This is just incredibly cool as well as important. The authors show artificial life spontaneously emerging from a soup of random code, under a range of conditions.

Now we’re in a position to ask: In a universe capable of computation, how often will life arise? Clearly, it happened here. Was it a miracle, an inevitability, or somewhere in between? A few collaborators and I set out to explore this question in late 2023.

Our first experiments used an esoteric programming language called (apologies) Brainfuck.⁸ While not as minimal as SUBLEQ, Brainfuck is both very simple and very similar to the original Turing Machine. Like a Turing Machine, it involves a read/write head that can step left or right along a tape.

In our version, which we call “bff,” there’s a “soup” containing thousands of tapes, each of which includes both code and data. The tapes are of fixed length—64 bytes—and start off filled with random bytes. Then, they interact at random, over and over. In an interaction, two randomly selected tapes are stuck end to end, creating a 128-byte-long string, and this combined tape is run, potentially modifying itself. The 64-byte-long halves are then pulled back apart and dropped back into the soup. Once in a while, a byte value is randomized, as cosmic rays do to DNA.

Since bff has only seven instructions, represented by the characters “< > + – , [ ]”, and there are 256 possible byte values, following random initialization only 2.7 percent of the bytes in a given tape will contain valid instructions; any non-instructions are skipped over. Thus, at first, not much comes of interactions between tapes. Once in a while, a valid instruction will modify a byte, and this modification will persist in the soup. On average, though, only a couple of computational operations take place per interaction, and usually, they have no effect. In other words, while computation is possible in this toy universe, very little of it actually takes place. When a byte is altered, it’s likely due to random mutation, and even when it’s caused by the execution of a valid instruction, the alteration is arbitrary and purposeless.

But after a few million interactions, something magical happens: The tapes begin to reproduce. As they spawn copies of themselves and each other, randomness gives way to complex order. The amount of computation taking place in each interaction skyrockets, since—remember—reproduction requires computation. Two of Brainfuck’s seven instructions, “[” and “],” are dedicated to conditional branching, and define loops in the code; reproduction requires at least one such loop (“copy bytes until done”), causing the number of instructions executed in an interaction to climb into the hundreds, at minimum.

The code is no longer random, but obviously purposive, in the sense that its function can be analyzed and reverse-engineered. An unlucky mutation can break it, rendering it unable to reproduce. Over time, the code evolves clever strategies to increase its robustness to such damage. This emergence of function and purpose is just like what we see in organic life at every scale; it’s why, for instance, we’re able to talk about the function of the circulatory system, a kidney, or a mitochondrion, and how they can “fail”—even though nobody designed these systems.

We reproduced our basic result with a variety of other programming languages and environments. In one especially beautiful visualization, my colleague Alex Mordvintsev created a two-dimensional bff-like environment where each of a 200×200 array of “pixels” contains a tape, and interactions occur only between neighboring tapes on the grid. The tapes are interpreted as instructions for the iconic Zilog Z80 microprocessor, launched in 1976 and used in many 8-bit computers over the years (including the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Osborne 1, and TRS-80). Here, too, complex replicators soon emerge out of the random interactions, evolving and spreading across the grid in successive waves.

Their main output is a paper, but I strongly recommend starting with the lead author’s more generally accessible article on the work: In the Beginning, There Was Computation

(hat tip to Peter Watts)

Elevators in North America have become over-engineered, bespoke, handcrafted and expensive pieces of equipment that are unaffordable in all the places where they are most needed. Special interests here have run wild with an outdated, inefficient, overregulated system. Accessibility rules miss the forest for the trees. Our broken immigration system cannot supply the labor that the construction industry desperately needs. Regulators distrust global best practices and our construction rules are so heavily oriented toward single-family housing that we’ve forgotten the basics of how a city should work.

Similar themes explain everything from our stalled high-speed rail development to why it’s so hard to find someone to fix a toilet or shower. It’s become hard to shake the feeling that America has simply lost the capacity to build things in the real world, outside of an app.

…

Behind the dearth of elevators in the country that birthed the skyscraper are eye-watering costs. A basic four-stop elevator costs about $158,000 in New York City, compared with about $36,000 in Switzerland.

…

But we can’t even put elevators together in factories in America, because the elevator union’s contract forbids even basic forms of preassembly and prefabrication that have become standard in elevators in the rest of the world. The union and manufacturers bicker over which holes can be drilled in a factory and which must be drilled (or redrilled) on site. Manufacturers even let elevator and escalator mechanics take some components apart and put them back together on site to preserve work for union members, since it’s easier than making separate, less-assembled versions just for the United States.

Opinion | Why Are Housing Costs So High? The Elevator Can Explain Why. – The New York Times

This is an interesting piece in general about some ways that charts can be misleading, but I was most struck by this particular example — it’s seemed worrying to me that US maternal mortality rates have risen in the past 25 years, and this seems like fairly strong evidence that it actually hasn’t.

But even when no one is intentionally trying to mislead or manipulate, charts designed to make information clear can still lead to erroneous conclusions. Just consider the U.S. maternal mortality statistics, which seem to show maternal deaths rising from 0.4 deaths per 100,000 women in 2003 to close to 1 per 100,000 in 2020.

This graph is worrisome, particularly if you or your partner is pregnant (or expect to be). Why are so many more expectant and new mothers dying? Is there some new danger? Is the healthcare system getting worse? Coverage in Scientific American, NPR, and elsewhere suggested that the answer to these questions was “yes.”

In May 2024, however, Saloni Dattani reported in Our World in Data that the purported increase in U.S. maternal mortality stems mostly from changes in how these deaths are counted. Before 1994, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) defined a “maternal death” as one where pregnancy is listed as the underlying cause of death on the death certificate. However, this led to many maternal deaths not being counted, including cases wherein the underlying cause of death was a condition that is exacerbated by pregnancy.

When the ICD was updated in 1994, the definition was expanded to include deaths from “any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management.” The ICD also recommended “pregnancy checkboxes” on death certificates to help doctors catch more pregnancy-related deaths.

Dattani shows that as U.S. states gradually introduced the pregnancy checkbox and implemented the new ICD definition, rates of maternal death appeared to rise. So, it seems that the upward trend in the graph doesn’t come from changes in the actual death rate but from changes in what counts as a maternal death, to begin with. None of this is indicated in the charts, which plot smooth lines without any gaps or discontinuities.

On Fables and Nuanced Charts – Asimov Press

The following is just a copy-paste of my description elsewhere of this 2008 paper from Christopher L. Heavey and Russell T. Hurlburt.

I just ran across a 2008 paper, ‘The phenomena of inner experience’ (https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/heavey-hurlburt-2008.pdf), that tries to taxonomize the common types of mental experience. They asked about 16 different phenomena; 11 of them were present in <= 3% of experience reports, so they focused on the other 5, which were all present in >= 22% of reports. Those are: inner speech, inner seeing, unsymbolized thinking, feeling, and sensory awareness. They found people varied very widely on which ones they had, and how often. See screenshots for a) a summary of the five phenomena, and b) the relative commonness of the different ones, along with the the highest level reported by any participant (eg the most visual participant had inner seeing in 90% of their reports) and lowest level (which is 0% in all categories). Interesting stuff IMHO!

For me personally, using their categories, I would say the large majority are ‘unsymbolized thinking’, and occasionally inner speech or feeling or sensory awareness, inner seeing never. I’d be curious to hear other people’s splits.

As I said at CL, for me a lot of it is kinesthetic, a sense of spatial relationships between concepts relative to my body, and a lot of it is…algebraic, almost? It’s about the relationships between concepts. And sometimes it’s really nothing verbalizable at all, like it’s not uncommon if someone asks me what I’m thinking to be like ‘uhhhhhh…’

The less verbalizable parts are maybe almost like sensory awareness, except that instead of awareness of something I’m seeing or hearing, it’s awareness of one or more concept-thingies.

A few excerpts:

‘Most participants had one form of inner experience predominate; 22 of the 30 participants had at least one of the five common phenomena occurring in 50% or more of their samples.’

‘The most common dominant phenomenon was inner seeing, followed by feelings, and then inner speech.’

‘The phenomenon of sensory awareness requires additional explanation to ensure that it is comprehended. Sensory awareness, as we define it, is the experience of being drawn to and the paying particular, thematic attention to some sensory quality of the inner or outer environment. Sensory awareness is not merely the perception of some object; it is the direct attention to some particular sensory quality of the object. Thus Sally is reaching for a can of Coke with the intention of taking a drink. She is perceptually aware of the can as she reaches toward it, and could, if asked, report its shape, color, and so on. That does not count as sensory awareness by our definition. By contrast, Maria is also reaching for a can of Coke with the intention of taking a drink. As she reaches, she notices how the light reflects off the shoulder of the can, notices the can’s slightly rosy redness below the shoulder and its deeper redness above. Maria does have a sensory awareness as we define it.’

Although their whole idea is to take an open-ended phenomenological approach without presuppositions, the following quote makes me a bit suspicious that the experimenters’ iterative feedback may be inadvertently guiding participants into certain categories:

‘training should be “iterative”: participants should make attempts at observing/describing their own phenomena, receive feedback on those attempts, then make new observing/describing attempts, followed by new feedback, and so on. For example, DES shows repeatedly that many, if not most, people who have unsymbolized thinking (the experience of thinking without words or other symbols) will at first report such thinking to be in words. Only after repeated training as they iteratively confront the apprehension of their own experience do they come to recognize their presupposition of words as being false.’

Also for the record, their full list of 16 (given in an earlier paper) is ‘inner speech, partially worded speech, unworded speech, worded thinking, image, imageless seeing, unsymbolized thinking, inner hearing, feeling, sensory awareness, just doing, just talking, just listening, just reading, just watching TV, and multiple awareness.’

This is just copypasted from a discussion I had in Signal; I ended up putting some effort into it, so I’m copying here for reference. I’m mostly omitting replies except for specific bits I’m replying to. I’ve made a few edits for clarity.

This definitely seems like a road we don’t want to go down…
Catherine Rampell in the Washington Post, critiquing Harris’s proposal

perhaps she’s right that high grocery prices are no longer a problem for folks, but I still hear & read complaints!

I don’t think it matters. The trouble is that even if it’s a big problem, price controls are a deeply counterproductive response. The biggest advantage of a free market Is that prices automatically equilibrate to match supply and demand, and scarce goods are allocated to those who need or want them most (with obvious caveats on that latter part). If you set prices on a product category by fiat, you get significantly worse outcomes in the ways she describes. I think economists are in pretty broad agreement about that, although I could be wrong.

articles featuring companies joyfully raising prices/charging consumers without being stopped.

How can you distinguish whether a company is raising prices joyfully or non-joyfully?

The trouble is that in order to claim price gouging (except in emergency situations where you get a sudden big spike in demand), you have to postulate that companies all of a sudden got greedy. It seems way more likely that whatever level of greed they had before, they still have now.

If that is already illegal

There’s nothing illegal about raising prices. Companies generally charge whatever price results in the highest profit (which is almost never the highest price that anyone would pay). Consider all the incredibly expensive luxury goods that have massive markups, eg gold-plated chocolate truffles. It’s only illegal to collude to keep prices high, because then you’ve lost the benefit of a free market anyway.

It seems intuitive that you could just set prices top-down, but it just never works AFAICT. Think of it this way — I’m a manufacturer of, I dunno, breakfast cereal. It costs me $x to make a box of cereal (and that amount is changing all the time as the price of grains and cardboard and whatever else go up and down). Now you tell me I have to sell it for $y.
– If $y is less than $x plus some amount of profit (because if I can’t make a living why would I bother), then I just stop making breakfast cereal because it’s no longer a viable company.
– If $y is more than $x plus some amount of profit — well, mostly I’ll charge less than $y, because that’s what my competitors charge; if I charge more than the market price then I’ll sell less cereal, and it won’t be worth it. Unless you make us all charge $y, I guess, in which you’re colluding on my behalf to increase my profits.

In the former case, the price controls mean that companies go out of business; in the latter case the price controls aren’t doing any good.

One might imagine that the government could just constantly adjust $y so that it was equal to $x plus some reasonable amount of profit! But that’s the famous economic calculation problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem); the government will never have as much information as I do about what it costs me to make cereal and what the market clearing price is, especially because those amounts are constantly changing.

There are exceptions where those mechanisms don’t work — eg monopolies — but in a healthy market with competition, under normal (equilibrium) conditions, price controls only make things worse.

What’s more, I think Harris very likely already knows this, and I would bet that if she gets elected she wouldn’t actually implement price controls (other than maybe some token ones) for that very reason. But it gets votes, because it sounds so good. It’s like promising that everyone will have an above average income.

I’m not sure she has said she would attack the problem by setting price controls!

Well, that’s a fair point. It took me ages to find her official economic policy (https://mailchi.mp/press.kamalaharris.com/vice-president-harris-lays-out-agenda-to-lower-costs-for-american-families), and all it says is:

• Advance the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries;
• Set clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive profits on food and groceries.
• Secure new authority for the FTC and state attorneys general to investigate and impose strict new penalties on companies that break the rules.

That said, I don’t think I see a way that it could work that wouldn’t ultimately be the same thing — if you forbid companies from charging ‘too much’, you force them to charge no more than the price you want them to.

if price gouging is indeed already against the law,

Price gouging is against various state laws in an emergency (see screenshot). This sounds like she plans to ban ‘gouging’ under normal conditions. Maybe that interpretation is wrong? It’d be awfully nice if she gave details in her economic proposal 😒

I don’t think Harris is just playing to the crowds by tossing tidbits that don’t exist and can’t exist.

I really hope she is, because I think that it would cause a lot of problems if she actually did it.

Maybe one other angle on it that would seem clearer: let’s go back to my cereal company. Suppose that the government sets a low price for my boxes of cereal, and I somehow don’t go out of business. It’s guaranteed that more people want my cereal at the new lower price than did before (since previously they were willing to pay more for it). Somehow my million boxes of cereal have to get distributed to the way-more-than-a-million who want it. What’s the right way to decide who gets it, if not prices?
– It could just go to whoever happened to get to the store at the right time, and then everyone else would miss out, many of whom wanted my cereal a lot more than the people who happened to get there first.
– You could have long lines (as has happened with bread in many places) — then ‘who’s willing to pay the most’ gets replaced by ‘who’s willing to waste the most hours in line’, which does to some extent allocate it to the people who want it most, but at the cost of huge amounts of wasted time that are just pure deadweight loss.
– You could have rationing, eg everyone gets one box of cereal a month, but then a) it goes to many people who don’t want it much, and b) any feasible rationing scheme fails to take into account people’s differing needs.
– It could go to my buddies, which doesn’t seem like a particularly fair allocation scheme to me. Or to whoever’s willing to do me the most favors in exchange, in which case we’ve just exchanged a legible pricing system for an illegible black market.
– You could have the government try to decide who needs it the most, but boy does that not sound like a fun time for anyone.

Note that under many of the above plans, people would perceive it as a cereal shortage.

The advantage of prices is that they’re a constant, implicit, running auction. As prices get higher, the people who value the item less drop out by buying something else instead. As a result, it goes to whoever cares the most. That’s distorted by different people having different amounts to spend. But I still don’t see a better alternative.

If you can see a better way of allocating goods that not everyone can have to the people who want or need them most, I’d love to hear it.

Some other good pieces on this topic:

• https://apnews.com/article/kamala-harris-price-gouging-ban-inflation-65dc8844bb41159d76886f752b6cab28
• https://web.archive.org/web/20230715183338/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/07/the-greedflation-debate-is-deeply-confused.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_controls

FWIW here’s a version that you could do that I think would at least cause way fewer problems (although an economist might poke a hole in it within 30 seconds): you could implement a progressive tax on corporate profits and distribute the proceeds. It definitely does still have some problems:
– It decreases the incentives for companies to find better ways of doing things that will result in greater success, which leads to less economic growth, which leads to a worse standard of living than you would otherwise have. I think this is just a fundamental price you pay for any anti-corporate-profit scheme.
– It increases the incentives for companies to spend money instead of keeping it as profit. Some of those are generally viewed as bad (eg stock buybacks) and some as good (capital stock, R&D); I’m not sure whether it would come out net good or bad.
– Historically I think it’s pretty hard to keep money earmarked for redistribution instead of congress taking it (or ‘borrowing’ it) for whatever they want to spend it on (weapons, pork barrel bills, probably maybe some good stuff too but not the redistribution you wanted).
– Most economists think that corporate taxes are already higher than would best serve the public. You could do it in a way that’s neutral on total corporate taxes, although I suspect it might be hard to find the political will to do that.

Sidebar: I hadn’t realized before now that Richard Nixon tried price controls (along with some other unconventional economic moves); Wikipedia summarizes their impact as, ‘The Nixon shock has been widely considered to be a political success, but an economic failure for bringing on the 1973–1975 recession, the stagflation of the 1970s, and the instability of floating currencies.’
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock

The most egregious example of price gouging that I am aware of is not in groceries, but in pharmaceuticals.

Ah, yeah, pretty much the exact opposite of groceries; there’s almost no competition, arguably mostly because the government prevents it. Scott Alexander had an interesting argument with Vox’s Sarah Kliff on this:
– https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-drugs-vs-chairs/
– (& later) https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/07/reverse-voxsplaining-brand-name-drugs/

(each of those links to the Kliff piece it’s responding to)

(that first Scott Alexander piece is quite short by his standards, and fairly mind-boggling; it looks at how things have gone with attempts to compete on epi-pens)

This uses a well-chosen thought experiment to demonstrate that our understanding of ‘poverty’ is maybe somewhat askew. I tend to lean toward feeling like we — including poor people, at least in the US — have become much better off, and that UBI could solve a lot of the remaining problems. This seems like a legitimate challenge to that view that I’ll have to spend some time thinking about.

I think this is the problem with saying that modern society can’t have real poor people, because they own an amount of clothing and fabric that would’ve once put somebody well into the realm of nobility, back when women spent most of their days stretching wool with a distaff in order to let anyone have clothes at all.  That amount of fabric doesn’t mean you can’t be poor, just like having vast amounts of oxygen in your apartment doesn’t rule out poverty.  It means that a resource which was once very expensive, like fabric in medieval Europe or oxygen in Anoxistan, has become cheap enough not to mention.

And that is an improvement, compared to the counterfactual!  I’m glad I don’t have to constantly worry about running out of clothing or oxygen!  It is legitimately a better planet, compared to the counterfactual planet where life has all of our current problems plus not enough oxygen!

But if you agree that medieval peasants or hunter-gatherers can be poor, you are acknowledging that no amount of oxygen can stop somebody from being poor.

Then fabric can be the same way: there can be no possible sufficiency of clothing in your closet that rules out poverty, even though somebody with plenty of clothing is counterfactually better off compared to somebody who owns only one shirt.

The sum of every resource like that could rule out poverty, if you had enough of all of it.  What would be the sign of this state of affairs having come to hold?  What would it be like for people to not be poor?

I reply:  You wouldn’t see people working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them.

Universal Basic Income and Poverty — LessWrong

This is a very nice demonstration of the robustness against manipulation of well-funded prediction markets. The attempted manipulators spent millions of dollars to drop Trump 5% and bump Harris 3%. The market quickly took their money, pushing both candidates back to (roughly) their previous prices, and the manipulators were unable to achieve their goal, which only required them to keep the market distorted for a three hour period.

Of course this particular market is unusually liquid! Markets that don’t have much liquidity or many people watching them are easier to distort for longer. But if prediction markets continue to thrive (despite recalcitrant regulators), we should expect to see them become much more liquid (more like commodity exchanges or options markets, which are quite tough to manipulate — although the successes make for fascinating stories).

There was a spectacular attempt at manipulation on Polymarket yesterday, and you can see evidence of it in the following sharp price movements:

What happened was this. A group of traders bet heavily on Harris and against Trump in an attempt to push her into the lead for a couple of hours. The sums involved were quite large, with one trader alone wagering about 2.5 million dollars. The goal was to ensure that the Harris contract would have the higher price for a majority of minutes during the three hour period between noon and 3pm EST on Friday, in order to profit from a derivative market that referenced prices in the primary market.

https://rajivsethi.substack.com/p/a-failed-attempt-at-prediction-market

The excellent ‘Roots of Progress’ blog investigates a very interesting question.

Personally, I’ve lately been starting to believe that precision manufacturing is much more difficult and finicky than people generally realize. Even if given precise and comprehensive plans for a high-precision product, it’s very difficult for a new manufacturer to start manufacturing it without hands-on help from someone who’s actually done it. This reaches its apex in semiconductor chip manufacturing, which is so difficult that basically only one company, TSMC, is able to manufacture the high-end wafers.

(this has been of interest to me because it somewhat decreases the risk of human extinction from AI; killing all humans is a losing move for any AI system not yet capable of this level of very-high-precision manufacture, which may require significantly greater-than-human intelligence to be able to reliably spin up from scratch on any reasonable timeframe)

The bicycle, as we know it today, was not invented until the late 1800s. Yet it was a simple mechanical invention. It would seem to require no brilliant inventive insight, and certainly no scientific background.

Why, then, wasn’t it invented much earlier?

Source: Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

If this pans out, it seems like a big improvement!

The AI was trained to detect statistical bumps in real-time seismic data that researchers had paired with previous earthquakes. The outcome was a weekly forecast in which the AI successfully predicted 14 earthquakes within about 200 miles of where it estimated they would happen and at almost exactly the calculated strength. It missed one earthquake and gave eight false warnings.

https://scitechdaily.com/artificial-intelligence-predicts-earthquakes-with-unprecedented-accuracy

I have in the past praised Seeing Like a State; this is by far the most interesting criticism of it that I’ve encountered. That said, I think that the critique leans too heavily on a view of Modernist motivation as fundamentally aesthetic; in many of the cases Scott discusses, it was purely pragmatic, eg in order to more effectively impose taxation.

A defence of metis (and Scott is right that it needs defending) must be mounted with great care, since otherwise it looks like an attack on education itself, which does more than anything else to help people discard those aspects of their local traditions that do them harm. Scott would be horrified to be associated with the school of conservatives who oppose education on the grounds that it gives power to the great unwashed, but they at least have the virtue of brutal honesty. What doesn’t horrify him, but ought to, is his keeping the company of the ‘something-precious-is-lost-to-modern-life-once-mothers-no-longer-circumcise-their-daughters-and-you-can-buy-rambutan-in-Sainsbury’s’ school. There is no feebler pretext for conservatism than the anxiety that progress is somehow inimical to charm.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n11/paul-seabright/the-aestheticising-vice