Things I Learnt in February 2021
Good practice in inclusivity and diversity, policy ideas, and weird flavours for ice cream
“More interesting”
The Turing Way is exemplary for its success in creating a diverse and inclusive online community. I intend to write a blogpost about it soon to go into more details.
Vast majority of companies have terrible hiring procedures that will be riddled with bias. Removing bias from hiring processes is intricate and non-intuitive. For example, how do you remove the bias that is caused by the order that you read job applications. Fortunately the company Applied has developed good practice and explains it clearly.
Genetic discrimination and linguicism are two forms of discrimination I had previously not heard about.
The majority of open source communities have less diversity than workplaces in tech/IT sector. One reason is culture of ‘bropen science’, which is thoroughly explored in this article by Kirstie Whitaker and Olivia Guest.
Julia Reda argues that governments should fund (but not govern) maintenance of open-source projects. Via a talk they give which is available on YouTube.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently published a book Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights which argues that there is an increase in sexual violence in Europe and that it is linked to male Muslim immigrants. From the blurb: “She explains why so many young Muslim men who arrive in Europe engage in sexual harassment and violence, tracing the roots of sexual violence in the Muslim world from institutionalized polygamy to the lack of legal and religious protections for women. A refugee herself, Hirsi Ali is not against immigration. As a child in Somalia, she suffered female genital mutilation; as a young girl in Saudi Arabia, she was made to feel acutely aware of her own vulnerability. Immigration, she argues, requires integration and assimilation. She wants Europeans to reform their broken system—and for Americans to learn from European mistakes. If this doesn’t happen, the calls to exclude new Muslim migrants from Western countries will only grow louder.”
In the very recent past, Uzbekistan used forced labour and child labour in cotton fields, e.g. by prescribing cotton quotas to schools. Fortunately, it looks like the situation has improved considerably in past few years, after the death of Islam Karimov, the President of Uzbekistan for 25 years. From the book Why Nations Fail.
“Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.” Quote of Albert Maysles via Russell Brand.
Sam Bowman has an interesting policy suggestion: student loans for everyone. “My proposal is to eliminate the bias in favour of university education by allowing any school leaver to access a loan on the same terms as the student loan scheme. This would mean that you could borrow £27,000 or more at the age of 18 to spend on whatever you wanted, to be repaid as you started earning more as you got older on the same terms as university loans are repaid”. It will have strong levelling effects, and force universities to innovate as they will no longer have a monopoly on young adults with such loans. Via his blogpost.
Quadratic voting is an interesting suggestion, in which people can vote multiple times in a single issue, but the cost of your nth vote is proportional to n (and so the total cost of n votes is proportional to n^2, hence the name quadratic voting). The intended benefit is that your influence on a vote is now better aligned with how much you care about the issue. From this blogpost about quadratic voting.
Kevin Mitchell highlights two points that most nature-vs-nurture debates miss. One is that there is variation during embryo development process (so two people with exactly the same genes will be different before experiencing any environmental/cultural differences). Second is that nurture/society often magnifies small differences in nature/genes, contrary to common narrative where nurture is a levelling force. Via Mitchell’s talk at the Royal Society.
Driverless taxis from AutoX are now available in Shenzhen, China. Via AutoX’s YouTube channel, via TLDR.
“Less interesting”
Tom Scott used GPT-3 to come up with ideas and scripts for their YouTube channel. GPT-3 managed to come up with an idea that Tom Scott was already planning, and Tom Scott uses a script created by GPT-3 for part of the video.
Gather.town and Sococo are interesting semi-virtual experiences, that allow you to digitally simulate various social dynamics from real-life. For example, being able to leave a group of people then join a different conversation, or, to ‘bump into somebody’ on your way to a team meeting. Learnt from Spencer Greenberg and a facebook friend.
If are trying to lose weight, then eating foods that have low-calorie density will help you feel full and hence feel less hungry, while consuming few calories. And apparently out of all the fruits, strawberries are the least calorie dense! Via this video from Greg Doucette.
Nutrition labels on food packaging, at least in the USA, are legally allowed to be off by up to 20%. Via Greg Doucette.
AirProtein makes a meat-like product using microbes that convert CO2 (and other stuff) into certain amino acids. Via Bay Area-based Air Protein makes “meat” from thin air using space-age science, via TLDR Newsletter. This YouTube video cuts through a lot of the marketing speak.
Taxometrics is the study of whether something is discrete or continuous. Most common application is in mental health. For example, is depression more like the flu (either you have the virus or you do not) or more like height (everybody has height but there are extremes in the distribution). There are various clever tests you can do to help work this out, but it is all very subtle. Via AstralCodexTen.
The black metal band Mayhem are, for lack of better term, crazy and messed up. For example, one of their albums had a horrific cover image. Read the wikipedia page if you want to know how. Via Pierre Novellie on the BudPod podcast.
Salt and Straw makes unusual flavours of ice cream, e.g. bone marrow and smoked cherries and avocado toast. Via The World According to Jeff Goldblum.
Amateurs can produce some high quality content nowadays, e.g. this parady of The Wolf of Wall Street. Despite the fact I disliked the movie, it made me want to watch it again!
Modern bench-press world records are ridiculous. Definition of bench press is that the bar touches your chest, so the best way to get a world record is to learn how to arch your back so much that you lift your chest to the bar. Via Greg Doucette’s rant about it, which includes a clip of how ridiculous it looks.
A ‘comet relationship’ is, roughly speaking, when an occasional lover passes through one’s life semi-regularly, without an expectation of continuity or a romantic relationship. Via this blopost in which the author describes in detail their experience with comet relationships.
‘Secular solstice’ is a secular annual festival for non-religious people / for humanists. Based on this speech, call-and-response, and story, it sounds like an uplifting, optimistic, bonding experience.