Emvolon, a new company founded by two MIT grads, says their technology can affordably convert methane from dispersed sources such as dumps, farms, and sewage treatment plants into methanol for industrial use. (Company web site, Engine Ventures, news story)
AI can predict human brain 5 states seconds into the future (Twitter/X) Tyler Cowen says this makes determinism more likely, but I think almost everyone agrees that human behavior is usually predictable.
Mass sacrifice of animals within the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan.
The amazing enameled chest of Cardinal Guala Bicchieri (ca. 1160-1227).
A report that Vietnam is pursuing radical reforms aimed at greatly shrinking the government.
Suicide note of AI leader Felix Hill, who took Ketamine to deal with minor mental health issues, went psychotic, had to be hospitalized, and emerged with a horrible depression he was unable to shake. "Ketamine, and the consequent psychosis, converted me from someone who has learned to live with depression on-the-whole pretty successfully to someone who is dead." Summary from Scott Siskind in his monthly links post. One of the weaknesses of the Rationalist movement is that their emphasis on thinking for themselves leaves these guys feeling qualified to prescribe drugs based on their own research. Like Felix Hill. In the same post, Siskind wonders if Elon Musk's personality change has to do with his own Ketamine use, or else steroids.
Tyler Cowen takes an economic approach to The Odyssey.
A tour of Mansion House, the home of the Lord Mayor of London, constructed in 1739.
From the geography blog at the Library of Congress, maps and other documents from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.
As they marched from Boston to Yorktown, the cartographers of Rochambeau's French legion made a map of every camp, including the ones at Philadelphia and Baltimore, giving us a set of 46 wonderful maps of America in 1781. Description here.
The fastest-growing major metropolitian area in the Americas is Toronto.
Alex Tabarrok attacks Curtis Yarvin's authoritarianism from a different angle than I did, emphasizing that capitalism works because of the market, not because individual firms have strong leaders. And it only works because we let firms fail, which is not how we usually treat nations.
The DOGE account on Twitter/X complains about the cost of pennies. If Musk can abolish the penny, that would be an achievement worth celebrating.
Richard Hanania reviews Trump's Day 1 Executive Orders. I may write something soon on Trump's ambition to end NEPA review of energy projects, a topic I know something about. I agree that NEPA is now being implemented in ways the people who voted for the law did not imagine, and I would like to see it cut back. Also, I think it is crazy that solar energy projects are regularly delayed so their environmental impact can be assessed; if climate change is a real concern, as everyone I know involved in the NEPA process agrees, then the environmental benefit of solar projects is always going to be positive and requiring them to go through NEPA is stupid.
The current vogue for online influencers reading classic novels. Via Marginal Revolution. As I said a while back, I think in some ways we have reached peak internet and we are going to see a lot more of people turning away from the social media whirl, at least in small doses.
Biologists think they know why mantas and other rays have such long tails: they are sensory organs. (NY Times, phys.org, original paper)
Noah Smith on the Trump and Melania memecoins.
At the Millersville Normal School, the (female) students who broke the rules had to produce hand-written notes to the administrators explaining their sins. JSTOR Daily has a collection.
Classical scrap yard full of statue fragments excavated in Turkey.
How one German intellectual thought about the Little Ice Age, a mixture of Christian apolalypticism and hermetic philosophy.
5 comments:
AI can predict human brain 5 states seconds into the future (Twitter/X) Tyler Cowen says this makes determinism more likely, but I think almost everyone agrees that human behavior is usually predictable.
Ugh. That's one of the most depressing things I've read in a long, long time, not the part about AI and an ultimate, complex, molecular-level determinism, but the simple, bland "almost everyone agrees that human behavior is usually predictable"--which makes it sound like "almost everyone"--not me, at any rate--agrees that human behavior is not only predictable, but simple and indeed simplistic, and predictable along familiar lines such as those used by classical economics. I hope we've at least moved beyond rational self-interest, simple materialism, economic structure determinism, and game theory, as well as the half-baked, historically ignorant just-so-storyism of someone like Sapolsky or the intellectual crudity of IR-style "realism." Note that I do NOT say all of this because I'm holding out for human freedom and/or heroic character and/or inherent moral nobility, only what I see as a tremendous complexity, fine-grained variation, ambivalence, impulsivity followed by chagrin and back-tracking, etc., etc., etc.--all the psychological mishegas I've talked about before.
"which is not how we usually treat nations"
I think Yarvin and much of the coalition he serves would like to treat nations like companies, and foreign policy as a sort of competitive market in force, with liberal countries paying the price for being too nice, protection of small nations at thing of the past, etc., etc. The strong do what they can, and the weak do what they must.
Emvolon, a new company founded by two MIT grads, says their technology can affordably convert methane from dispersed sources such as dumps, farms, and sewage treatment plants into methanol for industrial use.
A startup company seeking funding claims that they have a way to make money? ~NO!~ TELL ANOTHER!
Our next story tonight - a man claims to be a Nigerian prince in need of a small loan in order to access his family's vast fortune and repay the loan tenfold! Sounds trustworthy! After all, what POSSIBLE reason could someone have for making such a claim if it wasn't true?!
@John
I see you changed the wording on your entry about human behavior. I'm predictably (heh, see what I did there?) pleased that I've had an effect. But, debates aside (at least, for the moment), I'm curious who the "almost everyone" is and what exactly it is they agree on about human predictability.
A problem is that it is hard to cut through the noise about an issue like this. I tried a Google search on science of human behavior and the determinism of the latter, and I got, among the top results, a Northeast University College of Science article titled "Human Behavior is 93% Predictable, Research Shows." The key sentence in the actual text was: "Distinguished Professor of Physics Albert-László Barabási and his team studied the mobility patterns of anonymous cell-phone users and concluded that, despite the common perception that our actions are random and unpredictable, human mobility follows surprisingly regular patterns." I think you've posted before about how science news titles tend to click-bait the results of research in a way that misleads and can make the science look faintly ridiculous.
What is it that behaviorists actually mean when they say human behavior is usually predictable? In the Northeast article, it seems to mean only that humans tend to follow routines. Is that big news? If we say, "human behavior is usually predictable," does that simply mean, "mostly, humans follow routines," and similar somewhat intuitive notions, such as "if you interrupt people's routines, they will tend to get confused, have trouble taking further actions, and even get upset." Another somewhat innocuous conclusion, useful to have demonstrated and turned into "data," but not earth-shattering, IMHO.
But if a person, say, writes a book, can the behaviorist predict the contents of that book? I don't mean on the level of "Ian Fleming has written another Bond novel that follows the same basic pattern as the ones before it." I mean on a basis much more detailed, and including for authors who've never written before. How fine-grained will that prediction be? Probably not, at this point, word for word, but, for example, is this behavior science saying something more like, "if we had continual brain and biochemical studies of this person going back to gestation, plus a moment-by-moment record of all information taken in from the world, and if we had a sufficiently powerful AI that could analyze that data, the AI could predict the book word-for-word"? FWIW, I find the latter sort of idea interesting and suggestive of real possibilities.
Hmm, looking more carefully, I think you didn't change your post's wording, but maybe you put "usually" in italics? Predictably, I didn't look carefully enough. But aside from that, I'll stick with my second post.
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