Malmesbury
As far as I understand, the tails coming apart and the moment attribution are two different, superimposed problems. The tails coming apart is “Nigeria has the best Scrabble players in the world, but the persons with the richest English vocabulary in the world are probably not Nigerian”. The moment attribution is “the best Scrabble players in the world are Nigerian, but Nigerians are probably not the best Scrabble players in the world”. In the first case, we are talking about the distribution of country scores for two correlated variables, in the second we are talking about the distribution of individuals within a country for a single variable.
Also, thank you for bringing up Nigerian Scrabble, that would have made a somehow funnier example than NK’s math olympiads.
That’s a bold statement! The wiki article has a [citation needed] and that sounds wild. Typically, if height was heavy-tailed, we would expect the tallest person to be more than twice as big as the second tallest person. But then, Jeff Bezos is not twice as rich as Elon Musk, so it doesn’t always work...
It’s funny because, in your farming example, we could also accuse Person B of non-central fallacy: torture and child abuse are just particularly extreme, non-central forms of cruelty, but most cruelty is more subtle – like a manager belittling employees. In some way, you could say that the center lies in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps the best way to deal with that is to always evaluate things in comparison to their alternatives: everything might involve some cruelty to some degree, but maybe there are easy ways to make farming comparatively less cruel?
This is both messed up and not surprising.
2. The survey report you link to includes the following figures: (1) about half of all respondents in their survey who had experienced >= 4 instances of discrimination and violence in the last year attempted suicide in that year; (2) among all respondents in their survey, 7.3% attempted suicide in the last year. To me, that looks as if suicide rates among trans people are much more to do with actually being treated badly than with fearing they will be treated badly. (If so, I am cautiously optimistic that those terrible trans activists trying so hard to raise awareness of transness and reduce the extent to which trans people are regarded as strange and sinister are in fact making it less likely that any given trans person attempts suicide.)
Here is a possible counter-argument to this: if social pressure and discrimination cause suicides, we would expect the suicide rates of trans people to increase after hormonal treatment or surgery. After all, before transition, gender dysphoria is not particularly visible. From the point of view of most people who are not intimately familiar with the person, a pre-transition trans looks just like someone cis. After transition, however, they may or may not “pass”, and in many cases it is immediately obvious that they are trans (e.g. MtF still having a male voice unless they do the fancy vocal cords surgery). But we observe exactly the opposite: gender-affirming surgery greatly reduces the suicide rate of trans people.
Note that I don’t think that trans activists are causing the suicides either. My working hypothesis is that gender dysphoria (as in, not feeling at ease in your own body) is horrible by itself, and is the cause of suicides. Hormones and surgery might make the trans-ness more visible, but if it alleviates the mismatch between your body map and your actualy body, it might still be a net benefit.
I think this works well to describe the behavior of small, well-mixed groups, but as you look at larger societies, it gets more complicated because of the structure of social networks. You don’t get to see how many people overall are wearing face-masks in the whole country, only among the people you interact with in your life. So it’s totally possible that different equilibria will be reached in different locations/socio-economic classes/communities. That’s probably one reason why revolutions are more likely to fizzle out than it looks. Another problem arising from the structure of social networks is that the sample of people your interact with is not representative of your real surroundings: people with tons of friends are over-represented among your friends (I had a blog post about this statistical phenomenon a while ago). I’m not sure how one could expand the social behavior curve model to account for that, but it would be interesting.
I might be misunderstanding this, but it looks like humans would either:
Suppress T-cells and B-cells that react against transposase at the negative selection step during maturation, making vaccination impossible
Already be immune to the antigen (maybe that would be possible if the transposon is expressed very rarely, otherwise it would be recipe for auto-immune damage)
Full disclosure: I’ve forgotten everything about immunology since ~5 minutes after my last immunology exam.
Thanks for the feedback, the examples you cited are really cool. I didn’t know about akinetes but I’m reading more about them now. For the general point of the article, they might actually be too good examples of multicellularity: there is a pretty strong case that these are multicellular organism by the usual definition. What I wanted to emphasize here is that, even for species like E. coli that are most definitely not multicellular, we can still force ourselves to look at it through a multicellular lens and find interesting things. I agree that it’s awkward to change the definition of a technical term as liberally as I did, so I’ll try to see if I can come up with a better phrasing.
It’s hard to believe that scientists would deliberately manipulate their findings. The risk of getting caught and discredited is just too high – oh wait.
I know little about machine learning, so that may be a dumb question: in linguistic there is an argument called the poverty of stimulus. The claim is that children must figure out the rules of language using only a limited number of unlabeled examples. This is taken as evidence that the brain has some kind of hard-wired grammar framework, that serves as a canvas for further learning while growing up.
Is it possible that tools like EfficientZero help find the fundamental limits for how much training data you need to figure out a set of rules? If an artificial neural network ever manages to reconstruct the rules of English by using only the stimulus that the average children is exposed too, that would be a strong counter-argument against poverty of stimulus.
That’s a very good point, I didn’t think of that (I was kind of assuming that the immortals just cannot die, which is of course unrealistic as Donald Hobson pointed out).
Interesting. It’s hard to imagine the new markets opened by anti-aging. That being said, if such a drug existed I would probably take it regularly even if I’m not immortal. Now I wonder if that would be possible to do without erasing your memories. Otherwise, it would defeat the point of immortality.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean. The advantage of persisters is that they resist chemicals that target cell growth, so the human equivalent would be, for example, that a factory accident contaminates all the drinking water with potent contraceptive. In that case, maybe the mortals would go extinct and only the immortals would survive. But that doesn’t seem very likely.
Sorry if things are not clear. The way I look at it is through the number of generations, which directly determines the evolution rate.
The mortals do one generation every 20-40 years or so
The immortals do much fewer generations: either they don’t reproduce, or they do but then the average age at which they have children is much higher. If you have a child at 10,000 years old, your child (and yourself) will live in the same world as humans who underwent 10,000 years of natural selection.
This is all assuming all those people compete for a shared pool of resources. In the long run, that might make the immortals more likely to die of accidental causes (or diseases due to elevated temperatures, or new viruses etc.). If immortals decide to have children only when they are young, and then stop, then I agree my point doesn’t really apply.
For the second point, it’s not necessary that they live separately (talking about an Imperium may be a bit misleading, sorry). In fact, the more competition, the harder for the immortals to keep up.
I don’t think there was so much change in the environment in Lenski’s experiment (they are always using the same medium, but the environment may still change because of the organisms inside it evolve). But it’s true that immortality could make people more resistant just because they have young bodies, or some other side-effect reason. That is the case where first-order fitness is large enough to prevail over second-order. I don’t see why the immortality pill would have such a strong effect, though.
Thanks for the link. I enjoyed the article, not sure why it was downvoted.
The film has a very clear target audience, and 100% of this target audience will self-identify as the group of nice fashionable reasonable science-believers. The other tribes will probably never see the film, or if they do, they’ll see themselves portrayed with such disdain that they’ll just end up distrusting scientists even more. Nobody will update. I’m afraid the main effect of this kind of film is to further entrench the [belief in X] ~ [cool/uncool] correlation, which is generally a bad thing.
My impression was that the comet was a metaphor for climate change specifically, rather than x-risk in general. It turns out that I agree climate change is a serious threat, so I’ll consider it a good thing if spectators take it more seriously after seeing DLU. But there is nothing in the film-making process that automatically steers the writers towards legitimate issues. It could have been a “GMOs cause cancer” plot line instead (there are scientists who say that in real life, but nobody takes them seriously – just like in the film!).
I stand corrected. I’ll never trust the ISO norms for my tea again.
For extreme anonymity, you can probably learn from Gwern, who has a post about hardcore ways to protect your identity.
Metric for success: if people accuse you of being Satoshi Nakamoto, you’ve made it.
Standford’s collection of ancient data visualizations
https://exhibits.stanford.edu/dataviz
Complexity Explorables: interactive toys to learn about complex dynamical systems.
http://complexity-explorables.org/
The current state of AIDS in the European Union
https://www.politico.eu/article/aids-european-state-of-play/
Evolution of word usage in Scientific American over the last 150 years
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/explore-175-years-of-words-in-scientific-american/
Which and how body parts are described in literature, according to gender
https://pudding.cool/2020/07/gendered-descriptions/
Heatmap of mortality rates over the last centuries, by age, country and gender
https://jschoeley.shinyapps.io/hmdexp/
Historic usage of the word “ass”
https://pudding.cool/2019/10/slang/ (and anything by The Pudding really)
Simulated dendrochronology of USA immigration
https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/