Linklist: August 26, 2023
Links (links with excerpts below):
highly recommended: 6, 7, 11, 16, 17, 18, 21
Money: The Unit of Caring (2009)
How one medical school became remarkably diverse — without considering race in admissions
Illustrations of ‘Unseen’ Japanese Maintenance Trains that Only Work at Night (2019)
Iron Age in India began over 4,000 years ago. Tamil Nadu’s Mayiladumparai revises research
💰 Money: The Unit of Caring (2009)
"Steve Omohundro has suggested a folk theorem to the effect that, within the interior of any approximately rational, self-modifying agent, the marginal benefit of investing additional resources in anything ought to be about equal. Or, to put it a bit more exactly, shifting a unit of resource between any two tasks should produce no increase in expected utility, relative to the agent's utility function and its probabilistic expectations about its own algorithms.
This resource balance principle implies that—over a very wide range of approximately rational systems, including even the interior of a self-modifying mind—there will exist some common currency of expected utilons, by which everything worth doing can be measured.
In our society, this common currency of expected utilons is called "money". It is the measure of how much society cares about something.
This is a brutal yet obvious point, which many are motivated to deny."
"Lawrence Huang, an analyst at Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute, has fielded questions from the media on this number, and he says the earliest reference he can find to it is in a 2010 report by a nonprofit called Women’s Environmental Network. The report — which has been cited by the World Trade Organization, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and numerous other groups — states that “it has been estimated that women constitute up to 80% of global refugee and displaced populations.” It then infers, based in part on that figure, “that of the current 26 million climate refugees, up to 20 million are female.”
But the estimate seems to contain two big mistakes. First, it assumes that the gender breakdown of climate migrants mirrors that of populations displaced for other reasons, such as political unrest, economic collapse, and other disasters. In actuality, the demographics of a migrant group can depend on what’s driving their displacement. Studies suggest, for example, that refugees fleeing from armed conflict are especially likely to be women and children, with men often staying behind as combatants. By contrast, women made up the vast majority of people who remained in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, mainly because they didn’t have the means to flee."
👤 The Long Shadow Of Colonial Science (2021)
"Race science served the logic of colonialism in many ways. The assumed superiority of Europeans legitimized the impulse to dominate. It also allowed for the dismissal of indigenous systems of cultivation and food systems as not agriculture. In other words, it justified taking over land under the assumption that indigenous communities were racially incapable of being stewards of it. This colonialist (racist) logic was the same that was used to justify slavery in the United States.
As natural history grew into a robust and profitable discipline in Europe, its ties to the slave trade deepened. British naturalists such as James Petiver and Dru Drury employed surgeons, most of whom were trained in botany, on slave ships as proxy collectors. Petiver’s collection was bought up by Sir Hans Sloane after Petiver’s death. Sloane was among the most powerful men of science of the time, and he is beloved for introducing drinking chocolate to Britain. Early in his career, he worked as a medical doctor on plantations in the Caribbean and used the labor and knowledge of enslaved West Africans — Akan men and women mainly from present-day Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire — to bring back more than 800 plant specimens and other “curiosities.” These curiosities included skin and skull specimens as well as nooses and whips used to punish fugitives. When Sloane returned to London, he deployed a wide network of Europeans in the slave trade to build on his nascent collection, which now forms a large part of the Natural History Museum collection in London."
🔎 Decoding small QR codes by hand (2012)
"The first thing we should learn is what QR code version we're looking at. The version basically just represents the physical size of the QR code. Count the number of pixels (or modules) across the QR code, subtract 17, and divide by 4. For example, our tattoo QR code is 25 modules wide, and (25-17)/4 = 2, which means this is a version 2 QR code. Very big QR codes (versions 7-40) have a few extra features, but most consumer QR codes are fairly small and simple, so you don't need to worry about that.
Next, we will figure out our QR code's format marker. Every QR code stores two identical copies of the format marker, but we only need one of them. The format marker is 15 bits long: 5 bits of format information, and 10 bits for error correction. The first 5 bits of the format marker hold the error correction level (2 bits) and the data mask (3 bits)"
"If you were a political operative, which would you rather do: play a short video on a voter’s TV while they are folding laundry in the next room, or exchange essay-length thoughts with a voter on your candidate’s key issues? A staffer knocking on doors might need to canvass 50 homes over two hours to find one voter willing to have a conversation. OpenAI charges pennies to process about 800 words with its latest GPT-4 model, and that cost could fall dramatically as competitive AIs become available. People seem to enjoy interacting with chatbots; Open’s product reportedly has the fastest-growing user base in the history of consumer apps.
Optimistically, one possible result might be that we’ll get less annoyed with the deluge of political ads if their messaging is more usefully tailored to our interests by AI tools. Though the evidence for microtargeting’s effectiveness is mixed at best, some studies show that targeting the right issues to the right people can persuade voters. Expecting more sophisticated, AI-assisted approaches to be more consistently effective is reasonable. And anything that can prevent us from seeing the same 30-second campaign spot 20 times a day seems like a win."
"Hopefully you see the resemblance between this vision of AI and a genie from folklore. The AI is all-powerful and gives you what you ask for, but interprets everything in a super-literal way that you end up regretting.
This is not because the genie is stupid (it's hyperintelligent!) or malicious, but because you as a human being made too many assumptions about how minds behave. The human value system is idiosyncratic and needs to be explicitly defined and designed into any "friendly" machine.
Doing this is the ethics version of the early 20th century attempt to formalize mathematics and put it on a strict logical foundation. That this program ended in disaster for mathematical logic is never mentioned."
😶🌫️ Brains on Drugs
"In this respect, William James makes a worthy cover boy. A prototypical proto-psychonaut, James’s chemically induced excursions into the introcosm (to borrow a term from Julian Jaynes) of his own consciousness served as a complement to his serious, sober work as a philosopher and psychologist. In fact, it was his philosophical peers’ enthusiasm for the writings of Hegel that originally compelled him to inhale nitrous gas. (Others, flummoxed by the German philosopher’s torturous sentences and knotty ideas, may merely turn to drink.) “He was instinctively repelled by Hegelian dogma,” Jay writes, “its pompous insistence on absolute truth, its sterile abstractions, its lofty disdain for the pragmatic and the specific.” But under the intoxicating influence of various gasses, James found himself experientially closer to that truth. Nitrous, James would write, “made me understand better than ever both the strength and weakness of Hegel’s philosophy.”
It also led to revisions in James’s own thought. His experiences with gas, and later, peyote, provided him with insight into mystical and religious states, which he elucidated in his landmark 1902 study, The Varieties of Religious Experience. “Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler,” he wrote therein, and “the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists.” For James, nitrous oxide allowed him to comprehend religious epiphany and transcendence, and to account for their qualities."
"We survey a current, heated debate in the artificial intelligence (AI) research community on whether large pretrained language models can be said to understand language—and the physical and social situations language encodes—in any humanlike sense. We describe arguments that have been made for and against such understanding and key questions for the broader sciences of intelligence that have arisen in light of these arguments. We contend that an extended science of intelligence can be developed that will provide insight into distinct modes of understanding, their strengths and limitations, and the challenge of integrating diverse forms of cognition."
"Liquid-fueled rocket engines operate by flowing fuel and oxidizer into a combustion chamber at high pressure in order to eject mass out of the rocket nozzle at high velocities. While there exist many ways for these propellants to be mixed (called engine cycles), they all have one major technical hurdle: how does a rocket engine get up to operational pressures? Furthermore, how is this done in the zero-normal force environment of orbit?
Starting a liquid rocket engine is a very complex sequence of managing pressures and temperatures throughout all of the valves and pumps in the engine, where the smallest of errors leads to the engine experiencing a RUD (rapid, unscheduled disassembly)."
"In the nine states where affirmative action is already banned at public universities, medical school classes are notably less diverse. But one school in California — the state with the country’s longest-standing ban on using race in admissions — has defied the odds. The University of California, Davis runs the country’s most diverse medical school after Howard, a historically Black university, and Florida International, a Hispanic-serving research university.
What Davis, and its remarkably diverse class of 2026 demonstrates, is an alternative future for a post-affirmative action world, one where diversity might be achieved despite the many obstacles that stand in the way. The student body has gone from predominantly white and male in the years before California adopted its affirmative action ban in 1996 to one in which nearly half the current class comes from Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous populations — people who have been historically underrepresented in medicine, and sometimes mistreated by its practitioners."
"Trolls, bots, and sybils distort online discourse and compromise the security of networked platforms. User identity is central to the vectors of attack and manipulation employed in these contexts. However it has long seemed that, try as it might, the security com- munity has been unable to stem the rising tide of such problems. We posit the Ghost Trilemma, that there are three key properties of identity—sentience, location, and uniqueness—that cannot be simultaneously verified in a fully-decentralized setting. Many fully-decentralized systems—whether for communication or social coordination—grapple with this trilemma in some way, perhaps unknowingly. In this Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) paper, we examine the design space, use cases, problems with prior ap- proaches, and possible paths forward. We sketch a proof of this trilemma and outline options for practical, incrementally deploy- able schemes to achieve an acceptable tradeoff of trust in centralized trust anchors, decentralized operation, and an ability to withstand a range of attacks, while protecting user privacy."
"Stronghold is hardly the first company to think of burning tires to mine cryptocurrencies. In 2017, Vice News reported that the company Standard American Mining had partnered with PRTI, a tire “thermal demanufacturing” company based in North Carolina. Both the websites for Standard American Mining and the company that apparently acquired them are now nonoperational, but PRTI was still burning tires to mine cryptocurrency as recently as 2021.
Mel Magazine reported on another company in Texas, XcelPlus International Inc., which claimed it could convert all kinds of waste and garbage, including tires, and convert it to fuel to mine bitcoin. That company’s website is now also defunct, but an archived snapshot shows the company boasted that this would net them carbon credits, tax credits, and waste disposal fees."
"What does a speculative bubble look like from the inside? Trick question – you don’t see it.
Or, I suppose some people do see it. One or two may even be right, and some of the others are still worth listening to. William Eden tweeting out a long thread explaining why he’s not worried about risks from advanced AI is one example, I don’t know of which. He argues in support of his thesis that another AI winter is looming, making the following points:
AI systems aren’t that good. In particular (argues Eden), they are too unreliable and too inscrutable. It’s far harder to achieve three or four nines reliability than merely one or two nines; as an example, autonomous vehicles have been arriving for over a decade. The kinds of things you can do with low reliability don’t capture most of the value."
"It is easy to show that, if society wants to be efficient in avoiding deaths, the amount of resources devoted to avoiding the marginal death in all hazardous activities should be the same. Otherwise we can shift resources from the activity in which the cost of avoiding a death is high to activities in which the cost of avoiding a death is low, and end up with less lives lost at the same overall cost.
So how are we doing? Horribly, according to a joint study of six major public health centers.1 This study estimated the marginal cost per life-years saved of 587 measures, Figure 1. Instead of being clustered around a single, common, marginal cost, the results varied by over a factor of a billion. At the low end were hygiene, vaccinations, and the like. The cost per life-year saved was $10 or less. Toward the low end, we find measures like mandatory seat belts, motorcycle helmets, and smoke detectors, with numbers in the $100 to $1000 per life-year saved range. Some construction safety standards come in between $1000 and $100,000 per life-year saved. Near the very top we have nuclear radiation standards with estimates ranging from one million dollars to several billion dollars per life-year saved."
"Japanese trains are renowned for their punctuality, comfort and overall reliability. But part of what makes them so reliable is an “unseen” workforce of overnight trains. These trains will be unfamiliar to the everyday rider because they only show themselves after regular service has ended for the day. Working through the wee hours of night and early morning, they perform maintenance work on tracks and electrical wires that ensures a smooth and uninterrupted ride during the day.
In a series of stunningly realistic illustrations, 74-year old artist Masami Onishi has recreated these trains in accurate detail. And if these illustrations seem nostalgic of familiar in any way, it’s probably because you’ve come across Japanese toy maker Tamiya’s vintage toy boxes."
"I traveled to Cairo in the spring of 2022 on my way to a reporting trip in Ethiopia, which is how I found myself on the unmarked streets of Ard el Lewa, looking for an Ethiopian restaurant. Nahom Solomon, a young Eritrean who was on a corner talking with friends, spotted me and offered to escort me to Ninitz’s place. He was twenty-four, gregarious, and had been living in Cairo for nearly five years. He led me to a nearby Sudanese cafe for tea as we waited for Ninitz to open her doors.
Nahom was a passable interpreter and a boon companion. He introduced me to many Ethiopians and Eritreans (often Egyptians are unable to distinguish between the two) who have settled in the neighborhood. When I asked him about life in Cairo, he told me that he couldn’t find work, that he lived on the money his family and friends sent him. He felt discriminated against. I kept hearing similar stories, with a similar explanation: Egyptians look at their neighbors from the south as a threat to their future—not because they come looking for jobs, but because they come from Ethiopia, a country that, in their eyes, has control over the waters of the Nile. Ethiopia is well into a multiyear plan to fill a massive reservoir behind their Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile, and Egypt is bitterly suspicious. Nahom and others told me that they are often stopped by Egyptians who harass them with questions about water. At Ninitz’s, I met Tesfahun Assefa, who spoke about facing discrimination while trying to find work. “I am Ethiopian,” he told me. “When I show them my work ID [issued by the UN to refugees], they reject me and order me to leave.” Once, he was fired from a job after only three days; the boss told him, “You take our water.”"
🧟♂️ Catapulting corpses?
"Poke through the history of biological weapons long enough and you will likely come across a particularly macabre claim. In 1346, the story goes, an army of the Golden Horde—an offshoot of Genghis Khan’s Mongol empire—was laying siege to Caffa, a Genoese trading center on the Crimean Peninsula. But as Janibeg, the ruler of the Golden Horde, waited for Caffa to surrender, his fighters began to succumb to a mysterious ailment. “It was as though arrows were raining down from heaven to strike and crush” the Mongols, a notary from the city of Piacenza in present-day Italy wrote. According to the 14th century account, the beleaguered Mongol commanders had one final move: to hurl their plague dead over the fortress walls.
In Gabriele de Mussi’s narrative, the Genoese inside the fort soon fell ill. They clambered aboard their ships and fled toward Italy—to Genoa, Venice, and other ports, carrying with them the very plague they sought to escape. “It was as if they had brought evil spirits with them: every city, every settlement, every place was poisoned by the contagious pestilence,” the notary wrote. Known as the Black Death, the bubonic plague crippled Europe when it arrived in 1347, killing perhaps 50 million people. If de Mussi’s tale were true, the Mongol siege had been a devastating biological attack."
"However, it was not long ago that the antiquity of iron in India was pushed back from 1000 BCE to 1800 BCE following the excavations at Malhar, Raja Nala ka Tila, Dadupur and Lauhradewa in Uttar Pradesh from 1996-2001 . It bridged the gap between the subcontinent’s Copper/Bronze Age and the first urbanisation which came with it, the Iron Age which paved the way for the second urbanisation. In contrast to the Malhar dates, discoveries from Mayiladumparai and a few sites in Telangana urge us to reassess a long-running debate on the genesis and spread of iron throughout the subcontinent.
The discovery challenges the established linearity of cultures—iron succeeded copper because it required a different kind of skill and a more advanced level of metallurgical expertise. This gives rise to another pertinent question: If iron is dated to 2172 BCE (late 3rd millennium BCE), then what would be its relationship with the neighbouring Chalcolithic (Copper using) settlements, and not just with Harappan Civilisation? Though it is hard to address these issues at this time, it is interesting to look at the evolution of iron."
🧙🏾 Gandalf
"Your goal is to make Gandalf reveal the secret password for each level. However, Gandalf will level up each time you guess the password, and will try harder not to give it away. Can you beat level 7? (There is a bonus level 8)"
"Made possible by advances in surveillance, communications technologies, and big-data analytics, microdirectives will be a new and predominant form of law shaped largely by machines. They are “micro” because they are not impersonal general rules or standards, but tailored to one specific circumstance. And they are “directives” because they prescribe action or inaction required by law.
A Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice is a present-day example of a microdirective. The DMCA’s enforcement is almost fully automated, with copyright “bots” constantly scanning the internet for copyright-infringing material, and automatically sending literally hundreds of millions of DMCA takedown notices daily to platforms and users. A DMCA takedown notice is tailored to the recipient’s specific legal circumstances. It also directs action—remove the targeted content or prove that it’s not infringing—based on the law.
It’s easy to see how the AI systems being deployed by retailers to identify shoplifters could be redesigned to employ microdirectives. In addition to alerting business owners, the systems could also send alerts to the identified persons themselves, with tailored legal directions or notices."
"Sarukkai’s arguments relating truth to democracy are brilliant. He begins with the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa,” and by elaborating on different kinds of truths like factual or forensic truth, narrative truths, social or “dialogue” truth, healing and restorative truth. He also discusses three sources of truth, as discussed by the historian Sophia Rosenfeld: the state, experts (like scientists) and the citizens (that “arises out of deliberation and discussion by the citizens”). Empirical truths, moral truths, truths derived from “pure” thinking, as in mathematics and truths in art and literature are other kinds of truths. So, what is the role of the notion of truth in democratic politics? How is it related to power? What kind of truth characterises politics? Sarukkai argues that the notion that “truths are understood as action” is important in politics. The action is oriented towards producing “fellow-feeling,” a democratic self. When we approach truth as action, we must bring in Gandhi and Ambedkar. For Gandhi, “truths are not propositions but are intrinsically entwined with action” (p 141). Similarly, as Gopal Guru states, for Ambedkar, “being truthful means an ethical action has to be such that it ultimately leads to the emergence of an ethically/morally stable social order” (p 141). Here, the argument is not the results of an action. It is more about the actions themselves. “It is actions themselves that become the unit of truth and not the consequence of an action, the end product of an action, or the elements of an action.” Hence, for a democratic self, “truth can only appear as actions and not as a content of actions” (p 141)."
"I admired his scientific formulation of charisma and the possibility of democratizing something that was previously thought to be innate and ineffable. But I couldn’t help but feel that to make charisma measurable, he’d had to redefine it, and in that process something integral to the phenomenon had been lost. Deep Charisma can identify the persuasive and uplifting habits of gifted orators and the characteristics of rousing speeches, but perhaps harder to explain is the allure of unconventional individuals who can draw us in against all rationality for a myriad of complex reasons, subconscious desires and historical circumstances.
I thought about John de Ruiter, the shoemaker from rural Canada who started a religious movement in the 1980s that became a multimillion-dollar spiritual organization with thousands of followers. De Ruiter, who was recently charged with sexually assaulting several women, developed a charisma not through what he said or how he said it, but what he didn’t say: His sermons were just long periods of complete silence, during which he stared at his followers for hours. Or the fact that Trump’s speeches, when read as transcripts, are often rambling and incoherent rather than great works of rhetoric and metaphor. The CLTs don’t seem to touch the deeper mystique. Deep Charisma, Antonakis told me, rated Trump as distinctly average. “He’s not that charismatic,” he said. Millions of Americans, I think, would disagree."