evancoop

Apart from the clickbait headline, there is an important division between restorative and augmentative applications of BCI. The former, when the patient has already suffered serious neurological injuries (or even paralysis) presents an attractive risk/reward ratio. The latter is dubious, even if only for the operation risks such as the swelling the article notes.

Interesting to ponder where that dividing line resides.

Is the proper mechanism naming, shaming, reporting, and solidarity? Or is the mechanism proper compensation for the officials in question so that bribes are unnecessary to sustain a sufficient quality-of-life in their jurisdictions?

I might reframe the discussion slightly. Wikipedia is growing with respect to time (that would seem factually-verifiable if the number of topics with a Wiki page is larger in each successive year).

Increasing the number of pages should increase the number of pages that are controversial, problematic, or "echo-chambers" in absolute terms.

Are they increasing as a proportion? Is this diminishing the utility of the site in aggregate?

Unfortunately, this is a statistic without context. If a random, Toyota fails on the highway and causes a fatal collision, it's unlikely to yield an article of this ilk.

So, how frequently has this type of failure occurred? How often does that type of failure result in a fatality?

The analog here is that polls suggest parents believe the probability of a child abduction is higher now than 50 years ago, though the data show the opposite. The difference? The discussion on cable news when the event occurs. Availability bias is powerful. The car industry is likely to incur the same phenomenon.

When a private citizen buys software, the question is "does it do enough, for the price, for me to buy it?"

When an enterprise procurement office buys software, the question is "is there anything it does NOT do that will cause someone to fire me for having purchased it ?"

My algebra II teacher sung the formula to the tune of "pop goes the weasel."

"X equals negative b / Plus or minus square root / B-squared minus four a c / All over 2a"

Decades later, I have never forgotten. Apparently, we should just write parodies!

I have battled impostor syndrome throughout my life. The anxiety is real. It is a suitable antidote for some elements of Dunning-Krueger, but is a painful way to operate day-to-day.

In terms of software or any other professional field, the only solution I've found is finding balance between tasks that stretch one's abilities (verifying potential for growth and meeting challenges) and tasks one can accomplish successfully/efficiently (verifying competence). Too high a proportion of either and the psychological slide begins.

In a world that contains non-fungible tokens, it is ironic that a human being itself is, well, fungible.

The antidote seems to be taking the long view. Minsky moments in finance would have been diminished if CEOs of banks were compensated based upon the status of the firm in 10 years or if their estates' incentives were aligned with the state of the bank in 20 or even 100 years.

VC presumably can structure their compensation paradigms similarly. Thus, minimizing the probability of ruin becomes a more rational choice.

Admittedly, the alliterative title is catchy. Curious if what occurs in the learning process is really "pattern recognition," then innovation. When a child learns to play the piano, are they "imitating" Bach and Beethoven or recognizing patterns of chord progressions? When a child learns to read/write, they are probably not imitating childhood authors per se, rather, learning patterns in how words are assembled.

Perhaps, creativity is simply an extension of the same process. Recognize pleasing patterns, learning which can be broken, and assembling those patterns in a new way?

How many products are subsidized on one and and regulated on the other? Corn is subsidized in production, but then when those subsidies yield health-hindering quantities of cheap sweetener (corn syrup), we attempt to regulate its application and consumption.

Now, we'll subsidize growth again, but then regulate the greenhouse emissions on the other.

It is one thing for government regulation to address externalities (good). It is another to address externalities that government helped create in the first place!

I did not see this data placed alongside the number of traffic fatalities. Our intuition is that the new work-from-home/social-distance world leads to fewer cars on the road. Fewer cars mean higher speeds and possibly, less attentive drivers given the empty lanes. Increased pedestrian fatalities would align with this simple explanation.

A little searching suggests that in the latter quarters of 2021, traffic fatalities fell (https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/traffic-fatalities-esti....)

Before we jump to the explanation of angrier drivers (harder to verify or disprove), can we explore the simpler possibility?

About 18 months ago, GPT-3 composed an article for the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-...). So the notion of algorithm-generated prose is not new. Comedy is a logical extension.

The question is how can we augment human creativity rather than simply generate compelling toy models? The technologists who build tools that catalyze novel human thought will change how we create and compose forever.

This is a fascinating defense:

"When publishers choose to use our advertising services, they keep the majority of revenue and every year we pay out billions of dollars directly to the publishing partners in our ad network," a Google spokesperson said.

In other words, "our ads help other entities make money." Well yes, they're ads! That seems, even for a spokesperson, to be a rather stunning evasion. One could even amend the argument as "even if we don't play fair, the folks we cheat still make money."

The problem isn't that the ads are ineffective. The issue is that Google's scale all-but-requires that one advertise with them, and then in turn, they harvest prodigious quantities of data about everything and everyone to target those ads... and demand everyone else play by rules favorable to Google.

The ability to generalize patterns is the link between current brain-computer-interface (BCI) technology that must be recalibrated daily and solutions that might generalize for a single brain across time or even multiple brains (of which no two are alike).

Clearly, we respond to our fellow human beings not by processing the activity of their 80 billion neurons, but by recognizing latent patterns in their expressions and the vibrations of the air around them (sound/speech).

It looks like these models are the beginning of a path where software ascends that learning curve.

Exciting!

Academia risks becoming another such field. Professorial salaries are not commensurate with the educational years, as there is little demand for published research in journals. As a result, journals demand payment from the writers themselves.

While certainly not every doctoral candidate hails from a wealthy family, there is a pursuit of status that does lead to similarly homogeneous views.

That's the argument in Sarnoff's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sarnoff

There are four ways a business can grow: 1) Add more users 2) Sell more to each user 3) Retain a higher proportion of users 4) Reclaim churned users (a corollary of #1)

It seems like Meta, Oculus and such notwithstanding, had essentially focused exclusively on #1. Then they ran out of humans on earth. Folks rarely "churn" in the conventional sense (unless their government bans use!), so #3 became irrelevant.

So now what?

Seems like an issue of incentives at varying scales. A private business has an incentive to produce the quantity demanded and nothing more. Surplus is a cost, and capacity should be designed to meet, not exceed demand. Then, a stress appears on the system, and shortages occur.

A government has an incentive to avoid shortages of specific products and resources. In some industries, this leads to, essentially, a promise to purchase the supply the market does not (agriculture).

Does a similar model need to apply hereafter to certain technological inputs?

The notion of "normal" is dubious. For a decade preceding 2008, minimal verification of income or employment was required to buy a home (prices soared). Thereafter, the pendulum swung mightily in the other direction (having tried to purchase a home as a contractor, I can attest). Then the pandemic accelerated the migration to the suburbs for young families (prices soared).

If there are as many over-levered real-estate investors as the article suggests, a market downturn will yield foreclosures, and PE firms will feast once again.

There is no "normal." Only past, present, and future.

Most responses to this will be positive, and they should be. Typically, the real evaluation is the market (will more students and professors be drawn to MIT?). However, there is already a tremendous demand for admission (from students) and competitive hiring processes (for professors).

So...how many other comparable institutions will follow suit? Will universities in California adopt, oppose, or ignore?

The most common response is likely along the lines of "we don't need our dishwashers connected to the internet, this is unnecessary, another failure mode, another invasion, etc."

The more interesting question is who, in the bowels of the manufacturer's corporate headquarters, determined that this feature added value, how was it priced, and what, if anything was done after the fact to assess whether the additional cost was justified?

I was really hoping the answer was some input/output dad joke along the lines of: I/O...

This is an article about Germany's immigration policy that ought to be about America's education system. If we could "manufacture" skilled workers, the debate over "importing" them would be moot.

A quote like "...our nation has far too many people without jobs, far too many jobs without people to fill them..." is a statement about education, plain and simple.

One reads this article and thinks "would I want to live in one of these apartments?" Or possibly, one considers a conveniently-located store that will close.

The question that should come to mind might be "what happens to retail workers employed in malls?" Will they all be exerting themselves optimally in Amazon warehouses? Will they vanish from the workforce?

The market is speaking loudly. Society does not seem to have an answer.

The easy response is to dunk on Nature for rent-seeking. (And it most definitely IS just that). However, the best target for ire is not necessarily the journals (even if they charge a lot and provide nothing more than unpaid editors whose value-add is dubious).

The proper target of anger is those who allocate grant money and use the number of publications in a few top-tier journals as the primary credential. Not only does this exclude early-career researchers implicitly (hard to have 50 publications before age 30), but it then forces the payments to a cartel of elite journals.

It ends when grant-writing allows for ANY other assessment of worthiness.

The less-discussed issue is the high rate of turnover with respect to corporate roles. There are significant incentives that push new leaders to "remove the fences" rather than spend the time (money) and energy (capital) to determine why the fence was there in the first place.

Often, new leaders replace old frustrations, and concluding that the previous regime had some wisdom of its own is received like a lead balloon.

Chesterton was right, but probably did not consider corporate politics :-)

The next iteration will be "buy information, not experiences." Industry creates and purchases data. We purchase books (read on Kindles), online courses, and in extreme cases, credentials. Isn't an NFT just 0s and 1s?

Aren't we ultimately just converting material wealth to digital wealth?

Does technology force us to make decisions like horny teenagers?

In everything from federal law down to an organization's handbook, a simple principle applies:

If a nonsensical action helps one remain in compliance with the rule, it is the rule (not the action) that is nonsensical.

Amazing how many examples exist.