Those of you who are interested in regenerative medicine probably already know the SENS Foundation. As always, their annual report (pdf) gives a good overview of the progress made during the past year. If you are new to these ideas, the book Ending Aging by Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a good place to start. This speech also gives a good overview, though it doesn’t go into as much detail as the book.

Also interesting to note: George Church, who I wrote about in the post right below this one, has joined the SENS Foundation’s research advisory board.

Technology Review has a good interview with the Harvard Geneticist.

Dr. Church also has a new book that just came out: Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves.

By the way, sorry for posting mostly quick links here lately. I originally told myself that I would try to avoid doing that on this blog and instead focus on longer ruminations, but I’ve been working on too many other projects to do that. I suppose that quick links are better than nothing as long as they are good ones, so I hope you enjoy the ones I’ve shared. I’m sure at some point I’ll find the energy to work on more original content. In any case, thanks for reading!

Update (August 2nd, 2012): Here’s another interview with Elon Musk, this time by the LA Times, about his goals for SpaceX.

Update (August 8, 2012): Short video feature about Musk, SpaceX, and sending humans to Mars.

Update (September 8, 2012): Here’s a great interview with Elon Musk from Autoblog.

Update (September 10, 2012): Interview with Elon Musk by Kevin Rose (now at Google Ventures).

Update (November 22, 2012): Elon Musk speech and Q&A at the University of Oxford.

• Errors vs. Bugs and the End of Stupidity

This technology for grid-scale batteries made with liquid metals and molten salts is making me more excited than anything in a while. Very promising. Check out the video by following the link below.

TED Talk: Donald Sadoway on Liquid Metal Batteries

The officia website of Sadoway’s spinoff company can be found here: LMBC Corporation.

Check it out:

SpaceX Feature on 60 Minutes (Video)

May 25th Update: A new milestone for SpaceX and space exploration, SpaceX’s Dragon capsule has now docked with the International Space Station (ISS).

Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, the founder and chief science officer of the SENS Foundation, recently gave a talk at the MIT Club of Northern California.

I find his research on the diseases of aging fascinating, and his foundation is the main charity that I support because it has the best risk/reward ratio that I could find (in other words, each dollar spent there has a higher chance of making the world a much better place than a dollar spent elsewhere).

Here’s the video of the presentation:

• Part 1
• Part 2

If after that you want more, I recommend the book that he wrote for a mainstream book and the medical journal that he edits, Rejuvenation Research.

Yesterday, Mélanie and I spent a few hours at Ottawa’s Museum of Nature. We saw exhibitions on mammals, fresh water animals (check out this video of a blue whale skeleton being put together), and dinosaurs.

While standing next to a huge fossilized dinosaur skeleton, I was struck by a realization that somehow had escaped me thus far. I know a fair bit about dinosaurs, having been fascinated by them as a young boy like many others of my generation, but all that knowledge has always been very abstract. “X million years ago, Y tons, Z meters high, etc.” I can’t even blame it on not having seen the fossils in person, because I had been at that very museum at least 2-3 times before.

But yesterday, I stood there and took the time to think about what this mountain of bones represented: “These fossilized bones were part of a living creature a 100 million years ago, they were part of a unique individual, and it moved around, reacted to its environment, did its best to stay alive. There were many like it, but this one made it to this museum somehow and I’m looking at it.” It all seemed a lot more real, what could be a called a “gut level” understanding that I didn’t quite have before. (“feeling these old bones in my bones”)

What I’m trying to keep from this experience is not so much about dinosaurs per se but rather about taking the time to get that visceral understanding of things that I know in the abstract. I already try to do it, but I think I could do better, so I’m going to try to develop the habit of taking the time to reflect more on things that I can only know indirectly (via old bones, war stories in a newspaper, photos from a space telescope, etc).

Photo: Durocher1766, Flickr, Creative Commons.

Let’s say you have a very long piece of string, and it has absolutely no elasticity, it’s perfectly straight, and it’s totally frictionless. The string is floating out in the void of space and it takes light 1 year to travel from one end of the string to the other.

What if you and I are at each end of this string, and I pull on it (or I have an incredibly powerful machine do it for me). How fast would you feel the pull?

Intuitively, it seems like it would be instantaneous, but that can’t be right because it would be traveling faster than light. The answer is probably that it would depend on the mass of the string and the amount of energy in the pull, but that whatever those variables are, it would take at least 1 year, and that while that isn’t intuitive, our brains haven’t evolved to intuitively think about this kind of situation. But what if the string is massless? But then, if I add this premise, is it even a real question for physics anymore? Anyway, I thought it was a fun thought experiment.

A few months ago, I started suffering from RSI, no doubt caused by spending 60+ hours/week sitting on front of the computer for many years. I’ve done my best to reduce the number of time that I spend typing and using the mouse each day, but because that’s my day job, it mostly meant cutting on my evening and weekend side projects like this blog.

Based on information I found online and in books (this one in particular), I’ve started doing exercises and stretches, I made my desk more ergonomic and got a good chair, and I’m seeing a physical therapist next week. I’m confident I can heal, but this is something that takes a while, so I might have to stay away from this blog for a little longer.

I have no plans to drop it completely, though. This is just a temporary hiatus. I hope you’ll consider hitting the RSS button and subscribing so you automatically get notified when I’m back. Cheers, and read up on ergonomics and RSI before it’s too late. As they say, an ounce of prevention…

By definition, all but the last doomsday prediction is false. Yet it does not follow, as many seem to think, that all doomsday predictions must be false; what follow is only that all such predictions but one are false.

-Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, p. 13.

For more on existential risks, check out Nick Bostrom’s paper explaining what they are.

A cubic meter of the average crust of the Earth has about 12 grams of Thorium in it, and that would be enough to power your life for about 10 to 15 years. At Western standards of living.

Very intriguing stuff. I highly recommend watching the whole presentation (1 hour and 22 minutes long, so make sure you have the time or save it for later):

• Video: Energy From Thorium: A Nuclear Waste Burning Liquid Salt Thorium Reactor

Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.

–Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline (2009), p. 216

Switching Costs and Incentives
Google makes most of its money from ads (over 95% of revenue), and a very large portion of these appear on search results.

If Google wants to keep making money, it must encourage people to keep using its site for search. But the switching costs for search engines are very low (change a browser setting and/or a bookmark and that’s it). Right now, the average internet user probably doesn’t know how to do that, but that’s mostly because there hasn’t been a need for it so far; if Google was to significantly fall behind the competition or anger its users (and then turn a deaf ear to the complaints), how to switch to a different search engine would become common knowledge in the same way that people figured out how to switch from Altavista and Lycos a few years ago.

So Google’s incentives are aligned in such a way that it has to keep making products that are liked and very functional, and it must avoid at all cost giving its users reasons to switch. They also benefit from a vibrant web ecosystem with users constantly going from one site to the another (not staying on Facebook all day) and looking for new things.

Things are different at Microsoft. It makes most of its money from the Windows operating systems and the Office suite of applications. With these, switching costs are significantly higher than with search for the average user. We’re not talking about a few simple clicks anymore. This is scary enough that most people will endure a lot of pain and put up with a lot of inconveniences before they’ll consider dropping Office or Windows (especially the latter).

This creates different incentives. Microsoft benefits from increasing switching costs further, which is probably why they’ve historically tried to keep the interoperability of their products with competitors to a minimum (proprietary file formats in Word, for example).

They also benefit a lot less from making their products bug-free, intuitive, and aesthetically pleasing than an underdog like Apple, for example. If Windows is buggy, most people will keep using anyway because of the high switching costs, but if OS X was as ugly and buggy as Windows, nobody would pick Macs instead of Windows PCs. Of course, this is not absolute; if Microsoft does worse than usual (Vista) and the competition improves significantly (OS X Tiger), the switching cost calculus can become tempting to marginal users, but even that isn’t enough to convince most people.

Facebook is in a position a bit similar to Microsoft these days. Once you are signed up and have created a network of friends and family, the switching costs are very high. Most people don’t want to be members of too many social networking sites (Twitter succeeded because it was different enough to be complementary), and small competitors don’t benefit from the networking effect.

This is why Facebook is such a walled-garden, and it explains why Facebook is trying to make its users as dependent on it as possible (Facebook Connect for other sites, a soon-to-be-launched Facebook email to further increase switching costs, Instant Messaging features to replace other IM clients, etc).

Facebook is still a young company, they’re still growing and still have a bit of startup culture in them. But I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years they started to act like Microsoft. There won’t be much ‘stick’ left to punish them when they don’t give a good user experience to their customers (what are users going to do, leave Facebook and go to a social network where they don’t know anyone?), so chances are they’ll focus on keeping things “just okay” and making it harder to switch.

In Conclusion
Obviously things like GMail, Google Maps, Google News, Google Buzz, etc, are ways to keep you close to the Google Search page. But they are not integrated in that product the way that the .doc format is integrated with Microsoft Word. You could easily have Bing as your default search engine but have a direct bookmark to GMail (or POP3/IMAP).

This is why I’m not expecting Google to degenerate too much (at least as long as switching costs and incentives are the way they are). They will make mistakes, and when an 800lbs gorilla slips, it can cause a lot of damage (Google Buzz’s initial privacy problems are a good example of this). But I’m not expecting them to rest on their laurels or stop listening to their customers as long as search – a product with very low switching-costs – is their main business.

But as always, I might be wrong about this, so if you think there’s something important I’m overlooking, let me know in the comments.

Update: Case in point, while I was writing this Google announced (only 4 days after Buzz was launched) that it had made a few major modifications to the way Buzz works because of the feedback it received. The problem should never have happened in the first place, but they’re certainly being more responsive about things that anger readers than Microsoft or Facebook.

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A man may say he would not pay more than $5 for a coffee mug. But if he is told that the mug is his, and asked immediately afterwards how much he would be willing to sell it for, he typically holds out for more. Possession, it appears, lends things an added allure. [...]

At the beginning of the week, some groups of workers were told that they would receive a bonus of 80 yuan ($12) at the end of the week if they met a given production target. Other groups were told that they had “provisionally” been awarded the same bonus, also due at the end of the week, but that they would “lose” it if their productivity fell short of the same threshold.

Objectively these are two ways of describing the same scheme. But under a theory of loss aversion, the second way of presenting the bonus should work better. Workers would think of the provisional bonus as theirs, and work harder to prevent it from being taken away.

This is just what the economists found. The fear of loss was a better motivator than the prospect of gain (which worked too, but less well). And the difference persisted over time: the results were not simply a consequence of workers’ misunderstanding of the system. (source)

The fact that it kept working over time, even if the workers understood what was being done, shows how powerful these biases are. The reason for that is almost certainly because they helped our ancestors survive and reproduce; in a very dangerous environment, it is better to be risk-averse and live to see another day than to take a chance and die, and over-valuing what you already have probably made sense in an environment where acquiring desirable things was much harder than it is now.

For more on these biases, see:

• Endowment effect at Wikipedia
• Loss aversion at Wikipedia
• Experiencing The Endowment Effect at Overcoming Bias

See also: Rationality Resources

Simon Anholt, an analyst, heroically estimates the value of the “Obama effect” on America’s global brand at $2.1 trillion. Each year, Mr Anholt commissions a poll of 20,000-40,000 people to find out how much they admire various countries’ people, culture, exports, governance, human-rights record and so on. He finds that admiration in one area often translates (illogically) into admiration in others. When George Bush was president, foreigners expressed less positive views of American goods, services and even the landscape. Under Mr Obama, he finds, America is once again the most admired country in the world (having slipped to seventh place in 2008). Using the same tools that consultants use to value brands such as Coca-Cola or Sony, he guesses that the value of “Brand America” has risen from $9.7 trillion to $11.8 trillion. Writing in Foreign Policy magazine, Mr Anholt calls this “a pretty good first year”. (source)

This is a good example of a cognitive bias called the Halo Effect. It can apply to individuals, groups, things, and even abstract concepts like brands or ideologies.

For more on the Halo Effect, see:

• Halo Effect at Wikipedia
• Halo Effect at Less Wrong

See also: Rationality Resources

• Sugar: The Bitter Truth

For more on how the Western Diet (high in refined carbohydrates) is causing metabolic syndrome, I also recommend “Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health” by Gary Taubes.

Some were against, but a majority of people seemed to think it was a good idea, and Eliezer agreed to participate (he will film his answers to the questions that have received the higher number of votes), so I went ahead and created a thread where people can ask their questions:

• Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky: Ask Your Questions

If you have a question for Eliezer, all you need is a Less Wrong account. The rules are simple.

There’s a danger that lurks for those of us who are curious about lots of things and love learning, and it is that our “learning efforts” (of which there is a scarce supply) end up being allocated by external factors rather than by internal priorities. These outside forces bring us somewhere – and it might seem like a good place to be – but if we had initially asked ourselves where we wanted to go, it probably would’ve been somewhere else.

That might not be very clear, so allow me to demonstrate what I mean with three real-world examples:

Whole Brain Emulation
Earlier this year, during a trip to Detroit, I read a paper by Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom titled: Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap.

Going in, I knew that my goal was only to get a good idea of what was currently possible and where things were headed with whole brain emulation (WBE). I didn’t understand most of the paper (a lot of it is very technical), but the ~10-15% that made sense to me was enough to reach my goal, so I accepted that a lot of it was over my head.

To get to a level of comprehension significantly higher than the one I had would’ve required a massive amount of efforts, and that would have been disproportionate in relation to my target (my goal was not to become a brain scientist, but rather to understand the challenges and opportunities of WBE specifically).

Causality
Not long ago, I got Judea Pearl’s Causality (a book I’ve been meaning to read for years).

As he recommends in the preface, I started by reading the epilogue, which is a speech that he gave in 1996. That was fine. Then I moved on to the first chapter and found I was having difficulty with most of the math because I wasn’t familiar enough with probability theory.

Since my goal is to truly understand the work (as part of my larger goal of better understanding the math behind probability theory and Bayesian statistics), I decided that I had to take a step back to fill in holes in my knowledge.

I put Causality on the back-burner and dived into a statistics textbook* (Les Statistiques: Une Approche Nouvelle, 2e édition. Started with chapter 5, on probability theory). I really want to understand this stuff – not just have an idea of what’s going on – so I need to take the long way. This extra effort wouldn’t have been fulfilling with the Sanberg/Bostrom paper, but it is in this case. Different goals.

News
As mentioned in Discipline for my Information Diet, I have a tendency to do what’s easy for me – like water flowing through the path of least resistance – and spend a lot of my learning time on news & politics. It’s so much easier to just pick up a periodical than to dive into a textbook or technical paper.

The Economist arrives every week, it’s well-written, contains lots of interesting facts, and best of all, it’s predictable. Much easier to go to that familiar, comfortable place than to face the unknown.

The problem is that most of the newsy stuff doesn’t satiate. It doesn’t give the same satisfaction as the things that are higher on my priority list. So I have to make a conscious effort to go to news-type stuff last, when I’m done with the other things.

So far I’ve been successful in removing most newsy stuff from my routine (periodicals, blogs, etc) except The Economist. It’s like mental candy. Very addictive, but lots of empty calories.

Conclusion
This might all seem very obvious, but I think we too often (myself included) don’t have a clear idea of what we’re trying to achieve when we’re learning something, so we give up when we should be putting extra effort (and never reach the promised land), or we waste mental cycles on details that don’t really matter to us (they don’t feed our curiosity or have practical uses).

To avoid this trap, we need to keep in sight why we’re learning something. Otherwise, we risk allocating efforts based on secondary factors like “how motivated you happen to feel that day” or “how easy it is to find sources” rather than the degree of our desire to learn something.

See also:

• Discipline for my Information Diet
• Curiosity: Good Friend, Bad Master

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—
*If anyone has a really good statistics textbook to recommend, especially if it covers the Bayesian approach well, please let me know.

We’re Inconsistent About How Much Weight We Attribute to Genes
I think our intuition might be miscalibrated when it comes to evaluating how much a person’s genes impact how they turn out physically (which isn’t surprising). What’s a bit strange is that we seem to be closer to the truth when it comes to twins.

Nobody’s surprised when identical twins turn out to have very similar bodies (weight, muscle mass, etc), even into adulthood.

But when it comes to non-twins, people seem to think that “making the right choices” and “willpower” are primary factors in how human bodies turn out, and that we can assign a good amount of personal credit or blame to individuals for good and bad outcomes.

There is a disconnect between these two visions, and I think that it’s the latter that needs to be updated.

After all, even if we put aside the direct ways in which our genes build our bodies (encoding how our tissues grow) and instead look at our abilities to “make the right choices” and exert “willpower”, we find that those are also greatly determined by genetic factors. Identical twins probably turn out very similar in good part because they have almost identical amounts of those qualities of mind.

Wrong by Degrees
This doesn’t mean that all is pre-determined and that if we all stop trying we’ll turn out the same we would have otherwise, but rather that we are playing within certain parameters, and that the part we control is probably smaller than most people think (not non-existent — we still deserve some credit — just more modest).

To be clear, I’m not saying the situation was white and we thought it was black, or even that it’s a black & white thing, but rather that most people’s intuition might be the wrong shade of gray. Otherwise, I would think there would be a bigger variation between identical twins, but they spend their lives making different choices yet most stay very similar to each other (as far as I know — if you know of a study on this, please send it my way).

This article has been cross-posted on LessWrong. There’s more discussion of it in the comments over there.

The excerpt above is from page 185 of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt.

It comes at the end of a chapter on risk perception, ie. roads that seem safer can be more dangerous than we think because they encourage us to drive more dangerously, while roads that seem dangerous can actually be safer than we think since they make us slow down and pay more attention. The dangerous-looking roads might still be more dangerous than the safe-looking roads in the absolute, but both of them might not be respectively as safe or dangerous as drivers tend to think…

Anyway, what annoyed me is the last sentence of the excerpt. I think it’s a good real-world example of misleading statistics.

While it might be literally true that most crashes “happen on dry road, on clear, sunny days, to sober drivers” (I wouldn’t swear to it, I haven’t seen the stats), it doesn’t take into account the difference in sample sizes. In most places, the roads are dry more often than not, and most days are sunny, and most drivers are sober.

These conditions might produce a higher total number of crashes, but what really matters is how many crashes they produce per driver. If you look at it this way, it’s probably pretty obvious that wet roads, at night, with drunk drivers cause a lot more crashes.

See also: Rationality Articles

I Can’t See You, But I Know You’re There
I don’t think I spent a day of my life without thinking about invisible things. Of course I’m not talking about truly invisible things as in supernatural thing, but rather things that are invisible to the naked eye but that we know are there because we can see or measure them with instruments.

Every single day I randomly think about things like allergens (the photo above is of pollen), DNA, cells, viruses, atoms in various conformations (proteins, lipids, hydrocarbon chains, neurotransmitters, etc) and of various kinds, radio waves, photons and electrical flows (from how much energy is used when I flip various switches to the incredibly fast pulses that encode everything in my computer and over my broadband connection). I also often think about the large invisible things, like stars, galaxies, nebulas, black holes, and the vastness of space in between it all.

Our brain has a hard time with these things because, as Richard Dawkins would say, it has evolved in “middle world” and is simply not equipped to grasp these things properly at scale.

What’s Your Relationship With the Unseen?
I know that it’s probably not that way for everybody, and it makes me wonder how it changes my perception of the world.

How do you see the world? Do you naturally think about invisible stuff, or do you rarely consider these things? Please let me know in the comments below.

Analyzing and Comparing Books
I have just noticed that Amazon has a “Text Stats” section on its book pages. I’m not sure how long it has been there, but it’s very interesting.

• The Fog Index was developed by Robert Gunning. It indicates the number of years of formal education required to read and understand a passage of text.
• The Flesch Index, developed in 1940 by Dr. Rudolph Flesch, is another indicator of reading ease. The score returned is based on a 100 point scale, with 100 being easiest to read. Scores between 90 and 100 are appropriate for 5th and 6th graders, while a college degree is considered necessary to understand text with a score between 0 and 30.
• The Flesch-Kincaid Index is a refinement to the Flesch Index that tries to relate the score to a U.S. grade level. For example, text with a Flesch-Kincaid score of 10.1 would be considered suitable for someone with a 10th grade or higher reading level.

Information Technology & Book Writing
I wonder how long before publishers and writers start to use this data to better zero in on certain targets in the hope of better reaching their target demographics. I’m sure that someday – if it hasn’t already happened – writers will get notes from editors asking them to “bring the Fog Index rating of their manuscript down by at least 20%” or “reduce the number of complex words by 10%”, all based on statistical analysis of the composition of recent best sellers.

A kind of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for books, in a way.

Like all tools, it could be abused and lead to bad results. But if used properly, it could result in more readable books and reduce the variability in quality output between individual editors (probably not by much, but any improvement would be welcome).

The pic on top of this post is from the Amazon page for I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter (which I’m currently reading).

Here’s an excerpt that I liked:

Update: Just to make it clear, this post isn’t an ad for I Am A Strange Loop. It’s just the book I looked up on Amazon when I noticed the Amazon Text Stats feature, and I thought some people might be curious to know which book the Text Stats in the screenshot came from.

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• The singularity and the Methuselarity: similarities and differences

I think the weather this summer has inspired Mélanie…