Paul Christiano: Where I agree and disagree with Eliezer https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CoZhXrhpQxpy9xw9y/where-i-agree-and-disagree-with-eliezer
Why cameras are soon going to be everywhere — “Soon imaging sensors will be so small, cheap, and energy efficient that they’ll be added to many more devices in our daily lives, and because they’re so tiny they won’t even be noticeable!” https://petewarden.com/2022/06/15/why-cameras-are-soon-going-to-be-everywhere/
"...two San from different groups both living in Namibia’s Northern Kalahari desert, and speaking click languages from the same family, are more genetically distinct from one another, by a solid 20%, than a person from Stockholm is from a person from Shanghai." https://razib.substack.com/p/out-of-africas-midlife-crisis
Scientists Discover “Superworms” Capable of Munching Through Plastic Waste https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/mgen/10.1099/mgen.0.000842
Proof of evolution that you can find on your body. Evidence for evolution from vestigial traits in humans. https://youtu.be/rFxu7NEoKC8
Vael Gates: Risks from Advanced AI (June 2022) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a8fFLg8qBmq6yv53d/vael-gates-risks-from-advanced-ai-june-2022
Startup Plans to Launch Nuclear Reactor Into Space for First Time in Decades https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxnewb/startup-plans-to-launch-nuclear-reactor-into-space-for-first-time-in-decades
zmm28 transgenic maize increases both N uptake- and N utilization-efficiencies https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-022-03501-x
“So intense was the EU’s involvement in Northern Ireland – a part of a non-member state, remember – that it has imposed 4,000 new laws there over the past 18 months.” https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/06/14/we-are-right-to-rip-up-the-northern-ireland-protocol/
Is scale all you need to achieve artificial general intelligence? Sarah Constantin argues that human intelligence might merely be a scaled-up version of earlier primate intelligence:
Evidence for the scaling hypothesis isn't hard to find: https://www.gwern.net/Scaling-hypothesis
1. A recent meta-analysis showed that bigger brain size is robustly related to higher intelligence: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.211621
2. African-descended people (Blacks) average cranial capacities of 1267 cm^3, European-descended people (Whites) 1347 cm^3, and East Asian-descended people (East Asians) 1364 cm^3. Blacks average an IQ of 85, Whites 100, and East Asians 106: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016028960200137X
3. Low SES people tend to have smaller overall GMV (gray matter volume) as well as somewhat different volumes within brain regions: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm2923
4. On average, males have larger total brain volumes than females. Accordingly, there are more men at the right tail of the intelligence distribution: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16248939/ (see also: https://largescaleassessmentsineducation.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40536-019-0070-9)
5. Across studies, the correlation coefficient of height and intelligence was generally found to be around 0.2, indicating a positive association between height and intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_and_intelligence
Now, there are also some indications that scale might not be as important as architecture. For example, whales have bigger brains than humans. One explanation here might be that their brains simply have to support the sensory apparatus and motor neurons of a larger body which leaves fewer computational resources for higher cognition.
Another puzzling fact is that human brains have been shrinking for thousands of years. But this could be explained by the fact that culture and living in large collectivist societies reduces the need for individual intelligence by serving as an exocortex.
Despite these qualifications, the evidence that scale matters a lot seems strong.
The item about 4000 new laws being imposed in Norther Ireland by the EU has a strong smell of politicking. The first point would be that the number is entirely unsubstantiated beyond the statement of some member of government. Secondly, matter-of-factly the EU isn't "imposing" anything, the UK willingly entered into an agreement with the EU regarding customs/tax rules in relation to Northern Ireland which it is now unfaithfully trying to back out on when it's no longer politically convenient and they need a new rotten potato to sell the electorate. Thirdly, the article makes it sound like the EU is writing the law from A to Z in Northern Ireland when in reality I suspect that the vast majority of these 4000 new "laws" are actually just trading regulations, again implemented as part of the original exit deal, and hardly anything that would affect the random Joe directly as the text is trying to not-so-subtly imply.