Book review: “Good economics for hard times”

2023-08-21 by kaylene Leave a comment

Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo won the 2019 Economics Nobel for their work with experiments such as randomized controlled trials (RCTs), so I was excited to read their well-reviewed book (also from 2019). RCTs are designed to tease apart correlation from causation, and I’ve always found it frustrating that economic policy (at least the way it’s presented by politicians) makes little reference to whether we have evidence that something actually works. To make good predictions about the effects of a particular policy, we need a causal understanding of the system we’re trying to improve, and experiments are the best tools we have to get that understanding.… Read the rest

Book review: “Architects of Intelligence”

2023-01-13 by kaylene Leave a comment

Architects of Intelligence is a series of interviews with a grab bag of prominent researchers and entrepreneurs in AI. The roster is the star attraction – most of the interviewees are pretty famous, ranging from neural network pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton to “classic” AI experts like Stuart Russell. Most of them are excellent communicators, and this shines through in their responses. Unfortunately, the quality of the questions leaves a lot to be desired. Martin Ford is a business writer, and he’s more concerned about the impact of AI on the labor market than on how it works and whether it’s safe.… Read the rest

What’s in a lifespan?

2022-12-10 by kaylene Leave a comment

Mars rovers tend to be pretty durable, lasting long beyond the mission timelines they’re designed for. As depicted in a terribly sad XKCD comic, Spirit survived for nearly seven years. Opportunity had an even more impressive lifespan of 15 years; both rovers were designed to last only three months. An explanation I’ve heard for why this happens has stuck with me: no one wants to have the piece of the rover that they were responsible for be the one that ends the mission. If you’re the engineer in charge of the battery design, and the battery fails right at the end of the mission timeline, you’ve technically done your job perfectly – but the thought that the rover could have lasted much longer if not for your broken part would still keep you up at night.… Read the rest

“Disney Dreamlight Valley” is Japanese immersion paradise

2022-10-08 by kaylene Leave a comment

The language-learning intermediate plateau is tough. You’ve grown out of beginner-friendly resources, and you see diminishing returns from traditional studying because the more advanced grammar points and vocabulary are less frequently used. But at the same time, at this level you’re finally starting to see glimpses of the payoff from all that studying: for the first time you can sort of understand your favorite shows or books or whatever else motivated you to learn the language in the first place, and when this happens it’s magic!

At this point, you want to move beyond textbooks and study apps and find materials in your target language – podcasts, books, TV, shows, video games, forums, etc – and spend as much time with them as possible.… Read the rest

Valentines

2022-02-14 by kaylene Leave a comment

Inspired by the Planet Money podcast, I’d like to celebrate Valentine’s Day by giving out some virtual valentines to things I’m especially glad are real things that exist.

Water Bears

Whether or not tardigrades, or “water bears,” can really survive quantum entanglement, they still have a lot going for them: they’re insanely tough and oddly charismatic. So I was absolutely delighted to discover a wholesome puzzle game based on rehydrating tardigrades that are in their dried-out hibernation-like “tun” state. The puzzles themselves are only fine, but Water Bears is totally worth playing just for the tardigrades. They even make cute alien-ish purring sounds.… Read the rest

A car-less person’s guide to hiking around Berkeley

2022-01-29 by kaylene Leave a comment

Last week I was happy to have the opportunity to attend a research workshop on causality, hosted by the Simons Institute here at Berkeley. One of the other attendees asked for recommendations for things to do around the East Bay. Maybe because most of my time here has been under the influence of covid (but, honestly, I’m kind of just like this), I found myself rambling about different places I like to walk or hike around. Berkeley is a hiker’s paradise: hills overlooking the bay and San Francisco (with beautiful sunsets to boot), a huge diversity of plant life, and many miles of trails, all within 1.5 hours of the UC Berkeley campus on foot.… Read the rest

Curiosity in minds and machine learners

2022-01-17 by kaylene Leave a comment

In the “classic” machine learning paradigm of supervised learning, there’s no role for curiosity. The goal of a supervised learning algorithm is simply to match a set of labels for a provided dataset as closely as possible. The task is clearly defined, and even if the algorithm was capable of wondering about the meaning of the data pouring into it, this wouldn’t help with the learning task at all.

For humans, on the other hand, curiosity seems to be an integral part of how we learn. Even before starting school, children are hard at work figuring out the world around them.… Read the rest

Life is amazing: Fish-eating bat (Myotis vivesi)

2022-01-10 by kaylene Leave a comment

Bats make up around one-fifth of all mammal species, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they’ve adapted to just about every ecological niche you could think of. Even so, I think Myotis vivesi is something special. These little guys subsist almost entirely on seafood that they catch during long fishing expeditions on the open ocean. They have huge claws to grasp fish with, and long, stable wings that allow them to glide efficiently and carry heavy prey. During the day, they roost among the rocks and cliffs of islands in the Gulf of California. Since their land home is quite dry and they spend so much time at sea, they can even get by only on seawater!… Read the rest

A common misconception about the Chinese Room Argument

2022-01-03 by kaylene Leave a comment

The “Chinese Room Argument” is one of the most famous bits of philosophy among computer scientists. Until recently, I thought the argument went something like this: Imagine a room containing a person with no Chinese language proficiency and a very sophisticated book of rules. Occasionally, someone slides a piece of paper with a sentence in Chinese written on it under the door. The room’s inhabitant (let’s call them Clerk) uses the rulebook to look up each Chinese character and pick out the appropriate characters to form a response, which they slide back under the door. Clerk has no idea what the characters or the sentences they form mean, but with a sufficiently sophisticated rulebook, it would look to outside observers like Clerk was conversant in written Chinese.… Read the rest