I found it odd that a functioning adult can be put under conservatorship in a country where people can carry guns, sometimes without permits.
(I am not taking stance on either issue; just pointing out the irony.)
2021-07-14
Conservatorship
2021-07-12
Are drugs interfering with evolution
Natural selection has been fostering the formation of genetic traits that fit the environment better as well as addressing any imbalance between the relative populations of different specifies.
The introduction of drugs has interfered these natural mechanisms, such as antibiotics that made certain bacteria stronger, and hooking people on constant medical interventions.
Our efforts so far against covid-19 continued this trend. Nobody knows what will happen in the end, but the viral strains seemed quite adaptive to all our interventions so far and there is a chance that they can continue to do so unless we fundamentally change our genetics and/or behaviors.
2021-07-11
Today’s wrongs
There were values and practices that people used to take for granted only turned out to be bad or evil later.
Examples in the specific realm of people include race (slavery, genocide), sex (women, and more recently LBGTQIA, rights), religion (more people have died in the name of God than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao combined), etc.
Which made me wonder: what are the values and practices that we take for granted (or consider to be normal) today will likely to become flipped in the future?
One immediate answer that came to my mind is the expansion of legal/ethical protection of people towards biological creatures and natural habitats, due to the increasing awareness of climate change and environment degradation.
For example, maybe one day we will have legislation that gives all (multi-cellular) animals and plants the same rights to live as humans so that killing them will be considered as murder, or dumping garbage into a river, ocean, or landfill is like littering your neighbor’s yard.
Would that make a better future world?
2021-06-12
Design has to work, art does not
Saw this interesting quote today, which made me think that “engineering has to work, science does not” and “product has to work, research does not”.
2021-01-23
2020-12-17
2020-12-15
2020-11-05
2020-10-31
Epistemic dependence
I found this article a nice read, which highlights the much faster growth of our collective knowledge (accelerated by computers and algorithms) than our individual brain capacities (constrained by biology and evolution). Each one of us knows a shrinking slice of the world, and this has profound implications on our society and civilization.
One, as mentioned in the article, is the increasing need of collaboration among researchers, especially for experimental science. (At this moment of writing, it is still feasible to single author a computer science paper.)
Even though the numbers of co-authors of my papers have not increased too much, I do find it increasingly harder to know exactly what is going on in every aspect of a project, notably detailed implementations and user studies.
Another timely topic is about politics.
The policies can become so complex that nobody really understands what is going on.
Thus, each voter knows only a tiny aspect of each political topic or candidate, and thus can form drastically different opinions from one another. This can be a scientific factor driving political polarization, even without other factors like social media. Fortunately, Monte Carlo sampling indicates that with enough (sufficiently independent) samples, the aggregate estimation can still be robust (low bias/variance).
For example, the US essentially has 100+ million votes for the presidency, which should give us confidence on the outcome, no matter how ridiculous it may look.