zlatiah

joined 7 months ago
[–] zlatiah@lemmy.world 7 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

So... disclaimer first! I have played chess but only a year or so; I got into chess during the pandemic and had a peak ELO of ~1600+ on chess.com and 1900+ on Lichess; probably translates to a classical ELO of ~1200 (competition is tough in classical...). Obviously I'm not remotely a good player, but I can hold my ground. I also had to do a neuropsych evaluation recently for mental health reasons, so I spent the last month of my free time looking into research of intelligence (g factor, IQ tests, the disturbing history, etc...) for my own curiosity. So I might have a bit of knowledge on this... but:

For the most part chess is its own unique skills and is unrelated to "smartness". Nevertheless, I think chess might be related to probably just one or two specific narrow fields of intelligence. Being good at chess requires one to be knowledgeable of various chess openings (memorization, working memory), extremely strong pattern recognition (Magnus Carlsen is really good at this; AlphaZero was literally all pattern recognition due to the way it works), and being able to see 5, 10, or even 15 steps ahead and consider all the rational options (again, working memory)

I just took the WAIS-V test two weeks ago for my psych eval, and they do indeed test for working memory and pattern recognition in specific sub-tasks. However the difference is... IQ tests are never meant to be practiced as they measure a type of "potential" if you may, but chess is all about what you actually play on the board. Sure maybe if ppl were literally just given the rules and had no prior exposure then a smarter person might spot a forced checkmate faster, but ppl do pratice for the game... In fact, the advice people used to give to get better at chess is... to do more puzzles

Sooo... methinks an intelligent person might have a slight edge training themselves to do the above, but there is probably otherwise very little association. After a certain point intelligence itself probably has no influence on chess performance whatsoever, and realistically it's more about "grit", or how much time/effort someone puts into the game

Aaand... case in point. Apparently Kasparov went through a 3-day intensive intelligence test, but had a really "spiky" profile that is more commonly seen in neurodivergent individuals; scored really high on some categories and abysmally low on others. I saw this random Reddit post which says that Carlsen scored 115(+1SD) on AGCT (a fairly quick and accurate online test), which is not low but not impressive by any means either. Nakamura allegedly got 102 on Mensa Norway's trial test, which is not as accurate as AGCT but should be fairly good too; 102 is like dead-average

 

The top 10 (more than half of these have estimated citation counts over 100,000):

  1. Deep residual learning for image recognition (2016, preprint 2015)
  2. Analysis of relative gene expression data using real-time quantitative PCR and the 2–ΔΔCT method (2001)
  3. Using thematic analysis in psychology (2006)
  4. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-5 (2013)
  5. A short history of SHELX (2007)
  6. Random forests (2001)
  7. Attention is all you need (2017)
  8. ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks (2017)
  9. Global cancer statistics 2020: GLOBOCAN estimates of incidence and mortality worldwide for 36 cancers in 185 countries (2020)
  10. Global cancer statistics 2018: GLOBOCAN estimates of incidence and mortality worldwide for 36 cancers in 185 countries (2016)

The article went in-depth on some trends... but in brief:

  • 1, 6, 7, 8 are all papers that are foundational to the current generation of deep learning/AI research, so naturally they got cited a lot. Among these 6 may be less relevant than the others, but random forest is still incredibly important as a method
  • 2 and 5 were random (but extremely important) methods that got written into papers so ppl can cite them
  • 9, 10 are extremely important cancer statistics/reviews that are cited by just about every and any cancer researcher
  • 4 is the "psychiatry's bible" and is meant to be a foundational work to this field of research
  • 3 was meant to be a brief guideline for a psychology research method, but accidentally blew up in popularity

Link to the supplementary infomation of the top 25 papers. Note that this will open a link to download the Excel spreadsheet

[–] zlatiah@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

Bear, but I think it's because gorillas are known to be peaceful and will probably run away from conflict

If it is a fight to the death... Idk I think with how physics works it might be quite even?

[–] zlatiah@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Yup... I had a suspicion that the Belgian system will somehow be different, so thankfully I didn't find this out the hard way. I could have almost bricked my laptop login password that way...

Also it's the first time I had to use my right hand to type the Alt key which is so trippy

[–] zlatiah@lemmy.world 17 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Moving to Belgium for a new job so...

 

I did not realize this was a thing until I just switched to AZERTY which... despite being marketed as being "similar" to QWERTY, is still tripping me up

Edit: since this came up twice: I'm switching since I'm relocating to the French-speaking part of the world & I just happened to want to learn the language/culture, so yeah

[–] zlatiah@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Apparently my case is uncommon... I haven't voted in any serious elections yet. I'm still relatively young, the country where I have citizenship doesn't allow elections, and I have never been a permanent resident anywhere else that allows elections so...

[–] zlatiah@lemmy.world 36 points 1 week ago

I’m talking about PRC btw

Oh... OH

Their advice is good in this very specific context as the PRC is a bit... special, see other comments. They don't limit their reach to just Chinese citizens either, my interpretation of what has happened in Canada with the secret police stations is that they might consider all ethnically Chinese people fair game

For most instances though, methinks valid constructive criticisms toward the government is a good way to keep democracy going, and unfortunately this process sometimes involve protesting. I can't make decisions for others when a social cause is more important than their own safety, but to each their own at that point so...

[–] zlatiah@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

This might not apply to people who are not Autistic or somewhat neurodivergent but... my therapist literally just pointed out to me a few weeks ago that I have Alexithymia (emotional blindness)

I have been much more in tune with my emotions afterwards and realized I was actually quite satisfied/content with life a lot of the times, it's just that way too often I would not have known I was happy. So I guess if anyone's also neurodivergent in some way it might be a good thing to look into

[–] zlatiah@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Giving. It's not that I particular like doing so, since I don't have too many ppl I could give stuff to... It's more that I really don't desire any gifts. Up until this point in life I basically had to move every 1-2 years. Receiving something I don't like/want means that I'll have to throw or donate it away so... And the things I actually want are all several hundred dollars and above, since I have gotten basically everything I want that is below that price point

[–] zlatiah@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Northwestern's president sent an official email at 9 pm last night on this topic while being as sarcastic as ever

On the other R site there have been researchers at Cornell stating that they received stop-work orders

Shit is hitting the fan

[–] zlatiah@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

My interpretation is that visitors don't have specific rights to criticize a government per-se. However! In most non-authoritarian countries, everyone has the unequivocal rights to criticize a government as long as they are not intending on disobeying other harassment/discrimination laws, regardless of their status. Since visitors are also included in "everyone", they can criticize a government too

Of course this only applies to non-authoritarian countries. Authoritarian countries don't have that right even for their citizens, so visitors are not excluded either

(I hate where this train of thought is going but whatever...)

[–] zlatiah@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Had a serious car crash that would have gone fatal if I was just a bit unlucky... That was one month after I got my first car. I think after that I quickly became an insanely good & safe driver

 

If you look closely Tommy was covered in catnip powder (and smelled like it too)

 

Maybe you guys have heard of recent news mentioning how the wealthiest Americans live shorter than the poorest Western Europeans. This is the base study that supported that claim.

We performed a longitudinal, retrospective cohort study involving adults 50 to 85 years of age who were included in the Health and Retirement Study and the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe between 2010 and 2022. Wealth quartiles were defined according to age group and country, with quartile 1 comprising the poorest participants and quartile 4 the wealthiest. Mortality and Kaplan–Meier curves were estimated for each wealth quartile across the United States and 16 countries in northern and western, southern, and eastern Europe...

... Although all the countries showed an association between wealth and mortality, the United States had the widest gap in mortality between the bottom and top wealth quartiles. Mortality among the wealthiest Americans appeared to be higher than that among most northern and western Europeans and the wealthiest southern Europeans and similar to that among the poorest northern and western Europeans and most eastern Europeans. The poorest Americans appeared to have the lowest survival among all wealth groups in the study sample. U.S. regional differences in mortality were minimal, except for the finding of lower mortality among the wealthiest participants in western states than among the wealthiest participants in the other U.S. Census regions.

The DOI link doesn't seem to be working quite yet.

 

An artificial intelligence (AI) system has for the first time figured out how to collect diamonds in the hugely popular video game Minecraft — a difficult task requiring multiple steps — without being shown how to play. Its creators say the system, called Dreamer, is a step towards machines that can generalize knowledge learned in one domain to new situations, a major goal of AI.

Collecting a diamond is “a very hard task”, says computer scientist Jeff Clune at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who was part of a separate team that trained a program to find diamonds using videos of human play. “There is no question this represents a major step forward for the field.”

An even bigger target for AI, says Clune, is the ultimate challenge for Minecraft players: killing the Ender Dragon, the virtual world’s most fearsome creature.

The associated preprint

Associated blog post

~~Neuro-sama: finally a worthwhile opponent~~

 

On health economist Jay Bhattacharya’s first day as head of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the chiefs of four of the 27 institutes and centres that make up his agency — including the country’s top infectious-diseases official — were removed from their posts. The unprecedented move comes amid massive cuts to research at the NIH.

The directors of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) and the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) were informed late on 31 March that they were being placed on administrative leave. Together, these leaders were in charge of US$9 billion in funding at the NIH.

Try this archive.org link if there is soft paywall

 

The United States has ordered consular offices to significantly expand their screening processes for student visa applicants, including through comprehensive social media investigations, to exclude people they deem to support terrorism.

It specifically targets new and renewing F, M and J student visa applications, providing explicit instructions for consular officers to conduct mandatory social media reviews digging into applicants’ lives online. Officers are directed to examine the social media of all students applying to a visa for evidence of activities the administration defines as a threat to national security or terrorism.

So I guess this is a thing for people who want to study/do research in the US now

 

Since this wasn't apparent the last time I asked... no, I'm actually not a US citizen or green card holder (permanent resident). Just happened to be in this country for a long time due to career reasons.

 

The massive changes in US research brought about by the new administration of President Donald Trump are causing many scientists in the country to rethink their lives and careers. More than 1,200 scientists who responded to a Nature poll — three-quarters of the total respondents — are considering leaving the United States following the disruptions prompted by Trump. Europe and Canada were among the top choices for relocation.

The trend was particularly pronounced among early-career researchers. Of the 690 postgraduate researchers who responded, 548 were considering leaving; 255 of 340 PhD students said the same.

I have answered this poll myself; this is meant for scientists of all career-stages, so a lot of PhD students and postdocs along with faculty members.

I don't think the article is paywalled, but let me know if it is.

 
 

As title suggested. For context & as an example... there was something I wanted to investigate today, but the only primary information was from a 2023 Twitter (yup, before it became X) thread. The annoying part is that the crucial tweets got labelled as "sensitive content" so it's not even available on Wayback Machine

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