Links for 2022-07-06
2022 Fields Medalist June Huh: “...mathematics could give him what poetry could not: the ability to search for beauty outside himself, to try to grasp something external, objective and true, in a way that opened him up more than writing ever had. “You don’t think about your small self,” he said. “There’s no place for ego.” He found that unlike when he was a poet, he was never motivated by the desire for recognition. He just wanted to do math.” https://www.quantamagazine.org/june-huh-high-school-dropout-wins-the-fields-medal-20220705/
Does hot water freeze faster than cold? https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-hot-water-freeze-faster-than-cold-physicists-keep-asking-20220629/
"Contrary to lay expectations, people who have successfully achieved upward social mobility may, in fact, be less sensitive to the plight of the poor than those born into privilege." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/19485506221098921
“Estimates from the Minnesota Twin Study show that sociopolitical conservatism is extraordinarily heritable (74%) for the most informed fifth of the public – much more so than population-level results (57%) – but with much lower heritability (29%) for the public’s bottom half.” https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/06/how-the-heritability-of-politics-works.html
How much computation can a single neuron do by itself? https://silenceinbetween.substack.com/p/can-a-single-neuron-do-mnist?s=w
InssTek announces new 3D printing milestones for medical and aerospace applications https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/insstek-announces-new-3d-printing-milestones-for-medical-and-aerospace-applications-211119/
Arguments for and against the position claim that capabilities generalise further than alignment once capabilities start generalising far at all. https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/cq5x4XDnLcBrYbb66/will-capabilities-generalise-more
Paper by Lant Pritchett arguing that economic growth is necessary and sufficient for “everything basic to human material wellbeing” https://lantpritchett.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Basics-legatum-paper_short.pdf
Leading US researchers: “...most crops will be gene edited to some degree within the next 10 to 15 years.” https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/06/28/in-10-years-crispr-transformed-medicine-can-it-now-help-us-deal-with-climate-change/
Carbon-Removal Tech Grabs Elon Musk’s Check: Millions poured into XPrize effort to pull CO2 out of the sky https://spectrum.ieee.org/carbon-removal-x-prize-finalists
Intelligence and criminal behavior: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961500077X
Highlights:
• Examined a total birth cohort of Finnish males born in 1987
• Lower levels of intelligence are associated with greater levels of offending.
• The IQ-offending association is mostly linear.
• Pattern is consistent across multiple measures of intelligence and offending.