thinking about IQ, supersonic airliners & rational policy making
CC#80 - Status Quo of AI in China, Holidays in North Korea & Defensive Technology in Israel
Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
🧠 IQ discourse is increasingly unhinged
It seems the (scientific) discussion about IQ measurement, how these scores relate to the underlying concept we want to measure and how much of it is due to nature vs. nurture will never be fully settled. Nevertheless, I thought this article gave quite a nuanced yet comprehensive overview of the current state of the debate.
IQ research’s increasing popularity is due to its status as a battleground, in that it is often—not always, but often—used in an attempt to shift the needle politically. The supposed logic goes that if you think that humans are all just “blank slates” then you’re going to support different policies than if you think that intelligence is completely genetically determined from the moment of conception. (..)
Within the academic field of psychology, IQ remains the most popular and applicable measure of intelligence—for researchers, it is the canonical “best measure.” But the problem is that when laypeople hear it’s the “best measure” they think it therefore must be a good measure. Instead of what it really is, which is a noisy and weak signal. This makes sense within the context: psychology is a noisy and weak signal discipline with all sorts of problems around reported effect sizes. IQ being “the best” by those standards means a lot less than what outsiders might think. If medical tests, like tests for cancer, had the same reliability as IQ tests, they’d be throwing up false signals to the point of being unusable.
🇨🇳 Inside China’s AI Ecosystem : A View from Beijing [🎧]
The status quo of AI research in China has been I have had zero clue about. This is an interview with an tech worker in Beijing that helped me a lot to get at least some kind of a rough feeling of how China’s AI capabilities relate to those of the Western world and how politics and censorship play into all of this.
In this episode, we explore the Chinese AI ecosystem with 'L-squared,' an anonymous tech worker based in Beijing. We discuss major players, model quality, public engagement, regulation, and the US 'chip ban.' Discover the similarities and differences between US and Chinese AI landscapes, and gain a nuanced perspective on the current state of AI in China.
🛩️ Why Did Supersonic Airliners Fail?
The first supersonic jets werde developed ~75 years ago and large sums of money have since been invested in commercialising the technology - without success. This is an insightful write up of the history of supersonic aircraft development and the engineering challenges & political hurdles that lead to its failure.
Since the late 1950s, there have been numerous plans to build a supersonic airliner. Most of them never got past the planning stages, and only two – the Soviet Tu-144 and the Concorde – were ultimately built and entered commercial service. Neither the Tu-144 or the Concorde were a commercial success, and today there are no supersonic aircraft in commercial service. Modern airliners fly at roughly the same speed as Boeing’s first jet airliner, the 707.
Despite billions of dollars in government investment, supersonic airliners remained noisier and less economical to operate than their subsonic competitors. Even while they were in service, they were a niche offering, effectively dependent on government subsidy to survive. Supersonic transport (SST) projects have thus far the unfortunate distinction of being some of the largest commercial failures in aviation history, though a new crop of aviation startups is hoping to change this.
Food for Thought.
🔬What does reasonable / rational mean when it comes to the implementation of new policies? Under which circumstances should a policymaker decide to act according to a scientific finding?
🤖 Especially interesting in the context of AI driven task automation: can AI help us to get rid of boring work or will it ‘take the fun’ out of many creative (& mentally stimulating) occupations?
🇰🇵 A travel blogpost about.. well North Korea. A few interesting things to learn about North Korea but even more about the way the dictatorship presents itself to tourists.
Random Stuff.
🥗 Ever wondered what drives the price of you lunch salad? Interestingly, at prices often above $15 per salad & despite record sales, Sweetgreens - one of the most popular salad bars in the U.S. - still isn’t profitable.
🇮🇱 While I personally wished technologies like Israel’s iron dome weren’t necessary, I nonetheless found it interesting to get a better understanding of how Israel defended itself against Iran’s missile attacks.
🇮🇸 Apparently at least 11 people accidentally signed up to run for president of Iceland - all due to some suboptimal UX design decisions…
Personal Update.
Got to spend three days hiking in Yosemite (seriously impressive - if you ever get the chance you should go)
I also attended the annual meeting of the Society for Causal Inference in Seattle to present a poster on ongoing work regarding the influence of groups structures on social connections (this project is a seemingly never ending story - to be continued). Got some interesting insights into new methods development in econometrics / causal inf. & had a total of two people talk to me during poster session (→ note to future self: if you think you have many figures & large text on your poster, reconsider and put more figures and even larger text)
Got to reunite with a friend I met during my exchange in Sydney in 2017. We hadn’t seen each other for 7 years but somehow everything worked out well, we still got along and had a great weekend catching up and hiking around Portland.
It’s been my last weekend in Boston - time has been flying by… Managed to still see a Red Sox game which was honestly even more boring than expected. Seriously wondering why some sports become extremely popular and others don’t?
Crossing the big pond again end of the week. Off to Linz for two weeks of classes at IT:U Linz.
