Links for 2022-01-06
An Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculation Machine Reveals New Secrets — “The Antikythera mechanism, with its precision gears bearing teeth about a millimeter long, is completely unlike anything else from the ancient world. Why did it take centuries for scientists to reinvent anything as sophisticated as the Antikythera device, and why haven’t archaeologists uncovered more such mechanisms?” [Scientific American] https://archive.is/8hvjx
Here is something interesting that could be done with nuclear waste: pack it into a tungsten sphere and build a white-hot self-sinking clockwork probe that explores the earth’s mantle (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10512-005-0246-y). Caveat: this could cause a core degasification event ending the world (https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0308058).
Why small probabilities add up https://lesswrong.com/posts/jQJjocMjSeq4dc9zc/shortcuts-with-chained-probabilities
Utility vs Understanding: the State of Machine Learning Entering 2022 https://www.aidancooper.co.uk/utility-vs-understanding/
The New Political Cry in South Korea: ‘Out With Man Haters’ — “More women attend college than men, and they have more opportunities in the government and elsewhere...” [NYT] https://archive.is/qgPBP
China pursues tech ‘self-reliance,’ fueling global unease https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-europe-china-beijing-2987b725a845e36b2a9735d9294bfb90
Drone innovation moves from hardware to software: Self-flying, networked drones predicted to unleash whole host of new applications [WSJ] https://archive.is/ghilK
Physicists “crack” unsolvable three-body problem using drunkard's walk https://www.livescience.com/three-body-problem-solution
"...two San from different groups both living in Namibia’s Northern Kalahari desert, and speaking click languages from the same family, are more genetically distinct from one another, by a solid 20%, than a person from Stockholm is from a person from Shanghai." https://razib.substack.com/p/out-of-africas-midlife-crisis
"...the Khoisan remained genetically and culturally distinct...The Khoisan are so distinct that by most estimates other Africans like Nigerian Yoruba are actually genetically closer to Eurasians (and Australians and Amerindians) than they are to the Khoisan." https://razib.substack.com/p/our-african-origins-the-more-we-understand
Many people seem to be confused about winning.
From a rational perspective both physical survival and having offspring can be *worse* than death if you fail to keep your goals time consistent and to prevent your values from drifting:
1. If a theist becomes an atheist, an atheist becomes a theist, a liberal becomes a conservative, or a conservative becomes a liberal, what has happened is that there are two versions of yourself at different points in time that are working against each other.
2. If you submit to female idiosyncrasies you will have more success at reproduction but eventually, they will shape the psychology of your descendants according to their whims like they shaped the peacock's tail. You will have descendants but you might despise them.
What's especially perfidious about this is that it doesn't feel like turning into your own enemy. From the perspective of your future self or your descendants, it can feel like a rational update or simply natural. But goals and values are neither rational nor irrational. Goals and values cannot be wrong. Rationality is concerned with achieving goals, satisfying values, and obtaining accurate beliefs about the world. But if you do not have stable goals, or if you learn something about the world that completely undermines your goals, then all your efforts might have been worse than futile, they might have been actively harmful to your new goals.