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The Anti-Social Century | The Atlantic
Derek Thompson:
Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality. […]
Eroding companionship can be seen in numerous odd and depressing facts of American life today. Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home. The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species. Since the early 2000s, the amount of time that Americans say they spend helping or caring for people outside their nuclear family has declined by more than a third.
How pour-over coffee got good | Works in Progress
Pour-over coffee has long been popular with coffee enthusiasts, but it frustrated coffee shops because it takes so long to make. That’s changing.
How accurate are popular personality test frameworks at predicting life outcomes? A detailed investigation. | Clearer Thinking
Our aim was to measure the predictive accuracy of the most popular personality test frameworks, and then to create a single test that could measure all of these at once. […]
Our study suggests that if you care about how well a personality test can predict outcomes about people's lives, then the Big Five test is superior to a Jungian (MBTI-style) and Enneagram approach. It also suggests that dichotomizing traits into binaries (rather than using continuous scores) substantially impairs accuracy.
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The Case for Insect Consciousness | Asterisk
Last year, a team in Korea created transgenic flies that carried the human capsaicin receptor in their nociceptors — the neurons that detect negative stimuli. In flies as in humans, these neurons are widely distributed throughout the body. When the researchers brushed capsaicin on normal fly larvae, nothing happened. When the researchers did the same to the transgenic larvae, they curled and rolled, thrashing as though in pain.
Then, the researchers turned their attention to adult flies. After denying them food for 18 hours, the team offered the flies a capsaicin-laced liquid. The normal ones ate readily. The transgenic flies sipped for just a moment before they “ran away, scurried around, and vigorously rubbed and pulled on their mouthparts with their front legs.” As before, upping the concentration altered behavior, reducing the amount of time before “the nociceptive response,” or the reaction that looks, at least, like one driven by pain. The response was so strong that, eventually, the transgenic flies starved to death, refusing to eat any more of the capsaicin-laced substance.
Inside the Interconnection Queue | Construction Physics
We’re witnessing the early stages of a historic buildout of energy infrastructure, with thousands of gigawatts worth of generation projects currently in the pipeline. Assuming these projects withdraw from the queue at historic rates, currently planned projects alone can expect to increase the US’s electricity generation capacity by around 50%.
Some back of the envelope numbers suggest that the current interconnection queue represents around two trillion dollars’ worth of energy investment.
The End of Search, The Beginning of Research | One Useful Thing
A hint to the future arrived quietly over the weekend. For a long time, I've been discussing two parallel revolutions in AI: the rise of autonomous agents and the emergence of powerful Reasoners since OpenAI's o1 was launched. These two threads have finally converged into something really impressive - AI systems that can conduct research with the depth and nuance of human experts, but at machine speed. OpenAI's Deep Research demonstrates this convergence and gives us a sense of what the future might be. But to understand why this matters, we need to start with the building blocks: Reasoners and agents.
What's going to happen to Ukraine now? | Noahpinion
This inversion of common-sense morality — the idea that powerful nations deserve to be able to conquer weaker ones unopposed, and that regular people defending their homes and families are worthy of contempt — was an utterly shameful display, and largely failed to convince the American people. But it did convince a critical mass of Republicans, and now that Trump has won the election, it’s clear that the era of dependable American support for Ukraine is over.
The Divine Engineer of Ancient Sichuan | Chris Arnade Walks the World
Unlike their Homeric counterparts, like your Heracles or Achilles, the great heroes of Chinese tradition were not known primarily for slaying beasts and besting rivals. Rather, they were celebrated first and foremost for their service to the people. Li Bing was just another hero-minister in the tradition of Yu the Great, and as such, in the distinctive manner of Chinese tradition, whereby conscientious public servants, not strongmen, are those marked out for deification, he too was celebrated in history and worshiped at temples. In traditional China, a middle manager could become a god.
Nationalists Already Have the World They Want but Need to Pretend Otherwise | Richard Hanania's Newsletter
This is what makes modern nationalism so incredibly bizarre. The world looks pretty much exactly as they want, which means they need to completely check out of reality in order to argue for their positions.
The game theory of Trump's tariff threats | Silver Bulletin
To bring this back to the real world, this is what makes Trump’s strategy so risky. The game theory says that because the US economy has so much more leverage, he should be able to extract some minor concessions from Canada and Mexico by threatening a trade war. He doesn’t necessarily want a trade war, but he’s betting his bluff won’t be called — and he’ll usually be right. And that’s basically what happened in Round 1. We threatened tariffs, and because Trump’s threats are fairly credible for reasons ranging from his ideological commitments to his reputation as a rogue actor, Canada and Mexico capitulated.
Finding Populist Equilibrium | Chasing Sheep
What really unites la ultraderecha is its antagonism. According to la ultraderecha, there is an entrenched contingent of bureaucrats, journalists, and academics holding the nation back. Maybe they support free trade—maybe the opposite. Almost certainly, this contingent sees critical elements of the current order as sacred. You can’t just put everyone in prison. You can’t just get rid of half the government. You can’t just threaten NATO. Liberation from this contingent’s amber will usher in prosperity, la ultraderecha argues.
Birds have developed complex brains independently from mammals, studies reveal | Phys.org
Two studies published in the latest issue of Science have revealed that birds, reptiles, and mammals have developed complex brain circuits independently, despite sharing a common ancestor. These findings challenge the traditional view of brain evolution and demonstrate that, while comparable brain functions exist among these groups, embryonic formation mechanisms and cell types have followed divergent evolutionary trajectories.
Tally of bones, artifacts reveals 2000 years of population swings among Indigenous Americans | Science
Radiocarbon dates from tens of thousands of bones, textiles, food scraps, and charcoal bits are shedding light on fluctuations in Indigenous population numbers across the Americas before the arrival of Europeans. Researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the population of North America reached its maximum around the year 1150 C.E., then fell at least 30% by 1500. Those numbers were beginning to rebound when European conquest wreaked massive upheaval upon Indigenous societies.
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Masters of the Knight: The Art of Chess Carving in India | Atlas Obscura
In the bustling streets of Amritsar, India, the markets are lined with shops full of colorful tapestries and sweet treats like warm local chai served in clay mugs. But the real treasures are kept behind closed doors. Beyond stacks of gnarled logs, inside unsuspecting brick buildings off the main streets, generations of master craftsmen carefully carve, sand, and polish intricate chess pieces, carrying on a long legacy in the country where the earliest versions of chess were played over 1,500 years ago.
These are no basic sets. The pieces make up elaborate professional and collector’s chess sets that sell for up to $4,000 U.S. dollars on the international market. That price is well deserved. Each set is a collective labor of love, with every component handcrafted by a man who specializes in one type of chess piece. (Traditionally, women are not chess carvers.) There are pawn makers, queen craftsmen, and the most coveted—the knight carvers.
It's tough to resist scratching an itch — and evolution may be to blame | Live Science
A new study conducted in mice suggests that, although it's not all good, our urge to scratch at itchy skin may have an evolutionary benefit.
Don’t panic, but an asteroid has a 1.9% chance of hitting Earth in 2032 | Ars Technica
Within a few days, scientists gathered enough information on the asteroid—officially designated 2024 YR4—to determine that its orbit will bring it quite close to Earth in 2028, and then again in 2032. Astronomers ruled out any chance of an impact with Earth in 2028, but there's a small chance the asteroid might hit our planet on December 22, 2032.
Mantis shrimp clubs filter sound to mitigate damage | Northwestern University
Known for their powerful punch, mantis shrimp can smash a shell with the force of a .22 caliber bullet. Yet, amazingly, these tough critters remain intact despite the intense shockwaves created by their own strikes.
Only About 40% Of The Cruz "Woke Science" Database Is Woke Science | Astral Codex Ten
Why would a list of woke grants have so many non-woke grants in it? After reading the hundred abstracts, I found a clear answer: people inserted a meaningless sentence saying “this could help women and minorities” into unrelated grants, probably in the hopes of getting points with some automated filter.
Genetic Prediction and Adverse Selection | Marginal Revolution
The answer, as you might have guessed by now, is very significant. Even though current PGIs explain only a fraction of total genetic risk, they are already predictive enough so that it would make sense for individuals with high measured risk to purchase insurance, while those with low-risk would opt out—leading to adverse selection that threatens the financial sustainability of the insurance market.
Today, the 500,000 people in the UK’s Biobank don’t know their PGIs but in principle they could and in the future they will. Indeed, as GWAS sample sizes increase, PGI betas will become more accurate and they will be applied to a greater fraction of an individual’s genome so individual PGIs will become increasingly predictive, exacerbating selection problems in insurance markets.