Sunday, July 26, 2015

Study Notes: Apr 19-Jul 25, 2015: "On Measuring Tradeoffs In Effective Altruism", &c

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading in this time: 
Other notes: 
Also check out: 
Homework for the future:

"The Old Ones"
  • "A language (in particular as it appears in proper names and geographical names) may shown signs of so called substrate languages (like the influence of Celtic on ancient Gaul; compare some Indian geographical names in the US attesting the original inhabitants). Some professional names and agricultural implements in Sumerian show that agriculture and the economic use of metals existed before the arrival of the Sumerians." 
  • "Professional names such as simug 'blacksmith' and tibira 'copper smith', 'metal manufacturer' are not in origin Sumerian words. Agricultural terms, like engar 'farmer', apin 'plow' and absin 'furrow' are neither of Sumerian origin. Craftsman [sic] like nangar 'carpenter', agab 'leather worker'. Religious terms like sanga 'priests'. Some of the most ancient cities, like Kish, have names that are not Sumerian in origin. These words must have been loan words from a substrate language. The words show how far the division in labor had progressed even before the Sumerians arrived." 
  • Some of the rest of this might be useful to mine if I wrote something in particular in this region or time period, but for now I'm going to leave it alone. 
"Ursula K. Le Guin, Fyodor Dovstoevsky, and the Snuggly Comfort of Evil"
  • "People often use the term 'thought experiment' to mean something like 'a funny hypothetical, that is neat to consider but has no application to the real world because of its fanciful suppositions.' But that's bullshit. A thought experiment should have a result. A thought experiment shouldn't just end with you wiping your hands and saying, 'that certainly gave us something to think about.' Ideally, a thought experiment should make you angry or upset, or force you to see things you've been willfully unseeing, all this time. A thought experiment that leaves you unchanged is a failure." 
  • "When you read about the completely unavoidable death of Sandra Bland, or the countless other atrocities committed by people who believe themselves to be safeguarding your happiness, and then you shrug and carry on with your day, it's hard not to locate yourself in the dead center of Omelas."

"The most convincing argument for legalizing LSD, shrooms, and other psychedelics"
  • "The most remarkable potential benefit of hallucinogens is what's called 'ego death,' an experience in which people lose their sense of self-identity and, as a result, are able to detach themselves from worldly concerns like a fear of death, addiction, and anxiety over temporary--perhaps exaggerated--life events." 
  • "Preliminary, small studies and research from the 1950s and '60s found hallucinogens can treat--and maybe cure-- addiction, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder." 
  • "There's little to no change that someone will become addicted to psychedelics--they're not physically addictive like heroin or tobacco, and the experiences are so demanding and draining that a great majority of people simply won't be interested in constantly taking the drugs."
  • Mark Kleiman: "The risk with cannabis is, primarily, that you lose control of your cannabis taking. The risk with LSD is primarily that you'll do something stupid to ruin the experience, or you'll have such a scary experience that it'll leave you damaged. But those are safety risks rather than addiction risks." 

"Why Does This Ice Look Exactly Like Hair"

  • "According to new research, the icy hair-sculptures that crop up overnight in forests before melting away in the sun have fungal fingerprints all over them." 
  • "Tufts of ice crystals will sprout up over rotten logs and leaves, as if somebody scalped a bunch of Ian McKellens and left the evidence strewn everywhere. Hair ice forms in cool, high-latitude forests on humid nights when the temperatures are just below freezing, and it usually disappears soon after sunrise." 
  • "First, water near a branch surface freezes when it comes in contact with cold air, sandwiching a thin film of liquid water between ice and wood pores. Next, suction forces slowly push the liquid water inside the wood-ice sandwich outward, causing it to freeze in thin filaments as it moves." A fungus called Exidiopsis effusa takes over from there. 


"On Measuring Tradeoffs In Effective Altruism"

  • "One of the key facts leading one to effective altruism is that human lives are not arbitraged; because people have certain biases--we favor people in our own country, we don't intuitively understand the difference between 10,000 and 100,000-- it is possible to get tremendous steals on saving lives." 
  • "The value of a human life according to the US government is somewhere between six million and nine million dollars. Take the middle number and call it seven and a half million dollars. With this calculation, the ethical cost of a chicken meal turns out not to be equivalent to the $5.50 Katja calculates [in a referenced article] but a mind-boggling $3669. Of course, that assumes that chickens have equal moral weight to humans. I don't think they do. But assuming that chickens are worth half as much as humans are, it still works out that the average chicken meal causes almost $2000 of damage." 
  • "Some people are going to read this and be like 'wait that means that every time I pay for a Netflix subscription instead of donating to GiveWell I am complicit in thousands of dollars' worth of harm.' And, well, yeah. Are you new?" 
  • "Some effective altruists do 'morality offsets'-- every time they eat meat, they donate five dollars more to the Against Malaria foundation than they otherwise would." 
  • "Basically, my argument is this: the marginal cost of Alice becoming vegetarian is much much lower than the marginal cost of Alice donating more money. Therefore, if Alice wishes to do more good in the world, she should become vegetarian--regardless of whether donating more money is more effective." 
  • This is because "in many cases, the limiting factor on one's donations or career success is completely unrelated to limiting factors on one's ability to be vegetarian." 

"The General Factor of Correctness"
  • "Remember, IQ is supposed to come from a General Factor of Intelligence. If you make people take a lot of different tests of a lot of different types, people who do well on one type will do well on other types more often than chance. You can do this with other things too, like make a General Factor Of Social Development. If you're really cool, you can even correlate the General Factor Of Intelligence and the General Factor Of Social Development together." 
  • "A General Factor Of Correctness would mean that if you asked people's opinions on a bunch of controversial questions, like 'Would increasing the minimum wage to $15 worsen unemployment?' or 'Which interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct?' or 'are artificial sweeteners safe?' and then somehow discovered the answers to these questions, people who did well on one such question would do well on other types more often than chance." 
  • "Consider some position that was once considered fringe and bizarre, but now known to be likely true--for example, pre-Clovis settlement of the New World. Find the economists who believed in pre-Clovis settlement of the New World when doing so was unpopular. Those economists have demonstrated a proven track record of being able to winnow out correct ideas amidst a sea of uncertainty. Invest in whatever company they tell you to invest in and make a killing." 
  • "If this is true, we can gain new insight into all of our conundra just by seeing who believes what about New World migration. That sounds useful." 
  • "The first problem: if you just mark who's right and wrong about each controversial issue, the General Factor Of Correctness will end up looking a lot like a General Factor Of Agreeing With Expert Consensus. The current best-known heuristic is 'always agree with expert consensus on everything'; people who follow this heuristic all the time are most likely to do well, but we learn nothing whatsoever from their success." 
  • "We can get more interesting results by analyzing only people's deviations from expert consensus. If you agree with the consensus about everything, you don't get to play. If you disagree with the consensus about some things, then you get positive points when you're right and negative points when you're wrong... This is why Eliezer very reasonable talks about a correct contrarian cluster instead of a correct cluster in general." 
  • "The second problem: are you just going to rediscover some factor we already know about, like IQ or general-well-educatedness?"
  • "WHen [sic] I brought this up on Tumblr, people were quick to point out examples of very intelligent, very well-educated people believing stupid things--for example Newton's obsession with alchemy and Biblical prophecy, or Linus Pauling's belief that you could solve health just by making everyone take crazy amounts of Vitamin C. These points are well-taken, but I can't help wondering if there's selection bias in bringing them up. Yes, some smart people believe stupid things, but maybe even more stupid people do? By analogy, many people who are brilliant at math are terrible at language, and we can all think of salient examples, but psychometrics has shown again and again that in general math and language skills are correlated." 
  • "The third problem: can we differentiate positive from negative selection? There are lots of people who believe in Bigfoot and ESP and astrology." 
  • "The fourth problem: is there a difference between correctness and probability calibration?... This is important because we know calibration is a real thing and some people are good at it and other people aren't but can improve with practice. If all we're showing is that people who are good with probabilities are good with probabilities, then whatever." 
  • "I was involved in an unpublished study which I can't upload because I don't have the other authors' permission, but which showed conclusively that people with poor calibration are more likely to believe in the paranormal (P < 0.001), even when belief in the paranormal was not assessed as a calibration question." 
  • "Calibration [in the Less Wrong Survey data] was correlated with IQ (0.14, p = 0.01). But it was also correlated with higher belief in global warming (0.13, p = 0.01), with higher belief in near-term global catastrophic risk (-0.08, p - 0.01), increased support for immigration (0.06, p = 0.048) and with decreased support for the human biodiversity movement (0.01, p = 0.0002). These were all independent of the IQ correlation. Notably, although warming and GCR were asked in the form of probabilities, immigration and HBD weren't, suggesting that calibration can be (weakly) correlated with opinions on a non-calibration task." 
  • Philip Tetlock and IARPA's Good Judgment Project "got a few thousand average people and asked them to predict the probability of important international events like 'North Korea launches a new kind of missile.' They found that the same small group of people consistently outperformed everyone else in a way incompatible with chance. These people were not necessarily very well-educated and didn't have much domain-specific knowledge in international relations--the one profiled on NPR was a pharmacist who said she 'didn't know a lot about international affairs [and] hadn't taken much math in school'-- but they were reportedly able to outperform professional CIA analysts armed with extra classified information by as much as 30%. [brackets original]"
  • "Although the article doesn't specify, I think they're doing something more than just being well-calibrated. They seem to be succeeding through some mysterious quality totally separate from all of these things. But only on questions about international affairs. What I'd love to see next is what happens when you ask these same people to predict sports games, industry trends, the mean global temperature in 2030, or what the next space probe will find. If they can beat the experts in those fields, then I start really wondering what their position on the tax rate is and who they're going to vote for for President." 
  • "I think in a sense this is the center of the entire rationalist project. If ability to evaluate evidence and come to accurate conclusions across a broad range of fields relies on some skill other than brute-forcing it with domain knowledge and IQ, some skill that looks like 'rationality' broadly-defined, then cultivating that skill starts to look like a pretty good idea." 
  • "I find research into intelligence more interesting than research into other things because improvements in intelligence can be leveraged to produce improvements in everything else." 


 "The Genesis Engine"
  • "By 1975, other fields of science--like physics--were subject to broad restrictions. Hardly anyone was allowed to work on atomic bombs, say. But biology was different. Biologists still let the winding road of research guide their steps. On occasion, regulatory bodies had acted retrospectively--after Nuremberg, Tuskegee, and the human radiation experiments, external enforcement entities had told biologists they weren't allowed to do that bad thing again." 
  • "Two of the most powerful universities in the US are engaged in a vicious war over the basic patent [over CRISPR-Cas9]." 
  • "By the 1930s refining nature got faster. Scientists bombarded seeds and insect eggs with x-rays, causing mutations to scatter through genomes like shrapnel. If one of hundreds of irradiated plants or insects grew up with the traits scientists desired, they bred it and tossed the rest. That's where red grapefruits came from, and most barley for modern beer." 
  • "Most present-day animals and plants defend themselves against viruses with structures made out of RNA. So a few researchers started to wonder if Crispr was a primordial immune system." 
  • "Working together, Charpentier's and Doudna's teams found that Crispr made two short strands of RNA and that Cas9 latched onto them. The sequence of the RNA strands corresponded to stretches of viral DNA and could home in on those segments like a genetic GPS. And when the Crispr-Cas9 complex arrives at its destination, Cas9 does something almost magical: It changes shape, grasping the DNA and slicing it with a precise molecular scalpel." 
  • "Crispr could spell the end of mosquitos [sic]--and malaria. But what about the bats that rely on mosquitos for food? Unintended consequences is a dangerous game." 
  • "Any gene typically has just a 50-50 chance of getting passed on. Either the offspring gets a copy from Mom or a copy from Dad. But in 1957 biologists found exceptions to that rule, genes that literally manipulated cell division and forced themselves into a larger number of offspring than chance alone would have allowed." 
  • "In other words, if biologists don't start thinking about ethics, the taxpayers who fund their research might do the thinking for them." 
  • "Labs are working on the genetics of so-called elite controllers, people who can be HIV-positive but never develop AIDS. Using Crispr, researchers can knock out a gene called CCR5, which makes a protein that helps usher HIV into cells. You'd essentially make someone an elite controller. Or you could use Crispr to target HIV directly; that begins to look a lot like a cure." 
  • Hank Greely: "Genome editing started with just a few big labs putting in lots of effort, trying something 1,000 times for one or two successes. Now it's something that someone with a BS and a couple thousand dollars' worth of equipment can do. What was impractical is now almost everyday. That's a big deal." 
  • "In an odd reversal, it's the scientists who are showing more fear than the civilians. When I ask Church for his most nightmarish Crispr scenario, he mutters something about weapons and then stops short. He says he hopes to take the specifics of the idea, whatever it is, to his grave." 
  • "Science gives people power. And power is unpredictable." 
  • There's also a pretty good RadioLab podcast on this topic. 
"Bemundolack wrote..."
  • The question to which Medievalpoc responded: "I work at a historical archive in a southern US state. Ultra conservative legislature. Director is being pressured to erase anything from black history that will 'disturb the peace' so to speak. Revisionist white washing. Was wondering if you or followers had any sources on why that's awful? Have to make argument to director. Trying to get director to stop, but we might be de-funded if we do. Need help if you have time/ want [sic] to help." 
  • "How is it possible that the value of art and history, the value of humanity, must be 'proven' in order to save it from being obliterated, or taken away from the people who need it the most? This is racism at its most insidious, at its most destructive, and at its most harmful. Also notice that what has been specified for removal is Black history in particular. As if the history of Black people is somehow capable of 'disturbing the peace' just by existing, and being accessible to people who are interested in it." 
  • "Although I try to show how histories that have been marginalized or erased can be celebrated, it's almost impossible to do so without also taking into account the pressure that is constantly happening to shove it back to the margins, or to push it out of the sphere of human knowledge entirely." 
  • "We're expected to 'prove' this history has value? That it is important? Maybe we should ask: what happens when these histories are erased?"
  • "History is important. Water is wet. Human lives have value."
  • "We are enriched by learning from the past, and acknowledging its bearing on our present. Erasing information undermines our humanity. These aren't just ideas, this affects people living right now. It affects you, me, and anyone reading this."
Miscellaneous
  • Toni Morrison: "The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing." 
  • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: "Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become." 
  • *Chimamanda: "Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from." 
  • *Chimamanda: "I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else." 
  • *Chimamanda: "His advice to me, (and he was shaking his head sadly as he spoke) was that I should never call myself a feminist because feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands." 
  • *Chimamanda: "At some point I was a Happy African Feminist who does not hate men. And who likes lip gloss and wears high heels for herself. But not for men." 
  • Because Pluto and Charon "are tidally locked in orbit around a mutual barycenter" and Charon is large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet were it not Pluto's moon, the two are arguably a "binary planetary system."
  • A fungus called Tropical Race 4 (TR4) is making its way around the world and killing bananas. Might be the end of bananas as we know it. 
  • Alice Munro: "A story is not like a road to follow... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether this is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you." 

Artist's depiction of Tetrapodophis amplectus, a proto-snake. "The little arms and legs probably weren't used to get it around--they were used for grabbing prey. The relatively stubby tail gives scientists an intriguing clue about the origin of snakes. Some believe that snakes were creatures that evolved in the water and slithered up onto the land. The small tail... hints that snakes might have been burrowing animals that crawled up into the light." 

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