“If the world built nuclear power at no more than the per capita rate of these exemplar nations during their national expansion, then coal- and gas-fired electricity could be replaced worldwide in less than a decade.” https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0124074
School increases youth suicide rates. Evidence: Teen suicides plummeted in March '20, when schools shut due to COVID. Returning from online to in-person schooling was associated with a 12-18% increase in teen suicides https://nber.org/papers/w30795
Children’s mental health crises plummet in summer and rise in the school year. [pubished in 2014] https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/freedom-learn/201408/the-danger-back-school
On reinforcement learning: “The model never "sees" the reward. Each time it wakes up in an environment, its cognition has been altered slightly such that it is more likely to take certain actions than it was before. Reward is the mechanism by which we select parameters, it is not something "given" to the model…RL is more like asking 100 dogs to sit, breeding the dogs which do sit and killing those which don't. Overtime, you will have a dog that can sit on command. No dog ever gets given a biscuit.” https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/TWorNr22hhYegE4RT/models-don-t-get-reward
Researchers build long-sought nanoparticle structure, opening door to special properties https://www.news.iastate.edu/news/2022/11/28/chiralnano
“Have you ever heard of a gas core reactor? No not a gas cooled reactor, but a reactor with a gas CORE! This is a concept dating back to the Manhattan Project to just let the core become gaseous (or maybe plasma) instead of solid or even liquid.” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1607921318371934211.html
A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate [MIT Technology Review] https://archive.vn/PKGT7
Cartoon Epistemology by Steven Lehar (2003) https://qualiacomputing.com/2022/12/28/cartoon-epistemology-by-steven-lehar-2003/
The vaccine being used to prevent monkeypox is made from a lost virus that no one has ever been able to identify. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220725-the-mystery-virus-that-protects-against-monkeypox
``Consumers are left-digit biased, buying as if $3.00 is 22 cent more expensive than $2.99. However, firms underestimate this bias and price heuristically, forgoing profits.'' https://www.restud.com/paper/more-than-a-pennys-worth-left-digit-bias-and-firm-pricing/
Dynamic visualization of high-dimensional data https://twitter.com/james_y_zou/status/1609971827924951041
The utmost civilizational importance of very high IQ people is falsifiable. Ask people who came up with foundational work, like the back-propagation training algorithm, to take an IQ test.
I predict that not a single person will be of average or below-average IQ. More than 95% of them will have an IQ above 130.
Looking at wealth is very misleading because the smartest people tend to be drawn to foundational research. And, unsurprisingly, they are the ones who are remembered for thousands of years. Everyone knows the names of famous mathematicians or physicists like Pythagoras and Newton, but almost nobody remembers the names of historically rich people.
Re: The importance of high-IQ people to society.
I don't actually disagree, but here are some counter considerations anyways.
When I first encountered La Griffe du Lion's smart fractions theory, I was really impressed. It nicely explained a question I had always had. If you compare an 85 IQ person and a 100 IQ person, there are differences, but to my eye at least, those differences aren't eminently obvious. So why is that the difference between 85 IQ country and an 100 IQ country is a *qualitative* difference?
Smart fractions answers this question nicely: if your country's prosperity is a function of the number of people above IQ 130, then due to the mathematics of bell curves, the qualitative difference between 85 IQ countries and 100 IQ countries makes a whole lot sense. There is a 17x more people with IQs of 130 in the 100 IQ country than in the 85 IQ country. That's a big difference!
But lately, I've been having concerns. The main reason being India. India has a unique population structure amongst modern countries due to its long history of endogamy within subethnic groups. What this means is that despite India's pedestrian average IQ, it boasts extremely high-IQ subpopulations like the Tamil Brahmin and the Parsis. And indeed, when these high IQ groups emigrate to other countries, they soon join the elite (eg. Indian overrepresenation in leadership positions in tech).
And yet: India remains disfunctional in a way more befitting of its average IQ, not its smart fraction. This leads me to believe that while high IQ subpopulations do matter, a well-functioning society relies upon *everyone*--not just the top 2 %--being able to function competently and contribute to the project.
And another, unrelated counterpoint: you mention that intellectuals have longer historical staying power than the rich. I think that's directionally true, but overstated. In the present, people with high competitive drives channel those impulses into becoming billionaires. In the past, however, I suspect that those same impulses lead to accumulation of raw power, not wealth. If you think of billionaires as the modern analogues of local rulers of fiefdoms or whatever, then their historical importance seems more apparent.