Hopefully Interesting

Of course, there are really plenty of reasons.  I don't expect that Trump's potential abandonment of the One China Policy to have more than a 1 in 10 chance of leading to war with China but, well, he isn't even in office yet and this is a thing. Still, as potentially painful and maybe even disastrous as the next four years are going to be I'm worried that a Trump presidency will be even worse (assuming no nuclear annihilation) in the long run. I've already plugged  The Myth of the Rational Voter  as my main model of thinking about elections and that makes me really worried about the lessons that people will draw from Trump's victory.  To summarize, politicians running for office have to compromise between promising things that sound nice to people who aren't really paying attention to policy and promising things that will actually make voters happy and thus vote for them again in the next election. I think that most politician, at some level, don'

When people are looking at our two major parties they're often dissatisfied.  If you're a socialist or a libertarian or a Nazi then in most elections neither of the major candidates will represent your views.  Well, this election we have someone who at least appeals to Nazis  and we nearly had a candidate who called himself a socialist even if that wasn't totally accurate .  But this election is a bit weird and usually the people who complain about the major candidates being close to each other have a point. Thankfully political science has an explanation for this: the median voter theorem.   At this point I was going to give my own in depth explanation of it but I don't think I could possibly do a better job than Chris Hallquist does here .  Please read that link because otherwise the rest of this post might not make too much sense to you.  Or maybe you're already familiar with the theorem, in which case cool. The one thing I'd like to add to that analysis

Sorry for not posting much recently, I'll try to do more.  To ease myself back in here are some quick reviews of a few books I've read recently that don't deserve their own posts, plus some insights I got from them. Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane  by Starr, S. Frederick was just what the title leads you to expect.  It's about the flowering of philosophy and science in central Asia between 750 AD and 1000 AD.  The number of merchants involved in the silk road trade had always given the region a large educated class and after the Arab conquest in 750 AD better connected the area to the Mediteranian there was a large intellectual flowering involving greats like  Ibn-Sina  and  Biruni .  But as time went on anti-intellectual movements such as Sufism and books like  Al-Ghazali's   The Incoherence of the Philosophers  made science and philosophy less reputable and more dangerous.  When the Mongol's rolled throug

Britain recently voted to leave the EU.  That's probably going to have a lot of long term consequences and I'm mostly writing this to try to work through what I think they might be, good as well as bad. In the short term there's probably going to be a fair amount of bad.  Germany and France are Britain's  #1 and #3 trading partners  and there's likely to be some disruption there.  Now that Britain has said it wants to leave it can negotiate a divorce from the EU there's some question about exactly what Britain's terms of trade are going to end up looking like.  The leave campaign promised that Britain would be able to trade with Europe the same way it always had but now without cumbersome EU rules.  I don't think it'll work that way.  The first reason for that is that managing trade is a big part of the complex EU rules Britain had to deal with.  If I sell you a ton of "Grade A Beef" it's important that we both have the same understan

There's an old idea that all publicity is good publicity.  I seem to have have  written something about this  a few years ago but I should repeat the important bits.  If you're trying to sell something and you don't care about getting a majority of people to like you then your biggest foe is anonymity and the old chestnut is perfectly valid.  But if you're doing something that requires you to persuade a majority of people that you're correct then no, not all publicity is good publicity. I think this principle is very much applicable to the potential election of Donald Trump.  If you're looking at a 17 way contest and you only need a plurality, and besides only 13 of the 29 million people in the Republican primary voted for Trump compared to the 126 million  who voted in the 2012 presidential election.  So it's very much true that for Trump in the primary all publicity is good publicity.  But that won't hold for the general election.  I suppose th

Last Tuesday I faced a horrible dilemma as two books I'd been eagerly awaiting,  Too Like the Lightning  and The Age of the Em,  both came out the same day.  Luckily I was nearly done with the book I'd been reading, The Human Advantage  by Suzana Herculano-Houzel, so I could quickly finish that before moving on and I wasn't tortured by a third option of whether to just put it aside. In some ways this book was a good complement to  The Secret of Our Success  since it's another book about humanity's place in the world.  But this one is much more about where we fit in with other species in terms of our brains and less about the story of how we got there.  The real meat of the book is how the author figured out a good way to measure the number of neurons in a brain and was able to do the first real comparisons across species as to the number of neurons in their heads. The method was surprisingly simple as brilliant ideas sometimes are.  You can't just count the

I bet a lot of the people reading this blog have heard of the Drake Equation but, as a recap, the idea is that given some assumptions you should be able to calculate how many alien civilizations there ought to be in the Milky Way.  There are a few problem with the way the equation is put together but in general it's hard make make assumptions strict enough that the galaxy shouldn't have lots of other civilizations.  And now that it's looking like  most stars have planets  that leads to the  scary  conclusion that maybe civilizations just don't last very long. But thankfully I read a book recently that makes me a bit more hopeful.  A while ago I read  Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane which I really ought to have reviewed here because it was an excellent book.  It discusses how mitochondria allowed eukaryotic cells to become much larger than their forebears, the roll they plan in apoptosis or cell suicide, and how they effect how

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 and error then

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 engaged in constant feuds and ridi

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,

As many of you know I switched jobs recently.  I'd been working at Vecna for three years and while I loved my work and my coworkers I wasn't as happy with the way the company was run.  When I was on the west coast this last summer for Ross Hatton's wedding I ran into Lael Odhner who I knew from MIT.  One thing led to another and a while later I had joined RightHand Robotics. What does RightHand Robotics do?  Well, as you might guess from the name we work with robotic grasping.  If you go to  our webpage  you can see a bunch of videos with our robotic hands doing things.  I'll just embed this one video of the hand we make picking up and moving a bunch of different objects. The arm you see there is a relatively off the shelf model made by  Universal Robots , the UR5.  The hand at the end was made by us and is called the Reflex gripper. The Reflex grippers are actually open source.  On Github you can go to  this  repository to find most of the schematics and firm

You might have heard of the  famous self-photographing monkey  shown below.  Well, there was a bit of a to do regarding who owns the copyright to the photo.  The person who owned the camera thinks he owns the copyright for some reason but there was also a group that went to court hoping to have the copyright assigned to monkey.  Well, it seems that as everybody expected monkeys  can't own copyrights .   While I'm experimenting with putting images in blog posts here's a git of the heliocentric and geocentric models of the solar system.  You can see that the planets would have had to have moved in really weird ways in order to explain their apparent position.  On the other hand at the time of Galileo people had been adding so many corrective terms or epicycles  to the geocentric model that it explained observations very well.  Kepler would eventually figure out that planets moved in  ellipses  but when heliocentrists thought that planets moved in circles the geocentri

Joseph Henrich begins his preface to The Secret of Our Success  by going over how his path through academia led him to write this book.  He started out getting dual bachelor degrees in anthropology and  aerospace engineering.  He worked as an engineer for a while before going back to school for his doctorate in anthropology.  Luckily the math from his engineering background came in useful when he got interested in evolution, population genetics, and how the tools from population genetics could be applied to cultural transmission.  I don't think this book could have been written by someone without such a broad background. It's easy to do a bad job talking about how evolution has influenced human behavior.  It's easy to find people bloviating with evolutionary explanations about the ways men and women act differently in our society.  But clearly you won't come to any success if the supposed human universal you're trying to explain is particular to the society we

The idea of a  Basic Universal Income  has been talked about for a long time and has gotten support from such diverse sources as  Milton Friedman  and the  Pirate Party .  The idea is that everybody basically gets money from the government every month.  If that's less than they would have paid in taxes then their taxes are reduced but otherwise they get a check.  The problem with our current system is that its possible for someone making $20k a year to lose more than $10,000 in benefits if they get a raise to $30k a year though it isn't common.  What is common is that they face a very high effective marginal tax rate on that extra $10k and the poor and rich tend to be the most likely to change their behavior in response to tax rates since the poor have more opportunities to save money by doing things other than working and the rich are making enough anyways.  And unlike salaried middle class employees poor people usually have hourly wages and rich people have significant bonuse