Links for 2022-09-22
“The tycoon also wants to finance the development of military-use drones. He said he was in talks with Taiwanese drone makers to form an industry alliance for quickly producing 1mn attack drones at low cost.” [Financial Times] https://archive.ph/0FjKq
Google Deepmind Researcher Co-Authors Paper Saying AI Will Eliminate Humanity https://www.vice.com/en/article/93aqep/google-deepmind-researcher-co-authors-paper-saying-ai-will-eliminate-humanity
The energy of the vacuum should have a gravitational effect on large atoms. But physicists' attempts to measure it have puzzlingly come up empty. [Discovery Magazine] https://archive.ph/Tii47
Why aren’t medical breakthroughs in obesity a bigger deal? https://www.grid.news/story/science/2022/09/14/why-arent-medical-breakthroughs-in-obesity-a-bigger-deal/
Barriers to Becoming a Kardashev Civilization: Kardashev Civilizations are beyond immense, with even the first tier of them making any modern nation look miniscule, and there are many barriers to becoming one. https://youtu.be/nqG2eDkmrjM
Global brain volume and surface area 🧠 mediate 10-15 times more of the g-factor polygenic score 🧬(gPGS) and childhood adversity’s 🏡 effects on the intelligence (g-factor) than regional measures! https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.09.08.507068v1
"Ethnic differences in brain aging are likely due in large part to genetic factors" https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2020.00233/full
Yet another search engine for AI-art prompts https://www.krea.ai/
“US Navy has more experience building nuclear reactors than anyone in the world … Unlike civilian power stations, US naval nuclear-powered ships are frequently (though not always) delivered on-time and on-budget.” https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction-c3c
National IQ is the Best Predictor of Economic Growth — “We find national IQ to be the most robust predictor of economic growth with the largest effect size, compared to +70 variables in the growth literature. And the cherry on top is that it is causally identified.” https://georgefrancis.substack.com/p/national-iq-is-the-best-predictor
Protests in 24 of Iran's 31 Provinces (https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/anti-regime-protests-sweep-iran). People chanting "death to the dictator!" as they tear down posters of Khamenei (https://twitter.com/ThomasVLinge/status/1572683786915090434).
Non-defensive nuclear weapon threats must be ignored.
Just imagine Joe Biden was to hold a speech today declaring that Russia has 24h to leave Ukraine or the United States would use nuclear weapons against Russian targets located on the territory of Ukraine.
Would it be smart for Russia to give in to this sort of nuclear blackmail? If such a threat worked, nothing would stop the United States from continuing to make further demands until Russia has been entirely subjugated.
By symmetry, the United States should ignore similar threats made by Russia over their support of Ukraine.
A world in which it was common to use nuclear blackmail as a means to achieve foreign policy goals would either see a massive proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or end up being ruled by the whims of ruthless dictators such as Kim Jong-un.
Comment by reader Maximilian Schlederer regarding yesterday’s link #1:
This guy mixes up alethic (it is necessary that...) and epistemic (it is known that...) modal logic.
Long story: In Epistemic and alethic modal logic the operators behave similarly. For example, both "necessarily p" ([]p) and "the agent knows that p" [Kp] imply p, since both necessity and knowledge imply truth. Some even think they behave completely the same, they argue that both have to follow the modal axiom set called S5. But this implies the axiom 4, which states that []p --> [][]p in the alethic case, or Kp --> KKp in the epistemic case. This axiom seems less plausible in the latter, epistemic case.
But even if they are governed by the same rules, the interpretation is different: "necessarily p" and "the agent knows that p" are not equivalent. I may know that grass is green, but this is not necessary. Or suppose some mathematical theorem like P=NP is true, and mathematical truths are presumably necessary, but this doesn't mean I know that P=NP.