Things I read and liked in June

Cognition in creatures and computers, countering conflicts, consciousness collaborations

(1) Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart AIs Are? In the latest issue of Asterisk Magazine, I consider lessons from the history of animal cognition for how we talk and think about today’s AI systems. Summary thread here.

(2) A reminder that you can bet against the success of this newsletter over at Manifold Markets. Manifold Markets is a fun website for prediction markets, where the money you bet (“Mana”) is not real, but you can convert your Mana into real money as charitable donations. Sign up if you haven’t, and place your bets!

(3) Since the Center for AI Safety’s statement on AI extinction risks, there’s been a lot of discussion about how exactly AI is supposed to go badly. “An Overview of Catastrophic AI Risks” by Dan Hendrycks, Mantas Mazeika, and Thomas Woodside of CAIS, provides a comprehensive discussion.

(4) A website that tracks news stories that are widely covered in left-wing media but barely mentioned in the right-wing media, and vice versa. This effort seems noble and also inevitably unpopular.

(5) Magisterial report by Stephen Clare on the risk of great power conflict and how to reduce it. Stephen’s summary thread. 

(6) Twenty-five years ago, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet that by 2023 we would have discovered the neural correlates of consciousness, and it would be clear / consensus what they are. David Chalmers bet against this. The bet resolved, as you might imagine, in favor of Chalmers. See coverage in Nature, but also see Megan Peters’s discussion / criticism of how the bet, and other recent developments in consciousness science, have been covered.

(7) From Gwern: A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.

(8) Related, an argument that people have actually gotten hotter over time: attractiveness “is not purely positional and relative, but has increased in an absolute sense over the past few centuries”.

(9) In spite of protests from scientists and public outcry, plans for a factory farm for octopuses are still moving forward: “The aim is to gradually ramp up production over the next four years to 3,000 tons of meat annually. This would mean the slaughter of about 1 million octopuses a year.” 

(10) Napoleon loved perfume: “Napoleon went through 60 bottles of perfume a month. ‘He doused himself in it,’ Ms. Levitt writes, ‘bathed in it, carried a handkerchief scented with it, and even splashed some on the face of a man having a fit in front of him. He drank it, diluted with water or wine, and kept a bottle beside him on the eve of every battle. It was, he insisted, a necessary source of health and vitality.’” (WSJ, archive)

(11) What does it mean to understand how a scientific literature is put together?

(12) Interesting measures of “how fast life moves” around the world countries: “Three indicators of pace of life were observed: average walking speed in downtown locations, the speed with which postal clerks completed a simple request (work speed), and the accuracy of public clocks. Overall, pace of life was fastest in Japan and the countries of Western Europe and was slowest in economically undeveloped countries. The pace was significantly faster in colder climates, economically productive countries, and in individualistic cultures” (ht Alex Tabarrok).

(13) Elizabeth van Nostrand argues that veganism does involve health tradeoffs, and people concerned with animal welfare need to be much more clear-eyed and honest about this.

(14) The metta sutta (wiki)

(15) Ozy Brennan against anonymous feedback forms: “For many years, many of my friends have used an anonymous feedback form such as Admonymous. However, in my experience, these forms very rarely produce useful or actionable feedback.”

(16) Agency therapy

(17) Connor Tabarrok pays tribute to one of the wonders of the world, “a story of human achievement, global interconnectedness, and the power and fragility of our digital age”: the world's undersea telecommunications cable network. “These cables carry more than 95% of international data traffic, enabling global communication, commerce, and collaboration. They are the backbone of the internet and one of the world’s most impressive feats of human engineering…They cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and require specialized ships and equipment to lay and repair them.”

(18) Great article in Noema Magazine on using sound to understand the world - “Like the microscope and the telescope did centuries ago, new technologies to capture and analyze sound are leading to startling discoveries about what the eyes cannot see.” Excerpt.