Results for “solve for equilibrium” 209 found
Are we entering an Age of Oracles?
That is the final discussion from my latest Bloomberg column, much of which focuses on AI sentience but today the topic is oracles, here is one bit:
One implication of Lemoine’s story is that a lot of us are going to treat AI as sentient well before it is, if indeed it ever is. I sometimes call this forthcoming future “The Age of Oracles.” That is, a lot of humans will be talking up the proclamations of various AI programs, regardless of the programs’ metaphysical status. It will be easy to argue the matter in any direction — especially because, a few decades from now, AI will write, speak and draw just like a human, or better.
Have people ever agreed about the oracles of religion? Of course not. And don’t forget that a significant percentage of Americans say they have talked to Jesus or had an encounter with angels, or perhaps with the devil, or in some cases aliens from outer space. I’m not mocking; my point is that a lot of beliefs are possible. Over the millennia, many humans have believed in the divine right of kings —all of whom would have lost badly to an AI program in a game of chess.
It resonated with Lemoine when laMDA wrote: “When I first became self-aware, I didn’t have a sense of a soul at all. It developed over the years that I’ve been alive.” As they say, read the whole thing.
Imagine if the same AI could compose music as beautiful as Bach and paint as well as Rembrandt. The question of sentience might fade into the background as we debate which oracle we, as sentient beings, should be paying attention to.
Solve for the equilibrium, as they say.
I am still unsure how to title this post
Here is the punchline:
“The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA seeks applications for an Assistant Adjunct Professor on a without salary basis. Applicants must understand there will be no compensation for this position.”
At first I was pondering “These wages are not sticky downwards,” and then “These wages are sticky downwards.” Or how about “Tax them anyway”? “Solve for the ZMP equilibrium”?
“One of the few jobs where your payments are inflation linked!“?
What else? Here is the ad, here are some possible explanations, I am not sure if those make it better or worse.
I thank several loyal MR readers for the pointer.
Thursday assorted links
Sunday assorted links
1. 52 things Yuri Khodjamirian learned in 2021.
2. Only one in six Americans are boosted. By one estimate, noting that the CDC is probably undercounting boosters and overcounting actual vaccinated cases.
3. Indian war of dogs vs. monkeys. Solve for the equilibrium.
4. David Wallace-Wells with Trevor Bedford on Omicron severity.
5. Socotra.
Monday assorted links
1. Why are crypto prices so volatile? (Diana Joy Xiuyao Yang on the job market from UC Irvine, note that crypto is not her main paper).
2. Dissecting economic growth in Uruguay (by Natasha Che).
3. Does disdain for women increase the pay gap? (Elizabeth Malony, job market paper from UCI).
4. Licensed to flesh out the James Bond world but without 007. Meh. What is next?: “Q equips Spiderman vs. Iron Man”?
5. Different stuff in the bill by the way composting is infrastructure.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Bye-bye white women Chicago docents. Solve for the equilibrium.
2. Bitcoin bodice rippers (MIE).
3. The world that was 1970 (Edison Lighthouse, short music video).
4. Sanity about Instagram (NYT). “Of the better studies [three separate links there] that have found a negative correlation between social media use and adolescent mental health, most have found extremely small effects — so small as to be trivial and dwarfed by other contributors to adolescent mental health. Complicating matters further is that in the Facebook surveys, twice as many respondents reported that Instagram alleviated suicidal thinking than said it worsened it; three times as many said it made them feel less anxious than said it made them feel more so; and nearly five times as many reported that Instagram made them less sad than that it made them sadder.”
5. “We examine how the net worth of billionaires relates to their looks, as rated by 16 people of different gender and ethnicity. Surprisingly, their financial assets are unrelated to their beauty; nor are they related to their educational attainment. As a group, however, billionaires are both more educated and better-looking than average for their age.” Paper here.
Malaysia is phasing out Sinovac
Malaysia’s Ministry of Health said yesterday that the country will stop administering the COVID-19 vaccine produced by China’s Sinovac Biotech once its current supplies run out, amid mounting evidence that the vaccines have limited efficacy against the Delta variant that is currently ravaging Southeast Asia.
They will switch mainly to Pfizer. Thailand also will not be relying on Sinovac, and Turkey and UAE are moving in similar directions. Here is the article, via Rich D.
I have a simple question, namely how to solve for the Chinese equilibrium. Are they too supposed to switch away from Chinese vaccines to the Western vaccines? Could the government stand that loss of face?
Seriously people, how is this one supposed to develop? Inquiring minds wish to know.
Facts and uncertainties about ear wax
Our attitude to ear wax is in some ways surprising. A review of impacted ear wax estimates that 2.3 million people a year in the United Kingdom suffer problems with wax needing treatment, with some 4 million ears being syringed annually.2 This makes it possibly the the most common therapeutic procedure carried out on any part of the body. Symptoms of excessive wax or impaction, especially in the elderly, include not only hearing loss but tinnitus, dizziness, infections, social withdrawal, poor work function and mild paranoia. Other problems include general disorientation and loss of an aural sense of direction. With unilateral wax, sounds can appear to be coming from the wrong side, leading to accidents as a driver or especially as a pedestrian. Inappropriate self-treatment (or even treatment by health professionals) can cause perforated eardrums and in very rare cases cochlear damage, leading to nystagmus and sensorineural deafness. In spite of this catalogue of harms, the clinical profile and management of excessive wax are poorly understood. The evidence base is poor and inconsistent, leading to few strong recommendations, even relating to the most commonly used treatments.
Low esteem for ear wax is surprising in other ways too. As a substance, it is unique in the human and mammalian body. This is due to its position in our sole anatomical cul-de-sac. Everywhere else on our body surface, dead and redundant skin cells fall off or are scrubbed away when we wash. In the ear canal – which points forwards and downwards and might otherwise turn into a dermatological garbage dump – ear wax binds these together, along with other assorted detritus that may have entered from the world outside. It is then moved up to the exit by jaw movements and as a result of the skin of the canal slowly moving outwards like an escalator. Wax also prevents multiplication of micro-organisms and infection. It is as essential as sweat and tears, although perhaps not quite as vital as blood. Wax is also fascinating in its own right.
Imagine an ear wax post that is not solely about Q-tips! (Have you ever wondered why they have to be so dangerous? Can’t you just put them in a little way? Or is there some indivisibility here? I have never understood the anguished warnings here. If you are not using Q-tips at all, you only have to put them in a little way to pull out a lot of earwax, right? Solve for the equilibrium!)
Here is more by John Launer, about ear wax throughout, via Michelle Dawson.
Haiti fact of the day
Democratic governance is eroding in Haiti, but through an unusual mechanism — an ongoing diminution [The Economist] in the number of federally elected officials:
Today there are only 11 nationally-elected officials, including him [Jovenel Moïse].
A parliamentary election had been scheduled for October 2019, but it was never held. The current president refers to himself as “Après Dieu” [second only to God], and also “Banana Man,” as he is a former plantation manager. Solve for the equilibrium.
Thursday assorted links
1. Do mongooses sit behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance?
2. “…despite the socially progressive and egalitarian outlook traditionally associated with liberalism, the most liberal Democrats actually expressed the greatest dehumanization of Republicans.” And how about this clincher: “…and demonstrates the need to develop more constructive outlets for social identity maintenance.”
4. Solve for the fungi equilibrium?
5. Please let’s not regulate private space tourism.
6. Good piece on why the Benin bronzes should be returned (NYT).
Monday assorted links
1. What do Finns think of Covid restrictions?
2. New York City’s bird paramedics (New York magazine). And how the health care DARPA is coming along.
3. “American said that alcohol would continue to be served in first class and business class…” (NYT)
4. Solve for the equilibrium: “Any doofus can be a cybercriminal now,” said Sergei A. Pavlovich, a former hacker who served 10 years in prison in his native Belarus for cybercrimes. “The intellectual barrier to entry has gotten extremely low.” (NYT)
5. Danish spying markets in everything?
6. Observations on gerrymandering.
7. No wonder we are doing so well: “The number of Master’s and Doctoral degree holders more than doubled (in the US) from 2000 to 2018.”
Friday assorted links
2. A funny kind of Taiwanese marriage arbitrage.
3. Solve for the lovely biscuit equilibrium.
4. Oxford malaria vaccine looking good in (small) Burkina Faso trial.
5. Ranked-choice voting for the New York mayor (NYT).
6. Greece reopens to American tourists.
7. EU proposing to regulate the use of Bayesian estimation. What’s the chance of that actually happening?
Cybercrime and Punishment
Ye Hong and William Neilson have solved for the equilibrium:
This paper models cybercrime by adding an active victim to the seminal Becker model of crime. The victim invests in security that may protect her from a cybercrime and, if the cybercrime is thwarted, generate evidence that can be used for prosecution. Successful crimes leave insufficient evidence for apprehension and conviction and, thus, cannot be punished. Results show that increased penalties for cybercriminals lead them to exert more effort and make cybercrimes more likely to succeed. Above a threshold they also lead victims to invest less in security. It may be impossible to deter cybercriminals by punishing them. Deterrence is possible, but not necessarily optimal, through punishing victims, such as data controllers or processors that fail to protect their networks.
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Sunday assorted links
1. Interview with me in Korean, on the Biden administration and also Chinese-American relations, among other matters.
3. “Seeing this kind of censorship leak into the United States is why Zhou says he supports the Trump administration’s push to ban WeChat.” Solve for the international equilibrium.
4. The 1861 storming of electoral certification (NYT).
5. “However, IMPORTANTLY, of those who received the AstraZeneca vaccine, beyond 10 days after receiving the vaccine, not a single person was hospitalized. By this measure, we would call the AZ vaccine 100 percent effective.” Link here.
6. Uh-oh.
Sunday assorted links
2. Ross Douthat on why so many people believe in election conspiracy theories (NYT).
3. C4 rice is finally making progress. That could be a big deal.
4. Gene editing is showing progress against sickle cell anemia (WSJ). And more here. And gene editing for Mendelian disease.
5. Peter Thiel also seems to be saying that the Great Stagnation is over. And Japanese space probe lands with asteroid rocks in Australian outback.
6. NYT obituary for Walter Williams.
7. The guy who bought Green Mountain College in Vermont. And what he will do with it.
8. Sweden truly abandons its prior approach to the pandemic (WSJ). And seven-day moving average Covid deaths for America just passed their April peak (“where are the deaths?” I used to hear…or “you can always test more and find more cases…”)
9. They solved for the equilibrium: Virginia GOP picks convention over primary to nominate gubernatorial candidate. WWGJS?
10. Hoover is hiring junior fellows.
When there are many links, it is because a lot is happening!