Links for 2022-07-07
The Track Record of Futurists Seems ... Fine https://www.cold-takes.com/the-track-record-of-futurists-seems-fine/
Turkey found 694Mt of rare earths—that's 6x the size of all other global reserves and _15x_ the reserves of China, which currently dominates the market. Enough for >1,000 years at current demand. https://news.metal.com/newscontent/101881567/Turkey-Discovers-694-million-mt-of-Rare-Earth-Element-Reserves-with-Infrastructure-Construction-Starting-This-Year/
“I started writing a blog post on all the reasons we should continue to invest in space, and it just kept getting longer and longer, and now it’s a short paper.” https://www.thecgo.org/research/why-go-to-space/
When it comes to mathematics, "France is on par with the United States" and "the world's leading research center for mathematics" is in France. Yet 1. France's math funding is only a fraction of US's 2. "there aren't that many French mathematicians" 3. "French kids' performance in PISA maths assessments is merely average" 4. "France doesn't do particularly well at the International Mathematics Olympiad". At the same time "China lead the IMO but is underrepresented in the Fields Medal". https://nintil.com/us-science-leadership/
Landmark psychology experiment that indicated how easy it is to plant false memories in people's minds about getting lost in a shopping mall as a child passes the replication test with flying colors. https://psyarxiv.com/nh3zq/
"This eruption of warrior ferocity 5k years ago was triggered by an economic revolution that swept across Eurasia, the advent of an unbeatable new cultural toolkit that finally harnessed the full productive potential of the cattle, sheep and goats..." https://razib.substack.com/p/the-wolf-at-historys-door
“Written language is controlled and deliberate, whereas transcripts of spontaneous speech (like interviews) are hard to read because speech is disorganized and less fluent. One aspect that makes speech transcripts particularly difficult to read is disfluency, which includes self-corrections, repetitions, and filled pauses (e.g., words like “umm”, and “you know”).” https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/06/identifying-disfluencies-in-natural.html
Iterated meiotic selection instead of iterated embryo selection? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zWKA48izeoq5HcnkD/meiosis-is-all-you-need
“How exactly did China turn Hong Kong into a police state? It wasn't just the national security law. It was decades in the making. The party used infiltration, co-option, fear and intimidation - tactics it is now trying in the rest of the world.” [The Economist] https://archive.ph/uO4cr
2022 Fields Medalists: "Tao generously refrained from announcing his own work to avoid overshadowing the achievement of such a young mathematician..." https://mathscholar.org/2022/07/2022-fields-medalists-diverse-backgrounds-breakthrough-mathematics/