It turns out it is the same as “advantage”.

This is my first post trying to host a blog myself, using writefreely in my own server, and hopefully enjoying the free software and the fediverse.

Now I'd like to try some mathjax:

$$ i \hbar \frac{\partial \psi}{\partial t} = \hat{H} \psi $$

It works!

Information about how to write: https://writefreely.org/docs/main/writer

The theme I am using is “Nate Dickson Thinks”.

I'm generally very skeptic about anything that seems remotely self-help. A few exceptions to this in the past have been the books Getting Things Done and Feeling Good. This one may join the club, but I'm not sure yet.

Some of the ideas that I found there and I like: There is no single perfect life for you, there are many things that you could be, and they are all fine. Bias to action: try stuff. Prototype.

I'm not going to write much about it now, because this is mostly me trying to get back into blogging a bit when I think it makes sense (to me). But I wanted to mention those, and also another idea that I liked which is the “radical collaboration” one, that made me look at all this with my friend Jose and it is being the best thing so far. 😊

It is an amazing feat and it makes me very happy :) Here it is:

Galaxies have at their center a supermassive black hole. I'm not sure if all of them, but certainly most of them. The one in ours goes by the name of Saggitarius A*, because as seen from earth it is in the direction of the so-called Saggitarius constellation, and in that region there is something that sends a radio signal and got that A* name. Now we know what it is: a black hole with the mass of about 4 million suns, at about 30 thousand light-years from us.

Even if the black hole is huge, it is so far away that it seems like a miracle that we would be able to take an image of it. And when I say “of it”, I really mean its surroundings, since we cannot get light from inside the black hole's event horizon, its gravity being so strong that not even light can escape. On the other hand, things that surround it tend to get hot and emit a lot of radiation, specially if there is matter falling into it. And the gravity is so strong that the light bends around it and we can see things that are actually behind it.

There are so many cool things about this picture, and about this announcement, that I can't possibly give a good account of it. I'll just mention a couple more.

To get an image with such an astonishing resolution, they use a technique called very large baseline interferometry, or VLBI to friends. The idea is that, instead of looking with one single (radio)telescope, there is a cool way of combining the signal arriving at multiple ones. Rather than forming an image by combining the waves that arrive at an antenna, you can time them very precisely and correlate them with the ones from other antennas, obtaining a resolution that is basically as big as if you had a telescope the size of the distance between the telescopes being combined.

These are the locations of the telescopes combined:

Remember in the movie “Contact” when young Ellie says “I'm gonna need a bigger antenna” and the scene cuts to a shot of her next to the Arecibo telescope? Imagine how cool it'd be having a telescope THIS BIG!

This is the second black hole that posed for our earthling cameras. Our first one was:

M87, readers; readers, M87. This “Messier 87” is a black hole in another galaxy that dwarfs our own Saggitarius A*, being about a thousand times more massive. Since it is this big, and looking to it doesn't need to go through all the dust and gas that we find looking towards the center of our galaxy, it was the chosen one for the first picture. It was shown only a few years ago, in 2019. At the time of the announcement I gathered my colleagues at work, to stop working and come see it. This time, it was a friend who warned me (big thank you!).

We have not only one, but two pictures of black holes! In my lifetime. Including the one in the center of our galaxy. How freaking cool is that?

#astronomy

I thought it may be worth sharing. Here they are!

In the exercise, one tries to answer in particular the following questions:

• What work is and what it means to me
• What's work for?
• What does that mean?
• How does it relate to the individal, others, society?
• What defines good or worthwhile work?
• What does money have to do with it?
• What do experience, growth, and fulfillment have to do with it?

And finally, here is a slightly edited version of what I came up with:

We supposedly all have to work. Even though technology has made it less and less necessary for people to work, here we are, 21st century and all, and most people having to work 40ish hours/week doing whatever, to get a (occasionally) decent salary. In reality a big part of the manufacturing work that sustains our lifestyle is based on modern-slavery labor. And there are a few people that make tons of money thru it, while an immense fraction of the population live in terrible conditions.

For white people in 1st world countries, like our case, it turns out that most of the work is quite meaningless. “The smartest minds of our generation have been sucked into increasing the likelihood of you clicking”, or something like that I read and quite agree.

Certain kind of work is necessary to just live, like the work involved in producing food and distributing it, or build and keep basic infrastructures like water supply and energy, and waste disposal. A lot of work actually goes to the equivalent of breaking glasses to repair them – selling unnecessary electronic gadgets, having a lot of servants for doing simple tasks. The opportunity cost there is high.

Close to the essential kinds of works would be education and medicine. They allow for the well-being of people alive.

I suppose looking at the Maslow's pyramid of needs and seeing which kind of jobs allow them to be covered for all people, would be a good way to asses what work should be, what the working culture should strive to achieve.

The military and the banks gather a lot of resources, for doing things that are not productive and often are counterproductive. The ridiculously inflated resources that go into those make it seem like “normal work” in society is a farce.

As Kurt Vonnegut said, we are here to fart around. Maybe. In any case it certainly seems like no one is doing something anything that essential, or that one should worry for not doing so.

Bertrand Russell also had an interesting view on the matter, as he explained in “In Praise of Idleness”. Funnily enough, he did quite a lot of things, or “worked hard” as many would say.

What keeps it all going? Basically this exploitation system that is thinly hidden from our view. It seems difficult, if important, to change that.

Why work? To have a better live. Not just myself, but everyone. To change how the world is now into one that I think would be better: more fair, less hypocrite, one that makes more sense. One where people are actually free to pursue their interests in a respectful way with the others (and not one where a minority more-or-less is, and even in a disrespectful way with the rest).

I can't think of work as separate from the current unfair capitalistic system that we have. I think work can be reframed into something way more sensible if things like a universal basic income were a reality. I guess that while something like that doesn't exist, it's probably good to both try to get it and play within the system in a way that maximizes both its chances of changing into a better one and the usefulness of what you can do and the fun you can have meanwhile.

One way of making it easier for a different system to happen is to work in the dissemination of ideas that help have a better view of the future in mind to the people. Like writing a good book about how society could work differently and how to get there, at the same time as making it fun to read. Let the good memes spread.

Basic life-supporting work is not needed at this point – if it was, then the discussion would be different.

Doing research helps indirectly on the well being of everyone, especially if doing it in an open way. Science helps the truth have more weight, and having access to the truth is a basic need for a change to a better society. It's hard to change something that you don't even know exists. It's also pointless to have freedom of thought if you are not exposed to ideas so there is nothing for you to think about.

So, what's work for? There are different answers.

From a society point of view, work should aim to maximize the well-being of everyone, to have the needs of all covered and to enable people to pursue their interests. It is not how it is nowadays. Instead, work serves mainly to ensure that the status-quo is kept.

From a personal point of view, one answer is “to earn money”, to be able to survive and possibly buy a better car than your neighbor. Actually, it is more and more to be able to simply pay the debts that come form getting something as basic as an education (college debt) and a place to live (loan). And more and more, for medical insurance too. In any case, as much as I can speak ideally for myself, work is for enabling the well-being of all, producing social change and both earning enough to have a reasonable amount of freedom and having fun in the process.

Finally, what do experience, growth, and fulfillment have to do with it?

Experience is something that makes you better at whatever you are doing, and that brings both efficiency and joy. In as much as the work you are doing relates to the kind of changes you want to see, the more experience the better.

As for growth, I am not particularly interested in it. It's something I'd expect to come, but I can't quite see the point of things like me climbing the steps of positions at a company or at the university. I expect changes to arrive, in the way I think, in the way I do things, in how efficient I am, etc. But I'm not planing on any path because of the expected growth it could bring. At least, I can't think how that would be.

And fulfillment would come from seeing that the actions at work align with the things I value work for: mainly the enabling of the well-being of all. As long as I can see that it makes sense, work would be justified. There has to be an equilibrium at how much the different aspects are satisfied: I'd want both a positive impact in the world and a way to enable a good life for myself. Depending on how many of those things I can get from my job, there would be less need to get others from extra work.

Work should ultimately be an enabler for fun. Fun for me, fun for everyone.

#activism #ideas

Fasten your belts, curves ahead: the world is going to change spectacularly, and we humans as we understand ourselves today are going to become obsolete.

Singularity: A point at which a function takes an infinite value.

Technological Singularity: Point after which a technological civilization progresses with such an acceleration that it makes it impossible to predict its consequences.

The world as we know it is about to change until it looks unrecognizable. It is not only the revolution that comes with a new technology, but something much bigger: the concentration of revolutions at such a pace that we humans can't assimilate it. The technological singularity.

That's the opinion shared by many of the people working at the frontier of technology, and this is the story of its arrival.

Technological Revolutions

It is hard to imagine a time when we had no smartphones to communicate with anyone at any time, or a time when we could not connect to the internet to search for information. And yet, such past is very recent.

Technological revolutions used to come more spaced. In the 1830s, thanks to electricity, the invention of telegraphy brought a social and economic revolution, and since then 70 more years had to pass until the telephone and the radio would shake everything again. Then, only about 40 years until the arrival of TV. Computers, networks, internet, smartphones... each significant step has arrived faster.

From the giant 8” disk to the small microSD memory, 30 years have passed. The microSD contains about a million times more information than the disk.

Have you heard about Moore's Law? The number of transistors in a chip doubles in about two years (and their power with them), as observed in the 60s by Gordon Moore, cofounder of Intel. But this is just an example of many similar phenomena. Despite the fact that advances seem to arrive randomly, the general behavior looks so predictable that some people like Ray Kurzweil refer to it as a law, the law of accelerated returns. If it continues like this, there will be a day when we have revolutions at a pace as hectic as from one day to the next. A day when we won't be able to “stay updated” anymore and the life of humans, such as we know it, won't be able to continue.

Since the mathematician John von Neumann took it seriously in the 50s, a lot of people have thought about this and refer to that hypothetical moment with the name of technological singularity.

Not everyone thinks that something like this will happen, that the trends will continue to that point. But the experts that do think so expect that it will arrive around 2050, only about 30 years from now.

The Intelligence Explosion

One of the deepest advances has to do with the way we design machines more intelligent every time. Machines that deserve more and more to be described as “thinking”. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used nowadays for a multitude of complex tasks, from internet searches to autonomous driving cars. Nevertheless, it is still far off from what we consider an intelligent behavior for a human being, a general capacity for problem-solving.

But it doesn't need to be always like this. What we know as general intelligence is a goal that, despite being far away, could be reached surprisingly quickly thanks to the acceleration of technological revolutions.

When a few years ago the program AlphaGo defeated world champion Lee Sedol at the advanced game of Go, many recognized the qualitative jump given by artificial intelligence thanks to techniques like deep learning.

Once we create a general AI, it will be able to, among other things, design even better AIs. And those, themselves, others even better. A cycle of explosive augmentation of intelligence that will quickly leave us way behind: the arrival of an “artificial superintelligence”.

For many authors, including Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge, this is what characterizes the singularity. It is the moment when we go to bed being the dominant species in the planet to wake up discovering that we have become obsolete. It is the end of the human era.

Sounds dangerous? If you think so, you are not alone. People like the physicist Stephen Hawking and the entrepreneur Elon Musk had been warning for quite long that the uncontrolled advance of AI is a serious problem for the future of humanity. Musk even compares it with “summoning the devil”. And to confirm that the subject is no joke, Russian president Vladimir Putin wrote that whoever becomes leader in this area will control the world.

Beyond Humans

What will happen to us when (if) the singularity comes? The AIs could substitute us as the dominant species. But also maybe we'll integrate those AIs into ourselves, becoming beings beyond what we are today.

We could start integrating more technology into our bodies. We do it already in a small scale with prosthesis and pacemakers, and we could get to integrate electronics that in practice we'd control “with our thought”. Thanks to genetic engineering we are also more able to freely manipulate DNA, which opens more and more the door to improve ourselves at the molecular level. Finally, we can use advances in nanotechnology to integrate tiny robots that improve the functions of our organism.

This way in which humanity could become something more, enormously modifying through technology the biological beings that we are, is what is known as transhumanism.

Beyond the singularity, there may be no distinction between human and machine. Thrilling subjects become intertwined. Not only technology will be touched, but also themes like psychology or philosophy. What makes us human? Who are we really? Our answers will likely have little resemblance to the ones we have today.

The Singular Future

Predictions are hard to make (“especially about the future”, as the genius physicist Niels Bohr used to say). It is not clear what will happen with technological revolutions, and it is good to take predictions with a pinch of salt, wherever they come from. But it seems likely that the near future will hold surprises for us that will make the previous great events in the history of humanity look pale by comparison.

If we survive to the big catastrophes that threat our species, like the possibility of a nuclear war or the devastation of the planet due to global warming, we could expect a very, very special future. A point in the evolution as has never happened before in our planet. A time that many of the ones that are alive today will see. Maybe terrifying, maybe hopeful, but without any doubt exciting: the technological singularity.

#science #technology

While I was a student at Polytechnique, there was a talk by an old student who was working in the technology industry, around Silicon Valley or similar. He said he used to think that everything had been invented too, but that after graduating and starting to work “in the real world” he discovered otherwise. He saw how every day someone wakes up with a revolutionary idea!

Exciting! But I didn't hold my hopes high. I thought that by the time I would graduate, everything worth it would already have been found. Guess what? Not at all.

Related to this original idea that everything worth it is already known, I used to think that the standard teachings were the best. That what is taught at school and at the university are, with possibly minor adjustments, the best ideas that are out there to make sense of the world.

I started to suspect that it may not be the case when I learnt about Nonstandard Analysis. You learn at school how to do derivatives and integrals using an epsilon-delta kind of game to define different kind of limits, learn to ban infinitesimals and to contort your thoughts to write with some rigor (big words!) things that seem way easier to grasp in an informal way. But such is life, it seemed, and that's the best you can do. Except, it is not. Nonstandard Analysis is an approach to calculus that, in my view, makes much more sense, is close to our intuitions about infinitesimals and more straightforward. And it has been invented for many decades now, so being too new is not exactly an excuse.

A glitch in the standard curriculum? Soon after, I also discovered that Bayesian Statistics, which I had heard of before but always in a dismissing manner, beats the crap out of standard statistics. The insights and the techniques that come from the Bayesian viewpoint are way more powerful than what one sees in a standard course in statistics.

Those are fundamental fields, that so many people have thought about and that have wide applications. How can the standard be so grotesquely sub-optimal? I was shocked! Even more shocking was to realize that those are not the only fields. Not by a long shot.

Some of the other subjects I've learnt about and convinced myself that the standard ways are way inferior to them are: the Condorcet methods for voting (which show how lacking our current voting systems are, and for no good reason), Geometric Algebra instead of the standard matrix algebra, and the causal “do-calculus” statistics.

Somehow related, other important subjects were much less in the spotlight than they deserved (fortunately for many it may be less so nowadays than when I first met them), for example Loop Quantum Gravity in physics, or Universal Basic Income in society.

How many more examples are there? Why are they not better known? We are not talking about a limit to our knowledge that in the future is going by pushed by some people that will figure things out (though that too will happen). It's simpler. It's about getting those non-standard ways to do things, which already exist and are better than the standard, to be known and become the standard.

Rather than being the exception, I now suspect that for most standard ways of doing things there are already much better ways, already discovered and waiting to get attention. The world is much more exciting than living in a world where everything worth it has already been figured out — not only there are new ideas coming in all the time, but we can listen to nonstandard alternatives to gain an insight that most people are still lacking.

We as a society know only so much about certain diseases and how to treat them effectively. Like this very aggressive cancer that took his life away. We will do good to learn more and be more able to medically treat cases like this in the future, but there are other things that we can already do better. And it's how we treat the patients as human beings.

My friend was dying and he didn't know. He didn't say he didn't want to know or anything like that. And he didn't know because the doctor and the family conspired to hide it from him.

Sick.

That is so, so sick. I find it morally reprehensible and I'm shocked that we have such a low standard at the moment. Of course, they did it with the best intention, but with that best intention they behaved as monsters.

As a good friend pointed out to me, that behavior is related to our local culture. In Spain, many people believe in similarly paternalistic ideas. Many people don't, mind you, I for one.

That paternalism is tied to other similarly disgusting ideas. For example, that doctors are somewhat above the patients, that they are some kind of divinity figure. That politicians are entitled to choose for us in secrecy, because with their privileged knowledge they can see what's best for the rest of us. Or about euthanasia, that anyone would have more saying than the person that is most directly affected, cases that seem so clear-cut to me and yet only in very recent times this is starting to be mildly integrated in our culture.

I find those ideas revolting and profoundly immoral. I think those are very low ethical standards. And I wish more people will start to change them.

A friend died, as we most likely all will. But he didn't have to be lied about it, he could have been respected as a person, he could have had a saying on what to do with what was left of his life. His environment could have had the courage to accept that he was stronger than they were.

I'm enraged by the indecency of people who deny humanity to others. I hope we'll know better.

I didn't make up the numbers that appear, but I haven't included the references either. It is just a simple note with no big pretension.

You would like to go and visit your family. But we have an ongoing pandemic ☣ and there are risks. In particular, you risk infecting them.

Given that, is it worthwhile to go?

What Is Reasonable?

What is the acceptable threshold for the probability of passing the virus to your family? Is it one in a thousand? One in a million?

We could first see what we would accept as a reasonable chance. Then, make a rough estimation of what the actual probability is, and see if it is reasonable.

Current Conditions

We assume some facts. You:

• Live in Madrid and have gone out / socialized very little. We know that the incidence in Madrid is less than 1%, so $\Pr(\text{infected}) \lesssim 1 \%$.
• Have no symptoms. We know $\Pr(\text{no symptoms} \mid \text{infected}) \lesssim 50 \%$.
• Are going to get a PCR. If the result is negative, we have to consider that it has a false negative rate $= \Pr(\text{negative result} \mid \text{infected}) \lesssim 20 \%$.
• Use mask and hand sanitizer regularly, and keep interpersonal distance. In such cases $\Pr(\text{passing virus} \mid \text{infected}) \lesssim 10 \%$.

Estimating The Probability

Giving the current conditions, we have

$$ \Pr(\text{infected with no symptoms & PCR negative}) \approx I \times S \times F $$

where $I \lesssim 1 \%$ is the incidence, $S \lesssim 50 \%$ the probability of not having symptoms if infected, and $F \approx 20 \%$ the probability of a false negative in the PCR test.

Thus, the probability of passing the virus to your family is

$$ \begin{align} \Pr(\text{passing virus}) & = \Pr(\text{passing virus} \mid \text{infected})\Pr(\text{infected}) \\ & = P \times I \times S \times F \\ & \lesssim 10 \% \times 1 \% \times 50 \% \times 20 \% = 1 / 10000 \end{align} $$

That is, the probability is around one in ten thousand.

Limitations

What about the chances of you getting infected? Or of indirectly increasing the chances of infecting your family because they would go out more during your visit? And even if you don't pass the infection, what about the stress for you and your family of living under such threats? How is it going to affect all your interactions and feelings? How much frustration and worry can it all generate?

All those are important considerations too, and they go beyond the mere estimation of the probability of infecting that we did. So this is by no means a full account of all what's going on. It is just done in the spirit of helping inform the decision by providing some insight to one of the pieces.

And for fun ☺

Appendices

Notation

We write $\Pr(A)$ to represent the probability that the event $A$ has happened, and $\Pr(A \mid B)$ to represent the probability that $A$ has happened given that $B$ has happened.

Deriving Probabilities

When we want to estimate numbers such as $\Pr(\text{infected with no symptoms & PCR negative})$ we use Bayes' theorem:

$$ \Pr(A \mid B) = \frac{\Pr(B \mid A) \Pr(A)}{\Pr(B)} $$

For example, calling ☣ being infected, ⚕ being healthy, 🤒 having symptoms and ☺ having no symptoms, the probability of being infected given that we have no symptoms is

$$ \begin{align} \Pr(☣ \mid ☺) & = \frac{\Pr(☺ \mid ☣) \Pr(☣)}{\Pr(☺)} \\ & = \frac{\Pr(☺ \mid ☣) \Pr(☣)}{\Pr(☺ \mid ☣) \Pr(☣) + \Pr(☺ \mid ⚕) \Pr(⚕)} \\ & \approx \frac{\Pr(☺ \mid ☣) \Pr(☣)}{1 \times \Pr(⚕)} \\ & \approx \Pr(☺ \mid ☣) \Pr(☣) \end{align} $$

where we have used that $\Pr(☺ \mid ⚕) = 1$ and $\Pr(⚕) \approx 1 \gg \Pr(☣)$.

Finally, when we estimate the joint probability of not having symptoms (☺) and giving a negative result in the PCR, we assume they are independent:

$$ \Pr(\text{☺ & negative PCR} \mid ☣) = \Pr(☺ \mid ☣) \Pr(\text{negative PCR} \mid ☣) $$

#covid #maths

Go with a friend to a bookshop. Each one has about 30 minutes to go take books that they like, and then tell the other what they are about, why they like them, anecdotes, stories about the author, the subject, etc.

Since I thought about it while being in Paris, I call it a tour bouquin. Looking forward to trying it!

#books #ideas