Best of Twitter - Week of February 14, 2022
@ethanbdm When we piloted a public lottery to evaluate cash transfers in Liberia, the potential recipients arranged beforehand to insure one another. After the randomization and grant, the winners compensated the losers and unraveled the field experiment.
^ ppl underappreciate how much of science is various flavors of this
put slightly differently, the invention of immortality (whether biological or AI computer based) is one of the great filters.
Why? Because it strongly incentivizes civilization to become completely static and unchanging, so as to avoid risk of death of immortal ruling elites.
best slate star codex post in a while "sometimes the body communicates with itself by messages written with radioactive ink on asbestos-laced paper, in the hopes that it’s killing itself slightly more slowly than it’s killing anyone who tries to send it fake messages."
Alexander Kruel @XiXiDu
📈 All maps on @OurWorldInData now include sparklines – small line charts that appear when you hover over each country.
Try it live: ourworldindata.org/explorers/coro…
Brought to you by the wonderful @danielgavrilov!
A long time ago I was sitting in Demis’ office in Russell Square. Demis said he was going to use AI to solve everything. It just seemed so ridiculous that I laughed. Who’s laughing now?
nature @Nature
the model that at high exertion physical activity mostly steals energy away from other processes is a neat explanation for the observation that being an elite athlete is hazardous for your health (assuming that's true)
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
what if exercise treats depression because depression requires active maintenance and exercise steals away the energy being used on depression
^ 🤔
9/ Historically, the risk of financial censorship has been much lower because for the literally whole of human history until approximately 2001, it was mostly uncontroversial that people could have decentralized non custodial mediums of exchange
10/ For hundreds of thousands of years humans used commodity money (from cowry shells to gold) and then in the last few hundred years we have had various forms of cash based instruments as well.
All of these are "non custodial", "decentralized" and not "KYCed"
^ interesting thread. crypto is deeply reactionary if viewed this way
guys will literally make up a goal for themselves when they're 17 and vow never to respect themselves until they reach it
^ true and underappreciated
The professor I TA phil 101 for this semester had students write (fake) emails to their friend explaining Pascal’s wager. This worked so much better than having them write a paper explaining it. They all wrote in their own voices. Def stealing this.
At some point during the Civil War Lenin was discussing executing 100% of all the Red Army commanders including the Commander-in-Chief
For example, during the Great Purge he executed 3 out 5 of Red Marshals, 15 out of 15 of Army Commanders, 4 out of 4 Navy Admirals, 58 out of 62 Corpse Commanders and so on. In 1937-1938 professional military were exterminated. Right before the WWII started
^ thread
Results of our large suicide attempt prevention trial published today. We were surprised and disappointed by the results. But we're confident they are the correct results. Now we know.
^ “Among adult outpatients with frequent suicidal ideation, offering care management did not significantly reduce risk of self-harm, and offering brief dialectical behavior therapy skills training significantly increased risk of self-harm, compared with usual care. These findings do not support implementation of the programs tested in this study.”
NVIDIA’s New AI: Superb Details, Super Fast! 🤖
▶️Full video (ours): youtu.be/eaSTGOgO-ss
📜Source paper: deepimagination.cc/PoE-GAN/
#nvidia #ai #twominutepapers #whatatimetobealive #holdontoyourpapers
Big news from Flock Safety today.
2.3% of reported crime in America is solved in part with Flock evidence. Incredible impact.
We @bedrock are proud to continue to support this important mission.
Flock Safety @Flock_Safety
^ powerful accelerationism vibes
Difficult situation on campus. Traffic jam of automated food delivery robots, apparently all stuck behind a carelessly discarded scooter. I just observed a couple of students clearing a path out of pity for the robots. This is our future, I guess
^ powerful “did we really have to live in the dumbest version of The Future” vibes