Category: Other

Drawing on a large academic literature in topics like sociology, behavioral economics, anthropology, and psychology, and especially the (generalized) theory of signalling, Robin Hanson has assembled a large toolbox for systemically understanding hypocrisy, i.e., the ways in which people’s actions systematically and selfishly deviate from their verbalized explanations. Although he would be the first to admit that many of these ideas have been discovered and rediscovered repeatedly over centuries (or millennia) with varying degrees of clarity, and although there is much I am not convinced by, I find the general framework deeply insightful, and his presentation to be more clear, analytical, and descriptive (rather than disruptively normative) than other accounts. Most of this I have gathered from his renowned blogging at Overcoming Bias, but I have always wished for a more concise (and high status!) form factor that I could point others to. At long last, Hanson and his co-author Kevin Simler have written a nice book that largely satisfies me: The Elephant in the Brain (Amazon). I highly recommend it.

The reason I title these sorts of blog posts “Comments on…” is so I can present some disorganized responses to a work without feeling like I need to build a coherent thesis or pass overall judgment. I do not summarize the book below, so this post will mostly be useful for people who have read it. (You might think of this as a one-sided book club discussion rather than a book review.) But since I will naturally tend to focus on the places where I disagree with the authors, let me emphasize: the basic ideas of this book strike me as profound and probably mostly true.… [continue reading]

The Perimeter Scholars International (PSI) program is now accepting applications for this Master’s program, to start next fall. The due date is Feb 1st. Me previously:

If you’re in your last year as an undergrad, I strongly advise you (seriously) to consider applying. Your choice of grad school is 80% of the selection power determining your thesis topic, and that topic places very strong constraints on your entire academic career. The more your choice is informed by actual physics knowledge (rather than the apparent impressiveness of professors and institutions), the better. An additional year at a new institution taking classes with new teachers can really help.

Here’s the poster and a brand new propaganda video:
… [continue reading]

[Just shooting from the hip here, for fun.]

I think we should send humans to Mars, but I don’t really think it’s possible to justify it as an instrumental means of achieving other more concrete goals. (I just take it as an intrinsic goal.) But here is Robert Zubrin making the best instrumental case I’ve heard.

My biggest criticism is that not finding evidence of life on Mars does not imply life is extraordinarily rare, because there are other options besides easy-starting life (with the great filter somewhere after) and extremely-hard-starting life. If you think it’s possible that there’s a filter strong enough to prevent single-cell life from developing interstellar travelI’m skeptical. When it comes to estimating extremely unlikely events, with multiple independent unlikely steps that all need to happen quickly, the development of the first replicator seems to require vastly more steps than relatively simple things like sexual reproduction. The only thing that makes me uncertain is the possibility that there are extremely simple replicators that resemble nothing like minimal cells, and there is a relatively natural progression to minimal cells that simply isn’t large enough to leave fossils. I would love to update on this if you know something I’m not thinking of.^a, then it’s still very possible that single-cell life is hard-enough to start that we wouldn’t expect to find it on Mars, yet is still relatively common in the galaxy. Indeed, it’s easy (assuming a strong late filter) to imagine that life is easy to start with liquid water plus X, where X is a relative common planetary condition that just has never existed on Mars.

That said, Zubrin’s argument is better than I was expecting, and I agree that getting a quasi-definitive answer on whether there was ever life on Mars — even with my strong prior against it — is probably the best new evidence we are likely to collect for a very long time with regard to the prevalence of life in the universe.… [continue reading]

If you’re a fellow nerd, you know that New Horizons is bearing down on Pluto. It had a scary hiccup a few days ago but recovered quickly. Closest approach occurs on Tuesday.

The data connection from Pluto is very slow (~1kbit/s, I believe). Furthermore, the one-way latency is over 4 hours, and the spacecraft can’t transmit to Earth at the same time it is photographing. So to a good approximation, the encounter will take place over just a day or two of near radio silence, followed by several months of images and other data slowly dripped back. (New Horizons can’t see much once it’s gone past Pluto since everything will be dark, other than a few measurement of the atmosphere by looking at sunlight passing through it.) For excellent details and links about what you can expect to see when, look here and here. For a nice Wikipedia-level PDF, see here, and for an infinite rabbit hole of message board links, see here.

Added: New image, still well below the max resolution we will eventually see.

Added: New Horizons survived the encounter.… [continue reading]

I often hear very smart and impressive people say that others (especially Americans) who don’t travel much have too narrow a view of the world. They haven’t been exposed to different perspectives because they haven’t traveled much. They focus on small difference of opinion within their own sphere while remaining ignorant of larger differences abroad.

Now, I think that there is a grain of truth to this, maybe even with the direction of causality pointing in the correct way. And I think it’s plausible that it really does affect Americans more than folks of similar means in Europe.Of course, here I would say the root cause is mostly economic rather than cultural; America’s size gives it a greater degree of self sufficiency in a way that means its citizens have fewer reasons to travel. This is similar to the fact that its much less profitable for the average American to become fluent in a second language than for a typical European (even a British). I think it’s obvious that if you could magically break up the American states into 15 separate nations, each with a different language, you’d get a complete reversal of these effects almost immediately.^a But it’s vastly overstated because of the status boost to people saying it.

The same people who claim that foreign travel is very important for intellectual exposure almost never emphasize reading foreign writing. Perhaps in the past one had to travel thousands of miles to really get exposed to the brilliant writers and artists who huddled in Parisian cafes, but this is no longer true in the age of the internet. (And maybe it hasn’t been true since the printing press.)… [continue reading]