Category: Science
The gap gets smaller
Prayer doesn’t reduce mortality and neither does alcohol. In both cases, more evidence that there is no god.
Are You Boring Me?
Frankly, I could give a few of these out as Christmas presents.
MIT Media Lab researchers are building a device to help autistic people
determine if they’re boring or annoying the person they’re talking to. The
"emotional social intelligence prosthetic device" is a camera that clips on
eyeglasses and feeds images to a small computer that uses image recognition
software to characterize emotions. If the listener doesn’t seem to be engaged,
the device vibrates to alert the wearer.
From David Pescowitz at Boing Boing Blog.
The future of science
If all this happens, or even half of it, I won’t count as an economist any more. Thanks to kottke.org for the pointer.
AI, Consciousness and Robot Outsourcing
One of my "absurd views" is that the first computer to become conscious was Deep Blue playing against Gary Kasparov in 1997. It only happened for a moment but in one spectacular move Deep Blue performed like no computer ever had before. After the game, Kasparov said he felt a presence behind the machine. He looked frightened.
Ken Rogoff, a top-flight economist and chess prodigy, wonders whether we don’t all have a little something to fear.
But the level that computers have reached already is scary enough.
What’s next? I certainly don’t feel safe as an economics professor! I have no doubt that sometime later this century, one will be able to
buy pocket professors – perhaps with holographic images – as easily as
one can buy a pocket Kasparov chess computer today.
Rogoff thinks that the upheavals caused by cheap AI will be far more important than those caused by low-wage labor from India and China.
…will
artificial intelligence replace the mantra of outsourcing and
manufacturing migration? Chess players already know the answer.
Philosophical implications of inflationary cosmology
Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a nonzero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like our own, as well as infinitely many civilizations that differ from our own in any way permitted by physical laws. We explore the implications of this conclusion for ethical theory and for the doomsday argument. In the infinite universe, we find that the doomsday argument applies only to effects which change the average lifetime of all civilizations, and not those which affect our civilization alone.
Got that? Here is the paper. Here is brief background.
It seems if you count all possible universes (or call them parts of our multiverse, whatever) as normatively relevant, none of your actions matter in consequentialist terms.
As to how our world, and our decisions, matter at the margin, we delve into the murky waters of infinite expected values. With an infinity of alternatives out there, our little add-on doesn’t seem to make any difference for the grand total. Why should even you raise the average outcome across universes? (TC yesterday: "No, Bryan, we are not leaping up Cantorian levels of infinity, it is just one version of you getting another Klondike bar.")
One option is that only our universe, or some other "in-group," matters. The other universes cannot count for less, rather they must count for nothing. I recoil at such a thought, but it does avoid the mess of infinities. Alternatively, we might embrace some version of Buddhism.
On the bright side, philosophic talk about modality is no longer so problematic but rather refers to facts about other existing universes. Since that problem threatened to bring morality to its knees anyway ("what do you mean, you "could" have done something different? You did what you had to do."), maybe I don’t feel so bad after all. And who should care if I do feel bad? The other me feels fine. Infinity has its benefits, and there are many worse problems.
You should lower your probability that God exists, since the Anthropic Argument will dispense with the Argument from Design. Only the ordered pockets of the multiverse can wonder about why we are here and why things seem to run so smoothly.
That’s a lot to swallow in one day, but it seems the probability of all those propositions just went up.
Addendum: Have I mentioned that inflationary cosmology and its implications fit my crude, pathetic intuitions? Since we have a universe, I feel it must somehow be a kind of cosmic "free lunch." And once you open the door for free lunches, why stop at just one? There is no good reason to rely on our locally-evolved common sense intuitions when doing philosophic cosmology.
Fluctuating inflation field
This is cosmology, not monetary policy. Guth’s theory of inflation has just received a big boost from the data. Here is Andrei Linde’s portrayal of how an inflationary field fluctuates. Here is a slower version with higher resolution. Here is Linde’s home page, which has many other time wasters.
Addendum: Best sentence I read today: "Galaxies are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky," by Brian Greene.
How happy should I be?
Sometimes I will pull up to a red light and be, in the middle of the day, the first car in line waiting for the green. (Northern Virginia, of course, has its fair share of traffic, so this is unusual but it does happen.) I often wonder: should I be happy?
Under one view, I should be unhappy. The absence of other cars means the light hasn’t been red for very long. That suggests I have a relatively long time to wait for a green.
Under another view, I should be happy. It is a brute fact, carved into "the furniture of the universe," when the light will turn green. How many cars I see won’t change that. I should be happy that no cars will impede my forward progress.
Much rests on this question. I am very happy to have the friends I do. But exactly how happy should I be?
Should I be happy if I know the answer to this question? Or would knowing be like seeing no other cars around?
Do you want to be inspired?
Adam Phillips remains one of our most underrated thinkers:
However much we want inspiration, if it disturbs our normal sense of ourselves then we are going to resist it. Most people are not seeking self-knowledge; they believe – they live as if – they already know who they are. So self-knowledge in this sense is the enemy of inspiration, our best defence against this alien invasion. As in sex, we may long to lose our composure and self-control but there is one thing we desire even more, and that is not to. Self-knowledge protects us from inspiration; inspiration, like sexual desire, undoes us. For non-believers, inspiration is more like sexual desire than anything else; a fascination, a fear, and something we think of as having a secret solitary pleasure attached to it.
Read the whole thing. If you want to try one of his books, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored is the best place to start.
Department of !
Saturn moon spewing water vapor. Or so it seems…
Big dog
My admittedly uninformed perspective is that after the robot arm, progress in the field of robotics slowed greatly. Fixed location, repetitive movement robots for industrial production worked very well but the problems of autonomy turned out to be much more difficult than had been anticipated. It appears to me, however, that many roadblocks have fallen in recent years. The robots are on the move.
Case in point? Check out this movie of big dog. Further info here.
Thanks to Robin Hanson for the pointer.
Cooperative game theory vs. sexual selection
Roughgarden said that pairings are often better explained by creating a viable team than by finding the highest quality genes. Couples are usually genetically similar, she said, and their differences are often complementary: Both members provide the team with the strengths the other lacks.
"To make an analogy with humans, the number of children a couple can raise to adulthood is more influenced by the income of the family rather than the genetic makeup," Akcay said. "We think that in most species, this is what is going on: Males and females choose each other for ecological benefits rather than superior genetic makeups."
Read more here, including criticisms, hat tip to www.politicaltheory.info for the pointer.
HD-DVD v. Blu-Ray
The NYTimes thinks that Sony’s Blu-Ray standard for Hi Def DVD is in trouble now that Microsoft has announced it will support Toshiba’s rival standard. But the Times missed this even more important endorsement of Blu-Ray.
Will our universe be mangled?
"It could be there’s a moment of pain before the end," [Robin] Hanson says. "But you could be comforted by the fact that versions of you will go on, even if you don’t."
Yes that is our Robin Hanson, on quantum mechanics and multiple universes, picked up by New Scientist. Here is Robin guest-blogging quantum mechanics for us; see also here. The bottom line? Finish that novel you are working on.
The best sentence I read yesterday (previous post retraction edition)
Herr Andrew Hammel believes that German can be a happy language too:
I have tried smiling while saying umlauted vowels, and it seems to work just fine, it’s only a little tricky with the ‘ü’, since you’ve got to tighten your cheek muscles a bit to really get it right.
Hammel’s blog is frequently interesting, here is a good post on German compound nouns.
Are some languages happier than others?
Germans can be grumpy, unpleasant people–and it’s not because of post-Nazi guilt or a diet filled with bratwurst, says one American researcher. It’s because of their vowels. Hope College psychology professor David Myers says saying a vowel with an umlaut forces a speaker to turn down his mouth in a frown, and may induce the sadness associated with the facial expression. Myers added that the English sounds of "e" and "ah" naturally create smile-like expressions and may induce happiness. Clearly the solution for the Germans, much like the solution for every other people in the world, is to become more like Americans. The German Embassy would not comment on the findings, saying they were "too scientific."
Here is the link, which contains a few other tidbits as well. Thanks to Alina Stefanescu for the pointer.