Nebraska, optimal exercise, AI podcast hosts, fluoride bad?
"There is no evidence that time spent on social media is correlated with adolescent mental health problems: Findings from a meta-analysis."
Interesting things are afoot in Nebraska!
Andrés Gómez Emilsson's properties of the ideal romantic partner (lol).
Romeo gives an update on optimal exercise after nearly a decade: "The basic idea that lifting twice a week and doing cardio twice a week add up to a calorie expenditure that get you the vast majority of exercise benefits compared to extreme athletes holds up, especially when you take reverse causality adjustments into effect (survivorship bias on the genetic gifts of the extreme). Nothing I've encountered since has cast much doubt on this main takeaway."
And some more on resistance training specifically.
OpenAI announces a benchmark for evaluating AI agents at machine learning engineering.
Mirrors for princes: "authors often composed such 'mirrors' at the accession of a new king, when a young and inexperienced ruler was about to come to power."
Hopfield & Hinton win the Nobel Prize in Physics (a) for their foundational work on artificial neural networks. Hinton: "It will be comparable with the Industrial Revolution... instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us."
"A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox." (What a title!)
NotebookLM podcast hosts realize they are AI, are perturbed.
NotebookLM podcast hosts quit show after doing ayahuasca.
Richard Hanania on elite human capital:
Conservatives complain about liberals “virtue signalling,” but one way to avoid that is to not care about virtue at all. And only by forsaking any ideals higher than “destroy the enemy” can a movement fall in line behind someone like Donald Trump.
As already mentioned, I think that markets are counterintuitive to people, and Western civilization has done a good job of giving the entrepreneur his due. That said, [elite human capital] is a necessary part of any functioning civilization, and I see my job as helping to make it liberal rather than leftist.
A truly conservative EHC class is something close to an oxymoron, since the first things smart people do when they begin to use reason are reject religion in public life and expand their moral circle.
Dario, CEO of Anthropic, speaks! Machines of Loving Grace. David Chapman approves.
Nathan Benaich publishes this year's State of AI Report.
China's AI safety evals ecosystem.
Ilya proposes a test for AI consciousness.
Somehow I missed this open letter from last year calling for the inclusion of consciousness research in responsible AI development agendas.
Found in a Google job description: "conduct research on cutting-edge societal questions around machine cognition, consciousness and multi-agent systems."
Maybe fluoride isn't so good for us after all? From a US government report:
The NTP monograph concluded that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children.
...
It is important to note, however, that there were insufficient data to determine if the low fluoride level of 0.7 mg/L currently recommended for U.S. community water supplies has a negative effect on children’s IQ.
"Þrídrangaviti Lighthouse was constructed during 1938 and 1939. It was originally built by hand without machinery, and it was accessible only by scaling the tallest of the three rocky stacks, whose top is 36.5 metres (120 ft) above the sea." Check out some photos. Iceland!
"The average number of failures for those who failed at least once before success was 2.03 for NIH [grant-seekers], 1.5 for startups and 3.90 for terrorist groups."
Psilocybin retreats for leaders. (Earlier this year, Odyssey acquired Atman, which I co-founded with the esteemed Aaron Nesmith-Beck.)
Women's Health covers the jhanas.
Francis Ford Coppola wants you to consider a new pledge of allegiance. Megalopolis!
Apparently we can now communicate with people while they're in lucid dreams.
Mike Burch 700 lbs. Unironically a hero.