Month: August 2021

Woke Imperialism

A great example of woke imperialism was a recent foofaraw in which a woke tried to cancel someone for naming a protocol “AAVE”. The idea was that the authors of said protocol were insufficiently diverse because they didn’t know that “AAVE” stood for African American Vernacular English in the US. Now, the thing is that the word Aave is a Finnish word that means ghost, and the authors of the protocol were Finns, and it was a great word for what the protocol actually did (namely flash loans that could disappear in a second).

So, what this actually represented was Woke American chauvinism in the name of tolerance. A citizen of this gigantic global empire, the American empire, was using woke language to assert authority over some poor Finns as insufficiently respectful of the people his fellow Americans had once oppressed. Quite a trick: America’s history of slavery used to justify America’s present of imperialism! And again, this is similar to a Soviet soldier filling the ear of an Estonian civilian with the story of how Russian capitalists had once grievously oppressed Russian workers, a problem which Comrade Lenin solved with their glorious October Revolution…and that’s why they rolled the tanks into Tallinn. A non sequitur logically, but a useful tool ideologically.

and why might organizations adopt self-defeating woke positions?

It seems fair to say that there is a silent constituency, even a majority, within these organizations that does not support the mob and its methods. Why are they allowing the Woke to take over? There’s an increase of generic human capital relative to specific human capital. You don’t need to be trained on your firm’s computer system; you can navigate based on your experience with interfaces that are familiar on the Internet. People are not tied to organizations as closely as they were a couple of decades ago. They are not motivated to put up resistance when a determined minority of Wokesters tries to take over.

2023-07-03: Woke nonsense is destroying biology

Biology faces a grave threat from “progressive” politics that are changing the way our work is done, delimiting areas of biology that are taboo and will not be funded by the government or published in scientific journals, stipulating what words biologists must avoid in their writing, and decreeing how biology is taught to students and communicated to other scientists and the public through the technical and popular press. The science that has brought us so much progress and understanding—from the structure of DNA to the green revolution and the design of COVID-19 vaccines—is endangered by political dogma strangling our essential tradition of open research and scientific communication.
Campaigns were launched to strip scientific jargon of words deemed offensive, to ensure that results that could “harm” people seen as oppressed were removed from research manuscripts, and to tilt the funding of science away from research and toward social reform. The American government even refused to make genetic data—collected with taxpayer dollars—publicly available if analysis of that data could be considered “stigmatizing.” In other words, science—and here we are speaking of all STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)—has become heavily tainted with politics, as “progressive social justice” elbows aside our real job: finding truth.

Open-Ended Learning

Today, we published “Open-Ended Learning Leads to Generally Capable Agents,” a preprint detailing our first steps to train an agent capable of playing many different games without needing human interaction data. We created a vast game environment we call XLand, which includes many multiplayer games within consistent, human-relatable 3D worlds. This environment makes it possible to formulate new learning algorithms, which dynamically control how an agent trains and the games on which it trains. The agent’s capabilities improve iteratively as a response to the challenges that arise in training, with the learning process continually refining the training tasks so the agent never stops learning. The result is an agent with the ability to succeed at a wide spectrum of tasks — from simple object-finding problems to complex games like hide and seek and capture the flag, which were not encountered during training. We find the agent exhibits general, heuristic behaviors such as experimentation, behaviors that are widely applicable to many tasks rather than specialized to an individual task. This new approach marks an important step toward creating more general agents with the flexibility to adapt rapidly within constantly changing environments.

First Applied Geometry

Researchers have made a discovery that may shake up the history of mathematics, revealing evidence of applied geometry being used for the purposes of land surveying 3.7 ka BP. Found on a Babylonian clay table, the etchings are believed to represent the oldest known example of applied geometry, and feature mathematical techniques linked to the Greek philosopher Pythagoras that were well ahead of their time.

Grabby Aliens

Advanced aliens really are out there, and we have enough data to say roughly where they are in space and time, and when we will meet or see them. In our model, GCs are born according to a volume-based power law, and once born they simply expand at a constant speed relative to local materials. We show that for nontrivial powers this power law is a reasonable approximation to a more realistic model. This expansion speed and the 2 parameters of this power law are the only 3 parameters of our model, each of which can be estimated from data to within 4x. The hard-steps in Earth history literature helps to estimate the power, and our current date helps to estimate the power law timescale. Furthermore, the fact that we do not now see large alien-controlled volumes in our sky, even though they should control much of the universe volume now, gives us our last estimate, that aliens expand at > 50% of lightspeed. Given estimates of all 3 parameters, we have in this paper shown many model predictions regarding alien timing, spacing, appearance, and the durations until we see or meet them. And we have shown how optimism regarding humanity’s future is in conflict with optimism regarding SETI efforts. Being especially simple, our model is unlikely to be an exact representation of reality. So future research might explore more realistic variations. For example, one might more precisely account for the recent exponential expansion of the universe, and for deviations between a realistic appearance function and our power law approximation. Instead of being uniform across space, the GCs birth rate might be higher within galaxies, higher within larger galaxies, and follow their typical spatial correlations. A GC expansion might take a duration to bring its full effect to any one location, and the GC expansion speed might vary and depend on local geographies of resources and obstacles. Finally, GC subvolumes might sometimes stop expanding or die, either spontaneously or in response to local disturbances.

2023-04-11: A good summary of the argument

Trolling Italians

And so, with all this Italian dining going around, why not visit the most famous Italian restaurant in the country. Since Italians have a proclivity for dining on their own cuisine while abroad, I thought I’d snatch a couple of them and take them with me to the Olive Garden. When the food arrived, we took turns staring at each others’ plates. The “muffuletta olives” (not their real name—on the menu they’re called “Parmesan Olive Fritta”) were olive ascolane, stuffed fried olives, and they were quite good, actually. I had the carbonara, which at $26.99 is priced about the same, or higher, as the pasta dishes at some of the city’s best Italian restaurants. It didn’t taste like it, though. In fact, miraculously, despite the presence of parmesan cream, chicken and shrimp, it managed to be utterly tasteless. (Just for the sake of authenticity – not that authenticity is the Olive Garden’s M.O. – you’d never, ever find carbonara served with chicken and/or shrimp and the presence of cream is a culinary war crime.) Marco took a few bites of his “Tour of Italy” dish and said, “I’m ready to turn in my passport and stay home for a while.” Giovanna didn’t hate her salmon which was paired with bright green stalks of steamed broccoli, saying only that it would never have pesto spread over the top. And Sloane’s garlic-rosemary roasted chicken was rubbery.

Plant Fish

When a tuna marketing executive took a bite of the dehydrated tomato seasoned with olive oil, algae extract, spices, and soy sauce early last year, he was shook. “This is going to be a problem for us”. That’s how the CEO of Mimic Seafood recalls it, designating it the highest praise she could’ve imagined for the delicate slice of tuna that—despite what the marketing executive’s taste buds indicated—contained no tuna at all. The Madrid-based startup’s Tunato product, fabricated from a specialty tomato variety grown in southern Spain that resembles sliced sushi-grade tuna in shape and size, is part of a growing class of food innovations fighting for the last empty shelf in the booming plant-based protein market: seafood.

Segway Postmortem

now that there’s Segway equivalents for $100, time for a retrospective.

The Segway’s delays, cost, weight, and battery problems all derived primarily from 1 issue: how beautifully engineered, perhaps overengineered, the Segway was. The Segway was almost absurdly well-made, with custom components and redundancies built into every system to avoid breakdowns and accidents. Segways even had 2 identical motors, attached to 2 separate batteries, just in case something failed. The effect of all this redundancy and extra weight was to cause the batteries to drain quickly—especially considering how early in the development of rechargeable batteries 2002 was. Ideally, you’d be able to swap a drained battery for a fresh one—except, of course, that the Segway’s battery compartment was hermetically sealed to make it waterproof. The death of the 1 guy who still loved Segways enough to invest in Segway, killed by his Segway, basically seemed to put a cap on the dark comedy. It was too expensive, it looked doofy, it was cursed. End of story.