Hopefully Interesting

This is the followup post that I promised to write when I did my review of The Secret of Our Success .  Sorry it took so long. Well, something that occurred to me when I was reading that book was that the rate at which mutations crop up governs how fast you can change.  There's no way to develop a tolerance for lactose unless that mutation happens to occur in someone.  But the rate of mutation must also govern how complex an organism or simple society can get.  There's only so much selective pressure out there and each new mutation that isn't doing you any good requires, on average, on excess death to remove it from the gene pool.  And since each gene is an opportunity for something to go wrong in reproduction a higher rate of mutations must mean a smaller genome if your typical organism has the same number of offspring. The same with cultural knowledge.  If you're living in a band without economic specialization and people discover things by trial an...

I'm currently reading The Birth of the Modern  and the sections on colonialism in South East Asia.  It had always puzzled me just how that worked.  It's one thing for the Spanish to just come into the Caribbean and be able to dominate the inhabitants by main force.  But when expanding into state societies Europeans were usually outgunned until the mid 19th century, at least on land.  There's no way that Cortez could have conquered Mexico without local allies.  And you could say that same for European colonies through Asia.  The Pilgrims, in fact, wouldn't have survived with the explicit generosity of the Native Americans. I think the best explanation from this is probably a thing Scott Alexander mentions in I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup :  Freud spoke of  the narcissism of small differences , saying that “it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engage...

I'm sure those of you who follow this sort of thing know that Google's Go playing AI named AlphaGo beat the highest ranked human player last night.  There are still another four games between the two of them but I came across something in an  article  that I thought was particularly interesting. For me, the key moment came when I saw Hassabis passing his iPhone to other Google executives in our VIP room, some three hours into the game. From their smiles, you knew straight away that they were pretty sure they were winning – although the experts providing live public commentary on the match weren’t clear on the matter, and remained confused up to the end of the game just before Lee resigned. Either AlphaGo has a badly calibrated sense of confidence or it's a lot better at evaluating boards than the people watching are.  I'm looking forward to seeing how the other games turn out and whether AlphaGo's sense of how it's doing turns out to be accurate. Also, ...