Death Is Optional A Conversation: Yuval Noah Harari, Daniel Kahneman [3.4.15]

http://edge.org/conversation/yuvalnoahharari-daniel_kahneman-death-is-optional

The money quote:

KAHNEMAN: You seem to be describing this as something that is already happening. Are you referring to developments such as the plans to do away with death? That absolutely would not be a mass project. But could you elaborate on that?

.HARARI: Yes, the attitude now towards disease and old age and death is that they are basically technical problems. It is a huge revolution in human thinking. Throughout history, old age and death were always treated as metaphysical problems, as something that the gods decreed, as something fundamental to what defines humans, what defines the human condition and reality.

Even a few years ago, very few doctors or scientists would seriously say that they are trying to overcome old age and death. They would say no, I am trying to overcome this particular disease, whether it's tuberculosis or cancer or Alzheimers. Defeating disease and death, this is nonsense, this is science fiction.

But, the new attitude is to treat old age and death as technical problems, no different in essence than any other disease. It's like cancer, it's like Alzheimers, it's like tuberculosis. Maybe we still don't know all the mechanisms and all the remedies, but in principle, people always die due to technical reasons, not metaphysical reasons. In the middle ages, you had an image of how does a person die? Suddenly, the Angel of Death appears, and touches you on the shoulder and says, "Come. Your time has come." And you say, "No, no, no. Give me some more time." And Death said, "No, you have to come." And that's it, that is how you die.

We don't think like that today. People never die because the Angel of Death comes, they die because their heart stops pumping, or because an artery is clogged, or because cancerous cells are spreading in the liver or somewhere. These are all technical problems, and in essence, they should have some technical solution. And this way of thinking is now becoming very dominant in scientific circles, and also among the ultra-rich who have come to understand that, wait a minute, something is happening here. For the first time in history, if I'm rich enough, maybe I don't have to die.

KAHNEMAN: Death is optional.

HARARI: Death is optional. And if you think about it from the viewpoint of the poor, it looks terrible, because throughout history, death was the great equalizer. The big consolation of the poor throughout history was that okay, these rich people, they have it good, but they're going to die just like me. But think about the world, say, in 50 years, 100 years, where the poor people continue to die, but the rich people, in addition to all the other things they get, also get an exemption from death. That's going to bring a lot of anger.

Everything is heritable:

• "Genetic contributions to variation in general cognitive function: a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies in the CHARGE consortium (n=53949)", Davies et al 2015 (excerpts)
• "Genetic influence on family socioeconomic status and children's intelligence", Trzaskowski et al 2014 (excerpts)
• "Comparative analysis of the domestic cat genome reveals genetic signatures underlying feline biology and domestication", Montague et al 2014 (commentary; complex behavioral traits can be modified by relatively small shifts in many genes)

Politics/religion:

• "What Politicians Believe About Their Constituents: Asymmetric Misperceptions and Prospects for Constituency Control" (excerpts)
• "The Deflationist: How Paul Krugman found politics"/"Paul Krugman Is Brilliant, but Is He Meta-Rational?"
• "Father, Son and the Double Helix" (Gender politics of maternity/paternity DNA testing in India.)
• Wittgenstein's "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough"
• "North Korean border guards prefer married women?" (commentary)

Statistics/AI/meta-science:

• "50 Years of Deep Learning and Beyond: an Interview with Jürgen Schmidhuber"
• "Interpreting observational studies: why empirical calibration is needed to correct p-values", Schuemie et al 2012 (excerpts)
• "Large-Scale Simultaneous Hypothesis Testing: The Choice of a Null Hypothesis", Efron 2004

Psychology/biology:

• "The Trip Treatment: Research into psychedelics, shut down for decades, is now yielding exciting results"
• "Intelligence: Is it the epidemiologists' elusive 'fundamental cause' of social class inequalities in health?", Gottfredson 2004 (excerpts)
• "Low-dose paroxetine exposure causes lifetime declines in male mouse body weight, reproduction and competitive ability as measured by the novel organismal performance assay", Gaukler et al 2015 (excerpts)
• "There is Only Awe" (on Jaynes's Bicameral Mind Theory)
• "A Novel BHLHE41 Variant is Associated with Short Sleep and Resistance to Sleep Deprivation in Humans", Pellegrino et al 2014
• "Refugees of the Modern World: The "electrosensitive" are moving to a cellphone-free town. But is their disease real?"
• "How fast does the Grim Reaper walk? Receiver operating characteristics curve analysis in healthy men aged 70 and over"

Technology:

• "If the NSA has been hacking everything, how has nobody seen them coming?"
• "Freedom Zero" ("In the long run, the utility of all non-Free software approaches zero. All non-Free software is a dead end.")
• "The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator, Visionary and Genius"
• Project Iceworm
• "The Postmodern Ponzi Scheme: Empirical Analysis of High-Yield Investment Programs", Moore 2012 (excerpts)
• Reed Richards Is Useless

Economics:

• "Automation and Employment", Richard Posner
• "Does Affirmative Action Do What It Should?"
• "Brickyard Blues: Numbed by cold, pelted by rain, enduring smashed fingers and toes, poorly paid brick salvagers keep coming back for more"
• "How the recession turned middle-class jobs into low-wage jobs"

Philosophy:

• "What is Wrong with Our Thoughts? A Neo-Positivist Credo"
• "Scientists discover that atheists might not exist, and that’s not a joke"

subjectively, an octopus is probably something like an unruly parliament of snakes ruled by a dog.

Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links

The trustworthiness of a web page might help it rise up Google's rankings if the search giant starts to measure quality by facts, not just links.

...

Instead of counting incoming links, [Google's system for measuring the trustworthiness of a page] – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. "A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy," says the team (arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1). The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.

The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.

J. E. Farnham. Unusual methods of antigen transport. - Grana. - 1986. - 25 (1):89-92. Available online. Not a conprehensive review, just a couple case studies, but (subjectively) beautiful. I wish TV medical shows were based on this kind of stuff.

What scares the new atheists The vocal fervour of today’s missionary atheism conceals a panic that religion is not only refusing to decline – but in fact flourishing

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/03/what-scares-the-new-atheists