Links #6
Being an Honest Broker, a connection between evolution and mechanics, and much more.
Highlights
How I Became the Honest Broker. I like the concept of a broker who mediates exchanges and “puts forthright expression and straight dealing above everything else.” It seems like a healthy way to think about one’s role in any community.
As an aside, Gioia highlights changes in music criticism that have been repeated in many fields. Consumers listen to tastemakers who grow in power based on their recommendations, creators learn to manipulate these tastemakers to get more consumers. Pleasing creators and other tastemakers warps the original goal of helping consumers. This process comes up often in the arts, but also in journalism, policy, and science.
The virial theorem and the Price equation. Makes an interesting connection between evolutionary theory and Newtonian mechanics. This is pretty neat because there are existing connections between Newtonian mechanics and convex optimization. I expect Liorsdóttir and Pachter’s insight will generate other cool ideas.
Ozy Brennan wrote a series on measuring animal welfare. This convinced me that getting actionable information on animal welfare in factory farms and in the wild is possible. It seems pretty valuable to scale an organization that makes these kinds of measurements. I think the results will raise some uncomfortable questions. How do we trade off the welfare of different species (including humans)? What do we do if we discover that many wild animals are suffering?
Everything else
Divide and conquer: intermediate levels of population fragmentation maximize cultural accumulation
Fertility as Metascience. I would extend this point to say that research into fertility technologies, pro-natal policies, and AI are some of the highest-priority fields of study for increasing innovation.
Vox profile of Gebisa Ejeta who is developing better strains of sorghum.
Yohan Iddawela has a nice thread on using satellites to measure things like crop yields, economic activity, parking lot use, etc. Compliments some of the things I discussed in The High Potential of Satellites. Also see this thread on the Aeolus satellite establishing a global wind profile.
What do we really know about growth in LMICs?
The Indian Challenge to Blockchains: Digital Public Goods
Why Nigeria Is Suddenly Betting on Solar
Calcium-mediated nitrogen reduction for electrochemical ammonia synthesis
A nice piece on progress in enhanced geothermal.
Food without agriculture: Making edible fats directly from CO2. This is a relatively straightforward consequence of clean technologies that people haven’t really wrapped their heads around yet.
Gigahertz Sub-Landauer Momentum Computing. Ignore the title, they propose a method to do reversible computing using Josephson Junctions (also used in quantum computer implementations). Reversible computing is neat because it can use much less energy and produce much less heat than conventional computing.
Related: Thermodynamic Linear Algebra
Additional papers using electron beams to manipulate matter. This one was linked previously
Advances in nonlinear metasurfaces for imaging, quantum, and sensing applications
Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators, with Public Policy Recommendations
Uri Alon’s course notes on systems medicine are cool, especially the periodic table of diseases (H/T Sarah Constantin).
Mass spec for proteomics is quietly improving
Dobb·E: An open-source, general framework for learning household robotic manipulation.
GE’s Breakthrough In ‘Detonating’ Hypersonic Propulsion Is A Big Deal
A simple theory of Pareto-distributed earnings
EnsureDone is a platform for dominant assurance contracts. The main challenge is getting more users, but I hope this works out.
Re your link "Divide and conquer: intermediate levels of population fragmentation¹ maximize cultural accumulation":²
> "In this paper, we review the literature from various fields that suggest that, under some circumstances, increased connectedness can decrease cultural diversity and reduce innovation rates."
Related from social epistemology: the Zollman effect,³ which is when an epistemic community diverges from truth (or converges slower) when you increase their connectedness (or rate of sharing information). Computer simulations don't do it justice imo. The sims I've seen also don't seem to measure the notion of innovation-rate, as separate from "convergence to truth". E.g., in an actual community, you may wish to increase the precious few sources of noise/chaos you have, bc you can't discover anything novel without breaking up order from time to time.
If we look at the brain as an analogy (risky analogy tho this is), there's the Critical Brain Hypothesis,⁴ which suggests that the brain's homeostatic mechanisms are designed to keep the network in a constant state of "criticality, at the border between order and chaos, bc that tends to be the optimal balance between exploiting current best models (ie consolidation) vs exploring new ones (ie noise).
Reasons I expect cultural evolution to be much much less efficient (along some dimensions at least) than eg the brain or even DNA include:
- Cultural evolution has a very close analogy with language evolution, and people are reluctant to use new words unless they already expect other ppl to know those words. Thus, new words usually require common knowledge of them to emerge before the word gets used (sorta analogous w "epistasis" in the genetics context). There are some ways around this constraint (eg via a centralised node for generating common knowledge, like Hollywood, the government; or via specific dimensions along which innovation is viewed positively, like frivolous memes or designated topics du jour), but they tend to be inefficient and narrow.
- Sentences (or other units of cultural evolution) are already extremely chunked/high-abstraction relative to the neural assemblies that generated them. Thus the dimensionality on which cultural evolution can generate variety is much lower, and this leads to fewer smooth paths down the loss-landscape. Thus you're more likely to get stuck in spurious local minima, or get unlucky and traverse down a very long and very slow incline.
- Both of the above points lead to technical debt (which I call "dependency debt" in my notes, to make clear that it's a very general problem not restricted to programming), which is when the cost of refactoring complex (inadequate) equilibria increases superlinearly as the complex system evolves via smth like hill-climbing.
¹ In social epistemology context, I usually say "bubbliness" instead of "fragmentation", bc the former is a cuter word, and it associates to "social bubbles" which is a notion we already have some lived experience with.
² https://splittinginfinity.substack.com/p/links-6
³ https://jonathanweisberg.org/post/zollman/
⁴ Great youtube video about Critical Brain Hypothesis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwLb3XlPCB4&list=PLgtmMKe4spCMzkiVa4-eSHVk-N4SC8r9K&index=13