Comment on Will the world's elites navigate the creation of AI just fine?

Thu, 29 May 2014 04:25:04 GMT

More (#1) from Think Like a Freak:

The rules were simple. A contestant ate as many hot dogs and buns (“HDB,” officially) as he could in 12 minutes. Any HDB or portion thereof already in the eater’s mouth when the final bell rang would count toward his total as long as he swallowed it eventually. An eater could be disqualified, however, if during the contest a significant amount of HDB that had gone into his mouth came back out—known in the sport as a “reversal of fortune.” Condiments were allowed but no serious competitor would bother. Beverages were also allowed, any kind in unlimited quantity. In 2001, when Kobi decided to enter the Coney Island contest, the record stood at a mind-boggling 25.125 HDB in 12 minutes.

...How did he do? In his very first Coney Island contest, Kobi smoked the field and set a new world record... he ate 50.

...Kobayashi had observed that most Coney Island eaters used a similar strategy, which was not really much of a strategy at all. It was essentially a sped-up version of how the average person eats a hot dog at a backyard barbecue: pick it up, cram the dog and bun into the mouth, chew from end to end, and glug some water to wash it down. Kobayashi wondered if perhaps there was a better way. Nowhere was it written, for instance, that the dog must be eaten end to end. His first experiment was simple: What would happen if he broke the dog and bun in half before eating? This, he found, afforded more options for chewing and loading, and it also let his hands do some of the work that would otherwise occupy his mouth...

Kobayashi now questioned another conventional practice: eating the dog and bun together. It wasn’t surprising that everyone did this. The dog is nested so comfortably in the bun, and when eating for pleasure, the soft blandness of the bun pairs wonderfully with the slick, seasoned meat. But Kobayashi wasn’t eating for pleasure. Chewing dog and bun together, he discovered, created a density conflict. The dog itself is a compressed tube of dense, salty meat that can practically slide down the gullet on its own. The bun, while airy and less substantial, takes up a lot of space and requires a lot of chewing. So he started removing the dog from bun. Now he could feed himself a handful of bunless dogs, broken in half, followed by a round of buns.

...As easily as he was able to swallow the hot dogs—like a trained dolphin slorping down herring at the aquarium—the bun was still a problem. (If you want to win a bar bet, challenge someone to eat two hot-dog buns in one minute without a beverage; it is nearly impossible.) So Kobayashi tried something different. As he was feeding himself the bunless, broken hot dogs with one hand, he used the other hand to dunk the bun into his water cup. Then he’d squeeze out most of the excess water and smush the bun into his mouth. This might seem counterintuitive—why put extra liquid in your stomach when you need all available space for buns and dogs?—but the bun-dunking provided a hidden benefit. Eating soggy buns meant Kobayashi grew less thirsty along the way, which meant less time wasted on drinking. He experimented with water temperature and found that warm was best, as it relaxed his chewing muscles. He also spiked the water with vegetable oil, which seemed to help swallowing.

His experimentation was endless. He videotaped his training sessions and recorded all his data in a spreadsheet, hunting for inefficiencies and lost milliseconds. He experimented with pace: Was it better to go hard the first four minutes, ease off during the middle four, and “sprint” toward the end—or maintain a steady pace throughout? (A fast start, he discovered, was best.) He found that getting a lot of sleep was especially important. So was weight training: strong muscles aided in eating and helped resist the urge to throw up. He also discovered that he could make more room in his stomach by jumping and wriggling as he ate—a strange, animalistic dance that came to be known as the Kobayashi Shake.

And:

the United Nations set up an incentive plan to compensate manufacturers for curtailing the pollutants they released into the atmosphere. The payments, in the form of carbon credits that could be sold on the open market, were indexed to the environmental harm of each pollutant.

For every ton of carbon dioxide a factory eliminated, it would receive one credit. Other pollutants were far more remunerative: methane (21 credits), nitrous oxide (310), and, near the top of the list, something called hydrofluorocarbon-23, or HFC-23. It is a “super” greenhouse gas that is a by-product in the manufacture of HCFC-22, a common refrigerant that is itself plenty bad for the environment.

The UN was hoping that factories would switch to a greener refrigerant than HCFC-22. One way to incentivize them, it reasoned, was to reward the factories handsomely for destroying their stock of its waste gas, HFC-23. So the UN offered a whopping bounty of 11,700 carbon credits for every ton of HFC-23 that was destroyed rather than released into the atmosphere.

Can you guess what happened next?

Factories around the world, especially in China and India, began to churn out extra HCFC-22 in order to generate extra HFC-23 so they could rake in the cash. As an official with the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) put it: “The evidence is overwhelming that manufacturers are creating excess HFC-23 simply to destroy it and earn carbon credits.” The average factory earned more than $20 million a year by selling carbon credits for HFC-23.

Angry and embarrassed, the UN changed the rules of the program to curb the abuse; several carbon markets banned the HFC-23 credits, making it harder for the factories to find buyers. So what will happen to all those extra tons of harmful HFC-23 that suddenly lost its value? The EIA warns that China and India may well “release vast amounts of . . . HFC-23 into the atmosphere, causing global greenhouse gas emissions to skyrocket.”

Which means the UN wound up paying polluters millions upon millions of dollars to . . . create additional pollution.

Backfiring bounties are, sadly, not as rare as one might hope. This phenomenon is sometimes called “the cobra effect.” As the story goes, a British overlord in colonial India thought there were far too many cobras in Delhi. So he offered a cash bounty for every cobra skin. The incentive worked well—so well, in fact, that it gave rise to a new industry: cobra farming. Indians began to breed, raise, and slaughter the snakes to take advantage of the bounty. Eventually the bounty was rescinded—whereupon the cobra farmers did the logical thing and set their snakes free, as toxic and unwanted as today’s HFC-23.

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