In 2010, Ratcliff started working with brewer’s yeast, the single-celled fungus we use to make bread and beer. He repeatedly grew the yeast in liquid-filled tubes, shook them, and then used the cells that sank fastest to start new cultures. By favoring cells that stick together and settle faster, this simple procedure radically changed the yeast within just 60 days. Now whenever a cell divided in two, the new cells didn’t drift apart as they normally would; instead, they remained attached, creating beautiful, branching snowflakes that comprised dozens of cells. The yeast had evolved multicellularity in just two months.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/05/multicellular-organism-evolution-yeast-experiment/674030/

The evolution of MREs is surprisingly fascinating.

…the Metabolic Kitchen, the lone culinary research and development center for the world’s most technically advanced military, is what I’m after. This is the place that developed pizza that can survive for three years without refrigeration; a strangely convincing approximation of key lime pie that can be sucked through a tube at 9Gs, or nine times the force of gravity; dehydrated chili that can endure an Antarctic expedition; and ice cream that can go into outer space. I’m here to find out how.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/natick-lab-military-food-science

In December 2018, Thierry Brunfaut and Tom Greenwood published an article in Fast Company where they coined a new word: Blanding.

“The worst branding trend (…) is the one you probably never noticed. I call it blanding. The main offenders are in tech, where a new army of clones wears a uniform of brand camouflage. The formula is sort of a brand paint-by-numbers. Start with a made-up-word name. Put it in a sans-serif typeface. Make it clean and readable, with just the right amount of white space. Use a direct tone of voice. Nope, no need for a logo. Maybe throw in some cheerful illustrations. Just don’t forget the vibrant colors. Bonus points for purple and turquoise. Blah blah blah.”

https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average

I got curious about the current state of research on criminal deterrence. Caveat: I don’t know whether this summary of the research is broadly shared by those in the field or whether it’s controversial, nor am I clear on the reputation of the NIJ; I just wanted a first approximation.

1. The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.
   Research shows clearly that the chance of being caught is a vastly more effective deterrent than even draconian punishment.
2. Sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison isn’t a very effective way to deter crime.
   Prisons are good for punishing criminals and keeping them off the street, but prison sentences (particularly long sentences) are unlikely to deter future crime. Prisons actually may have the opposite effect: Persons who are incarcerated learn more effective crime strategies from each other, and time spent in prison may desensitize many to the threat of future imprisonment.

3. Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished.
   The police deter crime when they do things that strengthen a criminal’s perception of the certainty of being caught. Strategies that use the police as “sentinels,” such as hot spots policing, are particularly effective. A criminal’s behavior is more likely to be influenced by seeing a police officer with handcuffs and a radio than by a new law increasing penalties.
4. Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime.
   Laws and policies designed to deter crime by focusing mainly on increasing the severity of punishment are ineffective partly because criminals know little about the sanctions for specific crimes.

5. There is no proof that the death penalty deters criminals.
   According to the National Academy of Sciences, “Research on the deterrent effect of capital punishment is uninformative about whether capital punishment increases, decreases, or has no effect on homicide rates.”

https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence

Time Magazine, of all media outlets, again publishing an excellent piece on existential risk, this time from MIT researcher Max Tegmark.

https://time.com/6273743/thinking-that-could-doom-us-with-ai/

The piece isn’t all that great, but I like this quote:

You can flatter your audience over and over every day by showing them proof of how insane the people they despise are becoming. You can tell them what they want to hear about how everyone else is just hearing what they want to hear. You can even build an entire new media business model on this.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/how-stewart-made-tucker

Fascinating resolution to a longstanding disagreement, and a big success for adversarial collaboration.

Do larger incomes make people happier? Two authors of the present paper have published contradictory answers. Using dichotomous questions about the preceding day, [Kahneman and Deaton, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 107, 16489–16493 (2010)] reported a flattening pattern: happiness increased steadily with log(income) up to a threshold and then plateaued. Using experience sampling with a continuous scale, [Killingsworth, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 118, e2016976118 (2021)] reported a linear-log pattern in which average happiness rose consistently with log(income). We engaged in an adversarial collaboration to search for a coherent interpretation of both studies. A reanalysis of Killingsworth’s experienced sampling data confirmed the flattening pattern only for the least happy people. Happiness increases steadily with log(income) among happier people, and even accelerates in the happiest group. Complementary nonlinearities contribute to the overall linear-log relationship. We then explain why Kahneman and Deaton overstated the flattening pattern and why Killingsworth failed to find it. We suggest that Kahneman and Deaton might have reached the correct conclusion if they had described their results in terms of unhappiness rather than happiness; their measures could not discriminate among degrees of happiness because of a ceiling effect. The authors of both studies failed to anticipate that increased income is associated with systematic changes in the shape of the happiness distribution. The mislabeling of the dependent variable and the incorrect assumption of homogeneity were consequences of practices that are standard in social science but should be questioned more often. We flag the benefits of adversarial collaboration.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120

While the author doesn’t ultimately accept the argument that consciousness is first and foremost social, I’m very much reminded of Marvin Minsky’s similar perspective, which I’ve always found pretty compelling: that there were clear evolutionary advantages to developing the ability to model others’ minds, and that once we had that capability, the ability to model our own — ie consciousness — came along as a free bonus.

GPT-4 does an awfully good job of modeling humans’ minds, or at least seeming to; on what grounds can we say that it doesn’t model its own?

I would like at least to begin here an argument that supports the following points. First, we have no strong evidence of any currently existing artificial system’s capacity for conscious experience, even if in principle it is not impossible that an artificial system could become conscious. Second, such a claim as to the uniqueness of conscious experience in evolved biological systems is fully compatible with naturalism, as it is based on the idea that consciousness is a higher-order capacity resulting from the gradual unification of several prior capacities —embodied sensation, notably— that for most of their existence did not involve consciousness. Any AI project that seeks to skip over these capacities and to rush straight to intellectual self-awareness on the part of the machine is, it seems, going to miss some crucial steps. However, finally, there is at least some evidence at present that AI is on the path to consciousness, even without having been endowed with anything like a body or a sensory apparatus that might give it the sort of phenomenal experience we human beings know and value. This path is, namely, the one that sees the bulk of the task of becoming conscious, whether one is an animal or a machine, as lying in the capacity to model other minds.

https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/no-minds-without-other-minds

I don’t buy the argument — well, there’s not really an argument there at all — but wow is that some spectacularly gymnastic prose.

You know, secretly, even if you’re pretending not to, that this thing is nearing exhaustion. There is simply nothing there online. All language has become rote, a halfarsed performance: even the outraged mobs are screaming on autopilot. Even genuine crises can’t interrupt the tedium of it all, the bad jokes and predictable thinkpieces, spat-out enzymes to digest the world. ‘Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.’ Online is not where people meaningfully express themselves; that still happens in the remaining scraps of the nonnetworked world. It’s a parcel of time you give over to the machine. Make the motions, chant its dusty liturgy. The newest apps even literalise this: everyone has to post a selfie at exactly the same time, an inaudible call to prayer ringing out across the world. Recently, at a bar, I saw the room go bright as half the patrons suddenly started posing with their negronis. This is called being real.

Whoever you are, a role is already waiting for you. All those pouty nineteen-year-old lowercase nymphets, so fluent in their borrowed boredom, flatly reciting don’t just choke me i want someone to cut off my entire head. All those wide-eyed video creeps, their inhuman enthusiasm, hi guys! hi guys!! so today we’re going to talk about—don’t forget to like and subscribe!! hi guys!!! Even on the deranged fringes, a dead grammar has set in. The people who fake Tourette’s for TikTok and the people who fake schizophrenia for no reason at all. VOICES HAVE REVEALED TO ME THAT YOUR MAILMAN IS A DEMONIC ARCHON SPAT FROM BABYLON’S SPINNING PIGMOUTH, GOD WANTS YOU TO KILL HIM WITH A ROCKET LAUNCHER. Without even passing out of date, every mode of internet-speak already sounds antiquated. Aren’t you embarrassed? Can’t you hear, under the chatter of these empty forms, a long low ancient whine, the last mewl of that cat who wants to haz cheezburger?

The internet is already over

One thing that I find particularly striking here is that the percentage of articles with emotionally neutral headlines has absolutely plummeted. I would argue that a neutral stance should be the default for news articles, and news sources used to agree; it’s remarkable how rapidly that perspective has vanished.

…the sentiment of mainstream news media headlines has indeed become gradually more negative since the year 2000. What this means is that headlines with negative connotations, such as “Brazil Prison Riot Leaves 9 Dead”, are becoming more prevalent. In contrast, headlines with positive undertones, such as “A New Lens Restores Vision and Brings Relief”, are becoming less frequent.

Interestingly, when we partitioned news media outlets according to the ideological views they are widely associated with, we found that headlines from right-leaning news media have been consistently more negative than those from their left-leaning counterparts. Post-2013, the negativity of headlines in left-leaning news media appears to increase substantially. These trends might be partially related to a sharp uptick in news media usage of terminology that depicts prejudice (such as racism, sexism and homophobia) and political extremism (such as far right or far left).

When we further analysed the specific emotional undertones of the headlines, we discovered that the proportion denoting anger and fear has almost doubled in frequency over this period. Headlines embedded with anger and fear such as “Giving Poor Kids Free Meals at School Should Not Be Controversial. Tell That to Congressional Republicans!” or “Is rape epidemic in Sweden tied to influx of Muslim immigrants?” are becoming more prevalent. Sadness and disgust are also increasingly reflected in headlines, albeit to a lesser extent. In contrast, the proportion of emotionally neutral headlines is decreasing.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/11/27/bad-news-headlines-are-indeed-getting-more-negative-and-angrier