Here’s your weekly dose of treats 💌
A weekly lists of goodies curated by Robert.
Follow the white rabbit 🐇
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🎶 Something to listen while reading
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Complex, fiery and divisive stuff I’ve been reading 🌿
/// ⭓ Sound pollution decreased due to COVID-19, and "birds responded by producing higher performance songs at lower amplitudes, effectively maximizing communication distance and salience".
/// ⭓ Peer Rejection in Science: a collection of "key discoveries have been at some point rejected, mocked, or ignored by leading scientists and expert commissions."
/// ⭓ How to Overcome Practical Challenges for AI in Healthcare
There’s a lot of excitement about the potential for AI to improve healthcare. This is driven by compelling advances across a wide range of applications including drug discovery, radiology, pathology, electronic medical record (EMR) intelligence, clinical trials, and more. While this is a great opportunity, there are many practical and ethical challenges for development and deployment, both for AI in general and uniquely for healthcare. They need to be overcome for AI to deliver practical value.
/// ⭓ Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement
A fast-paced primer on how new genetic technologies will enable parents to influence the traits of their children, including their intelligence, moral capacities, physical appearance, and immune system.
/// ⭓ Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find, a 54 page paper published in American Economic Review, co-authored by two Stanford Professors, an MIT professor and a Stanford PhD student.
To sum up the basic conclusions of this paper, there is good and also wide-ranging evidence that the rate of scientific progress has indeed slowed down, [in] the disparate and partially independent areas of productivity growth, total factor productivity, GDP growth, patent measures, researcher productivity, crop yields, life expectancy, and Moore’s Law we have found support for this claim.
/// ⭓ Isolated Demands for Rigour in New Optimism
It’s not that I’m positing any kind of coordinated conspiracy, it’s that I don’t even have to. Because humans are basically apes and prone to shallow mimicry, it only takes one very prominent ape to have an opinion, and everyone else will rush to share it.
Appendix: All Innovations Cited in Favor of Progress
Aggregated across all sources listed above, here are all the innovations:
mRNA Vaccine
Apple M1 Chip
SpaceX Launch / SpaceX Starship (delayed until Monday)
GPT-3 / AI
Electric Cars
Mainstream Crypto / Ethereum 2.0
Operation Warp Speed
Affordable Solar Power / Green Energy
Remote Work
V-Shaped Recovery
Tons of cool companies IPO’ing and tons more getting started,
DeepMind Protein Folding
Lab-Grown Meat Lab Grown Meat Approval
I’ve done a few already, showing that the rest are not an obvious departure from existing trends is left as an exercise to the reader.
To be clear, the question is not “is this innovation very cool”, but rather “does this innovation depart from the previous decade’s trend of progress”.
For example:
The mouse study is cool, but is this a bigger deal than the 2012 discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 programming?
GPT-3 is very cool, but we’ve been on a sharp trajectory of progress in ML since 2012. GANs have seen enormous progress every year since 2014, as have many other tasks.
The Starship hop is very impressive. But is this a bigger leap forward than in 2008 when SpaceX became the first private company to ever launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft? Is it bigger than in 2015 when they achieved the first vertical landing, or in 2017 when they achieved the first vertical landing of an orbital rocket?
Electric cars have seen substantial progress with more competition from mainstream automakers, but surely the biggest breakthroughs were the General Motors EV1 in 1996, the Tesla Roadster in 2008 and perhaps the Tesla Model 3 in 2017? Here’s some actual data, if you care at all about that kind of thing. It demonstrates steady progress, with no clear inflection point or recent change of trajectory.
Cascading —Is the Great Stagnation over?
In case you missed it
First week of January, 2021. Performing mundane activities. This is a silent vlog. A fresh experiment.
I am also currently working on a video about Richard Feynman. This one will be ready in a couple of days.
🐦 Tweets for thought
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Thank you for reading 🤜🤛
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Have a great day ahead!