Peter Godfrey-Smith discusses this topic at length in his recent-ish book Metazoa and uses observations of insects and other invertebrates to argue, compellingly in my opinion, that sentience and cognitive abilities are not intrinsically linked, but rather depend on the specific organism's evolutionary/reproductive strategies.
Most insects do not exhibit the classic signs of pain responses (the new findings discussed in this New Yorker article, notwithstanding). For example insects generally don't groom or guard an amputated limb. This puzzling (lack of) response can be explained as being aligned with their reproductive strategy: they reach breeding age quickly and die soon after. Thus, it's better not to waste energy avoiding limb loss for a future that won't happen.
Despite this lack of sentience, insects can be quite intelligent and learn complex cues and behaviors. Other invertebrates that look superficially like insects, prawns for example, have quite different life cycles and lifespans and often do exhibit signs of pain / sentience.
Basically pain/sentience emerge when there is a reason for the organism to protect the body from damage, and does not evolve (or is subsequently lost!) when there are more important short term goals. One wonders, for example, whether salmon experience pain when they fling their bodies up rivers, over and onto rocks, damaging them horribly in the process: all for purposes of spawning.
The other pro is cost: cameras are much, much cheaper than LiDAR. Tesla is making the bet that they can close the performance gap between cameras and LiDAR faster than the cost of LiDAR will come down.
I wonder if this will ever be a significant factor. How much can a LiDAR setup cost? 4k? Maybe 2k if built in-house at car manufacturer scale in the long term? Is that significant when buying a whole car?
> Iteration itself isn’t inherently bad. It’s just that the objective
> function usually isn’t what we want from a scientific perspective.
I think this is exactly right and touches on a key difference between science and engineering.
Science: Is treatment A better than treatment B?
Engineering: I would like to make a better treatment B.
Iteration is harmful for the first goal yet essential for the second. I work in an applied science/engineering field where both perspectives exist. (and are necessary!) Which specific path is taken for any given experiment or analysis will depends on which goal one is trying to achieve. Conflict will sometimes arise when it's not clear which of these two objectives is the important one.
There is no difference between comparing A versus B or B1 versus B2. The data collection process and and the mathematical methods are (typically) identical or subject to the same issues.
E.g.: profiling an existing application and tuning its performance is comparing two products, it just so happens that they’re different versions of the same series. If you compared it to a competing vendor’s product you should use the same mathematical analysis process.
I was kind of scratching my head at what GP was getting at as well; I suspect that "better" has a different metric in the second case: i.e., the scientist is asking which chemical A or B has the stronger desired medical effect; the engineer is assuming we're going with chemical B, and trying to drive down cost of producing the chemical or improve lifespan of the pills or decrease discomfort administering or increase absorption speed or tweak the absorption curve or something like that. Those metrics are often much easier to measure than the effectiveness of the chemical itself, and much less scientifically interesting.
This is how I perceived the difference:
>SCIENCE< [a] create a hypothesis [b] collect all the data [c] check the hypothesis and publish; >ENGINEERING< [a] create a hypothesis [b] collect some data [c] refine the hypothesis [d] iterate over [b] and [c] until [e] PROFIT! (and maybe publish someday); the engineering approach is often better funded, allowing more data collection and better validation. If your engineering model is sufficiently deficient your product will be rejected in the market if it can even get to market. If your scientific model is sufficiently deficient, a researcher depending on that model will someday publish a refinement.
Off-topic: in the photo lede at the top of the article, are the rescued merchant mariners wearing standard eye/ear protection or is something else going on? Based on how they are holding the shoulder of the person in front of them, it almost looks like they are blindfolded.
It would look really bad to lose someone after landing on the carrier.
The flight deck of an aircraft carrier is a loud, confusing, and dangerous place. I imagine they were told something like "this is not a time or place for sightseeing. hang on to the person in front of you and they'll lead you to a safe place below decks".
I can see what you mean, but if you zoom all the way in on the man looking into the camera, you can just see their left eye (right from our perspective). I think this is a buddy-system safety measure for crossing an unfamiliar, loud, hectic, and hazardous environment.
I think language acquisition provides a pretty compelling example of learning affecting the experience of qualia. When someone is learning to speak a foreign language, there is often an period where certain sounds are difficult for the learner to produce, because those sounds are not present or are not distinguished in the learner's native tongue. For example, the R and L sounds of English are tricky for a native Japanese speaker.
A reason it's so hard to learn to produce these novel sounds, I would argue, is because the learner literally cannot hear the differences at first. It's only after learning (i.e. when the qualia starts to change) that production of the new sounds becomes possible.
One can think of other similar examples in the context of expert performance: a sonar operator can hear sounds in his headphones that most (at first) cannot; an artist can distinguish colors that the novice cannot, etc.
If you buy this argument, that learning can affect perception/qualia, then it's a fairly small leap to imagine how qualia itself might also be learned ex nihilo.
David MacKay discusses this in Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. He concludes that, while it's on first glance appealing to want to use waste heat from power generation, heat pumps are strictly superior to combined heat and power except for in a few specialized circumstances (e.g. industrial uses that require high temperatures). The book is fifteen years old now, so I suspect the math even more strongly favors heat pumps than when it was published.
But district heating is a distribution mechanism, not a heat generation mechanism. Cogeneration plants are one way to power it, but you can also use waste heat from industrial processes, very large scale heat pumps, or burning household waste. All of these are in common use in places where district heating is common. The public district heating utility in Stockholm claims to have the world's largest heat pump installation, which has the capacity to extract 225 MW of heat from treated sewage, in the process generating both heat that's sent into the district heating network, cooling that's sent into the district cooling network, and finally a small amount of electric power by releasing the treated water into a lake via a turbine. This facility opened in 1986. The utility also has various other facilities, both cogeneration plants that burn biofuel (mostly byproducts from the lumber industry) or household waste, as well as other heat pumps that extract energy from seawater.
District heating/district cooling has three advantages: you can change the heat source centrally without having to refit every single dwelling, there are economies of scale in the heat generation, and you can take advantage of heat or cooling that's just in the wrong place and transport it to where it's needed.
5th generation district heat systems can transport water at roughly the same temp as the underground and use distributed heat pumps to bring them up to the required temperature at point of use. This prevents heat losses along the way.
I’ve often wondered if late if rather than a “wet wall”, if houses should have a “hot wall”. Could I run a thermal loop past the fridge and a couple other appliances and either shunt it outside in the summer or distribute it around the house.
Total BTU aren't that great. Would (somewhat) work for a very small apartment, for any big house you would have a better experience making a proper thermal insulation.
Given that people are pointing out that heat recovery from washers doesn’t really work because they alternate between filling and draining (so there is no counterflow except incidental from other house activities), I’m not so sure that would be true.
Particularly if you use heat pumps instead of basic plumbing to achieve the transfer. Dump heat into a glycol line with a reservoir.
Seems to me like the electric power grid is an already existing, efficient energy distribution mechanism. Converting waste heat to electricity is probably a lot cheaper to retrofit than adding a new distribution network to places that don't already have one.
To my knowledge there's no really effective way of converting low grade waste heat into electricity. Basically all heat-based electricity generation today relies on being able to boil water into steam to spin a turbine. But with heat pumps and district heating, you can recover useful amounts of energy even from quite small thermal gradients. That's why things like room temperature sewage and waste heat from data centers can be useful to these systems even though they couldn't be used to generate electricity.
Also, if you rely on local heat pumps, you still need to take the energy from somewhere. Taking it from the air is fine in warmer climates, but in colder climates the efficiency of air-source heat pumps starts to become an issue when it gets colder. You can extract heat from deep underground, but that doesn't universally work in densely populated areas because the ground doesn't contain infinite amounts of energy and it's possible to extract more than it can sustain. So, in cold climates there's definitely a use case for distributing heat using water pipes, with or without local heat pumps in every building (see the sibling comment about 5th generation district heating systems).
Thermodynamics prevent you from turning low grade heat into electricity with anything resembling reasonable efficiency. Moving the heat around on the other hand it reasonably simple.
Yeah; if just used for hot water, this doesn’t make much sense compared to a hybrid heat pump water heater. Here in California, with a well insulated/partially passively heated/cooled house, our hot water is well under 10% of our electricity bill (ignoring our EV).
In places where it’s really hot or cold, it would be an even lower percentage. The money that it would cost to trench and maintain the hot water distribution lines for a house would probably be better spent on heat pumps, architectural features or upgraded insulation (Even just $2000 of extra insulation does an amazing amount of good vs. bare minimum code insulation, and I doubt you can get district hot water installed for less than that.)
Most insects do not exhibit the classic signs of pain responses (the new findings discussed in this New Yorker article, notwithstanding). For example insects generally don't groom or guard an amputated limb. This puzzling (lack of) response can be explained as being aligned with their reproductive strategy: they reach breeding age quickly and die soon after. Thus, it's better not to waste energy avoiding limb loss for a future that won't happen.
Despite this lack of sentience, insects can be quite intelligent and learn complex cues and behaviors. Other invertebrates that look superficially like insects, prawns for example, have quite different life cycles and lifespans and often do exhibit signs of pain / sentience.
Basically pain/sentience emerge when there is a reason for the organism to protect the body from damage, and does not evolve (or is subsequently lost!) when there are more important short term goals. One wonders, for example, whether salmon experience pain when they fling their bodies up rivers, over and onto rocks, damaging them horribly in the process: all for purposes of spawning.