stanfordkid

Not totally absurd that animals would have some sort of innate appreciation or sense of beauty -- infants certainly come hard-wired for recognizing symmetry. I wouldn't be surprised if the "awe" that we get from a large landscape or a rothko painting is some sort of reward system biased towards exploration.

I looked into the problems in this field in the past, my impression is that the difficulty lies in how the signal diffuses through the skull and top-most layers of the brain. It’s all about resolution, and this sounds like a very similar problem. The question always is how much non-linearity is there, and what’s the frequency and density of the sensors relative to how often you have to sample to characterize it. Very excited to see how the field develops!

It takes 1-bit to store the state “nothing” vs “something” — so it’s a question of information content — whether or not it is perceivable information is what we traditionally use to delineate existence vs. non existence.

This is insane -- Median age of 60 for diagnosed patients?

What this indicates to me is that Italy was testing only the worst patients. This whole scare to me reeks of sampling bias. We only test the worst patients for covid 19 which ups the mortality rate.

The truth is -- people who are at risk should social distance themselves rather than the general population. We want herd immunity to develop for this disease -- that means having young healthy people be exposed to it.

Really cool work! Would be interesting to fit a logistic as well to see if any case curve flattening can be seen. I plotted the points for Italy and it seems like the growth rate is decreasing.

Have you ever met an heir or an heiress to a large fortune? Most of them are coke heads. Without the actual culture of spiritual and moral training heirs would be incompetent and feudalism would quickly lead to anarchy. I don’t think modern society and culture could produce people like Alexander the Great. Non-western societies (e.g Asia/Singapore) have enough family values that feudal dynasties could work, but wouldn’t bet on it happening in the western world.

Couldn't have described it better. I felt myself vomit a little bit at how deeply the author misunderstands the philosopher he bases his entire pieces title on.

The piece is nothing more than a banal juxtaposition of modern issues (fascism! technology!) to an uncontroversial call to some "spirituality" of an arbitrary sort known only to the author. Oh yeah, and superheros.

Take some ketamine :) ... I'm stating this as someone with first hand experience, so it may seem hand wavy and "made up": memories are visual and those visuals directly trigger your nervous system which then responds and often impacts the visual memory replay (often cutting it off or moving to something else). Your nervous system is also constantly telling your visual system what to "lookup". Ketamine dissociates the nervous system from visual memory so you can sort of play the memory through like a spectator. I think this is why it is so effective at treating things like PTSD -- the memories are often so frightening or triggering to the nervous system that they cannot be replayed, understood and integrated... but with Ketamine cutting off the nervous system they can be understood without a panic attack or heart rate shooting through the roof.

Genes don’t directly create complex structures in the way you are thinking. Rather these patterns arise via emergent effects of proteins interacting and resisting each other across populations of cells.[1]

So really what you might have is a certain neuronal cell type that sends signaling molecules that cause it to divide in a very particular way that could roughly create a structure similar to a face detecting filter. If cells can grow into bones or coral reefs, why not face detecting neurons?

[1]https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ddns/2020/2308074/

It reduces volatility due to a unknown and unquantifiable risk in the short term to prevent panic. Obviously if the apocalypse hits the market will still tank, but if catastrophe doesn’t happen then the unneeded loss is prevented.

I used to be really into philosophy, until the revelation hit me that philosophy is ultimately ontological: it names ways of thinking -- suppose living life is like painting a painting. Philosophy, then, is a theory of aesthetics. Sure it can be handy, but at the end of the day you need to create a painting. How much time you spend reading about aesthetics deducts from your time actually painting and experimenting.

I think the author doesn't look at the drawbacks of nihilism completely -- nihilism is a blank canvas as opposed to something like paint-by-numbers. Ultimately the choice of nihilism is still personal. We are all given a blank canvas to start. What kind of painting do you want to hang up?

Nihilism is basically saying that no theory of aesthetics is better than any other. Is this really true? Would you paint random dots on the canvas? Surely circles are more meaningful than scribbles?

I think people are underestimating how much of an asymmetric advantage a tech giant like google has over opponents — so far it is in good hands, but I would argue that, if the company were taken over by a bad actor, they would have almost infinite data to blackmail any opponent that isn’t a saint with the most personal details of their life or monitor their activities.

Interesting article, but I think the "information" metaphor sort of misses the point. DNA is not a store of information but rather the result of computation to solve a hard problem (survival/reproduction in a given environment). Think about it this way: it is really hard to crack a SHA256 hash -- but the information contained in the solution is very small. DNA is the same thing. Using information is not really the appropriate metaphor to describe DNA. Geneticists and biologists have a concept called conservation [1] that sort of gets at this point. If we think of an environment as an encryption algorithm, then certain bits in the hashes ("genomes") that provide suitable solutions tend to be stable over time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conserved_sequence

I think this article is really overplaying the amount of change gene editing can do post-embryonic/childhood development. The architecture of the brain is not encoded in genes, but develops as a result of genes interacting with the environment.

Genes encode things like neuronal growth regulation (e.g BNDF), receptors (e.g 5HT, OXTR) and transport of neurotransmitters (e.g DAT/SERT). We have bred mice that lack entire receptor systems -- they exhibit evolutionarily disadvantageous traits, but are fully viable [1].

Think of your brain as a city (an embryo at day 1 is an open plot of land where it will be built) and think of your genome as defining construction workers of different types. . The city develops as a result of constraints and feedback -- but once it is the size of say, New York City, it's not like gene editing can suddenly tear down central park and replace it with a football stadium.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18712364

This is certainly not something that can be answered with a simple Yes or No.

I am by no means saying that the underlying traits are casually related — only that metrics which predict one may also predict the other.

The human brain is a complex system and IQ itself is a very simplistic way to characterize it.

Think of it this way: imagine IQ is like electricity powering a city. Different city configurations have very different power and load requirements. You might find that, in general, cities with more power function better.

But perhaps the well functioning cities also had better transmission infrastructure. If you applied the rule of “more power is better” to a city without that infrastructure it would blow fuses everywhere and cause chaos.

With this example aside, In fact the science does say that there is a relationship: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-018-0332-x?WT.feed_na...

On point! So much harder to execute and create something real and tangible than pontificate.

Polygenic scores for IQ are correlated with other traits that are less desirable (schizophrenia for example).

I think the lift in IQ you get from embryo selection is counteracted by a lot of other (negative) factors.

It is also unclear to what degree epigenetic inheritance plays in IQ. My opinion is the 8-10 IQ point boost is less than variance from unknown factors relating to doing IVF versus natural birth. In other words I would still go with natural birth (which has been time tested by evolution)

Nice! It is definitely a very easy way to understand the different matrices involved in 3D rendering.

It doesn’t do rasterization or culling in Numpy, so I wouldn’t call it a complete rendering pipeline.

Cool proof of concept — But not particularly surprising that you can do matrix multiplications on points using a matrix library. Pyrr is another good library that is built specifically for this 3D use case.

Sweden has a population 1/4 of California... and 1/40th the size of USA. Scandinavia is generally culturally homogenous and quite wealthy. American problems are more complex than meets the eye. It’s easy to be happy with a welfare state when most of your citizens are motivated and educated, and you have a large pool of wealth.

Seems like an absurd measure when comparing service versus production driven economies. GDP doesn’t measure whether you sold 1 million copies of a film, or manufactured the cameras out of raw materials to produce them. Obviously one has a significantly more linear relationship to carbon output than the other.

Seems like he lacks basic social skills and expects women to date him because he owns his own house. He feels guilty and "like a monster" hitting on or asking women out because of this thought process. He himself said he had been successful in the past -- why not continue that and make yourself happy?

What's left out is the industrial output of China -- which is probably producing for much of the EU and USA. It takes power to produce cheap phones and plastic knick-knacks for western consumers. The fact that the Chinese economy will adapt to meet these demands is inevitable. What is the coal output per capita, subtracting industrial output dedicated to exports to the US/Eurozone -- this would be a more fair assessment.

Probably a byproduct of outdated historical models that were built on the (historically true) assumption that the man handles and creates the household finances.

actual reality is if his wife ran up a $30 million credit bill he’d be pissed as hell and try to fight the credit card company. this is what the algorithm is trying to model, and what likely happens in real world middle class families in the past. The distortions become increasingly transparent and absurd as the wealth increases. Obviously someone like DHH or Woz would not care if his wife racked up a $50k credit card bill and is pissed the algorithm will not provide such a limit. The modeling totally breaks down at super high net worths.

I actually completely agree that the algorithm is sexist. But algorithms provide a sort of perfect lens into real human biases and social structure. Algorithms trained to fit to a historically unjust society will continue to reinforce injustice.

Happy he is bringing up the issue, important to blame the risk modelers but should also be blaming society and legislation itself.

I wouldn’t be so quick to label “quick learning” as a good thing. Sure learning quick is good when you’re trying to adapt to new environments, but environments aren’t always changing. In edge cases quick learning in response to, say, a traumatic event and environment change, can yield learning that is maladaptive.

A suitable analogy is to look at gradient descent methods — which explicitly rely upon a “learning rate” parameter that controls how quickly the algorithm updates its global result as a result of local, immediate, information. Certain classes of problems do well with higher or lower learning rates — so it is very unspecified and unknown how something like this translates to human behavior

Banksy pretty much ripped off Blek Le Rat — so much of his work is completely derivative. Plus you could argue he did much of his work in the public domain. If I graffiti an image in a public place, haven’t I kind of given away copyright to it?

Given Banksy’s anti-capitalist, semi-anarchist stance, and utilization of public property for his own fame, I can’t think of any better means for him to honor himself than to allow people to rip off his work freely.

I certainly can see the case against those who misappropriate bad work to his name — artistic integrity is important. There is also nothing wrong with him wanting to make money. But I see no moral problem with selling knick knacks with banksy imagery on it.

FWIW I love his art and his moral stance. Just can’t have your cake and eat it.

Not sure I understand where reflexivity applies here. It’s a pretty straightforward concept mostly concerned with feedback loop driven price behavior (bubbles).

Brains are messy things and the argument of the article linked is reductionist (as are most papers which make hand-wavy assertions that one brain is "similar" to another). MRI studies with small sample sizes such as the one linked are almost always underpowered [1]

All the study conclusively proves is that both trans women and regular women don't react as viscerally to porn as much as the average man. The actual connectivity and structure that yields similarity in activation between trans and cis women may be completely different.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

The thing with ZeroHedge is that you will see an article like this alongside another one like this: https://www.zerohedge.com/health/temperatures-pacific-ocean-...

It is in aggregate an extreme blog with narratives that are non-consensus. So, yes, climate denial fits in that box, but it will also have articles on climate apocalypse. In aggregate I find it to be fairly eye-opening and bring to light ideas that are forgotten by mainstream media. It also has a healthy disregard for any form of consensus reality or authority.

Furthermore, in the very article you linked there is a link to a NATURE commentary: https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2938.epdf

Of course, we should leave it to experts to interpret a scientific paper such as this one, but my perception is that reporters do not always get it right. In all of the NYTimes you just hear the consensus from organizations such as the UN, I have yet to see an interview with an author of a paper such as the one mentioned above.

ZeroHedge is the type of site that will quickly be labelled alt-right, fake news etc. in reality they tend to just interpret events in much more extreme ways but still rely on largely factual sources. I find the commentary to be much more thought provoking than consensus outlets. Glad to see some fellow HN'ers peruse the site.