How safe are self-driving cars?

I for one would really like to see self-driving cars become an everyday reality, as common as cars are now. It may surprise people that many such cars are already widely used in several cities as taxis. But there are key questions concerning safety and one would hope that the companies marketing these cars would be transparent about the ability of their cars to detect pedestrians and obstacles. But Sam Biddle writes that one major company is putting its cars out on the streets even though it seems to have two key vulnerabilities: an inability to see small children and large holes in the ground.
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How dangerous are deepfakes?

We have got used to the existence of ‘deepfakes’, computer generated images and videos that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing. This has caused some serious concerns about the possibility of deepfakes becoming a powerful tool for disinformation and mischief, especially in the political arena, since it is possible to have people seem to say and do things that are damaging to themselves with the viewer being none the wiser that they have been conned.

But how dangerous is this?

In the November 20, 2023 issue ofThe New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr reviews some recent books that look at the dangers posed by deepfakes and concludes that the fears may be overblown, and that even when deepfakes are explicitly political, most of it is used for parody and otherwise humorous purposes, and not meant to convince us that we are watching the real thing,

Fakery in the visual realm goes back to the earliest days of photography, where a lot of editing was done in darkroooms to get the effect sought.

In “Faking It” (2012), Mia Fineman, a photography curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, explains that early cameras had a hard time capturing landscapes—either the sky was washed out or the ground was hard to see. To compensate, photographers added clouds by hand, or they combined the sky from one negative with the land from another (which might be of a different location).
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From our vantage point, such manipulation seems audacious. Mathew Brady, the renowned Civil War photographer, inserted an extra officer into a portrait of William Tecumseh Sherman and his generals. Two haunting Civil War photos of men killed in action were, in fact, the same soldier—the photographer, Alexander Gardner, had lugged the decomposing corpse from one spot to another. Such expedients do not appear to have burdened many consciences. In 1904, the critic Sadakichi Hartmann noted that nearly every professional photographer employed the “trickeries of elimination, generalization, accentuation, or augmentation.” It wasn’t until the twentieth century that what Hartmann called “straight photography” became an ideal to strive for.

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On free will

There are few things that arouse stronger reactions in people than the claim that free will is an illusion. When I used to run workshops for graduate students on how to critically read research papers, I would hand out a paper that discussed experiments that had evidence that seemed to show support for the idea that we did not have free will. (More on the nature of this evidence later.) The students would get into this exercise with gusto, as I knew they would, poring over the paper and analyzing the data and the reasoning to try to find flaws so that they could hold on to the idea that they had free will.

Why do we cling so tenaciously to the idea that we have free will? To even discus the idea we need to be clearer about what we even mean by the term ‘free will’, since there is some ambiguity there and many different definitions floating around. The usual free will model is that ‘I’ consciously make a decision to take some action (get up, pick up a pen, say something, etc.) and then carry it out. The word ‘will’ is not that problematic. We can assign it to the decision-making process that results in the command to be executed. It is the word ‘free’ that causes problems. Free of what, exactly? A belief in ‘free’ will says that the ‘I’ is not purely biologically driven and is in control of that part of the process and could just as easily have made a different decision (keep sitting, not pick up the pen, stay silent, etc.) and carried that out.

But who is this ‘I’ that initiates the process?
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The need for immigrants

The GOP has taken a very anti-immigrant stance. According to what they say they want, the borders should be shut to any newcomers. But as can be seen from this graph that shows how the US population would change under various assumptions about the level of immigration, that would not be a good thing.

Immigration is essential to the long-term health of the country, because otherwise people 65 years or older will outnumber children under 18 by 2029, putting stress on medical care and other services.

What the xenophobes are likely most scared about is the growth of the Hispanic population, expected by 2060 to make up 26.9% of the country (currently it is 19.1%) while the non-Hispanic white population, currently making up around 58.9%, will begin to decline in 2045 and may drop to 44.9% by 2060.

One suspects that if the influx of immigrants were from (say) Scandinavian countries, they would be welcomed.

Serious injuries in rugby

I have been railing about the serious dangers to participants in American football, especially with the rise in evidence of CTE, the long-term brain injury that results from repeated collisions that can cause concussions. It is thought that the repeated accumulation of concussions, even small ones during practices, is what leads to later serious cognitive decline in players. I feel the evidence is already compelling enough that I no longer watch games and also think that schools and colleges should no longer offer this as a sports option to their students. It is an activity that should be left for adults to choose to participate in, though they should be made aware of the risks.

Americans tend to view rugby as pretty much the same as American football, except without the protective helmets and body padding and hence think that it must be much more dangerous. I used to tell them that it was not so, that there were differences that made rugby safer. One is that there is evidence that the protective gear actually gives players a false sense of safety and encourages them to do dangerous things that they would not do without it. Another is that in rugby, it is only the player who has the ball that can be tackled, thus any given player faces far fewer collisions per game. A third is that any collision that results in contact with a player’s head results in an immediate yellow card that requires the offender to be off the field for ten minutes, to sit in a chair that is quaintly called a ‘sin bin’. If, during that time, an off-field review shows no mitigating factors, it is upgraded to a red card and the player cannot return to the game.
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Materialism, scientism, and meaning

I am a materialist, in the sense that I believe the entire universe is made of matter that follows laws. I do not believe in the existence of anything supernatural or otherwise that can act in violation of the laws of science. As such, I do not think that the universe has any meaning in itself. The universe just is and any meaning that exists is what we construct. This does not bother me.

Jessica Tracy, a professor of psychology at the university of British Columbia, started out with beliefs similar to mine and was quite comfortable with them but then, at the age of forty, says that she suffered an existential crisis.

Suddenly, I was unable to stop thinking about the meaninglessness of my existence. Religious belief, the most obvious source of meaning available to many people when those big ‘Why are we here?’ questions come up, was not an option. As a scientist, I had always abided by the dictates of materialism: the central scientific doctrine holding that everything that matters is measurable. Materialism is largely responsible for the uncountable scientific advances our culture has accumulated over the past several centuries, from smartphones to vaccines. At the same time, it has placed a clear-cut kibosh on the possibility of a supernatural deity running the show.

In fact, one of science’s main draws for me was its airtight logic and appeal to rationality. I had no interest in seeking a source of meaning that requires abandoning – or at least setting aside – the critical thinking that my scientific background had instilled deep within me. And yet, as I hit midlife, I realised that science’s hardcore materialism was devastating me.

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Using large language models to understand whales

There has been a great deal of buzz about the latest developments in AI such as ChatGPT. There have been practical considerations about how dangerous it might be to develop it, but there have also been concerns that the current incarnations of AI are overblown, that they are merely large language models that use massive databases of language to seek out patterns and then use those patterns to provide merely a facsimile of intelligence, similar in principle to Siri and Alexa and to the algorithms that autocorrect words or suggest the next words in our text messages, except that these are far more sophisticated.

Leaving aside those issues, Elizabeth Kolbert writes about a very practical application of large language models, and that is to try and decipher whale communication, because they seem to use regular patterns.
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Bias in coin tosses

When we have to randomly but fairly choose between two outcomes, we instinctively reach for the coin toss. It is because it is an article of faith that the two outcomes of heads and tails are equally likely. But the two sides of the coin are not identical, and hence that slight difference may make a difference in outcome probabilities. In fact, there are four possible forms of bias that may exist. It is possible that either heads or tails may come out on top slightly more frequently or that there is a same-side bias (i.e., the side that is on top when flipped is more likely to be on top when it falls) or an opposite side bias.
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The Republican speaker fiasco continues

Yesterday the Republican members of the House of Representatives (there are 221 in all) met behind closed doors to hear from the two candidates Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan who put their names forward to replace Kevin McCarthy as speaker. In order to prevent a repeat of the public humiliation that took place in January when McCarthy had to make all manner of deals to win over votes and even then it took 15 rounds of voting, this time the party decided that they would vote behind closed doors until one candidate got at least 217 votes, the minimum necessary to get a majority in the 433-member house (two seats are vacant due to resignations).

Scalise and Jordan are supporters of all the extreme Republican positions. Both are Trump loyalists who refuse to concede that he lost the election and have refused to condemn the actions of the January 6th rioters. Scalise has even given a speech to a white nationalist neo-Nazi group and reportedly once referred to himself as “David Duke without the baggage”. In a normal party, such things would hurt a politician but in today’s Republican party it is likely seen as a plus. Meanwhile Jordan has been dogged by allegations that when he was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University, he turned a blind eye to rampant sexual abuse of about 300 wrestlers by the team doctor, claiming that he did not know what was going on.
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Meat, manliness, and the search for the perfect diet

There seems to be an endless fascination in America with diets. This is different from simply a fascination with food, where people seek new kinds of dishes. The diet craze is more about the belief that there is some kind of magic diet that will make you healthier, cure all your ailments, make you live longer, and other goals that vary from group to group. One of those other goals for a certain subset of diet enthusiasts seems to be manliness and the diets that are promoted by its advocates seem to be very much meat-focused.

Manvir Singh writes about the appeal of these diets, the latest of which is called carnivory, which emphasizes eating only meat. This one strongly associates the diet with manliness.

Pore over materials on carnivory and the overwhelming impression is that men are endangered. They were once strong. They lived with nature and had stone-hard chests. They killed or were killed. But not anymore. Now they are either scrawny or obese. They have plummeting sperm counts and middling testosterone levels. “Alexander the Great conquered the world at age 25,” posted Carnivore Aurelius (IG followers: 717K), an anonymous meme-maker who dances between satire and sincerity. “The average 25 year old today has a panic attack if they leave their vape at home. WTF happened to men?”
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Carnivory conjures up an Edenic past that contrasts with our current discontents: a mythical time when men were manly and bodies were fit and food was real and natural. Cleanse yourself of modern corruption, it urges, and the world and your body will be renewed. You will be strong. Your family will be healthy. The land will recover.

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