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Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will Favorite posts | Manifold podcast | Twitter: @hsu_steve
Thursday, November 16, 2023
China's EV Market Dominance and the Challenges Facing Tesla — Manifold #48
Thursday, November 09, 2023
Hypersonic Weapons and Missile Defense
Hypersonic Weapons: Vulnerability to Missile Defenses and Comparison to MaRVs
David Wright and Cameron L. Tracy
Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy, Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford UniversityAs I concluded long ago, current ship-based tech is not effective to defend even against older DF21 MaRV. See, e.g.,
Thursday, November 02, 2023
Taylor Ogan, Snow Bull Capital: China's tech frontier, the view from Shenzhen — Manifold #47
Sunday, October 29, 2023
The Future of Intelligence: An Interview with Steve Hsu (The Latecomer Magazine)
Thursday, October 26, 2023
Paradise Lost - Migdal, Polyakov, and Landau
Migdal: Khalat was a genius of political intrigue. Being married into Inner Circle of the Soviet System (his wife Valya is the daughter of a legendary Revolution hero), he used all his connections and all the means to achieve his secret goal — assemble the best brains and let them Think Freely.
On the surface, his pitch to the Party went as follows. “The West is attacking us for anti-Semitism. The best way to counter this slander is to create an Institute, where Jews are accepted, allowed to travel abroad and generally look happy. This can be a very small Institute, by standards of Atomic Project, it will have no secret military research, it will cost you very little, but it will help “Rasryadka” (Détente). These Jews will be so happy, they will tell all their Jewish friends in the West how well they live. And if they won’t –it is after all, us who decide which one goes abroad and which one stays home. They are smart kids, they will figure out which side of the toast is buttered.”
As I put it, Khalat sold half of his soul to Devil and used the money to save another half. I truly respect him for that, now once I learned what it takes to create a startup and try to protect it against hostile world.
As many crazy plans before it, this plan really worked. Best brains were assembled in Landau Institute, they were given a chance to happily solve problems without being forced to eat political shit like the whole country and – yes, they sometimes traveled abroad and made friends in the West.
In a way the plan worked too well — we became so worldly and so free that we could no longer be controlled. And, needless to say, our friends in the West became closer to us that our curators in KGB.I was in the 1990s generation of American physicists who had to contend on the job market with a stream of great theorists from the former Soviet Union. Both Migdal and Polyakov ended up at Princeton, and there were many others in their wake, closer to my age.
Sunday, October 22, 2023
Abdus Salam and the Pakistan Nuclear Weapons Program
Abdus Salam: A Reappraisal. Part II Salam's Part in the Pakistani Nuclear Weapon ProgrammeSalam's biographies claim that he was opposed to Pakistan's nuclear weapon programme. This is somewhat strange given that he was the senior Science Advisor to the Pakistan government for at least some of the period between 1972 when the programme was initiated and 1998 when a successful nuclear weapon test was carried out. I look at the evidence for his participation in the programme.
Salam shared the Nobel Prize with Glashow and Weinberg. He is a leading theoretician, although many have questioned what, exactly, was his contribution to the formulation of the electroweak theory of particle physics that Glashow and Weinberg contributed to.
Currently Pakistan's arsenal is ~200 warheads and similar in size to India's. Their largest warhead is estimated to have a yield of ~40kt, compared to ~20kt for the Indians.
What interested me the most was Salam's role in the early stages of the project.
See the paper for more interesting details. Previously I was only aware of Riazuddin through his academic publications, not his weapons work.
I mentioned to Karnad that I had been surprised that some of the Iranin theoreticians assassinated by Israel over the last 10-15 years had quite abstract research interests. They didn't seem the type to be working on bombs - but I suppose you never know!
Thursday, October 19, 2023
Bharat Karnad: India geostrategy, nuclear arsenal, and assassination of Homi Bhabha, the Oppenheimer of India — Manifold #46
".. their head expert was fully capable of building a bomb and we knew what he was up to. He was warned several times but what an arrogant prick that one was. Told our people to fuck off and then made it clear that no one would stop him and India from getting nuclear parity"
Wednesday, October 11, 2023
Quantum Hair During Gravitational Collapse (published version in Physical Review D)
Tuesday, October 10, 2023
SMPY 65: Help support the SMPY Longitudinal Study
The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) needs your help to support the Age-65 phase of their unique longitudinal study.
• Prodigies destined for eminent careers can be identified as early as age 13.
• There is no plateau of ability; even within the top 1%, variations in mathematical, spatial, and verbal abilities profoundly impact educational, occupational, and creative outcomes.
• The blend of specific abilities, such as mathematical, spatial, and verbal aptitudes, shapes the nature of one's accomplishments and career trajectory.
More information:
Indicate "Please designate this gift to Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth" in the Special Instructions.
Thursday, October 05, 2023
Yasheng Huang: China's Examination System and its impact on Politics, Economy, Innovation — Manifold #45
Thursday, September 21, 2023
Hacking State 13 - Steve Hsu: Polygenic Embryo Selection, Improving LLMs, & Getting Nearly Cancelled
Huawei and the US-China Chip War — Manifold #44
Thursday, September 07, 2023
Meritocracy, SAT Scores, and Laundering Prestige at Elite Universities — Manifold #43
Wednesday, August 30, 2023
The World of Yesterday: Steve Hsu on polygenic scores, gene editing, human flourishing
Thursday, August 24, 2023
Aella: Sex Work, Sex Research, and Data Science — Manifold #42
Thursday, August 10, 2023
AI on your phone? Tim Dettmers on quantization of neural networks — Manifold #41
Thursday, July 27, 2023
Paul Huang, the real situation in Taiwan: politics, military, China — Manifold #40
Thursday, July 13, 2023
Richard Hanania & Rob Henderson: The Rise of Wokeness and the Influence of Civil Rights Law — Manifold #39
Wednesday, July 05, 2023
Quantum Hair in Electrodynamics and Gravity (Eur. Phys. J. Plus)
The quantum effective actions for both electrodynamics and gravity lead to field equations which couple a compact source (charge current or energy-momentum tensor) to external fields (electromagnetic or graviton field) in a manner which, generically, leads to quantum memory and quantum hair effects. External solutions of the field equations deviate, due to quantum corrections, from the familiar classical forms that satisfy the Gauss law. As a specific consequence, more information about the interior source configuration is encoded in the external field than in the classical theory.
As specific applications, we considered semiclassical sources (large black hole, macroscopic charge distribution), which allowed us to solve the quantum corrected field equations by expanding around a classical solution. However, fully quantum statements regarding quantum hair are also possible, which do not, for example, require a semiclassical source. In [1–3] it was shown that the quantum state of a compact source (e.g., in an energy eigenstate or superposition thereof) determines certain aspects of the quantum state of its external field. In principle, measurements of the external fields can fully determine the interior state of a black hole.
Friday, June 30, 2023
Richard Sander (UCLA Law) on the Supreme Court Affirmative Action Ruling — Manifold #38
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Embryo Selection: Healthy Babies vs Bad Arguments
Polygenic screening and its discontents
... But monogenic and chromosomal screening can only address a part of disease risk because most health conditions that afflict people are polygenic, meaning they are not simply caused by one gene or by a chromosomal abnormality. Instead, they are caused by a huge number of small additive effects dispersed throughout the genome. For example, cancer, schizophrenia, and diabetes can be best predicted by models using tens of thousands of genes.
A polygenic risk score (PRS) looks at a person’s DNA to see how many variants they have associated with a particular disease. Like BRCA1, polygenic risk scores are typically not determinative: “Polygenic screening is not a diagnosis: It is a prediction of relative future risk compared to other people.” In other words, someone with BRCA1 has a higher risk than someone without, and someone with a high breast cancer PRS has a higher risk than someone with a lower breast cancer PRS. But in principle, BRCA1 is just one gene out of thousands contributing to a PRS, with each bit contributing a small part of a total risk estimate. ...
... Recently, a group of European scientists argued that polygenic screening should not be available to couples because it will lead to stigmatization, exacerbate inequalities, or lead to confusion by parents about how to weigh up information about risks before they decide which embryo to implant. These are indeed challenges, but they are not unique to embryo selection using polygenic scores, and they are not plausible arguments for restricting the autonomy of parents who wish to screen their embryos for polygenic traits. Furthermore, from an ethical perspective, it is unconscionable to deny polygenic screening to families with a history of any disease whose risk can be reduced by this lifesaving technology.
Many new technologies are initially only available to people with more money, but these first adopters then end up subsidizing research that drives costs down and quality up. Many other medical choices involve complexity or might result in some people being stigmatized, but this is a reason to encourage genetic counseling and to encourage social tolerance. It is not a reason to marginalize, stigmatize, or criminalize IVF mothers and fathers who wish to use the best available science to increase the chances that their children will be healthy and happy.This is a comment on the article:
1) They don't want to admit that some people are better than others, inherently. Boo hoo.
2) You put a scorecard of embryos in front of everyone, and everyone has a pretty good ballpark estimate of which are better and which are worse. Nobody is going to pretend equality is true when they are choosing their kids genes.
3) So bad feels.
4) Must therefore retard all human progress and cause immense suffering because don't want to deal with bad feels.
That's the anti-polygenic argument in a nutshell. I don't expect it to be very effective. At best it will cause it to take a bit longer before poor people have access.
Thursday, June 08, 2023
AI Cambrian Explosion: Conversation With Three AI Engineers — Manifold #37
Thursday, May 25, 2023
David Goldman: US-China competition, AI, Electric Vehicles, and Manufacturing — Manifold #36
Wednesday, May 17, 2023
Quantum Hair During Gravitational Collapse
Quantum Hair During Gravitational Collapse
https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09466
X. Calmet, R. Casadio, S. Hsu, F. Kuipers
We consider quantum gravitational corrections to the Oppenheimer-Snyder metric describing time-dependent dust ball collapse. The interior metric also describes Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker cosmology and our results are interpreted in that context. The exterior corrections are an example of quantum hair, and are shown to persist throughout the collapse. Our results show the quantum hair survives throughout the horizon formation and that the internal state of the resulting black hole is accessible to outside observers.
Thursday, May 11, 2023
Artificial Intelligence & Large Language Models: Oxford Lecture — Manifold #35
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