Links for 2022-07-08
On how discoveries about social insects transformed assumptions regarding humanity's position in nature and time. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220706-how-insect-civilisations-recast-our-place-in-the-universe
"She Spent a Decade Writing Fake Russian History. Wikipedia Just Noticed." (millions of words, 206 new articles, 100s edited) https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1010653/she-spent-a-decade-writing-fake-russian-history.-wikipedia-just-noticed.-?source=channel_rising
“My Most Likely Reason to Die Young is AI X-Risk” — “…as a 23 year old man living in the UK, conditional on dying in the next 30 years, the probability that I die due to AI x-risk is 41% (3.7% from AI, 5.3% from natural causes)” https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hJDid3goqqRAE6hFN/my-most-likely-reason-to-die-young-is-ai-x-risk
Energy Superabundance: How Cheap, Abundant Energy Will Shape Our Future https://www.thecgo.org/research/energy-superabundance/
“MYRRHA is the name of an innovative and ambitious European project to develop the next generation of clean and safe nuclear power plants. With this EU project, super meltdowns should be impossible, nuclear waste radioactivity should be drastically reduced...” https://3druck-com.translate.goog/forschung/saubere-kernenergie-soll-mithilfe-von-keramik-3d-druck-erreicht-werden-43109634/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp
Fleet-DAgger: Interactive Robot Fleet Learning with Scalable Human Supervision https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/fleet-dagger/home
New Artificial Photosynthesis Method Grows Food With No Sunshine https://singularityhub.com/2022/07/01/new-artificial-photosynthesis-method-grows-food-with-no-sunshine/
Effort impacts IQ test scores in a minor way: A multi-study investigation with healthy adult volunteers https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289622000332
“I believed the hype and did mindfulness meditation for dumb reasons-- now I'm trying to reverse the damage” https://hollyelmore.substack.com/p/i-believed-the-hype-and-did-mindfulness-meditation-for-dumb-reasons-now-im-trying-to-reverse-the-damage?s=r
We Are the God of the Gaps (a little poem): “And the rising tide of the learning machines will flood them all…Poker to poetry, physics to programming, painting to plumbing, which first and which last merely a technical puzzle…” https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6534
In the shooting room experiment we are to imagine a room of infinite capacity. First a batch of ten people are led into this room. A pair of dice is thrown in front of their eyes. If a double six comes up they are all shot. Otherwise they leave the room safely and a new batch, this one containing a hundred people, is thrust in. The process continues, with each consecutive batch ten times larger than the previous one, until there is a double six; whereupon the people in the room at that time are shot and the experiment ends.
Suppose you have been thrust into the room. You are asked to estimate the odds of leaving safely. On the one hand, since whether you will leave or not will be determined by the throw of a fair pair of dice, it seems that you have a 35/36 chance of exiting alive. On the other hand, 90% of all people who are in your situation will be shot, so it seems you have only a 10% chance of exiting alive. That is the paradox.
The Doomsday Argument: a Literature Review https://anthropic-principle.com/preprints/lit/
See also: The Anthropic Principle: Five Short Examples https://apointinblogspace.wordpress.com/2017/09/25/the-anthropic-principle-five-short-examples/