Links and quotes for May 17, 2016: Socialism, the necessity of free will, and more

Socialism is still really unpopular in the United States – Vox

Free Will: We’re better off believing in it – The Atlantic

It seems that when people stop believing they are free agents, they stop seeing themselves as blameworthy for their actions. Consequently, they act less responsibly and give in to their baser instincts. Vohs emphasized that this result is not limited to the contrived conditions of a lab experiment. “You see the same effects with people who naturally believe more or less in free will,” she said. …

Further studies by Baumeister and colleagues have linked a diminished belief in free will to stress, unhappiness, and a lesser commitment to relationships. They found that when subjects were induced to believe that “all human actions follow from prior events and ultimately can be understood in terms of the movement of molecules,” those subjects came away with a lower sense of life’s meaningfulness. Early this year, other researchers published a study showing that a weaker belief in free will correlates with poor academic performance.

The list goes on: Believing that free will is an illusion has been shown to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, and less grateful toward one another. In every regard, it seems, when we embrace determinism, we indulge our dark side.

The numbers of the dead on Facebook are growing fast – BBC

The numbers of the dead on Facebook are growing fast. By 2012, just eight years after the platform was launched, 30 million users with Facebook accounts had died. That number has only gone up since. Some estimates claim more than 8,000 users die each day.

Can Our Bodies Handle the Hyperloop? – Sci Am

Gender Based Occupational Segregation and Sex Differences in Sensory, Motor and Spatial Aptitudes – NBER

Our results suggest that males and females select into occupations in ways predicted by this research. For example, males have been found to have a higher tolerance of noise and are found disproportionately in noisy jobs. We estimate that occupational segregation is higher than it would otherwise be as a result of this selection. Conditional on our mapping of the research on sex differences in the aptitudes into DOT occupational attributes, in both 1970 and 2012, we estimate that absent this selection the Duncan index of occupational segregation would be 23 percent lower than its observed level.

The main implication of this research for research and policy is the identification of these skills as important correlates of the gender occupational segregation.

Amazon’s Giving Away the AI Behind Its Product Recommendations – Wired

“We are releasing DSSTNE as open source software so that the promise of deep learning can extend beyond speech and language understanding and object recognition to other areas such as search and recommendations,” the Q&A section of Amazon’s DSSTNE GitHub page reads. “We hope that researchers around the world can collaborate to improve it. But more importantly, we hope that it spurs innovation in many more areas.”

Paper suggests recent product innovations favor the wealthy –  Via Marginal Revolution

Why are British schools trying to wipe out regional accents? The Guardian