- A fascinating animation showing the altitude at which certain things occur, such as bird flights, balloon altitude records, and atmospheric phenomena: https://neal.fun/space-elevator/
- AI agents are taking the tech world by storm. What if we could give an AI system the ability to carry out tasks autonomously? This program does just that, and while in its infancy, the results are quite astonishing. We can now build a team of automatons to do things for us and communicate with us in our own voices, which is absolutely mind-blowing: https://github.com/Significant-Gravitas/Auto-GPT
- The but-for test, AKA sine qua non. This attempt at unearthing causality is cross-disciplinary, being used in fields such as law, insurance, and medicine, and attempts to establish proximate causation by considering that an event is considered the cause of an outcome if that outcome would not have occurred without the event. It’s a form of counterfactual analysis, which itself is plagued by complexity and ambiguity, so I’m quite surprised about its popularity. In an insurance case, causal ambiguity problems can arise when it is difficult to determine the exact cause of an event, making it challenging to assess liability or coverage. One example of causal ambiguity with proximate causation in an insurance case is the case of the World Trade Center (WTC) attacks on September 11, 2001.The events of September 11 involved two separate planes striking the Twin Towers of the WTC in New York City. In the aftermath of the attacks, the owner of the WTC, Larry Silverstein, filed insurance claims with various insurers, including Swiss Re, Allianz, and other major insurance companies. The main point of contention in this case was whether the attack on the Twin Towers constituted one or two separate occurrences for the purpose of determining insurance coverage.Silverstein argued that the two separate planes hitting the towers constituted two separate occurrences, thus entitling him to double the insurance payout. The insurers, however, argued that the attack constituted a single occurrence, as the attack was part of a coordinated plan carried out by the same group of terrorists.The causal ambiguity in this case lies in determining the proximate cause of the damage to the WTC. If the proximate cause is considered the individual planes’ impact, then there would be two separate occurrences. However, if the proximate cause is considered the coordinated terrorist attack, then it would be a single occurrence.In the end, after a long and complicated legal battle, the court ruled in favor of the insurers, determining that the attacks constituted a single occurrence for the purpose of insurance coverage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine_qua_non
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_cause#But-for_test
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