Links (17)
Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting.
Other
- Dick Pick is not what you think
- An analysis of the ideology of journalists vs average ideology, by country
Philosophy
- A defense of liberal eugenics, by the philosopher with the spiciest surname, Jonathan Anomaly.
- Utilitarian supervillains. Featuring Vegetarian Thanos
Economics
- Another blowfor the short-termism hypothesis. This is the idea that markets make companies myopic, causing a fall in R&D and so on. If you remember way back when I reviewed Mazzucato's book, I already found this hypothesis to be quite dodgy. The evidence since then (so far) has come out in my favor.
- Marshall islands launch the world's first sovereign cryptocurrency
- On the generalisability of research findings from social science (podcast)
Psychology
- A comprehensive review of the literature of paranormal effects ("psi") founds evidence that it is real. Published in a top journal, but not by Daryl Bem. Like previous studies, this makes one either accept psi, or lower substantially how trustworthy conclusions from some branches of psychology are.
- Remember the theory that the human brain got bigger to deal with the complexities of social life?New paper criticises that, arguing that instead the brain got sw0le to deal with the physical, not social, environment. (Not that the social is not physical, but I mean the non-social aspect of the physical!)
- A critique of some evopsy theories is that mate choice does not happen in isolation, e.g. parents pressure their kids. But evopsy has replies forthis.
- What is reverse psychopathy?
- Autistic kids, especially girls,express a higher interest to be the opposite gender
- Does temporary poverty reduce IQ by 13 points? Probably not.
Tech
- The complexity and ingenuity behind the Stuxnet worm
- Trains in Sydney: They have really cool reversible seats
- General Fusion to demo nuclear fusion power plant in 2023.
- So I heard you like the Kullback-Leibler divergence (aka relative entropy), here's a lot of places where it appears.
Comments from WordPress
- Tl7 2018-07-02T18:23:40Z
I've read your posts on consciousness,but you haven't talked much about computational functionalism.Why the mind isn't like a computer program in your view?Where is that computationalists fail for you?
- Artir 2018-07-08T16:52:43Z
Two reasons: One is that it doesn't give an answer at all to "what is consciousness". To explain the "easy problem of consciousness", sure, a computational approach sounds fine.
Second, that it leads to odd claims of substrate independence. We would have to accept that Searle's china room or that the China Brain are conscious. These are straightforward implications of functionalism, yet as they seem more false to me than the premises one might want to put forward to defend functionalism, I choose to reject functionalism.