Links for 2022-01-24
Ex-DeepMind team who did DeepStack (AI that beat pros at poker) doing algorithmic trading. Rich Sutton (father of RL) is on the Advisory Board. https://www.equilibretechnologies.com/about-us
“A trio of separate research teams from three different continents published individual papers indicating similar quantum computing breakthroughs yesterday. All three were funded in part by the US Army and each paper appears to be a slam dunk for the future of quantum computing.” https://thenextweb.com/news/nuclear-quantum-computing-its-coming
Progress On DNA Storage https://blog.dshr.org/2021/12/progress-on-dna-storage.html
New Virus-Like Particles Can Deliver CRISPR to Any Cell in the Body https://singularityhub.com/2022/01/18/new-ultra-efficient-engineered-carriers-could-overhaul-genetic-therapies/
Ants infected with tapeworms live 3x longer [The Atlantic] https://archive.fo/VdYyq
Evidence from six recent papers that socio-economic status is only very modestly correlated with educational attainment. https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2022/01/recent-papers-on-socio-economic-status.html [see also: https://axisofordinary.substack.com/p/genetic-confounding]
On the contrast between the behaviour of ordinary criminals and the strong internal mores of Camorra clans. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/01/the-prisoners-dilemma-for-prisoners-and-mafia-men.html
Watch out for the whimper, not the bang. "Historically, civilizational collapses are boring." Most apocalypses start as Boring Apocalypses, where decaying governmental capability & social dynamism lower our ability to stop risks & threats from turning into catastrophe. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324688255_Governing_Boring_Apocalypses_A_New_Typology_of_Existential_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposures_for_Existential_Risk_Research
Did you know people are trying to use fracking to slow climate change? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCE1i2tJQQY
A Cultural Species and its Cognitive Phenotypes: “…we review a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that culture shapes what people attend to, perceive and remember as well as how they think, feel and reason.” https://philpapers.org/rec/HENACS-3
Paul Graham points out that “the "obvious" trick of computing (a/b)/(c/d) by computing (a/b)(d/c) wasn't discovered, or at least published, till 1544.”
Such examples show that large amounts of crystallized intelligence (learned procedures and knowledge) can beat fluid intelligence (innate reasoning skills).
Human culture could be viewed as a type of crystallized intelligence. It allows people to learn, use, and understand concepts and techniques that would require vast amounts of fluid intelligence to figure out on their own.
The growth of crystallized intelligence in the form of human culture might also be the reason why the brain volume of Homo sapiens has decreased by roughly 10 percent within the past 40,000 years. Through cultural advancement, computationally expensive tasks got outsourced to the collective via specialization of individuals and cultural transmission of knowledge. Culture is an “exocortex” that reduces the necessity of individual intelligence.
This is also related to the philosophical question of whether a giant lookup table that contains a hardcoded answer to every question would count as intelligent.