Subconscious Mammalian Thermal Footprint Memory

When I return to a spot that I had recently occupied (on a chair, bed, etc.) I don't particularly notice that it's still warm. But if I settle onto a spot that is warm from some other mammal recently recently being there, it's keenly apparent. (The most palpable version of this is when you sit on recently-occupied toilet seat.)

I bet that humans have a subconscious memory of where they have recently left thermal footprints. So we subconsciously discount our own warm spots as uninteresting, but it bubbles up to our consciousness when our backside detects a potential interloper.

A redditor opines that it's because when you're sitting in your own spot you're in thermal equilibrium. But that doesn't explain the differential between self vs. other, because the feeling is quite different if the person who left the seat two minutes earlier was you vs. not you.

I noticed it again this morning when my dog and I both got up from bed at the same time. He'd been laying near my feet on top of my thick comforter. When I returned to bed after a few minutes, the spot recently warmed directly by a 230lb mammal felt unremarkable. But the spot recently warmed through a comforter by a 35lb mammal felt very warm.

Do other people notice this, or am I a mutant? My family thinks I'm crazy for "smelling" food after I remove it from the microwave, but I explain to them that my snout is a very sensitive heat detector, allowing me to check my food without burning a finger. And when raising three daughters I found that I could measure forehead temperature with my hand to ±1°F. 

My other superpower is recognizing voices, especially celebrity voiceovers. I'm constantly amazed that people watching a show with me don't immediately recognize many of the voices like I do. Alas, none of these superpowers are very good for crime-fighting...

Fairly Dividing Cake or Chores

There are entire books on the topic of fair cake-cutting.  "Fair cake-cutting is the subject of intense research in mathematics, computer science, economics and political science." As a parent of three self-interested daughters, I'm very interested in this topic!

But I'm not interested in procedures that re-divide shares. A cake should have N contiguous shares, period. Don't ruin the cake.

And I'm not interested in procedures with a moving knife. Nice theory, but players will argue about where and when the knife stopped. (And a moving knife doesn't work on chores, which are somewhat discrete rather than continuous.)

And I'm not interested in envy-free. Players gonna envy. I just want no complaints of favoritism or collusion or election-rigging.

And I don't want a referee. If we can appeal to a fair authority, there is no need for a procedure!

And I want to minimize randomness. Players have their own utility functions, and that's what creates gains from trade.

I've come up with a procedure that I think is better by the above criteria than anything I could find during a hasty scan of the existing scientific literature. The best procedure I could find is this one by Dan Hulme in 2014. But his technique leads to unfairness complaints, as your position in the circle can totally exclude you from the best shares.

The 2nd-best procedure I found is Who Shall Have This. It's inferior to mine because shares are assigned randomly, leaving no room to exploit heterogenous preferences about the shares.

Little Risk Of Authoritarian Socialism in U.S.

Some freedom-lovers fear that America is on a path toward a socialist police state -- a path already followed by the most murderous regimes in human history:

• French Reign Of Terror
• Soviet Russia
• Fascist Italy
• Nazi Germany
• Communist China
• Cuba
• Nicaragua
• Venezuela

In all these cases, an authoritarian socialist police state arose without foreign conquest. However, there were many risk factors in play:

• Strong tradition of aristocracy
• Historic ethnic hierarchy/grievance
• Weak tradition of democracy
• Weak tradition of free speech
• Weak tradition of gun rights
• Severe land/resource inequality
• Agrarian economy
• Poorer than developed nations
• Recent war and/or depression
• Foreign military support for revolution

If you score these cases by the risk factors, you get:

• 7 French Reign Of Terror
• 9 Soviet Russia
• 8 Fascist Italy
• 6 Nazi Germany
• 9 Communist China
• 8 Cuba
• 8 Nicaragua
• 7 Venezuela

By contrast, the U.S. has only one risk factor: our distant history of slavery and our recent history of generous immigration has afflicted us with ethnic grievance. The U.S. is largely exempt from the other 9 risk factors. This suggests that alarmism about a U.S. police state is misguided, whether the alarmists are from the Left or from the Right. There was never any risk of Trump making America fascist.

Do the Internet and social media constitute a risk factor, or a mitigator? They allow activists and extremists to organize and to be amplified and to be canceled and to be de-platformed. But current concerns over cancellation and de-platforming need some historical perspective. The authoritative history Radicals For Freedom tells us that up until the late 1960s, the freedom movement was a remnant, a tiny flickering candle.  Even in the early 1970s, the freedom movement ran on shared postal mailing lists of at best a few tens of thousands of people. Now, the freedom movement is many millions of people, entrenched in every corner of the Internet. Some people may be canceled from enjoying the widest audiences, but what freedom-lover can honestly say that he cannot find enough pro-freedom content to read? What semi-diligent freedom-lover can say that he's successfully being kept ignorant about current events?

The sky is not falling. Our main risk is our continued slide toward some flavor of Western European nanny-state socialism. Preventing that slide is less sexy than LARPing about a revolution, but it is the hard work that freedom-lovers should not shirk.

SARS-CoV-2 might be lab leak

The SARS-CoV-2 virus might be an accidental leak from a lab, created by researchers who have been engineering "gain of function" in coronaviruses to study whether/how they might become pandemic risks for humans. If true, then researchers will have accidentally caused they very tragedy they wanted to prevent.

Here is a short pre-pandemic 2015 article from Nature highlighting the potential risk of such research: Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research. If that article isn't worrisome enough, then follow me down the rabbit hole: 

Fiction-writer Nicholas Baker published a lengthy piece on Jan 4 2021 in New York Magazine exploring the history of gain-of-function research and the lab-leak hypothesis. He points to plausible-sounding work by a pair of scientists, without mentioning that they are husband-and-wife self-published anti-GMO activists. He also invokes the recent work of Yuri Deigin, a biotech entrepeneur who has rebutted in detail the widely-cited March 2020 Nature paper that downplayed the lab-creation theory.

The Wuhan lab that stored a bat virus 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2 was only a few hundred yards from the wet market where the pandemic exploded. Further research on SARS-CoV-2 origins may yet settle this question, but the Chinese government is discouraging investigation into the research history of its Wuhan lab. But what already seems clear is that gain-of-function virus research is reckless. As Deigin tweeted on Feb 28: "Vaccines require clinical trials — that’s the longest and most expensive part. DESIGNING a vaccine against a known virus takes just a few days — Moderna had their candidate within hours of downloading SARS2 genome. See why creating a vaccine for some “potential” virus is BS?"

There's no evidence that the virus was engineered as a bio-weapon. In fact, one argument against that theory is that there is an easy and obvious way to make the virus even better at binding to human ACE2 -- and they describe exactly how to do it! (Arj Barker will have to update his bit about the Discovery Channel leaking info to terrorists.) And if China intentionally started the global pandemic, then they were colossally stupid (or diabolically clever?) to start it 500 yards from their own virus lab inside a major Chinese city.

I had always assumed that nature was as good at designing viruses as humans could be, but now I think I was wrong. Is this a bad time to mention that the smallpox genome has already been fully sequenced and published?

2021-03-07: There seems to be a growing consensus that the 1977 H1N1 Russian flu was a lab escape, because it was virtual identical to a 1950s version that had since dropped out of circulation.

Note that the U.S. government has a limited interest in pursuing the lab-leak hypothesis, as the relevant Wuhan research was funded at least indirectly by the NIH.

Note that as recently as 10 years ago, gain-of-function research arguably gave a head start on sequencing dangerous viral genomes. Now, sequencing techniques are much cheaper and much faster.

AI + Simulations Solves The Fermi Paradox and Doomsday Argument

 There have been two big new developments in the Fermi Paradox in the last few years:

• A 2018 paper showing that the Drake Equation misled us into thinking technological civilization is more likely than it is. (The mistake was shocking. Everybody was focused on the average number of civilizations that should exist across all scenarios, rather than on the number of civilizations in the median scenario. Basic probability theory!)
• A new paper two days ago by Robin Hanson arguing that a hard-steps model of development places the nearest expansionist technological civilization roughly half a billion light-years away. (See videos here and here.)

So I need to get on the record with an idea that hit me a few years back, that I haven't seen elsewhere.

If you take seriously any or all of the Doomsday Argument, Simulation Hypothesis, Modal Realism, and the Fermi Paradox, then the Copernican Principle should make you question why we seem to be such an unlikely/early draw from the space of all possible intelligent observers.

A plausible answer is that we are in a category of simulation designed to explore the rise of artifactual intelligence, and that this would be one of the most frequently-run kind of simulation in a universe dominated (as ours will likely be) by artifactual intelligence.

By "artifactual intelligence" I mean not only the traditional AI of enthusiastic singularitarians, but more importantly the emulated intelligence popularized by Robin Hanson.

This theory answers several questions:

Q: Where is everybody? A: The universe is otherwise uninhabited because alien civilizations elsewhere are irrelevant to simulating the rise of AI here.

Q: Why are we in the kind of universe that seems to allow artifactual intelligence? A: In any base reality that allows AI, the vast majority of its universe simulations would also allow AI. (If the Simulation Argument feels somewhat circular here, throw in some Modal Realism and Anthropic reasoning to see that this answer biases the distribution of possible observers towards our kind.)

Q: Of the likely quadrillions of possible observers among our descendants, why has our sample observation been drawn from so early in the distribution? A: The dawn of AI is intensely interesting to AIs with resources for running simulations.

Tyler Cowen came close to this idea in 2012 when he wrote that "the Fermi Paradox raises the likelihood we are in a simulation." But he didn't point out that simulations would be run by AIs who would specifically be interested in simulating the dawn of AI.

A related idea is Roko's Basilisk, which has been called the world's most dangerous thought experiment, and so I won't describe it here.