Category: ideas

In a sense, we are all royals, even if we don’t all have royal DNA in our genomes. And yet, we are obsessed with genealogies. ‘By one estimate,’ Carl Zimmer writes, ‘genealogy has now become the second most popular search topic on the internet. It is outranked only by porn.’

The architecture of most deep learning models is based on layers of processing– an artificial neural network that is inspired by the neurons of the biological brain. Yet neuroscientists do not agree on exactly what intelligence is, and how it is formed in the human brain — it’s a phenomena that remains unexplained.

This new work says in precise fashion: These symmetries can exist in one type of space, but not in another. The achievement comes after progress on the conjecture had been stalled for decades.

Take a look at films and movies from the past, say, 20 years. It’s not pretty. “If this survey of today’s extreme culture tells us anything, it is that humans have worn out their welcome.”

It’s not – no tech is, and it’s dangerous to think that VR can cause more empathy. “Imagine if I came to the conclusion that homelessness wasn’t that big a deal because I enjoyed the challenging puzzle elements in the VR experience Becoming Homeless. Even worse, imagine if I believed I now had better insight into homelessness, and that my enjoyment left me with the impression that it wasn’t as bad as I feared.”

An ancient part of the brain long ignored by the scientific world appears to play a critical role in everything from language and emotions to daily planning.

The phrase “dumbing down” got its start in entertainment. During the golden age of Hollywood, in the 1930s, “dumbing down” became a screenwriter’s shorthand for making an idea simple enough that people with limited education or experience could understand it. Over time, it came to refer to intellectual oversimplification of all kinds, particularly in the interest of making something coarsely popular. In education, it named a worry about curricula and policy: that students were being asked to do less, held to a lower standard than necessary than they are capable of—and that is necessary to produce an informed citizenry. In the process, “dumbing down” has entrenched and spread as a lamentation, often well beyond any justification.

From the point of view of evolution, casting others as monsters would have been extremely adaptive and helpful to your own survival as a group. Nature was not a warm and fuzzy place. Some of these horror stories were helpful in getting you to be nervous about real predators—both non-human animals and human predators.

We remember innovators for their ideas, not their wealth. Why then has innovation been co-opted largely by business interests? When most people think of innovation, they tend to think of people making money from executing novel ideas. They think of today’s successful capitalists like Elon Musk, Bill Gates or Warren Buffett.

Perhaps there is no such thing as an easy or hard discipline. Maybe there are only easy and hard questions. Biology only seems so hard because it has been defined by a set of very hard questions. Physics only seems easy because centuries of effort by deeply insightful thinkers have produced a set of answerable questions.