some eternal human essence? Are current modes of interpretation sufficient for this task? Historically, new forms of art have changed how art is interpreted, with such influence used as evidence that a work of art has touched some essential human truth. As generative AI influences contemporary aesthetic judgment we outline some of the pitfalls and traps in attempting to scrutinize what AI generated media means.

• Will AI be an economic blessing or curse? History offers clues

  If medieval advances in the plough didn't lift Europe's peasants out of poverty, it was largely because their rulers took the wealth generated by the new gains in output and used it to build cathedrals instead.

  Economists say something similar could happen with artificial intelligence (AI) if it enters our lives in such a way that the touted benefits are enjoyed by the few rather than the many.

• What the heck happened in 2012?

  In comparison, 2012 appears to be more like 1968 in that it marked changes primarily cultural and psychological, not economic. Of course, we should expect it to be harder to measure cultural tipping-point years rather than economic ones, since what makes for healthy psychologies and cultures is often immeasurable. Still, if you look at charts about people's psychology, or culture in general, like how people use language, you often consistently see a major shift around 2012 or shortly thereafter.

• How Modernity Made Us Allergic

  Our very old immune systems can't keep up with modern lifestyles and diets, leading to increases in all sorts of chronic health problems like allergies and obesity.

  "Although allergy researchers may disagree on definitions, symptoms and methodology, all agree on one thing: Allergies have grown worse over the last few decades and the staggering numbers of allergy sufferers worldwide is likely to continue growing."
  ...
  "When we go from eating foods with lots of fiber to highly processed foods loaded with sugar and fat, we end up starving beneficial bacteria in our gut."
  ...
  "Changes in the gut microbiome in infants and children can lead to a greater risk of developing allergic responses as children age. And our children's earliest environments are likely the most crucial."
  ...
  "As the baby moves through the vaginal canal, it is exposed to its mother's friendly bacteria. Breastfeeding introduces more helpful bacteria into the infant's gut."
  ...
  "The most compelling evidence that our 21st-century lifestyles and manmade environmental changes have spurred our allergies is this: Our companion species of thousands of years - dogs, cats, birds and horses - all get allergies regularly. Other species - those that do not live in our homes or alongside us - do not."
  ...
  "Outdoor play and recreation were likely more protective against allergies than spending hours playing Minecraft or Fortnite."
  ...
  "All our tinctures and dyes, our synthetic fabrics and new plastics, our lotions and eyeliner and lipsticks and shampoos - wreak havoc on our immune systems."

• Should You Eat Oatmeal to Sleep Better?

  Oatmeal is high in melatonin and vitamin D
  ...
  Oatmeal contains avenine and trigonelline. These are two types of prolamines (vegetable proteins). They help reduce anxiety, nervousness, and the mental and physical agitation that tends to build up over the day and keep you from falling into a deep, healthy sleep.

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Play Deprivation Is A Major Cause of the Teen Mental Health Crisis

  Allowing more unsupervised free play is among the most powerful and least expensive ways to bring down rates of mental illness -- Jon Haidt and Peter Gray

  Two Very Well-Established and Disturbing Facts.

  1. Children's freedom to play and explore has declined greatly over the last half-century.
  2. Children's mental health has declined greatly over the last half-century.

  Too many people are focusing on drugs and therapy, as if something is wrong with the kids that needs correction, and not enough of us are thinking about prevention. Prevention would involve bringing normal childhood back to children. Children are designed to play and explore and thereby becoming increasingly independent as they grow older. Their instincts tell them that something is seriously wrong if they don't have such independence.
  ...
  Research shows that people of all ages who have a strong internal locus of control (internal LOC), that is, a strong sense of being able to solve their own problems and take charge of their own lives, are much less likely to suffer from anxiety and depression than those with a weaker internal LOC. Obviously, however, to develop a strong internal LOC a person needs considerable experience of actually being in control, which is not possible if you are continuously being monitored and controlled by others.

• Aging brains benefit from regular exercise, good night's sleep, study finds

  A new study found that people who were more active, but slept less than six hours on average, had faster cognitive (mental) decline. After 10 years, their cognitive function was equivalent to that of their more inactive peers.
  ...
  One limitation of the study is that participants self-reported on their sleep duration and physical activity.

• Hearing aids may cut risk of cognitive decline by nearly half

  A large study showed that older adults with a higher risk of dementia may be able to reduce their risk of cognitive decline by almost 50 percent by using hearing aids.

  Whether hearing treatment reduces the risk of developing dementia in the long term is still unknown.

• Diagnostic medical errors are a huge problem. Will A.I. come to the rescue?

  A new study estimates ~800,000 Americans are permanently disabled or die each year from diagnostic medical errors. Concurrently, multiple reports look at ways this may be reduced, including artificial intelligence. In this edition of Ground Truths, I'll review the scope of the problem and prospects for improvement that are desperately needed. Eric Topol

• The Psychological Depths of Rock-Paper-Scissors

  The reason rock-paper-scissors is not a purely arbitrary game, and the reason that an excellent player will win more often than chance would predict, is that human psychology is not random, and some behaviors are - not necessarily predictable, but likely to occur more often than chance would dictate.
  ...
  One heuristic of experienced "layers is "Losers lead with Rock." This is demonstrably true; naive players will lead with Rock more often than one-third of the time. Your hand begins in the form of a rock, and it is easiest to keep it that way. The name of the game begins with "Rock," and if you are mentally sorting through the options, it is the first one that will occur to you. And the word "rock" itself has connotations of strength and immovability.

• Uri Geller is Not A Magician

  The New York Times continues Geller's rehabilitation tour, surreally romanticizing his decades of harmful deceptions.

  Geller's enduring presence and rehabilitation isn't a testament to his genius, although he may well be a genius (or at the very least, a highly socially intelligent performer with no scruples!). Instead, his ability to remain in the headlines and to charm new generations of unduly credulous reporters is a disturbing reminder of our collective susceptibility to deception. Geller's stubborn refusal or inability to morally develop, to step out of his deceitful persona, is not laudable. It's tragic. As likable as I found the guy, I don't think his reputation should be salvaged, it should serve as a cautionary tale.

Some recent items related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLM)

• Why transformative artificial intelligence is really, really hard to achieve

  We think AI can be "transformative" in the same way the internet was, raising productivity and changing habits. But many daunting hurdles lie on the way to the accelerating growth rates predicted by some.

  1. The transformational potential of AI is constrained by its hardest problems
  2. Despite rapid progress in some AI subfields, major technical hurdles remain
  3. Even if technical AI progress continues, social and economic hurdles may limit its impact

  Moravec's paradox and Steven Pinker's 1994 observation remain relevant: "The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard." The hardest "easy" problems, like tying one's shoelaces, remain. Do breakthroughs in robotics easily follow those in generative modeling? That OpenAI disbanded its robotics team is not a strong signal.
  ...
  It seems highly unlikely to us that growth could greatly accelerate without progress in manipulating the physical world. Many current economic bottlenecks, from housing and healthcare to manufacturing and transportation all have a sizable physical-world component.

• Why AI is Harder Than We Think

  Since its beginning in the 1950s, the field of artificial intelligence has cycled several times between periods of optimistic predictions and massive investment ("AI spring") and periods of disappointment, loss of confidence, and reduced funding ("AI winter"). Even with today's seemingly fast pace of AI breakthroughs, the development of long-promised technologies such as self-driving cars, housekeeping robots, and conversational companions has turned out to be much harder than many people expected. One reason for these repeating cycles is our limited understanding of the nature and complexity of intelligence itself. In this paper I describe four fallacies in common assumptions made by AI researchers, which can lead to overconfident predictions about the field. I conclude by discussing the open questions spurred by these fallacies, including the age-old challenge of imbuing machines with humanlike common sense.

• AI and the automation of work

  ChatGPT and generative AI will change how we work, but how different is this to all the other waves of automation of the last 200 years? What does it mean for employment? Disruption? Coal consumption?

  As an analyst, though, I tend to prefer Hume's empiricism over Descartes - I can only analyse what we can know. We don't have AGI, and without that, we have only another wave of automation, and we don't seem to have any a priori reason why this must be more or less painful than all the others.

• Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon

  Want to really understand how large language models work? Here's a gentle primer.