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

Presumably over time this’ll lead to a different equilibrium where either fewer appeals are approved, or the number of required hoops will increase. But seems really useful for now.

…most denials can be successfully appealed. However, most people don’t appeal denied claims, with a study showing that Affordable Care Act patients only appeal about 0.1% of denials. Second, anybody, not just doctors, can file a claim with their insurer. You could do it yourself, just like Karau did.

She actually started helping friends with appeals and then wondered whether she could automate the process. The result is the Fight Health Insurance website. Karau spent a year developing the open-source AI platform before making it available to the general public in the US. The engineer spent about $10,000 to create the service.

Health insurance claim denial appeal: This AI website can help

This is a lovely meditation from Sarah Perry on the meaning of mess. I don’t think that I agree with her conclusion (I agree that ‘high-entropy’ isn’t sufficient, but maybe something like Murray Gell-Mann’s effective complexity would work?) but it was a joy to read.

Watts observes that elements of the natural world – clouds, foam on water, the stars, human beings – are not messes, though the nature of their order remains inscrutable, and Watts doesn’t try to pin down its precise nature. Mess seems to be somehow a property perceptible only in the presence of human artifacts. Is this the result of some kind of aesthetic original sin on the part of humans, uncanny beings severed from the holiness of Nature? I hope not. “Humans are bad” is a boring answer.

We can learn something about order from the mystery of mess. We start here: a cloud is not a mess, but an ashtray full of cigarette butts is a mess. In tracking down why this is so, we will find, through the lens of the mess and the non-mess, a clue to the hidden orders in our minds.

Tendrils of Mess in our Brains

This is what I personally try to strive for; it’s good to see that there’s been some academic work on defining and measuring it. Sorry to link to the low-quality Psychology Today; there just isn’t much out there yet for a lay audience on the topic.

date our beliefs takes cognitive effort. We need to override our initial impulses. This is further complicated when a belief is challenged that is central to us (Haidt, 2012). Nevertheless, it can serve as a cognitive aspiration. We will certainly fall short of being actively open-minded, but when we sense we are in Refutation Mode, we can try to momentarily recalibrate and see if being actively open-minded may serve us in the situation.

For example, in making billion-dollar investments, Ray Dalio, the founder of the world’s largest hedge-fund, places the dictate to be “Radically Open-Minded” as one of his key management principles. As he states:

“Radical open-mindedness is the ability to effectively explore different points of view and different possibilities…It requires you to replace your attachment to always being right with the joy of learning what’s true” (2017, p. 187).

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/learning-at-work/201805/do-i-really-have-to-be-actively-open-minded

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2024/08/beth-cavener-trust/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2024/08/beth-cavener-trust/

This is terrific advice, enough so that I’m just pasting much of it below. I have my own slightly different take on it (in particular I think it’s more valuable to put effort into changing the world, in narrow, carefully selected, high-leverage ways), but Caplan’s is mostly pretty close. I don’t always manage to do it, but I’m a lot closer than I used to be.

1. Amicably divorce your society.  Don’t get angry at the strangers who surround you, just accept the fact that you’re not right for each other.

2. Stop paying attention to things that aggravate you unless (a) they concretely affect your life AND (b) you can realistically do something about them.  Start by ceasing to follow national and world news.

3. Pay less frequent attention to things that aggravate you even if they do concretely affect your life and you can realistically do something about them.  For example, if you check your email twenty times a day and find the experience frustrating, try cutting back to two or three times a day.  If you need to know about world politics, read history books, not newspaper articles.

5. Abandon your First World Problems mentality.  Consciously compare your income to Haitian poverty, your health status to Locked-In Syndrome, your sorrow to that of parent who has lost a child.  As Tsunami Bomb tells us, “Be grateful that you have a brain for thinking/
And legs to take you places.”  For guidance, repeatedly read Epicurus’ Letter to Menoeceus and Julian Simon’s Good Mood.

8. Find a career you really enjoy.  Ask yourself, “Will I take daily pride in this work?” and “Are the kind of people I want to befriend statistically over-represented in this line of work?”  If you have to signal for years to get this job, sigh, signal, and see Step 5.

10. Now that your own life is in order, you are emotionally ready to quixotically visit your ex-society.  Maybe you want to publicly argue for open borders, abolition of the minimum wage, or pacifism.  Go for it.  Bend over backwards to be friendly.  Take pride in your quixotic quest.  Then go home to your Beautiful Bubble and relax.

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2013/04/make_your_own_b.html

Continuing neuroscience work on aphantasia.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-happens-in-a-mind-that-cant-see-mental-images-20240801/