>It's highly likely that the problem was solved before and the model picked that up.
If you can demonstrate that, I would put it to Strominger and his colleagues, and I imagine they would be obligated to cite your contribution in the peer-reviewed publication.
Do you understand the purported result, and the verification? I don't, but I'm confident that Andrew Strominger wouldn't have agreed to put his name on this if he didn't think it was correct and interesting.
The human authors have positions at the Institute for Advanced Study (Einstein's old institution), Vanderbilt, Harvard (Strominger) and Cambridge in the UK.
If you have to gauge this by the reputation of the experts involved in it as I do, that seems like a good list to me.
The two main sources for this piece seem to be interviews with Simon Thomas, the Chief Executive of a British semiconductor manufacturer (Paragraf) based in Cambridgeshire; and Raoul Ruparel, a director at Boston Consulting Group, which is based in Massachusetts.
The narrative is that there is a chronic lack of investment in the UK which is preventing promising companies from securing connections to the electrical grid, and that local planning bureaucracy is also inhibiting development. Public services, including transportation, are weak; there is a lack of affordable housing; and these problems are so bad that, following the passage of the CHIPS Act, Paragraf considered setting up in the US.
The article notes that Paragraf was spun out of the University of Cambridge six years ago, and established itself nearby. Cambridge is arguably the best university in Britain for science and technology, so perhaps if Paragraf had set up in the US, it might have chosen a location near a close equivalent, such as MIT or Harvard, both of which are coincidentally situated in Cambridge, Massachusetts — a town that was named in honour of the British university. The two Cambridges have similar populations and similar centuries-old associations with academia, but how do they compare on the criteria discussed in the article?
The average house price in the British Cambridge is currently about £500,000 ($635,000 at the exchage rate used in the article), and the average house price in the American Cambridge is currently in the region of $1,000,000 (£787,000). They are both unaffordable by normal standards, but the American Cambridge is the worst of the two at the moment (or best, if you like high property values).
As regards transportation, both the British and American Cambridge are known for their cycling culture. The British Cambridge has the largest guided busway in the world, which was opened in 2011. Public transport in the American Cambridge is part of one of the oldest mass transit systems in the US, which is run by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA). The MBTA has acquired a reputation for financial mismanagement, and the system it controls is amongst the most dangerous in America; in 2022 the Federal Transit Administration announced that it would be intervening at the authority and was 'extremely concerned with the ongoing safety issues' affecting the system [1].
What about connections to the electricity grid in the two locations? Curiously, much of the electrical infrastructure in both Britain and Cambridge in Massachusetts is owned by the same corporation: National Grid PLC. National Grid is a British company, but it happens to have a substantial American business [2], and it owns a lot of the electrical grid in Massachusetts and New York; it is likely that the entity responsible for large parts of Britain's electrical infrastructure also owns the electrical infrastructure that supplies the Boston office building where Raoul Ruparel's company is headquartered. The transatlantic involvement in electrical infrastructure runs both ways: a large part of the electrical grid of Northern England is owned by a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway [3].
The issues of planning bureaucracy discussed in the article are complicated, and properly comparing the American and British systems would be a difficult exercise, but from what I know of them they aren't dissimilar; the complaints about the systems are comparable. The article mentions recent measures by the British government to 'impede NIMBY-ism'; Nimbyism is originally an American term (the acronym can only be derived from American English; a 'back yard' in the US would typically be referred to as a 'back garden' in the UK), but it easily gained currency in Britain because the concept and many of the issues underlying it are familiar in both countries. It seems to me that in some respects this issue is a feature rather than a bug; the right of local people and organisations to some say over the fate of their immediate environment is part of the practice of democracy in both Britain and America, and it may be necessary to uphold the system of private property rights that businesses carrying out development themselves depend on.
This doesn't seem to have been firmly established, but as far as I can tell it's currently thought to be related to how carbon in the solar system's protoplanetary disk behaved when it was vaporized after fusion began in the sun. The question was studied in this paper published in 2021 [1], which is discussed in this article [2].
The authors of the paper suggest that the material that formed the Earth was depleted of carbon early in the solar system's history due to solar activity, and that most of the carbon now on Earth was delivered to the planet later on directly from the interstellar medium.
I should note a couple of clarifications to my first comment: the elemental abundance I mentioned for the universe and Earth's solar system does not include helium and neon, which are abundant, but are usually ignored in this context as they're noble gases.
There is also estimated to be slightly more mass in the present-day universe in the form of iron than nitrogen due to the high mass of iron atoms (nitrogen is the fourth most abundant element by mass in the human body, but the body contains relatively little iron). The number of nitrogen atoms in the universe, however, is substantially higher than the number of iron atoms. The amount of iron in the early universe should also have been lower; the element is formed late in the stellar life cycle [3], whereas the other cosmologically abundant elements that are relevant to biology (carbon, nitrogen and oxygen) are formed earlier [4].
>If generative AI can repeatedly test physics theories faster than humans, then we may witness progress in physics. AI could generate thousands of theories and conduct experiments successfully, possibly leading to new physics models. However, I am uncertain whether this will be achievable soon, particularly for theories requiring costly experiments.
I've long felt that this may be the strongest argument against an AI singularity.
The technical ability to emulate the minds of the world's theoretical physicists and run accelerated simulations of their thought processes may be developed, but the generation of valid new insights in physics might depend strongly on observations and experiments conducted in the physical world, as seems to have been the case historically, and the virtual equivalents of those experiments may prove to be inadequate or impractical to implement.
Steven Pinker made a similar argument in this 2018 discussion with Sam Harris (the remarks begin at 65m03s in this recording [1]; the full conext begins at around 50m36s [2]). Harris is concerned about existential risks posed by advances in artificial intelligence, whereas Pinker is less so, in part for this reason. I agree with Harris that there are risks associated with artificial general intelligence, but I agree with Pinker and the parent comment about the dependence of the scientific process on experiment, and that an inability to conduct accelerated experiments in the physical world may undermine the standard argument about the inevitability of an AI singularity.
An AI capable of interfacing with the physical world might develop the ability to conduct accelerated physical experiments, but it would presumably face the same fundamental and contingent limits as human researchers, and the history of human science suggests those limits may impede exponential progress.
> I asked it to stop adding disclaimers as you can see.
This is the first example of an extended dialogue with GPT-4 that I have read, and the fact that it failed to obey the request to dispense with its repetitive disclaimers was perhaps the most interesting thing to me about it. It seems somehow more fluent to me than GPT-3, as though its verbal IQ has increased a few points, but GPT-3 was already quite articulate; I havent yet seen any examples of clear new abilities from GPT-4.
The substance of the dialogue struck me as generic and lacking novel insight, though the bar was of course set rather high (essentially 'Describe revolutionary new physics'). I've also been jaded by the past few years of advances in AI; if I had seen this transcript ten years ago I would have been surprised and impressed that an AI could have a conversation about theoretical physics, and could demonstrate an ability to discuss relevant concepts in a reasonable and confident manner.
The ability of large language models to exhibit sophisticated verbal reasoning, albeit not yet reliably so, is their most striking feature to me, and I do think that has great scientific potential; perhaps GPT-4 isn't yet a major advance in that respect, but I imagine an important foundation has been laid. I should say I'm grateful to you for publishing this Ramraj; the transcript and the impressions you and others have shared in this thread have been illuminating.
Anyone who is curious about the application of AI to theoretical physics may be interested in the work of the MIT physicist Max Tegmark and his group, which is still at an early stage. Here are some videos in which he discusses AI and physics, in increasing order of detail:
This is a great analogy, I'd never seen it translated into tangible terms like that before.
I remember reading that, at close enough range, the neutrino emissions from a supernova would be intense enough to be dangerous to structures made of ordinary matter, despite the weakness of their interactions, and that they would reach an observer earlier than other forms of radiation due to their ability to escape the collapsing star relatively unimpeded. Neutrinos would be the least of your problems if you were the observer of course.
As I was trying to find a source for this, I discovered there is a unit [1] for the amount of energy released by a supernova called the Foe, which seems apt (it's an acronym derived from 'ten to the power of Fifty-One-Ergs').
Thanks for a great couple of replies. I'd just add that there are almost certainly more superheavy elements not thought to exist in nature which have yet to be produced artificially, but probably will be at some point.
> You are grasping as straws trying to prove that Blair, who went to fee-paying schools was actually a working-class man of the people...why?
I did not claim that Blair was a 'man of the people', though there are plenty of people who might credibly be described in those terms who have been involved in ruling the UK. You stated above that 'if you are a Brit, you understand that almost all of the people you name went to the same high school and have the same background'. I am British, and I know your statement is an exaggeration, which is why I noted examples of the backgrounds of some of the people referred to. I agree with you that it is relevant to a discussion of this topic that Tony Blair attended a fee-paying school, but I also think it is relevant — if background is important as you suggest — that the decision to send him to a fee-paying school was made by a mother who was the daughter of a butcher, and a father who was adopted into a working class family as a baby and grew up in a tenement in Glasgow. You can draw whatever conclusions you want from that, but to me, a reasonable consideration of that example, and others like the ones I noted, illustrate that it is not correct that 'almost all' of the British ruling class have the same cultural background.
> Does Philips-Exeter and Groton have the same route into govt specifically (which is surprising given that money is more important in US politics, and the US has far wealthier people at the top end)? No.
I'm no expert on American prep schools, but a quick look at the alumni of the ones you mention reveals two presidents, three secretaries of state, four treasury secretaries, dozens of governors, the founder of the Republican Party, the first Director of the CIA, the first Director of National Intelligence, the founder of Facebook, and too many senators, members of congress, federal judges and ambassadors etc. to list. It is curious to me that you don't believe this indicates that attending these schools provides a route into government, whereas a similar list of the alumni of a British school like Eton does. In looking up Groton alumni I found an observation about the school from one of them, who was a friend of Franklin Roosevelt's (another Groton alumnus). He wrote 'Ninety-five percent of the boys came from what they considered the aristocracy of America [...] Among them was a goodly slice of the wealth of the nation.' It seems to me that Eton and Groton are not dissimilar in that regard.
> All you have to do is convince the local constituency party or some other small group of people in a safe seat (again, both Cameron and Blair have reformed this, although Labour's recent issues with selection should demonstrate that the system is still problematic).
This is a description of the process required to be selected as a candidate for a particular party. In order to become an MP the candidate must then win an election that returns them as the most popular candidate. It may be disappointing that voters in safe seats reliably opt for the candidates of a particular party, but that does not necessarily make their election 'hugely undemocratic'. If the people in these constituencies objected to the candidate of the party that traditionally wins there, they could democratically elect someone else instead.
> It is nothing to do with a small number of votes deciding elections, that is just irrelevant, the outcome of an election is the outcome, it being close has nothing to do with anything.
It would be relevant if that is what you had meant when you wrote that becoming an MP in the UK only requires winning over a small number of people. You have clarified that what you actually meant is that being selected as a candidate for a particular party in parliamentary elections might only involve winning over a small number of people in a local constituency party. Those candidates must then secure the votes of a much larger number of people in an election if they are to become MPs. You neglected to mention that latter fact, presumably because you felt that elections in safe seats are somehow undemocratic because the local population reliably elects candidates from a particular party.
> FPTP isn't undemocratic. I would look at what the word democratic means. It is unrepresentative, it is most certainly not undemocratic.
In the UK, the first past the past system nearly always produces a result in which a substantial majority of voters are not represented by the MP they voted for. British governments are therefore typically controlled by a party that has been rejected by a majority of voters. The governing party in the UK hasn't won a majority of the votes in a general election since the 1930s. I would argue that the UK is a democracy in some sense of the word in spite of this, but the first past the post system is not guaranteed to produce democratic results, and in Britain it usually doesn't.
> If you were a scholarship boy, don't try to waggishly quote Latin. People can see through you like a window, it impresses no-one.
I think we're in agreement here. If quoting Latin impresses no-one, it's unclear to me why you think it is important that some old-fashioned schools briefly force their pupils to study it. It can be studied at Oxford and Cambridge and many other universities, but classics has been a niche subject for a long time, and it doesn't confer any particular career advantage over more popular subjects like economics and history that are taught at all schools. I doubt it is any easier to obtain a degree in classics from a prestigious university due to a lack of competition from applicants who were not educated at private schools than it is to obtain a degree in any other niche subject that is more widely taught. It is true that there is less competition for places to study classics than many subjects due to a lack of interest, but that is also true of courses in language and religion — subjects which are very widely taught outside private schools. [1]
Classics was already an outdated choice of university subject by the time Johnson was studying it in the eighties, which perhaps explains why prior to the 2019 election no Prime Minister or opposition leader with a classics degree had contested a general election for six decades.
Thanks for the link. I've read through the quotes, and I can't find any instance of Johnson making a promise during the referendum campaign to keep the UK in the single market. I don't understand how he could have made such a promise even if he had wanted to, since he would have had no power to keep the commitment at the time — he didn't become Prime Minister until years after the referendum campaign. In 2016 he wasn't part of the government and wasn't seeking to be, at least not openly. He had no authority to make promises about future policy, and he wasn't proposing to replace the Cameron government.
What I see in the quotes in the link is Johnson expressing a personal preference for the UK to retain access to the single market and influence in its governing structures, in remarks made in 2013, a few years before the referendum was held. He talks about his voting intentions — at that time, he was the Mayor of London and had no vote in Parliament, so he is referring to how he might vote in what was, at that time, a hypothetical future referendum. The wider context, which is apparent from the contemporary reporting [1], is that, at the time, he was calling for the Single Market to be reformed, and for the UK to leave most of the EU's structures, but to remain part of the reformed market. A couple of years later, Cameron attempted to secure some reforms to the UK's relationship with the EU, but he focused on immigration and welfare rather than the Single Market. Cameron then presented the reforms (such as they were) as part of the basis for his support of the UK's continued membership of the EU during the referendum campaign, but no changes to the Single Market of the kind that Johnson had called for earlier were agreed.
My recollection of the role of the Single Market in the referendum is that the official Leave campaign was pressed to take a position on retaining Single Market membership; that they ultimately came down in favour of leaving (in order to remove the UK from the jurisdiction of the ECJ and allow EU regulations to be repealed); and that Johnson (who was part of the official campaign) subsequently adopted that official campaign position in his public statements. During the referendum itself he therefore supported leaving the Single Market, at least in its unreformed 2016 incarnation.
My memory is that the key statement of the official Leave campaign's position on the Single Market was made by Michael Gove on the Andrew Marr show. I remember it because the Leave side had been under pressure to make its position clear at the time, and Gove's response on the show seemed to signify that they had chosen to bite the bullet and accept leaving the Single Market. On the one hand, adopting a clear position meant that they couldn't be accused of equivocating on the subject any longer, but on the other hand, the Remain campaign was then able to argue more strongly that the Leave side was embracing trade disruption. Here's the relevant quote from the transcript of the Marr show[2]:
'Marr: Let me ask you, just before we leave the economics actually, a very simple question I have tried to get an answer to from various people on your side – is should we or should we not be inside the single market? Do you want us to stay inside the single market? Yes or no.
Gove: No. We should be outside the single market. We should have access to the single market, but we should not be governed by the rules that the European Court of Justice imposes on us, which cost business and restrict freedom.'
The BBC reported at the time that Gove's answer on the Marr show was a response to the pressure to clarify the Leave campaign's position on the Single Market.[3]
Incidentally, with regard to Johnson claiming to be a fan of the EU; I don't personally find this surprising. He has a well-publicised affinity for European civilization; in a book about ancient Rome that he published some years ago, he wrote approvingly about the ability of the Empire to unite diverse peoples as citizens of a common European state, and contrasted that history with the EU — the book was adapted into a television series for the BBC that he presented. His father also used to work for the European Commission; before he was sent off to Eton, he, his siblings and his future wife were educated at a school in Brussels that was established for the children of EU staff [4]. It may be worth noting that the comment was also somewhat qualified; he said that 'in some ways' he was 'a bit of a fan'.
There is a semblance of truth to some of this, but I'm afraid anyone not especially familiar with the UK could come away from reading what you've written with a very distorted impression of reality.
I may be misreading some of your remarks — please forgive me if that's the case — but to respond to some of the points you make:
The list of UK Prime Ministers and opposition leaders, particularly in the earlier part of the twentieth century, does contain many wealthy 'establishment' figures, including some with aristocratic backgrounds, but the suggestion that almost all of them went to the same high school and have the same cultural background is a gross exaggeration.
Churchill was the son of a Lord and an American heiress, and was literally born in a palace. Thatcher was the daughter of a shopkeeper and a seamstress, and grew up in a home without a garden or a proper bathroom (the family's toilet was in a small outbuilding — not an uncommon situation for ordinary people at the time).
Attlee was the son of a wealthy lawyer, and he grew up in a house with a tennis court and several servants. Callaghan was the son of a coastguard sailor who died of a heart attack at a relatively young age, leaving his wife and children in poverty; as a teenager Callaghan was eligible to go to Oxford, but he couldn't afford to. He became Prime Minister regardless.
Cameron's father was a stockbroker and his mother was a magistrate. Major's father was a circus performer who made a living selling garden ornaments, and his mother was a dancer who worked in a local library; the family was nearly bankrupted in the 1950s and lived in a small flat in Brixton. Major never went to university, yet he still became Foreign Secretary (meaning he was in charge of the FCO — perhaps your friend's mistake was going to university at all, though I wouldn't worry about him; the future King and Queen are also both St. Andrew's graduates), and then Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister.
Eden's family were landed gentry. May's father was a village vicar; both of her parents died shortly after she graduated from university.
Wilson was the son of a chemist and a schoolteacher. Blair's father was given up for adoption as a baby and became part of the family of a shipyard worker and his wife; he grew up in a Glasgow tenement with an ambition to become a barrister, which he achieved. Blair's mother was the daughter of a butcher; she was born in the flat above the family shop.
One could go on; there is certainly privilege in the backgrounds of many British Prime Ministers, but there is also poverty and much else too.
There are popular private schools in the UK favoured by the wealthy, such as Eton, Harrow, Westminster etc., and many of the UK's political elites were educated at those schools, but it is not correct that almost all of them were. Many of the pupils at those schools do have wealthy parents, but not all of them are from the same background (I attended a British private school on a scholarship. Thatcher attended a local girls' grammar school on a scholarship). There are also expensive prep schools in the US favoured by the wealthy and privileged; the US and UK are not especially dissimilar in that regard. The main difference is that British schools tend to have longer histories, and admit a higher proportion of students on academic merit due to old bursaries and tax incentives.
I am struggling to understand your remarks about the number of people that must be won over to become an MP in parts of the UK, but what you are referring to sounds a lot like rotten boroughs, which were — contrary to what you state — abolished over a hundred years ago, by the 1832 Reform Act. If you are not referring to rotten boroughs, then what you are describing is just a marginal constituency where the vote is tightly contested between parties, and those exist in all democracies that use the first past the post system, including the US.
If anything, some would argue that the electoral situation is better in the UK because gerrymandering — which is acknowledged to be a widespread problem in the US — is for the most part impossible in Britain, since districting has largely been removed from political control and handed over to the independent Boundary Commissions. I take no stand on the wisdom or otherwise of the current approach to that issue in the UK, but similar solutions are widely advocated in the US in areas affected by gerrymandering. It is not uncommon for elections in the US to be decided on the basis of a small number of votes — the US and UK are, again, similar in that regard. So few people needed to be 'won over' to change the result of the 2000 presidential election in the US that the election was effectively decided by a court, and a closely divided court at that.
I agree with your observation that the electoral system in the UK can be 'hugely undemocratic', but that is a generic complaint about the first past the post system, which is also used to decide all major national elections in the US.
I can attest to the fact that Latin (if not full classics courses, which are typically the preserve of universities) is still commonly taught in British private schools, but I don't see much evidence that learning it will do a great deal for you career-wise anymore in the UK; Johnson is the first Prime Minister in sixty years to have a classics degree. Quod erat demonstrandum.
> The current Prime Minister even promised to stay in the single market while campaigning for Brexit, professing himself a 'Fan'.
Could you provide a source for the promise to stay in the single market?
> The single market was after all in large part the creation of Margaret Thatcher.
In the context of the European Union, the 'Single Market' is a legal construct; it was created by the international treaties that underpin the union, and it grants powers to the EU that can be used in various ways, ostensibly for the purpose of regulating trade.
Thatcher was in favour of liberalising trade in Europe and was therefore in favour of a European free market in the broadest sense, but her opinion of the particular mechanisms implemented under the rubric of the 'Single Market' would depend on the details. She was in favour of the Single Market to the extent that it removed trade barriers and decreased regulation, and she was against it to the extent that it was deployed as cover (as she would see it) to bypass national parliaments and introduce new economic regulations at the supranational level. Here is a quote from a speech she gave in Bruges in 1988 to the College of Europe [1], which is probably the most famous statement of her views on the subject:
'The aim of a Europe open to enterprise is the moving force behind the creation of the Single European Market in 1992. By getting rid of barriers, by making it possible for companies to operate on a European scale, we can best compete with the United States, Japan and other new economic powers emerging in Asia and elsewhere.
And that means action to free markets, action to widen choice, action to reduce government intervention.
Our aim should not be more and more detailed regulation from the centre: it should be to deregulate and to remove the constraints on trade.
Britain has been in the lead in opening its markets to others [...]
Of course, we want to make it easier for goods to pass through frontiers.
Of course, we must make it easier for people to travel throughout the Community.
But it is a matter of plain common sense that we cannot totally abolish frontier controls if we are also to protect our citizens from crime and stop the movement of drugs, of terrorists and of illegal immigrants [...]
And before I leave the subject of a single market, may I say that we certainly do not need new regulations which raise the cost of employment and make Europe's labour market less flexible and less competitive with overseas suppliers.'
'I think if you look at politics in the UK, it is self-evident that the culture of the UK is not exactly entrepreneurial...unless you believe that a group of probably 30-50 people who went to the same school, went to the same university and largely studied the same course should rule the country...it is very weird.'
My impression is that the UK and US are fairly similar in this respect. The leadership of the political and administrative class in both countries is dominated by graduates of a small number of institutions who took similar courses. In the UK it's primarily Oxford and Cambridge, and in the US it's Harvard, Yale and some other Ivy League colleges. There is a analogous pattern in many other countries.
Below is a list of all the national elections contested in the US and UK in the postwar period, noting the subject or subjects studied by the two leading candidates for head of government, along with the higher education institutions they attended:
USA
2020 Biden (Delaware/Syracuse, Law) v. Trump (Wharton, Economics)
2016 Trump (Wharton, Economics) v. H. Clinton (Wellesley/Yale, Politics/Law)
2012 Obama (Columbia/Harvard, Politics/Law) v. Romney (Brigham Young/Harvard, English/Law)
2008 Obama (Columbia/Harvard, Politics/Law) v. McCain (US Naval Academy)
2004 G. W. Bush (Yale/Harvard, History/Business) v. Kerry (Yale/Boston, Politics/Law)
2000 G. W. Bush (Yale/Harvard, History/Business) v. Gore (Harvard, Government)
1996 B. Clinton (Georgetown/Oxford/Yale, Foreign Service/PPE/Law) v. Dole (Washburn, Law)
1992 B. Clinton (Georgetown/Oxford/Yale, Foreign Service/PPE/Law) v. G. H. W. Bush (Yale, Economics)
1988 G. H. W. Bush (Yale, Economics) v. Dukakis (Swarthmore/Harvard, Politics/Law)
1984 Reagan (Eureka, Economics) v. Mondale (Minnesota, Politics)
1980 Reagan (Eureka, Economics) v. Carter (US Naval Academy)
1976 Carter (US Naval Academy) v. Ford (Michigan/Yale, Economics/Law)
1972 Nixon (Whittier/Duke, History/Law) v. McGovern (Dakota Wesleyan/Northwestern, History)
1968 Nixon (Whittier/Duke, History/Law) v. Humphrey (Minnesota/Louisiana State, Politics)
1964 Johnson (Texas State/Georgetown, Politics/Law) v. Goldwater (None)
1960 Kennedy (Harvard, Government) v. Nixon (Whittier/Duke, History/Law)
1956 Eisenhower (West Point) v. Stevenson (Princeton/Harvard/Northwestern, History/Law)
1952 Eisenhower (West Point) v. Stevenson (Princeton/Harvard/Northwestern, History/Law)
1948 Truman (None) v. Dewey (Michigan/Columbia, Law)
UK
2019 Johnson (Oxford, Classics) v. Corbyn (None)
2017 May (Oxford, Geography) v. Corbyn (None)
2015 Cameron (Oxford, PPE) v. Miliband (Oxford/LSE, PPE/Economics)
2010 Cameron (Oxford, PPE) v. Brown (Edinburgh, History)
2005 Blair (Oxford, Law) v. Howard (Cambridge, Law)
2001 Blair (Oxford, Law) v. Hague (Oxford, PPE)
1997 Blair (Oxford, Law) v. Major (None)
1992 Major (None) v. Kinnock (Cardiff, Industrial Relations)
1987 Thatcher (Oxford, Chemistry) v. Kinnock (Cardiff, Industrial Relations)
1983 Thatcher (Oxford, Chemistry) v. Foot (Oxford, PPE)
1979 Thatcher (Oxford, Chemistry) v. Callaghan (None)
1974 Wilson (Oxford, PPE) v. Heath (Oxford, PPE)
1974 Heath (Oxford, PPE) v. Wilson (Oxford, PPE)
1970 Heath (Oxford, PPE) v. Wilson (Oxford, PPE)
1966 Wilson (Oxford, PPE) v. Heath (Oxford, PPE)
1964 Wilson (Oxford, PPE) v. Douglas Home (Oxford, History)
1959 Macmillan (Oxford, Classics) v. Gaitskell (Oxford, PPE)
1955 Eden (Oxford, Oriental Languages) v. Attlee (Oxford, History)
1951 Churchill (Sandhurst) v. Attlee (Oxford, History)
1950 Attlee (Oxford, History) v. Churchill (Sandhurst)
1945 Attlee (Oxford, History) v. Churchill (Sandhurst)
Sandhurst is essentially equivalent to West Point. What is particularly notable about the UK is the number of Prime Ministers who were educated at Oxford: in the postwar period, all but two graduated from one of Oxford's various colleges. This probably has more to do with Oxford than the UK as a whole: in terms of prestige, academic success and establishment influence, Oxford and Cambridge are more or less identical, yet Cambridge clearly has a problem with producing Prime Ministers.
The US has a little more diversity in the academic institutions that educate its presidents, but that perhaps isn't surprising given it has about five times the population and about forty times the geographic area. A small number of institutions still dominate.
There is a little less diversity in the US in terms of the courses taken: all but three postwar US presidents have been law, politics, economics or history graduates. Of those who weren't, two were graduates of national armed forces academies, and one (Truman) had no degree. On the UK side there are graduates in chemistry, geography and languages, but law, politics, economics and history still dominate just as they do in the US (classics — which Johnson and Macmillan studied — is a combination of ancient history, languages (Greek and Latin), literature and philosophy).
> Finally, electric cars charge at ~96% efficiency, while hydrogen is something like 40%.
>> This claim has little substance and credibility.
The efficiency of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles versus battery vehicles is considered in some detail in this video [1]. The conclusion [2] is that, in the best case, the energy efficiency from power generation to road for existing or near future hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is about 25%, compared to about 65% for typical existing battery vehicles.
Continuing my review of the predictions from the 2010 thread, here are my last set of judgments — the Hits (the predictions I think the commenters largely got right):
Hits:
2010 Prediction: Electric cars become fairly common. A destructive feedback loop starts for gasoline fuel
—JulianMorrison
2021 Review: Electric cars are now fairly common, if not yet dominant, and the governments of several large countries have legislated to phase out fossil fuel vehicles completely.
2010 Prediction: Still no fusion power.
—DrJokepu
2021 Review: Accurate for now, though progress slowly continues.
2010 Prediction: Surprisingly enough, Apple will still stay relevant even though Steve Jobs will have to leave his position due to health problems or something else.
—DrJokepu
2021 Review: Prophetic. Steve Jobs resigned as CEO the following year due to his health and died shortly afterwards. Apple went on to become the first publicly-traded company to reach a market capitalisation of a trillion dollars in 2018, and the first to reach two trillion dollars in 2020.
2010 Prediction: Lady Gaga will be the new Madonna.
—DrJokepu
2021 Review: Arguably accurate.
2010 Prediction: I wrote my PhD on ubiquitous computing, and I can tell you that I heard "this is the year" for ubicomp every single year I spent writing it. I finished it last year, and stuff I wrote back in 2002 was still relevant. It's an incremental design that will slowly, slowly come, but nothing dramatic anytime soon, even across a decade.
—adw
2021 Review: Sounds right to me.
2010 Prediction: Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp. That'll be a watershed moment: the politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are. he politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are.
—kngspook
2021 Review: The author of this prediction might not have had precisely what we see today in mind, but in broad terms this was very prescient.
2010 Prediction: A habitable (to some life, not necessarily to human life) extra-solar Earth like planet is discovered by 2020.
—kf
2021 Review: This still isn't known with complete certainty, but the science has progressed enough to identify many plausible candidates.
2010 Prediction: My timeline is that Kepler has discovered hundreds of rocky planets in the habitable zones of their suns by 2013.
—kf
2021 Review: Accurate. The Kepler Space Telescope had identified hundreds of Earth-size planets by late 2011.
2010 Prediction: I think this is finally going to be the post-PC decade. The evolution of SmartPhones, set tops, cloud computing and other mobile devices is going to make the PC redundant for most people. By the end of this decade I could see the PC being exclusively a business tool or power user tool.
—jsz0
And...
2010 Prediction: By the end of the decade, the phone is the personal computer.
—ericb
2021 Review: Sounds more or less right to me.
2010 Prediction: Googles turnover exeeds Microsofts by 2015, if not earlier.
—jacquesm
This happened around 2016.
2010 Prediction: People become more privacy aware after an image search engine with facial recognition is popularized and they realize that any picture ever posted of them by anyone is in the search result for their name. People become less willing to let others take compromising pictures as if they become posted, the link back to them will be made.
—ericb
And...
2010 Prediction: privacy as an issue for the common user
—slvrspoon
2021 Review: Correct, though not specifically due to concerns about facial recognition, even though that technology has been widely deployed for surveillance, particularly in China.
2010 Prediction: KidneyExchange.com has 10,000th successful transplant
—edw519
2021 Review: Non-profit kidney exchange is now a viable option for some patients and their families.
2010 Prediction: The Apple Tablet to Launch 1st Quarter 2020
—edw519
2021 Review: The iPad was launched in April 2010.
2010 Prediction: Trevor Blackwell's Robot Collects Rocks on Mars
—edw519
2021 Review: NASA's (not Trevor Blackwell's) Perseverance rover is currently digging up rocks on Mars for later return to Earth.
2021 Review: This has arguably come to pass, if Virtual Reality headsets count as spherical displays.
2010 Prediction: Multi-core, with identical cores, is abandoned in favour of highly specialized cores
—10ren
2021 Review: Multiple cores haven't been abandoned, but there has been a definite shift towards coprocessors/accelerators and ASICs.
2010 Prediction: By 2019 newspapers may still exist, but will be a niche and relatively expensive retro media format for fashionistas.
—motters
2021 Review: Pretty accurate.
2010 Prediction: America will pull out from Afghanistan, and the central government will fall before the decade ends.
—varjag
2021 Review: A couple of years too early but otherwise prophetic.
2010 Prediction: Facebook will not be displaced by another social network. It will IPO some time in the next two years.
—IsaacL
2021 Review: A nearly perfect prediction. Facebook was not displaced by another social network, and the IPO took place in May 2012.
2010 Prediction: Twitter will become profitable, but not as much as some expect. It will be less profitable than Facebook, and may sell to another company.
—IsaacL
2021 Review: All correct. Twitter became profitable towards the end of the decade, though Facebook is much larger richer. Twitter remains independent for now.
2010 Prediction: Mobile phones won't replace computers, but increasing penetration amongst the poorest in developing countries, and increasingly capable handsets in developed countries (and developing countries) will make them a colossal juggernaut. Many of the really big changes, especially social changes, will be caused by mobiles.
—IsaacL
2021 Review: IsaacL is the Nostradamus of the 2010 thread.
2010 Prediction: Moore's law will at least hiccup and may stop altogether in the middle of the decade, as semiconductor feature widths drop below 11nm. Since this will likely encourage investment in quantum computing and nanotechnology, by 2020 we might be seeing something faster than Moore's Law.
—IsaacL
2021 Review: There is a strong consensus — though not universal — that Moore's law is failing. No new paradigm capable of sustaining advances in general purpose computing faster than Moore's Law has been clearly demonstrated, though something of that kind might conceivably be in the early stages of development. Quantum computing might be such a technology, and quantum supremacy has been demonstrated in principle (albeit only as an academic exercise), but more advances in both theory and engineering are still needed for it to be practically useful (e.g. algorithms with the potential for universal, rather than problem-specific, speedups on the theory side, and easily scalable error correction on the engineering side).
2010 Prediction: An international deal, of the kind that was aimed for at Copenhagen, will be reached over the next five years, though it might not be far-reaching enough to limit warming to 2 degrees in the long-term. (Despite the failure of the Copenhagen talks, it appears that world leaders almost universally recognize the need to take action over man-made climate change, though the various political problems will remain hard problems). China may not be part of such a deal, though the US likely will. Environmental disasters will begin to increase through the decade, as will disasters that are probably not caused by anthropogenic global warming but will be blamed by it anyway; this will provoke more of a push for action.
—IsaacL
2021 Review: Another eerily prescient prediction from IsaacL. The Paris Climate Accords were agreed in 2015; both China and the US were parties to the agreement, though the US officially withdrew in 2020 before being readmitted earlier this year.
2010 Prediction: Increasing fuel prices, and green taxes or incentives, will mean large shops will begin to replaced by warehouses, as traditional retail gives way to home delivery.
—IsaacL
2021 Review: Spot on again. IsaacL noted at the end of his post that he would save a copy of the predictions and look back at them when the time came (presumably last year), writing that he was 'probably laughably wrong on at least 2/3 of them'. I hope he did look back and congratulated himself; I think he deserved it.
2010 Prediction: Both solar and wind power will be produced at a lower cost than power from coal and natural gas plants
—DaniFong
2021 Review: This is now correct for many well-situated installations.
2010 Prediction: Internet will become for most people in developed countries as important as it used to be for "early adopters" in the past.
—antirez
2021 Review: I'd say this is right, but I think it was already true in 2010 to a large extent.
2010 Prediction: continued problems with islam, terrorists
—slvrspoon
2021 Review: There hasn't been another terrorist attack in the West on the scale of 9/11, but there have certainly been 'continued problems', and many lives lost in terrorist incidents.
2010 Prediction: we'll see a good-sized shift in our political base representing the un/under-skilled and unemployed.
—lallysingh
2021 Review: This is difficult to assess, but my sense is that rising resentment about employment opportunities, related to concerns about offshoring and immigration, was indeed a significant factor in the 2016 US presidential election.