"Russian reinforcements in the form of the D-1 cannon of the 1943 model are already rushing to the front"

Links for 2022-10-24

1. “Differences between adult male and female human brains have been observed in numerous magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies and confirmed on increasingly larger populations.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16763-y

2. “24 hours ago, I tried an experiment - I tweeted a thread with 15 productivity hacks. It’s become one of my highest performing tweets of all time, with over 1 million impressions and 23,648 engagements. The truth is - the entire thread was written by an AI.” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1583203039967850497.html

3. Counterarguments to the basic AI x-risk case https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LDRQ5Zfqwi8GjzPYG/counterarguments-to-the-basic-ai-x-risk-case

4. A conversation about Katja's counterarguments to AI risk https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/iXuJLARFBZbaBGxW3/a-conversation-about-katja-s-counterarguments-to-ai-risk

5. Response to Katja Grace's AI x-risk counterarguments https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GQat3Nrd9CStHyGaq/response-to-katja-grace-s-ai-x-risk-counterarguments

6. Assessing Natural Global Catastrophic Risks https://gcrinstitute.org/assessing-natural-global-catastrophic-risks/

7. 73 teams tested the same hypotheses with the same data. Some found negative results, some positive, some nada. No effect of expertise or confirmation bias. "Idiosyncratic researcher variability is a threat to the reliability of scientific findings." https://osf.io/preprints/metaarxiv/cd5j9/

8. “In @SenatorLeahy's new memoir, there's a wild story in it that I haven't ever seen before—a rare glimpse into the shadowy way that the intel agencies interact with Members of Congress. It feels ripped from a political thriller movie...” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1580949199151325184.html

9. Astronaut – YouTube videos with almost zero previous views [a window into the lives of ordinary people] http://astronaut.io/

10. “The cerebellum, for example, reaches full size at the age of 11 for girls, but not until age 15 for boys.” https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-boys-fall-behind

Republic XF-84H Thunderscreech:

"The XF-84H was almost certainly the loudest aircraft ever built. On the ground "run ups", the prototypes could reportedly be heard 25 miles (40 km) away. Unlike standard propellers that turn at subsonic speeds, the outer 24–30 inches (61–76 cm) of the blades on the XF-84H's propeller traveled faster than the speed of sound even at idle thrust, producing a continuous visible sonic boom that radiated laterally from the propellers for hundreds of yards. The shock wave was actually powerful enough to knock a man down.

Coupled with the already considerable noise from the subsonic aspect of the propeller and the T40's dual turbine sections, the aircraft was notorious for inducing severe nausea and headaches among ground crews. In one report, a Republic engineer suffered a seizure after close range exposure to the shock waves emanating from a powered-up XF-84H."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_XF-84H_Thunderscreech

Timnit Gebru is claiming that William MacAskill is a eugenicist (https://twitter.com/AmandaAskell/status/1584285124178296856). I don't know about William MacAskill but I'm definitely a eugenicist. Being against eugenics is a morally indefensible position.

I am a eugenicist because I believe we need to take the fate of humanity into our own hands rather than continue to play the genetic lottery.

I am a eugenicist because I believe our children deserve to receive the best opportunities we can give them rather than a roll of the genetic dice.

I am a eugenicist because I believe it is time to face up to the responsibilities that accompany our reproductive choices.

I am a eugenicist because I believe that we should not stand in the way of technological progress that could potentially make the next generation healthier, happier, and smarter.

I am a eugenicist because I believe that we need to wrest control of our genetic destiny from the uncaring claws of nature and shape our future according to our values.

The knee-jerk reaction to eugenics is to conjure the specter of fascism. But there is a big difference between desiring a counterfactual world in which someone would not have existed and desiring that someone does not live. Desiring a world without congenital heart disease is not the same as hating people with that disease.

If your parents would have had access to advance reproductive and gene-editing technologies then you and I might not exist. A smarter, more healthy person, with better opportunities, would exist in our place. This person isn't bothered by their nonexistence. Neither would we be.

Ironically, the same people who believe this attitude to be evil want to take away your liberty to decide which traits your children should have and make you accept whatever fate the uncaring forces of nature have in store for them. Don't be like these people. Embrace eugenics!

“Just how striking are the recent language model results with Flan-PaLM?

Here's a plot.

Across 57 tasks on mathematics, US history, computer science etc., Flan-PaLM surpasses both the June 2023 and June 2024 SotA forecasts from this summer by competitive forecasters.”

https://twitter.com/SamuelAlbanie/status/1584257440891416576

Underwater test of a South Korean supercavitating torpedo at MADEX2017: https://www.navyrecognition.com/index.php/news/naval-exhibitions/2017/madex-2017/5713-madex-2017-south-korea-developing-a-supercavitating-torpedo.html

"I made an animation that displays the birthplaces of people in Europe who were notable for science, discovery or philosophy. It covers the period from 1000 AD until the Industrial Revolution.

Each person's light is proportional to a proxy of their notability (and age)." (@Scientific_Bird)

https://twitter.com/Scientific_Bird/status/1584237159006945280

The new prime minister of the United Kingdom.

"And it's not like all snowflakes are the same. They're all different! But each one has a consistent style across its 6 sectors.

Seriously, this is spooky and seems magical. Like our universe is a simulation and the simulator got lazy with snowflakes and left an obvious absurdity."

https://twitter.com/RokoMijic/status/1584542688225132545

Funny quotes via Tyler Cowen:

1. "Some local girls married one VDV [part of the military] guy after another, because they’re dying quickly enough that you can get several compensations in a few months." https://www.chinatalk.media/p/kamil-on-nukes-and-civil-war-in-russia

2. “Before this attack, I had thought that I could take on a bear easily,” Cummings said. “Now I know that a bear is pretty legit. They are tougher, stronger and bigger than I thought. It’s not so easy.” [Washington Post] https://archive.ph/dCvPz

Links for 2022-10-25

1. Goalkeeping Robot Dog Tends Its Net Like a Pro: Mini Cheetah, in fact, outperforms the entire English Premiere League https://spectrum.ieee.org/football-robot-mini-cheetah

2. The Easy Guide to Using OpenAI’s Whisper Model to Transcribe [and Translate] Video and Audio https://andrewmayneblog.wordpress.com/2022/10/16/the-easy-guide-to-using-openais-whisper-model-to-transcribe-video-and-audio/

3. AI researchers announce NeuroAI agenda https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nNbnzegz7ppewZgCG/ai-researchers-announce-neuroai-agenda

4. “Throughout five experiments (total N = 120), we show that eight-month-old infants punished antisocial others.” https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2022/10/third-party-punishment-by-preverbal.html

5. When great apes encounter evidence contradicting their beliefs during a decision task, they pause to check the evidence before making a final decision – an impressive cognitive feat. Human children don't do it till they're around five. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2021.2686

6. New Discovery Indicates an Alternative Gravity Theory https://scitechdaily.com/new-discovery-indicates-an-alternative-gravity-theory/

7. Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(22)00236-4

"Large language models can write informal proofs, translate them into formal ones, and achieve SoTA performance in proving competition-level maths problems!"

https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.12283

This is one of many recent results bringing us closer to a full automatization of mathematics. I expect that the role of human mathematicians will very soon be reduced to that of a guiding hand pointing toward the rough direction of interesting and useful mathematics while artificial intelligence will do the rest.

AI which proves theorems could be trained on synthetic data: One AI could generate formal synthetic theorem/proof pairs, the other tries to come up with formal proofs for those theorems. A proof checker checks the correctness. This could enable self-training on essentially infinite data, similar to AlphaGo Zero