Links for 2021-12-04
In 'Morality is Scary' Wei_Dai highlights a passage from 'The Status Game' by Will Storr and concludes to be “more scared of many futures in which "alignment is solved", than a future where biological life is simply wiped out by a paperclip maximizer.” — “Adolescent boys of the Marind of South New Guinea are introduced to a culture of ‘institutionalised sodomy’ in which they sleep in the men’s house and absorb the sperm of their elders via anal copulation, making them stronger. Among the people of the Moose, teenage girls are abducted and forced to have sex with a married man, an act for which, writes psychologist Professor David Buss, ‘all concerned – including the girl – judge that her parents giving her to the man was a virtuous, generous act of gratitude’. As alien as these norms might seem, they’ll feel morally correct to most who play by them.” https://lesswrong.com/posts/y5jAuKqkShdjMNZab/morality-is-scary
How much should you update on a COVID test result? — “This writeup attempts to answer to the question, "how much more (or less) likely am I to have COVID given a positive (or negative) test result?" In particular, this is an attempt to calculate the Bayes factor for different types of COVID test results.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cEohkb9mqbc3JwSLW/how-much-should-you-update-on-a-covid-test-result
A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment — “Given the broad capabilities of large language models, it should be possible to work towards a general-purpose, text-based assistant that is aligned with human values, meaning that it is helpful, honest, and harmless.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.00861
Erosion of the Epigenetic Landscape and Loss of Cellular Identity as a Cause of Aging in Mammals https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/808642v1.full
LEDs - condensed matter/nanostructures having real impact http://nanoscale.blogspot.com/2021/11/leds-condensed-matternanostructures.html
How the amount of pre-training data affects the few-shot generalization performance of standard image classifiers: "(1) such performance improvements are well-approximated by power laws (linear log-log plots) as the training set size increases, (2) this applies to both cases of target data coming from either the same or from a different domain (i.e., new classes) as the training data, and (3) few-shot performance on new classes converges at a faster rate than the standard classification performance on previously seen classes." https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06990
David Denkenberger on using paper mills and seaweed to feed everyone in a catastrophe https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/david-denkenberger-sahil-shah-using-paper-mills-and-seaweed-in-catastrophes/
"In some ways, Washington is focused on the progress of China’s nuclear capability in a way that it has not been since Mao first tested a weapon in 1964." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/28/us/politics/china-nuclear-arms-race.html
Axon terminals of dopaminergic neurons of the SNc steal GABA from extracellular space, then release it at synapses https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.26.470142v1.article-info
Finally, a Fusion Reaction Has Generated More Energy Than Absorbed by The Fuel https://www.sciencealert.com/for-the-first-time-a-fusion-reaction-has-generated-more-energy-than-absorbed-by-the-fuel
Biostatistics professor Tom Wenseleers explains that evolutionary biology tells us that if a virus cannot gain a large fitness advantage by becoming more infectious, because there are not enough susceptible hosts left, selection shifts to immune escape so that the virus can reinfect people. Based on their high death toll, this could have been the case with Covid in South Africa. He also outlines how Omicron might infect 6.7 times as many people as Delta over the same time period. For Delta vs Alpha that was 1.7. This would either imply a highly implausible basic reproduction number of 40 or an immune escape. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1466501989500653568.html
Could Omicron have originated from a lab accident? — “"With omicron, your closest sequences are back from mid-2020 — so over a year ago. That is very rare to see." In other words, while scientists can tell that this variant evolved from a strain that was circulating in mid-2020, in the intervening months there has been no trace of all the intermediate versions that scientists would have expected to find as it morphed into its current form.” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1466485476014104583.html