recommended: 1, 3, 7, 8, 9, 16
links:
By Challenging Our Physical Bodies, We May Heal Our Civic Ones
How the COVID-19 pandemic signaled the demise of Antarctic exceptionalism
Statements by scientific organizations can, and should, shape society
Democracy as Approximation: A Primer for “AI for Democracy” Innovators
How Rich Donors Have Caused More Harm Than Good to India's Education
Why the Biden administration’s new nuclear gravity bomb is tragic
links with excerpts:
"In a similar, but arguably more fundamental way, our (increasingly sedentary) citizenry needs to learn how to use their bodies well from an early age. This entails developing a curiosity about and pleasure from our capacity for complex movement. There is a quiet form of excellence waiting to be recognized by becoming curious about what you can do when you select your own challenges (versus demanding that no external forces demand anything of you).
And while it’s a fraught subject, I’d argue this is even more true for those with physical disability. The general human goal must surely be to improve from your starting position, whatever that may be. Paralympics and the various provisions made for wheelchair athletes in marathons are a good start. Real physical education means learning to optimize movement capacity for each specific and unique human body, with its various strengths and inevitable limitations.
Nils Posse, another calisthenics and gymnastics instructor who, along with Jahn’s acolytes, influenced the Boston health reform movement in the 1800s, made the argument for what might be called a form of physical literacy that, like academic literacy, was a fundamental right, albeit one that required some initial discipline to acquire."
"I’M OFTEN TOLD THAT JAGADISH BOSE and his wife, the feminist and social activist Abala Bose, had no children of their own—as if this information was meant to ferry some deeper meaning. A colleague at a college where I once taught, a professor of physics, first told me this. “You are like Jagadish Chandra Bose,” he said to me, “a plant-mad parent who could not have children of his own.” It was a lack, my childlessness. Or not just a lack, it was a wrong.
I can’t quite remember how the lack began, though I do remember the transition from “When will you have a child?” to “Why don’t you have a child?” At some point later, it changed to “Because you don’t have children . . .” as in, because I didn’t have children, I had become a “plant parent.” I dislike that phrase, dislike its characterization, dislike how it alternates between consolation and moral superiority, how it turns plant life into an other, how parenting is turned into the likeness of a genre. But there it was—because I did not have children, I had started mothering plants. Had Jagadish Bose done the same?
He would go on to propose a torulipi, a plant script based on a record of a plant’s responses to different kinds of stimuli, condensing a metaphor into a compound word: brikkhoshishu, or plant-infant. In “Udbhider Jonmo O Mrityu” (“The Birth and Death of Plants”), he writes, “Infants do not have teeth; they only drink milk. Plants too do not have teeth—that is why they can only partake of liquid and air.” A few sentences later, he returns to the image: “Leaves have many tiny mouths. Seen closely with a microscope, all these mouths reveal tiny lips. When they no longer need food, the lips close.” The metaphor occurs repeatedly throughout his work: “The seed hides under the earth for a long time. Months go by. Spring follows winter. Then the rains start—a day of rain. There is no need to hide anymore. It is as if someone is calling the child from outside, ‘Don’t sleep anymore, climb out now, you’ll see the light of the sun.’”"
"Leon Landsberg, an intense Russian Jew who roomed with him in Manhattan while they gave classes there, wanted them to live off lentils. He was baffled by a guru who lived to cook and enraged by Vivekananda’s refusal to do the washing up. Too poor and foreign to succeed as a mendicant sannyasin, Landsberg had to moonlight as a bartender and was cold-shouldered by the other (teetotal) disciples. Vivekananda’s charm didn’t work so well in Britain, whose old colonial hands were more sceptical of his exotic mannerisms. His patron Edward Toronto Sturdy, a rich but ascetic Anglo-Canadian who had lived in India with a Brahmin cook, concluded that the eminent scholar Friedrich Max Müller was a sounder Vedantist than this corpulent, tobacco-stained guru who whinged about being forced to live off boiled cabbage. Vivekananda laughed off Sturdy’s charges as bad karma. In fact, he helped Müller, a German idealist who was no less of an oddity in Victorian England, to write a book on Ramakrishna. The two men hoped that a refined statement of Vedanta’s monism might insulate religion from scientific challenge, overcoming the divides – between the self and God, the natural and the supernatural – that bedevilled Christian theology.
Vivekananda did not build intellectual bridges between fixed systems so much as help to make new spiritual worlds with elements from the old. Although he became a famous yoga teacher in America, he did so by altering what yoga meant. At Green Acre, he mixed with seekers who were game for every ‘ism’ going, from New Thought to barefoot walks in dewy meadows. While mocking these enthusiasms, Vivekananda pillaged their vocabulary. Rāja Yoga (1896) was based on texts by the ancient yogi Patanjali, but without their crabbed soteriology. Vivekananda popularised yoga by simplifying it into the skill of breath control, which once mastered could measurably increase a practitioner’s energy levels. The rationale was pragmatic: it was true because it worked for people who tried it. Sara Bull suggested to William James that he write a preface to Rāja Yoga. James, the son of a Swedenborgian, yearned for a more open-ended model of selfhood, which could account for religious experience without resorting to an outmoded supernaturalism. An amateur Sanskritist and habitué of Green Acre, James had been struck by Vivekananda’s lectures there and by Müller’s presentation of Ramakrishna’s teaching. He adopted, or echoed, Vivekananda’s watery metaphors for the fluid mingling of mind and world. But he still refused to write the preface, finding the ‘monist absolutism’ of Advaita Vedanta too glib a solution to the riddles of consciousness. Müller too learned from Vivekananda without agreeing with him. His Ramakrishna book was intended to advance India’s conversion to a version of Christianity, teaching missionaries that its sophisticated inhabitants would not be swayed by crude methods ‘applicable to the races of Central Africa’."
"This paper explores how the COVID-19 pandemic affected science and tourism activities and their governance in the Antarctic and Southern Ocean. The pandemic reduced the ability of Antarctic Treaty Parties to make decisions on policy issues and placed a considerable burden on researchers. Tourism was effectively suspended during the 2020–2021 Antarctic season and heavily reduced in 2021–2022 but rebounded to record levels in 2022–2023. The pandemic stimulated reflection on practices to facilitate dialog, especially through online events. Opportunities arose to integrate innovations developed during the pandemic more permanently into Antarctic practices, in relation to open science, reducing operational greenhouse gas footprints and barriers of access to Antarctic research and facilitating data sharing. However, as well as the long-term impacts arising directly from the pandemic, an assemblage of major geopolitical drivers are also in play and, combined, these signal a considerable weakening of Antarctic exceptionalism in the early Anthropocene."
"Bayesian principles show up across many domains of human cognition, but wishful thinking—where beliefs are updated in the direction of desired outcomes rather than what the evidence implies—seems to threaten the universality of Bayesian approaches to the mind. In this Article, we show that Bayesian optimality and wishful thinking are, despite first appearances, compatible. The setting of opposing goals can cause two groups of people with identical prior beliefs to reach opposite conclusions about the same evidence through fully Bayesian calculations. We show that this is possible because, when people set goals, they receive privileged information in the form of affective experiences, and this information systematically supports goal-consistent conclusions. We ground this idea in a formal, Bayesian model in which affective prediction errors drive wishful thinking. We obtain empirical support for our model across five studies."
"There are many instances where the histories of the organizations themselves provide the intellectual stimulus and actual data that drive what some critique as “political” statements. For example, in the not-too-distant past, especially in the context of race/racism, many scientific organizations did capitulate to the pressures of racist government policy and requests, or were led by racist scientists, making statements and taking actions that were intended to harm. This includes support for segregation and miscegenation laws; legalized economic, educational, and health discrimination; and the justifications for white supremacy. However, many of those same organizations now publicly acknowledge their complicity and are explicit about efforts to publicly correct those past actions and negate the possibility of their reoccurrence. Science, as a human undertaking, cannot be neutral. Scientists are people and thus shape, and are shaped by, society just like everyone else. But scientists do practice specific methodologies that can produce a particularly clear and robust kind of knowledge about the world. Often the understandings and insights produced through scientific endeavors are central to the development of better modes of life, including legislative policies, medical practices, and a range technological and social aspects of everyday existence. When it comes to issues in human society that scientific knowledge and practice can inform upon, merely sitting on the sidelines, pretending to be “neutral,” is also a political decision—one that often has detrimental effects on both science and society."
"Consider the two most common modern forms of democracy: elections and referendums. With elected representatives, everyone allocates a very small amount of attention, which is used to delegate decision-making to representatives who, once elected, have a much more time and resources to make decisions. With referendums, a form of direct democracy, everyone allocates a small amount of attention to every decision. Both may operate in an extraordinarily adversarial media environment, where moneyand incumbency confer significant advantages due to their leverage on voter attention. In addition, with elected representatives, there can often be significant perverse incentives resulting from only some parts of the electorate voting and a need for representatives to raise money to compete effectively inthe attention-driven environment.
Participatory processes let people more directly shape policy, but they generally cannot adequately compensate participants for the time and attention required (given perverse incentives, limited resources, and the variable number of people involved). These processes involve significant time and attention from those closest to the issue and those most impacted by the decisions, which can include the businesses that stand to benefit the most, people on the extremes, and marginalized populations. While this approach leaves a vast majority on the sidelines, the perspectives and voices it brings to thefore can be invaluable in policymaking.
An increasingly common alternative to all of the above, representative deliberative processes—e.g., deliberative democracy via citizens’ assemblies or deliberative polls—involve selecting a representative microcosm of the population (e.g. 40-500 people) that allocates significant attention to the issue. These deliberators are chosen by democratic lottery (i.e., a stratified random sample) and compensated for their time (given the much smaller number involved) to learn about an issue in-depth from stakeholders, experts, and each other. They develop recommendations together, over many days or even weeks, either in-person or over video (with the support of facilitators). That depth of research and access to expertise can somewhat override the adversarial attention environment. The primary tradeoff is that most people are not chosen by the democratic lottery, and thus don’t have an opportunity to participate."
"Foundation models are large-scale AI models on which a diverse array of tools and applications can be built. A single foundation model can transform and operate on diverse data inputs that may range from text in any language and on any subject; to images, audio, and video; to structured data like sensor measurements or financial records. They are generalists which can be fine-tuned to accomplish many specialized tasks. While there is endless opportunity for innovation in the design and training of these models, the essential techniques and architectures have been well established.
Federally funded foundation AI models would be provided as a public service, similar to a health care private option. They would not eliminate opportunities for private foundation models, but they would offer a baseline of price, quality, and ethical development practices that corporate players would have to match or exceed to compete.
And as with public option health care, the government need not do it all. It can contract with private providers to assemble the resources it needs to provide AI services. The U.S. could also subsidize and incentivize the behavior of key supply chain operators like semiconductor manufacturers, as we have already done with the CHIPS act, to help it provision the infrastructure it needs."
"Pratham didn’t reply to my question on whether it has done any study on the impact of physically segregating students by ability, and FLN, and said these queries are better addressed to the Delhi government. Pratham’s spokesperson said the organisation hasn’t done any studies on either and chose to clump both as the Delhi government’s Mission Buniyaad policy, though FLN is part of the Union Government’s new education policy, and has begun to be implemented in schools country-wide.
It did not reply to my question on the impact of Pratham’s interventions on teachers.
Teachers are wary of repeated Pratham interventions because they have seen the NGO’s impact.
By constantly highlighting failure, Pratham has eroded the professional credibility of teachers, teachers I met with say, especially those working in government schools. Pratham’s interventions in government schools have included preparing ‘teacher-proof’ material which just needs to be delivered by any adult. This re-constitutes teaching as a non-profession and as ‘service’ or as ‘volunteering’, a big part of NEP 2020. This impacts teacher recruitment, already an area where state governments do not want to spend, and brings in contractual jobs where teachers have neither rights nor full salaries. Pratham’s tool for assessing literacy has come to be seen as a learning goal in itself. It is used extensively in government primary schools to assess and segregate children merely on the basis of their performance on the tool. This erodes the teacher’s own assessment of her students’ abilities."
"Patients rely on medical care providers to act in their best interests because providers understand disease pathology and appropriate treatment much better than patients. Providers, however, not only give advice (diagnose) but also deliver (sell) treatments based on that advice. This creates a moral hazard dilemma where provider financial interests can diverge from patient interests, especially when providers are motivated more by profits than by altruism. We investigate how profit motivated versus altruistic preferences influence medical care decision making in the context of malaria in Kenya. We measured the appropriateness of care using data from an audit study that employed standardized patients (SP) who were trained to present as real patients the identical clinical case scenario to providers. The SPs were confirmed to be malaria negative before and after field work with a very reliable and sensitive blood test at a high-quality laboratory. We measured provider preferences using a lab in the field, real stakes, modified version of the dictator game. We find that more profit-motivated providers report higher rates of false-positive malaria test results than do more altruistic providers. Specifically, purely profit motivated providers report 30 percentage points more positives than providers who are altruistically motivated, and providers likely knew that the positive results that they reported to their patients were false. We also find that more profit motivated providers sold more unnecessary antimalarial drugs than did more altruistic providers. Based on mediation analysis, more profit-oriented providers sold more drugs not only because they knowingly reported more false positives, but also because they promoted drugs sales more conditional on a positive test result. Thus, profit motivated providers seem to have misrepresented test results to sell more unnecessary malaria-related drugs."
"Coming from a Biden administration that pledged to seek to reduce the role of nuclear weapons, with a president who, as a candidate for office, declared his support for the policy that the United States would never use nuclear weapons first in any conflict, the decision to pursue the B61-13 is not only deeply disappointing, but a profound mistake. In short, the B61-13 is yet another sign that the United States intends to make its nuclear arsenal even more deadly and the foundational element of the existing security system. That system is based on the principle that this country, to keep itself “safe,” needs to be able to kill tens or hundreds of millions of people in less than an hour.
On moral grounds, and under international law, that prospect alone should be evidence enough to conclude that such an approach to security is grievously wrong, and that the United States should do everything it can to move away from that system.
But the reality is far worse, because Russia already has and China is now moving toward nuclear arsenals that will give them similar capabilities. Even with their vastly smaller arsenals, the other six nuclear weapons states—the UK, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—also have the capacity to kill tens of millions of people in hours. That horrible reality is the basis of the world’s security system. If everyone can kill everyone else, and no one can be safe from that threat, then—in the supreme irony of nuclear deterrence—everyone is supposed to be safe."
"In the past decade, open science and science of science communities have initiated innovative efforts to address concerns about the reproducibility and replicability of published scientific research. In some respects, these efforts have been successful, yet there are still many pockets of researchers with little to no familiarity with these concerns, subsequent responses, or best practices for engaging in reproducible, replicable, and reliable scholarship. In this work, we survey 430 professors from Universities across the USA and India to understand perspectives on scientific processes and identify key points for intervention. Our findings reveal both national and disciplinary gaps in attention to reproducibility and replicability, aggravated by incentive misalignment and resource constraints. We suggest that solutions addressing scientific integrity should be culturally-centered, where definitions of culture should include both regional and domain-specific elements."
"The contradictions of capitalism didn’t lead to the anticipated resolution where, after all these centuries of class stratification, society would be distilled into two classes, poised for a high-noon clash. This decisive confrontation between oppressor and oppressed would result in the liberation of humanity — the emancipation of humanity from all class conflict. Instead of that, however, this clash between the capitalist — the bourgeoisie — and the proletariat ended up in the complete victory of the bourgeoisie: a complete loss after 1991, especially.
In the absence of a competitor in the form of trade unions — the organized working class — capitalism went into a rampant dynamic evolution that caused this mutation into what I call cloud capital. This transformation effectively marked the end of traditional capitalism. It killed capitalism — a development that embodies a Marxist-Hegelian contradiction, but not the kind of contradiction we would have hoped for.
Cloud capital has killed off markets and replaced them with a kind of a digital fiefdom where not just proletarians — the precarious — but bourgeois people and vassal capitalists are all producing surplus value for the vassal capitalists. They are producing rents. They’re producing cloud rent, because the fiefdom is a cloud fiefdom now, for the owners of cloud capital."
"Since then, it’s become accepted that it’s unethical and malpractice for a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist to have sex with a client / patient, and they should basically never have a relationship with an ex-client (although the APA has a ‘two-year rule’).
So I think the main ethical implication of the case of Dr Sessa and Patient A is the power imbalance that still exists in psychiatry, between psychiatrists and patients, especially between white, male psychiatrists and female or non-white patients. That is changing slowly through citizen-led movements like Mad Pride, Hearing Voices or Surviving Anti-Depressants. I support such movements, not to overthrow psychiatry but to find a better power balance between doctors and patients.
We need to be particularly careful with psychedelic psychiatry because it increases the vulnerability of the patient and can increase the power trip of the psychiatrist. Dr Sessa’s case was not the only example of psychiatrists behaving unethically or criminally in the ketamine industry in the last six months."
🎞️ The Mathematical Movie Database (2020)
"About ten years ago, on a whim, we began to collect movies containing mathematics. Now, as a consequence of that whim, we own a library of more than 800 movies on DVD, VHS, 16 mm, Laserdisc, and some strange thing called a CED video disc. The movies range from those expressly about mathematicians, to those that, for whatever reason, just happen to have a snippet of humorous mathematical dialogue. Over the years, we have found that it is not only professional mathematicians who find the fun in this cinematic mathematics. Just about everybody is charmed by Meg Ryan explaining Zeno's paradox in I.Q., Danny Kaye singing about Pythagoras's theorem in Merry Andrew, Lou Costello explaining to Bud Abbott why 7 x 13 =28 in In the Navy, and so on. Our book is an attempt to identify, organize, and engagingly present this fascinating and funny material.
Some movie math is really, really dull. Even limiting to the good stuff, trying to cram everything in our collection into this one book would have resulted in a bloated, boring mess. However, we did want to be comprehensive, and to make available as much of our source material as possible. We found that the best way to do this was to create this page. Also as we learn of movies, new and old, we will add details to this page. By doing so, we hope to extend our book and to keep it up to date."
"We’re very much in the Transformer-era of history. ML used to be about detecting cats and dogs. Now, with Transformers, we’re generating human-like poetry, coding better than the median competitive programmer, and solving the protein folding problem.
But Transformers have one core problem. In a transformer, every token can look back at every previous token when making predictions. For this lookback, we cache detailed information about each token in the so-called KV cache.
This pairwise communication means a forward pass is O(n²) time complexity in training (the dreaded quadratic bottleneck), and each new token generated autoregressively takes O(n) time. In other words, as the context size increases, the model gets slower.
To add insult to injury, storing this key-value (KV) cache requires O(n) space. Consequently, the dreaded CUDA out-of-memory (OOM) error becomes a significant threat as the memory footprint expands. If space were the only concern, we might consider adding more GPUs; however, with latency increasing quadratically, simply adding more compute might not be a viable solution.
On the margin, we can mitigate the quadratic bottleneck with techniques like Sliding Window Attention or clever CUDA optimisations like FlashAttention. But ultimately, for super long context windows (like a chatbot which remembers every conversation you’ve shared), we need a different approach."