Links for 2021-11-09
Nate Soares on the Ultimate Newcomb's Problem: “…the small box contains $1k, and the big box is transparent and contains a number X whose primality you are unsure of. Omega will pay you $1M if the number in the big box is prime, and put a prime number in that box iff they predicted you will take only the big box. Meanwhile, a third actor Omicron chooses a number at random each day, and will pay you $2M if their randomly-selected number is composite, and today they happen to have selected the number X.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/F3aESx4JWWEDAFEiH/nate-soares-on-the-ultimate-newcomb-s-problem
Experimental relativistic zero-knowledge proofs: “…a prover can convince a verifier of the validity of a certain statement without facilitating the elaboration of a proof at all…Security is enforced via the physical principle of special relativity…” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03998-y
A spine-chilling presentation to open the eyes of people that think computers can't manipulate humans https://mythos.one/brianswichkow/ffb019
Zero-Shot Task Generalization with Robotic Imitation Learning: “We train a DNN to perform 100+ tasks, by imitating a lot of human teleop demos. Inputs are RGB img and task embeddings (sentence encoder on “put the apple in the bowl” or a video embedding of a person doing it)....It sounds naively simple, because it is. But this is sufficient for robots to zero-shot generalize to new tasks they have never seen teleop demos for. At test time, you give it a new video or language embedding it hasn’t seen before and the policy will “decode” it into actions for the correct task. Just ask for generalization!” https://sites.google.com/view/bc-z/home
A group at Berkeley has built a robot that uses reinforcement learning to teach itself to walk from scratch–i.e., through trial and error. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/08/1022176/boston-dynamics-cassie-robot-walk-reinforcement-learning-ai/
A universal law of physiology emerges from a professor's research https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-10-universal-law-physiology-emerges-professor.amp
The dark town that built a giant mirror to deflect the Sun https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170314-the-town-that-built-a-mirror-to-catch-the-sun
Researchers are building large natural language models, potentially the size of GPT-3, to decode the “speech” of whales. https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/are-we-on-the-verge-of-chatting-with-whales/
What’s a ‘digital twin’? And why do we need it for EV batteries? https://thenextweb.com/news/whats-a-digital-twin-and-why-ev-batteries-need-it
The Most Senseless Environmental Crime of the 20th Century (the Soviet Union killed 180,000 whales) https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-crime-of-the-20th-century-russia-whaling-67774
The Great Feminization https://thoughtsofstone.com/the-great-feminization/
Math scores for 2nd generation immigrants in Norway by country of origin: "A quick skim of the results suggest they are looking quite normal with African origins in the bottom and Asians in the top." kirkegaard.substack.com/p/math-scores-for-2nd-generation-immigrants
"The Western psyche is still traumatized by fascism, and the opposite of fascism is taking in any dark-skinned foreigner who knocks on your door. But the Eastern psyche is traumatized by communism, and the communists were all about the Brotherhood of Man - ethnonationalist sentiments feel like a bold revolt against tyranny rather than its inevitable companion." astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban