Links for 2022-12-28
“Some words have two opposite meanings. Why? … “Sanction”, for example, can mean both “to approve of” and “to lay a penalty upon”…Look up almost any common word in a historical tome such as the Oxford English Dictionary, and the oldest meaning will often be surprisingly far from the current one.” [The Economist] https://archive.vn/Rto7P
Two temperate Earth-mass planets orbiting the nearby star GJ 1002 https://www.aanda.org/component/article?access=doi&doi=10.1051/0004-6361/202244991
“My mom was misdiagnosed with metastatic lung cancer…Scientific literacy & self-advocacy are absolutely critical for quality of care.” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1604314571057111043.html
2D Material May Enable Ultra-Sharp Cellphone Photos in Low Light https://www.psu.edu/news/materials-research-institute/story/2d-material-may-enable-ultra-sharp-cellphone-photos-low-light/#rssowlmlink
“…the Royal Brompton Hospital in London had an out-of-control acute Candida auris infection in 2015. The team had tried everything to get rid of the infections for three months, and eventually, they launched a week-long spray attack. They sprayed all surfaces in infected rooms with hydrogen peroxide in hope that the spray will reach all crevices and corners. [Candida auris survived.]” https://scitechdaily.com/already-spread-to-every-continent-unusual-fungus-has-the-potential-to-become-a-global-health-problem/
Teaching Small Language Models to Reason: “Chain of thought prompting successfully improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models, achieving state of the art results on a range of datasets. However, these reasoning capabilities only appear to emerge in models with a size of over 100 billion parameters. In this paper, we explore the transfer of such reasoning capabilities to models with less than 100 billion parameters via knowledge distillation.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08410
Using language models to evaluate themselves https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1607428087297314816.html
“I still fundamentally expect text prediction to scale to superintelligence in the limit.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MmmPyJicaaJRk4Eg2/simulators-thesis
Many have claimed Irish IQ increased from around 80 to 100 in the late 20th century, suggesting the Flynn Effect can be sudden and rapid. But the claim is based on selective sampling. Russell T. Warne did a literature review and found no change in Irish IQ. https://russellwarne.com/2022/12/17/irish-iq-the-massive-rise-that-never-happened/
Italian economic inequality explained by cognitive inequality https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/italian-economic-inequality-explained
Biden UFO legislation: "provides greatly enhanced authorities & resources for the ‘All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office’ which now reports directly to the leaders of the Defense Department & the Intelligence Community. …Mandates a review of all intelligence documents involving UAP from 1945" https://www.christophermellon.net/post/unprecedented-uap-legislation
World Economic Forum cancels Twitter, directs followers to Chinese social media apps https://dossier.substack.com/p/world-economic-forum-cancels-twitter
Intelligence and criminal behavior: Examined a total birth cohort of Finnish males born in 1987: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961500077X
• Examined a total birth cohort of Finnish males born in 1987
• Lower levels of intelligence are associated with greater levels of offending.
• The IQ-offending association is mostly linear.
• Pattern is consistent across multiple measures of intelligence and offending.
Here is a reminder that almost nobody expected the Ukraine war to progress the way it did.
For example, on February 26, the Metaculus community prediction was 99% that Russian would enter Odessa in 2022.[1] And on March 5, the probability of Russia controlling Kharkiv by June was 90%.[2]
Before the war, the United States believed that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours.[3] And analysts believed that Western weapons wouldn't make any difference.[4]
Most people thought of Russia as a formidable military power. In February, a German general and advisor of the German government claimed that the Russian Army is modern and superior. The general argued that no military support from outside would make a difference and that in a few days the war would be over.[5]
Indeed, most people didn't even believe that Russia would invade in the first place.
If you now believe that all these predictions were obviously wrong, you are likely suffering from a bad case of hindsight bias.
My guess for the main reasons for getting this conflict wrong is that both the corruption inside Russia and the strength of Ukrainian national identity were vastly underestimated. The latter motivated Ukraine to curb its own corruption enough to build a powerful army.
P.S. I also wonder how much people's expectations were shaped by unmotivated third-world goat herders running away from terrorists on pickups because they were only there for the money. A group that should not be confused with extremely motivated European patriots capable of building their own aircraft.
I remember thinking Russia would steamroll Ukraine when I saw this video. Massively downscaled my expectations after the Kyiv offensive. Noticing I was still overconfident in favor of Russia, I made an even bigger update to stop myself from being surprised.
I'm now at the point where my expectations of Russia are so low that I've already been mildly surprised by some of their success. For example, I didn't expect them to have as many cruise missiles left as they apparently have.
[1]
[2]
[3] https://www.foxnews.com/us/gen-milley-says-kyiv-could-fall-within-72-hours-if-russia-decides-to-invade-ukraine-sources
[4] https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/21/weapons-ukraine-russia-invasion-military/
[5] https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1590471646762061824