Monday, 30 April 2018
StackOverflow is trying to be somewhere better
This is well said. I hope they'll stop giving correct answers in a patronising way and stop the extremely annoying practice of saying you could have found it with a search when the top search result points to a thread that says you could have found it with a search. Just give the appropriate link and be done with it.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/
https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/
Blue Origin's ferocious tortoises
As Chris Greene wrote :
Apparently, Blue Origin has turtles on their coat of arms. Also, apparently, they have a coat of arms.
Sadly they are not Discworldian Star Turtles, but tortoises.
“Gradatim Ferociter” is Latin for “Step by Step, Ferociously. Bezos says that’s his approach to spaceflight... The lesson from the fable of the hare and the tortoise is that “slow and steady wins the race.” Bezos puts a different twist on the tale: “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” The mascot also may be a commentary on other commercial space ventures that leap into aggressive schedules but don’t end up meeting them, like the hare in the fable. After each successful New Shepard flight, Blue Origin’s team paints a tortoise on the capsule’s hatch. And during last weekend’s banquet, Bezos showed off a pair of tortoise cufflinks (which you can buy on Etsy for $48).
If I had my own space program, you can rest assured I'd have gone with this one :
"We who are about to die, really don't want to."
https://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-motto-logo-boots/
Apparently, Blue Origin has turtles on their coat of arms. Also, apparently, they have a coat of arms.
Sadly they are not Discworldian Star Turtles, but tortoises.
“Gradatim Ferociter” is Latin for “Step by Step, Ferociously. Bezos says that’s his approach to spaceflight... The lesson from the fable of the hare and the tortoise is that “slow and steady wins the race.” Bezos puts a different twist on the tale: “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” The mascot also may be a commentary on other commercial space ventures that leap into aggressive schedules but don’t end up meeting them, like the hare in the fable. After each successful New Shepard flight, Blue Origin’s team paints a tortoise on the capsule’s hatch. And during last weekend’s banquet, Bezos showed off a pair of tortoise cufflinks (which you can buy on Etsy for $48).
If I had my own space program, you can rest assured I'd have gone with this one :
"We who are about to die, really don't want to."
https://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-motto-logo-boots/
Sunday, 29 April 2018
The bizarre excuses given to forbid women from voting
WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE : WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE HATS ?!?!?
"There are obvious disadvantages about having women in Parliament. I do not know what is going to be done about their hats. How is a poor little man to get on with a couple of women wearing enormous hats in front of him?" – Rowland Hunt, MP for Ludlow, 1917.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43740033
"There are obvious disadvantages about having women in Parliament. I do not know what is going to be done about their hats. How is a poor little man to get on with a couple of women wearing enormous hats in front of him?" – Rowland Hunt, MP for Ludlow, 1917.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43740033
Fundamentalism can be caused by brain damage
I normally don't even bother reading articles like this - they tend to be of such zealous, anti-religious crusading mindset that the bias is unbearable. While I have some quibbles, and this is sure to be abused by those unable to understand their own antitheist bigotry, the basic point is, I think, well made. There is apparently a region of the brain important for cognitive flexibility, and if damaged it becomes harder to change thinking between topics. The authors of this study are careful to state that this can lead only indirectly to religious fundamentalism, and is only a small but significant contributing factor.
I would presume that such a mindset is important in any kind of fundamentalist, dogmatic attitude. In my view this is a very different behaviour to religious thinking in general, though there does seem to be a significant cultural component to this. Interestingly there's a note at the end that indoctrination might play a role in the development of this region of the brain, making it harder to shift fundamentalist opinions and also not requiring external, physical effects to damage the brain.
The findings suggest that damage to particular areas of the prefrontal cortex indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness—a psychology term that describes a personality trait which involves dimensions like curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.
Religious beliefs can be thought of as socially transmitted mental representations that consist of supernatural events and entities assumed to be real. Religious beliefs differ from empirical beliefs, which are based on how the world appears to be and are updated as new evidence accumulates or when new theories with better predictive power emerge. On the other hand, religious beliefs are not usually updated in response to new evidence or scientific explanations, and are therefore strongly associated with conservatism. They are fixed and rigid, which helps promote predictability and coherence to the rules of society among individuals within the group.
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/03/scientists-established-link-brain-damage-religious-fundamentalism/
I would presume that such a mindset is important in any kind of fundamentalist, dogmatic attitude. In my view this is a very different behaviour to religious thinking in general, though there does seem to be a significant cultural component to this. Interestingly there's a note at the end that indoctrination might play a role in the development of this region of the brain, making it harder to shift fundamentalist opinions and also not requiring external, physical effects to damage the brain.
The findings suggest that damage to particular areas of the prefrontal cortex indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness—a psychology term that describes a personality trait which involves dimensions like curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.
Religious beliefs can be thought of as socially transmitted mental representations that consist of supernatural events and entities assumed to be real. Religious beliefs differ from empirical beliefs, which are based on how the world appears to be and are updated as new evidence accumulates or when new theories with better predictive power emerge. On the other hand, religious beliefs are not usually updated in response to new evidence or scientific explanations, and are therefore strongly associated with conservatism. They are fixed and rigid, which helps promote predictability and coherence to the rules of society among individuals within the group.
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/03/scientists-established-link-brain-damage-religious-fundamentalism/
Do we have free will ?
This is one of those things I don't agree with, but it's expressed well and the intention is positive.
It would take me a lot of thought before I could articulate my thoughts on this into something intelligible, so discuss amongst yourselves if you will.
Originally shared by Ryan Beck
I don't believe in free will, and I think the concept of free will has been detrimental to society.
If you're going to talk about free will it's useful to define it, because it seems that people think of it in different ways. When I talk about free will I mean the real possibility of making a different choice in a certain situation. So my definition of free will is that if a situation were to replay itself with every detail down to the sub atomic level exactly the same, everyone involved would be able to act differently than they did the first time. I don't believe this kind of free will exists.
The reason I don't believe it exists is because every decision we make can only be based on the contents of our brains, and those contents are defined by the information our brains were previously exposed to and our genetic makeup. At birth your brain has not received much outside information, other than what it's learned in the womb. To learn new things a baby has to be exposed to them enough times for it to sink in. If a baby were only provided with food and basic care and nothing else its whole life without any education do you think it would learn to talk, to read, to understand math, what it means to be nice, how to be polite, or how to do anything else that is common in modern society? No, it would only learn what it can figure out on its own through trial and error. As an adult this baby would hardly be similar to a normal person. So I think we all accept that who we are as people is largely defined by what we learn in life. And our learning will be largely impacted by the genes that define what our brains are like and how we perceive information.
If our brains receive a signal, such as an image from our eyes, that signal will be processed based on the contents of our brains. Signals that seem familiar will be compared to other information stored in our brains. The way we process new information is dependent on the previous information we've been exposed to. A regular person is going to process an image very differently from the hypothetical Tarzan child. And our response to that image is going to depend on the way our brain processed it. Tarzan might see a toaster and, having never seen a toaster before, be confused and hesitant. A more average person will see a toaster, their brain will recognize that they've seen it before and knows what it does, and then decide if the toaster is useful to them at the moment. The decisions we make are dependent on the information our brains have previously absorbed.
So when you're presented with two options, your brain will evaluate them based on the information currently stored in it. Say you choose option A. If time were to repeat and everything was exactly the same with your brain and all the information you receive, you would choose option A again. There's no new information in your brain that would cause you to make a different choice.
We don't choose the information we're exposed to in our lives. At birth that information is provided by our parents. We don't choose the things we see as we walk around the world. Even when we do "choose", such as what book to read, that choice is dependent on the information we've received earlier in our lives, information we didn't choose to expose ourselves to. That's why I don't believe in free will. Every choice we make is based on a series of circumstances outside our control.
I think if you really look at someone you can often see a lot of these influences. Sometimes you can see how someone is just like their parents, or how their friends influenced them, or how some other information may have influenced them. But of course we can't know every aspect of a person's life, every little thing they've ever been exposed to, and even if we could we don't have the processing power to trace those experiences down to the way that person is now. So free will still seems plausible to people, because we can't recognize all the influences in another person's life, or even our own thanks to our limited memory. And no one wants to believe that they're anything but self made. They want to believe that everything they have is thanks to their own hard work and grit.
The reason I think the concept of free will is detrimental is because we often blame people for not making different choices. But to me it seems likely that it was not possible to make a different choice. So blaming people for their actions is like blaming the sun for coming up in the morning. I think accepting a lack of free will means being more compassionate and understanding towards others. This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to discourage behavior that is detrimental to society. We still want to make sure people don't commit crimes or aren't mean to others or don't chew with their mouths open. But by accepting a lack of free will, instead of revenge or punishment perhaps we can instead focus on why people behaved poorly and how we can get them to stop behaving poorly. It's not easy, and in some cases maybe nearly impossible. But maybe instead of thinking punishment will solve our problems we can instead focus on trying to prevent future problems by promoting positive influences in people's lives.
It would take me a lot of thought before I could articulate my thoughts on this into something intelligible, so discuss amongst yourselves if you will.
Originally shared by Ryan Beck
I don't believe in free will, and I think the concept of free will has been detrimental to society.
If you're going to talk about free will it's useful to define it, because it seems that people think of it in different ways. When I talk about free will I mean the real possibility of making a different choice in a certain situation. So my definition of free will is that if a situation were to replay itself with every detail down to the sub atomic level exactly the same, everyone involved would be able to act differently than they did the first time. I don't believe this kind of free will exists.
The reason I don't believe it exists is because every decision we make can only be based on the contents of our brains, and those contents are defined by the information our brains were previously exposed to and our genetic makeup. At birth your brain has not received much outside information, other than what it's learned in the womb. To learn new things a baby has to be exposed to them enough times for it to sink in. If a baby were only provided with food and basic care and nothing else its whole life without any education do you think it would learn to talk, to read, to understand math, what it means to be nice, how to be polite, or how to do anything else that is common in modern society? No, it would only learn what it can figure out on its own through trial and error. As an adult this baby would hardly be similar to a normal person. So I think we all accept that who we are as people is largely defined by what we learn in life. And our learning will be largely impacted by the genes that define what our brains are like and how we perceive information.
If our brains receive a signal, such as an image from our eyes, that signal will be processed based on the contents of our brains. Signals that seem familiar will be compared to other information stored in our brains. The way we process new information is dependent on the previous information we've been exposed to. A regular person is going to process an image very differently from the hypothetical Tarzan child. And our response to that image is going to depend on the way our brain processed it. Tarzan might see a toaster and, having never seen a toaster before, be confused and hesitant. A more average person will see a toaster, their brain will recognize that they've seen it before and knows what it does, and then decide if the toaster is useful to them at the moment. The decisions we make are dependent on the information our brains have previously absorbed.
So when you're presented with two options, your brain will evaluate them based on the information currently stored in it. Say you choose option A. If time were to repeat and everything was exactly the same with your brain and all the information you receive, you would choose option A again. There's no new information in your brain that would cause you to make a different choice.
We don't choose the information we're exposed to in our lives. At birth that information is provided by our parents. We don't choose the things we see as we walk around the world. Even when we do "choose", such as what book to read, that choice is dependent on the information we've received earlier in our lives, information we didn't choose to expose ourselves to. That's why I don't believe in free will. Every choice we make is based on a series of circumstances outside our control.
I think if you really look at someone you can often see a lot of these influences. Sometimes you can see how someone is just like their parents, or how their friends influenced them, or how some other information may have influenced them. But of course we can't know every aspect of a person's life, every little thing they've ever been exposed to, and even if we could we don't have the processing power to trace those experiences down to the way that person is now. So free will still seems plausible to people, because we can't recognize all the influences in another person's life, or even our own thanks to our limited memory. And no one wants to believe that they're anything but self made. They want to believe that everything they have is thanks to their own hard work and grit.
The reason I think the concept of free will is detrimental is because we often blame people for not making different choices. But to me it seems likely that it was not possible to make a different choice. So blaming people for their actions is like blaming the sun for coming up in the morning. I think accepting a lack of free will means being more compassionate and understanding towards others. This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to discourage behavior that is detrimental to society. We still want to make sure people don't commit crimes or aren't mean to others or don't chew with their mouths open. But by accepting a lack of free will, instead of revenge or punishment perhaps we can instead focus on why people behaved poorly and how we can get them to stop behaving poorly. It's not easy, and in some cases maybe nearly impossible. But maybe instead of thinking punishment will solve our problems we can instead focus on trying to prevent future problems by promoting positive influences in people's lives.
Friday, 27 April 2018
North Korea's nuclear test facility has collapsed
Given the rampant brinkmanship and testosterone-fuelled blustering that was the norm just a short while ago, this would explain a lot about recent developments.
Chinese scientists have concluded that North Korea's nuclear test site has partially collapsed, potentially rendering it unusable. The test site at Punggye-ri has been used for six nuclear tests since 2006. After the last, in September, a series of aftershocks hit the site, which seismologists believe collapsed part of the mountain's interior.
A one-page summary of the research on the USTC website concluded: "The occurrence of the collapse should deem the underground infrastructure beneath mountain Mantap not be used for any future nuclear tests." But those words do not appear in the final peer-reviewed paper. It instead says that the "collapse in the test site calls for continued close monitoring of any leaks of radioactive materials".
The research echoes similar findings by a team from the Jilin Earthquake Agency, published in the same journal last month. That team concluded that the explosion "created a cavity and a damaged 'chimney' of rocks above it", leading to a collapse.
On Saturday, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un announced he was suspending his country's nuclear and missile tests. The surprise declaration came ahead of historic talks with South Korea and the US.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-43894394#
Chinese scientists have concluded that North Korea's nuclear test site has partially collapsed, potentially rendering it unusable. The test site at Punggye-ri has been used for six nuclear tests since 2006. After the last, in September, a series of aftershocks hit the site, which seismologists believe collapsed part of the mountain's interior.
A one-page summary of the research on the USTC website concluded: "The occurrence of the collapse should deem the underground infrastructure beneath mountain Mantap not be used for any future nuclear tests." But those words do not appear in the final peer-reviewed paper. It instead says that the "collapse in the test site calls for continued close monitoring of any leaks of radioactive materials".
The research echoes similar findings by a team from the Jilin Earthquake Agency, published in the same journal last month. That team concluded that the explosion "created a cavity and a damaged 'chimney' of rocks above it", leading to a collapse.
On Saturday, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un announced he was suspending his country's nuclear and missile tests. The surprise declaration came ahead of historic talks with South Korea and the US.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-43894394#
Brains without bodies
Scientists can now keep brains alive without a body - A team of scientists recently revealed they’d successfully conducted experiments on hundreds of pigs that involved keeping their brains alive for up to 36 hours after the animals had been decapitated. Maybe Sergio Canavero, the mad scientist who wants to perform a brain transplant on a human, isn’t so crazy after all.
http://ow.ly/R6ay50hb58h
http://ow.ly/R6ay50hb58h
Jeff Bezos funds space travel because he has nothing better to do
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos spends a tiny fraction of his net worth to fund Blue Origin, the aerospace company he started in 2000. For a man worth $127 billion, that tiny fraction amounts to $1 billion a year, which he gets by liquidating Amazon stock, Bezos said at an Axel Springer awards event in Berlin, Germany, hosted by Business Insider's US editor-in-chief, Alyson Shontell.
"The only way I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel," he said in an interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Dopfner. "Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune."
[Yeah, umm, while I'm not saying AT ALL that you shouldn't fund your space program, Jeff, there are other things - plenty of other things in fact - that you could do at the same scale as well that might actually be more directly and immediately beneficial.]
"The solar system can easily support a trillion humans," he said. "And if we have a trillion humans we would have a thousand Einsteins, and a thousand Mozarts, and unlimited — for all practical purposes — resources from solar power and so on."
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-liquidates-billions-to-fund-blue-origin-2018-4?r=US&IR=T
"The only way I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel," he said in an interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Dopfner. "Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune."
[Yeah, umm, while I'm not saying AT ALL that you shouldn't fund your space program, Jeff, there are other things - plenty of other things in fact - that you could do at the same scale as well that might actually be more directly and immediately beneficial.]
"The solar system can easily support a trillion humans," he said. "And if we have a trillion humans we would have a thousand Einsteins, and a thousand Mozarts, and unlimited — for all practical purposes — resources from solar power and so on."
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-liquidates-billions-to-fund-blue-origin-2018-4?r=US&IR=T
Finding patterns in revolutionary speeches
A team of researchers, including Carnegie Mellon University assistant professor Simon DeDeo, used machine learning to analyze more than 40,000 digitized transcripts from the first two years of debates of the first makeshift French parliament, during the beginning of the revolution.
"The first thing that really came out and surprised us was that you can distinguish left and right not by what they're saying, but by how they're saying it," DeDeo said.
The study found liberal revolutionaries were more likely to use novel turns of phrase to talk about new ideas, and they also did more discussion derailing. "So you have these really charismatic people who are essentially the rudders of revolution," he said. "They're steering this conversation about how to run France into directions that nobody's ever seen."
http://wesa.fm/post/computer-analyzing-parliamentary-speeches-understand-how-french-revolution-started#stream/0
"The first thing that really came out and surprised us was that you can distinguish left and right not by what they're saying, but by how they're saying it," DeDeo said.
The study found liberal revolutionaries were more likely to use novel turns of phrase to talk about new ideas, and they also did more discussion derailing. "So you have these really charismatic people who are essentially the rudders of revolution," he said. "They're steering this conversation about how to run France into directions that nobody's ever seen."
http://wesa.fm/post/computer-analyzing-parliamentary-speeches-understand-how-french-revolution-started#stream/0
Shooting a mock asteroid with a great big gun, FOR SCIENCE !
Some people have cooler jobs than others.
For the study, Daly and Schultz used marble-sized projectiles with a composition similar to carbonaceous chondrites, meteorites derived from ancient, water-rich asteroids. Using the Vertical Gun Range at the NASA Ames Research Center, the projectiles were blasted at a bone-dry target material made of pumice powder at speeds around 5 kilometers per second (more than 11,000 miles per hour). The researchers then analyzed the post-impact debris with an armada of analytical tools, looking for signs of any water trapped within it.
They found that at impact speeds and angles common throughout the solar system, as much as 30 percent of the water indigenous in the impactor was trapped in post-impact debris. Most of that water was trapped in impact melt, rock that's melted by the heat of the impact and then re-solidifies as it cools, and in impact breccias, rocks made of a mish-mash of impact debris welded together by the heat of the impact.
"The impact melt and breccias are forming inside that plume," Schultz said. "What we're suggesting is that the water vapor gets ingested into the melts and breccias as they form. So even though the impactor loses its water, some of it is recaptured as the melt rapidly quenches."
https://phys.org/news/2018-04-projectile-cannon-asteroids.html
For the study, Daly and Schultz used marble-sized projectiles with a composition similar to carbonaceous chondrites, meteorites derived from ancient, water-rich asteroids. Using the Vertical Gun Range at the NASA Ames Research Center, the projectiles were blasted at a bone-dry target material made of pumice powder at speeds around 5 kilometers per second (more than 11,000 miles per hour). The researchers then analyzed the post-impact debris with an armada of analytical tools, looking for signs of any water trapped within it.
They found that at impact speeds and angles common throughout the solar system, as much as 30 percent of the water indigenous in the impactor was trapped in post-impact debris. Most of that water was trapped in impact melt, rock that's melted by the heat of the impact and then re-solidifies as it cools, and in impact breccias, rocks made of a mish-mash of impact debris welded together by the heat of the impact.
"The impact melt and breccias are forming inside that plume," Schultz said. "What we're suggesting is that the water vapor gets ingested into the melts and breccias as they form. So even though the impactor loses its water, some of it is recaptured as the melt rapidly quenches."
https://phys.org/news/2018-04-projectile-cannon-asteroids.html
Wednesday, 25 April 2018
Performance-based metrics work for mundane tasks but not creative ones
The source of the trouble is that when people are judged by performance metrics they are incentivised to do what the metrics measure, and what the metrics measure will be some established goal. But that impedes innovation, which means doing something not yet established, indeed that hasn’t even been tried out. Innovation involves experimentation. And experimentation includes the possibility, perhaps probability, of failure. At the same time, rewarding individuals for measured performance diminishes a sense of common purpose, as well as the social relationships that motivate co-operation and effectiveness. Instead, such rewards promote competition.
Compelling people in an organisation to focus their efforts on a narrow range of measurable features degrades the experience of work. Subject to performance metrics, people are forced to focus on limited goals, imposed by others who might not understand the work that they do. Mental stimulation is dulled when people don’t decide the problems to be solved or how to solve them, and there is no excitement of venturing into the unknown because the unknown is beyond the measureable. The entrepreneurial element of human nature is stifled by metric fixation
[Notes : impedes creativity in the obvious way by only rewarding mundane tasks, e.g. doing the same process again and again. Also conflicts with intrinsic motivations (add link to earlier post). But what about if rewards are given specifically for creative thinking ?]
https://aeon.co/ideas/against-metrics-how-measuring-performance-by-numbers-backfires
Compelling people in an organisation to focus their efforts on a narrow range of measurable features degrades the experience of work. Subject to performance metrics, people are forced to focus on limited goals, imposed by others who might not understand the work that they do. Mental stimulation is dulled when people don’t decide the problems to be solved or how to solve them, and there is no excitement of venturing into the unknown because the unknown is beyond the measureable. The entrepreneurial element of human nature is stifled by metric fixation
[Notes : impedes creativity in the obvious way by only rewarding mundane tasks, e.g. doing the same process again and again. Also conflicts with intrinsic motivations (add link to earlier post). But what about if rewards are given specifically for creative thinking ?]
https://aeon.co/ideas/against-metrics-how-measuring-performance-by-numbers-backfires
Tuesday, 24 April 2018
The future of bionic eyes looks promising
As you look at this page, your eyes are doing a remarkable thing. A stream of light from the words and pictures is bouncing into the eyeball and falling onto photoreceptor cells on the retina. This visual information is passed on to output cells and then transmitted to the brain as a kind of code, where it is reconstructed to make up the letters in this sentence you are reading right now.
Degenerative eye diseases, however, can wreak havoc on this process, says neuroscientist Sheila Nirenberg of Weill Medical College at Cornell University. When they damage the retina, the image in front of you never gets further than the eyeball; the chain is broken. That’s what makes the technology that Nirenberg has built rather remarkable. She has found a way to transmit a visual code directly to the brain, bypassing damaged cells in the eye. In other words, she can help the blind see again. In the video above, she explains how her technology works and the eureka moment that started it all.
The video explains that they expect human trials within 18 months. The procedure is really sci-fi stuff : they can fit a camera to a retina in which all the photoreceptors have died and get it to fire off signals which the brain can correctly interpret. This has been demonstrated in a laboratory and promises to restore something very close to normal vision, vastly superior to any other comparable prosthetic devices currently available. However, this has not been demonstrated to actually work as advertised quite yet.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20141111-the-woman-who-makes-the-blind-see
Degenerative eye diseases, however, can wreak havoc on this process, says neuroscientist Sheila Nirenberg of Weill Medical College at Cornell University. When they damage the retina, the image in front of you never gets further than the eyeball; the chain is broken. That’s what makes the technology that Nirenberg has built rather remarkable. She has found a way to transmit a visual code directly to the brain, bypassing damaged cells in the eye. In other words, she can help the blind see again. In the video above, she explains how her technology works and the eureka moment that started it all.
The video explains that they expect human trials within 18 months. The procedure is really sci-fi stuff : they can fit a camera to a retina in which all the photoreceptors have died and get it to fire off signals which the brain can correctly interpret. This has been demonstrated in a laboratory and promises to restore something very close to normal vision, vastly superior to any other comparable prosthetic devices currently available. However, this has not been demonstrated to actually work as advertised quite yet.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20141111-the-woman-who-makes-the-blind-see
Our perception of time is not fixed
It started as a headache, but soon became much stranger. Simon Baker entered the bathroom to see if a warm shower could ease his pain. “I looked up at the shower head, and it was as if the water droplets had stopped in mid-air”, he says. “They came into hard focus rapidly, over the course of a few seconds”. Where you’d normally perceive the streams as more of a blur of movement, he could see each one hanging in front of him, distorted by the pressure of the air rushing past. The effect, he recalls, was very similar to the way the bullets travelled in the Matrix movies. “It was like a high-speed film, slowed down.”
One explanation for this double-failure is that our motion perception system has its own stopwatch, recording how fast things are moving across our vision – and when this is disrupted by brain injury, the world stands still. Another explanation comes from the discovery that our brain records its perceptions in discrete “snapshots”, like the frames of a film reel. “The healthy brain reconstructs the experience and glues together the different frames,” says Rufin VanRullen at the French Centre for Brain and Cognition Research in Toulouse, “but if brain damage destroys the glue, you might only see the snapshots.”
What’s more, Valtteri Arstila at University of Turku, Finland, points out that many of these subjects also report abnormally quick thinking. As one pilot, who’d faced a plane crash in the Vietnam War, put it: “when the nose-wheel strut collapsed I vividly recalled, in a matter of about three seconds, over a dozen actions necessary to successful recovery of flight attitude”. Reviewing the case studies and available scientific research on the matter, Arstila concludes that an automatic mechanism, triggered by stress hormones, might speed up the brain’s internal processing to help it handle the life or death situation. “Our thoughts and initiation of movements become faster – but because we are working faster, the external world appears to slow down,” he says.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140624-the-man-who-saw-time-freeze
One explanation for this double-failure is that our motion perception system has its own stopwatch, recording how fast things are moving across our vision – and when this is disrupted by brain injury, the world stands still. Another explanation comes from the discovery that our brain records its perceptions in discrete “snapshots”, like the frames of a film reel. “The healthy brain reconstructs the experience and glues together the different frames,” says Rufin VanRullen at the French Centre for Brain and Cognition Research in Toulouse, “but if brain damage destroys the glue, you might only see the snapshots.”
What’s more, Valtteri Arstila at University of Turku, Finland, points out that many of these subjects also report abnormally quick thinking. As one pilot, who’d faced a plane crash in the Vietnam War, put it: “when the nose-wheel strut collapsed I vividly recalled, in a matter of about three seconds, over a dozen actions necessary to successful recovery of flight attitude”. Reviewing the case studies and available scientific research on the matter, Arstila concludes that an automatic mechanism, triggered by stress hormones, might speed up the brain’s internal processing to help it handle the life or death situation. “Our thoughts and initiation of movements become faster – but because we are working faster, the external world appears to slow down,” he says.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140624-the-man-who-saw-time-freeze
The heart literally, physically affects the mind
So the folklore may be right: people who are in touch with their heart are more likely to be swayed by their instincts – for good or bad. All of which prompted Ibanez to wonder what would happen when you are fitted with an artificial heart? If Carlos experienced substantial changes, it would offer important new evidence that our mind extends well beyond the brain.
And that is exactly what he found. When Carlos tapped out his pulse, for instance, he followed the machine’s rhythms rather than his own heartbeat. The fact that this also changed other perceptions of his body – seeming to expand the size of his chest, for instance – is perhaps to be expected; in some ways, changing the position of the heart was creating a sensation not unlike the famous “rubber hand illusion”. But crucially, it also seemed to have markedly altered certain social and emotional skills. Carlos seemed to lack empathy when he viewed pictures of people having a painful accident, for instance. He also had more general problems with his ability to read other’s motives, and, crucially, intuitive decision making – all of which is in line with the idea that the body rules emotional cognition. “It is a very interesting, very intriguing study,” says Dunn of the findings.
Dunn, who is a clinical psychologist, is more concerned about its relevance to depression. “At the moment therapy is very much in the head – we change what the client thinks and trust that their emotions will follow up,” he says. “But I often hit a wall: they say that they know these things intellectually, but emotionally they can’t feel it.”
Along these lines, Furman has found that people with major depressive disorder (but without other complications like anxiety) struggle to feel their own heart beat; and the poorer their awareness, the less likely they were to report positive experiences in their daily life. And as Dunn’s work on decision making would have suggested, poor body perception also seemed to be linked to measures of indecision – a problem that blights many people with depression. Furman stresses, however, that there may be many different kinds of depression, and poor bodily awareness may only influence some of them.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20141205-the-man-with-two-hearts
And that is exactly what he found. When Carlos tapped out his pulse, for instance, he followed the machine’s rhythms rather than his own heartbeat. The fact that this also changed other perceptions of his body – seeming to expand the size of his chest, for instance – is perhaps to be expected; in some ways, changing the position of the heart was creating a sensation not unlike the famous “rubber hand illusion”. But crucially, it also seemed to have markedly altered certain social and emotional skills. Carlos seemed to lack empathy when he viewed pictures of people having a painful accident, for instance. He also had more general problems with his ability to read other’s motives, and, crucially, intuitive decision making – all of which is in line with the idea that the body rules emotional cognition. “It is a very interesting, very intriguing study,” says Dunn of the findings.
Dunn, who is a clinical psychologist, is more concerned about its relevance to depression. “At the moment therapy is very much in the head – we change what the client thinks and trust that their emotions will follow up,” he says. “But I often hit a wall: they say that they know these things intellectually, but emotionally they can’t feel it.”
Along these lines, Furman has found that people with major depressive disorder (but without other complications like anxiety) struggle to feel their own heart beat; and the poorer their awareness, the less likely they were to report positive experiences in their daily life. And as Dunn’s work on decision making would have suggested, poor body perception also seemed to be linked to measures of indecision – a problem that blights many people with depression. Furman stresses, however, that there may be many different kinds of depression, and poor bodily awareness may only influence some of them.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20141205-the-man-with-two-hearts
Einstein's biggest blunder
This is a very nice, readable article challenging the myth that Einstein never called the cosmological constant his biggest blunder. In brief, the popular story goes (and still dominates today) that Einstein introduced this as an otherwise-unjustified term in his equations : he preferred a static universe, which the equations didn't allow. Later, on Hubble's discovery (simplifying) that the Universe was actually expanding, he changed his mind and regretted missing out on an amazing prediction that observations would have proven, famously using the expression that it was his "biggest blunder".
The now rather popular skeptical position is that actually he never used that term, and may not even have regarded it as such an important failure (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/einstein-likely-never-said-one-of-his-most-oft-quoted-phrases/278508/). The quote is incredibly widely reported, so if nothing else it'd be nice to know if he really used it or not. The skeptical argument rests on there being only one source for the original quote : George Gamow, who wrote it down with a condescending sneer that Einstein was old and befuddled.
This article challenges this quite strongly, finding two other, independent sources of the quote. That alone makes it far more plausible. Less important for exact history, but much more interesting for the context, are their examinations of Gamow's character and the intent of his remark that "of course the old man agrees with anything nowaday". Gamow, they say, was underrated as a physicist precisely because of his mischevous humour, and they say this remark could be interpreted as Gamow actually being self-deprecating - essentially saying that Einstein's agreement with Gamow's theory wasn't the great honour one would normally assume it to be. A sort of backhanded insult, but more jovial and without the viciousness evident by reading the quote without context.
The most interesting part for me was a slightly tangential look at Gamow as a science populariser and how this wasn't seen as the desirable activity it's generally regarded as today. Paying tributed to Gamow, Wolfgang Yourgrau remarked :
Gamow committed an unforgivable sin. He wrote popular books on physics, biology and cosmology. Moreover, the books were bestsellers because they enabled the uninitiated not only to understand scientific discoveries and theories, but also to understand the human, often humorous facets of the researching men engaged in all of these mysterious ventures…. Most scientists do not fancy the oversimplifying, popularizing of our science…it is tantamount to a cheapening of the sacred rituals of our profession… many of us considered him washed up, a has-been, an intemperate member of our holy order.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018arXiv180406768O
The now rather popular skeptical position is that actually he never used that term, and may not even have regarded it as such an important failure (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/einstein-likely-never-said-one-of-his-most-oft-quoted-phrases/278508/). The quote is incredibly widely reported, so if nothing else it'd be nice to know if he really used it or not. The skeptical argument rests on there being only one source for the original quote : George Gamow, who wrote it down with a condescending sneer that Einstein was old and befuddled.
This article challenges this quite strongly, finding two other, independent sources of the quote. That alone makes it far more plausible. Less important for exact history, but much more interesting for the context, are their examinations of Gamow's character and the intent of his remark that "of course the old man agrees with anything nowaday". Gamow, they say, was underrated as a physicist precisely because of his mischevous humour, and they say this remark could be interpreted as Gamow actually being self-deprecating - essentially saying that Einstein's agreement with Gamow's theory wasn't the great honour one would normally assume it to be. A sort of backhanded insult, but more jovial and without the viciousness evident by reading the quote without context.
The most interesting part for me was a slightly tangential look at Gamow as a science populariser and how this wasn't seen as the desirable activity it's generally regarded as today. Paying tributed to Gamow, Wolfgang Yourgrau remarked :
Gamow committed an unforgivable sin. He wrote popular books on physics, biology and cosmology. Moreover, the books were bestsellers because they enabled the uninitiated not only to understand scientific discoveries and theories, but also to understand the human, often humorous facets of the researching men engaged in all of these mysterious ventures…. Most scientists do not fancy the oversimplifying, popularizing of our science…it is tantamount to a cheapening of the sacred rituals of our profession… many of us considered him washed up, a has-been, an intemperate member of our holy order.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018arXiv180406768O
Finland's trial of basic income
Currently 2,000 unemployed Finns are receiving a flat monthly payment of €560 (£490; $685) as basic income. Some see basic income as a way to get unemployed people into temporary jobs. The argument is that, if paid universally, basic income would provide a guaranteed safety net. That would help to address insecurities associated with the "gig" economy, where workers do not have staff contracts. Supporters say basic income would boost mobility in the labour market as people would still have an income between jobs.
Finland's two-year pilot scheme started in January 2017, making it the first European country to test an unconditional basic income. The 2,000 participants - all unemployed - were chosen randomly. But it will not be extended after this year, as the government is now examining other schemes for reforming the Finnish social security system. The pilot's full results will not be released until late 2019.
IIRC, UBI has to be really universal for it to work, otherwise recipients tend to see it as a demeaning charity handout. 2,000 people is surely not enough to capture this effect, though I would imagine 2 years is long enough to see some influence. Unfortunately the article doesn't say anything about what's been see so far.
More interesting are the alternative options under consideration. Also, as Sakari Maaranen points out, Finland already has a functioning welfare system and ranks as one of the happiest countries anywhere, so this test case would have unique factors to consider. I would also point out that the Czech Republic has close to full employment, but another term for this is labour shortage. There's no competition for jobs because everyone already has one so feels less incentive to change, and it's hard to find new, better people for roles that are already taken - the pool of availability is very small. A certain amount of temporary unemployment, in which people are comfortably supported by the state (or indeed by any other means) with a near certainty of finding a new job after some short period, is perfectly healthy. It's chronic unemployment and its grinding poverty that are problematic.
In February this year the influential OECD think tank said a universal credit system, like that being introduced in the UK, would work better than a basic income in Finland. Universal credit replaces several benefit payments with a single monthly sum.
Let's not forget to mention that while universal credit is a fine thing in principle, in the UK it's being implemented really, really badly.
The study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said income tax would have to increase by nearly 30% to fund a basic income. It also argued that basic income would increase income inequality and raise Finland's poverty rate from 11.4% to 14.1%. In contrast, the OECD said, universal credit would cut the poverty rate to 9.7%, as well as reduce complexity in the benefits system.
Another reform option being considered by Finnish politicians is a negative income tax, Prof Kangas said. Under that scheme, people whose income fell below a certain threshold would be exempt from income tax and would actually receive payments from the tax office.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43866700
Finland's two-year pilot scheme started in January 2017, making it the first European country to test an unconditional basic income. The 2,000 participants - all unemployed - were chosen randomly. But it will not be extended after this year, as the government is now examining other schemes for reforming the Finnish social security system. The pilot's full results will not be released until late 2019.
IIRC, UBI has to be really universal for it to work, otherwise recipients tend to see it as a demeaning charity handout. 2,000 people is surely not enough to capture this effect, though I would imagine 2 years is long enough to see some influence. Unfortunately the article doesn't say anything about what's been see so far.
More interesting are the alternative options under consideration. Also, as Sakari Maaranen points out, Finland already has a functioning welfare system and ranks as one of the happiest countries anywhere, so this test case would have unique factors to consider. I would also point out that the Czech Republic has close to full employment, but another term for this is labour shortage. There's no competition for jobs because everyone already has one so feels less incentive to change, and it's hard to find new, better people for roles that are already taken - the pool of availability is very small. A certain amount of temporary unemployment, in which people are comfortably supported by the state (or indeed by any other means) with a near certainty of finding a new job after some short period, is perfectly healthy. It's chronic unemployment and its grinding poverty that are problematic.
In February this year the influential OECD think tank said a universal credit system, like that being introduced in the UK, would work better than a basic income in Finland. Universal credit replaces several benefit payments with a single monthly sum.
Let's not forget to mention that while universal credit is a fine thing in principle, in the UK it's being implemented really, really badly.
The study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said income tax would have to increase by nearly 30% to fund a basic income. It also argued that basic income would increase income inequality and raise Finland's poverty rate from 11.4% to 14.1%. In contrast, the OECD said, universal credit would cut the poverty rate to 9.7%, as well as reduce complexity in the benefits system.
Another reform option being considered by Finnish politicians is a negative income tax, Prof Kangas said. Under that scheme, people whose income fell below a certain threshold would be exempt from income tax and would actually receive payments from the tax office.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43866700
Monday, 23 April 2018
Being nice to everyone all the time sounds like a horrible way to live
It sounds like some ultra-perverse version of hell. People who are nice all the time are either just weird or don't understand the fundamental shittiness of the world. No, I'll stick with with the regular bitchiness and backstabbing ways of my European brethren, thankyouverymuch. Much easier to trust someone who's complaining about the weather than trying to drag me on a boar-hunting expedition I didn't really want to go on, forcing me to concoct some highly ambiguous lie.
The correct way of dealing with problems is to ingest copious amounts of tea, but of course everyone knows that by now.
And that speech became the basis for Hawaii’s Aloha Spirit law, which essentially mandates consideration and kindness:
“Akahai, meaning kindness to be expressed with tenderness;
Lōkahi, meaning unity, to be expressed with harmony;
ʻOluʻolu, meaning agreeable, to be expressed with pleasantness;
Haʻahaʻa, meaning humility, to be expressed with modesty;
Ahonui, meaning patience, to be expressed with perseverance.”
According to the Hawaii State Attorney’s Office, the law is mostly symbolic, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work – especially when political leaders or business people get out of line.
“This law is virtually impossible to enforce because it is a philosophy that directs a code of conduct and way of life. Nonetheless… all citizens and government officials of Hawaii are obligated to conduct themselves in accordance with this law,” Dana Viola, first deputy attorney general of Hawaii, said in an email. If a business or a government official doesn’t act with Aloha Spirit, they could lose business or be chastised publicly. “So the consequences are real,” she added.
The law also falls foul of the toleration paradox. If everyone obeys the law then fine, but if not - and they won't, that's human nature - then things can go dangerously wrong.
“The Aloha Spirit is used to argue that everyone in Hawaii can ‘feel’ and should accept the love for humanity… [and] says that the Aloha Spirit transcends race, differences and embraces togetherness or ‘equality’. That is a problem because it ignores all of the complexities of our life and society,” Perry said.
“Maybe, on a good day, the law can support Hawaiian rights,” he added. But on a bad day, he said, it can be used to silence native Hawaiians who are protesting injustices in the islands. When that happens, “The Aloha they are using is actually part of the ‘passive’ and ‘don’t-make-waves’ native identity created during the US occupation and control. But, if you look at the thousands of debates that were publicly expressed in Hawaiian language newspapers and protests, it is obvious that passivity was not the only Hawaiian cultural practice.”
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180422-in-hawaii-being-nice-is-the-law
The correct way of dealing with problems is to ingest copious amounts of tea, but of course everyone knows that by now.
And that speech became the basis for Hawaii’s Aloha Spirit law, which essentially mandates consideration and kindness:
“Akahai, meaning kindness to be expressed with tenderness;
Lōkahi, meaning unity, to be expressed with harmony;
ʻOluʻolu, meaning agreeable, to be expressed with pleasantness;
Haʻahaʻa, meaning humility, to be expressed with modesty;
Ahonui, meaning patience, to be expressed with perseverance.”
According to the Hawaii State Attorney’s Office, the law is mostly symbolic, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work – especially when political leaders or business people get out of line.
“This law is virtually impossible to enforce because it is a philosophy that directs a code of conduct and way of life. Nonetheless… all citizens and government officials of Hawaii are obligated to conduct themselves in accordance with this law,” Dana Viola, first deputy attorney general of Hawaii, said in an email. If a business or a government official doesn’t act with Aloha Spirit, they could lose business or be chastised publicly. “So the consequences are real,” she added.
The law also falls foul of the toleration paradox. If everyone obeys the law then fine, but if not - and they won't, that's human nature - then things can go dangerously wrong.
“The Aloha Spirit is used to argue that everyone in Hawaii can ‘feel’ and should accept the love for humanity… [and] says that the Aloha Spirit transcends race, differences and embraces togetherness or ‘equality’. That is a problem because it ignores all of the complexities of our life and society,” Perry said.
“Maybe, on a good day, the law can support Hawaiian rights,” he added. But on a bad day, he said, it can be used to silence native Hawaiians who are protesting injustices in the islands. When that happens, “The Aloha they are using is actually part of the ‘passive’ and ‘don’t-make-waves’ native identity created during the US occupation and control. But, if you look at the thousands of debates that were publicly expressed in Hawaiian language newspapers and protests, it is obvious that passivity was not the only Hawaiian cultural practice.”
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180422-in-hawaii-being-nice-is-the-law
Guns enable violence
Philip Alpers, an adjunct associate professor at the Sydney School of Public Health, argues that the data shows that the impact of the gun legislation on deaths has been significant. That is the case true even if you take into account other possible explanations and pre-existing declines in suicide and homicide rates. “The result of that was the risk of dying by gunshot in Australia statistically reduced by more than 50%, and in the past 22 years has shown no sign of creeping up again,” he says.
Suicide was a big part of that drop: up to 80% of gun suicides no longer happened. “Suicide went down and surprised the hell out of us,” Alpers says. “Even more so, we were delighted to discover that the displacement of lethal methods did not occur. In other words, there is no evidence that those intending to commit suicide or homicide simply moved on to another weapon.”
It wasn’t just suicides. The rate of gun homicides in Australia was also slashed by more than half following the ban. And furthermore, while critics in the US often argue that murderers would just find another way to kill their victims, that didn’t happen in Australia. Instead, non-gun homicides remained roughly the same – meaning a drop in murders overall. “Murderers simply do not choose another weapon,” Alpers says.
“Think of two immature, angry, impulsive and intoxicated young men in the UK who come out of a pub and get into an argument,” Swanson says. “Someone’s going to get a black eye or bloody nose. But in our country [the US],” he says, “it’s statistically more likely one of those men will have a hand gun, and you’re going to get a dead body.”
That difference boils down to what experts refer to as the ‘weapons instrumentality effect’: the fact that the weapon used has an effect on the outcome, says Robert Spitzer, a political science professor at the State University of New York College at Cortland. “There’s no weapon more efficient at killing people than a gun.”
That and the fact the promoting violence as a legitimate means to solve problems - threatening to shoot burglars, FFS - is to the rest of the word and obvious and objectively stupid idea with precisely zero redeeming features.
Whether guns actually help people stay safe and defend themselves is a controversial subject. But the limited research available on this topic tends to indicate that guns have the opposite effect. A 1993 study of 1,860 homicides found that the presence of guns in a home significantly increases the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance, for example. A 2014 meta-study likewise found that access to firearms is associated with homicide and completed suicide attempts.
So while some gun owners may lose a sense of security if guns disappeared, “the data show that’s a false sense of security,” Miller says.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180417-what-would-happen-if-all-guns-disappeared
Suicide was a big part of that drop: up to 80% of gun suicides no longer happened. “Suicide went down and surprised the hell out of us,” Alpers says. “Even more so, we were delighted to discover that the displacement of lethal methods did not occur. In other words, there is no evidence that those intending to commit suicide or homicide simply moved on to another weapon.”
It wasn’t just suicides. The rate of gun homicides in Australia was also slashed by more than half following the ban. And furthermore, while critics in the US often argue that murderers would just find another way to kill their victims, that didn’t happen in Australia. Instead, non-gun homicides remained roughly the same – meaning a drop in murders overall. “Murderers simply do not choose another weapon,” Alpers says.
“Think of two immature, angry, impulsive and intoxicated young men in the UK who come out of a pub and get into an argument,” Swanson says. “Someone’s going to get a black eye or bloody nose. But in our country [the US],” he says, “it’s statistically more likely one of those men will have a hand gun, and you’re going to get a dead body.”
That difference boils down to what experts refer to as the ‘weapons instrumentality effect’: the fact that the weapon used has an effect on the outcome, says Robert Spitzer, a political science professor at the State University of New York College at Cortland. “There’s no weapon more efficient at killing people than a gun.”
That and the fact the promoting violence as a legitimate means to solve problems - threatening to shoot burglars, FFS - is to the rest of the word and obvious and objectively stupid idea with precisely zero redeeming features.
Whether guns actually help people stay safe and defend themselves is a controversial subject. But the limited research available on this topic tends to indicate that guns have the opposite effect. A 1993 study of 1,860 homicides found that the presence of guns in a home significantly increases the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance, for example. A 2014 meta-study likewise found that access to firearms is associated with homicide and completed suicide attempts.
So while some gun owners may lose a sense of security if guns disappeared, “the data show that’s a false sense of security,” Miller says.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180417-what-would-happen-if-all-guns-disappeared
The Black Hole Bomb
Originally shared by Martin Krischik
Who would have thought it's possible to extract energy from a black hole?
> The Black Hole Bomb and Black Hole Civilizations
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulCdoCfw-bY
#astrophysics #science #physics #astronomy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulCdoCfw-bY
Who would have thought it's possible to extract energy from a black hole?
> The Black Hole Bomb and Black Hole Civilizations
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulCdoCfw-bY
#astrophysics #science #physics #astronomy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulCdoCfw-bY
The march of progress is not inevitable
Well, I dunno. Certainly the hype about AI being able to do everything for us by next Tuesday or in five years or whatever is a massive exaggeration. But I think this particular article goes too far in the other direction.
At the same time, we cannot predict the numbers of new jobs/careers that new technology will create. [So let's immediately give a prediction then] One study from Gartner Research states that while 1.8 million jobs will be lost by 2020, 2.3 million new ones will be created. Even today, there are a huge number of technology jobs that did not exist ten years ago: State-of-the-art programming, data science, web security, marketing and sales. There is no reason to believe that the need for humans to create and manage new technology will decrease.
Literally all of those jobs existed very much more than twenty years ago, with the single exception of web security. Technology didn't create any of those jobs, but it has certainly made them easier, e.g. programming in Python versus punch cards. However, while it would be nice to think that essentially anyone is broadly willing and able to do those jobs, I'm far from convinced that is the case. "I liked astronomy but can't / don't want to do the maths" is something I hear all the time. And you've got to have people who are both willing and able to do the jobs replaced by robots/AI (see https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/MUhGwJT3HqR) for more complex definitions of AI), otherwise you're just replacing one dystopia with another.
Robots and AI will certainly replace jobs – boring, dangerous, and dirty ones mostly. Consider coal mining for example. How many people still want to go down into a mineshaft and dig out coal? How many want to subject themselves to black lung disease and a host of other health problems from that job? This is why coal mining towns are dying out. Young people in these towns are moving on to the brighter job prospects. And technology is taking over what’s left of the mining industry. Green energy is taking over, and with it, a host of new, clean jobs and careers. It’s the march of civilization that will never cease.
OK, that's ludicrously happy-clappy naivety right there. The author needs to swallow a bunch of history books before being allowed back on the internet. Also, young people today are earning less than those of their parents generation of the same age (http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20171003-millennials-are-the-generation-thats-fun-to-hate). Granted, that doesn't mean technology is causing a problem, but for that very reason it's crazy to infer an inevitable march of progress based on technological advancement. Politics, in its broadest possible sense of how humans relate to each other, is already the reason we're not living in a golden age; in the material senses we've largely never had it so good. In previous ages a lack of knowledge (e.g. of the technological advancements needed to cure diseases) may have been the limiting factor, but today, by and large, it is political concerns which prevent discoveries and abundances from being applied correctly and distributed fairly.
Those entering the workforce today will have to be adaptable. What robots can do is make humans more productive than ever before. Workers will need to develop technical skills and keep those skills updated as technology moves forward. Those who do not want to deal with technology need to pursue careers where it is not as much a factor or where demand for human skills and talents remains high.
Yeah, what careers ? Are people actually going to be willing and able to do them ? The author is guilty of the very sin he accuses the technophiles of : unjustified assumptions with so little context that a debate becomes very difficult.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewarnold/2018/04/20/why-robots-will-not-take-over-human-jobs/#155a23a747cd
At the same time, we cannot predict the numbers of new jobs/careers that new technology will create. [So let's immediately give a prediction then] One study from Gartner Research states that while 1.8 million jobs will be lost by 2020, 2.3 million new ones will be created. Even today, there are a huge number of technology jobs that did not exist ten years ago: State-of-the-art programming, data science, web security, marketing and sales. There is no reason to believe that the need for humans to create and manage new technology will decrease.
Literally all of those jobs existed very much more than twenty years ago, with the single exception of web security. Technology didn't create any of those jobs, but it has certainly made them easier, e.g. programming in Python versus punch cards. However, while it would be nice to think that essentially anyone is broadly willing and able to do those jobs, I'm far from convinced that is the case. "I liked astronomy but can't / don't want to do the maths" is something I hear all the time. And you've got to have people who are both willing and able to do the jobs replaced by robots/AI (see https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/MUhGwJT3HqR) for more complex definitions of AI), otherwise you're just replacing one dystopia with another.
Robots and AI will certainly replace jobs – boring, dangerous, and dirty ones mostly. Consider coal mining for example. How many people still want to go down into a mineshaft and dig out coal? How many want to subject themselves to black lung disease and a host of other health problems from that job? This is why coal mining towns are dying out. Young people in these towns are moving on to the brighter job prospects. And technology is taking over what’s left of the mining industry. Green energy is taking over, and with it, a host of new, clean jobs and careers. It’s the march of civilization that will never cease.
OK, that's ludicrously happy-clappy naivety right there. The author needs to swallow a bunch of history books before being allowed back on the internet. Also, young people today are earning less than those of their parents generation of the same age (http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20171003-millennials-are-the-generation-thats-fun-to-hate). Granted, that doesn't mean technology is causing a problem, but for that very reason it's crazy to infer an inevitable march of progress based on technological advancement. Politics, in its broadest possible sense of how humans relate to each other, is already the reason we're not living in a golden age; in the material senses we've largely never had it so good. In previous ages a lack of knowledge (e.g. of the technological advancements needed to cure diseases) may have been the limiting factor, but today, by and large, it is political concerns which prevent discoveries and abundances from being applied correctly and distributed fairly.
Those entering the workforce today will have to be adaptable. What robots can do is make humans more productive than ever before. Workers will need to develop technical skills and keep those skills updated as technology moves forward. Those who do not want to deal with technology need to pursue careers where it is not as much a factor or where demand for human skills and talents remains high.
Yeah, what careers ? Are people actually going to be willing and able to do them ? The author is guilty of the very sin he accuses the technophiles of : unjustified assumptions with so little context that a debate becomes very difficult.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewarnold/2018/04/20/why-robots-will-not-take-over-human-jobs/#155a23a747cd
Language affects how we want to respond to crimes
The OP has, irritatingly, chosen to quote the entire article but randomly stick certain sections in bold and join the paragraphs together, thus making it unreadable. Hence I'll do my own quoting and let you read the rest by clicking the link if you so desire.
In a recent Stanford study, participants were presented with brief passages about crime in a hypothetical city named Addison. For half of the participants, a few words were subtly changed to describe crime as a “virus infecting” the city. For the other half, crime was described as a “beast preying” on the city. Otherwise, the passages remained exactly the same.
When asked to come up with solutions for crime, those who read the passage with the “beast” metaphor thought that crime should be dealt with by using more punitive solutions, such as longer jail time. Those who read the passage with the “virus” metaphor thought crime should be dealt with using more reformative measures that addressed the root causes of crime. And the metaphor alone caused an even bigger difference in opinion than pre-existing differences between Republicans and Democrats.
Consider the results of a study by Yale social psychologist John Bargh. Participants were either given a cup of iced or hot coffee, and then were asked to read a description about an individual. Holding the warm coffee caused participants to rate this individual as more socially warm.
Cognitive scientists suggest that many of the metaphors we use to understand reality are based on our experience of having a body in the physical world. Mental thought is built on physical thought, and we use physical metaphors to understand abstract concepts. This causes certain ideas, like social warmth and physical warmth, to be intertwined in our minds to a point where experiencing physical warmth can activate ideas of social warmth.
https://qz.com/1241030/metaphors-can-change-our-opinions-in-ways-we-dont-even-realize/
In a recent Stanford study, participants were presented with brief passages about crime in a hypothetical city named Addison. For half of the participants, a few words were subtly changed to describe crime as a “virus infecting” the city. For the other half, crime was described as a “beast preying” on the city. Otherwise, the passages remained exactly the same.
When asked to come up with solutions for crime, those who read the passage with the “beast” metaphor thought that crime should be dealt with by using more punitive solutions, such as longer jail time. Those who read the passage with the “virus” metaphor thought crime should be dealt with using more reformative measures that addressed the root causes of crime. And the metaphor alone caused an even bigger difference in opinion than pre-existing differences between Republicans and Democrats.
Consider the results of a study by Yale social psychologist John Bargh. Participants were either given a cup of iced or hot coffee, and then were asked to read a description about an individual. Holding the warm coffee caused participants to rate this individual as more socially warm.
Cognitive scientists suggest that many of the metaphors we use to understand reality are based on our experience of having a body in the physical world. Mental thought is built on physical thought, and we use physical metaphors to understand abstract concepts. This causes certain ideas, like social warmth and physical warmth, to be intertwined in our minds to a point where experiencing physical warmth can activate ideas of social warmth.
https://qz.com/1241030/metaphors-can-change-our-opinions-in-ways-we-dont-even-realize/
The dress colour illusion that everyone can see
OK, that's impressive.
Found on the internet.
A commenter on the original thread still didn't believe it, so a certain Bio Hazard made this very nice image to demonstrate that it's really true : https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/xQEAOk3IT1srGbUDYFqPcb2EQN9p79u4H4Dd0KaW7UlvgrrekjdsAKI027osCoeceRL7eGpVQA=w260-h183-n-rw
Found on the internet.
A commenter on the original thread still didn't believe it, so a certain Bio Hazard made this very nice image to demonstrate that it's really true : https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/xQEAOk3IT1srGbUDYFqPcb2EQN9p79u4H4Dd0KaW7UlvgrrekjdsAKI027osCoeceRL7eGpVQA=w260-h183-n-rw
A history of logic
Pretty sure I've shared this before, but heck it can have another one because it's good.
Descartes hits the nail on the head when he claims that the logic of the Schools (scholastic logic) is not really a logic of discovery. Its chief purpose is justification and exposition, which makes sense particularly against the background of dialectical practices, where interlocutors explain and debate what they themselves already know. Indeed, for much of the history of logic, both in ancient Greece and in the Latin medieval tradition, ‘dialectic’ and ‘logic’ were taken to be synonymous.
A disputation starts with a statement, and then goes on to examine arguments in favour and against the statement. It is essentially a dialogical practice in that it features two parties disagreeing on a given statement and producing arguments to defend their respective positions, even if both roles can be played by one and the same person. The goal might be simply that of convincing your interlocutor or the audience, but the implication is typically that something deeper is achieved, such as coming closer to truth on the matter in question by means of examining it from many different angles.
Plato goes on about this at some length, holding that writing is only a device for reminding rather than learning. You can't argue back to a piece of text, you can never know what its author really thought or if you could convince them they were wrong. Only through sincere dialogue, said Plato, could you really get at anything approaching the truth. Of course this doesn't mean you can't get useful information from written texts, but there is an experience to an interactive debate that cannot be fully replicated.
It is also not happenstance that the downfall of the disputational culture roughly coincided with the introduction of new printing techniques in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg, around 1440. Before that, books were a rare commodity, and education was conducted almost exclusively by means of oral contact between masters and pupils in the form of expository lectures in which textbooks were read out loud, disputations of various kinds, examinations. By the time of Descartes roughly two centuries later, the idea that a person could educate themselves on their own by means of books (which would have been virtually unthinkable before the wide availability of printed books) was well-established.
To return to Bocheński’s characterisation of the three grand periods in the history of logic, two of them, the ancient period and the medieval scholastic period, were closely connected to the idea that the primary application of logic is for practices of debating such as dialectical disputations. The third of them, in contrast, exemplifies an entirely different rationale for logic, namely as a foundational branch of mathematics, not in any way connected to the ordinary languages in which debates are typically conducted... The history of logic also leads us to question the overly individualistic conception of knowledge and of our cognitive lives that we inherited from Descartes and others, and perhaps to move towards a greater appreciation for the essentially social nature of human cognition.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-logic
Descartes hits the nail on the head when he claims that the logic of the Schools (scholastic logic) is not really a logic of discovery. Its chief purpose is justification and exposition, which makes sense particularly against the background of dialectical practices, where interlocutors explain and debate what they themselves already know. Indeed, for much of the history of logic, both in ancient Greece and in the Latin medieval tradition, ‘dialectic’ and ‘logic’ were taken to be synonymous.
A disputation starts with a statement, and then goes on to examine arguments in favour and against the statement. It is essentially a dialogical practice in that it features two parties disagreeing on a given statement and producing arguments to defend their respective positions, even if both roles can be played by one and the same person. The goal might be simply that of convincing your interlocutor or the audience, but the implication is typically that something deeper is achieved, such as coming closer to truth on the matter in question by means of examining it from many different angles.
Plato goes on about this at some length, holding that writing is only a device for reminding rather than learning. You can't argue back to a piece of text, you can never know what its author really thought or if you could convince them they were wrong. Only through sincere dialogue, said Plato, could you really get at anything approaching the truth. Of course this doesn't mean you can't get useful information from written texts, but there is an experience to an interactive debate that cannot be fully replicated.
It is also not happenstance that the downfall of the disputational culture roughly coincided with the introduction of new printing techniques in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg, around 1440. Before that, books were a rare commodity, and education was conducted almost exclusively by means of oral contact between masters and pupils in the form of expository lectures in which textbooks were read out loud, disputations of various kinds, examinations. By the time of Descartes roughly two centuries later, the idea that a person could educate themselves on their own by means of books (which would have been virtually unthinkable before the wide availability of printed books) was well-established.
To return to Bocheński’s characterisation of the three grand periods in the history of logic, two of them, the ancient period and the medieval scholastic period, were closely connected to the idea that the primary application of logic is for practices of debating such as dialectical disputations. The third of them, in contrast, exemplifies an entirely different rationale for logic, namely as a foundational branch of mathematics, not in any way connected to the ordinary languages in which debates are typically conducted... The history of logic also leads us to question the overly individualistic conception of knowledge and of our cognitive lives that we inherited from Descartes and others, and perhaps to move towards a greater appreciation for the essentially social nature of human cognition.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-logic
The different kinds of AI : turning data into conclusions
A nice overview presenting the differences between and importance of machine learning (where a computer learns new data, finds new trends, or otherwise acquires new factual information), intelligence augmentation (wherein computers are used to augment human intelligence by doing the more complex tasks for them, e.g. finding trends in large data sets, but don't choose those tasks for themselves), intelligence infrastructure (the network connecting all the flows of data from difference sources and the understanding of how they relate to each other), and of course true artificial intelligence in the classical sense (a machine that can genuinely think about and understand data and make/present choices based on its conclusions). All of these can have important consequences. The latter does not yet exist and probably won't anytime soon, but that doesn't negate the others.
The problem had to do not just with data analysis per se, but with what database researchers call “provenance” — broadly, where did data arise, what inferences were drawn from the data, and how relevant are those inferences to the present situation? While a trained human might be able to work all of this out on a case-by-case basis, the issue was that of designing a planetary-scale medical system that could do this without the need for such detailed human oversight.
I’m also a computer scientist, and it occurred to me that the principles needed to build planetary-scale inference-and-decision-making systems of this kind, blending computer science with statistics, and taking into account human utilities, were nowhere to be found in my education. And it occurred to me that the development of such principles — which will be needed not only in the medical domain but also in domains such as commerce, transportation and education — were at least as important as those of building AI systems that can dazzle us with their game-playing or sensorimotor skills.
...we might imagine living our lives in a “societal-scale medical system” that sets up data flows, and data-analysis flows, between doctors and devices positioned in and around human bodies, thereby able to aid human intelligence in making diagnoses and providing care. The system would incorporate information from cells in the body, DNA, blood tests, environment, population genetics and the vast scientific literature on drugs and treatments. It would not just focus on a single patient and a doctor, but on relationships among all humans — just as current medical testing allows experiments done on one set of humans (or animals) to be brought to bear in the care of other humans. It would help maintain notions of relevance, provenance and reliability, in the way that the current banking system focuses on such challenges in the domain of finance and payment. And, while one can foresee many problems arising such a system — involving privacy issues, liability issues, security issues, etc — these problems should properly be viewed as challenges, not show-stoppers.
I do have a quibble where the author discusses genuine AI though :
It is sometimes argued that the human-imitative AI aspiration subsumes IA and II aspirations, because a human-imitative AI system would not only be able to solve the classical problems of AI (as embodied, e.g., in the Turing test), but it would also be our best bet for solving IA and II problems. Such an argument has little historical precedent. Did civil engineering develop by envisaging the creation of an artificial carpenter or bricklayer? Should chemical engineering have been framed in terms of creating an artificial chemist?
Well, the historical argument seems relevant to me; different industries have different goals. Labour considerations aside, the idea of a bricklaying robot or robotic chemist seems like a very good idea to me* - just because those industries haven't proceeded with the view to creating a perfect AI doesn't mean others won't.
* Obviously, an artificial astronomer is just a ludicrous idea.
A related argument is that human intelligence is the only kind of intelligence that we know, and that we should aim to mimic it as a first step. But humans are in fact not very good at some kinds of reasoning — we have our lapses, biases and limitations. Moreover, critically, we did not evolve to perform the kinds of large-scale decision-making that modern II systems must face, nor to cope with the kinds of uncertainty that arise in II contexts. One could argue that an AI system would not only imitate human intelligence, but also “correct” it, and would also scale to arbitrarily large problems. But we are now in the realm of science fiction — such speculative arguments, while entertaining in the setting of fiction, should not be our principal strategy going forward in the face of the critical IA and II problems that are beginning to emerge. We need to solve IA and II problems on their own merits, not as a mere corollary to an human-imitative AI agenda.
I've always thought that the goal was a human-like intelligence only in the sense that it would have a capacity to understand and reason about the world, to actually think about things and not just correlate data. While I agree with this paragraph, I don't think it's (too) unreasonable to speculate about a machine that can process data, check the validity of the data, correct for any possible biases, and then form an emotionless conclusion with carefully-stated assumptions as a result. That's always been my interpretation of the goal of AI, rather than, or at least in addition to, forming one that's more similar to the madcap blob of goop that is the human brain. I full agree with the author that such a goal is a long way off, however.
https://medium.com/@mijordan3/artificial-intelligence-the-revolution-hasnt-happened-yet-5e1d5812e1e7
The problem had to do not just with data analysis per se, but with what database researchers call “provenance” — broadly, where did data arise, what inferences were drawn from the data, and how relevant are those inferences to the present situation? While a trained human might be able to work all of this out on a case-by-case basis, the issue was that of designing a planetary-scale medical system that could do this without the need for such detailed human oversight.
I’m also a computer scientist, and it occurred to me that the principles needed to build planetary-scale inference-and-decision-making systems of this kind, blending computer science with statistics, and taking into account human utilities, were nowhere to be found in my education. And it occurred to me that the development of such principles — which will be needed not only in the medical domain but also in domains such as commerce, transportation and education — were at least as important as those of building AI systems that can dazzle us with their game-playing or sensorimotor skills.
...we might imagine living our lives in a “societal-scale medical system” that sets up data flows, and data-analysis flows, between doctors and devices positioned in and around human bodies, thereby able to aid human intelligence in making diagnoses and providing care. The system would incorporate information from cells in the body, DNA, blood tests, environment, population genetics and the vast scientific literature on drugs and treatments. It would not just focus on a single patient and a doctor, but on relationships among all humans — just as current medical testing allows experiments done on one set of humans (or animals) to be brought to bear in the care of other humans. It would help maintain notions of relevance, provenance and reliability, in the way that the current banking system focuses on such challenges in the domain of finance and payment. And, while one can foresee many problems arising such a system — involving privacy issues, liability issues, security issues, etc — these problems should properly be viewed as challenges, not show-stoppers.
I do have a quibble where the author discusses genuine AI though :
It is sometimes argued that the human-imitative AI aspiration subsumes IA and II aspirations, because a human-imitative AI system would not only be able to solve the classical problems of AI (as embodied, e.g., in the Turing test), but it would also be our best bet for solving IA and II problems. Such an argument has little historical precedent. Did civil engineering develop by envisaging the creation of an artificial carpenter or bricklayer? Should chemical engineering have been framed in terms of creating an artificial chemist?
Well, the historical argument seems relevant to me; different industries have different goals. Labour considerations aside, the idea of a bricklaying robot or robotic chemist seems like a very good idea to me* - just because those industries haven't proceeded with the view to creating a perfect AI doesn't mean others won't.
* Obviously, an artificial astronomer is just a ludicrous idea.
A related argument is that human intelligence is the only kind of intelligence that we know, and that we should aim to mimic it as a first step. But humans are in fact not very good at some kinds of reasoning — we have our lapses, biases and limitations. Moreover, critically, we did not evolve to perform the kinds of large-scale decision-making that modern II systems must face, nor to cope with the kinds of uncertainty that arise in II contexts. One could argue that an AI system would not only imitate human intelligence, but also “correct” it, and would also scale to arbitrarily large problems. But we are now in the realm of science fiction — such speculative arguments, while entertaining in the setting of fiction, should not be our principal strategy going forward in the face of the critical IA and II problems that are beginning to emerge. We need to solve IA and II problems on their own merits, not as a mere corollary to an human-imitative AI agenda.
I've always thought that the goal was a human-like intelligence only in the sense that it would have a capacity to understand and reason about the world, to actually think about things and not just correlate data. While I agree with this paragraph, I don't think it's (too) unreasonable to speculate about a machine that can process data, check the validity of the data, correct for any possible biases, and then form an emotionless conclusion with carefully-stated assumptions as a result. That's always been my interpretation of the goal of AI, rather than, or at least in addition to, forming one that's more similar to the madcap blob of goop that is the human brain. I full agree with the author that such a goal is a long way off, however.
https://medium.com/@mijordan3/artificial-intelligence-the-revolution-hasnt-happened-yet-5e1d5812e1e7
Machine learning that predicts chaotic evolution
In a series of results reported in the journals Physical Review Letters and Chaos, scientists have used machine learning — the same computational technique behind recent successes in artificial intelligence — to predict the future evolution of chaotic systems out to stunningly distant horizons. The approach is being lauded by outside experts as groundbreaking and likely to find wide application.
The Lyapunov time represents how long it takes for two almost-identical states of a chaotic system to exponentially diverge. As such, it typically sets the horizon of predictability.
The algorithm knows nothing about the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation itself; it only sees data recorded about the evolving solution to the equation. This makes the machine-learning approach powerful; in many cases, the equations describing a chaotic system aren’t known, crippling dynamicists’ efforts to model and predict them. Ott and company’s results suggest you don’t need the equations — only data.
They employed a machine-learning algorithm called reservoir computing to “learn” the dynamics of an archetypal chaotic system called the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation. The evolving solution to this equation behaves like a flame front, flickering as it advances through a combustible medium. After training itself on data from the past evolution of the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, the researchers’ reservoir computer could then closely predict how the flamelike system would continue to evolve out to eight “Lyapunov times” into the future, eight times further ahead than previous methods allowed, loosely speaking.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/machine-learnings-amazing-ability-to-predict-chaos-20180418/
The Lyapunov time represents how long it takes for two almost-identical states of a chaotic system to exponentially diverge. As such, it typically sets the horizon of predictability.
The algorithm knows nothing about the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation itself; it only sees data recorded about the evolving solution to the equation. This makes the machine-learning approach powerful; in many cases, the equations describing a chaotic system aren’t known, crippling dynamicists’ efforts to model and predict them. Ott and company’s results suggest you don’t need the equations — only data.
They employed a machine-learning algorithm called reservoir computing to “learn” the dynamics of an archetypal chaotic system called the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation. The evolving solution to this equation behaves like a flame front, flickering as it advances through a combustible medium. After training itself on data from the past evolution of the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, the researchers’ reservoir computer could then closely predict how the flamelike system would continue to evolve out to eight “Lyapunov times” into the future, eight times further ahead than previous methods allowed, loosely speaking.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/machine-learnings-amazing-ability-to-predict-chaos-20180418/
Seven thought experiments
They don't make me question everything, but they are pretty intriguing.
Mary lives in a black and white room, reads black and white books, and uses screens that only display images in black and white to learn everything that has ever been discovered about colour vision in physics and biology. One day, her computer screen breaks and displays the colour red. For the first time, she sees colour. Question: Does she learn anything new?
If she does, then it shows that qualia, individual occurrences of subjective elements of experience, exist; as she had access to all possible information other than experience before she saw the colour but still learned something new. This has implications for what knowledge and mental states are. Because if she learns something new then mental states, like seeing colour, can’t be described entirely by physical facts. There would have to be more to it, something subjective and dependent on experience.
[My thoughts on this one here]
Imagine a donkey placed precisely between two identical bales of hay. The donkey has no free will, and always acts in the most rational manner. However, as both bales are equidistant from the donkey and offer the same nourishment, neither choice is better than the other. Question: How can it choose? Does it choose at all, or does it stand still until it starves?
If choices are made based on which action is the more rational one or on other environmental factors, the ass will starve to death trying to decide on which to eat- as both options are equally rational and indistinguishable from one another. If the ass does make a choice, then the facts of the matter couldn’t be all that determined the outcome, so some element of random chance or free will may have been involved.
I don't really see the problem if we strictly abide by the notion that the donkey has no free will. We might as well replace it with a computer algorithm that any makes a selection when something is different. If nothing is different, then by definition it cannot choose. The donkey analogy only seems more problematic because, quite obviously, real donkeys do have free will. Unless you're one of those people who don't believe in free will at all, in which case I guess you still have problems.
Alternatively, if the donkey always acts in the most rational matter, it will realise that there is nothing preventing it from choosing at random. Eating is the most rational course of action, therefore choosing randomly is the most sensible action.
Question: If you are obligated to save the life of a child in need, is there a fundamental difference between saving a child in front of you and one on the other side of the world? In The Life You Can Save, Singer argues that there is no moral difference between a child drowning in front of you and one starving in some far off land. The cost of the ruined shoes in the experiment is analogous to the cost of a donation, and if the value of the shoes is irrelevant than the price of charity is too. If you would save the nearby child, he reasons, you have to save the distant one too. He put his money where his mouth is, and started a program to help people donate to charities that do the most good.
There are counter-arguments of course. Most of them rely on the idea that a drowning child is in a different sort of situation than a child who is starving and that they require different solutions which impose different obligations.
I prefer Terry Pratchett's philosophy : at least start by doing the good that's in front of you. But if we reduce it down the extreme, then no, I don't think you're obligated to spend all your resources and all your energy on being as selfless as possible. That will only lead to your rapid demise anyway, but more fundamentally, you're not obligated to organise your entire life in order to maximise the good that you do in the world. That too is unhealthy and counter-productive.
http://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/seven-thought-experiments-thatll-make-you-question-everything
Mary lives in a black and white room, reads black and white books, and uses screens that only display images in black and white to learn everything that has ever been discovered about colour vision in physics and biology. One day, her computer screen breaks and displays the colour red. For the first time, she sees colour. Question: Does she learn anything new?
If she does, then it shows that qualia, individual occurrences of subjective elements of experience, exist; as she had access to all possible information other than experience before she saw the colour but still learned something new. This has implications for what knowledge and mental states are. Because if she learns something new then mental states, like seeing colour, can’t be described entirely by physical facts. There would have to be more to it, something subjective and dependent on experience.
[My thoughts on this one here]
Imagine a donkey placed precisely between two identical bales of hay. The donkey has no free will, and always acts in the most rational manner. However, as both bales are equidistant from the donkey and offer the same nourishment, neither choice is better than the other. Question: How can it choose? Does it choose at all, or does it stand still until it starves?
If choices are made based on which action is the more rational one or on other environmental factors, the ass will starve to death trying to decide on which to eat- as both options are equally rational and indistinguishable from one another. If the ass does make a choice, then the facts of the matter couldn’t be all that determined the outcome, so some element of random chance or free will may have been involved.
I don't really see the problem if we strictly abide by the notion that the donkey has no free will. We might as well replace it with a computer algorithm that any makes a selection when something is different. If nothing is different, then by definition it cannot choose. The donkey analogy only seems more problematic because, quite obviously, real donkeys do have free will. Unless you're one of those people who don't believe in free will at all, in which case I guess you still have problems.
Alternatively, if the donkey always acts in the most rational matter, it will realise that there is nothing preventing it from choosing at random. Eating is the most rational course of action, therefore choosing randomly is the most sensible action.
Question: If you are obligated to save the life of a child in need, is there a fundamental difference between saving a child in front of you and one on the other side of the world? In The Life You Can Save, Singer argues that there is no moral difference between a child drowning in front of you and one starving in some far off land. The cost of the ruined shoes in the experiment is analogous to the cost of a donation, and if the value of the shoes is irrelevant than the price of charity is too. If you would save the nearby child, he reasons, you have to save the distant one too. He put his money where his mouth is, and started a program to help people donate to charities that do the most good.
There are counter-arguments of course. Most of them rely on the idea that a drowning child is in a different sort of situation than a child who is starving and that they require different solutions which impose different obligations.
I prefer Terry Pratchett's philosophy : at least start by doing the good that's in front of you. But if we reduce it down the extreme, then no, I don't think you're obligated to spend all your resources and all your energy on being as selfless as possible. That will only lead to your rapid demise anyway, but more fundamentally, you're not obligated to organise your entire life in order to maximise the good that you do in the world. That too is unhealthy and counter-productive.
http://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/seven-thought-experiments-thatll-make-you-question-everything
Does everyone need a job ?
Related :
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2015/06/the-time-machine-again-ii.html
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2015/06/the-time-machine-again-iii.html
He gives an example of how our desire to have everybody work full time hurts us. He asks us to imagine that two large factories make pins. These two plants produce all the pins the world needs and employ many people. However, one day an invention comes along that doubles production rates. Russell suggests that:
"In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?"
http://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/does-everyone-really-need-a-job-why-we-should-question-full-employment
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2015/06/the-time-machine-again-ii.html
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2015/06/the-time-machine-again-iii.html
He gives an example of how our desire to have everybody work full time hurts us. He asks us to imagine that two large factories make pins. These two plants produce all the pins the world needs and employ many people. However, one day an invention comes along that doubles production rates. Russell suggests that:
"In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?"
http://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/does-everyone-really-need-a-job-why-we-should-question-full-employment
People who think they know the answer are worse at confirmation bias
People doing badly at self-examination is nothing new, but this little snippet intrigued me :
Belief-superior people were significantly more likely than their modest peers to choose information that supported their beliefs. Furthermore, they were aware that they were seeking out biased information: when the researchers asked them what type of articles they had chosen, they readily admitted their bias for articles that supported their own beliefs.
"We thought that if belief-superior people showed a tendency to seek out a balanced set of information, they might be able to claim that they arrived at their belief superiority through reasoned, critical thinking about both sides of the issue," Hall says. Instead, researchers found that these individuals strongly preferred information that supported their views, indicating that they were probably missing out on opportunities to improve their knowledge.
"Having your beliefs validated feels good, whereas having your beliefs challenged creates discomfort, and this discomfort generally increases when your beliefs are strongly held and important to you," says study coauthor Kaitlin Raimi, assistant professor of public policy.
It's nothing revolutionary, but it's nice to try and quantify the correlation between poor self-evaluation and poor self-selection of information sources. Plato's wise woman again : "If you don't think you need anything, of course you won't want what you don't think you need." Those are are worse at self-evaluation are also worse at challenging their own viewpoints. Maybe the underling variable is curiosity (as has been suggested elsewhere but I don't have time to go link hunting right now), sheer stupidity, or a combination of both.
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-tested-how-much-know-it-alls-actually-know-and-the-results-speak-for-themselves
Belief-superior people were significantly more likely than their modest peers to choose information that supported their beliefs. Furthermore, they were aware that they were seeking out biased information: when the researchers asked them what type of articles they had chosen, they readily admitted their bias for articles that supported their own beliefs.
"We thought that if belief-superior people showed a tendency to seek out a balanced set of information, they might be able to claim that they arrived at their belief superiority through reasoned, critical thinking about both sides of the issue," Hall says. Instead, researchers found that these individuals strongly preferred information that supported their views, indicating that they were probably missing out on opportunities to improve their knowledge.
"Having your beliefs validated feels good, whereas having your beliefs challenged creates discomfort, and this discomfort generally increases when your beliefs are strongly held and important to you," says study coauthor Kaitlin Raimi, assistant professor of public policy.
It's nothing revolutionary, but it's nice to try and quantify the correlation between poor self-evaluation and poor self-selection of information sources. Plato's wise woman again : "If you don't think you need anything, of course you won't want what you don't think you need." Those are are worse at self-evaluation are also worse at challenging their own viewpoints. Maybe the underling variable is curiosity (as has been suggested elsewhere but I don't have time to go link hunting right now), sheer stupidity, or a combination of both.
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-tested-how-much-know-it-alls-actually-know-and-the-results-speak-for-themselves
The concept of east is a liberal hoax
Pretty sure if I worked for 6 months w/an alt account I could get Fox News consumers to believe the concept of ‘east’ is a liberal hoax.
Like, literally, the other three points of the compass are real but east isn’t. Oh, you’ve travelled east? How interesting. Please provide proof. Just honestly curious.
Here are 48 consecutive articles from newstruth.factprank.ru showing that what you call ‘east’ is just a combination of north and south. Oh, so SCIENCE says there’s an East. Convenient for them. Follow the money. Of *course* GPS works on 3 points of the compass. What do you think 3G coverage on your data plan is? Lol.
Here I am spending $14k to fly West from Des Moines to Chicago to trigger the libs.
If China is the ‘Far East’ why is it WEST of us? How interesting. I’ll wait.
And so it continues, with increasing hilarity.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/926964599299198976.html
Like, literally, the other three points of the compass are real but east isn’t. Oh, you’ve travelled east? How interesting. Please provide proof. Just honestly curious.
Here are 48 consecutive articles from newstruth.factprank.ru showing that what you call ‘east’ is just a combination of north and south. Oh, so SCIENCE says there’s an East. Convenient for them. Follow the money. Of *course* GPS works on 3 points of the compass. What do you think 3G coverage on your data plan is? Lol.
Here I am spending $14k to fly West from Des Moines to Chicago to trigger the libs.
If China is the ‘Far East’ why is it WEST of us? How interesting. I’ll wait.
And so it continues, with increasing hilarity.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/926964599299198976.html
A giant jet-propelled helicopter for catching rockets was once a real idea
I do love a good dose of sheer, semi-mindless audacity.
But back in 1965 the company made a proposal so bold that it bordered on insane: a giant helicopter with a rotor diameter bigger than the length of a football field, capable not merely of transporting a Saturn 5 first stage, but of actually catching it in midair as it fell on a parachute. Strike that—it did not border on insane, it was insane. But those were heady days in the mid-1960s, a time when NASA was getting nearly five percent of the federal budget—ten times more than today—and when the agency was doling out study contracts for everything from nuclear rockets to ion engines to 100-man space stations. The United States was kicking the Soviets’ asses in space. There was nothing we couldn’t do. So why should a small helicopter company that had never gained a major contract, or built a helicopter capable of carrying more than six people, think small?
It would be a monster. The rotor diameter would be over 120 meters (400 feet). Empty weight would be over 200,000 kilograms (450,000 pounds), with a useful load of nearly 250,000 kilograms (550,000 pounds)—for a gross weight of a whopping 453,000 kilograms (1,000,000 pounds).
Oh, and did we mention that this would not be any old helicopter? No, it would utilize a concept that Hiller had worked on for years and tried unsuccessfully to sell to the Army: the rotor-tip-powered lifting system. This involved putting a jet engine, or more likely two jet engines, on the tip of each of the three rotors—six jet engines in all, plus a seventh in the rear fuselage to power the tail rotor. The rotors would not have to turn very fast by helicopter standards, only about once per second. But even that would result in the advancing rotor tip approaching the speed of sound. Not only would it be big, it would be noisy. A mighty roar from a mighty monster chopper.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1045/1
But back in 1965 the company made a proposal so bold that it bordered on insane: a giant helicopter with a rotor diameter bigger than the length of a football field, capable not merely of transporting a Saturn 5 first stage, but of actually catching it in midair as it fell on a parachute. Strike that—it did not border on insane, it was insane. But those were heady days in the mid-1960s, a time when NASA was getting nearly five percent of the federal budget—ten times more than today—and when the agency was doling out study contracts for everything from nuclear rockets to ion engines to 100-man space stations. The United States was kicking the Soviets’ asses in space. There was nothing we couldn’t do. So why should a small helicopter company that had never gained a major contract, or built a helicopter capable of carrying more than six people, think small?
It would be a monster. The rotor diameter would be over 120 meters (400 feet). Empty weight would be over 200,000 kilograms (450,000 pounds), with a useful load of nearly 250,000 kilograms (550,000 pounds)—for a gross weight of a whopping 453,000 kilograms (1,000,000 pounds).
Oh, and did we mention that this would not be any old helicopter? No, it would utilize a concept that Hiller had worked on for years and tried unsuccessfully to sell to the Army: the rotor-tip-powered lifting system. This involved putting a jet engine, or more likely two jet engines, on the tip of each of the three rotors—six jet engines in all, plus a seventh in the rear fuselage to power the tail rotor. The rotors would not have to turn very fast by helicopter standards, only about once per second. But even that would result in the advancing rotor tip approaching the speed of sound. Not only would it be big, it would be noisy. A mighty roar from a mighty monster chopper.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1045/1
The fish with a knife on its face
Unexpectedly, Smith discovered that his pet essentially possessed a switchblade on its face. The weapon is known as a lachrymal saber: “lachrymal” meaning “concerned with tears” and referring to the armament’s placement on each cheek below the eye. And saber, well, it pretty much speaks for itself.
The weapon is usually tucked alongside their face, but when danger looms a series of muscles and ligaments whip the wicked blade into action. The lachrymal saber can ratchet to different angles depending on the situation, in addition to locking all the way in or out. This switchblade is likely defensive — in pictures of stonefish in the mouths of predators, the lachrymal saber is always locked out, Smith said. “As far as I can tell, the saber itself or its surrounding tissue are not venomous,” he added.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2018/04/13/stonefish-switchblade-lachrymal-saber/
The weapon is usually tucked alongside their face, but when danger looms a series of muscles and ligaments whip the wicked blade into action. The lachrymal saber can ratchet to different angles depending on the situation, in addition to locking all the way in or out. This switchblade is likely defensive — in pictures of stonefish in the mouths of predators, the lachrymal saber is always locked out, Smith said. “As far as I can tell, the saber itself or its surrounding tissue are not venomous,” he added.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2018/04/13/stonefish-switchblade-lachrymal-saber/
Thursday, 19 April 2018
Resurrecting the UK's rocket research centre
Just like the World War Two codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park, some 24km (15 miles) to the north east, the Westcott site seems heavy with a brooding atmosphere – one you could almost cut with a knife. "This was the UK's main rocket development site during the Cold War, with all sorts of important programmes centred here. But as time passed things fell away," says Millard.
It's changing for the better now, however. "There is certainly a certain Cold War ambience here but with the new rocketry activities now taking place here there is a new sense of energy, the place is taking on a fresher character," says Jubb. "The atmosphere is getting back to what it once was, with regular rocket firings taking place," he says.
Falcon Project makes research rockets and specialist fuels for the UK and US militaries but is perhaps best known for prototyping a hybrid rocket motor for the Bloodhound Supersonic Car, which is being built in the hope of setting a 1,000mph (1,600km/h) land speed record on a South African lake bed sometime in the next couple of years.
The firm is just one of those in a surprising British rocketry renaissance, in which a clutch of rocket firms are setting up in business at Westcott to try and put British rocket engineering back on the map after many decades of decline. These pioneering companies include Reaction Engines. It will be testing Sabre, its revolutionary air-breathing rocket engine for future spaceplanes, plus the "precooler" that lets it scavenge liquid oxygen from the air as it powers through the atmosphere.
Also on the site is rocket motor manufacturer Moog UK, whose Leros 1b engine powered Nasa's Juno space probe into orbit around Jupiter last year – using a new motor technology which Moog has also seen flown on Nasa Mars and Mercury probes.
The testing site is also home to a rocket and propulsion test services company, Airborne Engineering, some of whose facilities are set to be seriously upgraded as part of an £8m investment in Westcott by the UK Space Agency. They’re hoping it will spark a new British space race – especially with the Space Act now in force, allowing commercial spaceports to launch rockets and spaceplanes from British soil as soon as 2020.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180418-the-return-of-a-secret-british-rocket-site
It's changing for the better now, however. "There is certainly a certain Cold War ambience here but with the new rocketry activities now taking place here there is a new sense of energy, the place is taking on a fresher character," says Jubb. "The atmosphere is getting back to what it once was, with regular rocket firings taking place," he says.
Falcon Project makes research rockets and specialist fuels for the UK and US militaries but is perhaps best known for prototyping a hybrid rocket motor for the Bloodhound Supersonic Car, which is being built in the hope of setting a 1,000mph (1,600km/h) land speed record on a South African lake bed sometime in the next couple of years.
The firm is just one of those in a surprising British rocketry renaissance, in which a clutch of rocket firms are setting up in business at Westcott to try and put British rocket engineering back on the map after many decades of decline. These pioneering companies include Reaction Engines. It will be testing Sabre, its revolutionary air-breathing rocket engine for future spaceplanes, plus the "precooler" that lets it scavenge liquid oxygen from the air as it powers through the atmosphere.
Also on the site is rocket motor manufacturer Moog UK, whose Leros 1b engine powered Nasa's Juno space probe into orbit around Jupiter last year – using a new motor technology which Moog has also seen flown on Nasa Mars and Mercury probes.
The testing site is also home to a rocket and propulsion test services company, Airborne Engineering, some of whose facilities are set to be seriously upgraded as part of an £8m investment in Westcott by the UK Space Agency. They’re hoping it will spark a new British space race – especially with the Space Act now in force, allowing commercial spaceports to launch rockets and spaceplanes from British soil as soon as 2020.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180418-the-return-of-a-secret-british-rocket-site
Plato on education as improvement or discovery
Building Better Worlds, part 3/3
Final part in my extremely long trilogy on Plato's fictional demi-paradise of Magnesia. I examine Magnesian culture and daily life in much more detail than in the other posts, looking at what the citizens are supposed to enjoy doing rather than what crimes they should be punished for. I also try and look at what we can still learn from Laws today, both from its failures and successes. Which, if I'm doing it right, ought to annoy a lot of people.
While I cover just about everything to some degree, including gender equality, meritocracy, the importance and subtleties of excessive wealth and poverty (Did Plato believe in an UBI ? Sort of but not really; Did he hate the very rich ? Yes but with some extremely important caveats), and the need for everyone over 30 to get drunk regularly (damn straight), I concentrate mainly of the two key themes of freedom and education. How is it that a man who devotes himself to exploring complex and controversial issues should propose a state based on extensive censorship ?
The answer, I suggest, lies in earlier dialogues where Plato considers education. Clearly it's possible to change people's opinions and beliefs, and maybe it's even possible to make them morally better. But in terms of raw abilities, it's vital to understand if education is just a good way of finding who's innately good at learning what, or if it actually does bestow new, fundamental abilities such as wisdom and critical thinking.
For a variety of (not implausible) reasons, Plato seems to have decided it's the former - and his resulting conclusions are therefore not as ironic or hypocritical as they appear. If people cannot be changed by education, and only a small fraction have the combination of skills and virtue necessary for good leadership, then giving everyone an equal say in how things are run makes absolutely no dang sense at all. Plato recognises that they must, however, be given some genuine say in political affairs - and institutes something not too dissimilar to a representative democracy as a result. Had he concluded that education does in fact change people, then a more direct democratic system would be more sensible. But since you can - simplifying - only find philosophers rather than make them, his proposed system allows people to make real choices but attempts to limit the damage they can do. Equally, power among the governing is divided (imperfectly in some ways, but in others to a greater degree than in modern Western countries) to prevent tyranny. Plato seems to see despotism and populist mob rule as equal vices, and in this I think he may be on to something. Any system of government needs to account for both the potential malevolence of the elite and the stupidity of the masses : failing to do so on either count leads to disaster.
The problem with rule by the masses seems to be one of stupidity : they lack the skills necessary to govern, but cannot bring themselves to admit it. Presently the tide of evidence is waxing towards the conclusion that people are indeed extremely vulnerable to various forms of manipulation; doubtless a better education system could be constructed, but the magnitude of the stupidity of the choices of the masses beggars belief. When a world leader habitually talks in word salad, it becomes very difficult indeed to give his electorate much intellectual credit - the finer details of critical thinking do need to be taught, but the absolute basics ought to be obvious just from living in the world. The majority of people are perhaps not innately unethical, but their susceptibility to manipulation leads them to immoral beliefs and ignoble acts.
And on the other side, the problem of the elites is not their intelligence, but their virtue. Experts do indeed make the best liars, as Plato said, and the ruling elites hardly seem to have the interests of the masses at heart. Rather they seem determined to keep the mob down, to provide them with enough to subsist and service their so-called superiors but not enough to ever improve themselves. They seek, not always successfully, the fawning stupidity of the great unwashed, realising that their goals are achievable not by the impossibility of fooling all of the people all of the time but by the far easier method of fooling most of the people most of the time. Their success ends on those occasions when the masses, always rendered sufficiently but not entirely idiotic, find a populist candidate able to persuade them of the misdeeds of their rulers. And now the trap shuts : a bunch of credulous morons, long kept ignorant by a corrupt elite, suddenly believe themselves capable of acts of which they have not the slightest apprehension.
Also I look at how Plato would have reacted to the Lego movie theme song, because why not.
Final part in my extremely long trilogy on Plato's fictional demi-paradise of Magnesia. I examine Magnesian culture and daily life in much more detail than in the other posts, looking at what the citizens are supposed to enjoy doing rather than what crimes they should be punished for. I also try and look at what we can still learn from Laws today, both from its failures and successes. Which, if I'm doing it right, ought to annoy a lot of people.
While I cover just about everything to some degree, including gender equality, meritocracy, the importance and subtleties of excessive wealth and poverty (Did Plato believe in an UBI ? Sort of but not really; Did he hate the very rich ? Yes but with some extremely important caveats), and the need for everyone over 30 to get drunk regularly (damn straight), I concentrate mainly of the two key themes of freedom and education. How is it that a man who devotes himself to exploring complex and controversial issues should propose a state based on extensive censorship ?
The answer, I suggest, lies in earlier dialogues where Plato considers education. Clearly it's possible to change people's opinions and beliefs, and maybe it's even possible to make them morally better. But in terms of raw abilities, it's vital to understand if education is just a good way of finding who's innately good at learning what, or if it actually does bestow new, fundamental abilities such as wisdom and critical thinking.
For a variety of (not implausible) reasons, Plato seems to have decided it's the former - and his resulting conclusions are therefore not as ironic or hypocritical as they appear. If people cannot be changed by education, and only a small fraction have the combination of skills and virtue necessary for good leadership, then giving everyone an equal say in how things are run makes absolutely no dang sense at all. Plato recognises that they must, however, be given some genuine say in political affairs - and institutes something not too dissimilar to a representative democracy as a result. Had he concluded that education does in fact change people, then a more direct democratic system would be more sensible. But since you can - simplifying - only find philosophers rather than make them, his proposed system allows people to make real choices but attempts to limit the damage they can do. Equally, power among the governing is divided (imperfectly in some ways, but in others to a greater degree than in modern Western countries) to prevent tyranny. Plato seems to see despotism and populist mob rule as equal vices, and in this I think he may be on to something. Any system of government needs to account for both the potential malevolence of the elite and the stupidity of the masses : failing to do so on either count leads to disaster.
The problem with rule by the masses seems to be one of stupidity : they lack the skills necessary to govern, but cannot bring themselves to admit it. Presently the tide of evidence is waxing towards the conclusion that people are indeed extremely vulnerable to various forms of manipulation; doubtless a better education system could be constructed, but the magnitude of the stupidity of the choices of the masses beggars belief. When a world leader habitually talks in word salad, it becomes very difficult indeed to give his electorate much intellectual credit - the finer details of critical thinking do need to be taught, but the absolute basics ought to be obvious just from living in the world. The majority of people are perhaps not innately unethical, but their susceptibility to manipulation leads them to immoral beliefs and ignoble acts.
And on the other side, the problem of the elites is not their intelligence, but their virtue. Experts do indeed make the best liars, as Plato said, and the ruling elites hardly seem to have the interests of the masses at heart. Rather they seem determined to keep the mob down, to provide them with enough to subsist and service their so-called superiors but not enough to ever improve themselves. They seek, not always successfully, the fawning stupidity of the great unwashed, realising that their goals are achievable not by the impossibility of fooling all of the people all of the time but by the far easier method of fooling most of the people most of the time. Their success ends on those occasions when the masses, always rendered sufficiently but not entirely idiotic, find a populist candidate able to persuade them of the misdeeds of their rulers. And now the trap shuts : a bunch of credulous morons, long kept ignorant by a corrupt elite, suddenly believe themselves capable of acts of which they have not the slightest apprehension.
Also I look at how Plato would have reacted to the Lego movie theme song, because why not.
Well, umm, errr.... yes ?
Originally shared by Event Horizon
Thomas the Tank Engine, Vanquisher of Civilisations, after being upgraded by the Cybermen. On a distant planet somewhere, Ringo Starr silently weeps...
Thomas the Tank Engine, Vanquisher of Civilisations, after being upgraded by the Cybermen. On a distant planet somewhere, Ringo Starr silently weeps...
Castle closed due to very angry badger
It’s a 16th-century Scottish fortress which once thrived amid war, attack and treason, but now parts of Craignethan Castle have been abandoned because of a somewhat different invader – a “very angry badger”.
Historic Scotland was forced to shut tunnels which are popular with the public after staff discovered the unexpected guest. “If you’re heading to #CraignethanCastle over the next few days you might find the Cellar Tunnel closed due to the presence of a very angry badger,” the heritage organisation tweeted. “We’re trying to entice it out with cat food and send it home.”
It did not elaborate on why the badger was angry, but it is thought the animal may live in surrounding woodland and became lost.
[I blame it on Brexit.]
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/very-angry-badger-craignethan-castle-scotland-part-closure-a8303811.html
Historic Scotland was forced to shut tunnels which are popular with the public after staff discovered the unexpected guest. “If you’re heading to #CraignethanCastle over the next few days you might find the Cellar Tunnel closed due to the presence of a very angry badger,” the heritage organisation tweeted. “We’re trying to entice it out with cat food and send it home.”
It did not elaborate on why the badger was angry, but it is thought the animal may live in surrounding woodland and became lost.
[I blame it on Brexit.]
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/very-angry-badger-craignethan-castle-scotland-part-closure-a8303811.html
Wednesday, 18 April 2018
Taking a TIE-fighter to work
I can't help but think : 1) This is very cool indeed; 2) If it had just been a little bit bigger, it would have been much more comfortable; 3) That sounds an awful lot like the theme from Dune, only not quite; 4) That's very cool indeed.
Swapping ion engines for an electric drivetrain, Nova Scotia’s Allan Carver built a battery-powered replica of a TIE Fighter that can hit a top speed of six miles per hour when piloted using an RC remote. But at roughly one-third the size of the movie version, the ship is also big enough to accommodate a pilot on board.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/you-can-actually-ride-inside-this-magnificent-remote-co-1825317046
Swapping ion engines for an electric drivetrain, Nova Scotia’s Allan Carver built a battery-powered replica of a TIE Fighter that can hit a top speed of six miles per hour when piloted using an RC remote. But at roughly one-third the size of the movie version, the ship is also big enough to accommodate a pilot on board.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/you-can-actually-ride-inside-this-magnificent-remote-co-1825317046
The only good Brexit is no Brexit
All forms of Brexit are hugely expensive :
Each of the government’s four Brexit scenarios, including a bespoke deal, would leave Britain poorer and cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds each week, analysis has shown. The study for the thinktank Global Future by Jonathan Portes, a professor of economics and public policy at King’s College, London, found that a bespoke deal, the government’s preferred option, would have a net negative fiscal impact of about £40bn a year.
Under the so-called Norway option, there would be £262m less a week, under the Canada model it would be £877m, while under a no deal it would be £1.25bn. This would mean 22% less funding available for the NHS if there was a bespoke deal, and 9%, 31% and 44% less under each of the other options.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/apr/18/each-brexit-scenario-will-leave-britain-worse-off-study-finds
Each of the government’s four Brexit scenarios, including a bespoke deal, would leave Britain poorer and cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds each week, analysis has shown. The study for the thinktank Global Future by Jonathan Portes, a professor of economics and public policy at King’s College, London, found that a bespoke deal, the government’s preferred option, would have a net negative fiscal impact of about £40bn a year.
Under the so-called Norway option, there would be £262m less a week, under the Canada model it would be £877m, while under a no deal it would be £1.25bn. This would mean 22% less funding available for the NHS if there was a bespoke deal, and 9%, 31% and 44% less under each of the other options.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/apr/18/each-brexit-scenario-will-leave-britain-worse-off-study-finds
How to make someone believe they committed a crime that never happened
Never ever EVER trust a psychologist !
Following up on that Scientific American blog that repressed memories don't exist. I was much more interested in the related claim about inducing false memories than the dodgy nature of memory retrieval, and my code is running very slowly, so I did some digging. This is one of those nice cases where the paper is more interesting than the press release.
"Our findings show that false memories of committing crime with police contact can be surprisingly easy to generate, and can have all the same kinds of complex details as real memories," says psychological scientist and lead researcher Julia Shaw of the University of Bedfordshire in the UK. "All participants need to generate a richly detailed false memory is 3 hours in a friendly interview environment, where the interviewer introduces a few wrong details and uses poor memory-retrieval techniques."
Emphasis on "same kinds", as in the paper itself they show that true memories tend to be more vivid and detailed than false ones. How do you go about inducing false memories ? The researchers used a variety of techniques. They don't try and identify which one (if any) is the most important as that's beyond the scope of the study. What they did was as follows, from the press release :
Shaw and co-author Stephen Porter of the University of British Columbia in Canada obtained permission to contact the primary caregivers of university students participating in the study. The caregivers were asked to fill out a questionnaire about specific events the students might have experienced from ages 11 to 14, providing as much detail as possible. The caregivers were instructed not to discuss the questions with the student.
The researchers identified a total of 60 students who had not been involved in any of the crimes designated as false memory targets in the study and who otherwise met the study criteria. These students were brought to the lab for three 40-minute interviews that took place about a week apart. In the first interview, the researcher told the student about two events he or she [the student] had experienced as a teen, only one of which actually happened. [This was either a crime or another emotional event - anxiety seems to be important, though they didn't examine less emotional events]
Importantly, the false event stories included some true details about that time in the student's life, taken from the caregiver questionnaire. Participants were asked to explain what happened in each of the two events. When they had difficulty explaining the false event, the interviewer encouraged them to try anyway, explaining that if they used specific memory strategies they might be able to recall more details.
But there are more subtleties to this, which the paper describes very well. The interviewer (always the same person, and they even tried to make sure the word count of each interview was similar !) was " a senior Ph.D. student who was well trained in police interview tactics and is extroverted — a personality characteristic that has been demonstrated to be related to high success rates for generating false memories." One paragraph from the paper deserves to be quoted in full (omitting only references and splitting this for readability ) :
The strategies that were employed throughout all interviews in this study were based on literature regarding factors that facilitate the generation of false confessions. The tactics that were scripted into all three interviews included incontrovertible false evidence (“In the questionnaire, your parents/ caregivers said. . .”), social pressure (“Most people are able to retrieve lost memories if they try hard enough”), and suggestive retrieval techniques (including the scripted guided imagery)... Incorporating true details into the false-memory account — especially the caregiver-provided details regarding the city the participant lived in and the name of a friend the participant had at the time of the alleged event — likely constituted a personalised manipulation in our study.
Other tactics that were consistently applied included building rapport with participants (e.g., asking “How has your semester been?” when they entered the lab), using facilitators (e.g., “Good,” nodding, smiling), using pauses and silence to allow participants to respond (longer pauses seemed to often result in participants providing additional details to cut the silence), and using the open-ended prompt “what else?” when probing for additional memory details. We also used the tactic of presumed additional knowledge if participants asked about the accuracy of details. In other words, participants were told that the interviewer had very detailed information about the event from their caregiver but was able only to vaguely confirm details (e.g., “this sounds like what your parents described,” “I can’t give you more details because they have to come from you”).
Further, when participants reported that they could not recall the false memory, the interviewer seemed disappointed but sympathetic (while saying the scripted line “That’s ok. Many people can’t recall certain events at first because they haven’t thought about them for such a long time.”) and scribbled down a note on her clipboard. Finally, the interview office had a bookshelf intentionally filled with very visible books on memory and memory retrieval to help increase the interviewer’s credibility as a memory researcher.
Also, importantly, the techniques extend beyond the interviews themselves, so that quoted 3 hours is a bit misleading :
The fact that no participants immediately [at the first interview] recalled the false event helped rule out the possibility that participants had actually experienced such an event... When participants had difficulty recalling the false event, the interviewer encouraged them to try to remember it, and (falsely) told them that most people can remember these kinds of memories if they try hard enough... they were asked to use context reinstatement and guided imagery to retrieve the memory. They also were told to practice visualization of the false event each night at home. These methods have been shown to effectively generate details that form the foundations of false memories.
Later on they speculate that false memories are easier to generate if they have "explanatory coherence" :
In other words, imagined memory elements regarding what something could have been like can turn into elements of what it would have been like, which can become elements of what it was like... it is possible that participants increasingly tried to make sense of the introduced false events by spinning explanatory frameworks around what they thought could have happened.
And it's also important forvictims participants to use their own imaginations, Inception apparently getting that one right :
Imagination exercises such as this one have been repeatedly associated with the generation of false memories... The relevance of imagination for false memories may be partially explained by the source-monitoring framework, which refers to people’s tendency to confuse imagination with reality. Individuals who are recalling details from a visualization exercise or experimenter misinformation can forget the source of their ideas and may think they are recalling details from a genuine experience.
When analysing the results that students (about 70% success rate !) apparently believe in the induced memories, they make an interesting distinction between false memories and false false memories, i.e. the students might be deceiving themselves (or just the researchers) about the false memories :
It has been argued that false beliefs are qualitatively different from false memories... Participants who provided 10 or more details of the false event but did not claim at the debriefing that they had believed the event actually happened were classified as compliant; they could be seen as having simply acquiesced to the situational demands. Participants who provided fewer than 10 details but claimed at debriefing that they had believed the event actually happened were classified as being accepting of the false memory event. They seemed immune to significant memory generation despite appearing to believe that the event had happened to them.
The paper is aimed at the legal process of getting reliable eye-witness testimony, but I think it surely has much broader implications : political manipulation, the extent to which fiction influences moral beliefs, etc. More of that in tomorrow's concluding part of the Magnesia trilogy. What would have been nice to see in the paper is more discussion on those few individuals who were wholly resistant to this manipulation - do they have unusually good memories, or are they (for instance) just more resistant to forming memories in the first place ? Or were they less trusting for some reason ? Anyway, it's fascinating stuff, or at least I think so. Assuming I haven't misremembered the whole thing, of course.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150115102835.htm
Following up on that Scientific American blog that repressed memories don't exist. I was much more interested in the related claim about inducing false memories than the dodgy nature of memory retrieval, and my code is running very slowly, so I did some digging. This is one of those nice cases where the paper is more interesting than the press release.
"Our findings show that false memories of committing crime with police contact can be surprisingly easy to generate, and can have all the same kinds of complex details as real memories," says psychological scientist and lead researcher Julia Shaw of the University of Bedfordshire in the UK. "All participants need to generate a richly detailed false memory is 3 hours in a friendly interview environment, where the interviewer introduces a few wrong details and uses poor memory-retrieval techniques."
Emphasis on "same kinds", as in the paper itself they show that true memories tend to be more vivid and detailed than false ones. How do you go about inducing false memories ? The researchers used a variety of techniques. They don't try and identify which one (if any) is the most important as that's beyond the scope of the study. What they did was as follows, from the press release :
Shaw and co-author Stephen Porter of the University of British Columbia in Canada obtained permission to contact the primary caregivers of university students participating in the study. The caregivers were asked to fill out a questionnaire about specific events the students might have experienced from ages 11 to 14, providing as much detail as possible. The caregivers were instructed not to discuss the questions with the student.
The researchers identified a total of 60 students who had not been involved in any of the crimes designated as false memory targets in the study and who otherwise met the study criteria. These students were brought to the lab for three 40-minute interviews that took place about a week apart. In the first interview, the researcher told the student about two events he or she [the student] had experienced as a teen, only one of which actually happened. [This was either a crime or another emotional event - anxiety seems to be important, though they didn't examine less emotional events]
Importantly, the false event stories included some true details about that time in the student's life, taken from the caregiver questionnaire. Participants were asked to explain what happened in each of the two events. When they had difficulty explaining the false event, the interviewer encouraged them to try anyway, explaining that if they used specific memory strategies they might be able to recall more details.
But there are more subtleties to this, which the paper describes very well. The interviewer (always the same person, and they even tried to make sure the word count of each interview was similar !) was " a senior Ph.D. student who was well trained in police interview tactics and is extroverted — a personality characteristic that has been demonstrated to be related to high success rates for generating false memories." One paragraph from the paper deserves to be quoted in full (omitting only references and splitting this for readability ) :
The strategies that were employed throughout all interviews in this study were based on literature regarding factors that facilitate the generation of false confessions. The tactics that were scripted into all three interviews included incontrovertible false evidence (“In the questionnaire, your parents/ caregivers said. . .”), social pressure (“Most people are able to retrieve lost memories if they try hard enough”), and suggestive retrieval techniques (including the scripted guided imagery)... Incorporating true details into the false-memory account — especially the caregiver-provided details regarding the city the participant lived in and the name of a friend the participant had at the time of the alleged event — likely constituted a personalised manipulation in our study.
Other tactics that were consistently applied included building rapport with participants (e.g., asking “How has your semester been?” when they entered the lab), using facilitators (e.g., “Good,” nodding, smiling), using pauses and silence to allow participants to respond (longer pauses seemed to often result in participants providing additional details to cut the silence), and using the open-ended prompt “what else?” when probing for additional memory details. We also used the tactic of presumed additional knowledge if participants asked about the accuracy of details. In other words, participants were told that the interviewer had very detailed information about the event from their caregiver but was able only to vaguely confirm details (e.g., “this sounds like what your parents described,” “I can’t give you more details because they have to come from you”).
Further, when participants reported that they could not recall the false memory, the interviewer seemed disappointed but sympathetic (while saying the scripted line “That’s ok. Many people can’t recall certain events at first because they haven’t thought about them for such a long time.”) and scribbled down a note on her clipboard. Finally, the interview office had a bookshelf intentionally filled with very visible books on memory and memory retrieval to help increase the interviewer’s credibility as a memory researcher.
Also, importantly, the techniques extend beyond the interviews themselves, so that quoted 3 hours is a bit misleading :
The fact that no participants immediately [at the first interview] recalled the false event helped rule out the possibility that participants had actually experienced such an event... When participants had difficulty recalling the false event, the interviewer encouraged them to try to remember it, and (falsely) told them that most people can remember these kinds of memories if they try hard enough... they were asked to use context reinstatement and guided imagery to retrieve the memory. They also were told to practice visualization of the false event each night at home. These methods have been shown to effectively generate details that form the foundations of false memories.
Later on they speculate that false memories are easier to generate if they have "explanatory coherence" :
In other words, imagined memory elements regarding what something could have been like can turn into elements of what it would have been like, which can become elements of what it was like... it is possible that participants increasingly tried to make sense of the introduced false events by spinning explanatory frameworks around what they thought could have happened.
And it's also important for
Imagination exercises such as this one have been repeatedly associated with the generation of false memories... The relevance of imagination for false memories may be partially explained by the source-monitoring framework, which refers to people’s tendency to confuse imagination with reality. Individuals who are recalling details from a visualization exercise or experimenter misinformation can forget the source of their ideas and may think they are recalling details from a genuine experience.
When analysing the results that students (about 70% success rate !) apparently believe in the induced memories, they make an interesting distinction between false memories and false false memories, i.e. the students might be deceiving themselves (or just the researchers) about the false memories :
It has been argued that false beliefs are qualitatively different from false memories... Participants who provided 10 or more details of the false event but did not claim at the debriefing that they had believed the event actually happened were classified as compliant; they could be seen as having simply acquiesced to the situational demands. Participants who provided fewer than 10 details but claimed at debriefing that they had believed the event actually happened were classified as being accepting of the false memory event. They seemed immune to significant memory generation despite appearing to believe that the event had happened to them.
The paper is aimed at the legal process of getting reliable eye-witness testimony, but I think it surely has much broader implications : political manipulation, the extent to which fiction influences moral beliefs, etc. More of that in tomorrow's concluding part of the Magnesia trilogy. What would have been nice to see in the paper is more discussion on those few individuals who were wholly resistant to this manipulation - do they have unusually good memories, or are they (for instance) just more resistant to forming memories in the first place ? Or were they less trusting for some reason ? Anyway, it's fascinating stuff, or at least I think so. Assuming I haven't misremembered the whole thing, of course.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150115102835.htm
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