Axis of Ordinary

How Mathematical ‘Hocus-Pocus’ Saved Particle Physics https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-renormalization-saved-particle-physics-20200917/

"Decisions from Data: How Offline Reinforcement Learning Will Change How We Use ML", Sergey Levine https://medium.com/@sergey.levine/decisions-from-data-how-offline-reinforcement-learning-will-change-how-we-use-ml-24d98cb069b0

Fermat’s Last Theorem Implies Euclid’s Infinitude of Primes https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06722

Array programming with NumPy https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2649-2

Air Force was reportedly able to cut the process of creating a new jet from 10 years to 1 using modeling software. https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a34030586/air-force-secret-new-fighter-jet/

The brain-computer interface is coming and we are so not ready for it https://thebulletin.org/2020/09/the-brain-computer-interface-is-coming-and-we-are-so-not-ready-for-it/

Chinese database details 2.4 million influential people, their kids, addresses, and how to press their buttons https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/15/china_shenzhen_zhenhua_database/

The Computational Philosophy: Simulation as a Core Philosophical Method http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/18100/

"...evidence is emerging that the virus can cause heart damage even in people who’ve had mild symptoms or none at all, especially if those people exercise while they’re infected...Even if only 1 percent of Americans experience some kind of heart issue, that’s still 500,000 people." https://www.wired.com/story/if-youve-just-had-covid-exercise-might-not-be-good-for-you/

“We find no evidence of manipulation of Chinese COVID-19 data using Benford’s Law.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176520303475

“We conclude that the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally generated public health costs of as much as $12.2 billion.” https://www.nber.org/papers/w27813

Joscha Bach on GPT-3, achieving AGI, Intelligence and much more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMfA6i60WDA

Conjecture: The profoundly gifted like Carl Friedrich Gauss, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Alexander Grothendieck, and Robert Langlands who lay the foundations for new fields of mathematics. They can intuitively locate the golden needle in an infinite haystack and terminate thoughts that are intractable by predicting which thoughts will quickly lead to infinite recursion or combinatorial explosion. The intuitive and suggestive notation they introduce can outlast centuries.

Proof: The extremely gifted people like Andrew Wiles and Peter Scholze who are able to absorb a huge amount of knowledge, take a bird's eye view, spot cross-connections, and converge insights and techniques from various parts of mathematics into a single powerful tool.

Transformation: The highly gifted people like computer scientist Donald Knuth who transform these abstract results into a form that allows people to use them to solve real-world problems.

Application: The moderately gifted people in engineering, medicine, biology, business, computer science, and industry who can read and understand applied mathematics in order to use that knowledge for concrete application or as a stepping-stone to further research.

Insight: The mildly gifted people who are able to teach themselves a limited amount of higher mathematics, make practical use of it, or get a rough idea about the workings of the natural world and technological artifacts.

Benefit: The people of average intelligence who are the beneficiaries of a technological civilization that runs on math. They only have a vague idea of what mathematics is and most of the time only need simple arithmetic to get by. If they are younger they might still be in command of some simple algebra.

"An adaptive deep reinforcement learning framework enables curling robots with human-like performance in real-world conditions", Won et al 2020 https://robotics.sciencemag.org/content/5/46/eabb9764

“Another experiment showing how influential Wikipedia is on the real world: Adding two paragraphs of text & nice pictures to randomly selected articles about small European cities led to an over 9% increase in hotel stays; the edit is worth $190k per year!" http://marit.hinnosaar.net/wikipediamatters.pdf

"Murder rates would be up to five times higher than they are but for medical developments over the past 40 years…Without this technology, there would be no less than 50,000 and as many as 115,000 homicides annually instead of an actual 15,000 to 20,000" https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1124155/

Aligning superhuman AI with human behaviour: chess as a model system https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/09/14/aligning-superhuman-ai-with-human-behaviour/

Troubling Drone Incursions Have Occurred Over Guam’s THAAD Anti-Ballistic Missile Battery https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36085/troubling-drone-incursions-have-occurred-over-guams-thaad-anti-ballistic-missile-battery

"Modern deep learning is a story of learned features outperforming (then replacing!) hand-designed algorithms. But we still use hand designed loss functions and optimizers. Here is a big step towards learned optimizers outperforming existing optimizers. Analogously to the first time a compiler can compile itself, it is even capable of training itself from scratch!!!" -- Jascha Sohl-Dickstein https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.11243

“The Recursive Universe”, Amanda Ghassaei (detailed examination of how to implement Conway’s Game of Life inside itself as a single giant ‘metapixel’ pattern) http://blog.amandaghassaei.com/2020/05/01/the-recursive-universe/

Fortified Churches in Romania built by Germans to withstand Mongols: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villages_with_fortified_churches_in_Transylvania

“Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres." https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/09/this-is-not-fine.html

Women attracted to men at about their own age Men are attracted to young women, no matter the man's age: https://nytimes.com/2017/09/29/opinion/sunday/dating-age-gap.html?_r=0

"With 2 ongoing studies rigorously testing the EmDrive’s 'impossibility,'… only months away from its do-or-die moment.… several research groups, including NASA… & a team at Xi’an in China, tried it & got the same result… small-but-distinct net force." https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a33917439/emdrive-wont-die/

Astronomers are surprised by what they have learned from Voyager 1 and 2 as they leave the heliosphere. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200908-the-weird-space-that-lies-outside-our-solar-system

North Korean Hackers Steal Billions in Cryptocurrency. How Do They Turn It Into Real Cash? https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/10/1008282/north-korea-hackers-money-laundering-cryptocurrency-bitcoin/

"Over the past year I have skimmed through more than 2500 social science papers. I wrote a giant post about everything that's wrong with them and how to fix the process that generates them." https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/

Beyond the brain: towards a mathematical modeling of emotions https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.04216

Mega-analysis: “Personality is a powerful predictor of life outcomes, above and beyond standard variables often trumpeted in economics and sociology.” https://psyarxiv.com/vsm9y/

“NASA will pay some company or companies to go to the moon and bring back soil. Not because the soil is important. Because they are creating a market in the capability to go to the moon. “Create a market for the thing you want to do” is a great strategy." https://blogs.nasa.gov/bridenstine/2020/09/10/space-resources-are-the-key-to-safe-and-sustainable-lunar-exploration/

"Rapid Evolution of Plastic-degrading Enzymes Prevalent in the Global Ocean", Alam et al 2020 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.07.285692v1

First of all, the amount of suffering happening in the world is unbearable. Someone who did care about everyone else like they care about their own children would essentially be a negative utility monster, continuously experiencing massive distress. The way normal people naturally cope with this is that their concern for a person is inversely proportional to the social distance between themselves and the person. 

Secondly, most people are both not smart enough and too irrational to be able to handle the emotional stress such unbounded compassion would cause. They would be constantly outraged and make the world a worse place for themselves and everyone else. As communism amply proves, even many smart people miserably fail to implement their noble goals and end up maximizing suffering rather than reducing it.

A better strategy than telling people to care about strangers is to encourage them to have kids. This will most often force them to care about the consequences their actions have for other beings. And if they are a little bit rational they will also realize that the well-being of their children requires a prosperous and peaceful society and a habitable planet. In other words, having children will make people care about others as a consequence of their affection for their children.

Better-than-GPT3 performance with 0.1% the number of parameters. Shrinking GPT-3-scale capabilities from billions to millions of parameters. https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.07118

Generative Language Modeling for Automated Theorem Proving https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.03393

Sex differences in the prevalence of a range of autoimmune disorders, psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, and painful and socially disabling disorders. https://thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31561-0/fulltext

Chinese scientists say their neuromorphic computer Darwin Mouse has the same number of neurons as a real mouse https://www.scmp.com/abacus/tech/article/3099945/chinese-scientists-says-their-neuromorphic-computer-darwin-mouse-has

Design is the first demonstration of a magnetic, multi-material pump 3D printed all in one piece. https://news.mit.edu/2020/3d-printing-miniature-magnetic-pump-0909

Self-Supervised Natural Image Reconstruction and Rich Semantic Classification from Brain Activity https://biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.06.284794v1?rss=1

"Low Prevalence of Lactase Persistence in Bronze Age Europe Indicates Ongoing Strong Selection over the Last 3,000 Years", Burger et al 2020 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)31187-8

The carbon opportunity cost of animal-sourced food production on land https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4

As part of their 25 year pact, China will be integrating Iran into its mass surveillance system. Millions of cameras will be installed in 28 cities starting with the 7 largest, which will be linked into China's state surveillance and monitoring systems. And Mandarin will become the main foreign language in schools. https://oilprice.com/Geopolitics/Middle-East/China-Looks-To-Build-Espionage-Hub-In-Iran-Under-25-Year-Deal.html

GPT3, but for protein sequences instead of text https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/622803v3

A general dimension of genetic sharing across diverse cognitive traits inferred from molecular data: A genetic g factor accounts for an average of 58.4% of the genetic variance in the cognitive traits considered, with the proportion varying across traits. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-00936-2

“A huge (750,000 participants) just-published study found that of the more than 5,000 mutations in human DNA that affect blood characteristics, about 100 were restricted to certain races ("population groups”).“ https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200904090308.htm

“A U.S. Army self-propelled howitzer firing a Mach-5 shell just shot down a cruise missile for the first time.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2020/09/06/sci-fi-awesome-a-us-army-howitzer-just-shot-down-a-cruise-missile/#793ff445209e

“The CCP collects data in bulk and worries about what to do with it later. Even if it’s not all immediately usable, the Party anticipates better technical ability to exploit the data later on.” https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/19/1006455/gtcom-samantha-hoffman-tiktok/amp/

Meta-Analysis: Self-control is around 60% heritable – that is, genes explain around 60% of the differences between individuals in their levels of self-control (N > 100,000) https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763418307905

"Hollywood movies that cost $300M to produce today might be generated for a few cents within our lifetimes." -- The Generative Age: AI will do for content production what the internet did for distribution. https://arr.am/2020/09/15/the-generative-age/

Is there an IQ threshold (like 120), beyond which more IQ doesn’t matter? Nope. Higher IQ gives hugely increasing benefits, all the way up the scale. New paper by the brilliant David Lubinski debunks this & many other IQ myths. https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-my/wp-content/uploads/sites/826/2013/02/05123527/Article-GCQ-Lubinski-Benbow-2020.pdf

Britain’s first robot ship prepares to set sail: “On Sept 16, the Mayflower Autonomous Ship, a 15-metre-long steel trimaran, will slip into Plymouth Sound to prepare for a pioneering voyage: the first unmanned transatlantic crossing powered by artificial intelligence and solar energy." https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/09/06/britains-first-robot-ship-prepares-set-sail/

“The evolutionary paths of paddlefish and sturgeons diverged 184 million years ago. For those fish to breed is more like ‘if a human came out of a platypus egg.’” https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/08/accidental-creation-hybrid-fish/614974/

“Can we invent new states of matter as different from what came before as something like consciousness is from other states of matter?" https://mobile.twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/1302412654246420480

"Dune” as an exploration of AI safety https://twitter.com/micahtredding/status/1275648973445922816

Genetic factors play a significant role in food preferences, with no effect of family upbringing. https://cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-human-genetics/article/causes-of-variation-in-food-preference-in-the-netherlands/6D5C6B7507838ADC48B25FF5707FF5E3

One could write a whole book on left-wing science denial and propaganda in the 21st century and the millions of expected casualties.

For example, due to lies and propaganda, - nuclear power has been dramatically curtailed in favor of coal power - GM crops have been blocked which has cost millions of lives and led to child blindness and malnutrition - glyphosate, one of the best tested and completely safe herbicides, will be replaced with several dangerous and environmentally harmful products - billions of dollars are and will be wasted on useless interventions while unequal outcomes of different populations have been and will be cited as evidence of continued discrimination because genetic confounding, IQ research, sex differences, stereotype accuracy, and crime statistics have been and will be ignored due to the erroneous Blank Slate dogma - racial tensions and institutional distrust have been stoked by convincing people that the police is engaging in racist lynchings on a grand scale when in reality an unarmed black person is more likely to be struck by lightning than being killed by the police - wood stoves and fireplaces have been promoted and even government-funded because they are "green" and "natural" - climate change is erroneously portrayed as an existential risk in order to distract from political mismanagement, achieve unrelated political goals, and push an anti-capitalist narrative that has already cost 100 million lives during the 20th century - animal-rights activists have hampered and continue to hamper critical research relying on animal experimentation.

Single cells are able to navigate complex mazes. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6507/eaay9792.full

“Body builders and athletes sometimes take a supplement called AKG. It was found to prolong life in worms. Researchers have now found that AKG massively delays frailty in mice: old mice that took AKG look better and are stronger. The mice also live a bit longer." https://www.buckinstitute.org/news/a-metabolite-produced-by-the-body-increases-lifespan-and-dramatically-compresses-late-life-morbidity-in-mice/

“Ask Woodward and he’ll tell you his gizmo has merely tapped into the fabric of the universe and hitched a ride on gravity itself. Sound impossible? A lot of theoretical physicists think so too. …But in June, after two decades of halting progress, Woodward and Fearn made a minor change to the configuration of the thruster. Suddenly, the MEGA drive leapt to life.” https://www.wired.com/story/mach-effect-thrusters-interstellar-travel/