This is pretty cool to read! I may make a practice of going through this once a year. “A number of significant scientific events occurred in 2018…”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_in_science

I desperately wish more people would realize how sensitive we all are to noise. It’s hard to imagine that anyone who thought about the impact of noise on themselves and others would choose to use a leaf-blower, for example.

Experts say your body does not adapt to noise. Large-scale studies show that if the din keeps up—over days, months, years—noise exposure increases your risk of high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, and heart attacks, as well as strokes, diabetes, dementia, and depression. Children suffer not only physically—18 months after a new airport opened in Munich, the blood pressure and stress-hormone levels of neighboring children soared—but also behaviorally and cognitively. A landmark study published in 1975 found that the reading scores of sixth graders whose classroom faced a clattering subway track lagged nearly a year behind those of students in quieter classrooms—a difference that disappeared once soundproofing materials were installed. Noise might also make us mean: A 1969 study suggested that test subjects exposed to noise, even the gentle fuzz of white noise, become more aggressive and more eager to zap fellow subjects with electric shocks.

Even when not intentionally deployed for harm, the sound of drilling, barking, building, crying, singing, clomping, dancing, piano practicing, lawn mowing, and generator running becomes, to those exposed, a source of severe anguish that is entirely at odds with our cavalier attitude toward noise. “It feels like it’s eating at your body,” a man plagued by a rattling boiler told a reporter. A woman who was being accosted on all sides by incessant honking told me, “The noise had literally pushed me to a level of feeling suicidal.” For those grappling with it, noise is “chaos,” “torture,” “unbearable,” “nauseating,” “depressing and nerve-racking,” “absolute hell,” and “an ice pick to the brain.” “If you didn’t know they were talking about noise, you might think they were describing some sort of assault,” Erica Walker, an environmental-health researcher at Boston University, has said. This has spurred scientists, physicians, activists, public officials, and, albeit less in the United States, lawmakers to join in the quest for quiet, which is far more elusive than it may seem. “Quiet places,” says the acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, “have been on the road to extinction at a rate that far exceeds the extinction of species.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/the-end-of-silence/598366/

There are broader lessons from this currency invention. Many policymakers regard the rise of online banking as a way to tackle illicit trade and money-laundering, because banking digitally leaves a trace. This should mean that digital economies are easier to police than cash-based ones. Some countries are even considering banning paper money entirely as a way to clean up their economies. Yet an understanding of how currency innovation works suggests these hopes are credulous: from remote islands to high-security prisons, money invention is informal, organic and – as Louisiana’s prisons show – can now be untraceable. The new digital “dot” currency is reportedly already being used to launder cash across national borders.

Despite the damage illicit prison markets can do, one ex-convict in his 30s defended the underground prison economy to me: “I’ve got friends inside. This is how they support their families.” He said most prisoners have limited chance to improve their lot. “So they sell drugs, they run tickets and they gamble; this is how they make their money.” Veterans who have spent decades in Louisiana’s prisons defend their economy too, insisting that underground exchanges are a way to keep life inside the prison calm.Simple trades – haircuts, pecans, books, shirt pressing and even tattoos – that were once made using tobacco have shifted to alternative currencies including coffee, packets of noodles and even tins of mackerel. They are a way to make the ultra-long Louisiana sentences a little easier to bear.

For those concerned about the future, the hidden economies of the Louisiana prison system offer a vital lesson. It stems from the power of the informal economy in enabling a society to recover from a shock, and the extraordinary levels of effort and innovation that people will use to establish a trading system if theirs is damaged or destroyed.

Louisiana’s prisons have parallel economies. There is the illicit drug economy that runs on its untraceable dot currency, and alongside it a more innocent marketplace where basic necessities are mediated with some agreed item – currently coffee – acting as a currency. Trades in both economies work because of the most basic law of prison economics – that a prison is a place defined by unsatisfied needs, tastes and demands. Both economies are self-built, organic and highly innovative. Both show that a currency, the provision of which can seem like the ultimate role of the state in an economy, can be established completely informally. Prisons show that the human urge to trade and exchange is impossible to repress, and that solutions to future challenges are as likely to come from informal markets as formal ones.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/30/prison-economy-informal-markets-alternative-currencies

But while those things matter, Vivyan told me, it’s partisanship that is “the most obvious and often the most salient” factor at play. “Partisanship is the biggest predictor we have,” he said, of whether someone who looks at a set of facts will see an im🍑ment waiting to happen or just so much rotten fruit.

And that effect has grown over time in the United States, as partisans of both parties dislike one another more and have stronger negative emotional reactions to the other side, said Eva Anduiza, professor of political science at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. This “affective polarization” is something that’s been measured by the American National Election Study’s “feelings thermometer” since the late 1970s. The survey asks respondents to rate their feelings about “Democrats” and “Republicans” on a 100-point scale and then compares how people rate the party they identify with vs. the one they don’t.

Since 1980, our average feelings about “the other guys” have become significantly chilly — falling from around 50 to around 25 points on the 100-point scale. In fact, almost all the significant increase in affective polarization is due to an increased dislike of the other side and not, say, an increased preference for your own side.

That kind of emotional partisanship matters for scandals because it increases the likelihood of motivated reasoning — basically upping our tendency to not want to hear things that contradict our previously held beliefs. In the case of politics, that means finding reasons why the other side’s scandals are a very big deal and/or finding reasons why our own preferred party’s scandals are not.

Why Partisans Look At The Same Evidence On Ukraine And See Wildly Different Things

Fun little piece from Lev Grossman.

I hadn’t counted on the sheer, dispiriting width of the state of Pennsylvania. It took the fight out of me. While superficially high-functioning, I was in fact easily daunted, and instead of driving west I gave up and veered north to Niagara Falls. If I failed to cross the country I could at least check off one major geographical milestone.

The falls were surrounded by an outer corona of honeymoon motels that underscored my growing sense of isolation. I had second thoughts about what I was doing. My friends were getting on with their lives, moving to plausible-sounding places like Seattle and Atlanta, starting sensible jobs and graduate schools and professional schools, and what the hell was I doing out here, all by myself? Did I really think I was some kind of novel-writing genius person? I got out of my Subaru and saw the falls and was duly impressed. Then I got back in and headed back east.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/levgrossman/it-is-ok-not-to-be-a-genius

I just discovered the existence of FIRE, which defends assaults on free speech at colleges and universities, whether those assaults come from left or right. I’ve been increasingly concerned in recent years about the lack of strong, nonpartisan voices defending free speech on campus. FIRE seems like a terrific group and I’ve donated to them; perhaps you might want to consider a donation as well 🙂

FIRE’s mission is to defend and sustain the individual rights of students and faculty members at America’s colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience—the essential qualities of liberty. FIRE educates students, faculty, alumni, trustees, and the public about the threats to these rights on our campuses, and provides the means to preserve them.

Experienced. Nonpartisan. Defending Your Rights. – FIRE

I highly, highly recommend this for its richly historical picture of authoritarianism, and how that history shapes where we are now as we see authoritarianism resurging around the world, armed with potent new tools of surveillance and control.

At the same time, the compelling narrative of this essay is complicated by some strong criticism of this essay (linked at the bottom of the piece).

The liberal democracies had overestimated the challenge of communism, and they underestimated the challenge of traditional authoritarianism. And this, too, was understandable. Throughout the years of the Cold War and during the era of liberal dominance that followed, the world’s autocracies were too weak to challenge liberalism as they had before. They struggled just to survive. The right-wing dictatorships that depended on the United States for money and protection had to at least pay lip service to liberal principles and norms, lest they lose that support. Some held elections when pressed, provided space to “moderate” political opponents and allowed liberal international nongovernmental organizations to operate within their borders, monitoring their human rights records, working with civil society and training political parties — all as a way of avoiding potentially fatal economic and political ostracism.

The authoritarians’ weakness reinforced the belief among liberal democracies that ideological competition had ended with the fall of communism. In the brief era of liberal hegemony that followed the end of the Cold War, we did not worry, because we did not notice, as authoritarianism gradually regained its power and its voice as liberalism’s most enduring and formidable challenge.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2019/03/14/feature/the-strongmen-strike-back/

I may have posted this before, but it’s a really fun read:

The firewall paradox involves a thought experiment where Alice—it’s always Alice—sits outside of a black hole waiting for it to mostly but not completely evaporate, and scooping up all the Hawking radiation it emits as it does so. For a black hole the mass of our sun, this would take about 10⁶⁷ years (we’ll assume Alice has a really long grant). Then, Alice routes all the photons of Hawking radiation into her quantum computer, where she processes them in such a way as to prove that they did encode information about the infalling matter. Then, as the final step, Alice jumps into the black hole. The clincher is that, if you combine all the ideas about black holes that had previously been accepted, you can now make a firm prediction that Alice will encounter an end of spacetime right at the event horizon (in the physicists’ colorful language, she’ll “hit a firewall and burn up”). But this is totally contrary to the prediction of general relativity, which says that Alice shouldn’t notice anything very special at the event horizon, and should only encounter an end of spacetime at the singularity.

There are various ways out of this that aren’t very satisfying: you could deny that information escapes from black holes. You could say that general relativity is wrong, and what we’d previously called black holes are really just firewalls. You could argue that what happens inside a black hole isn’t even within the scope of science—since much like life after death, it’s not empirically testable by anyone who “remains on this side.” Or—and this seems like the “conservative” option!—you could admit that Alice can create a firewall by doing this crazy processing of the Hawking radiation, but insist that, if she doesn’t do the processing, then she’ll pass through the event horizon just like general relativity always said she would. But if you take this last option, then what Alice perceives as the structure of spacetime—whether she encounters an event horizon or a firewall—will depend on what she programmed her quantum computer to do.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/scott-aaronson-answers-every-ridiculously-big-question-i-throw-at-him/

I’m reviewing previous state-of-the-art in quantum computing in preparation for Google’s supposed upcoming announcement of quantum supremacy. Hadn’t heard anything about D-Wave in a few years, so I thought I’d check where things stand…

…why bother with one of these devices? We posed that question to researchers using D-Wave computers at Lockheed Martin, Los Alamos National Lab, Volkswagen, and elsewhere. In short, D-Waves are in their early days, but these organizations are hoping to eventually use them to solve problems, like predicting elections, routing taxis in traffic jams, or picking crucial data out of background noise. They want to start approaching these puzzles from a quantum computing mindset as early as possible. No one yet claims to have found the killer app that will bring quantum computing power to the masses. And while D-Wave has demonstrated it can really simulate quantum mechanics, other machines can perform similar tasks, quicker. But if these researchers continue to refine their ideas, they’ll be ready for the day some future D-Wave machine, or any other quantum computer, might provide real benefits.

https://gizmodo.com/why-did-nasa-lockheed-martin-and-others-spend-million-1826241515

Some food for thought on college degrees:

Obstacles to employment are a problem. They impede social mobility, disproportionately harm society’s most vulnerable citizens, and hinder the larger economy. That is why efforts to remove such barriers have become a bipartisan cause. It’s why more than two dozen states now ban public employers (and sometimes even private ones) from inquiring about applicants’ criminal history, due to concerns that capable job candidates will be turned away or otherwise deterred. A number of states and locales are going further: New York City, for example, prohibits public employers from asking about applicants’ prior-earnings history; in 2016, Massachusetts became the first state to prohibit the practice for all employers.

Occupational-licensing reform has similarly seen growing, bipartisan support. Reformers on the left and right have surveyed the staggering costs and barriers to entry for quotidian positions such as masseuse, nail technician, exterminator, and florist, and concluded that these need to be reduced or eliminated. In doing so, they are embracing the understanding Milton Friedman propounded most fluently in his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom: “The most obvious social cost,” Friedman wrote of occupational registration, certification, and licensure, “is that any one of these measures…almost inevitably becomes a tool in the hands of a special producer group to obtain a monopoly position at the expense of the rest of the public.”

Yet even as reformers have pushed to remove a variety of barriers to employment, the biggest and most significant barrier to employment in American life — the use of the college degree as a default hiring device — has gone blithely unremarked. Indeed, even as reformers target employment obstacles for felons and florists, the pervasive use of college-degree requirements, despite its dubious legality and profound costs, has bizarrely escaped serious consideration.

https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/busting-the-college-industrial-complex

See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/