Links for 2021-11-19
"A great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer...The best publicity expert can dream up a stunt that attracts millions more customers than the average one." https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/08/netflix-ceo-reed-hastings-on-high-salaries-the-best-are-easily-10x-better-than-average.html
"Solving Linear Algebra by Program Synthesis", Drori & Verma 2021 (Codex can solve all tested linear algebra course programming problems) https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.08171
Moral Permissibility of Action Plans: “We saw that, with respect to our formalization, verification is PSPACE-complete for utilitarianism, co-NP-complete for do-no-harm, for do-noinstrumental-harm, and for the doctrine of double effect, and that it is polynomial-time for deontology. It turned out that verifying the do-no-harm principles involves a combinatorial reasoning over possible sets of actions that lead to harm or that may be instrumental towards achieving a goal condition, which makes verifying those ethical principles surprisingly hard.” http://gki.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/papers/lindner-mattmueller-nebel-xaip2018.pdf
IBM announced a new 127-quantum bit (qubit) ‘Eagle’ processor at the IBM Quantum Summit 2021. https://newsroom.ibm.com/2021-11-16-IBM-Unveils-Breakthrough-127-Qubit-Quantum-Processor
AI-tocracy: “Can frontier innovation be sustained under autocracy? We argue that innovation and autocracy can be mutually reinforcing when: (i) the new technology bolsters the autocrat’s power; and (ii) the autocrat’s demand for the technology stimulates further innovation in applications beyond those benefiting it directly. We test for such a mutually reinforcing relationship in the context of facial recognition AI in China. To do so, we gather comprehensive data on AI firms and government procurement contracts, as well as on social unrest across China during the last decade. We first show that autocrats benefit from AI: local unrest leads to greater government procurement of facial recognition AI, and increased AI procurement suppresses subsequent unrest. We then show that AI innovation benefits from autocrats’ suppression of unrest: the contracted AI firms innovate more both for the government and commercial markets. Taken together, these results suggest the possibility of sustained AI innovation under the Chinese regime: AI innovation entrenches the regime, and the regime’s investment in AI for political control stimulates further frontier innovation.” https://www.nber.org/papers/w29466
Ngo and Yudkowsky on alignment difficulty https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7im8at9PmhbT4JHsW/ngo-and-yudkowsky-on-alignment-difficulty
How NFTs Create Value https://hbr.org/2021/11/how-nfts-create-value
Relationship between rice farming and polygenic scores potentially linked to agriculture in China https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.210382
The Agricultural Origins of Time Preference https://www.nber.org/papers/w20438
What would the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics concretely imply if it were right? https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/david-wallace-many-worlds-theory-of-quantum-mechanics/
Pacific rougheye rockfish can live hundreds of years while other rockfish barely live past ten years. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg5332
Do chimpanzees enjoy a virtual forest? A pilot investigation of the use of interactive art as a form of environmental enrichment for zoo-housed chimpanzees https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajp.23343
The hierarchy of intelligence in terms of mathematics
Conjecture: The profoundly gifted like Carl Friedrich Gauss, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Alexander Grothendieck, and Robert Langlands who lay the foundations for new fields of mathematics. They can intuitively locate the golden needle in an infinite haystack and terminate thoughts that are intractable by predicting which thoughts will quickly lead to infinite recursion or combinatorial explosion. The intuitive and suggestive notation they introduce can outlast centuries.
Proof: The extremely gifted people like Andrew Wiles and Peter Scholze who are able to absorb a huge amount of knowledge, take a bird's eye view, spot cross-connections, and converge insights and techniques from various parts of mathematics into a single powerful tool.
Transformation: The highly gifted people like computer scientist Donald Knuth who transform these abstract results into a form that allows people to use them to solve real-world problems.
Application: The moderately gifted people in engineering, medicine, biology, business, computer science, and industry who can read and understand applied mathematics in order to use that knowledge for concrete application or as a stepping-stone to further research.
Insight: The mildly gifted people who are able to teach themselves a limited amount of higher mathematics, make practical use of it, or get a rough idea about the workings of the natural world and technological artifacts.
Benefit: The people of average intelligence who are the beneficiaries of a technological civilization that runs on math. They only have a vague idea of what mathematics is and most of the time only need simple arithmetic to get by. If they are younger they might still be in command of some simple algebra.
Magic: The least able part of the population. They often struggle with simple arithmetic and cheat their way through life, always at the mercy of others. From their perspective, the world runs on incomprehensible magic.