Links for 2021-12-27
@gwern on the possibility of achieving artificial general intelligence by scaling language models: The possibility of nonlinear gains in capability and sudden phase transitions add to the uncertainty in predicting what artificial neural nets can and cannot do. https://www.reddit.com/r/mlscaling/comments/rkzfnm/do_you_buy_the_idea_that_there_could_be_natural/hpyxusa/ [also mentioned a fascinating phenomenon you might not have heard of: grokking https://mathai-iclr.github.io/papers/papers/MATHAI_29_paper.pdf]
“Forty million acres of land in the US consists of lawns. Maintaining them requires 800 million gallons of mower fuel and three million tonnes of (carcinogenic, endocrine-disrupting) fertilisers a year, and they guzzle up to 60 per cent of fresh water in urban areas.“ https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/august/the-lawn-problem
In January 2021, for the first time in 35 years, no oil flowed from Saudi Arabia to the United States, according to EIA data. https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Crude-Oil-Flow-From-Saudi-Arabia-To-US-Falls-To-Zero.html
Singles’ day sales in China dwarfs all US holiday retail events combined. https://am.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-am-aem/global/en/insights/market-insights/guide-to-the-markets/mi-guide-to-the-markets-us.pdf
“In 2006, using an SAT score from a test he’d taken at the age of 13...Patrick matriculated to Lisp’s birthplace: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He’d sped through the final two years of his high school curriculum in just twenty days.” https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/stripe
The Webb Space Telescope Will Rewrite Cosmic History. If It Works. https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-nasas-james-webb-space-telescope-matters-so-much-20211203/ [See also: The Insane Engineering of James Webb Telescope youtu.be/aICaAEXDJQQ]
Leveraging Symmetries to Invent Exotic Materials https://annualreports.simonsfoundation.org/2020/leveraging-symmetries-to-invent-exotic-materials/
Greater male variance in brain structure amongst male chimpanzees, consistent with humans. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2019.2858
“Innovation is the goose that lays our golden eggs of growth. Regulation can kill it, as could increasing legal liability for the real harms caused by innovation, without also increasing the rewards we offer to innovators.” https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/12/innovation-liability-nightmare.html
Prediction: “The Bitcoin protocol will be broken in at most five years.” https://rjlipton.wpcomstaging.com/2021/12/19/favorite-theorems-of-the-next-ten-years/
The Travels of Hadrian across the Roman Empire c. 125 CE [see image below] https://www.worldhistory.org/image/14744/the-travels-of-hadrian-across-the-roman-empire-c-1/