Category: Science

Geologists have called for a taskforce to be set
up to consider emergency management in the event of a massive volcanic
eruption, or super-eruption…Experts say such an event would have a colossal impact on a global scale.  A super-eruption is also five to 10 times more likely to happen than an asteroid impact, the report claims.

The effects, say the authors, "could be sufficiently
severe to threaten the fabric of civilisation" – putting events such as
the Asian tsunami into the shade.  The fallout from a super-eruption could cause a "volcanic winter", devastating global agriculture and causing mass starvation…the frequency of equivalent super-eruptions is [at least] about once every 100,000 years.

Here is the full story.  Here is more background information.  Here are some apocalyptic worries of a religious nature.

A group of engineers has offered a solution for people who want a
direct line to aliens – by broadcasting their phone calls directly into
space.

People
wanting to contact extraterrestrial beings through www.TalkToAliens.com
can dial a premium rate US number and have their call routed through a
transmitter and sent into space through a 3.2-metre-wide dish in
central Connecticut, US.

The
service, launched on 27 February, will cost users $3.99 per minute,
says Eric Knight, president of the company. He says that a large radio
receiver – like the Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico – situated on a distant
planet might be large enough for an alien civilisation to receive the
calls.      
   

But who pays the long distance charges when ET returns your call?  Here is the story, and thanks to www.geekpress.com for the pointer.

(The debate so far Tyler 1, Alex 1, Tyler 2).  Transhumanism raises two issues of identity, personal identity and species identity.

We change our personal identities all the time not only in obvious ways such as cosmetic surgery, psychoactive drugs, and emigration but even more through personal growth.  A university is at it most glorious and exciting when students are confronted with new ideas and visions that forever change who they are.

Contra Tyler, what Kass, Fukuyama and others worry about is not that the demand for identity is too strong but that it is too weak.  In their equation, Personal growth + Biotechnology = Velociraptors.

When the demand for a change in personal identity is strong it can have important external effects.  You may not want to be a velociraptor but if I change what choice do you have?  Or you may simply have a preference (atavistic and irrational perhaps but still a preference) for human beings as they are now.

Tyler makes the mistake, however, of jumping from such and such preferences are important and real to such and such preferences justify regulation/taxation/subsidization etc.

But I have many real identity preferences that do not justify coercing others.  I think of myself as a professor of economics at GMU but I do not have an absolute right to my job.  I am a friend of Tyler but Tyler gets a say in this too.  I understand why the Quebecois want to prevent the use of English in Quebec but I don’t agree that they have the right to do so.

In the same way, I understand that some people don’t want to expand the human lifespan beyond its "natural" limits but I object to their preventing others from doing so just because they don’t like the sight of sprightly senior citizens.

In one study, four British universities measured the IQ of 900 11-year-olds
and revisited them 40 years later to see how their lives had moved on.

They found that the brighter girls were less likely to find a man who
wants to marry them, with their chances diminishing dramatically in
direct proportion to their level of intelligence.

For each 16-point rise in their IQ, their marriage prospects fell by 40 per cent.

In contrast, boys’ chances increased by 35 per cent with each 16-point rise.  (Qtd. here).

One theory is that men want to marry women who are not as smart as they are.  I thus explained to my wife (who has a PhD in microbiology) how lucky she was to find a really smart man.  Her response was unprintable in a family blog.  Let’s just say that she had an alternative theory of why smart women don’t get married, something about a fish and a bicycle.

The Implicit Association Test is revolutionizing the study of prejudice and bias.  The basic idea is simple, the test taker is asked to categorize a series of faces, hitting a right hand key for a white face and a left hand key for a black face.  Then the taker must similarly categorize a series of words as good or bad, words like wonderful, nasty, peace, hate etc.

Now here is where it gets interesting.  The next list contains both faces and words and the test taker is asked to hit a right hand key if the word is either good or the face is white or to hit a left hand key if the word is either bad or the face black.  Finally, the same task is performed but now the test taker must categorize together good words and black faces and bad words and white faces. The test taker is asked to do the test as fast as possible. 

Bias is revealed, so the argument goes, if response time is faster when good words must be paired with white faces and bad words paired with black faces than the reverse.  Call it the Blink, Blink, Bias test.

Now before you object, it has been shown that the biases revealed by the test do correlate
well with policy preferences and a wide variety of conscious and
unconscious actions.  Also the order of the two important tests, whether you hit the right or left hand keys etc. can all be varied with no change in results.

But what I find most interesting about these tests is that they do not always correlate the way one might expect.  This article from the Washington Post, for example, discusses a number of liberals who took the test and were shocked and appalled to find that they were unconsciously biased.

And now for my confession.  I am well aware of the differences in crime rates, IQ scores, welfare dependency and other factors across races.  I have sometimes been called a racist for mentioning these things.  I would be lying if I said I had a lot of black friends.  Thus, I was prepared to be told the worst about myself and adjust my conscious beliefs accordingly.

But according to the IAT, I showed no signs of bias!  Frankly, I am surprised but my unconscious is clear.

You can take the test here.  Hat tip to Mahalanobis.

I tend to sympathize with transhumanist ideals, if only for the same reason that I do not hesitate to use antibiotics.  Furthermore I have never had huge hang-ups over the "identity" concept; I don’t celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and I find it embarrassing to admit that I root for the Washington Wizards.  "The Six Million Dollar Man" was one of my favorite TV shows as a kid, although even then I thought the price was too low.

That being said, the economist in me asks not "whether" but rather "at what margin"?  Is there any margin at which concerns of identity should cause us to reject otherwise beneficial transhumanist improvements?

Most people want their children to look like themselves, and to some extent to think like themselves.  We invest many thousands of dollars and many months of our time to acculturate our children.  Now let’s say your children could be one percent happier throughout their lives, but this would mean they were totally unlike you, the parent.  In fact your children would be turned into highly intelligent velociraptors and flown to another planet to live among their own kind.  How many of us would choose this option?  I can think of a few responses:

1. Transhumanism will bring improvements of more than one percent; we should forget about identity and let everyone become healthier and happier.  What’s wrong with uploads?

2. Governments should not restrict transhumanist innovation.  Let people and their children choose their degrees of identity continuity for themselves.  (Isn’t there a collective action problem here?  Everyone wants a more competitive kid but at the end humanity is very different.)

3. The parental analogy is not relevant for policy choices.  Parents should be partial across identities, but governments should be more neutral.  And surely uploads will still be allowed to vote, no?

4. Identity attachments are, very often, petty and small-minded to considerable degree.  We should be cosmopolitan across chimpanzees and intelligent velociraptors, not to mention enhanced humans.

I still favor laissez-faire for transhumanist innovation.  And all the listed arguments have force with me.  But I would feel better rejecting the critics if I had a framework that would simultaneously recognize the value of identity while giving it limited weight to override medical progress.

These thoughts were stimulated by reading the new and useful More than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, by Ramez Naam.

Addendum: Here is an excellent Nick Bostrom essay, which argues human evolution may otherwise deteriorate.  He also wonders whether happiness and consciousness have evolutionary advantages in the long run.  Thanks to the Vassar family for the pointer.

Compared to say quantum physics or relativity the big bang seems straightforward – there was a big bang, right?  In fact, the idea of an expanding universe is as strange and intuition-defying as any in physics.

The strangeness of the big bang model first become clear to me when I quizzed Robin Hanson along the following lines.  How can the universe be infinite (as some cosmologists think) when we know that the universe is some 14 billion years old and it is expanding?  Doesn’t this mean that it must be finite?

Robin, who continues to publish papers in quantum physics as well as economics, explained that the universe is infinite and was already infinitely large when the big bang began, it’s space that has expanded.  The big bang was not an expansion in space but an expansion of space.  (My interpretation – think of the infinite number of points between 0 and 1 being mapped to the infinite number of points between 1 and 10.) 

If that’s not clear, and I don’t suppose that it is, this month’s Scientific American has the best introduction to the big bang that I have ever read.  I’ve also found this FAQ useful (see especially the answer to my question here).

The idea of a cloak of invisibility
that hides objects from view has long been confined to the more
improbable reaches of science fiction. But electronic engineers have
now come up with a way to make one.

Andrea
Alù and Nader Engheta of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia
say that a ‘plasmonic cover’ could render objects "nearly invisible to
an observer". Their idea remains just a proposal at this stage, but it
doesn’t obviously violate any laws of physics…

The key to the concept is to reduce
light scattering. We see objects because light bounces off them; if
this scattering of light could be prevented (and if the objects didn’t
absorb any light) they would become invisible. Alù and Engheta’s
plasmonic screen suppresses scattering by resonating in tune with the
illuminating light.

Read more here.

Gay men employ the same strategies for navigating as women – using landmarks to find their way around – a new study suggests.

But
they also use the strategies typically used by straight men, such as
using compass directions and distances. In contrast, gay women read
maps just like straight women, reveals the study of 80 heterosexual and
homosexual men and women.

Here is the full story.   
       
            

“We speculate that high testosterone individuals are comfortable in
a high status position, and able to concentrate on the task at hand,”
Newman said. “In a low status position, however, they appear to be
distracted by their low status, and thus presumably less able to
concentrate on the task at hand.

“They were more impaired
by low status than they were helped by high status,” Newman added. “If
you’re a high testosterone person, it is a really big deal to lose
status, where as to get a high status position is more expected.

Here is the full story.  And thanks to Eloise for the pointer.

Here is one good analysis.

Addendum: Read also Brad DeLong.

Matt Yglesias claims he is defective and asks:

Are there good reasons for young people to be designed as more risk-friendly than older people? …Is there some more general logic to this?

After all, teenagers can do some very stupid things, and for no apparent benefits.  Why?  I see a few major hypotheses:

1. The young take risks to signal they are strong and thus good potential mates.  We are biologically programmed so that this motivation declines with age.  This also helps explain why the young are most foolish amongst their peers.  Note that under this hypothesis, the default setting must be that a non-risk-taker doesn’t reproduce very much (otherwise why take risks?).  If polygamy was once common, this might explain why young men are more reckless than young women.

2. The young have greater need for some skill which is biochemically correlated with risk-taking behavior.  The risk-taking itself performs no useful functional role.  Read Randall Parker on this.

3.  When it comes to the kind of risks that were most prevalent in early hunter-gatherer societies — such as facing hostile large animals — today’s young are still quite risk-averse.

4. The young have fewer commitments and thus less to live for.  This is related to yesterday’s discussion of theism and risk-taking.

I view #4 as an underrated hypothesis, but I have turned on the comments function for your ideas.  And here is my earlier post on risk-taking and life extension.

Many of you have written back in defense of cryogenics (be sure to read Robin Hanson’s appended response).  But reader Michael Goodfellow offers a more negative view:

Robin Hanson’s comment implies cryonics will continue to be used even after the first set of people is revived.  This is unlikely.

There are few diseases (including aging) that could damage your brain more than having your head cut from your body and frozen.  The ability to repair this huge damage implies the ability to repair nearly any damage in a living person.  So no one will be frozen after the point where revival becomes possible (because no one will die!)  In fact, since repair of lesser injuries would be possible before
that, cryonics would already be an unused technology (no new brains frozen) long before revival is possible.

This has some consequences — if you are revived, it will be to a society of immortals.  Second, cryonics will stop being used before it has been proven to work, even if it does work (because no one dies and is frozen.)  So only a limited number of people will ever be frozen, and they will all have to take on faith that the technology can work.

My take: I’ll stick with my original pessimism, albeit for simpler reasons.  Despite recent efforts, it remains hard to buy insurance against the price of your home falling five years from now.  And how many companies issue fifty-year bonds?  Can I expect that  anyone will maintain my web page long after I die?  How much capitalization is needed to insure that an organization lasts even as little as fifty years?

In reality the series should be called "Spot Markets in Everything."

Some people I know have contracted to have their heads chopped off and frozen after (before? during?) their death.  Here is one fun and engaging calculation of one’s chances of resurrection:

At the end, then, what is the combined probability of success? If all my best case figures are used, P(now) from the Warren Equation is 0.15, or a  bit better than one chance in seven. This is my most optimistic scenario. The pessimistic scenario puts P at 0.0023, or less than one chance in 400.

The idea that (in my personal estimation) cryonics has all told at best only   a 15% chance of working, may be a bit shocking. But answers of this sort fall naturally out of chained probability equations. Like it or not, the Warren equation simply forces one to remember that the success of cryonics depends on the correctness of at least four separate physical hypotheses, the fortunate consummation of at least eight modern social trends, and some luck in the circumstances surrounding one’s demise. That’s a lot of hurdles. Even if the probability for each of these 13 factors is a flat 95%, the total probability of success would still only be 51% — barely better than flipping a coin.

My take: The true estimate should be even more pessimistic.  I think simply no one will care to thaw you out.

Addendum: Robin Hanson responds…