Links for 2022-09-20
Human-level Atari 200x faster: "Taking Agent57 as a starting point, we employ a diverse set of strategies to achieve a 200-fold reduction of experience needed to outperform the human baseline." https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.07550
“…full reprogramming is reasonable evidence that cells have in then the machinery required for near complete (as complete as we can reasonably hope to get) cellular rejuvenation.” https://nintil.com/aging-solved-in-vitro/
Mental speed is high until age 60 as revealed by an analysis of over a million participants https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01282-7
Summaries of more than 60 articles of the AI alignment curriculum https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eymFwwc6jG9gPx5Zz/summaries-ai-alignment-curriculum
A survey on over 300 works about interpretability in deep networks https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WWcPFBZqpwA5kzE5y/linkpost-a-survey-on-over-300-works-about-interpretability
Meta Built an AI That Can Guess the Words You’re Hearing by Decoding Your Brainwaves https://singularityhub.com/2022/09/13/meta-built-an-ai-that-can-guess-the-words-youre-hearing-by-decoding-your-brainwaves/
“What is a quantum state? It’s a unit vector of complex numbers (or if we’re talking about mixed states, then a trace-1, Hermitian, positive semidefinite matrix), which encodes everything there is to know about a physical system.”
Latest research finding sex brain differences: Large study of nearly 10,000 boys and girls was able to detect the sex of an individual by examining the patterns of grey and white matter in the brains. The models used in the study accurately classified the biological sex of a person 93.32% of the time. A greater brain sex score correlated significantly with greater intelligence. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35471639/
“Democratic” is often used as a synonym for “good” or “progressive”. Yet pure democracy is just the tyranny of the majority. In a pure democracy, the majority can democratically decide to exterminate a minority.
It is not democracy that makes Western countries different but the rule of law that protects certain inalienable rights. This is implicitly acknowledged when the term “populism” is being used negatively.
Populism is a close approximation of pure democracy. Any successful election campaign thrives on the discontent of the electorate. Only if the electorate is dissatisfied, only if people see problems that need to be solved, only then is it possible for political parties to present themselves and their policies as alternatives and to displace the current government. Populists take this attribute to its logical extreme and fan the flames of discord and pessimism.
That democracy in and of itself is not something positive is further acknowledged by the worry that social networks such as YouTube allow bad people to influence the opinion of the masses. What's implied by this fear is the belief that democracy can function only under the premise that access to information is restricted by the elites because the average voter is intellectually incapable of distinguishing lies and misinformation from the truth. But then they are also incapable of deciding who to vote for because the principle of democracy requires the average voter to be able to form a rational opinion about all kinds of highly complex political, economic, and scientific topics in order to choose the party that best represents their interests.
In summary, when people are using the term "democracy" positively or warn that something is endangering "democracy" they often mean the opposite. The protection of minorities is only possible if you protect them from popular sentiments and the tyranny of the majority by restricting democracy.