Links for 2021-09-23
This is from the UK Government's just-released National AI strategy: “The government takes the long term risk of non-aligned Artificial General Intelligence, and the unforeseeable changes that it would mean for the UK and the world, seriously...Given the speed at which AI developments are impacting our world, it is also critical that the government takes a more precise and timely approach to monitoring progress on AI, and the government will work to do so....central government will work with the national security apparatus to consider narrow and more general AI as a top-level security issue.” https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-ai-strategy/national-ai-strategy-html-version
An asteroid destroyed the city of Tall el-Hammam in about 1650 BC with an explosion 1000x the strength of the one that destroyed Hiroshima. This event may have become the destruction of Sodom in Genesis. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97778-3
A worked bone assemblage from 120,000–90,000 year old deposits at Contrebandiers Cave, Atlantic Coast, Morocco https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(21)00956-1
"in the 20th century, people [said] … this was racist propaganda on the part of the Greeks & Romans … & that Carthage should be saved from this terrible slander. 'What we are saying now is that the … evidence for child sacrifice is overwhelming" https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-01-23-ancient-carthaginians-really-did-sacrifice-their-children
Issues with Bloom et al's "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?" and why total factor productivity should never be used as a measure of innovation https://guzey.com/economics/bloom/
How We Saved the Ozone Layer youtube.com/watch?v=1iGISskc-EI
A video explaining the rationale behind Robin Hanson's Grabby Aliens model youtu.be/l3whaviTqqg
Variance Reduction — “One of the most common tasks after you start running a lot of A/B tests is figuring out how to get more precise estimates so people can make decisions with more confidence.” https://towardsdatascience.com/online-experiments-tricks-variance-reduction-291b6032dcd7
“You must not cite the wrong people, their papers must be retracted, AND we are going to hide research results from you too, so you can’t compute the forbidden results. This is of course the exact opposite of what open science stands for. It’s straight out of a how to Soviet textbook.” https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/09/thou-shallt-not-look-at-the-polygenic-scores/
"Zero cities with over one million people currently have Republican mayors. From the standpoint of the textbook Median Voter Model, this is awfully puzzling." https://www.econlib.org/why-are-there-zero-republican-mega-cities/
‘Kamikaze pigeons’ trained to intercept suspicious drones amid warnings of deepening UAV terror threat https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/kamikaze-pigeons-trained-us-intercept-suspicious-drones-uav-threat-warning-1204561