^ check out the 15 seconds following 5:38 (direct link to that start time) for some really useful mnemonics for the polyrhythms for 2:3 (‘Nice cup of tea’), 3:4 (‘Pass the goddamn butter’), and 4:5 (‘I’m looking for a home to buy’).

Some others can be found at these links (although you really have to hear them, or feel them out against the polyrhythm, to get them right):

Reddit

WordPress

[EDIT]

A couple more I figured out by using https://4four.io/ploop:

3:5, emphasis on the 5 — “HEAT UP the CHEESE PIZza PLEASE”

2:5, emphasis on the 5 — “I’VE BEEN CEL-e-BRAT-ING”

3:4 emphasis on the 3, as mentioned above, is “PASS the GODdamn BUTter”. With emphasis on the 4, you can use “I’M LOOKing FOR a CAKE”. It’s pretty interesting to put on a 3:4 rhythm (using eg this excellent tool) and switch between those two.

Wow. If you know you’re going to read this fascinating essay, which I highly recommend, avoid reading my spoilers below.

Galton, Ehrlich, Buck – by Scott Alexander

…still here? Today I learned:

In 1975, India had a worse-than-usual economic crisis and declared martial law. They asked the World Bank for help. The World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, made support conditional on an increase in sterilizations.

…

In the end about eight million people were sterilized over the course of two years. No one will ever know how many were “voluntary” by standards that we would be comfortable with, but plausibly well below half.

The West didn’t just tolerate this process, they supported it and cheered it on. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations provided much of the funding. Western media ranged from supportive to concerned-for-the-wrong-reasons…

Maybe now you’ll go read it? I was pretty shocked to learn about this. In the mid-70s! Despite the enormous post-WWII backlash against forcible sterilization for eugenic purposes!

Wow.

In 2010, Ratcliff started working with brewer’s yeast, the single-celled fungus we use to make bread and beer. He repeatedly grew the yeast in liquid-filled tubes, shook them, and then used the cells that sank fastest to start new cultures. By favoring cells that stick together and settle faster, this simple procedure radically changed the yeast within just 60 days. Now whenever a cell divided in two, the new cells didn’t drift apart as they normally would; instead, they remained attached, creating beautiful, branching snowflakes that comprised dozens of cells. The yeast had evolved multicellularity in just two months.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/05/multicellular-organism-evolution-yeast-experiment/674030/

The evolution of MREs is surprisingly fascinating.

…the Metabolic Kitchen, the lone culinary research and development center for the world’s most technically advanced military, is what I’m after. This is the place that developed pizza that can survive for three years without refrigeration; a strangely convincing approximation of key lime pie that can be sucked through a tube at 9Gs, or nine times the force of gravity; dehydrated chili that can endure an Antarctic expedition; and ice cream that can go into outer space. I’m here to find out how.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/natick-lab-military-food-science

In December 2018, Thierry Brunfaut and Tom Greenwood published an article in Fast Company where they coined a new word: Blanding.

“The worst branding trend (…) is the one you probably never noticed. I call it blanding. The main offenders are in tech, where a new army of clones wears a uniform of brand camouflage. The formula is sort of a brand paint-by-numbers. Start with a made-up-word name. Put it in a sans-serif typeface. Make it clean and readable, with just the right amount of white space. Use a direct tone of voice. Nope, no need for a logo. Maybe throw in some cheerful illustrations. Just don’t forget the vibrant colors. Bonus points for purple and turquoise. Blah blah blah.”

https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average

I got curious about the current state of research on criminal deterrence. Caveat: I don’t know whether this summary of the research is broadly shared by those in the field or whether it’s controversial, nor am I clear on the reputation of the NIJ; I just wanted a first approximation.

1. The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.
   Research shows clearly that the chance of being caught is a vastly more effective deterrent than even draconian punishment.
2. Sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison isn’t a very effective way to deter crime.
   Prisons are good for punishing criminals and keeping them off the street, but prison sentences (particularly long sentences) are unlikely to deter future crime. Prisons actually may have the opposite effect: Persons who are incarcerated learn more effective crime strategies from each other, and time spent in prison may desensitize many to the threat of future imprisonment.

3. Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished.
   The police deter crime when they do things that strengthen a criminal’s perception of the certainty of being caught. Strategies that use the police as “sentinels,” such as hot spots policing, are particularly effective. A criminal’s behavior is more likely to be influenced by seeing a police officer with handcuffs and a radio than by a new law increasing penalties.
4. Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime.
   Laws and policies designed to deter crime by focusing mainly on increasing the severity of punishment are ineffective partly because criminals know little about the sanctions for specific crimes.

5. There is no proof that the death penalty deters criminals.
   According to the National Academy of Sciences, “Research on the deterrent effect of capital punishment is uninformative about whether capital punishment increases, decreases, or has no effect on homicide rates.”

https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence

Time Magazine, of all media outlets, again publishing an excellent piece on existential risk, this time from MIT researcher Max Tegmark.

https://time.com/6273743/thinking-that-could-doom-us-with-ai/

The piece isn’t all that great, but I like this quote:

You can flatter your audience over and over every day by showing them proof of how insane the people they despise are becoming. You can tell them what they want to hear about how everyone else is just hearing what they want to hear. You can even build an entire new media business model on this.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/how-stewart-made-tucker

Fascinating resolution to a longstanding disagreement, and a big success for adversarial collaboration.

Do larger incomes make people happier? Two authors of the present paper have published contradictory answers. Using dichotomous questions about the preceding day, [Kahneman and Deaton, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 107, 16489–16493 (2010)] reported a flattening pattern: happiness increased steadily with log(income) up to a threshold and then plateaued. Using experience sampling with a continuous scale, [Killingsworth, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 118, e2016976118 (2021)] reported a linear-log pattern in which average happiness rose consistently with log(income). We engaged in an adversarial collaboration to search for a coherent interpretation of both studies. A reanalysis of Killingsworth’s experienced sampling data confirmed the flattening pattern only for the least happy people. Happiness increases steadily with log(income) among happier people, and even accelerates in the happiest group. Complementary nonlinearities contribute to the overall linear-log relationship. We then explain why Kahneman and Deaton overstated the flattening pattern and why Killingsworth failed to find it. We suggest that Kahneman and Deaton might have reached the correct conclusion if they had described their results in terms of unhappiness rather than happiness; their measures could not discriminate among degrees of happiness because of a ceiling effect. The authors of both studies failed to anticipate that increased income is associated with systematic changes in the shape of the happiness distribution. The mislabeling of the dependent variable and the incorrect assumption of homogeneity were consequences of practices that are standard in social science but should be questioned more often. We flag the benefits of adversarial collaboration.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120

While the author doesn’t ultimately accept the argument that consciousness is first and foremost social, I’m very much reminded of Marvin Minsky’s similar perspective, which I’ve always found pretty compelling: that there were clear evolutionary advantages to developing the ability to model others’ minds, and that once we had that capability, the ability to model our own — ie consciousness — came along as a free bonus.

GPT-4 does an awfully good job of modeling humans’ minds, or at least seeming to; on what grounds can we say that it doesn’t model its own?

I would like at least to begin here an argument that supports the following points. First, we have no strong evidence of any currently existing artificial system’s capacity for conscious experience, even if in principle it is not impossible that an artificial system could become conscious. Second, such a claim as to the uniqueness of conscious experience in evolved biological systems is fully compatible with naturalism, as it is based on the idea that consciousness is a higher-order capacity resulting from the gradual unification of several prior capacities —embodied sensation, notably— that for most of their existence did not involve consciousness. Any AI project that seeks to skip over these capacities and to rush straight to intellectual self-awareness on the part of the machine is, it seems, going to miss some crucial steps. However, finally, there is at least some evidence at present that AI is on the path to consciousness, even without having been endowed with anything like a body or a sensory apparatus that might give it the sort of phenomenal experience we human beings know and value. This path is, namely, the one that sees the bulk of the task of becoming conscious, whether one is an animal or a machine, as lying in the capacity to model other minds.

https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/no-minds-without-other-minds