What’s News For 2022? 1. Firstly, after only 2 generations of breeding guppies (small fish) a scientist had increased the brain size by 9%. The big brain fish were also smarter. However, their guts were smaller and their fertility lower. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/…/scientists-breed…
2. Moreover, the whole prefrontal cortex is premotor cortex: “we mean that the prefrontal cortex consists of an action abstraction hierarchy whose core function is the potentiation and depotentiation of possible action plans at different levels of granularity.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.04651
3. Whistleblower warns baffling illness affects growing number of young adults in Canadian province: “A whistleblower in the Canadian province of New Brunswick has warned that a progressive neurological illness that has baffled experts for more than two years appears to be affecting a growing number of young people and causing swift cognitive decline among some of the afflicted.” https://www.theguardian.com/…/neurological-illness…
4. Want to Be an Actuary? Moreover, odds Are, You’ll Fail the Test — “Insurers need experts to calculate risk. Among those number-crunchers’ riskiest endeavors are the tortuous exams for credentials.” [WSJ] https://archive.is/UTmFQ [sample questions: https://archive.is/…/files/edu/edu-exam-p-sample-quest.pdf]
5. “A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment”, Askell et al 2021 {Anthropic} (scaling to 52b, moreover, larger models get friendlier faster & learn from rich human preference data) https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.00861
6. The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization prior to the standard knowledge of ancient human civilizations? https://www.cambridge.org/…/div-class-title
