Links for 2022-05-02
gwern on "Why hasn't deep learning generated significant economic value yet?" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MR6cJKy2LE6kF24B7/why-hasn-t-deep-learning-generated-significant-economic?commentId=XtFuLC5RtWb6N9br2
“The skill of surgeons varies tremendously, with bottom quartile surgeons having over 4x as many complications as the best surgeons in the same hospital. And surgeons are keenly aware of who is good & who is bad - their rankings of others are very accurate.” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1520589431861878786.html
A story that discussed how a single individual (not a CS prof but a stay-at-home-dad software engineer) was able to win the simulation component of recent DARPA robotics challenges (but not the latest one). https://www.wired.com/story/darpa-challenge-robot-olympics-underdog/ (archived version: https://archive.ph/w8Ida)
Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets — “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets
„169 cases of acute hepatitis of unknown origin have been reported“ from Europe and US. 17 children have required liver transplantation; at least one death has been reported. https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/multi-country-acute-severe-hepatitis-of-unknown-origin-in-children
Evidence of Zoonotic Spread: Superbug C. difficile Can Jump Between Pigs and Humans https://scitechdaily.com/evidence-of-zoonotic-spread-superbug-c-difficile-can-jump-between-pigs-and-humans/
Hadza hunter-gatherers are not deontologists and do not prefer deontologists as social partners. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022103122000336
Anti-technology, anti-growth, anti-humanist thinking was the rule, not the exception, among the originating thinkers of environmentalism. https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/wait-environmentalists-are-anti-technology
Distributed Acoustic Sensing is a technique that uses light feedback from twisted fiber optic cables to detect vibrations or deformation in the ground. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/scientists-spy-on-mount-etna-with-fiber-optic-cables/
Elegant Six-Page Proof Reveals the Emergence of Random Structure https://www.quantamagazine.org/elegant-six-page-proof-reveals-the-emergence-of-random-structure-20220425/
The truth is, one could write a whole book on crazy and extreme beliefs to be found on the left. The difference is that the beliefs on the left have institutional support and kill millions of people.
To name just a few examples,
- due to propaganda and lies, nuclear power has been dramatically curtailed in favor of fossil fuels, killing people through air pollution and the financing of wars
- due to disinformation, GM crops have been blocked, which has led to childhood blindness and malnutrition, costing millions of lives
- glyphosate, one of the best tested and completely safe herbicides, will be replaced with several dangerous and environmentally harmful products
- due to an erroneous Blank Slate dogma, billions of dollars are wasted on useless interventions while unequal outcomes of different populations are cited as evidence of continued discrimination because genetic confounding, IQ research, sex differences, and crime statistics are ignored
- racial tensions and institutional distrust have been stoked by convincing people that the police are engaging in racist lynchings on a grand scale when in reality an unarmed black person is more likely to be struck by lightning than being killed by the police
- wood stoves and fireplaces have been promoted and even government-funded because they are allegedly "green" and "natural" when in reality they cause massive amounts of deadly air pollution
- climate change is falsely portrayed as an existential risk in order to distract from political mismanagement, achieve unrelated political goals, and push an anti-capitalist narrative that has already cost 100 million lives during the 20th century
- due to misguided moral grandstanding, animal-rights activists have hampered and continue to hamper critical research relying on animal experimentation
- based on the false narrative that ethnic diversity is a strength, mass immigration from culturally incompatible cultures has led to parallel societies, social unrest, and general distrust
The problem with crazy right-wing beliefs is not that they are objectively more bizarre than left-wing beliefs but rather that they are not supported by reputable institutions and people.
Take, for example, the idea of a global pedophile network run by important people on the political left. I don't think such a network exists, just like I don't believe that there still exists systemic racism against black people in America. But I also don't think that the former conspiracy theory is more bizarre than the latter belief. There even exists tentative evidence in support of such a theory:
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_of_consent_laws
- https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-authorities-placed-children-with-pedophiles-for-30-years/a-53814208
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_cases
And there is yet another advantage of bad left-wing ideas: they are not explicitly bad. Superficially, concepts such as equity sound nice. But when taken to their logical conclusion they are as destructive as explicit calls for genocide. For example, the only way to guarantee equity is by force; by continuously robbing people of wealth and status, and to redistribute it among strangers. Because even in a society with advanced genetic engineering in which everyone can be a good-looking and healthy genius won't be enough to achieve equity. Due to sheer luck, people will eventually accumulate more wealth, connections, and thereby opportunities, than others. Outcomes will then start to diverge.