Results for “ufo” 115 found
Thursday assorted links
1. Zurich and Winterthur move to a $26.70 minimum wage (in German). Is that higher than the average wage in Germany?
2. Much more transmission capacity is needed.
3. China claim of the day: “Wow ByteDance buying $1Bn of NVIDIA AI chips in first half of this year is a lot … that’s 100K chips. ChatGPT was trained on 10K chips”
4. New Behavioral Economics Guide 2023.
5. So, so often people are writing about themselves.
6. Ezra Klein on building and California and the energy transition (NYT). And Ezra talking to Leslie Kean (NYT, with transcript), she really cannot hold up a plausible defense for her UFO claims.
Saturday assorted links
1. The Mechanical Turk is increasingly mechanical in fact.
2. Participating in a climate prediction market increases concern about global warming.
4. Taliban markets in everything, “Cash-strapped Taliban selling tickets to ruins of Buddhas it blew up.”
5. Guess who is being blamed for high rates of Swedish inflation?
6. SpaceX hires fourteen-year-old engineer, he is then denied a LinkedIn account.
7. Ross on C.S. Lewis and the weirdness of our time (NYT). Good Straussian clincher at the very end.
8. Daniel Ellsberg, RIP (NYT).
Tuesday assorted links
1. Further reason to discount Grusch. And commentary from Ross. Nonetheless here is a look at the more serious evidence.
2. How culture normalizes patriarchy.
3. The UK plans to lead on AI. Says Sunak. And a few of you have been asking for more Macca content, so here is Macca on AI, not the worst comments I have heard on the topic. Macca is still at the frontier, even at age 80 or so.
4. What do we know about corporate discount rates?
6. Dugin update.
Sunday assorted links
2. Price controls: too early for a victory lap.
3. David Pogue reviews Apple Vision Pro (WSJ). And Raymond Wong on the same.
4. John Cochrane on discount rates.
5. Ross on whether the government wants you to believe in UFOs (NYT).
6. How does college alter political attitudes?
7. Samuel Hammond: “European AI safety is focused on privacy while American AI safety is focused on paternalism. Neither make us more safe in any substantive sense.”
Tuesday assorted links
1. Is that what French YIMBY looks like? Does building needs its own ideology? Is Brutalism OK after all?
2. Looking back at some key AGI predictions, the core lesson being not to weigh non-proven methods of abstract reasoning too heavily. EY vs. Hanson is the organizing theme. You can talk yourself into a lot of things.
3. Arnold Kling on narrow banking.
4. Some parts of Canada really are worth a whole lot more.
5. Should California allow Sikh motorcyclists to ride without helmets?
7. UFO weird stuff update. And more. Can we go back to talking about YIMBY for Chattanooga now? How about which is the most underrated Wings album?
Monday assorted links
2. Average age people in various nations lose their virginity. “Iceland [Malaysia] fact of the day.”
3. The political beliefs of Native Americans?
4. Which are the most expensive license plates and why?
5. “But it’s not a realistic option,” he said, ” to keep moving decoys and buying gallons of [coyote] urine.” Link here, the elk fighting culture that is Oregon. And this: “But apparently, once an elk gets a taste for rhododendrons, it will walk miles back to town to satisfy that craving.”
6. Is processed food the real divide between southern and northern Europe?
8. Starmer now pushing for UK nuclear power.
9. UFO likely fake news but more detailed and credible than usual?
Friday assorted links
2. Russell Hogg and Scott Sumner podcast on Japanese movies.
3. Foundations and Frontiers, some new essays on new technologies, by Anna-Sofia Lesiv.
4. “Meet the one-person team behind Antarctica’s longest-running newspaper, the Antarctic Sun.”
5. Benjamin Wallace-Wells on libertarianism (New Yorker).
6. The excellent Dan Senor podcasts with me.
7. How to keep people chatting.
8. Pentagon now hunting for UFOs with sensors actively built for that purpose.
Model this upper atmospheric infrasound
A solar-powered balloon mission launched by researchers from Sandia National Laboratories carried a microphone to a region of Earth’s atmosphere found around 31 miles (50 km) above the planet called the stratosphere. This region is relatively calm and free of storms, turbulence and commercial air traffic, meaning microphones in this layer of the atmosphere can eavesdrop on the sounds of our planet, both natural and human-made.
However, the microphone in this particular study also heard strange sounds that repeat a few times per hour. Their source has yet to be identified. The sounds were recorded in the infrasound range, meaning they were at frequencies of 20 hertz (Hz) and lower, well below the range of the human ear. “There are mysterious infrasound signals that occur a few times per hour on some flights, but the source of these is completely unknown,” Daniel Bowman of Sandia National Laboratories said in a statement.(opens in new tab)
No, I don’t think it is “UFOs,” but perhaps by now it should be clear we really don’t know what is going on up there? And it really would e good if we did. Here is the full story.
Sunday assorted links
1. Game-theoretic analysis of China blockading Taiwan.
2. Pentagon official offers new UFO theory (not my theory, to be clear).
3. “How did the men, whom the authorities are still working to identify and arrest, lug so many dimes into their white Chrysler 300 and dark-colored pickup truck?” (200k, NYT) And problems with prompt injection.
Thursday assorted links
1. Good to see a Mexican amate up for auction at Christie’s. Might anyone here know what is being done with the rest of the Citibanamex collection?
4. Return to Seoul is an excellent movie (NYT).
5. Shruti interviews Alain Bertaud (newly part of Mercatus) on cities in India.
6. Fifty conversations in Bangalore and Chennai.
7. Ross on magic, AI, and related topics (NYT): “…what we’re doing resembles a complex incantation, a calling of spirits from Shakespeare’s “vasty deep.””
Broader implications of ChatGPT
No, it is not converging upon human-like intelligence or for that matter AGI. Still, the broader lesson is you can build a very practical kind of intelligence with fairly simple statistical models and lots of training data. And there is more to come from this direction very soon.
This reality increases the probability that the aliens around the universe are intelligent rather than stupid. They don’t need a “special box” in their heads (?) to become cognitively sophisticated, rather experience can bring them a long way.
That in turn heightens the Fermi paradox. Where are they?
Which in turn, for any particular views about The Great Filter (presumably there is some chance it lies ahead of us), should make us more pessimistic about the future survival of humankind.
It modestly increases the chances that UFOs are drone probes from space aliens.
It also narrows the likely gap between human and animal intelligence.
What else?
I thank a friend for a useful conversation related to these points.
Wednesday assorted links
2. Does constructing a belief distribution reduce overconfidence?
3. UFOs in Kyiv?, and research paper here.
4. Finances of the royal family (WSJ).
5. Ian McEwan, etc. (Atlantic).
6. Freddie Wong on how to find authentic Chinese food (short video).
Tuesday assorted links
1. Cultural intelligence” as a factor behind your talent, and talent-spotting? From 2017.
2. The Physiognomy Theory of Revolutionary History (speculative).
3. Changing Congressional lingo on UFOs. Don’t worry, though, it is just the stupid bureaucracy.
4. Car seat laws as contraception.
5. Lance Taylor has passed away.
7. Why is it so difficult for Carlsen to achieve a rating of 2900?
Wednesday assorted links
The intellectual mistake of once-and-for-allism
One of the most common intellectual mistakes!
Do note however that it is an efficient mistake for many people to commit, and that is part of why it is so common.
“Once-and-for-allism” occurs when people decide that they wish to stop worrying about an issue at the margin. They might either dismiss the issue, or they might blow up its importance but regard the issue as hopeless and undeserving of further consideration. Either way, they seek to avoid the hovering sense of “I’ve still got to devote time and energy to figuring this out.” They prefer “I am now done with this issue, once and for all!” Thus the name of the syndrome.
I see once-and-for-allism with so many issues, but one recent example would be the forthcoming path of Covid and Long Covid. Most people just don’t want to think about it any more, and so they settle on something (“it’s just a cold!” or “it will bankrupt the nation!”) rather than having to do lots of intellectual revisions based on the stream of new data.
Other examples of topics that attract once-and-for-all thinking would be crypto, demographic decline, long-run fiscal solvency, various foreign policy crises, biodiversity, AI issues, the Repugnant Conclusion and Non-Identity Problems, whether we are living in a simulation, UFOs, abortion, what is the person’s ultimate normative standard, and much more.
People won’t let these topics take up too much of their mind space. But neither can they do the Bayesian detachment thing, and so they shunt these topics into settled categories and put them aside.
If you are trying to figure out a thinker and his or her defects, see if you can spot that person’s “once-and-for-all” moves. There will be plenty of them.