The global average for food available in terms of calories per person per day rose from 2,254 in 1961 to 2,804 in 2002. For developed countries the rise over that period was 24% while for developing countries it was 38%.
“We’ve never had it so good,” Daniel Ben-Ami’s review of The Improving State of the World, by Indur Goklany
“Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,” wrote Kruger.
In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning found that subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most likely to “grossly overestimate” how well they had performed.
In all 3 tests, subjects’ ratings of their ability were positively linked to their actual scores. But the lowest-ranked participants showed much greater distortions in their self-estimates.
Asked to evaluate their performance on the test of logical reasoning, subjects who scored only in the 12th percentile guessed that they had scored in the 62nd percentile, and deemed their overall skill at logical reasoning to be at the 68th percentile.
Similarly, subjects who scored at the 10th percentile on the grammar test ranked themselves at the 67th percentile in the ability to “identify grammatically correct standard English,” and estimated their test scores to be at the 61st percentile.
On the humor test, in which participants were asked to rate jokes according to their funniness (subjects’ ratings were matched against those of an “expert” panel of professional comedians), low-scoring subjects were also more apt to have an inflated perception of their skill. But the results were less conclusive.
Unlike unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study were likely to underestimate their competence.
When high-scoring subjects were asked to “grade” the grammar tests of their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their own performance. The self-assessments of those who scored badly themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others; some subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own abilities.
A short training session in logical reasoning improved the ability of low-scoring subjects to assess their performance realistically.
Other studies have found that the vast majority of people rate themselves as “above average” on a wide array of abilities. And this overestimation is more likely for tasks that are difficult than for those that are easy.
“Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find They’re blind to own failings, others’ skills,” by Erica Goode
Recent epidemiological studies suggest that adult vegetarians tend to have lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol levels, lower rates of obesity, and higher childhood IQs — though vegans tend to have lower IQs than their carnivorous peers, and the nature of the links between vegetarianism, health, and I.Q. is unclear.
A recent report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization reckons that at least 18% of the global-warming effect comes from livestock, more than is caused by all the world’s transportation systems. It has been estimated that 40% of global grain output is used to feed animals rather than people, and that 1/2 of this grain would be sufficient to eliminate world hunger.
The number of vegetarians in developed countries is evidently on the increase, but the world’s per-capita consumption of meat rises relentlessly: in 1981, it was 62 pounds per year; in 2002, 87.5 pounds. In the US, it increased from 240 to 280 pounds. Indians’ meat consumption has risen from 8.4 to 12 pounds since 1981; in China, it has increased from 33 to an astonishing 120 pounds.
“Vegetable Love,” by Steven Shapin
In a study of monthly positions for over 66,000 households with accounts at a large discount brokerage, Brad Barber and Terrance Odean found that the 20% of investors who traded least actively outperformed the 20% who traded most actively by an average of 5.5 percentage points a year.
Barber & Odeon found that men - who tend to be more overconfident than women in areas such as finance - traded on average 45% more actively than women. Both men and women tended to reduce their returns through trading, but men did so annually by 1 percentage point more, on average, than did women.
When Odeon studied the common stock trading patterns for investors at a large discount brokerage, he found that they are far more likely to sell their winners than their losers. The losers people clung to subsequently underperformed the winners they sold.
8 million New Yorkers use only 301 square miles, which comes to less than 1/40th of an acre a person. Even supposedly green Portland, Ore., is using up more than 6 times as much land a person than New York.
Less than 1/3 of New Yorkers drive to work. Nationwide, more than 7 out of 8 commuters drive. More than 1/3 of all the public transportation commuters in America live in the 5 boroughs. Matthew Kahn estimates that NY has by a wide margin the least gas usage per capita of all American metropolitan areas. DOE data confirm that NY State’s energy consumption is next to last in the country because of NYC.
In the 1960s, an environmental anti-growth movement managed to shut off development in the San Francisco Bay area. But they did not stop development spreading to eastern California, Las Vegas, and Phoenix.
In many cases, development occurred in places that were less dense and that had less public transit than the older places that the environmentalists had protected.
A local approach can do more harm than good because dense areas are rich in protesters who push new housing out to where there are fewer people to oppose it.
The price-performance of computation has grown at a super-exponential rate for over a century. The doubling time (of computes per dollar) was three years in 1900 and two years in the middle of the 20th century; and price-performance is now doubling each year. This progression has been remarkably smooth and predictable through five paradigms of computing substrate: electromechanical calculators, relay-based computers, vacuum tubes, transistors, and now several decades of Moore’s Law (which is based on shrinking the size of key features on a flat integrated circuit). The 6th paradigm — three-dimensional molecular computing — is already beginning to work.
The amount of data we are gathering about the brain is doubling each year, and we are showing that we can turn this data into working models and simulations.
By 2029, sufficient computation to simulate the entire human brain, perhaps 10 to the 16th power (10 million billion) calculations per second (cps), will cost about a dollar.
We will merge with this technology by sending intelligent nanobots (blood-cell-sized computerized robots) into our brains through the capillaries to intimately interact with our biological neurons. We already have blood-cell-sized devices that are performing sophisticated therapeutic functions in animals, such as curing Type I diabetes and identifying and destroying cancer cells. We already have a pea-sized device approved for human use that can be placed in patients’ brains to replace the biological neurons destroyed by Parkinson’s disease, the latest generation of which allows you to download new software to your neural implant from outside the patient.
By the mid-2040s, the nonbiological portion of the intelligence of our human-machine civilization will be about a billion times greater than the biological portion.
The ultimate one-kilogram computer (less than the weight of a typical notebook computer today) could perform about 10 to the 42nd power cps if we want to keep the device cool.
If we devoted 1/20th of 1 percent (.0005) of the matter of the solar system to “computronium,” we get capacities of 10 to the 69th power cps for “cold” computing.
Taking this 10 to the 69th power cps figure, if we compare that to the 10 to the 26th power cps figure, which represents the capacity of all human biological intelligence today, that will represent an expansion by a factor of 10 to the 43rd power (10 million trillion trillion trillion).
All of the vagaries (and tragedies) of human history, such as two world wars, the cold war, the great depression, etc., did not make even the slightest dent in the ongoing exponential progressions.
Ray Kurzweil’s Foreword to The Intelligent Universe by James N. Gardner
A study published in Psychological Science has found a link between a set of genes involved with immune function and mate selection in humans.
Vertebrate species and humans are inclined to prefer mates who have dissimilar MHC (major histocompatibility complex) genotypes, rather than similar ones. This preference may help avoid inbreeding between partners, as well as strengthen the immune systems of their offspring through exposure to a wider variety of pathogens.
The study investigated whether MHC similarity among romantically involved couples predicted aspects of their sexual relationship. “As the proportion of the couple’s shared genotypes increased, womens’ sexual responsivity to their partners decreased, their number of extra-pair sexual partners increased and their attraction to men other than their primary partners increased, particularly during the fertile phase of their cycles,” says Christine Garver-Apgar, author of the study.
This is the first to show that compatible genes can influence sexual relationships.
“New Study is First to Link Romantic Relationships to Genes,” by Sean Wagner