LSD microdosing did not have any effect on Gwern who run a randomized test on himself https://www.gwern.net/LSD-microdosing
Aella experimentd macrodosing, here is the story https://knowingless.com/2017/02/11/experiences-on-acid/ and here is the effects 3 yearns on https://knowingless.com/2018/01/17/permanent-mental-effects-from-lsd/
experiments that show the otherworldly character of quantum physics, someone would call it also manyworldly
Two-slit ecperiment (conigli di schroedinger ?)
Interferometro di Mach-Zehnder (beginning of infiniti Deutsch, but also https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferometro_di_Mach-Zehnder#
kw: interference experiments -> link: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05892-6 Two slits and one hell of a quantum conundrum, book by Philip Ball
Renewable energy behaves more like Telecom/Internet than Oil&Gas, economics-wise, taking into account sourcing and transportation.
Oil&Gas is about exploration, find an oil field and your paramount problem is shipping the oil to the market, provided there is a market. Imagine the Dutch who just discovered an oil field in Sumatra in 1885, with no clear market nearby, how could they feel stranded.
So you fret finding buyers, then booking rail carts to the refinery, sold what is in demand and dump the rest into streams. At early times, you could sell kerosene for light and throw away the exploding part od oil. Over time internal combustion engines are developed and most of oil used. Gas used to be vented, but a market developed there too. Today all oil is used, unless there’s a glut then it stays aboard ships around the world, which is the cheapest stockage, as we learned in 2020.
Wind&Solar, you need not discover them, there are maps and no need to dig a hole in the ground. Rather you have to study government papers to find money buried in there for sustainable projects, but that’s another story.
The story is that the economics of solar and wind is now competitive and so it should be a case of “build it and we will fill it” and the best way to promote renewables in the world would be building power lines from most productive areas to markets, according to forecast consumption.
Sun and wind is there for us, To be clear, if Europe builds direct current power lines going into sahara states, should it expects those pipes to be filled wiht renewable electricity which has found a market ? Smart money would move to north afrcia and build capacity, like in the end some smart money thought it could profit from Sumatra oil and built refineries nearby.
So the global renewable energy build-up should look very much like the global broadband buildup at the turn of the century when most undersea cable would be laid (but demand took time to materailize and the bandwidth glut le to a few telecomm companies, while the slack was picked up by internet players like google etc, dark fiber).
So my question, why are we not building those power lines ? The technolgy is called High Voltage Direct Current Transmmission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current, isn’t it ready from prime time ? Are we waiting to develop a business case for it ? Or we need first figure out how to fit it in our geopolitics ? China has already proposed those links as part of Belt and Roads so now you know. Still, if the econommics of renewable production are right, why don’t we create the market for the would be producer of the world ?
Let’s built it and they will fill it.
Le energie rinnovabili non sono come il settore Oil&Gas, somigliano piuttosto a Telecom/Internet, tutto dipende da dove si trovano.
Il petrolio lo trovi in giacimenti, quando hai il giacimento hai il problema di portarlo al compratore. Nei tempi eroici Rockfeller monopolizzò vagoni ferroviari e oleodotti in USA . Immaginatevi invece gli olandesi che nel 1885 trovano il petrolio a Sumatra e non c’è ancora un mercato in Asia, nemmeno una raffineria nè un compratore.
Invece oggi, negli anni pioneristici delle rinnovabili, tutti vogliono avere più rinnovabili e meno co2 nel proprio kix energetico, non se ne producono abbastanza, nonostante le sovvenzioni. Ma tutti dicono che ormai gli economics di solare ed olico sono giusti, sono i migliori, LCOE più basso e allora perchè non crescono più velocemente. Una modesta proposta, costruiamo una o più linee HVDC verso i paese del Sahara e vediamo se le riempono di elettricità rinnovabile
le linee HDVC sono linee a corrente continua ottimali per il trasporto su lunghe distanze oltre, gli 800 km. Se ne potrebbero stendere tante sul fondo dei mari come all’inizio del secolo, in pieno di boom internet, si stendevano migliaia di km di fibra ottica su cui far passare il traffico internet. Sulle prime, tropa fibra, molti fallimenti e fibra rimasta spenta. Ma col tempo, ce l’avete costruita e noi l’abbiamo riempita, Google et al. hanno comprato dark fiber per anni e non hanno più smesso
Possiamo ripetere l’impresa con le linee elettriche, facendo partire un boom di investimenti in rinnovabili nei paesi più dotati di sole e vento ?
the world taken as a single country would be as unequal as the most unequal country on earth, South Africa
World’s inequality was reduced in the past 30 years, for the first time since maybe the 1820’s and this was mainly due to China getting back into the world economy. No longer, right now China is more unequal than the average, so its growth will add inequality
Will Africa grow and reduce world inequality? Very likely no, african countries need growing on avergae 7-8% a year and historically they have not recorded that steady growth ever. And also India needs growing and pulling its population out of poverty, will it succed?
So, unless advqned countries takes a decisive action within, world inequality will soon stop oing down and will start growing again
Thanks Branko Milanovic for that clear view http://glineq.blogspot.com/2021/05/notes-on-global-income-inequality-non.html
and 2 charts from here https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1211317792361926658
Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement from Joel Spolsky essay about tech companies keeping control of chocke point in the tech stack, and commoditize the djacent stacks as a way of preempting competition
rekated, I think, the law of attractive profits by Clayton Christensen that states “When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.” HBR breaktru ideas of 2004 https://hbr.org/2004/02/breakthrough-ideas-for-2004
Chris Dixon on complements https://cdixon.org/2009/09/10/non-linearity-of-technology-adoption
christensen and spolsky really say the same thing but chosse to show the arrow of causation in different directions, C is worried how the managers of an incumbent company, the sort of company that does portfolio decisions within an estabilished business, can chase profits in other segment of the value chain once they are commoditizied. SPolsky speaks to startups which have doggedly built a business in one segment and need preventing competition, in an environent marked by disruption
Testing The Natural Abstraction Hypothesis: Project Intro
“Our physical world abstracts well: for most systems, the information relevant “far away” from the system (in various senses) is much lower-dimensional than the system itself.”
Reminds me of Hofstadter example with the sort of billiard balls, how does he call it?
Detusch rather talks of emergent phenomenon, we can usefully do thermodynamic calculations on a pot of boiling water but if we wnated to he reductionists we should do impossible calculations on the dynamics of bubbles and the result would be the samme.
In the lesswrong post the hypothesis is developed in relation to AI and its “alignment”, I still do not grasp the full extent of this concept, mostly theoretical and detached from reality
“the natural abstraction hypothesis would dramatically simplify AI and AI alignment in particular. It would mean that a wide variety of cognitive architectures will reliably learn approximately-the-same concepts as humans use, and that these concepts can be precisely and unambiguously specified”
“If true, the natural abstraction hypothesis provides a framework for translating between high-level human concepts, low-level physical systems, and high-level concepts used by non-human systems.”
a neologism, but it was, in here needed https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture
originally here https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/04/respectability-cascades/
an horse chestnut is genetically closer to broccoli than to a sweet chestnut
There is no such a thing as a tree, phylogenetically like there is carcinization for sea arthropods tending to become crabs, so there is dendronization, tweak the expression of a couple of genes, heat the right and a green plant develop wood
and there’s no such a thing as wood, althought evident is it, from the point of view of evolution
apparently there is a classic Scott Alexander I should read here THE CATEGORIES WERE MADE FOR MAN, NOT MAN FOR THE CATEGORIES
The incipt does indeed smell of classic “The argument goes like this. Jonah got swallowed by a whale. But the Bible says Jonah got swallowed by a big fish. So the Bible seems to think whales are just big fish. Therefore the Bible is fallible. Therefore, the Bible was not written by God.”
https://www.the-scientist.com/features/can-single-cells-learn-68694
“To Gelber, the experiments demonstrated that Paramecium was learning to associate the wire with food, a conclusion that challenged scientists’ belief that only highly evolved, multicellular animals with central nervous systems were capable of such behavio. More fundamentally, her results suggested that at least some of the biological machinery needed for learning and other cognitive processes might exist not in the connections among neurons in an animal brain, but within individual cells themselvesr”
Previously on this site “Neurons with memory”https://1500poundgoat.com/2021/04/21/neurons-with-memory/”
I see a pattern here, at least MR Tyler Cowen getting interested in alternative explanations to neurons connecting, I found both links on his website
