University of Maryland psychiatrist Polymnia Georgiou and colleagues accidentally came across an unexpected example of researchers unwittingly skewing a study’s results when their laboratory mice’s reactions to ketamine differed depending on the sex of the humans who administered the drug.
To check it wasn’t just a weird fluke, they did a blinded, randomized trial with an even mix of male and female experimenters. The mice indeed had a greater antidepressant response to ketamine when handled by male humans.
Obviously, the presence of male humans does not somehow change the properties of ketamine, so the researchers probed deeper to confirm the exact mechanism.
Dr. Joscha Bach is VP of Research at AI Foundation and Author of Principles of Synthetic Intelligence, focused on how our minds work, and how to build machines that can perceive, think, and learn.
SHOW NOTES 📝 0:00 Open. 0:17 Hello & welcome. 0:37 Dr. Joscha Bach bio and introduction. 0:56 “It’s an insane world; an amazing time to be alive“ 3:46 Conversation on the S-curve; current instability based on not handling aftermath of collapse of Industrial Revolution society with the advent of the Internet. 8:22 “Either kids or long-term civilization”; carbon sequestration involves not burning any carbon at all. 10:08 Organizing principles conflict with systems bent on infinite growth. 14:30 More on Dr. Bach at Cambridge; entrepreneurial journey leads to MIT and then AI Foundation. 16:23 Relationship between the physical world and our minds; pattern generation; types of computers. 18:10 Mathematics vs. Computation. 19:20 Accidental question-Dr. Bach’s thoughts on psychedelics. 20:27 Turing, “something is true if you can prove it“ 23:14 Quantum computing discussion; Minecraft CPU example; “is our universe efficiently implemented or inefficiently implemented?“ 23:50 Relationship between mind and universe; observational interface. 27:28 Materialism and idealism may complement each other. 29:08 Dream space neural architecture; “you and me are characters in a multimedia novel being authored by the brain”; the collective is part of your dream. 31:51 Necessity of ability to change the way you perceive vs. changing a physical world; perception upgrade is really a will or desire upgrade. 34:12 What is a model? Perspectives of variables and their relationship; probabilities. 35:58 Model convergence to truth aided by probabilities; motivations guide preferences. 38:00 People are born with ideas and then acquire preferences; motivation is how you regulate and push against reality; feedback loop from brain regulating body, awareness and unawareness of loops. 41:28 Needs don’t form a hierarchy; they coexist and compete. 43:00 “the shape of your soul is the hierarchy of your purposes“ 45:26 Neurons; dopamine and other brain chemicals speak many languages; “neurons get fed if you regulate what you want to regulate“ 48:50 Social interaction and brain chemistry; neurons work through pattern recognition, then patterns in the patterns. 51:43 Auditory (and all) senses build layers until we get a unified model of the world/universe. 53:24 Question-who’s in charge of the super-intelligence; single mind; which kind of system; sane/insane implementation. 59:50 Precepts; spatial intelligence; pattern to perception to worldview; intentional self. 1:02:36 Self controls simulations in the brain; “only a simulation can be conscious“ 1:05:05 “The reason why you perceive the world as meaningful is because it’s generated in your mind to model your meaning.“ 1:07:10 Everything you can perceive is generated by your mind; model of architecture. 1:11:45 Use of the DLPFC (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex); “hippocampus has a script”; neurons individually not that important, somewhat interchangeable, just a signal processor. 1:14:52 “Are we individually intelligent?” Not generally so; generations of specialized people talked to each other; rebuilding efforts usually get foundations wrong; “it’s hard to wake a sleeping person; it’s impossible to wake a person pretending to sleep“ 1:17:52 “The family of good people” is a human condition; morals need to guide our decisions but not our model-making. 1:19:00 Human-centric social media; scientists and philosophers are mostly confused people, humble but without answers; Dunning-Kruger Effect. 1:20:40 More on social media; understanding the nature of reality; “which way can I be useful to other people?”; why are we drawn to things that don’t have utility, like politics on current social media. 1:24:20 Social media done right are individual thoughts in the same mind, “Gaia doesn’t exist but it would be very useful to have one”; endgame of social media is a global brain. 1:26:15 Current society optimized for short games; “tumors“ 1:29:02 Lebowski Theorem — “No super-intelligent system is going to do anything that is harder than hacking its own reward function“ 1:31:12 “Imagine you build an AI that is way smarter, why SHOULD it serve us?“ 1:32:20 “Maybe our motivational function is wrapped up in a big ball of stupid so we don’t debug it;” opting out of reality; how can we balance super-intelligence, will, and evolution or conditions of existence. 1:34:08 Philosophical remarks; reiteration that things are just happening, making it very difficult to predict outcomes; there isn’t a running simulation of a better society so it’s difficult to make changes. 1:36:15 Life is about cells, and cells are very rare. 1:38:08 Would have to be a larger, more imperceptible pattern around us and how would we know; Minecraft example.
Multiple gene editing of soybean can improve photosynthesis and boost crop yields by 20%, according to a study by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
While Hubble can spot Jupiter’s auroras when capturing ultraviolet light, Webb’s infrared image shows the auroras in greater detail.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” O’Donoghue said, adding, “I can’t quite believe we’ve got that shot from such a vast distance. It really speaks to how effective JWST is at picking up faint light.”
Webb’s new images of Jupiter show two of the planet’s moons, Amalthea and Adrastea, the smaller of the two, measures just 12 miles across, according to NASA. In comparison, Hubble’s image of Jupiter shows the planet’s ocean-filled moon, Europa, which measures 1,940 miles across.
Earlier this year, researchers revealed the discovery of an extraordinarily compact “one-of-a-kind” system of three stars. A partnership between two young researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen is currently focusing on how this unusual combination of a binary set of stars and a revolving larger star can form.
The star system is made up of a binary set of stars, two stars that orbit each other, and one more massive star that orbits the binary.
“As far as we know, it is the first of its kind ever detected”, Alejandro Vigna-Gomez says. “We know of many tertiary star systems (three star systems), but they are typically significantly less massive. The massive stars in this triple are very close together – it is a compact system. The orbital period of the binary (~1 d) is the same as that of the rotation of Earth (1 day). The combined mass of the two of them is twelve times the mass of our Sun – so rather big stars. The tertiary star is approximately 16 times the mass of our Sun, so even bigger! The inner orbit is circular in shape with close to six revolutions of the tertiary star around the binary per year. Pretty fast, when you consider the size of them – unsurprisingly, the system is very luminous, so at first they were detected as a stellar binary”.
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In this video I explain how the argument that the universe is finetuned for life works, why it’s wrong, how the mistake happens, and what that means for the existence of god and the multiverse.
