Decaeneus's Shortform

Infertility rates are rising and nobody seems to quite know why.  Below is what feels like a possible (trivial) explanation that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere.

I'm not in this field personally so it's possible this theory is out there, but asking GPT about it doesn't yield the proposed explanation: https://chat.openai.com/share/ab4138f6-978c-445a-9228-674ffa5584ea

Toy model:

• a family is either fertile or infertile, and fertility is hereditary
• the modal fertile family can have up to 10 kids, the modal infertile family can only have 2 kids
• in the olden days families aimed to have as many kids as they could
• now families aim to have 2 kids each

Under this model, in the olden days we would find a high proportion of fertile people in the gene pool, but in the modern world we wouldn't. Put differently, the old convention lead to a strong positive correlation between fertility and participation in the gene pool, and the new convention leads to 0 correlation. This removes the selective pressure on fertility, hence we should expect fertility to drop / infertility to rise.

Empirical evidence for this would be something like an analysis of the time series of family size variance and infertility -- is lower variance followed by increased infertility?

Reflecting on the particular ways that perfectionism differs from the optimal policy (as someone who suffers from perfectionism) and looking to come up with simple definitions, I thought of this:

• perfectionism looks to minimize the distance between an action and the ex-post optimal action but heavily dampening this penalty for the particular action "do nothing"
• optimal policy says to pick the best ex-ante action out of the set of all possible actions, which set includes "do nothing"

So, perfectionism will be maximally costly in an environment where you have lots of valuable options of new things you could do (breaking from status quo) but you're unsure whether you can come close to the best one, like you might end up choosing something that's half as good as the best you could have done. Optimal policy would say to just give it your best, and that you should be happy since this is an amazingly good problem to have, whereas perfectionism will whisper in your ear how painful it might be to only get half of this very large chunk of potential utility, and wouldn't it be easier if you just waited.

Regularization implements Occam's Razor for machine learning systems.

When we have multiple hypotheses consistent with the same data (an overdetermined problem) Occam's Razor says that the "simplest" one is more likely true.

When an overparameterized LLM is traversing the subspace of parameters that solve the training set seeking the smallest l2-norm say, it's also effectively choosing the "simplest" solution from the solution set, where "simple" is defined as lower parameter norm i.e. more "concisely" expressed.

I wonder how much of the tremendously rapid progress of computer science in the last decade owes itself to structurally more rapid truth-finding, enabled by:

• the virtual nature of the majority of the experiments, making them easily replicable
• the proliferation of services like github, making it very easy to replicate others' experiments
• (a combination of the points above) the expectation that one would make one's experiments easily available for replication by others

There are other reasons to expect rapid progress in CS (compared to, say, electrical engineering) but I wonder how much is explained by this replication dynamic.

It feels like (at least in the West) the majority of our ideation about the future is negative, e.g.

• popular video games like Fallout
• zombie apocalypse themed tv
• shows like Black Mirror (there's no equivalent White Mirror)

Are we at a historically negative point in the balance of "good vs bad ideation about the future" or is this type of collective pessimistic ideation normal?

If the balance towards pessimism is typical, is the promise of salvation in the afterlife in e.g. Christianity a rare example of a powerful and salient positive ideation about our futures (conditioned on some behavior)?

From personal observation, kids learn text (say, from a children's book, and from songs) back-to-front. That is, the adult will say all but the last word in the sentence, and the kid will (eventually) learn to chime in to complete the sentence.

This feels correlated to LLMs learning well when tasked with next-token prediction, and those predictions being stronger (less uniform over the vocabulary) when the preceding sequences get longer.

I wonder if there's a connection to having rhyme "live" in the last sound of each line, as opposed to the first.

Is meditation provably more effective than "forcing yourself to do nothing"?

Much like sleep is super important for good cognitive (and, of course, physical) functioning, it's plausible that waking periods of not being stimulated (i.e. of boredom) are very useful for unlocking increased cognitive performance. Personally I've found that if I go a long time without allowing myself to be bored, e.g. by listening to podcasts or audiobooks whenever I'm in transition between activities, I'm less energetic, creative, sharp, etc.

The problem is that as a prescription "do nothing for 30 minutes" would be rejected as unappealing by most. So instead of "do nothing" it's couched as "do this other thing" with a focus on breathing and so on. Does any of that stuff actually matter or does the benefit just come from doing nothing?