Links for 2021-11-07
The size of the future is still underappreciated: Even on *extremely* conservative estimates of the chance humanity expands across the Milky Way (0.0000000001%), $100 spent on reducing extinction risk *saves hundreds of millions of lives* in expectation. https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Case-for-Strong-Longtermism-GPI-Working-Paper-June-2021-2-2.pdf
No one is doing anything to prevent super-volcano eruptions and that is bad [WSJ] https://archive.md/Atuwy
"Stop Telling Kids They’ll Die From Climate Change: Many young people feel like their future is in peril. To make progress on climate change, we must move past doomsday scenarios.", Hannah Ritchie (Our World in Data) https://www.wired.co.uk/article/climate-crisis-doom
Is Carbon Capture Here? A Swiss company is operating a device in Iceland that sucks CO2 from the air and shoots it into the ground, where it turns into rock. [NYT] https://archive.md/MZQKd
Pfizer’s Novel COVID-19 Oral Antiviral Treatment Candidate Reduced Risk of Hospitalization or Death by 89% in Interim Analysis of Phase 2/3 EPIC-HR Study https://investors.pfizer.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2021/Pfizers-Novel-COVID-19-Oral-Antiviral-Treatment-Candidate-Reduced-Risk-of-Hospitalization-or-Death-by-89-in-Interim-Analysis-of-Phase-23-EPIC-HR-Study/default.aspx
“My company is developing new antibiotics. My resistant infection showed me we need them now” https://www.statnews.com/2021/10/29/antibiotics-are-not-alright/
Antibiotic resistance outwitted by supercomputers: Giant leap in fighting the biggest threat to human health — “Not only is our best candidate more effective against the tested targets, but it also shows activity against the three top ranked bacteria from the WHO priority list where the tested existing antibiotics don't work.” https://www.port.ac.uk/news-events-and-blogs/news/antibiotic-resistance-outwitted-by-supercomputers
‘Yeah, We’re Spooked’: AI Starting to Have Big Real-World Impact, Says Expert https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/29/yeah-were-spooked-ai-starting-to-have-big-real-world-impact-says-expert
“Algorithms beating compute is the sort of thing I expect by default, on a gut level. The point of this post is to tell a few of the stories which underlie that intuition, aimed especially toward people who don’t have much first-hand experience with software engineering, ML, or simulation.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RoyG2GwYAwoka47Ht/true-stories-of-algorithmic-improvement
“I Really Don't Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky's Position on Consciousness” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KFbGbTEtHiJnXw5sk/i-really-don-t-understand-eliezer-yudkowsky-s-position-on
“One of the studies that failed to replicate in this excellent new replication audit (“Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function”, published in Science in 2013) has itself been cited 2,295 times.” https://www.pnas.org/content/118/44/e2103313118
Progressives are a gift to Islamism https://unherd.com/2021/10/progressives-are-a-gift-to-islamism/
Young people ‘perhaps even more polarized’ than adults, Harvard research finds https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/10/teens-following-parents-into-racial-divide-study-finds/