Links for 2022-01-20
Are you ready to live forever? An insanely well-funded company ($3bn) called Altos Labs is going after "rejuvenation" technology. Yamanaka factors. Epigenetic clocks. CRISPR. Offering academics $1 million salaries and more. Altos Labs launches with the goal to transform medicine through cellular rejuvenation programming. Press release: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/altos-labs-launches-with-the-goal-to-transform-medicine-through-cellular-rejuvenation-programming-301463541.html / Media: https://amp.economist.com/science-and-technology/a-3bn-bet-on-finding-the-fountain-of-youth/21807244
A working group to make artificial wombs happen and are recruiting experts. http://exo-genesis.co
Practically-A-Book Review: Yudkowsky Contra Ngo On Agents https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/practically-a-book-review-yudkowsky
The AI Control Problem in a wider intellectual context https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/the-ai-control-problem-in-a-wider
Meta patents reveal how to cash in on the metaverse: “Pupil movements, body poses and nose scrunching are among the flickers of human expression that Meta wants to harvest in building its metaverse, according to an analysis of dozens of patents recently granted to Facebook’s parent company.” [WSJ] https://archive.fo/2ecQy
Eye-tracking may be the closest thing we have to mind-reading: New study shows that visual behaviour can reveal people's sex, age, ethnicity, personality traits, drug-consumption habits, emotions, fears, skills, interests, sexual preferences, and physical and mental health. https://rd.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-42504-3_15
It's written all over your face: How our faces are our biggest privacy vulnerability https://axisofordinary.substack.com/p/its-written-all-over-your-face
"dramatic shift over the course of 2021, from a nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter to a rare five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter" https://news.gallup.com/poll/388781/political-party-preferences-shifted-greatly-during-2021.aspx
HyperTransformers, a novel architecture for few-shot learning able to generate the weights of a CNN directly from a given support set. https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.04182
UNICORN on RAINBOW: A Universal Commonsense Reasoning Model on a New Multitask Benchmark https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.13009
Does the advent of machine learning mean the classic methodology of hypothesise, predict and test has had its day? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/09/are-we-witnessing-the-dawn-of-post-theory-science
Vladimir Putin on the cultural revolution the West is undergoing: “The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags, as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs, and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion, and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones — all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs...This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now. Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices — which we, fortunately, have left, I hope — in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past — such as Shakespeare — are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood, memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what color or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jordan-peterson-why-i-am-no-longer-a-tenured-professor-at-the-university-of-toronto
A physics question I asked on Facebook and a reply by Scott Aaronson
Question: I just tried to understand the entropy of the universe at different times with essentially zero physics knowledge and, unsurprisingly, got stuck.
What I get is that the early universe was just a "soup" of photons, quarks, and electrons, something that, appears to have very high entropy. But it actually had lower entropy than today because the early universe didn't have black holes. Even the Milky Way's supermassive black hole has an entropy that's about a factor of 1,000 more than the entire Universe at the Big Bang.
How come black holes have so much entropy? As far as I understand, entropy measures the number of possible arrangements of the state of a system. The more ways there are of rearranging the small components of a system without making a difference to what the system looks like as a whole, the higher the entropy of the system is. Black holes are made up of lots of particles and rearranging them doesn't make a difference; you can rearrange the particles in a singularity all you want...it's still a singularity.
BUT...doesn't the big bang theory imply that the universe started as a singularity as well? How come black holes have high entropy but the early universe resulting from a primordial singularity had low entropy? Or do black holes belong to a completely different category of singularities?
Scott Aaronson: The “microscopic description of black-hole entropy” is considered one of the great open problems in physics. Strikingly, we know the exact *amount* of black hole entropy from Bekenstein and Hawking’s calculations in the 70s, but describing the actual states would require a quantum theory of gravity. One key, though, is that a black hole’s entropy scales with the *area of its event horizon*, and someone outside the black hole would “see” its entropy as living on the event horizon, not at the singularity. (Recall that, due to time dilation, an outside observer never actually sees anything fall into the black hole — they just see things get pancaked on the event horizon, and then a VERY long time later, they see the information fizzle out as Hawking radiation.) So, picture the event horizon covered with qubits, one qubit per Planck area (ignoring a multiplicative constant), encoding degrees of freedom in spacetime that are not yet understood — invisible to quantum field theory and classical general relativity, but we know they’re there. OK, but that’s the external observer’s perspective. Someone who jumped into the black hole, *if* they weren’t spaghettified and killed, would “see” the same entropy all collected at the singularity — which is only a “singularity” at all in the classical GR approximation. In quantum gravity, it’s believed to look more like a giant “bridge to nowhere,” which gets longer and longer as the black hole’s entropy increases, and which encodes the qubits in a way that, again, is not yet understood. Unless the black hole is entangled with a second black hole, in which case the “bridge to nowhere” would actually be a wormhole connecting the two black holes — not a wormhole that one could traverse, but if you jumped into the black hole at one end of it and your friend jumped into the other (and if, again, you somehow weren’t spaghettified), it’s possible that you could meet in the middle. I hope this answers your question.
So yeah, while I didn’t say this explicitly, this is very different from the Big Bang singularity, which doesn’t come with an obvious event horizon and which doesn’t seem to be a “bridge” to anything. But explaining why the entropy at the Big Bang was as low as it was is *another* of the great open problems in physics!