Links for 2022-10-23
From Play to Policy: Conditional Behavior Generation from Uncurated Robot Data https://play-to-policy.github.io/
Transcending Scaling Laws with 0.1% Extra Compute: Performs on par with PaLM 540B with 2x less compute by continuing training PaLM with UL2R. https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.11399
Introduction to abstract entropy: “Here, I try to take on the task of synthesizing the abstract concept of entropy, to show what's so deep and fundamental about it.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/REA49tL5jsh69X3aM/introduction-to-abstract-entropy
Resurrecting billon-year-old enzymes reveals how photosynthesis adapted to the rise of oxygen https://www.mpg.de/19348003/1010-terr-back-to-the-future-of-photosynthesis-153410-x
“The non-violent entrepreneurs create wealth. But they can flourish only under abnormal circumstances with the violent ones wiped out. Then they tend to perceive their abnormal circumstances as normal and their artificial security as given…” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1579124072390463488.html
“Restarting progress means getting energy that is so abundant that it’s almost free.” https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/energy-and-abundance/
More evidence that social media debates feel toxic because social media *breaks* echo chambers: "It is not isolation from opposing views that drives polarization but precisely the fact that digital media bring us to interact outside our local bubble." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364310131_How_digital_media_drive_affective_polarization_through_partisan_sorting
Who made these circles in the Sahara? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twAP3buj9Og
“Videos contain a wealth of information about the visual world, but self-supervised methods have yet to use them for learning good image representations. Introducing VITO, a new method which discovers semantic concepts by binding content across time” https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.06433
Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/34/htm
Here is a quick reminder of how anyone could have ever taken the COVID-19 lab leak theory seriously:
1. Of all places, the outbreak happened in the vicinity of a BSL-4 laboratory that has among the world's largest collections of this type of virus and did the most research about them.
2. Laboratory biosecurity incidents are common and there are confirmed historic examples of actual lab leaks causing infectious disease outbreaks.
3. Scientists have been and still are working to make various viruses more lethal and transmissible.
4. The domain experts debunking the COVID-19 lab leak theory were directly connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
5. Official organizations repeatedly and extensively damaged their reputation as reliable sources. For example, it took the WHO two years to even acknowledge that COVID is airborne.
6. The more costly it is to dispute X the less confident we can rationally be about X. And it is very costly for domain experts to take the lab leak theory seriously. This means that the majority of people who take it seriously will be nonconformists who likely hold other beliefs outside the Overton window. Trying to inform yourself about the possibility of an actual conspiracy makes it therefore necessary to accept some noise and engage with actual conspiracy theorists.