3 stars
Your Book Review: Nine Lives | Astral Codex Ten
Cats have nine lives but they don’t get involved in jungle wars in the Philippines
Aimen Dean (pseudonym) compares himself to the proverbial cat: he has nine lives, surviving every impossible situation and starting new lives under strange new conditions.
Cats pack their nine lives in an average of 12-18 years, which is a quite impressive speed, but Aimen Dean was committed to living his lives even quicker than that.
Born in 1978, he was 16 when he left the comfort of his Saudi home, learned to fire a mortar, and fought in the battles of the Bosnian War. He and two friends ran a million dollar fraudulent charity to smuggle supplies to the Chechens when he was 18. He was 19 when he swore an oath of allegiance in front of Osama bin Laden, and started making chemical weapons. He was 20 when he got disillusioned with al-Qaeda, left, got caught by the Qatari secret police and became a British informant. He was 24 when he unraveled a plot to release poison gas in the New York subway. And by the time he was 28, due to an embarrassingly stupid leak from the American intelligence agencies, his spying career was over and he was a man in hiding.
The Divorce Tapes | New York Magazine
My family knew that my father had been tapping the phone lines. Only later would I discover the secrets the recordings contained.
Lab-grown diamonds | Works in Progress
Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and vastly cheaper than mined diamonds. Beating nature took decades of hard graft and millions of pounds of pressure.
The Long Road to Fiber Optics | Construction Physics
The path to getting fiber optics was long and meandering. It required a broad range of technological advances in a variety of different fields to make possible, and for many years the technology did not appear particularly promising. Many, perhaps most, experts felt that other technology like millimeter waveguides were a better bet for the next step in telecommunications. And even once fiber optics seemed possible, it took over a decade to go from the early development efforts to the first field trials, and several more years before it was used for major commercial installations. Unpacking how fiber optic technology came about can help us better understand the nature of technological progress, and the difficulty of predicting its path.
2 stars
What if absolutely everything is conscious? | Vox
Scientists spent ages mocking panpsychism. Now, some are warming to the idea that plants, cells, and even atoms are conscious.
The iPhones 16 | Daring Fireball
The Things They Carried | Daring Fireball
When Apple’s competitors stopped laughing at the iPhone and started copying it, they got rid of their hardware keyboards — theretofore the primary signifier differentiating a “smartphone” from a regular phone — but they couldn’t bring themselves to eliminate the not one but two dedicated hardware buttons that, to their unimaginative minds, were inherent to making any cell phone a phone: the green “call” and red “hang up” buttons. Android phones had those red/green buttons. The BlackBerry Storm had them too. Every phone but the iPhone had them. Until they caught up and realized those buttons were obviated too. […]
The facile take is that Apple has run out of hardware ideas and now just adds a new button to the iPhone each year — Action button last year, Camera Control this year, maybe they’ll finally add those green/red phone call buttons next year. But that’s underestimating just how radical it is for Apple, in the iPhone’s 18th annual hardware iteration, to add a hardware button dedicated to a single application.
What we’re seeing is Tim Cook’s Apple. Cook is a strong, sage leader, and the proof is that the entire company is now ever more in his image. That’s inevitable. It’s also not at all to say Apple is worse off. In some ways it is, but in others, Apple is far better. I can’t prove any of this, of course, but my gut says that a Steve-Jobs–led Apple today would be noticeably less financially successful and industry-dominating than the actual Tim-Cook–led Apple has been.
I think Apple Watch, under Jobs, would have been more like iPod was or AirPods have been: a product entirely defined by Apple, not a platform for third-party developers. (Jobs was famously reluctant to even make iPhone a platform.)
But the biggest difference is that Apple, under Jobs, was quirky, and I think would have remained noticeably more quirky than it has been under Cook. You’d be wrong, I say, to argue that Cook has drained the fun out of Apple. But I do think he’s eliminated quirkiness. Cook’s Apple takes too few risks. Jobs’s Apple took too many risks.
Sakana, Strawberry, and Scary AI | Astral Codex Ten
The history of AI is people saying “We’ll believe AI is Actually Intelligent when it does X!” - and then, after AI does X, not believing it’s Actually Intelligent. […]
What would it mean for an AI to be Actually Dangerous?
Back in 2010, this was an easy question. It’ll lie to users to achieve its goals. It’ll do things that the creators never programmed into it, and that they don’t want. It’ll try to edit its own code to gain more power, or hack its way out of its testing environment.
Now AI has done all these things. […]
It’s not that AIs will do something scary and then we ignore it. It’s that nothing will ever seem scary after a real AI does it.
I can’t even say this is wrong. We wouldn’t have wanted to update to “okay, we’ve solved intelligence” after ELIZA “treated” its first “patient”. And we don’t want to live in fear that GPT-4 has turned evil just because it makes up fake journal references. But it sure does make it hard to draw a red line.
How will you save small midwestern towns without mass immigration? | Noahpinion
So if this research is right, why have we seen an upsurge in anti-immigration attitudes in America since 2021? There are two clear answers here. First, people get temporarily upset when there’s a flood of new immigrants, as there was from 2021 to 2023. Second, a lot of people are upset about the immigration they read about in the news, rather than the immigration happening in their own cities and neighborhoods. It’s a lot easier to fear people when you don’t meet them.
But in any case, if you’re upset about “floods” of low-skilled immigrants getting “dumped” on small towns in the American heartland, you should ask yourself: How else do you propose to revive those declining regions? Would you starve them of the only resource that they could possibly use to revitalize themselves? Would you just tell all the people in those towns to pack up and move to New York and Chicago? What’s your alternative plan? Because I honestly don’t see any other way those places are going to get saved.
The Conservative Case for Abolishing the Electoral College | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter
For most of American history, the electoral college hasn’t mattered all that much. From the founding of the country until 2000, the candidate who got the most votes ended up becoming president in all but two elections. But starting that year, the popular vote winner has been kept out of the White House two out of six times. It came very close to happening again in 2020, which means that we could’ve had an entire generation where the popular vote and electoral college outcomes diverged in half of presidential races, each time in favor of the Republican candidate. […]
Since it helps them win elections, conservatives often feel the need to defend the electoral college. But their arguments tend to be quite silly, and there is no country in the world that picks its leaders in a similar way. […]
Trying to win over wealthier and more educated parts of the country would help attract higher human capital, as business leaders, intellectuals, and journalists would no longer be ashamed to identify with the Republican Party. I think the culture of conservatism would change, as Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and New York City bankers would find it a lot more motivating to be part of a movement that took up issues that could excite members of their own communities, rather than trying to intuit what non-college whites in a completely different part of the country are thinking and figuring out how to appeal to them. […]
Abolishing the electoral college would force Republicans to compete for votes where Americans actually live. Just as importantly, it would help craft a message that resonates in parts of the country where most of the brains, money, and ambition are concentrated. If conservatives don’t have enough of a sense of enlightened self-interest to do this themselves, they can at least get out of the way and let Democrats make their movement smarter.
Scaling: The State of Play in AI | One Useful Thing
Now feels like a good time to lay out where we are with AI, and what might come next. I want to focus purely on the capabilities of AI models, and specifically the Large Language Models that power chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini. These models keep getting “smarter” over time, and it seems worthwhile to consider why, as that will help us understand what comes next. Doing so requires diving into how models are trained. I am going to try to do this in a non-technical way, which means that I will ignore a lot of important nuances that I hope my more technical readers forgive me for.
I was a black child raised in a white supremacist cult. When doomsday didn’t come, I had to learn how to live | The Guardian
Jerald Walker grew up believing the world would end in 1972, when he was eight. But when fire and brimstone failed to rain from the skies, he and his family had to start again
Why children perceive time slower than adults | BBC
Children's perception of time is relatively understudied. Learning to see time through their eyes may be fundamental to a happier human experience.
Weaponizing Anger is a Useful Political Strategy | Rob Henderson’s Newsletter
Indeed, across political settings, angry people are more likely to vote than those who are not angry. In other words, politicians who can stoke anger can use it to motivate their base. The angrier voters are at the opposing party, the more likely they are to show up to the polls to support their own party. As Webster puts it, “angry voters are loyal voters.”
Political anger has consequences that extend beyond how Americans view their governing institutions or the opposing political party. When American voters are angry about politics, they are inclined to avoid social interactions or social events where they are likely to come into contact with those whose political leanings differ from their own.
In a chapter titled “Emotions in Politics” published last year, the psychologists Florian van Leeuwen and Michael Bang Peterson suggest that along with other emotions, anger “seems to be a distinct strategy for increasing what one is entitled to in the minds of others.”
Gargantuan Black Hole Jets Are Biggest Seen Yet | Caltech
Astronomers have spotted the biggest pair of black hole jets ever seen, spanning 23 million light-years in total length. That's equivalent to lining up 140 Milky Way galaxies back to back.
1 star
Contra DeBoer On Temporal Copernicanism | Astral Codex Ten
The world’s leading expert on anthropic reasoning is probably Oxford philosophy professor Nick Bostrom, who literally wrote the book on the subject. Awkwardly for Freddie, Bostrom is also one of the founders of the modern singularity movement. This is because, understood correctly, anthropics provides no argument against a singularity or any other transhumanist idea, and might (weakly) support them.
I think if you use anthropic reasoning correctly, you end up with a prior probability of something like 30% that the singularity (defined as a technological revolution as momentous as agriculture or industry) happens during your lifetime, and a smaller percent that I’m not sure about (maybe 7%?) that the apocalypse happens during your lifetime. None of these probabilities are lower than the probability that you’re born in North America, so people should stop acting like they’re so small as to be absurd or impossible.
Propaganda is Proof by Repetition | Bet On It
What exactly does the word “propaganda” mean?
The connotation is plainly negative. But what precisely is the nature of the negativity?
You could say, “Calling X ‘propaganda’ insinuates that the speaker is wrong.” But most errors clearly don’t qualify as propaganda. If I send a lone tweet that “1+1=3,” that wouldn’t count. Nor would a 30-page essay arguing that Biden is Bigfoot.
You could say, “Calling X ‘propaganda’ insinuates that the speaker is lying.” But most lies don’t qualify as propaganda either. Coming from my mouth, “I’m eager to see the next Avengers movie” would be a lie, but it’s hardly propaganda.
You could say, “Calling X ‘propaganda’ insinuates that the speaker has low intellectual standards.” Again, though, most people have low intellectual standards, yet that hardly turns them into “propagandists.”
If all of these stories are wrong, what story is right? Here is my favorite answer, in slogan form: Propaganda is proof by repetition. When you repeat yourself over and over in order to persuade others by sheer endurance, your words are propaganda.
Multiple ways to evolve tiny knee bone could have helped humans walk upright | King’s College London
The evolution of bones in primates’ knees could have implications for how humans evolved to walk upright, a new study has found.