Links for 2021-12-06
Bryan Caplan pays Eliezer $100 now, in exchange for $200 CPI-adjusted from Eliezer if the world has not been ended by nonaligned AI before 12:00am GMT on January 1st, 2030. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2017/01/my_end-of-the-w.html
How to make railway timetables (with graphs) youtu.be/NFLb1IPlY_k
Long-Term Effects of the Targeting the Ultra Poor Program https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20200667
The New York-based startup will use the Series A funding to scale up its platform that provides traceability and food preservation tools in the form of spray-on microbes. https://agfundernews.com/aanika-biosciences-raises-12m-to-boost-food-traceability-with-edible-microbial-tags.html
"Political ideology turns out to be a continuous quantitative trait, like height or intelligence, with many genes controlling the variation. And like height and intelligence, it expresses itself in particular environmental contexts." https://razib.substack.com/p/thanksgiving-squabbles-are-a-feature
The reward hypothesis states that reward can capture “all of what we mean by goals & purpose.” In this paper, researchers explore this hypothesis by analysing the expressivity of Markov reward in finite environments. https://deepmind.com/research/publications/2021/On-the-Expressivity-of-Markov-Reward
MURAL: Multimodal, Multi-task Retrieval Across Languages — “This technology could allow users to express words that may not have a direct translation into a target language using images instead. For example, the word “valiha”, refers to a type of tube zither played by the Malagasy people, which lacks a direct translation into most languages, but could be easily described using images...The model learns associations between images and text from the image–text data, and learns the representations of hundreds of diverse languages from the translation pairs. The idea is that a shared encoder will transfer the image–text association learned from high-resource languages to under-resourced languages.” https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/11/mural-multimodal-multi-task-retrieval.html
“Our results show that face masks significantly reduce the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to social distancing. We find a very low risk of infection when everyone wears a face mask, even if it doesn’t fit perfectly on the face.” https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2110117118
War movie about defeat of US Army is now China’s biggest film ever https://nypost.com/2021/11/25/war-movie-about-defeat-of-us-army-now-chinas-biggest-film/
The Universe from a Single Particle https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.05917
Planetary scientists are starting to get stirred up by Starship’s potential https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/12/planetary-scientists-are-starting-to-get-stirred-up-by-starships-potential/
On the ideological corruption of the medical profession https://quillette.com/2021/11/30/what-is-happening-to-my-profession/