tingilinde

A nice Quanta discussion with Arvind Narayanan

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You also gave a talk on detecting AI snake oil, which was also well received. How does that relate to fairness in machine learning?

So the motivation for this was that there’s clearly a lot of genuine technical innovation happening in AI, like the text-to-image program DALL·E 2 or the chess program AlphaZero. It’s really amazing that this progress has been so rapid. A lot of that innovation deserves to be celebrated.

The problem comes when we use this very loose and broad umbrella term “AI” for things like that as well as more fraught applications, such as statistical methods for criminal risk prediction. In that context, the type of technology involved is very different. These are two very different kinds of applications, and the potential benefits and harms are also very different. There is almost no connection at all between them, so using the same term for both is thoroughly confusing.

People are misled into thinking that all this progress they’re seeing with image generation would actually translate into progress toward social tasks like predicting criminal risk or predicting which kids are going to drop out of school. But that’s not the case at all. First of all, we can only do slightly better than random chance at predicting who might be arrested for a crime. And that accuracy is achieved with really simple classifiers. It’s not getting better over time, and it’s not getting better as we collect more data sets. So all of these observations are in contrast to the use of deep learning for image generation, for instance.

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the bbc self-censors

They're afraid of rightwing backlash against a show by Sir David Attenborough.

THE SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH

a tip of the hat to Greg

 

how the flu let's you know it's visiting

Neurons in your throat signal your brain.

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Scientists know feeling crummy during an illness is partly the result of chemicals produced by infected tissue. Several of these compounds, such as prostaglandins, are known to trigger sickness behaviors. (Drugs such as ibuprofen work by blocking prostaglandin production.)

But it’s often unclear exactly how these chemicals communicate with the brain, says Stephen Liberles, a molecular neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School. “Surprisingly little is understood about how the brain becomes aware that there’s an infection in the body.”

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a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

the etymology of the periodic table

unfair and just plain anti-female

There's a difference between biological sex and gender. I'm supportive of trans-rights when gender is the only criteria.  That isn't true in sport - there's a reason for age divisions, weight divisions, and the male-female sex division.  There's overriding evidence for a male advantage that takes place during puberty. Depending on the sport a biological male performing in the middle of male performance can outperform a biological female world champion. Testosterone reduction therapies only don't change the equation much.  Trans-women are removing opportunity from biological female athletes.  Some federations are going with biological female and open divisions, most are waiting and watching, and some - like this one - are prioritizing inclusitivioty over fairness to biological females. 

There's a big worry over lawsuits by trans-women.  I suspect we'll have to see serious lawsuits and boycotts from biological women to make a point.  Trans-woman can still compete - properly in an open category that includes biological men who happen to be biologically similar. 

 

 

 

third world america

The red states

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That’s what readers will feel, but not what they will see. What they will see is detailed stories of political shenanigans, immorality, corruption, half-truths, lies and deceptions of all flavors in these red states. Extremely low quality, amoral leadership, surrounded by incompetents. It can be gripping to read these real crime stories, and the criminals get rich. But it is also endless. It gets predictable and even tiresome. It’s the same in every red state, in every domain of government. Red states are for pillaging. Red bad.

Some red states have managed to go without personal income tax altogether (though they typically make it up in real estate taxes and/or sales taxes). Does this make them the darlings of business as predicted? Kleinknecht cites the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, saying: “States with the highest personal income tax rates have greater economic growth, higher wages and better employment opportunities than the states with no personal income tax.” Other studies, he says “show the red states have lower per capita growth, higher poverty, inferior school performance, higher rates of suicide, greater prevalence of diabetes, higher rates of infant mortality and teen pregnancy, less effective health care systems, and lower health care spending.” Business makes its choice clear. Red states are mostly unattractive to them unless the incentives overcome their principles.

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chinese and the darién gap

I had no idea Chinese citizens were trying to get to America through this hellscape.

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Xu learned about his route through social media, where information about the crossing has spread, increasingly in Mandarin. Telegram groups with names like “United States DIY” or “run away to the US” have thousands of members. Migrants usually fly to Istanbul and then on to Ecuador, which is one of the few Latin American countries offering visa-free entry for Chinese nationals. From there, they travel by bus to Colombia, and Necoclí.

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a dawning in washington

Historian Adam Tooze on the dawning realization of Putin and Russia before the invasion.  A nice augmentation to the Politico piece.

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Like any such effort at history writing, it is constrained, on the one hand by the self-presentation and perspective of the witnesses and on the other hand by the aim of the editors to frame a coherent narrative in a limited space. In this compilation of dozens of interviews one striking thing is the lack of dissonances. Within a matter of weeks, the witnesses cited here all came to an agreed interpretation of the military intelligence - Putin was going to strike. This is either the result of editing or a pretty remarkable and, it turns out, constructive example of group-think. We can’t judge which, because given the constraints of the Politico presentation there is no meta data. We don’t know what they left in and what they took out. Perhaps a longer form presenation will or the publication of the full interviews will allows us to judge.

In any case, in the form of a long read article, the result is a powerful narrative in which the Biden team realize what is about to happen and it is people outside the beltway, notably political leaders in Europe, who have had hard time seeing the truth that is dawning on the inner circle in Washington.

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chomsky and others on chatgpt

Language is thought - machine learning is neither.

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That day may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking, contrary to what can be read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious investments. The Borgesian revelation of understanding has not and will not — and, we submit, cannot — occur if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I. However useful these programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in computer programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects.

It is at once comic and tragic, as Borges might have noted, that so much money and attention should be concentrated on so little a thing — something so trivial when contrasted with the human mind, which by dint of language, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make “infinite use of finite means,” creating ideas and theories with universal reach.

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what the nba can learn from f1

Ben Thompson on two sports and what they mean given the Internet.