Links for 2022-12-23
If car engineers knew cars the way DL researchers know how Transformers/self-attention work, they'd sit around and ask 'do cars need... 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘦𝘭𝘴?', take them off, and find it works almost as well.
– gwern
“Young children overwhelmingly gave utilitarian responses to trolley problems in new study. Deontological responses increased rapidly with age, but much less so for children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-022-05795-6
“UBI was a popular idea a few years ago, as championed by Andrew Yang. Some utopian idealists claimed it would enable people to volunteer and join community associations 🌸🕊☮️ The data is pretty clear that this is NOT what jobless men choose to do!” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1603320237151383552.html
Moderna cancer vaccine reduces melanoma’s return by 44% https://www.statnews.com/2022/12/13/moderna-cancer-vaccine/
Significant new study analyzed more than 400,000 people and found that higher genetic diversity is associated with lower educational attainment (a good proxy for IQ). https://www.nature.com/articles/s10038-022-01105-1
“Someone with a 1-hr car commute needs to earn 40% more to be as happy as someone with a short walk to work. On the other hand, if someone shifts from a long commute to a walk, their happiness increases as much as if they’d fallen in love.” [Published in 2016] https://www.fastcompany.com/3062989/50-reasons-why-everyone-should-want-more-walkable-streets
Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos https://spectrum.ieee.org/video-friday-no-pilot-needed
Richard Ngo on large language models, OpenAI, and striving to make the future go well https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/richard-ngo-large-language-models/
Why Can GPT Learn In-Context? Language Models Secretly Perform Gradient Descent as Meta Optimizers https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10559
What do Vision Transformers Learn? A Visual Exploration:" “...neurons in vision transformers trained with language model supervision are activated by semantic concepts rather than visual features.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.06727
NeurIPS Chats — Yuhuai Wu: LMs for Math (Minerva) + the Future of Bootstrapping Reasoning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4DFvgs810o
Japan has adopted a new policy promoting greater use of nuclear energy to ensure stable power supply amid global fuel shortages and to reduce carbon emissions, in a major reversal of its phase-out plan following the Fukushima crisis. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-business-japan-climate-and-environment-02d0b9dfecc8cdc197d217b3029c5898
“Russia's advance on Kyiv was halted by old-fashioned artillery, even though anti-tank missiles got most of the credit. Another reminder that even in the Age of Drones and Smart Bombs, artillery is still the God of War.” https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-heavy-artillery-stopped-russian-military-rush-to-kyiv-2022-12
Show that the set of all finite subsets of N is countable: https://math.stackexchange.com/a/200406/245312