Links for 2021-10-22
Matthew Barnett predicts human-level language models this decade: “To help answer this question, I turn to some basic concepts in information theory, as pioneered by Claude Shannon. My result is a remarkably short timeline: Concretely, my model predicts that a human-level language model will be developed some time in the mid 2020s, with substantial uncertainty in that prediction.” https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/8329/human-level-language-models/
“EcoHealth/WIV proposed to "introduce furin cleavage sites into lab-created versions of SARS-related coronaviruses, recovered from bats in Yunnan. They planned to fully sequence and generate clones of three to five novel bat viruses each year." Clone=create virus that can infect…EcoHealth's President Peter Daszak was instrumental in coordinating the high-profile "scientist response" to the question of origins, and was in both WHO team and Lancet task force.” mobile.twitter.com/zeynep/status/1447966041800327168 (see also: Documents released by the NIH contradict previous assertions by the EcoHealth Alliance about its experiments on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan. https://theintercept.com/2021/10/21/virus-mers-wuhan-experiments/)
Study sees booster dose giving 95.6% RR reduction versus a control *of 2 doses* https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-announce-phase-3-trial-data-showing
“If you’re interested in biology, don’t sleep on somatic mutation. This is where the next giant leap in human biology will come from.” mobile.twitter.com/95thoughts/status/1448349950794862596
“This century is critical for humanity. We build tech, infrastructure, and community to navigate it.” https://www.lightconeinfrastructure.com/
“We are at a critical stage in neuroscience when we have large amounts of data and models that not only attempt to explain a very narrow domain but engage with multiple brain areas during complex behavior. Brain-Score is a platform that evaluates models of the primate ventral stream and object recognition behavior. It does so via integrative benchmarking, that is, it incorporates vast and diverse neuronal and behavioral datasets and evaluates how well the models explain them.” http://www.brain-score.org/
The Borderless Welfare State (p. 19): “Currently, per capita expenditures on immigrants are significantly higher than on indigenous people in areas such as education, social security and benefits. Moreover, immigrants pay fewer taxes and social security premiums, which further lowers their net fiscal contribution...The total net costs for the Dutch public sector of immigration in the period 1995-2019 averaged €17 billion per year, with a peak of €32 billion in 2016 due to the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’. By comparison, the Dutch government also spent roughly €30 billion on education in 2016. As for totals, the total costs of immigration over the period 1995-2019 amounted to €400 billion.” http://www.demo-demo.nl/files/Grenzeloze_Verzorgingsstaat.pdf
"Updates and Lessons from AI Forecasting", Jacob Steinhardt (initial forecast results of steady general progress & increasing compute, challenges in designing good questions; Hypermind, funded by OpenPhil) https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2021/10/14/forecasting/
How the brain deals with uncertainty: Dedicated circuits evaluate uncertainty in the brain, preventing it from using unreliable information to make decisions. https://news.mit.edu/2021/how-the-brain-deals-with-uncertainty-1014
UK Mathematician Teases Internet With Tricky Math Problem https://interestingengineering.com/uk-mathematician-teases-internet-with-tricky-math-problem