Links for 2022-05-31
The unreasonable effectiveness of complex numbers in discrete math https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOXCLR3Wric
Nuclear energy can be the turning point in the race to decarbonize: “About 30 countries are actively considering, planning, or preparing to build nuclear power plants, seeing their benefits as long-term reliable low-carbon energy sources and stimulators of economic activity and employment.” https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/05/nuclear-energy-decarbonization/
“We develop NaturalProver, a language model capable of proving theorems and giving useful suggestions to human proof writers, improving on fine-tuned GPT-3 via knowledge & constrained decoding.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.12910
Literature review on the evidence showing that cognitive tests predict job performance almost entirely because of general intelligence. Measures of specific cognitive abilities add almost zero predictive power. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2021.101617
What’s worse: death by red giant sun or proton decay? Anders Sandberg says he’s most worried about the latter. [podcast] http://bigpicturescience.org/episodes/end-of-eternity
Activity Subspaces in Medial Prefrontal Cortex Distinguish States of the World https://www.jneurosci.org/content/42/20/4131.abstract
"many secular [academic] institutions now require faith statements, too. They go by the name diversity statements, but they function in the same ways as faith statements at religious institutions." https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2022/05/23/diversity-statements-are-new-faith-statements-opinion
Netflix Takes Aim at Wokeness: “Netflix recently canceled several social justice-oriented projects and on Tuesday laid off 150 employees…” https://www.nationalreview.com/news/netflix-takes-aim-at-wokeness/
I understand why neurotypical people have a hard time admitting that they are willing to accept the death of a few children for certain rights and freedoms. But it's obviously true.
For example, I am against the proposed EU rules that would allow the government to scan private messages. Would it help fight child exploitation? Possibly. But I'm willing to accept the sexual abuse of a few children in order to keep my privacy.
Here is a more extreme example. Suppose humanity's chance of surviving this century was 1%. If our chance of survival would increase to 50% under total around-the-clock surveillance of everyone by a global government whose values are comparable to the current government of China, should this be implemented? When I ran a poll with this question, 37% answered no and 16% were not sure. In expectation, that's A LOT of children those 37% are willing to sacrifice in exchange for keeping their freedoms.
The same is true for the right to bear arms. Some people are willing to accept the death of a bunch of children to keep their guns. But they are mostly good people with a conscience. Which makes them unwilling to admit this fact. You need to be some psychological outlier like me to articulate this explicitly.
But nobody needs to own guns, right? Well, there are a bunch of arguments in favor of owning guns, such as enabling people to defend themselves when law and order break down. But even if there were no arguments and people just liked owning guns this wouldn't really be that outrageous. Nobody needs to drink alcohol either yet lots of people are willing to accept the hugely negative effects of its legality.
All this might sound horrible. But what other options are there? Everyone implicitly assigns a price to the well-being of a child in order to weigh it against other outcomes. Because they have to! If the value of a life was infinite our decision-making would break down and we would be paralyzed by impossible choices.