Links for 2022-01-03

Alexander Kruel

Jan 3

After only 2 generations of breeding guppies (small fish) a scientist had increased the brain size by 9%. The big brain fish were also smarter. However, their guts were smaller and their fertility lower. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/scientists-breed-smarter-fish-but-reveal-the-costs-of-big-brains
The whole prefrontal cortex is premotor cortex: “we mean that the prefrontal cortex consists of an action abstraction hierarchy whose core function is the potentiation and depotentiation of possible action plans at different levels of granularity.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.04651
Whistleblower warns baffling illness affects growing number of young adults in Canadian province: “A whistleblower in the Canadian province of New Brunswick has warned that a progressive neurological illness that has baffled experts for more than two years appears to be affecting a growing number of young people and causing swift cognitive decline among some of the afflicted.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/02/neurological-illness-affecting-young-adults-canada
Want to Be an Actuary? Odds Are, You’ll Fail the Test — “Insurers need experts to calculate risk. Among those number-crunchers’ riskiest endeavors are the tortuous exams for credentials.” [WSJ] https://archive.is/UTmFQ [sample questions: https://archive.is/o/UTmFQ/https://www.soa.org/globalassets/assets/files/edu/edu-exam-p-sample-quest.pdf]
"A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment", Askell et al 2021 {Anthropic} (scaling to 52b, larger models get friendlier faster & learn from rich human preference data) https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.00861
The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization prior to the standard knowledge of ancient human civilizations? https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/77818514AA6907750B8F4339F7C70EC6/S1473550418000095a.pdf/div-class-title-the-silurian-hypothesis-would-it-be-possible-to-detect-an-industrial-civilization-in-the-geological-record-div.pdf
What is a Counterfactual: An Elementary Introduction to the Causal Hierarchy — “At the end of this article, you'll be able to explain exactly what is a counterfactual and how to compute them. You'll understand why they are hard to answer, even though they are conceptually as straightforward to compute as the probability formulas you learned in school.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vuvS2nkxn3ftyZSjz/what-is-a-counterfactual-an-elementary-introduction-to-the