Links for 2022-06-05
Review: What Is a Woman? — “The wholesale refusal to engage with reality is replicated over and over in his conversations with therapists, politicians and college professors. Time and again, the people Walsh speaks with obfuscate in response to simple questions.” https://konstantinkisin.substack.com/p/review-what-is-a-woman
"Language models can execute a task by conditioning on a few labeled examples. Can they generate natural language instructions describing the task? To a large extent, the answer is yes! ... This ability is currently unique to the largest (175B) InstructGPT model ..." https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10782
Building a neural network FROM SCRATCH (no Tensorflow/Pytorch, just numpy & math) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8yWXqWQYmU
We can be optimistic about the next decade. Techno-optimism for 2022. https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/techno-optimism-for-2022?utm_source=url&s=r
The Future of Nuclear War https://philpapers.org/rec/TURTFO-14
This singing lemur is the first known nonhuman mammal with “categorical rhythm” https://bigthink.com/life/mammal-rhythm-study/
Collective Intelligence as Infrastructure for Reducing Broad Global Catastrophic Risks https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.03300
The Evolutionary Optimality Challenge: "...we develop a practical heuristic, the “evolutionary optimality challenge”, for evaluating the plausibility that specific candidate biomedical interventions would be safe and effective." https://www.nickbostrom.com/evolutionary-optimality.pdf
Brain size and intelligence: 2022 https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/brain-size-and-intelligence-2022?s=r
“Semiconductor manufacturing is the most sophisticated, unforgiving high volume production technology that has ever been done successfully. You need a lot of practice. The more chips that TSMC makes, the better it gets at it.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DCZsT2plw8
To understand the German attitude towards nuclear power you have to realize how much disinformation is spread about this topic.
Three examples:
Social Democrats: “We have overcome nuclear power because it creates eternally radiating nuclear waste, and we still do not know what to do with it. In addition, as we witness in Chornobyl, it can make whole countries uninhabitable and irradiate half a continent.”
Green Party: “Today is the tenth anniversary of the #Fukushima nuclear disaster. Tens of thousands of people died, the region around the destroyed nuclear power plant remains contaminated and uninhabitable. That teaches us: The only thing that is sure is that it is a risk.”
German news channel NTV: "It was one of the largest nuclear accidents in world history, with around 15 thousand deaths and around 2500 missing."
Sources:
The truth looks very different:
UN finds 'no adverse health effects' from Fukushima disaster: Japan's 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster has not harmed the health of local residents 10 years on, according to a report published by UN researchers. https://www.unscear.org/docs/publications/2020/UNSCEAR_2020_AnnexB_AdvanceCopy.pdf
No excess mutations in the children of Chernobyl survivors, new study finds: https://www.science.org/content/article/no-excess-mutations-children-chernobyl-survivors-new-study-finds
Nuclear waste isn't a problem but a valuable resource: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1502247704667246594.html
Nuclear fuel will last us for 4 billion years: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1515325071124045829.html
Nuclear power plants can be built very quickly: “France did things differently back in the 1970s, when they decarbonised in under 12 years through building nuclear power plants, which means that they have one of the cleanest energy mixes in Europe.” https://quillette.com/2021/05/31/the-sad-truth-about-traditional-environmentalism/
Nuclear power is expensive because of overregulation: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
440 reactors producing electricity in their fourth to sixth decade of service...100s more power ships & submarines...just 3 accidents...No one has called for closing chemical plants—even though there have been far more fatal chemical plant accidents. https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/a-1908-lesson-in-risk-and-reward/