Best of Twitter - Week of September 27, 2021

Alexander Kruel @XiXiDu

The most counterintuitive facts in all of mathematics, computer science, and physics axisofordinary.substack.com/p/the-most-cou… (posted before but this has additional items and is easier to access)

axisofordinary.substack.comThe most counterintuitive facts in all of mathematics, computer science, and physicsIt is possible to compute over encrypted data without access to the secret key: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption It is possible to prove that you know a value x, without conveying any information apart from the fact that you know the value x:

^ “A one-in-billion event will happen 8 times a month: https://gwern.net/Littlewood” — reading this article by gwern a few years ago really changed how I read news. With an increasing sample size, you can find arbitrary outliers, often multiple, and present them to your audience in any way you wish.

Tim Urban @waitbutwhy

Worldwide, 30-year-old men have spent 10 years in school, on average. How many years have women of the same age spent in school? (Go to the follow-up tweets after you answer)

Tim Urban @waitbutwhy

This is a survey conducted by Hans, Ola, and Anna Rosling, which they discuss in their book Factfulness. The correct answer is 9 years. A monkey guessing randomly would get it right 1/3 of the time. It turns out that a country of monkeys would have beaten all human countries.

Tim Urban @waitbutwhy

Most unnerving is that no one did worse than U.S. journalists. For every 8 monkeys who get the question right, 1 American journalist does. On certain topics, it's good to remember that you're often being informed by the most delusional people in the country.

KordingLab 👨‍💻🧠∇🔬📈,🏋️‍♂️⛷️🏂🛹🕺⛰️☕🦖 @KordingLab

Very rarely I meet someone who really changes my way of thinking. @kaznatcheev (kaznatcheev.github.io) is one of these people. Check out his paper relating to Leslie Valiant's treatment of evolution: biorxiv.org/content/10.110… - evolution may be richer than I thought.

biorxiv.orgEvolution is exponentially more powerful with frequency-dependent selectionValiant [[1][1]] proposed to treat Darwinian evolution as a special kind of computational learning from statistical queries. The statistical queries represent a genotype’s fitness over a distribution of challenges. And this distribution of challenges along with the best response to them specify a gi…

Alexey Guzey @alexeyguzey

New essay: Issues with Bloom et al's "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?" and why total factor productivity should never be used as a measure of innovation guzey.com/economics/bloo… Key takeaways:

Dror Poleg @drorpoleg

I always thought it was admirable of @Google to leave China in 2010 instead of bowing to censorship/info requests. This piece from @ConradBastable (h/t @alexeyguzey) offers an alternative scenario — with interesting echoes in 2021.

conradbastable.comChina’s Trillion-Dollar Tech War: When To Defend A Monopoly | Conrad Bastable2010 was the year Silicon Valley lost the war in China. It took another 5-6 years for the rest of the playing field to realize the war was already lost ( shoutout Uber & Facebook ) , and most of the commentariat still don’t quite understand the Trillion-dollar nation-defining stak

^ post suggests Google could’ve fought China’s censorship

Steven Byrnes @steve47285

Blog post: "The Intense World Theory of Autism"

lesswrong.comThe Intense World Theory of Autism - LessWrongThe first section is well-written and reliable, because I didn’t write it, it’s a book excerpt. The rest of the post is more prone to errors and speculations; you can skip it if you’re not into that kind of stuff—I read a few books and articles about autism, but I’m definitely not an expert, and I d…

Steven Byrnes @steve47285

…with a bonus "Dim World Theory of Psychopathy" at the end

Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong

This is pretty amazing - people working 40-50 hours a week in VR blog.immersed.team/working-from-o… Lots of potential in this new medium.

blog.immersed.teamWorking From OrbitI float in space, surrounded on all sides by a grand view of the Milky Way Galaxy. A movie-theater-sized screen hangs before me, gently curved, everything at the perfect viewing distance. Eight…

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Karan Ganesan @karanganesan

Crazy 👀

Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong

This is pretty amazing - people working 40-50 hours a week in VR https://t.co/7VEcmyWwMp Lots of potential in this new medium.

Quarantined section

Luca Dellanna @DellAnnaLuca

MEGA-THREAD OF ALL THE TIMES VIRUS LABS "LOST" DANGEROUS PATHOGENS 1/ SARS is documented to have escaped virus labs multiple times; twice from the same one 2/ The Institut Pasteur lost 2349 vials of SARS and once transported vials on a regular plane breaking protocols (thread)