10% Happier by Dan Harris is a meditation (ghehe) on meditation and how it has helped him. Although the book is fun to read/listen to, it provides little information per page/chapter. Recommended if you’re into biographies of this kind and fun description, but read a long-form article if you want to learn why meditation is all the rage.
Human Compatible by Stuart Russell is a great intro to where we are now with AI. It also lays out some of the problems and ways to tackle them.
I liked the book as a lay-person overview of where we are with AI. Stuart Russell does a great job of not looking too far ahead and also foreseeing some problems that we already have. There was no clear distinction between AI today and AGI, and that divide might be too technical/doubtful, but I (and Russell too) think the systems of today won’t get us to AGI.
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See this good video om 10 reasons to ignore AI safety (and their rebuttals)
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Update 17 March 2020: I’ve checked out this review on Slate Star Codex
“Russell goes over all the recent debates in AI – Facebook, algorithmic bias, self-driving cars. Then he shows how these are caused by systems doing what we tell them to do (ie optimizing for one easily-described quantity) rather than what we really want them to do (capture the full range of human values). Then he talks about how future superintelligent systems will have the same problem.”
In a way this is an analogy to a 4 year old, they will do what you tell them to do, but here are the first signs that they will do this literally and not per se as you intended them to do it.
“(from the book) The problem comes from confusing two distinct things: reward signals and actual rewards. In the standard approach to reinforcement learning, these are one and the same. That seems to be a mistake. Instead, they should be treated separately…reward signals provide information about the accumulation of actual reward, which is the thing to be maximized. “
This part highlights some of the work that has already been done on solving the ‘fuck-now-the-world-is-a-paperclip-problem’.
The article also looks at how algorithms (current day AI) is doing things wrong, but concludes that in general there isn’t much to worry about. For example deep fakes have been around for some year, it isn’t being used widely (but yes, there are examples, but the same goes for forging a signature).
Title: AlphaStar: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning
Still not the ‘creativity’ that I think will be the general AI, but it’s not any less impressive!
Title: New GMO Mosquitoes Aim to Eradicate Malaria, But Could Be Disastrous
Go for the clicks XD Title is way too alarming (and expert they spoke to is from another field), but good explainer videos linked. Still not sure how fast this is going to happen, but why not.
One point I think about is that we also have gotten rid of mosquitos here in Europe, and our system didn’t break down. And from the series ‘Unnatural Selection’, I can also imagine that people who suffer from malaria really want this!
Title: How to Use Occam’s Razor Without Getting Cut
“Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.” And for scientists, “When you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is better.“
https://www.fastcompany.com/90422553/the-first-map-of-americas-food-supply-chain-is-mind-boggling
Title: The first map of America’s food supply chain is mind-boggling
Really cool maps of how food is moved across America. (actual paper)
https://stratechery.com/2019/tech-and-liberty/
Title: Tech and Liberty
A thorough analysis of free speech and how the laws of the US and tech companies collide. Nuance should be taken into account.
http://www.bretthall.org/the-multiverse.html
Title: The Multiverse
A bit above my pay-grade, but ink-blots as an analogy for electrons with regard to the multiverse.
“So too the electron occupies many states simultaneously, but not all states can be observed simultaneously (again, to push another analogy: this is akin to the fact that you cannot observe many different times simultaneously. You see a discrete time on the clock, even though you know there must be a continuous number of possible times that have happened and will happen). “
“[U]nlike what you may have heard it is not the case that an electron can be simultaneously a wave and a particle all at once in a universe.”
https://www.exponentialview.co/p/-deep-tech-trends-thinking-about
A very interesting newsletter that is worth reading 🙂 About tech (trends).
Title: Polyamory Is Growing—And We Need To Get Serious About It
A good, and long, read about polyamory and how it can work, how many people do it, and how to deal with it as a society. Very interesting.
Title: The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss
A great website that reviews health and nutrition books. This one gets a 60% score (meh), especially because of the low scientific accuracy, but ok healthfulness (if you follow the advice).
Title: Biggest Private Coal Miner Goes Bust as Trump Rescue Fails
Good news, and bye-bye mining (and hi to cleaner energy of course).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31637709
Title: Cancer mortality predictions for 2019 in Latin America
Just like the above one, linked from Future Crunch newsletter. Cancer mortality rates are falling.
“Between 1990 and 2019, mortality from all neoplasms is predicted to fall by about 18% in Argentina, 26% in Chile, 14% in Colombia, 17% in Mexico and 13% in Venezuela, corresponding to almost 0.5 million avoided cancer deaths. No decline was observed in Brazil and Cuba.”
Title: London Says Air Pollution Fell By Roughly A Third After New Emissions Rules
“According to the report, nitrogen dioxide pollution has fallen by 36% in the central zone since February 2017, when the city first announced a “toxicity charge” on older vehicles.”
https://www.wired.com/story/not-youtubes-algorithm-radicalizes-people/?
Title: Maybe It’s Not YouTube’s Algorithm That Radicalizes People
“The paper, written by Penn State political scientists Kevin Munger and Joseph Phillips, tracks the explosive growth of alternative political content on YouTube, and calls into question many of the field’s established narratives. It challenges the popular school of thought that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is the central factor responsible for radicalizing users and pushing them into a far-right rabbit hole.”
“Instead, the paper suggests that radicalization on YouTube stems from the same factors that persuade people to change their minds in real life—injecting new information—but at scale. The authors say the quantity and popularity of alternative (mostly right-wing) political media on YouTube is driven by both supply and demand.”
https://aeon.co/amp/essays/psychedelics-work-by-violating-our-models-of-self-and-the-world
Title: Model hallucinations
“Psychedelics have a remarkable capacity to violate our ideas about ourselves. Is that why they make people better?”
There isn’t a consensus about the ‘I’ and how our brains exactly work, there are many theories from different perspectives. Psychedelics might be a way to come closer to the truth.
“A possible solution comes from the predictive processing theory of cognition, the second set of principles we need to introduce. The details of the framework are still hotly debated, especially among its proponents. However, in broad outline, it views the brain as a prediction machine that models the causal structure of the world to anticipate future inputs. Any discrepancies between an expectation and an input take the form of an error signal that demands a response from the organism – either by updating the internal model, or acting to reduce the unpredicted input.” and “One startling consequence of predictive coding is that perception becomes little more than a kind of controlled hallucination. We do not experience the external world directly, but via our mind’s best guess as to what is going on out there.”
“There’s now considerable evidence about the patterns of brain activity that correspond to the hierarchical self-model. These neural correlates are implemented in certain brain circuits, in particular the salience network and the default mode network.” and “To simplify things a bit, we can say that the default mode network is frequently linked to the narrative self, while the salience network is associated with a more minimal, embodied self and its affective states.”
Let me stop quoting here, you should read the article if interested. The link to psychedelics is that they break the models or make them more open to new paths/interpretations. You will have another way of seeing yourself.
We are making explanations now, but before we didn’t have any, how and why?
One start is the Scientific Revolution, so what happened there (that lead to better explanations)? It isn’t that knowledge comes from the senses. It also isn’t induction. Scientific knowledge is not based on anything, it’s based on conjecture! and tested by observation. But this also isn’t all, we had conjecture and observations (e.g. greek myths why it rained).
“This easy variability is the sign of a bad explanation, because, without a functional reason to prefer one of countless variants, advocating one of them, in preference to the others, is irrational. So, for the essence of what makes the difference to enable progress, seek good explanations, the ones that can’t be easily varied, while still explaining the phenomena.”
“The search for hard-to-vary explanations is the origin of all progress. It’s the basic regulating principle of the Enlightenment. So, in science, two false approaches blight progress. One is well known: untestable theories. But the more important one is explanationless theories. Whenever you’re told that some existing statistical trend will continue, but you aren’t given a hard-to-vary account of what causes that trend, you’re being told a wizard did it.”
http://www.bretthall.org/free-will.html
http://www.bretthall.org/free-will-consciousness-creativity-explanations-knowledge-and-choice.html
Title: Free Will / .. Consciousness, Creativity, Explanations, Knowledge and Choice
Another article from Brett Hall (I’ve been going through his website a bit). He argues for free will as something that is real and emergent.
He agrees there is no ‘naive/libertarian’ free will (that something from outside the laws of physics makes you ‘free’).
He also states that we humans are unique as ‘universal explainers’ or entities that can create explanatory knowledge.
“The creativity is a unique thing people have and other animals do not. So we “feel” consciousness in ourselves but we “observe” creativity in others. I postulate: Creativity (of the kind where people create explanations – create knowledge) is just the outward manifestation of an inner consciousness. What it “feels like” to be creative is “consciousness”.“
Hall also argues that our ‘self’ really is the person that is lost in thought, maybe even more than the meditator who ‘discovers’ himself.
https://stratechery.com/2019/the-google-squeeze/
Title: The Google Squeeze
An article about why Google has stayed relevant (and very profitable). One key point is just more ads in search results, especially on mobile. In the article the hotel listing companies are used as an example. And it shows how booking.com and Amazon find a way around it (get customers to come to them directly).
Title: Modern genetics will improve health and usher in “designer” children
A company called Genomic Prediction is letting people choose their babies (when doing IVF), based on disease and/or ‘positive’ traits. No CRISPR or anything like that, but selection. Also: designer babies.
“In 2007 he and his colleagues used models to show that for a condition with a prevalence of 10% in the general population, approximately 10,000 volunteers are required to identify the snps marking the 5% of those at highest risk of developing that condition.”
“In the end, then, it is generally a good idea to remember that human beings have already been optimised by a powerful agent called natural selection. Trade-offs between different pieces of physiology, even in domestic animals, will have been forged in the crucible of evolution and will generally be optimal, or close to it. Genetic tinkering may sometimes improve things. But by no means always.”
Title: The plant-based diet | Michael Greger, MD, | TEDxBismarck
Eat plant-based, the ones with complete cell walls.
https://neo.life/2019/11/the-dawn-of-cheap-and-easy-dna-writing/
Title: The Dawn of Cheap and Easy DNA Writing
Molecular Assemblies is trying to revolutionize synthetic biology. They want to write DNA molecules using enzymes. They have $12 million in funding, there are at least 7 other companies trying too.
“George Church, a geneticist at Harvard University who is a cofounder of both the Human Genome Project and GP-write, says chemical DNA synthesis methods generally induce an error every 1 in 300 bases. Error-correction methods can improve the figure to 1 in 10,000. When enzymes naturally copy a strand of DNA in cells, however, the error rate is close to one in a billion. But he agrees with Kosuri that no enyzmatic synthesis company has come even close to such low error rates.”
https://stratechery.com/2019/integration-and-monopoly/
Title: Integration and Monopoly
That Apple is integrated leads to more advantages than only costs (usability and leverage).
A potential downside is that people are locked-in. So that with a bad keyboard, they don’t leave (but do complain).
Title: A network of science: 150 years of Nature papers
An awesome overview of the papers that were published in Nature. It would be cool to be able to do this for my new field too.
Title: The world’s first Gattaca baby tests are finally here
Designer babies are here (or at least so does Genomic Prediction claim).
https://www.aging-us.com/article/102487/text
Title: Latest advances in aging research and drug discovery
This field is still young (as we all hope to stay), so much needs to be done before we can say that we can do intervention X to live 10 healthy extra lives.
One key idea from the paper is to put the focus on healthspan (instead of lifespan) and get support for those interventions easier.
Another one is that we need good markers of age(ing). If we know what reliably happens during ageing, we can see if interventions prevent/reverse this from happening.
https://time.com/5730790/banana-panama-disease/
Title: What We Can Learn From the Near-Death of the Banana
Bananas are (here) an example of how our system is quite fragile, so fragile that one disease could wipe out all banana’s (because 99% are genetically identical).
Maybe we can innovate our way out of this mess (genetic editing), but then buyers/sellers should want them.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/15/nyregion/amazon-mechanical-turk.html
Title: I Found Work on an Amazon Website. I Made 97 Cents an Hour.
So the average is more like $1.77, but yeah. And these are tasks mostly done by Americans. Not cool Amazon (but also showing that some people are willing to do this work for this wage).
“Mechanical Turk is now one of a handful of big players in the field known as crowdwork or microwork. (One crowdwork company, Prolific, used by academic researchers, enforces a minimum wage: $6.50 an hour.)” (better)
The article continues to list why some people ‘turk’, and it’s rather depressing (e.g. to pay for insulin).
The customers range from universities and NYtimes (where this article is published) to businesses that need transcribing of business cards.
In the end, it could be a good practice, but then I think it should be used mostly as opportunity by people from countries with lower wages.
Title: Ghost ships, crop circles, and soft gold: A GPS mystery in Shanghai
Very interesting, about the scrambling of GPS and how there is a big mystery unfolding in Shanghai.
Title: Heliogen’s new tech could unlock renewable energy for industrial manufacturing
“At its core, Heliogen is taking a well-known technology called concentrated solar power, and improving its ability to generate heat with new computer vision, sensing and control technologies, says Gross.” (also backed by Bill Gates)
Title: Terminally ill scientist ‘transforms himself into world’s first full cyborg’
(note that the ads on this website are just too much) Good story about how a doctor has given his body many upgrades/adjustments to live longer and thrive.
Title: TEDxBrussels – David Deutsch – The Unknowable & how to prepare for it
If we look towards the future, we will become worse at predicting specific events (because of our creativity and faster innovation). We can use general explanatory knowledge to prepare for the future (which reaches beyond the planning horizon).
https://www.freethink.com/videos/carbon-capture-technology
Title: Could Carbon Capture Save Us From Climate Disaster?
Carbon capture to combat climate change, and… to make money! Now we have to scale it up.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2019/p1114-smoking-low.html
Title: Cigarette Smoking Among U.S. Adults Hits All-Time Low
Some good news (again via the Future Crunch newsletter). Smoking is on the way down (will it ever go close to zero?)
Title: Starlink is a very big deal
A long read on why Starlink will make money and democratize access to the internet!
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter is a tome of a book. As of writing this intro, I’m only at 1/7th of the way there.
In the intro, he writes that the book is about the question: how can life exists from inanimate matter (no life). Here on planet earth, it started quite quickly after the conditions were right. What makes it so.
TBD
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky is an interesting sci-fi book that takes the human race towards a new planet. Alas, the humans don’t really get to land and some other species gains consciousness over time.
I really enjoyed the book and can recommend it as a good sci-fi book without much technology/universe building.
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli is a lucid description of what time is and how it flows. It is based mostly on our best (and consensus) understanding of physics but also interlaced with some conjecture and his own work.
One of the main ideas is that time is not set as one moment, it depends on where you are (and how quickly it goes by depends on how far away we are from mass, e.g. the earth).
See for more a review by The Guardian.
One thing I really liked was how lucid he wrote, like David Deutsch with The Beginning of Infinity.
The awesome short stories of Exhalation by Ted Chiang.
I forgot to add this somewhere in mid/beginning September. I will write a review some other time. Discussed twice on Very Bad Wizards Podcast.
This year my theme is Connection. To follow along with what I’ve been reading, learning, listening, see the Timeline.
Over the last three months, I’ve been reflecting on the theme by looking back at some things I learned and read. I have started the Three Body Problem series again (almost finished within 2 weeks) and reread ReWork.
I would like, in the coming three months, to upgrade my website some more. So that I can better search back and rely on the site even more.
I think that that I can also use the theme with a new venture I’m exploring, by going back to the knowledge I had before, and to connections (ghehe) I have made throughout my life (now at 29 years and counting).
Here is my analysis of the goals and various updates:
Goal 1: Make this website a true personal knowledge hub
I didn’t find time for writing essays (as I would like to have done) and I think that this quarter I might not make them, but who knows.
What I do want to do is work on the book part and make a better overview of that on the site.
I like how the timeline is going and enjoy writing down my notes of important/valuable things I read/listened/discussed. The pace where it’s at now (2/3 updates per week) is good for me.
Goal 2: Eat good meals that support my well-being 90% of the time
Last quarter I experimented with intermittent fasting (IF). In relation to doing weightlifting, I stopped doing it. But since this week I started again. I do weightlifting in the afternoon now (at 2 pm) and start eating at around noon. So far, so good.
Other food things are going well and Lotte and I cook almost every day (and I eat leftovers for lunch/brunch).
Goal 3: Keep on improving my house
The house is going well. In the coming quarter, we want to make the hallway a little nicer and I think that’s it for now.
Double-glass at the front of the house might be the next thing, but it’s not a high priority thing.
Goal 4: Achieve my fitness goals
I’m now almost in the middle of the 13-week strength cycle and that has been going really well. So off to the gym in a few moments.
With regards to the Clean & Jerk of 90kg, I think I will be able to make that. But let’s focus on the training and max out later. Or just give it a little try tomorrow, I will see. And maybe I will try doing an Overhead Squat Press today, just to test if I can even do it with the bar.
Goal 5: Write Spero
Yes, I’ve done it. Version 0.2 is out and you can find it at the link above. Feedback is very welcome.
Soon I will start writing other stories too.
That is it for now. Next quarter I hope to share some good updates (and the reflection for the whole year) again.
https://stratechery.com/2019/beachheads-and-obstacles/
Title: Beachheads and Obstacles
In the article, we get an analysis of the hardware ambitions of Facebook and Amazon. Where the first isn’t making real progress, the second might have a shot at dominating the home.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-pay-attention-the-brain-uses-filters-not-a-spotlight-20190924/
Title: To Pay Attention, the Brain Uses Filters, Not a Spotlight
First researchers looked at how we focus on specific inputs, now they are looking at how we suppress other stimuli.
One system identified with regards to the suppression is the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN). This system is an old (from an evolutionary point of view) part of the brain.
https://stratechery.com/2019/the-china-cultural-clash/
Title: The China Cultural Clash
The article asks and reiterates that China has been unfairly using (abusing?) tech from the US, and attacking it when feelings got hurt.
“Whoever was controlling the Great Cannon would use it to selectively insert malicious JavaScript code into search queries and advertisements served by Baidu, a popular Chinese search engine.”
With international trade (WTO), the democracy didn’t spread equally as well.
“China is not simply resisting Western ideals of freedom, but seeking to impose their own.”
Technology can be a force for good, but also multiply the control a state has.
“The documents, revealed by the Guardian for the first time, lay out how ByteDance, the Beijing-headquartered technology company that owns TikTok, is advancing Chinese foreign policy aims abroad through the app.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/poland-could-lose-its-demcracy/599590/
Title: Democracy in Poland Is in Mortal Danger
Is Poland following Hungary (and Turkey)? It seems that way as things are going. The US is pushing in the wrong direction. Hmm…
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/trump-betrayed-kurds-whos-next/600004/
Title: Trump Betrayed the Kurds. He Couldn’t Help Himself.
So yeah, let’s just leave it with this quote “President Trump doesn’t interpret his abandonment of America’s faithful and intrepid Kurdish ally as betrayal because he can’t even understand why betrayal is a vice. It’s like trying to explain color to a person born with no eyesight.”
https://stratechery.com/2019/google-and-ambient-computing/
Title: Google and Ambient Computing
Google is coming into your house. They are switching from organising information, to actively helping you be productive: “to “be helpful” Google needs to be everywhere, which by extension means the company needs to be trusted.”
A way to capture this idea is with ambient computing, always being there, always available. And not dependant on a single device (or price).
https://stemlounge.com/muddy-america-color-balancing-trumps-election-map-infographic/?v=2
Title: Muddy America : Color Balancing The Election Map – Infographic
A very interesting graph of how Americans voted. Do scroll down to see the breakdown.
Title: How this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics influenced GiveWell’s work
A short blog about how the work of the Nobel Prize winners in Economics have influenced the work of GiveWell. Especially on why they recommend deworming initiatives.
Title: Investors hope psychedelics are the new cannabis. Are they high?
“In January atai Life Sciences, the German biotech company he founded last year, acquired a majority stake in Perception Neuroscience, a biopharmaceutical firm from New York which is developing a medication for pyschiatric conditions like depression from the drug…”
“In particular, backers think, psychedelic drugs could be used to treat mental-health disorders like depression, anxiety and addiction. In April Imperial College London, inaugurated the first research centre dedicated to psychedelics research. Last month Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore launched America’s first such scientific outfit.”
“The market for antidepressants is dispiritingly large. Over 300m people worldwide suffer from depression. A report last year by the Lancet Commission, a body of experts, estimated that mental-health disorders could cost the global economy $16trn by 2030. Sales of antidepressants were $14bn in 2017…”
“Field Trip Ventures, a Canadian startup, plans to open speciality clinics where they could be administered (and clinical trials conducted).”
It is great that The Economist is talking about the investment here and why it’s happening (decriminalisation and research into the effectiveness).
Title: When should an Effective Altruist be vegetarian?
In this post, another EA-aligned person talks about her considerations of being (or not) vegetarian, and if this has any value/impact on the world.
The first part of the posts focusses on how helping animals (i.e. not eating meat) is not effective (and this you shouldn’t do it?). I don’t really get the analogy, since if I change my behaviour at no cost (you can cook good food with veggies, the costs are not much higher/cheaper if you plan accordingly).
“For instance, if instead of eating vegetarian you ate a bit frugally and saved and donated a few dollars per meal, you would probably do more good (see calculations lower in this post).”
This sounds plausible, but maybe I’m also swayed by the argument of not doing more/no harm (in as much as that is possible). Or I think that it’s just as easy to be frugal as to be vegetarian (says the person with a company that makes convenient vegetarian meals XD).
“For instance, vegetarianism means spending a bit more time searching for vegetarian alternatives, researching nutrition, buying supplements, writing emails back to people who invite you to dinner explaining your dietary restrictions, etc.”
But is this not a one-time investment? And I don’t buy supplements, just eat varied. And I liked cooking before (so same time-investment). She does mention creatine in the next paragraph, I take that for weightlifting and I’m not sure about the effect on IQ (and IQ itself, but that’s another story).
” If you would happily pay this much (in my case, less than $0.002) to eat meat on many occasions, you probably shouldn’t be a vegetarian.”
See the blog for the calculations. I guess that my calculations would be a bit different, and that I don’t think I’m paying much (if anything) extra. And I guess that I don’t see these costs as money I would go and donate (as it’s a percentage of total income, not free cashflow). But all in all a good blog and interesting to read.
Ohh and I liked this part of the first comment very much: “Vegetable production does have negative effects on animals. However, most of the crops grown in the United States are converted into feed for factory-farmed animals. It takes 10,000 calories of crops to feed an animal to create 1000 calories of food for a human. So the negative effects on animals of crop farming is /also/ reduced, in fact dramatically, by not eating meat.”
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/01/766057380/how-magic-mushrooms-can-help-smokers-kick-the-habit
Title: How Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick The Habit
From Short Wave, a new science podcast from NPR.
“New research shows that psilocybin might be an effective treatment for diseases such as depression and addiction. While the work is still in its early stages, there are signs that psilocybin might help addicts shake the habit by causing the brain to talk with itself in different ways.”
“Psilocybin seems to work because it temporarily rewires the brain, according to Johnson. Sections that don’t normally talk to each other appear to communicate more, and parts of the brain that normally do talk to each other talk less.”
Title: Op truffeltrip in Zandvoort: waarom psychedelica een comeback maken (Dutch)
Story about Truffles Therapy (owner, Chi, 31). Interesting, but not much new info for me. But good exposure. Well, ok, I think the rituals and mystical aspects shouldn’t really be part of it, but that is just my opinion/view. Ok, on a second reading, it’s really spiritual/religious (“I’m just a servant of the truffles”).
“‘We willen de golden standard zijn in deze industrie,’ legt Schirp uit aan zijn bureau. Synthesis staat voor de synthese tussen wetenschap en spiritualiteit. ‘Dat is niet makkelijk. We werken met krachtige middelen en moeten daar verantwoordelijk mee omgaan. Daarom investeren we veel in medische kwaliteit. Dit is een ongereguleerde markt, als je daarin de beste standaarden wilt hebben, dan moet je die zelf bouwen.’” (ambition of Synthesis to become the gold standard of retreats)
“Ik moet glimlachen om de brief van John en herken de tweestrijd tussen de gedachten. Toch: weken later ben ik nog steeds gestopt met roken, drink ik bijna geen alcohol en eet ik vrijwel geen vlees. Ik voel me gelukkiger, rustiger, erger me nauwelijks aan zaken waarover ik eerst geïrriteerd zou raken. Een trein die te laat komt, een serveerster die m’n bestelling twee keer vergeet, iemand die voordringt in de rij – in het licht van de oneindigheid van het universum stelt het allemaal weinig voor.” (the final experience of the reporter)
https://www.wired.com/story/biopunks-are-pushing-the-limits-with-implants-and-diy-drugs/
Title: Biopunks are Pushing the Limits With Implants and DIY Drugs
“Lee is part of a loosely connected group of biohackers—garage geneticists, chemists, and grinders (those who modify their own bodies)—who are stretching the capabilities of DIY augmentation.”
It’s so interesting to see what others are doing with Biohacking. I wonder what will become of this, also in relationship to life extension and CRISPR/gene-editing.
Title: Psilocybin Sessions: Psychedelics could help people with addiction and anxiety
A 60 minutes documentary (video) on Psychedelics and how it’s being used with addiction and anxiety.
It highlights the research that is being done and highlights awesome people like Roland Griffiths, Matthew Johnson, Michael Pollan.
https://stratechery.com/2019/the-internet-and-the-third-estate/
Title: The Internet and the Third Estate
How to look at free speech (on Facebook, et al.) through the lens of the ‘estates’, 1) executive, 2) legislative, 3) judicial, 4) media, 5) you/everyone that now has a voice.
“What is published on the Internet, meanwhile, can reach anyone anywhere, drastically increasing supply and placing a premium on discovery; this shifted economic power from publications to Aggregators.”
Quoting an earlier article: “… the most successful politicians in an aggregated world are not those who serve the party but rather those who tell voters what they most want to hear.”
What is the power of Facebook: “The first and most straightforward way is Facebook putting its thumb on the scale.” and “The second concern is the capacity of trolls, both of the profit-seeking and foreign government variety, to leverage Facebook’s fundamental engagement-seeking nature to push misinformation and division.” and “Facebook’s decision to not fact-check any posts or ads from politicians.”
What can we do against China (and their vision of the internet): “To fight the Internet’s impact, instead of seeking to understand it and guide the fundamental transformations that will surely follow, is a commitment by the West to lose the fight for the future.”
https://www.donebyforty.com/2019/10/way-too-transparent-all-money-we-made.html
Title: Way Too Transparent, All The Money We Made
An interesting blog by two people who want to retire early. It’s about income, frugality, and why they want/can achieve it by 40.
https://www.wired.com/story/a-new-crispr-technique-could-fix-many-more-genetic-diseases
Title: A New Crispr Technique Could Fix Almost All Genetic Diseases
That is quite the bold title. CHECK LATER, no access at the moment.
Title: Ayn Rand on Why Philosophy Matters
In the article, FS takes a look at why we would need philosophy in our lives. Here is a quote of Ayn Rand: ” [y]our only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown. “
So we need to think for ourselves, be reflective in our thinking. And work from first principles.
“What objectivity and the study of philosophy require is not an ‘open mind,’ but an active mind—a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them critically.”
Title: Why Costco is Cheaper than Amazon
Membership (that is the money maker), big stores (long walks, deal hunting), few products (quality, quantity)
Title: Onderzoekers willen mensen in een vegetatieve toestand met psychedelica behandelen (Dutch)
A percentage of people in a vegetative state does respond to stimuli (in their mind), what happens if we give them psilocybin. The idea would be that psychedelics increase the complexity (entropy) for the brain, and so maybe more consciousness.
“Scott and Carhart-Harris want to start slowly, with healthy people anesthetized from sleep, to see how psilocybin influences consciousness and brain complexity in those states. If the results are promising, and the study design is appropriate and safe enough, they will also apply it to people with a consciousness disorder.”
https://www.parool.nl/nederland/ptss-patienten-krijgen-partydrug-mdma-als-medicijn~bc1018f5/
Title: PTSS-patiënten krijgen partydrug mdma als medicijn (Dutch)
First test of eight veterans in The Netherlands with MDMA. They say that 83% of PTSD patients recover (and if I remember correctly, that is with a group that was treatment-resistant).
Title: 16 Minutes on the News #11: CRISPR! Policy, Platform, Trials
Summary of the news (not research) on CRISPR. Nothing much new, but some regulation on CRISPR and ideas about how to use it for good/change. Some self-regulation also around not germline editing, yet!
Title: Human Eggs with the Goal of Altering Deaf Gene
Gene editing to solve real problems, in this case, deafness.
Title: New CRISPR genome editing system offers a wide range of versatility in human cells
““Prime editing” combines two key proteins and a new RNA to make targeted insertions, deletions, and all possible single-letter changes in the DNA of human cells.”
They combined CRISPR-Cas9 and reverse transcriptase to make better edits to our genome.
“… and has the potential to correct up to 89 percent of known disease-causing genetic variations.”
The technique is being made available for free (for research).
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/10/earth-rocks-can-absorb-shocking-amount-of-carbon/
Title: Earth’s rocks can absorb a shocking amount of carbon: here’s how
We are carbon (18%), trees are carbon (80%?), but what if most of the carbon is underground?
“life, in the form of microbes and bacteria, thrives miles beneath our feet in such abundance that its total carbon mass is up to 400 times greater than all 7.7 billion of the humans on the surface. That one of Earth’s largest ecosystems lies deep inside the planet is just one of the many discoveries from the decade-long Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) project that brought together 1,200 researchers from 55 nations to explore the internal workings of our planet.”
“In the next 20 to 40 years CO2 emissions from fossil fuels have to be eliminated and large amounts of CO2 already in the atmosphere need to be removed to prevent very dangerous levels of global warming.” – Or put more back in than we put out? Innovation?
“Experiments pumping carbon-rich fluids into the ophiolite rock formation show that carbonate minerals form very rapidly. That could potentially remove billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, though it would be a huge project and very different for Oman, which is dependent on its oil revenues, he says.”
“Diamonds also provided DCO researchers with evidence that the deep earth has more water—mostly locked up within the crystals of minerals as ions rather than liquid water—than all of the world’s oceans.”
Quite interesting, go read it all!
Title: Quantum computing’s ‘Hello World’ moment
A good analysis of what Google actually did, and much more elaborate than the 500-word articles all around. In short, as far as my understanding goes it was something that only a quantum computer could do. It was not too practical (just like Sputnik), but proves that quantum computers are here.
Title: The Origin of Consciousness in the Brain is About to be Tested
It could be interesting, but the research described isn’t done yet.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-close-are-we-to-creating-artificial-intelligence
Title: How Close are we to Creating Artificial Intelligence / Creative blocks
I’ve been listening to an analysis of David Deutsch’s book The Beginning of Infinity. And it has sparked me to look up some of his articles online. So here is a short analysis of one of them.
The laws of physics say that AI should be possible (universality of computation), but why don’t we have it yet? (AI as in AGI, one that is creative). “But no brain on Earth is yet close to knowing what brains do in order to achieve any of that functionality. The enterprise of achieving it artificially — the field of ‘artificial general intelligence’ or AGI — has made no progress whatever during the entire six decades of its existence.”
“This entails that everything that the laws of physics require a physical object to do can, in principle, be emulated in arbitrarily fine detail by some program on a general-purpose computer, provided it is given enough time and memory.” As theorised by Babbage and Lovelace, and confirmed by Deutsch.
What is lacking in AI programs is ‘creativity’: the ability to produce new explanations. Deutsch argues (in the article and elsewhere) that all AI nowadays doesn’t produce new explanations. If you give it 5 ways of looking at Dark Matter, and it says/computes/confirms that one is correct, then it hasn’t added new explanations.
“What is needed is nothing less than a breakthrough in philosophy, a new epistemological theory that explains how brains create explanatory knowledge and hence defines, in principle, without ever running them as programs, which algorithms possess that functionality and which do not.” It makes me think of The Book of Why, alas one I haven’t read, but which is about the theory that we might be able to do/compute this – but focus on math, not philosophy).
Then he uses some of Popper’s work to argue that induction sucks (e.g. I saw a 1 at the beginning of the calendar each year, until it was the year 2000).
“Now, the truth is that knowledge consists of conjectured explanations — guesses about what really is (or really should be, or might be) out there in all those worlds.” (and that links to this article about the brain).
“Thinking consists of criticising and correcting partially true guesses with the intention of locating and eliminating the errors and misconceptions in them, not generating or justifying extrapolations from sense data.”
“Likewise, when a computer program beats a grandmaster at chess, the two are not using even remotely similar algorithms. The grandmaster can explain why it seemed worth sacrificing the knight for strategic advantage and can write an exciting book on the subject. The program can only prove that the sacrifice does not force a checkmate, and cannot write a book because it has no clue even what the objective of a chess game is. Programming AGI is not the same sort of problem as programming Jeopardy or chess.” AGI is built on a different frame than what is already being worked on.
“And here we have the problem of ambiguous terminology again: the term ‘consciousness’ has a huge range of meanings. At one end of the scale there is the philosophical problem of the nature of subjective sensations (‘qualia’), which is intimately connected with the problem of AGI. At the other, ‘consciousness’ is simply what we lose when we are put under general anaesthetic. Many animals certainly have that.”
Deutsch argues that even apes don’t have AGI (like we humans have) and that there the behaviourist arguments do stand/work. Just like with very smart AI (as commonly used) programs.
He also says the brain is no quantum computer and links to another paper if you were so inclined to learn more).
“The battle between good and evil ideas is as old as our species and will continue regardless of the hardware on which it is running.” So what can we do, stop the AGI development (or think of some guidelines as they are doing now)? Deutsch argues for not (but I can see that it could be good for the current AI landscape, so the one not related to AGI).
“We use, rather, the method of trial and the elimination of error.’ That is to say, conjecture and criticism. Learning must be something that newly created intelligences do, and control, for themselves.”
“I am convinced that the whole problem of developing AGIs is a matter of philosophy, not computer science or neurophysiology, and that the philosophical progress that is essential to their future integration is also a prerequisite for developing them in the first place.”
He ends the article with an optimistic note: “So in one respect I can agree with the AGI-is-imminent camp: it is plausible that just a single idea stands between us and the breakthrough. But it will have to be one of the best ideas ever.”
https://aeon.co/essays/how-constructor-theory-solves-the-riddle-of-life
Title: How Constructor Theory Solves The Riddle of Life / Life without design
How could life be possible? That sounds like an ambitious question if I ever heard one. An article by Chiara Marletto (who works with David Deutsch (see above) on this). (the question is also being asked in GEB)
“The very problem Darwin’s theory addresses is ultimately rooted in physics: living things have certain properties that seem to set them apart from other aggregations of inert matter.” And they seem designed (but are of course not, just evolution through variation and natural selection).
“[L]iving things, again just like factories and robots, have the ability to perform physical transformations with a very high degree of precision, and to do so repeatedly and reliably.”
So life is good at faithful replication, and all other stuff (non-life) in the universe isn’t really good at it. “In other words, the laws of physics contain no built-in facility for accurate transformations; nor, in particular, for biological adaptations that can bring such transformations about.” But where is the jump from one to the other?
She explains that the laws of physics also provide no tailoring for life to exist.
“So, how can we explain physically how replication and self-reproduction are possible, given laws that contain no hidden designs, if the prevailing conception’s tools are inadequate? By applying a new fundamental theory of physics: constructor theory.”
“In constructor theory, physical laws are formulated only in terms of which tasks are possible (with arbitrarily high accuracy, reliability, and repeatability), and which are impossible, and why – as opposed to what happens, and what does not happen, given dynamical laws and initial conditions.”
“accurate self‑reproduction can occur only in two steps. Using letter-by-letter replication and error-correction, the parent cell makes a high-fidelity copy of the recipe to be inserted in the new cell; then it constructs the copying mechanism plus the rest of the cell afresh, following the recipe.”
“Constructor theory gives the ‘recipe’ an exact characterisation in fundamental physics. It is digitally coded information that can act as a constructor and has resiliency – the capacity, once it is instantiated in physical systems, to remain so instantiated. In constructor theory, that is called knowledge” Ok let me stop copy-pasting things here, see the article for more about constructor theory.
It seems logical to me, yet I do also feel that I don’t fully grasp the implications yet.
Title: What Does an Infamous Biohacker’s Death Mean for the Future of DIY Science?
I’m watching ‘Unnatural Selection’ (docu from Netflix) and this was a good companion piece.
The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts by Shane Parrish (of Farnham Street blog fame) is a short (3,5 hours) read/listen that introduces some awesome and useful mental models. Here a very short summary I found:
Maps are not the territory – All models are wrong, but some are useful
1. Reality is the ultimate update
2. Consider the cartographer
3. Map can influence territory
Circle of competence
If you want to improve your odds of success in life and business then define the perimeter of your circle of competence, and operate inside. Over time, work to expand that circle but never fool yourself about where it stands today, and never be afraid to say “I don’t know.”
Inversion – Approach situation from the opposite end of the natural starting point
Occam’s razor – simpler solutions are more likely to be correct than complex ones. “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras”
Hanlon’s razor – Don’t attribute to malice that which is explained by stupidity. It’s less likely for two things to be true than one