Links for 2022-04-14
“If Ukraine succeeds in preserving its freedom and territorial integrity, a diminished Russia will be contained; if it fails, the chances of war between NATO and Russia go up, as does the prospect of Russian intervention in other areas on its western and southern peripheries. A Russian win would encourage a China coolly observing and assessing Western mettle and military capacity; a Russian defeat would induce a salutary caution in Beijing.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/ukraine-russia-war-consequences/629541/
Video and lecture notes from a tutorial on probability and statistics given at PyData NYC 2019. This tutorial provides a crash course in probability in statistics that will cover the essentials, including probability theory, parameter estimation, hypothesis testing, and using the generalized linear model—all in just 90 minutes! https://www.countbayesie.com/blog/2019/12/1/probability-and-statistics-in-90-minutes
Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’, scientist claims https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/apr/06/fungi-electrical-impulses-human-language-study
SpaceX's Starship: America's Secret Weapon https://austinvernon.site/blog/starshipsuperweapon.html
The Great Filter with Robin Hanson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1DQ6uwfGE4
The extreme illusion of understanding: “Though speakers and listeners monitor communication success, they systematically overestimate it.” https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/04/the-extreme-illusion-of-understanding.html
Tanis: Fossil of dinosaur killed in asteroid strike found, scientists claim https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61013740
US military confirms an interstellar meteor collided with Earth https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/13/world/interstellar-meteor-discovery-scn/index.html
When to use "meta" vs "self-reference", "recursive", etc. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gQ5eQjRTY87LpjhQv/when-to-use-meta-vs-self-reference-recursive-etc
“We’re in a golden age of merging AI and neuroscience.” https://xcorr.net/2021/12/31/2021-in-review-unsupervised-brain-models/
“These new data challenge traditional interpretations of early neural activity and offer a more holistic perspective on the interplay between choice, behavior, and their neural underpinnings.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982222004420
Wokism's commonalities with the Nazis: "the belief that it’s illegitimate for a certain ethnic group to be represented out of proportion with its share of the population; assigning ethnic labels to unobservable forces or processes; and rejecting quantifiable measures of merit" https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/how-are-the-woke-like-nazis?s=w
"direct exposure to refugee arrivals induces sizable and lasting increases in natives’ hostility toward refugees, immigrants, and Muslim minorities" https://cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/does-exposure-to-the-refugee-crisis-make-natives-more-hostile/3E66D9B39336C652F9EF6D7EF9DF0735
“Introducing Frontier—a $925M advance market commitment (AMC) to accelerate carbon removal.” https://frontierclimate.com/
Why is America's military budget so high?
1. In order to successfully and globally project power, you need an overwhelming advantage. A defending force has at least a 3:1 advantage over an attacker.
2. The more coffins of dead soldiers come home the larger will be the reluctance of your population to sustain a military operation. To prevent this you need an overwhelming advantage that allows you to quickly overpower an enemy.
3. Your enemies might cooperate to attack you or your allies on multiple fronts. To win such a multi-frond war you need several times the defense budget of your biggest enemy.
But couldn't America just decide to stay neutral and focus on defending its homeland? No, that's not a viable strategy, as I explain here, after the links section (scroll down).