Links for 2022-07-20
“The purpose of this short film is to identify the perennial time-distance problem of human space exploration beyond Mars and to identify a few propulsion approaches we might utilize to send humans to all the worlds in our solar system and reach out across the vast distances between stars. The spacecraft architectures highlighted in the film are nuclear electric propulsion (known physics, known engineering), fusion propulsion (known physics, unknown engineering), and finally space warps (unknown physics, unknown engineering).” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiJFo-kaJBQ
“Is scale all you need for AGI?(unlikely).But our new paper "Beyond neural scaling laws:beating power law scaling via data pruning" shows how to achieve much superior exponential decay of error with dataset size rather than slow power law neural scaling” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1542599453659451392.html
The Robots Have Landed: Creative destruction of cultural production is near. https://cperry248.substack.com/p/the-robots-have-landed
DNA Typewriter Taps Out a Record Inside Cells https://www.hhmi.org/news/dna-typewriter-taps-out-record-inside-cells
“In 2020, Algolia partnered with Open AI to connect #GPT3 with its existing search technology. The result: Algolia Answers, a next-generation product enabling intelligent, semantics-driven single-search endpoint for search queries.” https://youtu.be/nh0VJvr9umA
Specialized nerve cells in the zebrafish visual system enable recognition of conspecifics https://www.mpg.de/18951827/0712-psy-a-brain-network-for-social-attraction-155111-x
Caring for children makes people all over the world more conservative, and most of the association between age and social conservatism is accounted for by parenthood. https://psyarxiv.com/d3fg2/
“There are four main criticisms of national IQs. My latest newsletter argues that two are valid (though not disqualifying) and two are invalid.” https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/how-useful-are-national-iqs
“Voters of color are backing the GOP at historic levels” https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/17/politics/republicans-voters-color-women-midterm-elections/index.html
Some fake distinctions used to justify arbitrary behavior:
1. Ideology vs. religion: It's okay to discriminate against far-right people but not against Muslims.
2. Private vs. public property: Restricting freedom of speech is only bad if the government does it. Open borders are only good as long as the border isn't owned by a corporation. A private Mars colony with laws, courts, and police would be totally different from a Mars colony founded by a government.
3. Humans vs. animals: It's okay to eat animals because they are not humans but it wouldn't be okay to eat a Neanderthal, a Homo habilis, an Australopithecus...a chimp?