Links for 2022-06-09
“If You Don’t Like An AI’s Performance, Wait A Year Or Two” — Scott Alexander accepts a bet on AI performance and takes a look at some previous predictions by Gary Marcus. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-bet-ai-size-solves-flubs?s=r
Generating Long Videos of Dynamic Scenes: "We present a video generation model that accurately reproduces object motion, changes in camera viewpoint, and new content that arises over time." https://www.timothybrooks.com/tech/long-videos/
About 200 years ago, the world started getting rich. Why? https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/6/1/23138463/how-the-world-became-rich-industrial-revolution-koyama-rubin
Unexpected outcomes trigger release of noradrenaline, which helps the brain focus its attention and learn from the event. https://news.mit.edu/2022/noradrenaline-brain-surprise-0601
High Intelligence is not a Risk Factor for Mental Health Disorders https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.05.26.22275621v1
Killer Asteroids Are Hiding in Plain Sight. A New Tool Helps Spot Them. [The New York Times] https://archive.ph/eP3o0
Toward a more accurate 3D atlas of C. elegans neurons https://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12859-022-04738-3
“Pupil size indexes arousal, but more than that! We argue: changes in pupil size indicate (all) separate aspects of attention: Orienting, alerting, and executive functioning; which can be linked to distinct nerual circuits.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166223622000972?dgcid=author
“…could you actually make a polyhedron that when rolled is a fair dice with 65536 equally likely outcomes?” http://aleph.se/andart2/math/the-cursed-d65536/
What if the black-white achievement gaps have the same fundamental causes as the Asian-white gaps?
A moderate difference in the means of two distributions translates into a large difference at the tails:
1. Singapore has 150,000 mathematics top achievers (TIMSS) at a population of 5.612 million while Germany has 190,000 top achievers at a population of 82.79 million.
2. For every African-American who scores 1400 or higher on the SAT, there are 21 Asian-Americans in the same range, despite being half as numerous as blacks.
3. China has 28 times as many people who have an IQ above 160 as the United States despite only having 4 times the population. This means that China could launch 28 Manhattan projects at the same time.
4. 64% of Vietnamese in Germany manage to join the most advanced of the three types of German secondary schools. That is 5 times more often than for Muslim immigrants and 20 percentage points higher than for Germans.
5. Venture capital-funded vs US population: White: 77.1% vs 76.5% / Asian: 17.7% vs 5.9% / Middle Eastern: 2.4% vs 3% / Latinx: 1.8% vs 18.3% / Black: 1% vs 13.4%.
6. Asian Americans are 40% more likely to hold an undergraduate degree, nearly twice as likely to hold a master’s degree, and more than twice as likely to have a doctorate, compared to whites.
See also:
“Race and ethnicity are now more important than either family income or parental education in accounting for [SAT] score differences. White and Asian students from the poorest families perform at same level as black students from the wealthiest families.” https://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/growing-correlation-between-race-and-sat-scores-new-findings-california-saul-geiser
Math scores for 2nd generation immigrants in Norway by country of origin: "A quick skim of the results suggest they are looking quite normal with African origins in the bottom and Asians in the top." https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/math-scores-for-2nd-generation-immigrants
P.S.
It's often pointed out how many companies are owned by immigrants. But where do they come from? Approximately 116 first-generation immigrants have founded American Fortune 500 companies. 106 come from Europe or the anglosphere (Canada/Australia/SA) and 6 are East Asian.
England has 21 entries, Germany 17, Canada 14, Russia 9, Ireland 8, Scotland 7, Switzerland 6, France 4, Poland 4, Taiwan 4, Sweden 3, Hungary 3, Brazil 1, Italy 1, Greece 1, Cuba 1, Zambia 1, Norway 1, Australia 1, Netherlands 1, Turkey 1, South Africa 1, Lithuania 1, Bosnia 1, Croatia 1, Finland 1, China 1, Hong Kong 1.
The Brazilian is a white Jew. The Cuban is also white. The “Turkish immigrant” is Armenian.
Source: http://startupsusa.org/fortune500/
See also: The Demographics of Innovation in the United States (Page 27) http://www2.itif.org/2016-demographics-of-innovation.pdf?_ga=2.44113956.1263383430.1513639962-1733797525.1513639962