Absolutely fascinating. I recommend reading at least the linked summary of the paper from Marginal Revolution, if not the paper itself;

We leverage the as-if random assignment of nonviolent misdemeanor cases to Assistant District Attorneys (ADAs) who decide whether a case should move forward with prosecution in the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts.These ADAs vary in the average leniency of their prosecution decisions. We find that,for the marginal defendant, nonprosecution of a nonviolent misdemeanor offense leads to large reductions in the likelihood of a new criminal complaint over the next two years.These local average treatment effects are largest for first-time defendants, suggesting that averting initial entry into the criminal justice system has the greatest benefits.

… We find that the marginal nonprosecuted misdemeanor defendant is 33 percentage points less likely to be issued a new criminal complaint within two years post-arraignment (58% less than the mean for complier” defendants who are prosecuted; p < 0.01). We find that nonprosecution reduces the likelihood of a new misdemeanor complaint by 24 percentage points (60%; p < 0.01), and reduces the likelihood of a new felony complaint by 8 percentage points (47%; not significant). Nonprosecution reduces the number of subsequent criminal complaints by 2.1 complaints (69%; p < .01); the number of subsequent misdemeanor complaints by 1.2 complaints (67%; p < .01), and the number of subsequent felony complaints by 0.7 complaints (75%; p < .05). We see significant reductions in subsequent criminal complaints for violent, disorderly conduct/theft, and motor vehicle offenses.

Source: Misdemeanor Prosecution – Marginal REVOLUTION

(full paper here)

I’m entirely agnostic about NFTs at this point, personally, but this is an interesting take on it.

A lot of people’s first response to NFTs is to reject them as a scam or a fad – but that is essentially the same category error skeptics make about crypto itself. The NFT space is indeed full of scams, shills and fools – but the core is something genuinely interesting and powerful.

Many people think they are NFT skeptics when actually what they actually are is skeptical about the art market itself. Rather than thinking of NFTs as a strange new genre of art, I think it is easier to conceptualize NFTs as a tool that helps people achieve all the strange artistic things they already wanted to do.

https://www.somethinginteresting.news/p/its-not-nfts-you-dont-understand

💃

Excellent news today: we have word of the most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered. A year-long trial in Burkina Faso has shown 77% efficacy, which is by far the record, and which opens the way to potentially relieving a nearly incalculable burden of disease and human suffering.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/04/23/great-malaria-vaccine-news

Sometimes a torpedo is just a torpedo. But maybe not so much in fascist Italy, where young men were prepared to go to absolutely any length for their country.

https://weaponsandwarfare.com/italian-human-torpedoes/

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the past couple of years thinking about opposing perspectives on capitalism. In this 25-minute talk from 2014, Jonathan Haidt, whose writing I tend to really appreciate, does a nice job laying out those two perspectives and then trying to synthesize them.

OpenAI’s latest iteration of the GPT architecture does a pretty remarkable job synthesizing novel images from text descriptions.

https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/

Also available Matt Taibbi interviews Frank about this article.

What all this censorship talk really is, though, is a declaration of defeat – defeat before the Biden administration has really begun. To give up on free speech is to despair of reason itself. (Misinformation, we read in the New York Times, is impervious to critical thinking.) The people simply cannot be persuaded; something more forceful is in order; they must be guided by we, the enlightened; and the first step in such a program is to shut off America’s many burbling fountains of bad takes.

Let me confess: every time I read one of these stories calling on us to get over free speech or calling on Mark Zuckerberg to press that big red “mute” button on our political opponents, I feel a wave of incredulity sweep over me. Liberals believe in liberty, I tell myself. This can’t really be happening here in the USA.

But, folks, it is happening. And the folly of it all is beyond belief. To say that this will give the right an issue to campaign on is almost too obvious. To point out that it will play straight into the right’s class-based grievance-fantasies requires only a little more sophistication. To say that it is a betrayal of everything we were taught liberalism stood for – a betrayal that we will spend years living down – may be too complex a thought for our punditburo to consider, but it is nevertheless true.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/19/rightwing-misinformation-liberals

Note that the researchers have a downloadable Android app for using the technique at home.

For 20 min prior to sleep the experimenter played alternating audio and visual cues at 1-min intervals. Participants were instructed to practice a mental state of critical self-awareness, observing their thoughts and experiences each time they noticed a cue. This procedure associated the cues with the trained mental state. Subsequently, participants were allowed 90 min to nap, and the audio and visual cues were presented during REM sleep to activate self-awareness in dreams and elicit lucidity. A control group followed the same procedure but was not cued during sleep. All participants were instructed to signal their lucidity by looking left and right 4 times (LR signal). Signal-verified lucid dreams (SVLDs) qualified as dreams in which the LR signal was observed and the participant reported becoming lucid. Across the 2 nap times, this protocol induced SVLDs in 50% of cued participants. In the absence of cueing during sleep, participant SVLD rate was 17%. Of note, 3 successful participants had never before experienced a LD, suggesting this protocol may be effective across the general population.

https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fcns0000227

Instead of waiting for dreamers to tell us about a dream after it has ended, when they have transitioned to the waking state, we sought to obtain evidence showing that it is possible to interview them about their dreams at the time they are experiencing them. Our experimental goal is akin to finding a way to talk with an astronaut who is on another world, but in this case the world is entirely fabricated on the basis of memories stored in the brain. Demonstrating the viability of this “interactive dreaming”—when experimenter and dreamer communicate with each other in real time—would be a large step forward to promote future progress in dream research.

Here, we report multiple demonstrations of successful two-way communication during lucid dreams achieved by four independent scientific teams in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the USA. We substantiate the validity of this interactive-dreaming phenomenon by bringing together results obtained using a diverse set of strategies. Several methods for communicating into and out of dreams were used, as shown in Figure 1. Lucid dreamers were able to follow instructions to compute mathematical operations, answer yes-or-no questions, or discriminate stimuli in the visual, tactile, and auditory modalities. They were able to respond using volitional control of gaze direction or of different facial muscles. There were three different participant categories: (1) experienced lucid dreamers, (2) healthy people with minimal prior experience who we trained to lucid dream, and (3) a patient with narcolepsy, a neurological disorder characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness, short-latency REM sleep periods, and frequent lucid dreaming. Evidence of two-way communication was found with all three participant categories, and also with both nocturnal sleep and daytime naps.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)00059-2

[Education about conspiracy theories] won’t be effective if it tells a too simplistic story, where all consensus claims are true and all conspiracy theories empty. In reality, a consensus can be wrong, and a conspiracy theory can sometimes point toward an overlooked or hidden truth — and the approach that Caulfield proposes, to say nothing of the idea of a centralized Office of Reality, seem likely to founder on these rocks. If you tell people not to listen to some prominent crank because that person doesn’t represent the establishment view or the consensus position, you’re setting yourself up to be written off as a dupe or deceiver whenever the consensus position fails or falls apart.

I could multiply examples of how this falling apart happens — I am old enough to remember, for instance, when only cranks doubted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — but the last year has given us a thuddingly obvious case study: In January and February of 2020, using a follow-the-consensus method of online reading could have given you a wildly misleading picture of the disease’s risks, how it was transmitted, whether to wear masks and more.

Is there an alternative to leaning so heavily on the organs of consensus? I think there might be. It would start by taking conspiracy thinking a little more seriously — recognizing not only that it’s ineradicable, but also that it’s a reasonable response to both elite failures and the fact that conspiracies and cover-ups often do exist.

If you assume that people will always believe in conspiracies, and that sometimes they should, you can try to give them a tool kit for discriminating among different fringe ideas, so that when they venture into outside-the-consensus territory, they become more reasonable and discerning in the ideas they follow and bring back.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/opinion/misinformation-conspiracy-theories.html