Links for 2021-11-21
In simple English, what does it mean to be transcendental? https://blog.plover.com/2021/11/18/#transcendental
INTERN: A New Learning Paradigm Towards General Vision: “By learning with supervisory signals from multiple sources in multiple stages, the model being trained will develop strong generalizability. We evaluate our model on 26 well-known datasets that cover four categories of tasks in computer vision. In most cases, our models, adapted with only 10% of the training data in the target domain, outperform the counterparts trained with the full set of data, often by a significant margin. This is an important step towards a promising prospect where such a model with general vision capability can dramatically reduce our reliance on data, thus expediting the adoption of AI technologies.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.08687 [Check the authors. Better get used to seeing mostly Chinese names listed as authors of future papers.]
Scientists invent a gel that, when injected into the site of a spinal cord injury in mice, stimulates nerve regeneration. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abh3602
Coevolution of tool use and language - shared syntactic processes and basal ganglia substrates https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2021/11/coevolution-of-tool-use-and-language.html
"Causal relationships between genetically determined metabolites and human intelligence: a Mendelian randomization study", Yang et al 2021 https://molecularbrain.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13041-021-00743-4
"Rapid mosaic brain evolution under artificial selection for relative telencephalon size in the guppy (Poecilia reticulata)", Fong et al 2021 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj4314
Sierra Space Secures Record $1.4 Billion Series A Growth Investment and Achieves $4.5 Billion Valuation https://sierraspace.com/newsroom/press-releases/sierra-space-secures-record-1-4-billion-series-a-growth-investment-and-achieves-4-5-billion-valuation/
Parenting practices seem to have little or no impact on children's personalities, contrary to some of the best-known theories in psychology. (Longitudinal study; N = 3,880) https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/7/1/29766/118998/Longitudinal-Associations-Between-Parenting-and
"Synthetic fat from petroleum as a resilient food for global catastrophes: Preliminary techno-economic assessment and technology roadmap", Martínez et al 2021 (ALLFED) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0263876221004275
This post argues that a certain change both in the environment and the biological changes of our society have contributed to the decline of scientific quality and achievement. Particularly, the rise of conformist science, other issues with academia, demographic shifts, dysgenics, as well as other explanations for that are explored. https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2020/10/05/the-rise-and-fall-of-science/
"Both liberals and conservatives judge misinformation to be more accurate when the [news] source is politically congruent." https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886921006486
“There was no evidence of [hiring] discrimination against women in male-dominated professions or in mixed-gender professions, but the researchers did find evidence of discrimination against men in female-dominated professions.” [Sweden] https://www.psypost.org/2021/05/swedish-study-suggests-hiring-discrimination-is-primarily-a-problem-for-men-in-female-dominated-occupations-60699
Fredkin’s Paradox highlights something that always bothered me about Kahneman's modes of thought dichotomy:
“[[I]f I want to optimize, I must also determine the effort it will take me to optimize; however, the subtask of determining this effort will itself take effort, and so forth into the tangle that self-referential activities create.”
For all practical purposes, there really only is "System 1". Unconscious, automatic processes decide when to reason more slowly and when to stop doing so. In fact, a famous procedure used to make difficult decisions highlights how conscious, logical, and calculated reasoning is often just a tool to rationalize what we subconsciously want:
"Hold the coin in your hand for a minute, visualizing the two options on either side. Take a deep breath, and toss the coin into the air. Suddenly it doesn't matter which side the coin lands on – because you know which side you're hoping it lands on. You have your answer."
This is also why the biggest advantage of the profoundly gifted is not their complex logical reasoning skills but their superior intuition. 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. In other words, it's system 1 rather than system 2 that allows them to make useful conjectures.
The same is true for all kinds of successful people. They possess superior noise filtering. Their gut feelings are able to correctly dismiss certain information.
System 1 is the very foundation of bounded rationality (rational decision-making under limited resources). It is the reason why we don't get mugged by game-theoretic agents threatening us with their magic powers from outside the Matrix: our gut feelings call bullshit.
Evolution equipped us with numerous defenses against various sorts of memetic hazards that would cause our minds to crash: heuristics that terminate infinite recursions and intractable problems. For example, “near bias” allows us to avoid indecision and unbearable suffering by both ignoring long-term consequences and by focusing on people who are close to us.