This new paper finds 10% higher likelihood to acquit per hour of fasting. That’s huge. Imagine you’re in the criminal’s shoes. The original also found a marked impact of hunger on acquittal rates.
They real story here is that a just system would have no relationship between judge hunger and acquittal rate, and both studies show human judges fall far short of that mark.
The new paper found that practicing muslim judges were more lenient on a major religious holiday involving fasting. I wish the study looked at whether the results generalized to other religious holidays without fasting.
> The original also found a marked impact of hunger on acquittal rates.
Yes, but the opposite one, and it's been completely discredited. What this article calls out as a clever gotcha is in fact obvious to any subject matter expert: case assignment isn't random. People without lawyers were scheduled for right before lunch, and that's what correlated with worse outcomes.
This is a human system, so it will never be perfect. “just” needs to be relative. This isn’t a framework for wholesale ignoring of problems. Rather, an appeal for a degree of grace in our judgments.
The authors make a classic mistake: the brain is not comparable to a Turing Machine, it is a finite state machine. There’s no infinite tape in a brain.
The infinite tape doesn't have to be physically inside the brain. The tape is the universe itself, we read it through senses and write to it through actions.
Brain is not the Turing Machine, but it's the controller part of it, which we often treat as the same thing.
We have multiple controllers (brains) operating on a shared tape (universe).
The universe is finite, so Turing machines are still more powerful. We know the universe is finite because it has a finite volume, and even if it were to expand infinitely, which is debatable, it still has finite extent in spacetime because of heat death.
The brain is not a finite state machine. If it is then it is clearly equivalent to a Turing machine. It seems like your position maybe is just based on there not being “infinite tape” or something but human intelligence is not anything like any computational model we have conceived, or at least no one has presented any such evidence.
Yes it is, all finite volumes contain finite information. This is a consequence of physics called the Bekenstein Bound. This means the brain can be fully captured by a finite state machine. It has a very large state space, but it's still finite.
I mean you can quote those bounds all you like but this is not what a “finite state machine” is. You are using the words in a nominalistic way but for people in computing, we know very well what a finite state machine is and it encompasses things far greater than the “Bekenstein Bound”. It’s no problem to consider more states in an FSM than there are particles in the universe. Of course, this is silly because what you are describing as an FSM is not.
So you're saying that a set of finite states governed by a set of finite state transitions is not a finite state machine. Ok buddy.
Don't confuse expressiveness and state space. Even if there are more faithful encodings that better preserve other properties, what I said is strictly true and it's important for people to understand that human cognition is not as powerful as some think: a finite state space means a human can be fully captured by a finite state machine.
Your brain has a finite number of particles. The information content of your brain must be encoded in those particles. Thus, the brain's state space is finite.
A finite set of configurations is enumerable, and can be mapped to any other finite set of same or larger size, like a computer's memory, with no loss of information.
Therefore, any state your brain can enter can similarly be created within a computer, in principle.
I think you need to revisit your proof. Human intelligence is more complicated than that. It is not using encoding in the way you are claiming or if it is this is such a bizarre concept that it requires evidence. We don’t really understand how humans think but experientially it is a phenomena that is more complicated than a process that follows from a small set of simple rules.
More complicated than what? Rule 110 is sufficient to compute all computable functions. All the richness of the internet today can be produced from Rule 110 alone. You'd be surprised how much complexity can arise from simple rules.
Furthermore, the proof I laid out is a corollary of simple physics. If you want a more rigorous version, look up the Bekenstein Bound, which proves conclusively that any finite volume can only contain finite information. Your body is a finite volume, therefore it contains finite information, therefore it can be captured by a finite state machine.
Edit: I just realized I also replied to you above, so I'll take up the thread there.
All arguments disputing a computable brain reduce to claiming that something exists beyond physics or claiming that physics is non-computable in some way. There is no evidence for either of these, Penrose's theory included.
Quantum physics is still physics. The fact that it's not computable (non-deterministic) is not even disputable at this point, it's the nature of reality.
The only questionable thing is whether quantum effects are essential in brain activity.
> The fact that it's not computable (non-deterministic) is not even disputable at this point, it's the nature of reality.
Of course it's disputable. There are at least two well known deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics that are indistinguishable from orthodox QM, Many Worlds and Bohmian mechanics.
The brain isn't a fsm simply because I can create a game with an aribtrary number of rules. If I can do that, then there are countably infinite fsm just for making games in my brain, "making a game with one rule fsm", "making a game with two rules fsm" etc.
One of the unfortunate things about the GM foods debate is how rarely the details of a particular crop are considered. What method was used to engineer it? What gene was added in or modified? What is the IP approach used by the inventor? What are the results of field trials? For all the strong opinions I’ve seen, nobody mentions these specifics. It’s like deciding someone is guilty or innocent of a crime when all you know is that they’ve been charged.
It's a good point. Why would the length effect you describe be be associated with age, across many organs, cell types, datasets, and species? The technical effect would be a good explanation for this finding in one dataset, but it seems unlikely that many datasets would have a technical length effect that correlates with age by chance.
What I'm saying is that it looks like there's an effect and that effect is visible as a change in expression vs length but that I wouldn't expect it to be too related to length in a meaningful way biologically. If you take one population of transcripts and another and you measure the lengths, it's likely that you'll see a shift in the median - regardless of whether length is important, particularly due to the specific ways in which length relates to sequencing depth. And on top of that, comparing across genes requires compensating in some way for the length of the gene and it's not obvious how to do that correctly - could they be finding an artifact of how they normalized for length? (Eg: a "gene" actually doesn't have a single length, it's multiple possible variations in transcripts of different lengths and most reads from the sequencer is ambiguous as to which it came from. Quantify the different transcripts incorrectly - and it's impossible to do it correctly - and you may be mis-estimating the effective length and mis-normalizing.) It's a starting point of an investigation, not an end point.
(And they do try to take the next step to make that investigation and they report that they see a further decrease in a gene related to transcribing long transcripts. However it's 27th in their list of related genes and I'm not sure how unlikely having one of the top N genes has a reported connection to transcription. Hopefully they will follow up with a biological experiment involving knock-down of this gene and seeing an accelerated aging phenotype or something of that sort.)
The most compelling piece of evidence in my mind here is that the effects they report are consistent in direction across conditions. The most worrisome is that they tested a bunch of factors and the only ones they report as consistently informative are the ones that confound technical aspects the most and therefore are confounded with any number of underlying biological changes.
Thanks, your points make sense. It’s definitely a worrisome coincidence given the multiple tests they ran but didn’t correct for. I hope to see that knockout experiment you describe!
It’s important to note: the study only had 20 participants, so it wouldn’t have enough statistical power to detect a moderately large effect. Failure to find an effect is different from evidence there is no effect.
> It’s important to note: the study only had 20 participants, so it wouldn’t have enough statistical power to detect a moderately large effect.
This is a within-subject experiment: each participant got all 4 possible doses. The paper (https://www.gwern.net/docs/nootropics/2019-bershad.pdf) doesn't discuss power that I can see, but the power of a within-subject design will be a lot higher than the between-subject you're probably thinking of, where n=20 is generally way too little. So, might be decently powered after all.
So the article did not do a good job of explaining the study.
Also, why did they not go for a dose every 3-5 days like the anecdotes, but instead of went for every 7 days. And then say it might be different when done every few days. Were they trying to avoid testing on the weekends or something?
That said: I know firsthand that people who are borderline schizophrenic can have a very bad, long-lasting outcome from a regular dose of LSD. I doubt a microdose would do them any good. I hope that in studies like this, they screen the participants carefully.
This is an interesting article, but the core argument that aging is an inevitable result of physics and not biology has a counterexample. It’s the biologically immortal hydra: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_(genus)
There are many good examples in history of oppression making a movement stronger. Think of the Boston massacre, Rosa Parks, or British treatment of Ghandi. That said, the plural of anecdote is not evidence.
That said, the above arguments are against government oppression of a movement. Actions by localities to remove statues or by private companies to not provide a platform for hate speech are a different ballgame. It's not obvious they lead to blowback.
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