Psychotic “delusions” are more about holding certain genres of idea with a socially inappropriate amount of intensity and obsession than holding a false idea. Lots of non-psychotic people hold false beliefs (eg religious people). And, interestingly, it is absolutely possible to hold a true belief in a psychotic way.
I have observed people during psychotic episodes get obsessed with the idea that social media was sending them personalized messages (quite true; targeted ads are real) or the idea that the nurses on the psych ward were lying to them (they were).
Preoccupation with the revelation of secret knowledge, with one’s own importance, with mistrust of others’ motives, and with influencing others’ thoughts or being influenced by other’s thoughts, are classic psychotic themes.
And it can be a symptom of schizophrenia when someone’s mind gets disproportionately drawn to those themes. This is called being “paranoid” or “grandiose.”
But sometimes (and I suspect more often with more intelligent/self-aware people) the literal content of their paranoid or grandiose beliefs is true!
sometimes the truth really has been hidden!
sometimes people really are lying to you or trying to manipulate you!
sometimes you really are, in some ways, important! sometimes influential people really are paying attention to you!
of course people influence each others’ thoughts—not through telepathy but through communication!
a false psychotic-flavored thought is “they put a chip in my brain that controls my thoughts.” a true psychotic-flavored thought is “Hollywood moviemakers are trying to promote progressive values in the public by implanting messages in their movies.”
These thoughts can come from the same emotional drive, they are drawn from dwelling on the same theme of “anxiety that one’s own thoughts are externally influenced”, they are in a deep sense mere arbitrary verbal representations of a single mental phenomenon...
but if you take the content literally, then clearly one claim is true and one is false.
and a sufficiently smart/self-aware person will feel the “anxiety-about-mental-influence” experience, will search around for a thought that fits that vibe but is also true, and will come up with something a lot more credible than “they put a mind-control chip in my brain”, but is fundamentally coming from the same motive.
There’s an analogous but easier to recognize thing with depression.
A depressed person’s mind is unusually drawn to obsessing over bad things. But this obviously doesn’t mean that no bad things are real or that no depressive’s depressing claims are true.
When a depressive literally believes they are already dead, we call that Cotard’s Delusion, a severe form of psychotic depression. When they say “everybody hates me” we call it a mere “distorted thought”. When they talk accurately about the heat death of the universe we call it “thermodynamics.” But it’s all coming from the same emotional place.
In general, mental illnesses, and mental states generally, provide a “tropism” towards thoughts that fit with certain emotional/aesthetic vibes.
Depression makes you dwell on thoughts of futility and despair
Anxiety makes you dwell on thoughts of things that can go wrong
Mania makes you dwell on thoughts of yourself as powerful or on the extreme importance of whatever you’re currently doing
Paranoid psychosis makes you dwell on thoughts of mistrust, secrets, and influencing/being influenced
You can, to some extent, “filter” your thoughts (or the ones you publicly express) by insisting that they make sense. You still have a bias towards the emotional “vibe” you’re disposed to gravitate towards; but maybe you don’t let absurd claims through your filter even if they fit the vibe. Maybe you grudgingly admit the truth of things that don’t fit the vibe but technically seem correct.
this does not mean that the underlying “tropism” or “bias” does not exist!!!
this does not mean that you believe things “only because they are true”!
in a certain sense, you are doing the exact same thing as the more overtly irrational person, just hiding it better!
the “bottom line” in terms of vibe has already been written, so it conveys no “updates” about the world
the “bottom line” in terms of details may still be informative because you’re checking that part and it’s flexible
“He’s not wrong but he’s still crazy” is a valid reaction to someone who seems to have a mental-illness-shaped tropism to their preoccupations.
eg if every post he writes, on a variety of topics, is negative and gloomy, then maybe his conclusions say more about him than about the truth concerning the topic;
he might still be right about some details but you shouldn’t update too far in the direction of “maybe I should be gloomy about this too”
Conversely, “this sounds like a classic crazy-person thought, but I still separately have to check whether it’s true” is also a valid and important move to make (when the issue is important enough to you that the extra effort is worth it).
Just because someone has a mental illness doesn’t mean every word out of their mouth is false!
(and of course this assumption—that “crazy” people never tell the truth—drives a lot of psychiatric abuse.)
I once saw a video on Instagram of a psychiatrist recommending to other psychiatrists that they purchase ear scopes to check out their patients’ ears, because: 1. Apparently it is very common for folks with severe mental health issues to imagine that there is something in their ear (e.g., a bug, a listening device) 2. Doctors usually just say “you are wrong, there’s nothing in your ear” without looking 3. This destroys trust, so he started doing cursory checks with an ear scope 4. Far more often than he expected (I forget exactly, but something like 10-20%ish), there actually was something in the person’s ear—usually just earwax buildup, but occasionally something else like a dead insect—that was indeed causing the sensation, and he gained a clinical pathway to addressing his patients’ discomfort that he had previously lacked
It’s pretty far from meeting dath ilan’s standard though; in fact an x-ray would be more than sufficient as anyone capable of putting something in someone’s ear would obviously vastly prefer to place it somewhere harder to check, whereas nobody would be capable of defeating an x-ray machine as metal parts are unavoidable.
This concern pops up in books on the Cold War (employees at every org and every company regularly suffer from mental illnesses at somewhere around their base rates, but things get complicated at intelligence agencies where paranoid/creative/adversarial people are rewarded and even influence R&D funding) and an x-ray machine cleanly resolved the matter every time.
Schizophrenia is the archetypal definitely-biological mental disorder, but recently for reasons relevant to the above, I’ve been wondering if that is wrong/confused. Here’s my alternate (admittedly kinda uninformed) model:
Psychosis is a biological state or neural attractor, which we can kind of symptomatically characterize, but which really can only be understood at a reductionistic level.
One of the symptoms/consequences of psychosis is getting extreme ideas at extreme amounts of intensity.
This symptom/consequence then triggers a variety of social dynamics that give classic schizophrenic-like symptoms such as, as you say, “preoccupation with the revelation of secret knowledge, with one’s own importance, with mistrust of others’ motives, and with influencing others’ thoughts or being influenced by other’s thoughts”
That is, if you suddenly get an extreme idea (e.g. that the fly that flapped past you is a sign from god that you should abandon your current life), you would expect dynamics like:
People get concerned for you and try to dissuade you, likely even conspiring in private to do so (and even if they’re not conspiring, it can seem like a conspiracy). In response, it might seem appropriate to distrust them.
Or, if one interprets it as them just lacking the relevant information, one needs to develop some theory of why one has access to special information that they don’t.
Or, if one is sympathetic to their concern, it would be logical to worry about one’s thoughts getting influenced.
But these sorts of dynamics can totally be triggered by extreme beliefs without psychosis! This might also be related to how Enneagram type 5 (the rationalist type) is especially prone to schizophrenia-like symptoms.
(When I think “in a psychotic way”, I think of the neurological disorder, but it seems like the way you use it in your comment is more like the schizophrenia-like social dynamic?)
In general, mental illnesses, and mental states generally, provide a “tropism” towards thoughts that fit with certain emotional/aesthetic vibes.
Depression makes you dwell on thoughts of futility and despair
Anxiety makes you dwell on thoughts of things that can go wrong
Mania makes you dwell on thoughts of yourself as powerful or on the extreme importance of whatever you’re currently doing
Paranoid psychosis makes you dwell on thoughts of mistrust, secrets, and influencing/being influenced
Also tangential, this is sort of a “general factor” model of mental states. That often seems applicable, but recently my default interpretation of factor models has been that they tend to get at intermediary variables and not root causes.
Let’s take an analogy with computer programs. If you look at the correlations in which sorts of processes run fast or slow, you might find a broad swathe of processes whose performance is highly correlated, because they are all predictably CPU-bound. However, when these processes are running slow, there will usually be some particular program that is exhausting the CPU and preventing the others from running. This problematic program can vary massively from computer to computer, so it is hard to predict or model in general, but often easy to identify in the particular case by looking at which program is most extreme.
Thank you, this is interesting and important. I worry that it overstates similarity of different points on a spectrum, though.
in a certain sense, you are doing the exact same thing as the more overtly irrational person, just hiding it better!
In a certain sense, yes. In other, critical senses, no. This is a case where quantitative differences are big enough to be qualitative. When someone is clinically delusional, there are a few things which distinguish it from the more common wrong ideas. Among them, the inability to shut up about it when it’s not relevant, and the large negative impact on relationships and daily life. For many many purposes, “hiding it better” is the distinction that matters.
I fully agree that “He’s not wrong but he’s still crazy” is valid (though I’d usually use less-direct phrasing). It’s pretty rare that “this sounds like a classic crazy-person thought, but I still separately have to check whether it’s true” happens to me, but it’s definitely not never.
For a while I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about specifically the versions of the idea where I couldn’t easily tell how true they were… which I suppose I do think is the correct place to be paying attention to?
One has to be a bit careful with this though. E.g. someone experiencing or having experienced harassment may have a seemingly pathological obsession on the circumstances and people involved in the situation, but it may be completely proportional to the way that it affected them—it only seems pathological to people who didn’t encounter the same issues.
If it’s not serving them, it’s pathological by definition, right?
So obsessing about exactly those circumstances and types of people could be pathological if it’s done more than will protect them in the future, weighing in the emotional cost of all that obsessing.
Of course we can’t just stop patterns of thought as soon as we decide they’re pathological. But deciding it doesn’t serve me so I want to change it is a start.
Yes, it’s proportional to the way it affected them—but most of the effect is in the repetition of thoughts about the incident and fear of future similar experiences. Obsessing about unpleasant events is natural, but it often seems pretty harmful itself.
Trauma is a horrible thing. There’s a delicate balance between supporting someone’s right and tendency to obsess over their trauma while also supporting their ability to quit re-traumatizing themselves by simulating their traumatic event repeatedly.
If it’s not serving them, it’s pathological by definition, right?
This seems way too strong, otherwise any kind of belief or emotion that is not narrowly in pursuit of your goals is pathological.
I completely agree that it’s important to strike a balance between revisiting the incident and moving on.
but most of the effect is in the repetition of thoughts about the incident and fear of future similar experiences.
This seems partially wrong. The thoughts are usually consequences of the damage that is done, and they can be unhelpful in their own right, but they are not usually the problem. E.g. if you know that X is an abuser and people don’t believe you, I wouldn’t go so far as saying your mental dissonance about it is the problem.
Some psychiatry textbooks classify “overvalued ideas” as distinct from psychotic delusions.
Depending on how wide you make the definition, a whole rag-bag of diagnoses from the DSM V are overvalued ideas (e.g, anorexia nervosa over valuing being fat).
Most people will do very bad things, including mob violence, if they are peer-pressured enough.
It’s not literally everyone, but there is no neurotype or culture that is immune to peer pressure.
Immunity to peer pressure is a rare accomplishment.
You wouldn’t assume that everyone in some category would be able to run a 4-minute mile or win a math olympiad. It takes a “perfect storm” of talent, training, and motivation.
I’m not sure anybody “just” innately lacks the machinery to be peer-pressured. That’s a common claim about autistics and loners, but I really don’t think it fits observation. Lots of people “don’t fit in” in one way, but are very driven to conform in other social contexts or about other topics.
Evidence that any culture (or subculture), present or past, didn’t have peer pressure seems really weak.
there are environments where being independent-minded or high-integrity is valorized, but most of them still have covert peer-pressure dynamics.
Possibly all robust resistance to peer pressure is intentionally cultivated?
In other words, maybe it’s not enough for a person to just not happen to feel a pull towards conformity. That just means they haven’t yet encountered the triggers that would make them inclined to conform.
If someone really can’t be peer-pressured, maybe they have to actually believe that peer pressure is bad and make an active effort to resist it. Even that doesn’t always succeed, but it’s a necessary condition.
upshot #1: It may be appropriate to be suspicious of claims like “I just hang out with those people, I’m not influenced by them.” Most people, in the long run, do get influenced by their peer group.
otoh I also don’t think cutting off contact with anyone “impure”, or refusing to read stuff you disapprove of, is either practical or necessary. we can engage with people and things without being mechanically “nudged” by them.
maybe the distinction between engaging in any way and viewing someone as your ingroup is important?
or maybe we just have to Get Good at resisting peer pressure (even though that’s super hard and rare.) Otherwise the next time some terrible thing happens to be popular, we’ll go along with it.
like...basic realism here. most things don’t last forever, it is an extraordinary claim to say that your virtue would survive any change in your culture.
upshot #2: “would probably have been a collaborator in Nazi Germany” is not actually that serious an accusation. it just means “like the majority of the population, not at all heroic.” in good circumstances, non-heroes make perfectly fine friends and neighbors. in bad circumstances, they might murder you. that’s what makes the circumstances bad!
and don’t be too quick to assume that someone who’s never been in bad circumstances would be a hero. it’s just hard to tell ahead of time.
otoh I also don’t think cutting off contact with anyone “impure”, or refusing to read stuff you disapprove of, is either practical or necessary. we can engage with people and things without being mechanically “nudged” by them.
I think the reason not to do this is because of peer pressure. Ideally you should have the bad pressures from your peers cancel out, and in order to accomplish this you need your peers to be somewhat decorrelated from each other, and you can’t really do this if all your peers and everyone you listen to is in the same social group.
What is categorized as “peer pressure” here? Explicit threats to report you to authorities if you don’t conform? I’m guessing not. But how about implicit threats? What if you’ve heard (or read in the news) stories about people who don’t conform—in ways moderately but not hugely more extreme than you—having their careers ruined? In any situation that you could call “peer pressure”, I imagine there’s always at least the possibility of some level of social exclusion.
The defining questions for that aspect would appear to be “Do you believe that you would face serious risk of punishment for not conforming?” and “Would a reasonable person in your situation believe the same?”. Which don’t necessarily have the same answer. It might, indeed, be that people whom you observe to be “conformist” are the ones who are oversensitive to the risk of social exclusion.
We call it “peer pressure” when it is constraining the individual (or at least some of them) without providing perceived mutual value. It is the same mechanism that leads to people collaborating for the common good. The interesting question is which forces or which environments lead to a negative sum game.
I kinda agree with the claim, but disagree with its framing. You’re imagining that peer pressure is something extraneous to the person’s core personality, which they want to resist but usually fail. Instead, the desire to fit in, to be respected, liked and admired by other people, is one of the core desires that most (virtually all?) people have. It’s approximately on the same level as e.g. the desire to avoid pain. So, people don’t “succumb to peer pressure”, they (unconsciously) choose to prioritize social needs over other considerations.
At the same time, the moral denouncing of groupthink is mostly a self-deception defense against hostile telepaths. With two important caveats:
Having “independent thinking” as part of the ethos of a social group is actually beneficial for that group’s ability to discover true things. While the members of such a group still feel the desire to be liked by other members, they also have the license to disagree without being shunned for it, and are even rewarded for interesting dissenting opinions.
Hyperbolic discount seems to be real, i.e. human preferences are time-inconsistent. For example, you can be tempted to eat candy when one is placed in front of you, while also taking measures to avoid such temptation in the future. Something analogous might apply to peer pressure.
he desire to fit in, to be respected, liked and admired by other people, is one of the core desires that most (virtually all?) people have. It’s approximately on the same level as e.g. the desire to avoid pain.
I think the comparison to pain is correct in the sense that some part of the brain (brainstem) is responding to bodily signals in the same mechanistic way as it is to pain signals. The desire to fit in is grounded in something. Steven Byrnes suggests a mechanism in Neuroscience of human social instincts: a sketch.
I won’t claim to be immune to peer pressure but at least on the epistemic front I think I have a pretty legible track record of believing things that are not very popular in the environments I’ve been in.
As for a specific group of people resistant to peer pressure—psychopaths. Psychopaths don’t conform to peer pressure easily—or any kind of pressure, for that matter. Many of them are in fact willing to murder, sit in jail, or otherwise become very ostracized if it aligns with whatever goals they have in mind. I’d wager that the fact that a large percentage of psychopaths literally end up jailed speaks for itself—they just don’t mind the consequences that much.
This is easily explained due to psychopaths being fearless and mostly lacking empathy. As far as I recall, some physiological correlates exist—psychopaths have a low cortisol response to stressors compared to normies. On top of the apparent fact that they are indifferent towards others’ feelings, some brain imaging data supports this as well.
What they might be more vulnerable to is that peer pressure sometimes goes hand in hand with power and success. Psychopaths like power and success, and they might therefore play along with rules to get more of what they want. That might look like caving in to peer pressure, but judging by how the pathology is contemporarily understood, I’d still say it’s not the pressure itself, but the benefits aligned with succumbing to it.
there is no neurotype or culture that is immune to peer pressure
Seems like the sort of thing that would correlate pretty robustly to big-5 agreeableness, and in that sense there are neurotypes immune to peer pressure.
Edit: One may also suspect a combination of agreeableness and non-openness
“Peer pressure” is a negatively-valanced term that could be phrased more neutrally as “social consequences”. Seems to me it’s good to think about what the social consequences of doing or not doing a thing will be (whether to “give in to peer pressure”, and act in such a way as to get positive reactions from other people/avoid negative reactions, or not), but not to treat conforming when there is social pressure as inherently bad. It can lead to mob violence. Or, it can lead to a simplified social world which is easier for everyone to navigate, because you’re doing things that have commonly understood meanings (think of teaching children to interact in a polite way). Or it can lead to great accomplishments, when someone internalizes whatever leads to status within their social hierarchy. Take away the social pressure to do things that impress other people, and lots of people might laze about doing the minimum required to have a nice life on the object-level, which in a society as affluent as the modern industrialized world is not much. There are of course other motivations for striving for internalized goals, but like, “people whose opinion I care about will be impressed” is one, and it does mean some good stuff gets done.
Someone who is literally immune to peer pressure to the extent that social consequences do not enter their mind as a thing that might happen or get considered at all in their decision-making, will probably face great difficulties in navigating their environment and accomplishing anything. People will try fairly subtle social pressure tactics, they will be disregarded as if they hadn’t happened, and the person who tried it will either have to disengage from the not-peer-pressurable person, or escalate to more blunt control measures that do register as a thing this person will pay attention to.
Even if I’m right about “is immune to peer pressure” not being an ideal to aim for, I still do acknowledge that being extremely sensitive to what others may think has downsides, and when taken to extremes you get “I can’t go to the store because of social anxiety”. A balanced approach would be aiming to avoid paranoia while recognizing social pressure when someone is attempting to apply some, without immediately reacting to it, and be able to think through how to respond on a case-by-case basis. This is a nuanced social skill. “This person is trying to blackmail me by threatening social exclusion through blacklisting or exposing socially damaging information about me if I don’t comply with what they want” requires a different response than “this person thinks my shirt looks tacky and their shirt looks cool. I note their sense of fashion, and how much importance they attach to clothing choices, and may choose to dress so as to get a particular reaction from them in future, without necessarily agreeing with/adopting/internalizing their perspective on the matter”, which in turn is different from “everyone in this room disagrees with me about thing X (or at least says they disagree, preference falsification is a thing) should I say it anyway?”.
The key, I would think, is to raise people to understand what social pressure is and its various forms, and that conformance is a choice they get to make rather than a thing they have to do or they’ll suffer social death. Choices have consequences, but the worst outcomes I’ve seen from peer pressure are when people don’t want to do the thing that is being peer-pressured towards, but don’t treat “just don’t conform” as an option they can even consider and ask what the consequences would be.
otoh I also don’t think cutting off contact with anyone “impure”, or refusing to read stuff you disapprove of, is either practical or necessary. we can engage with people and things without being mechanically “nudged” by them.
Is there a particular reason to believe this? Or is it more of a hope?
I think what might help is engaging with different kinds of people. A group’s pressure is weaker if you also meet people who openly believe that the group is a group of idiots. You can voice your concerns without fearing disapproval; but even if some things are difficult to explain to outsiders, at least you have a mental model of someone who would disagree.
But I also suspect that some people would just develop a different persona for each group, and let themselves be peer-pressured towards different extremes on different occasions.
some people would just develop a different persona for each group
That is possible but maybe only more likely if the groups are very clearly separate, such as when you are in a faraway country for a long time. But if you are e.g. in a multi-cultural city where there are many maybe even overlapping groups or where you can’t easily tell which group it is, it is more difficult to “overfit” and easier to learn a more general strategy. I think universal morality is something of the more general case of this.
Julian Jaynes would say that this is how human consciousness as we know it today has evolved.
Which makes me wonder, what would he say about the internet bubbles we have today. Did we perhaps already reach peak consciousness, and now the pendulum is swinging back? (Probably not, but it’s an interesting thought.)
Most people will do very bad things, including mob violence, if they are peer-pressured enough.
Shouldn’t this be weighted against the good things people do if they are peer-pressured? I think there’s value in not conforming but if all cultures have peer-pressure there needs to be a careful analysis of the pros and cons instead of simply strifing for immunity from it.
I’m not sure anybody “just” innately lacks the machinery to be peer-pressured.
My first thought here aren’t autists but psychopaths.
My fear is that this will extend to many aspects of the Trump administration (just look at how it’s vetting people based on who they voted for/if they believe in the 2020 election results), esp b/c some people who work in the government are now deleting their old tweets...
it’s wrong to try to control people or stop them from doing locally self-interested & non-violent things in the interest of “humanity’s future”, in part because this is so futile.
if the only way we survive is if we coerce people to make a costly and painful investment in a speculative idea that might not even work, then we don’t survive! you do not put people through real pain today for a “someday maybe!” This applies to climate change, AI x-risk, and socially-conservative cultural reform.
most cultures and societies in human history have been so bad, by my present values, that I’m not sure they’re not worse than extinction, and we should expect that most possible future states are similarly bad;
history clearly teaches us that civilizations and states collapse (on timescales of centuries) and the way to bet is that ours will as well, but it’s kind of insane hubris to think that this can be prevented;
the literal species Homo sapiens is pretty resilient and might avoid extinction for a very long time, but have you MET Homo sapiens? this is cold fucking comfort! (see e.g. C. J. Cherryh’s vision in 40,000 in Gehenna for a fictional representation not far from my true beliefs — we are excellent at adaptation and survival but when we “survive” this often involves unimaginable harshness and cruelty, and changing into something that our ancestors would not have liked at all.)
identifying with species-survival instead of with the stuff we value now is popular among the thoughtful but doesn’t make any sense to me;
in general it does not make sense, to me, to compromise on personal values in order to have more power/influence. you will be able to cause stuff to happen, but who cares if it’s not the stuff you want?
similarly, it does not make sense to consciously optimize for having lots of long-term descendants. I love my children; I expect they’ll love their children; but go too many generations out and it’s straight-up fantasyland. My great-grandparents would have hated me. And that’s still a lot of shared culture and values! Do you really have that much in common with anyone from five thousand years ago?
Evolution is not your friend. God is not your friend. Everything worth loving will almost certainly perish. Did you expect it to last forever?
“I love whatever is best at surviving” or “I love whatever is strongest” means you don’t actually care what it’s like. It means you have no loyalty and no standards. It means you don’t care so much if the way things turn out is hideous, brutal, miserable, abusive… so long as it technically “is alive” or “wins”. Fuck that.
I despise sour grapes. If the thing I want isn’t available, I’m not going to pretend that what is available is what I want.
I am not going to embrace the “realistic” plan of allying with something detestable but potent. There is always an alternative, even if the only alternative is “stay true to your dreams and then get clobbered.”
it’s wrong to try to control people or stop them from doing locally self-interested & non-violent things in the interest of “humanity’s future”, in part because this is so futile.
if the only way we survive is if we coerce people to make a costly and painful investment in a speculative idea that might not even work, then we don’t survive! you do not put people through real pain today for a “someday maybe!” This applies to climate change, AI x-risk, and socially-conservative cultural reform.
How does “this is so futile” square with the massive success of taxes and criminal justice? From what I’ve heard, states have managed to reduce murder rates by 50x. Obviously that’s stopping people from something violent rather than non-violent, but what’s the aspect of violence that makes it relevant? Or e.g. how about taxes which fund change to renewable energy? The main argument for socially-conservative cultural reform is fertility, but what about taxes that fund kindergartens, they sort of seem to have a similar function?
The key trick to make it correct to try to control people or stop them is to be stronger than them.
I think this prompts some kind of directional update in me. My paraphrase of this is:
it’s actually pretty ridiculous to think you can steer the future
It’s also pretty ridiculous to choose to identify with what the future is likely to be.
Therefore…. Well, you don’t spell out your answer. My answer is “I should have a personal meaning-making resolution to ‘what would I do if those two things are both true,’ even if one of them turns out to be false, so that I can think clearly about whether they are true.”
I’ve done a fair amount of similar meaningmaking work through the lens of Solstice 2022 and 2023. But that was more through lens of ‘nearterm extinction’ than ‘inevitability of value loss’, which does feel like a notably different thing.
So it seems worth doing some thinking and pre-grieving about that.
I of course have some answers to ‘why value loss might not be inevitable’, but it’s not something I’ve yet thought about through an unclouded lens.
Therefore, do things you’d be in favor of having done even if the future will definitely suck. Things that are good today, next year, fifty years from now… but not like “institute theocracy to raise birth rates”, which is awful today even if you think it might “save the world”.
I honestly feel that the only appropriate response is something along the lines of “fuck defeatism”[1].
This comment isn’t targeted at you, but at a particular attractor in thought space.
Let me try to explain why I think rejecting this attractor is the right response rather than engaging with it.
I think it’s mostly that I don’t think that talking about things at this level of abstraction is useful. It feels much more productive to talk about specific plans. And if you have a general, high-abstraction argument that plans in general are useless, but I have a specific argument why a specific plan is useful, I know which one I’d go with :-).
Don’t get me wrong, I think that if someone struggles for a certain amount of time to try to make a difference and just hits wall after wall, then at some point they have to call it. But “never start” and “don’t even try” are completely different.
It’s also worth noting, that saving the world is a team sport. It’s okay to pursue a plan that depends on a bunch of other folk stepping up and playing their part.
What about influencing? If, in order for things to go OK, human civilization must follow a narrow path which I individually need to steer us down, we’re 100% screwed because I can’t do that. But I do have some influence. A great deal of influence over my own actions (I’m resisting the temptation to go down a sidetrack about determinism, assuming you’re modeling humans as things that can make meaningful choices), substantial influence over the actions of those close to me, some influence over my acquaintances, and so on until very extremely little (but not 0) influence over humanity as a whole. I also note that you use the word “we”, but I don’t know who the “we” is. Is it everyone? If so, then everyone collectively has a great deal of say about how the future will go, if we collectively can coordinate. Admittedly, we’re not very good at this right now, but there are paths to developing this civilizational skill further than we currently have. So maybe the answer to “we can’t steer the future” is “not yet we can’t, at least not very well”?
it’s wrong to try to control people or stop them from doing locally self-interested & non-violent things in the interest of “humanity’s future”, in part because this is so futile.
if the only way we survive is if we coerce people to make a costly and painful investment in a speculative idea that might not even work, then we don’t survive! you do not put people through real pain today for a “someday maybe!” This applies to climate change, AI x-risk, and socially-conservative cultural reform.
Agree, mostly. The steering I would aim for would be setting up systems wherein locally self-interested and non-violent things people are incentivized to do have positive effects for humanity’s future. In other words, setting up society such that individual and humanity-wide effects are in the same direction with respect to some notion of “goodness”, rather than individual actions harming the group, or group actions harming or stifling the individual. We live in a society where we can collectively decide the rules of the game, which is a way of “steering” a group. I believe we should settle on a ruleset where individual short-term moves that seem good lead to collective long-term outcomes that seem good. Individual short-term moves that clearly lead to bad collective long-term outcomes should be disincentivized, and if the effects are bad enough then coercive prevention does seem warranted (E. G., a SWAT team to prevent a mass shooting). And similarly for groups stifling individuals ability to do things that seem to them to be good for them in the short term. And rules that have perverse incentive effects that are harmful to the individual, the group, or both? Definitely out. This type of system design is like a haiku—very restricted in what design choices are permissible, but not impossible in principle. Seems worth trying because if successful, everything is good with no coercion. If even a tiny subsystem can be designed (or the current design tweaked) in this way, that by itself is good. And the right local/individual move to influence the systems of which you are a part towards that state, as a cognitively-limited individual who can’t hold the whole of complex systems in their mind and accurately predict the effect of proposed changes out into the far future, might be as simple as saying “in this instance, you’re stifling the individual” and “in this instance you’re harming the group/long-term future” wherever you see it, until eventually you get a system that does neither. Like arriving at a haiku by pointing out every time the rules of haiku construction are violated.
I disagree a lot! Many things have gotten better! Is sufferage, abolition, democracy, property rights etc not significant? All the random stuff eg better angels of our nature claims has gotten better.
Either things have improved in the past or they haven’t, and either people trying to “steer the future” in some sense have been influential on these improvements. I think things have improved, and I think there’s definitely not strong evidence that people trying to steer the future was always useless. Because trying to steer the future is very important and motivating, i try to do it.
Yes the counterfactual impact of you individually trying to steer the future may or may not be insignificant, but people trying to steer the future is better than no one doing that!
“I love whatever is best at surviving” or “I love whatever is strongest” means you don’t actually care what it’s like. It means you have no loyalty and no standards. It means you don’t care so much if the way things turn out is hideous, brutal, miserable, abusive… so long as it technically “is alive” or “wins”. Fuck that.
Proposal: For any given system, there’s a destiny based on what happens when it’s developed to its full extent. Sight is an example of this, where both human eyes and octopus eyes and cameras have ended up using lenses to steer light, despite being independent developments.
“I love whatever is the destiny” is, as you say, no loyalty and no standards. But, you can try to learn what the destiny is, and then on the basis of that decide whether to love or oppose it.
Plants and solar panels are the natural destiny for earthly solar energy. Do you like solarpunk? If so, good news, you can love the destiny, not because you love whatever is the destiny, but because your standards align with the destiny.
1) Regarding tiling the universy with computronium as destiny is Gnostic heresy.
2) I would like to learn more about the ecology of space infrastructure. Intuitively it seems to me like the Earth is much more habitable than anywhere else, and so I would expect sarah’s “this is so futile” point to actually be inverted when it comes to e.g. a Dyson sphere, where the stagnation-inducing worldwide regulation regulation will by-default be stronger than the entropic pressure.
More generally, I have a concept I call the “infinite world approximation”, which I think held until ~WWI. Under this approximation, your methods have to be robust against arbitrary adversaries, because they could invade from parts of the ecology you know nothing about. However, this approximation fails for Earth-scale phenomena, since Earth-scale organizations could shoot down any attempt at space colonization.
I would more say the opposite: Henri Bergson (better known for inventing vitalism) convinced me that there ought to be a simple explanation for the forms life takes, and so I spent a while performing root cause analysis on that, and ended up with the sun as the creator.
history clearly teaches us that civilizations and states collapse (on timescales of centuries) and the way to bet is that ours will as well, but it’s kind of insane hubris to think that this can be prevented;
It seems like it makes some difference whether our civilization collapses the way that the Roman Empire collapsed, the way that the British Empire collapsed, or the way that the Soviet Union collapsed. “We must prevent our civilization from ever collapsing” is clearly an implausible goal, but “we should ensure that a successor structure exists and is not much worse than what we have now” seems rather more reasonable, no?
This post reads like it’s trying to express an attitude or put forward a narrative frame, rather than trying to describe the world.
Many of these claims seem obviously false, if I take them at face value at take a moment to consider what they’re claiming and whether it’s true.
e.g., On the first two bullet points it’s easy to come up with counterexamples. Some successful attempts to steer the future, by stopping people from doing locally self-interested & non-violent things, include: patent law (“To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries”) and banning lead in gasoline. As well as some others that I now see that other commenters have mentioned.
I don’t think it was articulated quite right—it’s more negative than my overall stance (I wrote it when unhappy) and a little too short-termist.
I do still believe that the future is unpredictable, that we should not try to “constrain” or “bind” all of humanity forever using authoritarian means, and that there are many many fates worse than death and we should not destroy everything we love for “brute” survival.
And, also, I feel that transience is normal and only a bit sad. It’s good to save lives, but mortality is pretty “priced in” to my sense of how the world works. It’s good to work on things that you hope will live beyond you, but Dark Ages and collapses are similarly “priced in” as normal for me. Sara Teasdale: “You say there is no love, my love, unless it lasts for aye; Ah folly, there are episodes far better than the play!” If our days are as a passing shadow, that’s not that bad; we’re used to it.
I worry that people who are not ok with transience may turn themselves into monsters so they can still “win”—even though the meaning of “winning” is so changed it isn’t worth it any more.
I do think this comes back to the messages in On Green and also why the post went down like a cup of cold sick—rationality is about winning. Obviously nobody on LW wants to “win” in the sense you describe, but more winning over more harmony on the margin, I think.
The future will probably contain less of the way of life I value (or something entirely orthogonal), but then that’s the nature of things.
I have been having some similar thoughts on the main points here for a while and thanks for this.
I guess to me what needs attention is when people do things along the lines of “benefit themselves and harm other people”. That harm has a pretty strict definition, though I know we may always be able to give borderline examples. This definitely includes the abuse of power in our current society and culture, and any current risks etc. (For example, if we are constraining to just AI with warning on content, https://www.iwf.org.uk/media/q4zll2ya/iwf-ai-csam-report_public-oct23v1.pdf. And this is very sad to see.) On the other hand, with regards to climate change (can also be current too) or AI risks, it probably should also be concerned when corporates or developers neglect known risks or pursue science/development irresponsibly. I think it is not wrong to work on these, but I just don’t believe in “do not solve the other current risks and only work on future risks.”
On some comments that were saying our society is “getting better”—sure, but the baseline is a very low bar (slavery for example). There are still many, many, many examples in different societies of how things are still very systematically messed up.
You seem to dislike reality. Could it not be that the worldview which clashes with reality is wrong (or rather, in the wrong), rather than reality being wrong/in the wrong? For instance that “nothing is forever” isn’t a design flaw, but one of the required properties that a universe must have in order to support life?
“fair-weather friends” who are only nice to you when it’s easy for them, are not true friends at all
if you don’t have the courage/determination to do the right thing when it’s difficult, you never cared about doing the right thing at all
if you sometimes engage in motivated cognition or are sometimes intellectually lazy/sloppy, then you don’t really care about truth at all
if you “mean well” but don’t put in the work to ensure that you’re actually making a positive difference, then your supposed “well-meaning” intentions were fake all along
I can see why people have these views.
if you actually need help when you’re in trouble, then “fair-weather friends” are no use to you
if you’re relying on someone to accomplish something, it’s not enough for them to “mean well”, they have to deliver effectively, and they have to do so consistently. otherwise you can’t count on them.
if you are in an environment where people constantly declare good intentions or “well-meaning” attitudes, but most of these people are not people you can count on, you will find yourself caring a lot about how to filter out the “posers” and “virtue signalers” and find out who’s true-blue, high-integrity, and reliable.
but I think it’s literally false and sometimes harmful to treat “weak”/unreliable good intentions as absolutely worthless.
not all failures are failures to care enough/try hard enough/be brave enough/etc.
sometimes people legitimately lack needed skills, knowledge, or resources!
“either I can count on you to successfully achieve the desired outcome, or you never really cared at all” is a long way from true.
even the more reasonable, “either you take what I consider to be due/appropriate measures to make sure you deliver, or you never really cared at all” isn’t always true either!
some people don’t know how to do what you consider to be due/appropriate measures
some people care some, but not enough to do everything you consider necessary
sometimes you have your own biases about what’s important, and you really want to see people demonstrate a certain form of “showing they care” otherwise you’ll consider them negligent, but that’s not actually the most effective way to increase their success rate
almost everyone has a finite amount of effort they’re willing to put into things, and a finite amount of cost they’re willing to pay. that doesn’t mean you need to dismiss the help they are willing and able to provide.
as an extreme example, do you dismiss everybody as “insufficiently committed” if they’re not willing to die for the cause? or do you accept graciously if all they do is donate $50?
“they only help if it’s fun/trendy/easy/etc”—ok, that can be disappointing, but is it possible you should just make it fun/trendy/easy/etc? or just keep their name on file in case a situation ever comes up where it is fun/trendy/easy and they’ll be helpful then?
it’s harmful to apply this attitude to yourself, saying “oh I failed at this, or I didn’t put enough effort in to ensure a good outcome, so I must literally not care about ideals/ethics/truth/other people.”
like...you do care any amount. you did, in fact, mean well.
you may have lacked skill;
you may have not been putting in enough effort;
or maybe you care somewhat but not as much as you care about something else
but it’s probably not accurate or healthy to take a maximally-cynical view of yourself where you have no “noble” motives at all, just because you also have “ignoble” motives (like laziness, cowardice, vanity, hedonism, spite, etc).
if you have a flicker of a “good intention” to help people, make the world a better place, accomplish something cool, etc, you want to nurture it, not stomp it out as “probably fake”.
your “good intentions” are real and genuinely good, even if you haven’t always followed through on them, even if you haven’t always succeeded in pursuing them.
you don’t deserve “credit” for good intentions equal to the “credit” for actually doing a good thing, but you do deserve any credit at all.
basic behavioral “shaping”—to get from zero to a complex behavior, you have to reward very incremental simple steps in the right direction.
e.g. if you wish you were “nicer to people”, you may have to pat yourself on the back for doing any small acts of kindness, even really “easy” and “trivial” ones, and notice & make part of your self-concept any inclinations you have to be warm or helpful.
“I mean well and I’m trying” has to become a sentence you can say with a straight face. and your good intentions will outpace your skills so you have to give yourself some credit for them.
it may be net-harmful to create a social environment where people believe their “good intentions” will be met with intense suspicion.
it’s legitimately hard to prove that you have done a good thing, particularly if what you’re doing is ambitious and long-term.
if people have the experience of meaning well and trying to do good but constantly being suspected of insincerity (or nefarious motives), this can actually shift their self-concept from “would-be hero” to “self-identified villain”
which is bad, generally
at best, identifying as a villain doesn’t make you actually do anything unethical, but it makes you less effective, because you preemptively “brace” for hostility from others instead of confidently attracting allies
at worst, it makes you lean into legitimately villainous behavior
OTOH, skepticism is valuable, including skepticism of people’s motives.
but it can be undesirable when someone is placed in a “no-win situation”, where from their perspective “no matter what I do, nobody will believe that I mean well, or give me any credit for my good intentions.”
if you appreciate people for their good intentions, sometimes that can be a means to encourage them to do more. it’s not a guarantee, but it can be a starting point for building rapport and starting to persuade. people often want to live up to your good opinion of them.
… this can actually shift their self-concept from “would-be hero” to “self-identified villain”
which is bad, generally
at best, identifying as a villain doesn’t make you actually do anything unethical, but it makes you less effective, because you preemptively “brace” for hostility from others instead of confidently attracting allies
at worst, it makes you lean into legitimately villainous behavior
Sounds like it’s time for a reboot of the ol’ “join the dark side” essay.
I want to register in advance, I have qualms I’d be interested in talking about. (I think they are at least one level more interesting than the obvious ones, and my relationship with them is probably at least one level more interesting than the obvious relational stance)
it may be net-harmful to create a social environment where people believe their “good intentions” will be met with intense suspicion.
The picture I get of Chinese culture from their fiction makes me think China is kinda like this. A recurrent trope was “If you do some good deeds, like offering free medicine to the poor, and don’t do a perfect job, like treating everyone who says they can’t afford medicine, then everyone will castigate you for only wanting to seem good. So don’t do good.” Another recurrent trope was “it’s dumb, even wrong, to be a hero/you should be a villain.” (One annoying variant is “kindness to your enemies is cruelty to your allies”, which is used to justify pointless cruelty.) I always assumed this was a cultural anti-body formed in response to communists doing terrible things in the name of the common good.
there’s a new field of “pan-cancer” where you make (mostly molbio) comparisons across cancers, including vulnerability screens where you use CRISPR or RNAi to knock down each gene and see which ones kill the cancer cells when absent.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s13059-023-03020-w.pdf CRISPR and RNAi both have their strengths and weaknesses but if you look at the overlap there are still a bunch of “pan-essential” genes that all cancers need to survive. (do healthy cells also need those, or are they good therapeutic targets? we just don’t know.)
a call to work harder dammit and treat it like a true war on cancer, not a sedate and bureaucratic academic field
a call for more pan-cancer RNAi vulnerability screens
a call to focus on transcription factors as targets, particularly things like Myc and BRD4 that are particularly involved in the transition to metastasis—we don’t yet have any good drug therapies that work well on metastatic cancers
transcription factors are obviously causally upstream of what makes cancer cancer—its invasiveness, its metastatic potential, its evasion of immune surveillance, etc
they are hard to drug though, because they’re in the nucleus, not on the cell surface. but we can start to do hard things now!
cell surface growth factors (think EGFR) are the easiest to target but the associated drugs have unimpressive clinical effects in most patients because targeting growth factors only slows growth, it doesn’t kill cancer cells. usually just slightly delays the inevitable.
a statement of his redox hobbyhorse—ROS is good, ROS is how the body fights cancer, etc.
not sure how to operationalize this as a strategy. it might, as it turns out, be redundant with immunotherapy.
a couple specific targets/mechanisms he thinks deserve more attention—apparently the circadian regulator PER2 is a tumor suppressor. i’m always down for more attention to circadian stuff.
the Halifax Project researched the hypothesis that low-dose combinations of environmental carcinogens might synergistically increase cancer risk:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CpG_oligodeoxynucleotide this is the inflammatory molecule on bacteria that’s the reason bacterial infections sometimes cause complete regressions of very difficult tumors (like sarcoma—we have no drugs for sarcoma! it’s either surgery or death!). fortunately the immunooncology people are On It and researching this as an immunostimulant.
if you’ve heard of “Coley Toxins”, they’re kind of an alt-med thing with a tantalizing grain of truth—but we don’t need to inject bacteria into tumors any more, we know how they work, we can replicate the effect with well-defined compounds now.
basically this is using the same principle as old-fashioned chemo—hit it in the DNA replication—but with a new target, and with modern structural-biology-based rational drug design to hit the cancer version of the target rather than the healthy-cell type.
would I have guessed there was room for optimism here a priori? no way.
but apparently we have not explored this space sufficiently. now try it with AlphaFold.
I haven’t yet seen many examples of “put the iCasp9 in the cell if-and-only-if the cell has some molecular marker” but that’s the obvious place to go.
you can kinda reduce the drug resistance thing by putting a promotor to increase iCasp9 expression. buddy if this is where we are in 2022 i’m going to predict there is a LOT of potential value in continuing to work out the kinks in this system. get in on the ground floor!
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006291X0302504X if you actually measure what % of ATP comes from glycolysis, cancers cover a wide range, and the distribution overlaps substantially with the distribution of healthy cells. glycolysis dominance is not a distinguishing characteristic of all or even most cancers.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8274378/ mechanical stress is also a natural feature of cancer—tumors get more rigid and experience pressure. in fact this stress can be a trigger for increased proliferation or metastasis, so watch out!
are cancer cells selectively vulnerable to electrical stress? also kinda yeah
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6694/13/9/2283 “tumor treating fields”, just an oscillating electric field, are actually an approved therapy in glioblastoma that extends life a few months. (not saying much though...glioblastoma is so deadly that it’s easy mode from an FDA standpoint)
i don’t even know man. somebody who knows physics explain this. little nanoelectrodes with some chemical functionalization kill cancer cells? “quantum biological tunneling?” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-023-01496-y
cancer cells have depolarized membranes—you can literally distinguish them from healthy cells by voltage alone.
this is a Michael Levin thing. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3528107/ you can give a frog a tumor—or make the tumor go away—through manipulating voltage alone! it does not matter what ion channel you use, it’s about the voltage.
something in (some of?) the neutrophils in (some) humans and a cancer-resistant strain of mice can kill cancer, including when transferred. a Zheng Cui research program.
my take is, he’s not an immunologist and modern methods could elucidate the specific clonal population a LOT better than this, but I like the thought process.
eg https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/pdfExtended/S2211-1247(22)00984-6 we can determine the “good guy” neutrophil subpopulation that infiltrates tumors and promotes an anti-tumor immune response: it’s HLA-DR+CD80+CD86+ICAM1+PD-L1-. in metastasis these guys become PD-L1+ and immunosuppressive.
so like...the secret to replicating Zheng Cui’s miracle mice...might be nivolumab?? don’t get me wrong it’s a good drug but this is anticlimactic.
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/scitranslmed.3007646 alkylphosphocholine is a type of lipid especially present in cancer cells, across cancer types, via lipid rafts. a synthetic analog has preferential uptake in basically all rodent & human tumors. usable for imaging and radiotherapy.
they found a fusion transcript and a corresponding fusion protein—the root cause
they did the reasonable thing: screen a compound library against tumor samples.
one hit is napabucasin, usually known as a STAT3 inhibitor (but that’s not the mechanism here) but somebody owns it
another was irinotecan. and navitoclax...but navitoclax has platelet toxicity
irinotecan + a BcrX PROTAC is being investigated though
or you can just. shRNA the fusion transcript. that’s a thing you can do now.
apparently Elana wanted to do that in 2013 but her dad said “pshaw RNA breaks down in the body.” now Spinraza is a thing (antisense oligonucleotide.) not to mention the mRNA world. truly these are the days of miracle and wonder.
“neutrality is impossible” is sort-of-true, actually, but not a reason to give up.
even a “neutral” college class (let’s say a standard algorithms & data structures CS class) is non-neutral relative to certain beliefs
some people object to the structure of universities and their classes to begin with;
some people may object on philosophical grounds to concepts that are unquestionably “standard” within a field like computer science.
some people may think “apolitical” education is itself unacceptable.
to consider a certain set of topics “political” and not mention them in the classroom is, implicitly, to believe that it is not urgent to resolve or act on those issues (at least in a classroom context), and therefore it implies some degree of acceptance of the default state of those issues.
our “neutral” CS class is implicitly taking a stand on certain things and in conflict with certain conceivable views. but, there’s a wide range of views, including (I think) the vast majority of the actual views of relevant parties like students and faculty, that will find nothing to object to in the class.
we need to think about neutrality in more relative terms:
what rule are you using, and what things are you claiming it will be neutral between?
what is neutrality anyway and when/why do you want it?
neutrality is a type of tactic for establishing cooperation between different entities.
one way (not the only way) to get all parties to cooperate willingly is to promise they will be treated equally.
this is most important when there is actual uncertainty about the balance of power.
eg the Dutch Republic was the first European polity to establish laws of religious tolerance, because it happened to be roughly evenly divided between multiple religions and needed to unite to win its independence.
a system is neutral towards things when it treats them the same.
there lots of ways to treat things the same:
“none of these things belong here”
eg no religion in “public” or “secular” spaces
is the “public secular space” the street? no-hijab rules?
or is it the government? no 10 Commandments in the courthouse?
“each of these things should get equal treatment”
eg Fairness Doctrine
“we will take no sides between these things; how they succeed or fail is up to you”
e.g. “marketplace of ideas”, “colorblindness”
one can always ask, about any attempt at procedural neutrality:
what things does it promise to be neutral between?
are those the right or relevant things to be neutral on?
to what degree, and with what certainty, does this procedure produce neutrality?
is it robust to being intentionally subverted?
here and now, what kind of neutrality do we want?
thanks to the Internet, we can read and see all sorts of opinions from all over the world. a wider array of worldviews are plausible/relevant/worth-considering than ever before. it’s harder to get “on the same page” with people because they may have come from very different informational backgrounds.
even tribes are fragmented. even people very similar to one another can struggle to synch up and collaborate, except in lowest-common-denominator ways that aren’t very productive.
narrowing things down to US politics, no political tribe or ideology is anywhere close to a secure monopoly. nor are “tribes” united internally.
we have relied, until now, on a deep reserve of “normality”—apolitical, even apathetic, Just The Way Things Are. In the US that means, people go to work at their jobs and get paid for it and have fun in their free time. 90′s sitcom style.
there’s still more “normality” out there than culture warriors tend to believe, but it’s fragile. As soon as somebody asks “why is this the way things are?” unexamined normality vanishes.
to the extent that the “normal” of the recent past was functional, this is a troubling development...but in general the operation of the mind is a good thing!
we just have more rapid and broader idea propagation now.
why did “open borders” and “abolish the police” and “UBI” take off recently? because these are simple ideas with intuitive appeal. some % of people will think “that makes sense, that sounds good” once they hear of them. and now, way more people are hearing those kinds of ideas.
when unexamined normality declines, conscious neutrality may become more important.
conscious neutrality for the present day needs to be aware of the wide range of what people actually believe today, and avoid the naive Panglossianism of early web 2.0.
many people believe things you think are “crazy”.
“democratization” may lead to the most popular ideas being hateful, trashy, or utterly bonkers.
on the other hand, depending on what you’re trying to get done, you may very well need to collaborate with allies, or serve populations, whose views are well outside your comfort zone.
neutrality has things to offer:
a way to build trust with people very different from yourself, without compromising your own convictions;
“I don’t agree with you on A, but you and I both value B, so I promise to do my best at B and we’ll leave A out of it altogether”
a way to reconstruct some of the best things about our “unexamined normality” and place them on a firmer foundation so they won’t disappear as soon as someone asks “why?”
a “system of the world” is the framework of your neutrality: aka it’s what you’re not neutral about.
eg:
“melting pot” multiculturalism is neutral between cultures, but does believe that they should mostly be cosmetic forms of diversity (national costumes and ethnic foods) while more important things are “universal” and shared.
democratic norms are neutral about who will win, but not that majority vote should determine the winner.
scientific norms are neutral about which disputed claims will turn out to be true, but not on what sorts of processes and properties make claims credible, and not about certain well-established beliefs
right now our system-of-the-world is weak.
a lot of it is literally decided by software affordances. what the app lets you do is what there is.
there’s a lot that’s healthy and praiseworthy about software companies and their culture, especially 10-20 years ago. but they were never prepared for that responsibility!
a stronger system-of-the-world isn’t dogmatism or naivety.
were intellectuals of the 20th, the 19th, or the 18th centuries childish because they had more explicit shared assumptions than we do? I don’t think so.
we may no longer consider some of their frameworks to be true
but having a substantive framework at all clearly isn’t incompatible with thinking independently, recognizing that people are flawed, or being open to changing your mind.
“hedgehogs” or “eternalists” are just people who consider some things definitely true.
it doesn’t mean they came to those beliefs through “blind faith” or have never questioned them.
it also doesn’t mean they can’t recognize uncertainty about things that aren’t foundational beliefs.
operating within a strongly-held, assumed-shared worldview can be functional for making collaborative progress, at least when that worldview isn’t too incompatible with reality.
mathematics was “non-rigorous”, by modern standards, until the early 20th century; and much of today’s mathematics will be considered “non-rigorous” if machine-verified proofs ever become the norm. but people were still able to do mathematics in centuries past, most of which we still consider true.
the fact that you can generate a more general framework, within which the old framework was a special case; or in which the old framework was an unprincipled assumption of the world being “nicely behaved” in some sense; does not mean that the old framework was not fruitful for learning true things.
sometimes, taking for granted an assumption that’s not literally always true (but is true mostly, more-or-less, or in the practically relevant cases) can even be more fruitful than a more radically skeptical and general view.
an *intellectual* system-of-the-world is the framework we want to use for the “republic of letters”, the sub-community of people who communicate with each other in a single conversational web and value learning and truth.
that community expanded with the printing press and again with the internet.
it is radically diverse in opinion.
it is not literally universal. not everybody likes to read and write; not everybody is curious or creative. a lot of the “most interesting people in the world” influence each other.
everybody in the old “blogosphere” was, fundamentally, the same sort of person, despite our constant arguments with each other; and not a common sort of person in the broader population; and we have turned out to be more influential than we have ever been willing to admit.
but I do think of it as a pretty big and growing tent, not confined to 300 geniuses or anything like that.
“The” conversation—the world’s symbolic information and its technological infrastructure—is something anybody can contribute to, but of course some contribute more than others.
I think the right boundary to draw is around “power users”—people who participate in that network heavily rather than occasionally.
e.g. not all academics are great innovators, but pretty much all of them are “power users” and “active contributors” to the world’s informational web.
I’m definitely a power user; I expect a lot of my readers are as well.
what do we need to not be neutral about in this context? what belongs in an intellectual system-of-the-world?
another way of asking this question: about what premises are you willing to say, not just for yourself but for the whole world and for your children’s children, “if you don’t accept this premise then I don’t care to speak to you or hear from you, forever?”
clearly that’s a high standard!
I have many values differences with, say, the author of the Epic of Gilgamesh, but I still want to read it. And I want lots of other people to be able to read it! I do not want the mind that created it to be blotted out of memory.
that’s the level of minimal shared values we’re talking about here. What do we have in common with everyone who has an interest in maintaining and extending humanity’s collective record of thought?
lack of barriers to entry is not enough.
the old Web 2.0 idea was “allow everyone to communicate with everyone else, with equal affordances.” This is a kind of “neutrality”—every user account starts out exactly the same, and anybody can make an account.
I think that’s still an underrated principle. “literally anybody can speak to anybody else who wants to listen” was an invention that created a lot of valuable affordances. we forget how painfully scarce information was when that wasn’t true!
the problem is that an information system only works when a user can find the information they seek. And in many cases, what the user is seeking is true information.
mechanisms intended to make high quality information (reliable, accurate, credible, complete, etc) preferentially discoverable, are also necessary
but they shouldn’t just recapitulate potentially-biased gatekeeping.
we want evaluative systems that, at least a priori, an ancient Sumerian could look at and say “yep, sounds fair”, even if the Sumerian wouldn’t like the “truths” that come out on top in those systems.
we really can’t be parochial here. social media companies “patched” the problem of misinformation with opaque, partisan side-taking, and they suffered for it.
how “meta” do we have to get about determining what counts as reliable or valid? well, more meta than just picking a winning side in an ongoing political dispute, that’s for sure.
probably also more “meta” than handpicking certain sources as trustworthy, the way Wikipedia does.
if we want to preserve and extend knowledge, the “republic of letters” needs intentional stewardship of the world’s information, including serious attempts at neutrality.
perceived bias, of course, turns people away from information sources.
nostalgia for unexamined normality—“just be neutral, y’know, like we were when I was young”—is not a credible offer to people who have already found your nostalgic “normal” wanting.
rigorous neutrality tactics—“we have so structured this system so that it is impossible for anyone to tamper with it in a biased fashion”—are better.
this points towards protocols.
h/t Venkatesh Rao
think: zero-knowledge proofs, formal verification, prediction markets, mechanism design, crypto-flavored governance schemes, LLM-enabled argument mapping, AI mechanistic-interpretability and “showing its work”, etc
getting fancy with the technology here often seems premature when the “public” doesn’t even want neutrality; but I don’t think it actually is.
people don’t know they want the things that don’t yet exist.
the people interested in developing “provably”, “rigorously”, “demonstrably” impartial systems are exactly the people you want to attract first, because they care the most.
getting it right matters.
a poorly executed attempt either fizzles instantly; or it catches on but its underlying flaws start to make it actively harmful once it’s widely culturally influential.
OTOH, premature disputes on technology and methods are undesirable.
remember there aren’t very many of you/us. that is:
pretty much everybody who wants to build rigorous neutrality, no matter why they want it or how they want to implement it, is a potential ally here.
the simple fact of wanting to build a “better” world that doesn’t yet exist is a commonality, not to be taken for granted. most people don’t do this at all.
the “softer” side, mutual support and collegiality, are especially important to people whose dreams are very far from fruition. people in this situation are unusually prone to both burnout and schism. be warm and encouraging; it helps keep dreams alive.
also, the whole “neutrality” thing is a sham if we can’t even engage with collaborators with different views and cultural styles.
also, “there aren’t very many of us” in the sense that none of these envisioned new products/tools/institutions are really off the ground yet, and the default outcome is that none of them get there.
you are playing in a sandbox. the goal is to eventually get out of the sandbox.
you will need to accumulate talent, ideas, resources, and vibe-momentum. right now these are scarce, or scattered; they need to be assembled.
be realistic about influence.
count how many people are at the conference or whatever. how many readers. how many users. how many dollars. in absolute terms it probably isn’t much. don’t get pretentious about a “movement”, “community”, or “industry” before it’s shown appreciable results.
the “adjacent possible” people to get involved aren’t the general public, they’re the closest people in your social/communication graph who aren’t yet participating. why aren’t they part of the thing? (or why don’t you feel comfortable going to them?) what would you need to change to satisfy the people you actually know?
this is a better framing than speculating about mass appeal.
even a “neutral” college class (let’s say a standard algorithms & data structures CS class) is non-neutral relative to certain beliefs
Things that many people consider controversial: evolution, sex education, history. But even for mathematical lessons, you will often find a crackpot who considers given topic controversial. (-1)×(-1) = 1? 0.999… = 1?
some people object to the structure of universities and their classes to begin with
In general, unschooling.
In my opinion, the important functionality of schools is: (1) separating reliable sources of knowledge from bullshit, (2) designing a learning path from “I know nothing” to “I am an expert” where each step only requires the knowledge of previous steps, (3) classmates and teachers to discuss the topic with.
Without these things, learning is difficult. If an autodidact stumbles on some pseudoscience in library, even if they later figure out that it was bullshit, it is a huge waste of time. Picking up random books on a topic and finding out that I don’t understand the things they expect me to already know is disappointing. Finding people interested in the same topic can be difficult.
But everything else about education is incidental. No need to walk into the same building. No need to only have classmates of exactly the same age. The learning path doesn’t have to be linear, could be a directed oriented graph. Generally, no need to learn a specific topic at a specific age, although it makes sense to learn the topics that are prerequisites to a lot of knowledge as soon as possible. Grading is incidental; you need some feedback, but IMHO it would be better to split the knowledge into many small pieces, and grade each piece as “you get it” or “you don’t”.
...and the conclusion of my thesis is that a good educational system would focus on the essentials, and be liberal about everything else. However, there are people who object against the very things I consider essential. The educational system that would seem incredible free for me would still seem oppressive to them.
neutrality is a type of tactic for establishing cooperation between different entities.
That means you can have a system neutral towards selected entities (the ones you want in the coalition), but not others. For example, you can have religious tolerance towards an explicit list of churches.
This can lead to a meta-game where some members of the coalition try to kick out someone, because they are no longer necessary. And some members strategically keeping someone in, not necessarily because they love them, but because “if they are kicked out today, tomorrow it could be me; better avoid this slippery slope”.
Examples: Various cults in USA that are obviously destructive but enjoy a lot of legal protection. Leftists establishing an exception for “Nazis”, and then expanding the definition to make it apply to anyone they don’t like. Similarly, the right calling everything they don’t like “communism”. And everyone on internet calling everything “religion”.
“we will take no sides between these things; how they succeed or fail is up to you”
Or the opposite of that: “the world is biased against X, therefore we move towards true neutrality by supporting X”.
is it robust to being intentionally subverted?
So, situations like: the organization is nominally politically neutral, but the human at an important position has political preferences… so far it is normal and maybe unavoidable, but what if there are multiple humans like that, all having the same political preference. If they start acting in a biased way, is it possible for other members to point it out.. without getting accused in turn of “bringing politics” into the organization?
As soon as somebody asks “why is this the way things are?” unexamined normality vanishes.
They can easily create a subreddit r/anti-some-specific-way-things-are and now the opposition to the idea is forever a thing.
a way to reconstruct some of the best things about our “unexamined normality” and place them on a firmer foundation so they won’t disappear as soon as someone asks “why?”
Basically, we need a “FAQ for normality”. The old situation was that people who were interested in a topic knew why things are certain way, and others didn’t care. If you joined the group of people who are interested, sooner or later someone explained it to you in person.
But today, someone can make a popular YouTube video containing some false explanation, and overnight you have tons of people who are suddenly interested in the topic and believe a falsehood… and the people who know how things are just don’t have the capacity to explain that to someone who lacks the fundamentals, believes a lot of nonsense, has strong opinions, and is typically very hostile to someone trying to correct them. So they just give up. But now we have the falsehood established as an “alternative truth”, and the old process of teaching the newcomers no longer works.
The solution for “I don’t have a capacity to communicate to so many ignorant and often hostile people” is to make an article or a YouTube video with an explanation, and just keep posting the link. Some people will pay attention, some people won’t, but it no longer takes a lot of your time, and it protects you from the emotional impact.
There are things for which we don’t have a good article to link, or the article is not known to many. We could fix that. In theory, school was supposed to be this kind of FAQ, but that doesn’t work in a dynamic society where new things happen after you are out of school.
a lot of it is literally decided by software affordances. what the app lets you do is what there is.
Yeah, I often feel that having some kind of functionality would improve things, but the functionality is simply not there.
To some degree this is caused by companies having a monopoly on the ecosystem they create. For example, if I need some functionality for e-mail, I can make an open-source e-mail client that has it. (I think historically spam filters started like this.) If I need some functionality for Facebook… there is nothing I can do about it, other than leave Facebook but there is a problem with coordinating that.
Sometimes this is on purpose. Facebook doesn’t want me to be able to block the ads and spam, because they profit from it.
but having a substantive framework at all clearly isn’t incompatible with thinking independently, recognizing that people are flawed, or being open to changing your mind.
Yeah, if we share a platform, we may start examining some of its assumptions, and maybe at some moment we will collectively update. But if everyone assumes something else, it’s the Eternal September of civilization.
If we can’t agree on what is addition, we can never proceed to discuss multiplication. And we will never build math.
I think the right boundary to draw is around “power users”—people who participate in that network heavily rather than occasionally.
Sometimes this is reflected by the medium. For example, many people post comments on blogs, but only a small part of them writes blogs. By writing a blog you join the “power users”, and the beauty of it is that it is free for everyone and yet most people keep themselves out voluntarily.
(A problem coming soon: many fake “power users” powered by LLMs.)
I have many values differences with, say, the author of the Epic of Gilgamesh, but I still want to read it.
There is a difference between reading for curiosity and reading to get reliable information. I may be curious about e.g. Aristotle’s opinion on atoms, but I am not going to use it to study chemistry.
In some way, I treat some people’s opinions as information about the world, and other people’s opinions as information about them. Both are interesting, but in a different way. It is interesting to know my neighbor’s opinion on astrology, but I am not using this information to update on astrology; I only use it to update on my neighbor.
So I guess I have two different lines: whether I care about someone as a person, and whether I trust someone as a source of knowledge. I listen to both, but I process the information differently.
this points towards protocols.
Thinking about the user experience, I think it would be best if the protocol already came with three default implementations: as a website, as a desktop application, and as a smartphone app.
A website doesn’t require me to install anything; I just create an account and start using it. The downside is that the website has an owner, who can kick me out of the website. Also, I cannot verify the code. A malicious owner could probably take my password (unless we figure out some way to avoid this, that won’t be too inconvenient). Multiple websites talking to each other in a way that is as transparent for the user as possible.
A smartphone app, because that’s what most people use most of the day, especially when they are outside.
A desktop app, because that provides most options for the (technical) power user. For example, it would be nice to keep an offline archive of everything I want, delete anything I no longer want, export and import data.
tl;dr: yes, lots of legal businesses get debanked; no, he disagrees with some of the crypto advocates’ characterization of the situation
in more detail:
you can lose bank account access, despite doing nothing unethical, for mundane business/credit-risk related reasons like “you are using your checking account as a small business bank account and transferring a lot of money in and out” or “you are a serial victim of identity theft”.
this is encouraged by banking regulators but fundamentally banks would do something like this regardless.
FINCEN, the US treasury’s anti-money-laundering arm, shuts down a lot of innocent businesses that do some kind of financial activity (like buying and selling gift cards) without proper KYC/AML controls. A lot of bodegas get shut down.
this is 100% a gov’t-created issue and it’s kind of tragic.
FDIC, which guarantees bank deposits in the event of a bank run, is also tasked with making rules against banks doing things that might lead to bank runs.
You know what might cause a run on a bank? A bunch of crypto-holders suddenly finding out their assets are worthless or gone, and wanting to cash out. To some extent, FDIC’s statutory mandate does entitle it to tell banks not to serve the crypto sector too heavily, because crypto is risky.
Another thing the FDIC is entitled to do is regulate banking products to ensure that consumers are not misled into thinking their money is in an FDIC-insured institution when it isn’t. Under that mandate, a lot of crypto-based consumer banking/trading products have gotten shut down.
This does amount to “FDIC doesn’t like crypto”, but it is in fact FDIC’s job to regulate banking in ways related to preventing consumers from losing their savings. Patrick McKenzie is fine with this; given the picture he presents, if you are not fine with this, it basically means you’re not fine with the existence of the FDIC. (Which is not an unheard-of position; it belongs in the same category as objecting to other New Deal innovations like going off the gold standard and creating the welfare state.)
Separately, In the Obama administration, Operation Chokepoint happened. the FDIC claimed that a wide variety of politically disfavored businesses (guns, pornography, fireworks, etc) were risky...because of the regulatory risk of FDIC disapproving of them.
unlike the crypto regulation, this is totally unrelated to things like bank run risk that are in FDIC’s official mandate. It is simply using FDIC to punish businesses that someone in the government doesn’t like. Patrick McKenzie considers it a “lawless” abuse of power.
The Fed & Treasury’s refusal to allow Facebook to issue the Libra cryptocurrency was similarly politically motivated. Senators blamed Facebook (and the Cambridge Analytica scandal) for Trump’s election and warned the CEOs of Visa, MasterCard, and Stripe not to engage with Libra. Patrick McKenzie also views this as the “naked exercise of power.”
Politically motivated debanking of individuals is clearly possible—it happened in Canada with the truckers’ convoy. However, Patrick McKenzie does not think it is routine in the US today. It is a risk rather than a common reality.
However, he wants to insist that the “crypto agenda” of “crypto should be treated on an equal playing field with USD by the banking sector” is not going to protect ordinary people from getting debanked for being, say, bodega owners or gun enthusiasts or conservatives or pornographers. He views it as a crypto-specific lobbying agenda, pretty much separate from the civil-rights/authoritarianism issue of political debanking.
Another interesting part from the “debanking” article:
[Sam Bankman-Fried] orchestrated a sequential privilege escalation attack on the system that is the United States of America, via consummate skill at understanding how power works, really works, in the United States. They rooted trusted institutions and used each additional domino’s weight against the next. A full recounting of the political strategy alone could easily fill a book. [...] One major reason why crypto has experienced what feels like performative outrage from Democrats since 2022 is that they are trying to demonstrate that crypto did not successfully buy them.
reward shaping, i.e. comparing the expected value of two possible states, so that the agent gets an incremental “reward” when it moves to a state with higher expected value
rewards based on novelty rather than expected success, such as assigning more reward to visiting novel states, or assigning more reward to states with high prediction error relative to the agent’s model of the world
https://pdoom.org/ AI organization, research aimed at AGI; young, educated European team, they seem smart (to my unsophisticated eye) and idealistic (they want to share/open-source as much as possible, in contrast to secretive for-profit AI labs)
aka, not useful for subcutaneous imaging in living mammals, but possibly quite useful for non-destructive imaging of organoids (mentioned in the article) or maybe invertebrates, embryoids, other small living things;
maybe also nondestructive imaging of surface cells in live mammals:
skin
eyes
surgically exposed tissues
when you’re operating on a tumor, it’s important to make sure you have clean margins; would tumor cells look different under this sort of “metabolic” imaging?
“One could imagine things like formally verified course notes, which would later turn into some searchable database, and then to a tool which attempts example sheet questions by applying theorems from the course”.
“No available system currently has all of an undergraduate pure mathematics degree, so undergraduates can even contribute to research projects. Over ten Imperial maths undergraduates have contributed to Lean’s maths library, and there are plenty of students at other universities in the UK and beyond who have also got involved.”
https://www.za-zu.com/blog/playbook how to cold-email at scale. apparently if you just send a bajillion emails from one account it can get marked as spam; there are methods to circumvent this.
today in What Can’t The Hypothalamus Do: stimulate the lateral hypothalamus and you get improved walking in recovery from spinal cord injury in mice, rats, and 2 humans.
appears to be specific to Vglut2 neurons (as shown by optogenetics)
got the patients to be able to climb stairs and walk 50 m, when they couldn’t before, after 3 months of rehab (they had both had their spinal injury for many years prior without being able to walk/climb).
you can see from the emg data that both patients have way more leg muscle activation when trying to walk or raise their knees from a lying position when the DBS is on vs off
how crazy is this? the standard lists of things the lateral hypothalamus does don’t include motor function. mostly it’s autonomic stuff, arousal, hunger, and motivation/mood.
otoh it does directly innervate the motor cortex, spinal cord, cerebellum, etc
https://www.cognition.ai/blog/devin-generally-available this worries me from a mundane security point of view, though maybe I’m excessively paranoid; do you really want an AI agent autonomously mucking about in your code repo and pushing changes? I’ve heard the argument that this doesn’t really introduce more risk than a new junior developer (who might likewise be error-prone or even a crook) but my mind is not at ease.
https://ideaharbor.xyz/ a cute site where people can post project ideas. some of them are not, y’know, possible. “Batteries that can store the internet in them for when your connection goes down.”
medial hypothalamus neuron groups are mostly “tracking a state variable”;
lateral hypothalamus neuron groups are mostly “turning on a behavior” (especially a “consummatory behavior”).
(…apart from the mammillary areas way at the posterior end of the hypothalamus. They’re their own thing.)
State variables are things like hunger, temperature, immune system status, fertility, horniness, etc.
I don’t have a great proof of that, just some indirect suggestive evidence. (Orexin, contiguity between lateral hypothalamus and PAG, various specific examples of people studying particular hypothalamus neurons.) Anyway, it’s hard to prove directly because changing a state variable can lead to taking immediate actions. And it’s really just a rule of thumb; I’m sure there’s exceptions, and it’s not really a bright-line distinction anyway.
The literature on the lateral hypothalamus is pretty bad. The main problem IIUC is that LH is “reticular”, i.e. when you look at it under the microscope you just see a giant mess of undifferentiated cells. That appearance is probably deceptive—appropriate stains can reveal nice little nuclei hiding inside the otherwise-undifferentiated mess. But I think only one or a few such hidden nuclei are known (the example I’m familiar with is “parvafox”).
Yeah, the word “consummatory” isn’t great in general (see here), maybe I shouldn’t have used it. But I do think walking is an “innate behavior”, just as sneezing and laughing and flinching and swallowing are. E.g. decorticate rats can walk. As for human babies, they’re decorticate-ish in effect for the first months but still have a “walking / stepping reflex” from day 1 I think.
There can be an innate behavior, but also voluntary cortex control over when and whether it starts—those aren’t contradictory, IMO. This is always true to some extent—e.g. I can voluntarily suppress a sneeze. Intuitively, yeah, I do feel like I have more voluntary control over walking than I do over sneezing or vomiting. (Swallowing is maybe the same category as walking?) I still want to say that all these “innate behaviors” (including walking) are orchestrated by the hypothalamus and brainstem, but that there’s also voluntary control coming via cortex→hypothalamus and/or cortex→brainstem motor-type output channels.
I’m just chatting about my general beliefs. :) I don’t know much about walking in particular, and I haven’t read that particular paper (paywall & I don’t have easy access).
people generally think they are okay and good, and they are generally right.
self-criticism is rare.
if someone is being self-critical, guilty, ashamed, etc, that indicates an unusual problem.
implications:
intense self-criticism will be taken as evidence of something actually wrong with the person—either they really did screw up quite badly, or they have poor judgment.
criticism is direct and overt.
if someone objects to what you’ve done, they’ll tell you straight out, and expect that this will clear the air and lead to a resolution of the problem.
“negative” judgments are not necessarily intended, or expected, to be painful; the listener may very well disagree with the judgment or find it helpful feedback.
as a corollary, nobody assumes that an ambiguous comment or facial expression is a hint at criticism or disapproval. The default assumption is that people are fine with you, that you’re fine, and if there’s a problem it’ll become obvious.
pro-self-criticism culture (Puritans):
baseline assumptions:
people are generally deeply flawed; we are constantly screwing up, sinning, etc. this is the universal or near-universal human condition, not something limited to unusually bad people. but it really is genuinely Bad and Not Okay.
people tend to be complacent—by default we engage in far too little self-criticism. We are screwing up without knowing it. We let ourselves off the hook, make excuses for ourselves, ignore warning signs. It takes active, continual effort to be vigilant against our own flaws.
implications:
intense self-criticism and guilt is normative. virtuous people will not think well of themselves. in fact, if someone does think well of themselves, that means they’re lazy and have low standards.
corollary: an intensely self-critical or guilty person is not assumed to be an unusually bad person or to have a mental health problem; they are just doing what we’re all supposed to do!
criticism can be harsh and intentionally painful, because the assumption is that it needs to be “strong enough” to overcome natural human complacency
it’s also common to read criticism into subtle or ambiguous signs. the assumption is that there are always more problems than the obvious ones; it’s never safe to presume things are fine.
people generally are too self-critical. most people are basically fine but torture themselves over minutiae.
complacency—failing to self-criticize enough about genuine faults—is literally monstrous. complacent people are rare, and pathological; we might call them sociopaths. you absolutely would not want to be one, and you’re almost certainly not.
“healing” or “growth” means learning to quiet the overactive inner critic. this is very difficult; people need help with it.
everybody always needs validation and reassurance that they’re ok, and the kindest thing you can do for anyone is give them permission not to worry or self-criticize. the cruelest thing you can do is trigger their insecurities and intensify their (already painful) self-criticism.
implications:
self-criticism is not normative; it’s an affliction we all suffer from and long to be freed from.
like sin in pro-self-criticism cultures, misery in counter-self-criticism culture is seen as Genuinely Terrible, Deeply Not Okay, but also a part of the human condition, not a sign that something has gone unusually wrong with you. you’re mentally ill, like everyone else.
criticism is mild and gentle, or suppressed altogether, because it’s assumed everybody is already torturing themselves and doesn’t need other people piling on.
corollary: it’s common to read a lot of criticism or disapproval into subtle or ambiguous signals because it’s assumed that people are holding back their true negative opinions. The absence of reassurance or validation is considered a sign of severe, harsh disapproval.
relationships:
Barbarians see Puritans as totally excessive, and see Therapy Patients as trying to counteract a problem that one can just...not have.
Puritans see both Barbarians and Therapy Patients as dangerously complacent.
Therapy Patients see Puritans as a familiar enemy—something they understand but reject and want to get away from, like an unhappy childhood home—and see Barbarians as incomprehensible, alien, insane, not-even-human.
it doesn’t seem clear to me whether this is better or not!
reduced anxiety seems great, but reduced sense of narrative drama is a big cost. part of what makes life seem meaningful to me is the sense of being part of a story, and if anything i feel like my current arc involves gaining abilities to envision myself as inside a narrative.
https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/checking-my-prejudices-on-materials-decarbonization eg: where does it make economic sense to use electrochemical or biological manufacturing? (compared to “thermochemical”, fossil-fuel-powered). For biomanufacturing, only for complex molecules like proteins; for electrochemical processing, mostly metals and things with big voltage potentials in the chemical reaction (zinc, cobalt, copper, lithium, etc) but not simple organic molecules (methane, ethanol, etc)
registering my concern that someday we will find that NMDA inhibitors do something bad to cognition. but all these recent studies are 6-week only and don’t report any side effects that look like cognitive impairment, but maybe wouldn’t have been able to pick it up even if it existed.
“Azapirones (example: BuSpar) is, unusually, a rare drug which is specifically targeted at anxiety, rather than a being a repurposed antidepressant or something. BuSpar is very safe, not at all addictive, and rarely works. Every so often somebody comes out with a very cheerful study saying something like “Buspar just as effective as benzodiazepines if given correctly!” and everybody laughs hysterically and goes back to never thinking about it.”
gabapentin for anxiety—meh, some positive results but they’re not extraordinary.
Gena Gorlin hosts a discussion on “psychological safety”
Good point in comments, that different people see different (sometimes opposite) things necessary for psychological safety. For some, it means they can speak candidly about whatever they think and feel. For others, it means that some things cannot be said in their presence.
I think, you can make it both, as long as it is one-sided, e.g. in a therapy, where the client could say anything, and the therapist would be careful about their feedback.
But this wouldn’t work at a workplace or any other larger group… unless you split people into “those who are safe” and “those who have a duty to make them feel safe”, and even then, maybe someone in the former group could make someone else from the same group feel unsafe.
You make a good point that it is not enough for your boss to tell you “you can speak freely”, you must also believe that it is true. (I also have a negative experience here: I was told to speak freely; I did; it had consequences.) This would probably sound more credible if other colleagues are already speaking freely. Also, if you generally don’t feel like your job is at risk somehow. For example, if your performance is below the average (and by definition, half of the team is like that), you might believe that neither your performance nor the candor alone would get you fired, but their combination would.
https://www.cato.org/blog/national-security-hoax Joe Biden blocked a Japanese company’s acquisition of U.S. Steel on “national security” grounds...even though Japan is a US ally and this would be an investment into America-based steelmaking facilities
this...does not match my experience, though maybe I was seeing a different side of the elephant. In the mid-2010s, ML people knew that “deep learning” was the best at the benchmarks, but it was fiendishly hard to get business results from it in most contexts, so startups would typically aspire to use it and then...quietly not. in my corner of startupland, machine learning PhDs were definitely not being paid to do freeform research; these were the days of “feature engineering is king” and “data munging” and “let’s just use a logistic regression, it works better”
article’s probably right that it’s not a great time to be in non-LLM fields of ML, though there are exceptions
“if the cumulative work that goes into an average grant application adds up to considerably more than a couple of days, these grant schemes draw more resources from the scientific community than they add.” in reference to two (actually existing) grant programs awarding €50,000 and €30,000 with success rates of 5% and 2.5%, respectively.
in other words: if grants are small, selective, and time-consuming, they’re using up more scientist-hours on grant applications than they are funding scientist-hours of research.
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/113721192051328193 Terence Tao on getting his papers declined; it happens to him about once a year. rejections are not unusual in math journals and even good mathematicians get them.
https://hearth.ai/thesis keeping track of people you know. as an inveterate birthday-forgetter and someone too prone to falling out of touch with friends, I bet there are ways for AI tools to do helpful things here.
the subjective experience of perceiving; Thomas Nagel’s “what it is like to be a bat”; qualia
awake states (as opposed to dreamless sleep, anaesthesia, coma, etc)
things we are mentally aware of (perceptions, thoughts, emotions, etc) as opposed to things we are not aware of (most autonomic processes, blindsight, “subconscious” motives)
the fact that we do not have a scientific account of what consciousness is made of, doesn’t mean consciousness doesn’t exist or is inherently mystical or incoherent. Isaac Newton had never heard of “H20” but he knew what water is. The point of science is to give explanations for the things we know about experientially but don’t fully understand.
A “theory of consciousness” would allow us to, given some monitoring data of brain activity in an organism, determine whether the organism is conscious or not, and what it is conscious of.
is the anaesthesia patient conscious?
is the locked-in patient conscious?
which animals have consciousness?
I’ve long had a vague sense of suspicion around consciousness research and the idea of qualia, but I’ve never really been able to put my finger on why.
When defined crisply like this, it does seem clear that consciousness is a real, mundane thing (if a nurse says “the patient is unconscious” there’s no confusion about what that means).
But why is consciousness mysterious? why is it a “hard problem”?
David Chalmers’ “hard problem of consciousness” refers to the difficulty of explaining how physical processes give rise to subjective experiences. Even if you explained a lot of brain mechanisms that have to go on for us to consciously experience something, would that really cross the explanatory gap?
I think this is what has turned me off “consciousness”, because I don’t get why there’s supposed to be a gap.
If we had some full explanation based on patterns of brain activity, like “you consciously perceive a bright light precisely when when the foo blergs the bar”, then...I think there wouldn’t be any mystery left!
I agree that e.g. “you see a bright light when the visual cortex is stimulated” is not enough, because you don’t see it if you’re unconscious, and we don’t have a necessary-and-sufficient physical correlate of consciousness. but, like, Eric Hoel and apparently a lot of mainstream neuroscientists are saying that we could find such a thing.
I guess you could keep asking “ok, the foo blerging the bar produces the phenomenon we experience as consciousness, but why does it?” and it would be hard to come up with any experimental way to even approach that question...
but that’s an “explanatory gap” that comes up everywhere and we’re usually happy to live with.
it also depends what kind of “why” you want.
if you’re asking “why does it produce consciousness” as in “what’s the efficient cause?” or “how does it work to produce consciousness?” then I think all how-does-it-work questions are going to have to be about physical (or algorithmic) processes. and if you say “well but my subjective experience is not even really commensurate with these kinds of objectively observable processes, it’s a different sort of thing, how can it ever emerge from them” then...you are SOL? “how” questions will never satisfy you?
if you’re asking “why does it produce consciousness” in a final-cause sense, like what is the use of consciousness, then I think we can have fruitful ideas. “why don’t organisms operate on pure blindsight” is an interesting question! (pace Peter Watts, i think it must have some evolutionary function or we wouldn’t have it.)
I think p-zombies are stupid, obviously just because you can verbally say you’re “imagining” something exactly the same down to every physical detail, but magically different in its properties, doesn’t mean it’s possible!
ok, so: my beef with “consciousness studies” is primarily with the non-physicalists who say that even if we had a perfect neural correlate of consciousness, we still wouldn’t understand consciousness as a subjective experience. but what I didn’t realize, is that there are neuroscientists interested in consciousness who just want to find that neural correlate, and don’t necessarily have any weird philosophical assumptions.
The global neuronal workspace theory of consciousness says that consciousness is produced by an “interconnected network of prefrontal-parietal areas and many high-level sensory cortical areas.”
early sensory processing is unconscious.
stimuli are sometimes attended to (made conscious), a process which involves sending (pre-processed) signals about the stimuli through the prefrontal and parietal areas which control executive function, and distributing them to a bunch of other areas of the brain as part of the current working context.
IIT is an information-theoretic theory of consciousness; it says that consciousness is measured by the power of a neuronal network to influence itself. “The more cause-effect power a system has, the more conscious it is.”
keeping track of people you know. as an inveterate birthday-forgetter and someone too prone to falling out of touch with friends, I bet there are ways for AI tools to do helpful things here.
Facebook already reminded me when my friends had birthdays, but recently I noticed that it also offers to write a congratulation comment for me, I just need to make a single click to send it. Now, Facebook has an obvious incentive to keep me returning to their page every day, so they are not going to fully automate this.
The next necessary functionality would be to write automated replies. I think that could be achieved by LLMs, I just need some service to do it automatically. That way I could have a rich social life, without the need to interact with humans.
I don’t want automatic messages; that seems too inhuman. I do want things like reminders to follow up with people I haven’t talked to for a while, with context awareness for social appropriateness. like, i wouldn’t know how to reach out to my roommate/best friend from college; we haven’t talked in 16 years! but maybe the right app could keep that from happening in the first place, or create a new normalized type of social behavior that’s “reaching out after a long time apart” or whatever.
The description on the page you linked—“augments the brain’s ability to reason on a) who am I, b) who are you, and c) who are you to me, now and over time”—leaves a lot to imagination. Sounds like a chatbot that will talk to you about your contacts?
i wouldn’t know how to reach out to my roommate/best friend from college; we haven’t talked in 16 years!
Maybe try finding out their birthday (on social networks, by online research, or maybe ask a mutual friend), and then set up a reminder. “Happy birthday, we haven’t seen each other for a while, how are you?” Sounds to me like a socially appropriate thing (but I am not an expert).
Also, spend 5 minutes by the clock writing a list of people you would like to stay in contact with.
Now, I guess the question is how to set up a system that will let you store the data and provide the reminders. The easiest version would a spreadsheet where you enter the names and birthdays, and some system that will read it and prepare notifications for you. A more complicated version would allow you to write more data about the person (how do we know each other, what kinds of activities did we do together, when was the last time we talked), and group the people by categories. You could make an AI go through your e-mail archive and compile an initial report on the person.
I would probably feel very uncomfortable doing this online, because it would feel like I am making reports on people, and the owner of the software will most likely sell the data to any third party. I would want this as a desktop application, maybe connected to a small phone app, to set up the reminders. But many people seem to prefer online solutions as more convenient, privacy be damned.
(The phone reminders could be like: “Today, XY has a birthday; you have their phone number, e-mail, and Less Wrong account. You relationship status is: you have met a few times at a LW meetup. Topics you usually discuss: AI, kitten videos.”)
https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace [[AI]] [[biotech]] [[Dario Amodei]] spends about half of this document talking about AI for bio, and I think it’s the most credible “bull case” yet written for AI being radically transformative in the biomedical sphere.
one caveat is that I think if we’re imagining a future with brain mapping, regeneration of macroscopic brain tissue loss, and understanding what brains are doing well enough to know why neurological abnormalities at the cell level produce the psychiatric or cognitive symptoms they do...then we probably can do brain uploading! it’s really weird to single out this one piece as pie-in-the-sky science fiction when you’re already imagining a lot of similarly ambitious things as achievable.
https://venture.angellist.com/eli-dourado/syndicate [[tech industry]] when [[Eli Dourado]] picks startups, they’re at least not boring! i haven’t vetted the technical viability of any of these, but he claims to do a lot of that sort of numbers-in-spreadsheets work.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/shapley-values [[EA]] [[economics]] how do you assign credit (in a principled fashion) to an outcome that multiple people contributed to? Shapley values! It seems extremely hard to calculate in practice, and subject to contentious judgment calls about the assumptions you make, but maybe it’s an improvement over raw handwaving.
https://gwern.net/maze [[Gwern Branwen]] digs up the “Mr. Young” studying maze-running techniques in [[Richard Feynman]]’s “Cargo Cult Science” speech. His name wasn’t Young but Quin Fischer Curtis, and he was part of a psychology research program at UMich that published little and had little influence on the outside world, and so was “rebooted” and forgotten. Impressive detective work, though not a story with a very satisfying “moral”.
She’s doing an interesting thing here that I haven’t wrapped my head around. She’s not making the positive case “students today are NOT oversensitive or illiberal” or “trigger warnings are beneficial,” even though she seems to believe both those things. she’s more calling into question “why has this complaint become a common talking point? what unstated assumptions does it perpetuate?” I am not sure whether this is a valid approach that’s alternate to the forms of argument I’m more used to, or a sign of weakness (a thing she’s doing only because she cannot make the positive case for the opposite of what her opponents claim.)
NSAIDS and omega-3 fatty acids prevent 95% of tumors in a tumor-prone mouse strain?!
also we’re targeting [[STAT3]] now?! that’s a thing we’re doing.
([[STAT3]] is a major oncogene but it’s a transcription factor, it lives in the cytoplasm and the nucleus, this is not easy to target with small molecules like a cell surface protein.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLARITY [[biotech]] make a tissue sample transparent so you can make 3D microscopic imaging, with contrast from immunostaining or DNA/RNA labels
tl;dr: Hamas consistently wants to destroy Israel and commit violence against Israelis, they say so repeatedly, and there was never going to be a long-term possibility of living peacefully side-by-side with them; Netanyahu is a tough talker but kind of a procrastinator who’s kicked the can down the road on national security issues for his entire career; catering to settlers is not in the best interests of Israel as a whole (they provoke violence) but they are an unduly powerful voting bloc; Palestinian misery is real but has been institutionalized by the structure of the Gazan state and the UN which prevents any investment into a real local economy; the “peace process” is doomed because Israel keeps offering peace and the Palestinians say no to any peace that isn’t the abolition of the State of Israel.
it’s pretty common for reasonable casual observers (eg in America) to see Israel/Palestine as a tragic conflict in which probably both parties are somewhat in the wrong, because that’s a reasonable prior on all conflicts. The more you dig into the details, though, the more you realize that “let’s live together in peace and make concessions to Palestinians as necessary” has been the mainstream Israeli position since before 1948. It’s not a symmetric situation.
concentrated in the [[anterior cingulate cortex]] and [[insular cortex]] which are closely related to the “sense of self” (i.e. interoception, emotional salience, and the perception that your e.g. hand is “yours” and it was “you” who moved it)
she’s more calling into question “why has this complaint become a common talking point? what unstated assumptions does it perpetuate?” I am not sure whether this is a valid approach that’s alternate to the forms of argument I’m more used to, or a sign of weakness
It is good to have one more perspective, and perhaps also good to develop a habit to go meta. So that when someone tells you “X”, in addition to asking yourself “is X actually true?” you also consider questions like “why is this person telling me X?”, “what could they gain in this situation by making me think more about X?”, “are they perhaps trying to distract me from some other Y?”.
Because there are such things as filtered evidence, availability bias, limited cognition; and they all can be weaponized. While you are trying really hard to solve the puzzle the person gave you, they may be using your inattention to pick your pockets.
In extreme cases, it can even be a good thing to dismiss the original question entirely. Like, if you are trying to leave an abusive religious cult, and the leader gives you a list of “ten thousand extremely serious theological questions you need to think about deeply before you make the potentially horrible mistake of damning your soul by leaving this holy group”, you should not actually waste your time thinking about them, but keep planning your escape.
Now the opposite problem is that some people get so addicted to the meta that they are no longer considering the object level. “You say I’m wrong about something? Well, that’s exactly what the privileged X people love to do, don’t they?” (Yeah, they probably do. But there is still a chance that you are actually wrong about something.)
tl;dr—mentioning the meta, great; but completely avoiding the object level, weakness
So, how much meta is the right amount of meta? Dunno, that’s a meta-meta question. At some point you need to follow your intuition and hope that your priors aren’t horribly wrong.
The more you dig into the details, though, the more you realize that “let’s live together in peace and make concessions to Palestinians as necessary” has been the mainstream Israeli position since before 1948. It’s not a symmetric situation.
The situation is not symmetric, I agree. But also, it is too easy to underestimate the impact of the settlers. I mean, if you include them in the picture, then the overall Israeli position becomes more like: “Let’s live together in peace, and please ignore these few guys who sometimes come to shoot your family and take your homes. They are an extremist minority that we don’t approve of, but for complicated political reasons we can’t do anything about them. Oh, and if you try to defend yourself against them, chances are our army might come to defend them. And that’s also something we deeply regret.”
It is much better than the other side, but in my opinion still fundamentally incompatible with peace.
kinda meta, but I find myself wondering if we should handle Roam [[ tag ]] syntax in some nicer way. Probably not but it seems nice if it managed to have no downsides.
It wouldn’t collide with normal Markdown syntax use. (I can’t think of any natural examples, aside from bracket use inside links, like [[editorial comment]](URL), which could be special-cased by looking for the parentheses required for the URL part of a Markdown link.) But it would be ambiguous where the wiki links point to (Sarah’s Roam wiki? English Wikipedia?), and if it pointed to somewhere other than LW2 wiki entries, then it would also be ambiguous with that too (because the syntax is copied from Mediawiki and so the same as the old LW wiki’s links).
And it seems like an overloading special case you would regret in the long run, compared to something which rewrote them into regular links. Adds in a lot of complexity for a handful of uses.
I don’t know how familiar you are with regular expressions but you could do this with a two-pass regular expression search and replace: (I used Emacs regex format, your preferred editor might use a different format. notably, in Emacs [ is a literal bracket but ( is a literal parenthesis, for some reason)
replace “^(https://.? )([[.?]] )*” with “\1″
replace “[[(.*?)]]” with “\1″
This first deletes any tags that occur right after a hyperlink at the beginning of a line, then removes the brackets from any remaining tags.
tl;dr: he thinks they defaulted to a weak message of “generic Democrat” because they lacked the conviction to push any other distinctive brand (and in some cases the situation made alternatives infeasible).
the optimal amount of fraud is not zero; anti-fraud enforcement trades off against ease of use and we (as a nation) generally don’t want to make it super hard to get government benefits
nonetheless benefits fraud does indeed happen. kind of a lot. “let’s bill Medicare for stuff we don’t do” or “let’s take unemployment insurance for fake SSNs” or “let’s take PPP funds for anything and everything, they literally said that we wouldn’t have to pay back the “loan”″
the US government is much more upset about any amount of money going to terrorists or foreign enemies than it is about larger amounts of money going to ordinary crooks or just people who are ineligible for the benefits in question. we almost have two processes for these types of “fraud”?
Jetson thinks government fraud-detection agencies are underfunded.
most fraud prevention is managed by the financial sector, which is generally a good thing (far less expensive than court cases)
though it does often lead to the industry not really caring whether you are a fraudster or a fraud victim. either way you’re a risk, which the bank doesn’t like.
“one reason to buy services from the financial industry and not from the government is that the financial industry finds the statement “stealing from businesses is wrong” to be straightforwardly uncontroversial. A business owner would need to put some thought into whether they trust your local police department or district attorney to have the same belief. I apologize to non-American readers of this piece who believe I am spouting insanity. It has been an interesting few years in the United States.”
I am an American and this sounds kind of Big If True to me too.
the reason firms put up annoying hurdles for their customers is often to screen for fraudsters. I already knew this, but somehow i did not realize that when they ask you for a phone call, they are not doing this because they hate you for being shy/neurodivergent, that too is a way to screen out scammers using fake identities.
https://chrislakin.blog/p/bounty-your-bottleneck Chris Lakin claims he can completely solve (psychological) insecurity through coaching. He’s very young and new at this, but the pay-for-results model is unusually client-friendly.
https://screwworm.org/ these people want to use gene drives to eradicate screwworm, a parasite that infects animals in South America.
https://christopherrufo.com/p/counterrevolution-blueprint Chris Rufo is a troll on Twitter, but this is a pretty sober/earnest proposal for how all affirmative action, racial quotas, etc can be eliminated from the Federal Government. I am not qualified to opine on whether this is feasible or whether it will have harmful unintended consequences.
https://parthchopra.substack.com/p/what-i-learned-working-at-a-high somewhere hidden behind the business-speak of this article, there is clearly an actual story about some Shit That Went Wrong. but unfortunately he is likely not free to disclose it and I am not familiar enough with this company to know what it was.
they lacked the conviction to push any other distinctive brand (and in some cases the situation made alternatives infeasible).
I guess it is difficult to promote the brand of Tough No-Nonsense Prosecutor in the age of Defund The Police.
Which is really unfortunate, because it seems like “defund the police” was actually what woke white people wanted. Black people were probably horrified by the idea of giving up and letting the crime grow exponentially at the places they live. Unfortunately, the woke do not care about the actual opinions of the people they speak for.
why we have to go beyond nostalgia for the retro-future
A part of this is the natural “hype—disappointment” cycle. The 21st century is better, but we were promised that it would be 100x better, and it is only maybe 10x better, so now we feel that it sucks. What we would need, psychologically, is probably some disaster that would first threaten to destroy us, but then we would overcome it, and then feel happy that now the future is better than we expected.
But we had covid, which kinda fits this pattern, except the popular reaction was opposite: instead of “thanks to the amazing science and technology of the 21st century, we have eradicated a pandemic in a year” the popular wisdom of the cool people became “it was never dangerous in the first place, the evil Americans just tried to scare us”. Instead of admiring the mRNA vaccines, people seem outraged that we didn’t let more people die naturally instead.
Another thing is that people are bad at noticing gradual change. If you could teleport 10 or 20 years in the future, you would be shocked. But if you advance to the future one day at a time, it mostly feels like nothing happens. (Even the proverbial flying cars would be a huge disappointment if we at first got cars that can only fly 1 cm above the surface, and then every year they could get 1 cm higher.)
Jetson thinks government fraud-detection agencies are underfunded.
Maybe the people who profit from the fraud want it that way, and lobby against the funding?
A business owner would need to put some thought into whether they trust your local police department or district attorney to have the same belief. I apologize to non-American readers of this piece who believe I am spouting insanity. It has been an interesting few years in the United States.
Uhm, our experience in Eastern Europe is that police was never optimizing for us, and quite often against us.
it’s people who were working on “Birdwatch” before Musk bought Twitter, and they use algorithms derived from PageRank.
these guys are not, even a little bit, “based.” Yet the Twitter userbase loves Community Notes!
if you have a capable team that firmly believes in “fairness”, in auditable, open, participatory processes that don’t put a top-down thumb on the scale on controversial issues, and they get to actually use the neutral algorithm instead of being pressured to make exceptions, you get solid results and community trust!
it’s not machine-learning based; it’s a version of GOFAI that’s formalizing the types of “tactics” or “moves” that a human goes through in a proof, trying to get the formalism right such that a computer proceduralization only has a modest, human-like amount of trial-and-error & backtracking rather than vast amounts of brute-force search.
“proof repair” is the problem of updating formally verified software; if you have a library of provably correct code, and you make any kind of software updates to the library, now you also have to update the proofs such that it’s still verifiably correct (assuming the update didn’t break anything.) Progress towards automating this.
https://web.stanford.edu/~jlmcc/ Jay McClelland, co-inventor (with Rumelhart of backprop fame) of the Parallel Distributed Processing theory of cognition, has been doing a lot with LLMs lately
https://web.stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/McClelland22CapturingAdvCogAbilitiesWithDeepNets humans learn human-made formal systems (like mathematics, computer science, logic) in order to solve certain kinds of difficult problems. perhaps AIs should also “go to school”, being trained on math problems, in particular with diagrams as well as text. also, goal-directed motivation may require fundamentally different architecture from the usual LLM transformer setup.
https://web.stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/NamMcC21RapidLearningGeneralizationInHumansArxiv.pdf human mTurkers are better at abstract problem-solving tasks if they’ve taken high school algebra and geometry (no effect for other educational variables). they split pretty bimodally into people who learn a strategy and people who guess at random. this points towards “basic math education teaches systematic thought.” also, small RNNs generalize much worse than humans, but who cares.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_set_programming ASP is used for difficult search & combinatorics or optimization problems. I’m struggling to understand whether it is in wide industrial use or if it’s more of a research specialization.
if you have a capable team that firmly believes in “fairness”, in auditable, open, participatory processes that don’t put a top-down thumb on the scale on controversial issues, and they get to actually use the neutral algorithm instead of being pressured to make exceptions, you get solid results and community trust!
Then it is quite sad that the neutral algorithm was introduced as the same time as Xitter started losing popularity. (At least, it seems that it loses popularity? Maybe that’s just some bubble. I don’t know what to trust anymore.)
Could these things be related? It seems like the opposition against Xitter is mostly because Musk is hanging out with Trump recently. But hypothetically, it could be a combination of that and the fact that the Community Notes may be inconvenient for people who instead could have the content policed by members of their tribe.
Sorry for getting political, but at least until recently it seemed like one political tribe practically owned all the “mainstream” parts of the internet; not necessarily most of the users, but most of the mods and admins. They didn’t need to try finding a neutral ground, because instead, they could simply have it all.
I have seen a few attempts to make a neutral place where both sides could discuss, and those usually didn’t work well. The dominant tribe had no incentive to participate, if they could win the debate by avoiding the place and from outside declaring it to be full of horrible people who should be banned. You could only attract them by basically conceding to many of their demands (declaring their norms and taboos to be the rules of the group), which already made an equal debate impossible (stating your disagreement already meant breaking some of the rules), which made the debate kinda pointless (you could only make your point by diluting it to homeopathic levels, and then the other side yelled at you for a while, and then everyone congratulated themselves for being so tolerant and open-minded). I don’t want to give specific examples, but instead I will point to how Scott Alexander’s blog was handled e.g. by Wikipedia—despite the fact that most of its readers (and Scott himself) actually belonged to the dominant tribe, the fact that dissent was allowed was enough for some admins to call him names.
It is usually the weaker side that calls for fairness. Yes, it is amazing that you can implement it algorithmically, but the people who have the power to make this decisions, are usually not the ones who want it made.
So I wonder what will happen in future. Will more web platforms adopt the neutral algorithm? Or will it be instead something like “a neutral algorithm, but our trusted moderators can override its results if they don’t like them”?
propaganda is important (and potentially dangerous) primarily for functions besides directly causing people to believe/do what the propaganda says, such as:
creating common knowledge and coordination points
eg emboldening people who already agree with the propaganda
crowding out non-propaganda communication and creating confusion about what the real, non-propaganda story is
demonstrating the propagandist’s power
but people are generally not easy to manipulate in the manipulator’s intended direction.
this comports with all the failure to replicate the claims that simple priming/context cues (from power poses to stereotype threat) can “nudge” human behavior in a predictable direction.
I believe people are, of course, influenced by culture and communication, but we are relatively robust to single persuasive/manipulative interventions. People are agents; we often ignore or defy people’s attempts to change us.
the marketing literature also shows that advertising is usually ineffective, that most people are indifferent to almost all products, and that the most effective advertising (in terms of increasing sales) isn’t about inducing passionate enthusiasm for a product but rather informing/reminding the marginal potential customer that it exists and is conveniently available.
like many C. elegans simulation models, it’s specific to a subset of neurons and body components. We don’t yet have a “whole-worm simulation” that does everything a worm does, but we have lots of special-purpose models.
A priori, it’s worth being suspicious of special-purpose models that “succeed” in the sense of recapitulating a particular worm behavior, since there are lots of ways to (intentionally or unintentionally) set up complex statistical models to guarantee you get the outcome you want.
But these guys (from the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, https://eng.bigai.ai/) do eventually want to build a whole-worm, multipurpose simulation.
I didn’t love this. It presents liberalism as a “compromise” for allowing people with different views to live together in peace, which is not exactly wrong but seems a bit ahistorical. Liberalism, as it was born in the 1600s in the Dutch Republic and then England, was indeed a truce between conflicting religions, but it was also conceived, by its advocates, as a positive good that was necessary for true religion, and later as a worldview of its own that represented values like civilization, humaneness, lawful justice, and reason.
The linked post is written from within liberalism; it uses concepts that wouldn’t be natural for an illiberal (say, someone today who’s sympathetic to Hamas, Putin, or Xi.) I don’t necessarily think you need to successfully persuade such a person, but you should be able to write to them and say “this is what we believe & value; it is different from what you believe & value, but I can convey why it appeals to us, why it’s a continuing passion and not just an unexamined default.”
I guess I like lists. (Or maybe the ideas in their articles are not that good, so I’d rather have 30 ideas sketched than 1 idea written long.)
propaganda (including advertising) does not have extraordinary abilities to manipulate people into believing or doing things they would not otherwise do.
propaganda is important (and potentially dangerous) primarily for [...] creating common knowledge and coordination points [...] crowding out non-propaganda communication [...] demonstrating the propagandist’s power
Sounds almost like a glass half full / half empty distinction. It is almost impossible for propaganda to create something from scratch, but given that conflicts of interest exist almost everywhere, and you have all kinds of people almost everywhere (likely including someone who already supports your agenda), amplification of existing things seems sufficient. The lesson is for propagandists to look at what is already there and work with that, rather than start your own thing from scratch. It may be not exactly what you wanted, but if your goal is to create chaos, it is probably good enough.
If you take a group of crazy people, give them money to buy a place for their community to meet, create for them a website to share their ideas (webhosting, technical support, proofreading, editing, photos—simply, if you make it appear professional without needing a shred of talent on work on their side), and then you buy for them web advertising and billboards, arrange the logistics of their meetings, provide catering… the thing will explode. And almost everyone around them will be paralyzed.
As the article says, “Russian operatives behave as if they want to watch the world burn”. Exactly this, they have a zero-sum approach. (It even seems to me, at least in my part of the world, that zero-sum perspective is a good predictor of how pro-Russian a person will be.) Russians only feel safe when the places around them are in ruins; they have no friends, only servants and enemies. But for that purpose, propaganda is sufficient.
https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/as-above-so-garage I kind of liked this Venkatesh Rao essay. the “garage project” sort of hackerish engineering is a “hobby” project that has potential to connect to the “big story” of advanced technology (unlike, say, woodworking, which may be personally or artistically fulfilling but is clearly opting out of the race towards the cutting edge) but also is a sort of “pure” personal project that has no obligation to deliver a result or make a profit or please anyone but oneself. it’s that intersection of “probably nothing” but “could be something”, limitless potential at the far horizon but tiny in the here-and-now/
“tinkering in your garage” is the tech equivalent of “starting a band” in the days where rock bands had a shot at stardom
there’s a Fun Theory thing here. it’s not Fun to do things that you know are trivial/meaningless and will definitely never “matter” in a big or deep sense; it’s also not Fun to be burdened with expectations and obligations. Fun thrives in the zone of “playing around that could someday grow into Something”
https://substack.com/home/post/p-154556883 Dan Davies on the problem of governments that outsource everything to contractors and NGOs, which then fail to do the job and can’t be held accountable or monitored because the government no longer has the staff or the expertise to oversee the project in detail.
outsourcing was, itself, a response to the high cost (and overspending and overstaffing) of governments running programs directly through civil service departments. the hope was that outsourcing would impose market discipline through competition.
from this point of view i’m not sure what one can do.
if the government refuses to provide public services at all, people might overthrow it?
or at least vote it out in elections
if the government provides public services itself, it will predictably overcharge, underdeliver, and engage in direct abuses of power
if the government hires third parties to provide public services, those parties will predictably overcharge and underdeliver, except more opaquely and in ways that are less amenable to being changed when voters get disgruntled.
http://okayfail.com/2025/i-met-pg-once.html heartfelt and says something I’ve been concerned about myself. when you say you’re “anti-woke”, how can we tell whether that means you’re against specific, recent types of administrative overreach or whether e.g. you actually want to drive gender-nonconforming people out of public life? I’m sure there’s some of both going on, but there’s also a lot of uncomfortable (or strategic) ambiguity, which is a much more pressing concern for those with personal reason to worry whether they’re going to experience a huge rise in discrimination.
the problem of governments that outsource everything to contractors and NGOs, which then fail to do the job and can’t be held accountable or monitored because the government no longer has the staff or the expertise to oversee the project in detail.
I have seen this happen, both in government and in private companies. It’s like people don’t realize the full extent of the principal-agent problem. The solution seems easy “just outsource the task to someone else, and if you are not happy about the outcome, fire them and hire someone else”. Here is what sometimes happens instead:
you have actually no idea whether the outcome is good or bad; different people give you contradictory strong opinions, and of course the contractor says that it’s good and that the people who say it’s bad are merely trying to deceive you into taking their services instead;
it turns out that firing the contractor is impossible, because they have built a large and complex project no one else understands, and if they stop maintaining it for a moment, it will all fall apart, with all responsibility being yours;
it turns out that the outcome kinda sucks but you can live with it, and trying to replace the contractors and rebuild the solution would be possible but too expensive (also in terms of political capital: some important guy has approved of the project, now he would look like an idiot);
the outcome sucks and you could fire the contractor and hire a new one, but you realize that you actually have no way to make sure that the next contractor is any better, so maybe you should stick with the devil you know, and hope that they will get more competent as they keep working for you.
There are even contractors out there who create such situations on purpose; that is their actual business model. Like, they will provide you excellent customer service first, so you switch to their system, then they make sure that switching back would be too expensive for you, and then the customer service becomes crappy. (That’s basically how SAP works. You pay for their system and e.g. 5 developers to help you. The first year, they will give your their best 5 developers, and the system does everything you want. So you switch your entire company to SAP. From then on, they will give you 5 junior developers—for the same price—and every little change you want now requires buying a new module and expensive customization.
With government, another problem is that the election cycle means no one is interested in making things work long-term. Switch to contractors can be done overnight (and someone can collect a bribe for that), growing your own team of experts from zero is difficult and takes years, so it almost never happens. And even if it happens by a miracle, again with a proper bribe the system can revert back overnight.
when you say you’re “anti-woke”, how can we tell whether that means you’re against specific, recent types of administrative overreach or whether e.g. you actually want to drive gender-nonconforming people out of public life?
This feels like a false dilemma, are there no options in between? For example, I would be against specific administrative overreaches or whatever, but I am also against the general atmosphere of hate aimed at white men. I don’t want to drive anyone out of anything, but I want the same courtesy to be extended to myself. What happened to the idea of fucking equality? I didn’t choose my race or gender any more than any other person, so if you are going to hold that against me, expect some pushback.
It sucks that politics often becomes a battle of wide coalitions, where your choices are limited to choosing a group that includes those who hate X, or choosing a group that includes those who hate Y. Not sure what can be done about it.
https://people.mpi-sws.org/~dg/teaching/lis2014/modules/ifc-1-volpano96.pdf the Volpano-Smith-Irvine security type system assigns security levels to variables (like “high” and “low” security). You can either use type checking or information theory inequalities to verify properties like “information can’t flow from low to high security.”
tbh I was pretty alienated by this. this was mostly an essay about grief. I feel bad for her, of course, but I was kind of curious about the details of the physical/procedural experience and we don’t get much of that.
some people feel grief about abortion, some don’t. I’ve never had an abortion or miscarriage, but I’ve had children, and I can tell you, I didn’t feel a seismic unprecedented maternal love in early pregnancy. I looked forward to having kids while pregnant, but in my mind a fetus has no lovable characteristics; it’s all imagination and my own bodily symptoms! I felt love when my kids were born and loved/appreciated them increasingly over time as they gradually developed distinctive personalities. Some mothers don’t even feel love towards newborns; it often “grows in” later.
https://www.rosemarykirstein.com/ Rosemary Kirstein’s blog, author of the Steerswoman series. I love the books; the blog is mostly travel/event updates but she seems like a lovely person and has many SFF book recommendations.
a proposal that tentatively makes a lot of sense to me, for making LLM-generated code more robust and trustworthy.
the goal: give a formal specification (in e.g. Lean) of what you want the code to do; let the AI generate both the code and a proof that it meets the specification.
as a means to this end, a crowdsourced website called “Code With Proofs: The Arena”, like LeetCode, where “players” can compete to submit code + proofs to solve coding challenges. This provides a source of training data for LLMs, producing both correct and incorrect (code, proof) pairs for each problem specification. A model can then be trained “given a problem specification, produce code that provably meets the specification”.
In real life, the model would probably use the proof assistant’s verifier directly at inference time, to ensure it only returned code + proofs that the automatic verifier confirmed were valid. It could use the error messages and intermediate feedback of the verifier to more efficiently search for code + proofs that were likely to be correct.
In general I wonder why Americans tend to be blind to Japanese scientific/technological innovation these days! A lot of great stuff was invented in Japan!
I tend to think that the public will demand a certain level of safety and pleasantness in their environments no matter what, and it’s the civil libertarian’s job to find a way to deliver that without infringing anybody’s rights and while avoiding undue cruelty/harm to those suspected of crime or viewed as “disorderly.” If the public is unsatisfied, they will demand “tough on crime” policies sooner or later; we need to ensure that when they do, we end up with something reasonable and effective rather than overkill.
In that context, Lehman does seem concerned with using the least-harsh solutions where available. He recognizes that usually, if you want to deter a fairly mild public nuisance, you don’t need to arrest or jail anybody, you just have cops and ordinary citizens tell troublemakers to knock it off, with escalating to tougher enforcement being an option that’s usually not needed. We’re on the same page that (valid) rules should be enforced, and that enforcement ultimately has to be backed by physical force, but ideally we wouldn’t resort to force often. That’s a reasonable basis for beginning to negotiate on policy.
OTOH his picture of reducing crime is entirely about calling for more enforcement, rather than addressing other points of failure like the lack of accountability (eg qualified immunity) for police generally. Lack of funding and tight restrictions on enforcement activities are not the only reason police might fail to enforce laws and catch criminals; sometimes they are gang-affiliated themselves, or are not bothering to do their jobs, in the fashion typical of any employee with infinite job security. When a police department is seriously dysfunctional, you’re not going to get better public safety by giving it more funding and more freedom to operate.
Scratch is awesome for kids. My kids love it. My older daughter has afternoon lessons at school, and I help her debug her projects if there is a problem. I am not sure how I would teach her, if I had to start from zero.
I found a few videos on how to make games in Scratch, and I learned a lot about Scratch from them, but sometimes the author uses in the algorithm a mathematical expression that seems a bit too complicated for a small child. For example, how to make a moving object stop right before the wall. Like, if it moves 10 pixels each turn, and the wall is 5 pixels ahead, you want it to go 5 pixels at the last step; neither 10 nor 0. The author’s solution is to go 10 pixels forward, and then “repeat 10 times: if there is a collision with the wall, go 1 pixel back”. (Collisions of pictures are a primitive operation in Scratch.) That sounds trivial, but because the speed could be 10 pixels per turn or −10 pixels for turn, and it’s not even guaranteed to be an integer, the algorithm becomes “repeat ceil(abs(V)) times: if there is a collision with the wall, go V/ceil(abs(V)) pixels back”, and which point my daughter just says “I don’t get it”. (This is not a problem with Scratch per se; you could limit the speed to integer, and maybe avoid the absolute value by using an if-statement and doing the positive and negative values separately; and maybe ceil(abs(V)) could be a local variable. I am just saying that the videos are generally great… but you get one or two moments of this per video.)
In a bookstore I found a translation of Carol Vorderman’s Computer Coding For Kids, which seems good (so it’s going to be a Christmas present); the first 1⁄3 of the book is Scratch, the remaining 2⁄3 are Python.
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I like the definition of disorder as domination of public space for private purposes. As I see it, the problem with informal systems of preventing disorder is that some people are resistant to shame; specifically:
assholes
criminals
homeless
mentally ill
drug addicts
teenagers, when encouraged by other teenagers (unless you happen to know their parents)
Once your neighborhood becomes a favorite place of these, you either need a strong community (the kind that can summon a group of adult men with baseball bats, who would ask the disorderly people to kindly leave and never set their foot in this neighborhood again), or you have to call the police. Or you give up your public space.
I was looking forward to a genuine practical how-to, but this isn’t really it; while I can’t argue with the value of “stick to your principles even in the face of authoritarianism” and “people who think they’ll be targeted by authoritarians need to be especially mindful of communications & payments privacy” I think this author is envisioning scenarios worse than I think are likely.
https://nadia.xyz/jhanas unusually straightforward explanation of one person’s experience learning the jhanas
ok, you blame Big Tech, and you see “Dark Forest” discourse as insufficiently hard on Big Tech.
you also think that retreat to “private” nooks is not adequate (I agree) and that different cultures around the world should get to choose their own forms of online networking instead of being lumped into a US-centric paradigm (sure) and that we need ways to connect around the world (yes)...but what do you propose and who will pay for it etc are the questions coming to my mind
a particular kind of cis women who feel entitled to be extremely rude and intrusive because they assume “women = inherently benign”.
Seems to me that some women believe that when they do something, it is fundamentally different from when a man does exactly the same thing. (Something like the fundamental attribution error, or xkcd#385 but with reversed genders.) For example, if the woman gets angry and yells at someone, it is because that person was really annoying, or she was tired, etc. Simply, she acted that way because of external reasons. But if she sees a man get angry and yell at someone, it’s obvious: men are inherently aggressive. (Or maybe, if she is a good feminist, it’s because men are privileged.) This way, she can condemn a certain type of behavior and be really emotional about it… and then go and do exactly the same thing—because in her mind, it is not the same thing at all.
Or to use the example from the article, men are inherently rude and intrusive; she faced an interesting situation and was naturally curious about it. To be curious about an interesting thing is a perfectly normal and healthy human reaction.
EDIT: I find it interesting—and sad—how the author insists, also in other articles, that their unpleasant experiences must be related to being trans, as opposed to simply being things that sometimes happen to men.
For example, “when a cis woman tells a trans person to follow sexist societal rules, she does so to demonstrate her own power”. In my experience (as a cis man), when someone reminds me to follow societal rules, it is typically a woman; men usually don’t give a fuck about societal rules, they only warn you if you annoy them personally. Just remember the elementary school; who was the first to tell the teachers when someone did something improper?
the man has good taste. like, it’s not blindingly original to appreciate Retro, but it is eminently reasonable.
there’s a lot of moderate-Democrat post-election resignation to the effect of “this is what the country wanted; the median voter is in fact pretty OK with Trump” and “the progressive apparatus was more interested in staying in its comfort zone than winning elections”
I’m also seeing a fair number of women going “ok, sure, there are things to criticize about feminist dogma, but actually I have experienced traditionalist religious mores and they were Not Good”, which I think is a needed corrective these days
https://bibliome.ai/ is a resource for looking up specific genome variants and their references in the literature and open-access databases.
when i click through to references they’re often inaccurate (they are claimed to reference a variant that they do not, in fact, contain) but tbh this is also true of Google Search and Google Scholar when it comes to rare variants.
we have not found a physiological difference between the brains of addicts and non-addicts
people are more likely to get addicted to drugs when their lives are terrible; only focusing on biomedical angles on tackling drug addiction means that it’s not considered “real” drug-addiction work to try to improve underlying social problems like poverty or injustice
in particular drug-war policies are often part of the problem, and biomedical addiction research can’t critique laws
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.abb5920 this one didn’t make the cutoff for my success-story post (only 1/10 patients had a CR) but it’s astonishing that it does anything at all; a fecal matter transplant resulted in a complete response (and two partial responses) upon reintroduction of PD1 immunotherapy, in metastatic melanoma patients who had failed it before.
i am so disillusioned with FMTs that i might still chalk this up to a fluke, but who knows
really high complete response rates in metastatic cancers almost only occur when you have a topical/intratumoral/etc treatment physically localized to the tumor, frequently using an innate-immune mechanism.
that’s also the literal majority of all historical cases of spontaneous tumor regressions—they tend to happen when there’s an infection at the tumor site, causing a powerful (innate! fever, inflammation, sepsis!) immune reaction.
the innate immune system is potent, and it is nasty, which is why you want to confine it.
immune checkpoint inhibitors are real good for metastatic cancer:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1245/s10434-018-07143-4 isolated limb perfusion for melanoma: get higher doses of chemo into the tumor than the patient could survive otherwise, by cutting off circulation to the limb. when this sort of thing is possible, it really, really works.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10549-022-06678-1 I hate on growth factor-targeted therapies a lot, but there are exceptions. Herceptin is a real drug. Look at this. 69 HER2+ patients presenting with metastatic breast cancer and treated with trastuzumab as part of their initial treatment, 54% get a complete response. 41% survived 5+ years after diagnosis. This is really, really solid.
electrochemotherapy is injecting tumors with cytotoxic drugs and electroporating the tumor so the drugs get in better.
It’s only possible when you can physically access the tumor, i.e. when it’s on the skin or when you’re operating anyway (but can’t surgically remove the tumor, because if you could, you would just do that).
if you can prove your computer program does what it’s supposed to—for almost any reasonable interpretation of “what it’s supposed to”—you will, as a side effect, also prove it doesn’t have common security flaws like buffer overflows.
people I looked up while reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle:
I wouldn’t say “not a Bayesian” because there’s nothing wrong with Bayes’ Rule and I don’t like the tribal connotations, but lbr, we don’t literally use Bayes’ rule very often and when we do it often reveals just how much our conclusions depend on problem framing and prior assumptions. A lot of complexity/ambiguity necessarily “lives” in the part of the problem that Bayes’ rule doesn’t touch. To be fair, I think “just turn the crank on Bayes’ rule and it’ll solve all problems” is a bit of a strawman—nobody literally believes that, do they? -- but yeah, sure, happy to admit that most of the “hard part” of figuring things out is not the part where you can mechanically apply probability.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YZvyQn2dAw4tL2xQY/rationalists-are-missing-a-core-piece-for-agent-like [[tailcalled]] this one is actually interesting and novel; i’m not sure what to make of it. maybe literal physics, with like “forces”, matters and needs to be treated differently than just a particular pattern of information that you could rederive statistically from sensory data? I kind of hate it but unlike tailcalled I don’t know much about physics-based computational models...[[philosophy]]
https://alignbio.org/ [[biology]] [[automation]] datasets generated by the Emerald Cloud Lab! [[Erika DeBenedectis]] project. Seems cool!
when a mouse trapped in water stops struggling, that is not “despair” or “learned helplessness.” these are anthropomorphisms. the mouse is in fact helpless, by design; struggling cannot save it; immobility is adaptive.
in fact, mice become immobile faster when they have more experience with the test. they learn that struggling is not useful and they retain that knowledge.
also, a mouse in an acute stress situation is not at all like a human’s clinical depression, which develops gradually and persists chronically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_Exactly! [[semiconductors]] the Wiki doesn’t mention that Copy Exactly was famously a failure. even when you try to document procedures perfectly and replicate them on the other side of the world, at unprecedented precision, it is really really hard to get the same results.
https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/research/funded-research/optimization-african-killifish-platform-rapid-drug-screening-aggregate [[biology]] you know what’s cool? building experimentation platforms for novel model organisms. Killifish are the shortest-lived vertebrate—which is great if you want to study aging. they live in weird oxygen-poor freshwater zones that are hard to replicate in the lab. figuring out how to raise them in captivity and standardize experiments on them is the kind of unsung, underfunded accomplishment we need to celebrate and expand WAY more.
https://www.nature.com/articles/513481a [[biology]] [[drug discovery]] ever heard of curcumin doing something for your health? resveratrol? EGCG? those are all natural compounds that light up a drug screen like a Christmas tree because they react with EVERYTHING. they are not going to work on your disease in real life.
they’re called PAINs, pan-assay interference compounds, and if you’re not a chemist (or don’t consult one) your drug screen is probably full of ’em. false positives on academic drug screens (Big Pharma usually knows better) are a scourge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-assay_interference_compounds
https://substack.com/home/post/p-149791027 [[archaeology]] it was once thought that Gobekli Tepe was a “festival city” or religious sanctuary, where people visited but didn’t live, because there wasn’t a water source. Now, they’ve found something that looks like water cisterns, and they suspect people did live there.
I don’t like the framing of “hunter-gatherer” = “nomadic” in this post.
We keep pushing the date of agriculture farther back in time. We keep discovering that “hunter-gatherers” picking plants in “wild” forests are actually doing some degree of forest management, planting seeds, or pulling undesirable weeds. Arguably there isn’t a hard-and-fast distinction between “gathering” and “gardening”. (Grain agriculture where you use a plow and completely clear a field for planting your crop is qualitatively different from the kind of kitchen-garden-like horticulture that can be done with hand tools and without clearing forests. My bet is that all so-called hunter-gatherers did some degree of horticulture until proven otherwise, excepting eg arctic environments)
what the water actually suggests is that people lived at Gobekli Tepe for at least part of the year. it doesn’t say what they were eating.
everybody want to test rats in mazes, ain’t nobody want to test this janky-ass maze!
One of the interesting things I found when I finally tracked down the source is that one of the improved mazes before that was a 3D maze where mice had to choose vertically, keeping them in the same position horizontally, because otherwise they apparently were hearing some sort of subtle sound whose volume/direction let them gauge their position and memorize the choice. So Hunter created a stack of T-junctions, so each time they were another foot upwards/downwards, but at the same point in the room and so the same distance away from the sound source.
https://solarfoods.com/ solar-powered industrial-fermentation food? they have a microbial protein called Solein. it’s made from bacteria, probably Cupriavidus necator.
the inventor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allene_Jeanes, also pioneered mass production of dextran (from industrial fermentation) which saved many lives as an ingredient in an emergency blood substitute in the Korean and Vietnam wars
the pop-culture chakra model comes from modern Theosophical books, not ancient Indian scripture
Kind of true, although the core of it is a system of 6 or 7 chakras which the author acknowledges (way down in the comments) was dominant in India “by 1500”.
This made me curious about the credentials of Transcendental Meditation, the system espoused by David Lynch (RIP) and Jerry Seinfeld among others. Turns out their guru was a student of the head of one of the four big Vedic monasteries founded over 1000 years ago by the Kant of Hinduism (that’s just my name for him), Adi Shankara. So at least in this case, there are no troubling Russian or British intermediaries. :-)
he’s right that efficiency improvements in AI training shouldn’t reduce demand for chips; In This House We Believe in Jevon’s Paradox
I believe him if he says he’s priced in efficiency improvements into his estimates for time and cost to human-level AI performance. it would be stupid not to, and he’s not stupid.
the case he’s making is “no, DeepSeek doesn’t show that export controls backfire by motivating Chinese AI researchers to pursue efficiency.”
I think I agree narrowly.
China’s top AI researchers aren’t stupid either; they’re pursuing efficiency anyhow. So is everyone.
I think it’s never wise to bet on the best people in a competitive field being complacent, even when they can “afford to be.”
Poverty is a cost, not a benefit. It’s not clear to me that China’s chip-poverty (or overall poverty) made DeepSeek more innovative than its American counterparts.
I know there are DeepSeek stans out there who think everything about American culture is toxic, but the world is big, you have not read every AI paper under the sun, and you simply do not have enough information to conclude that they are uniquely innovative.
also, whether we have export controls or not right now, it is Known that the US-China relationship is chilly and that it’s in both countries’ national interest to pursue independent tech stacks.
otoh, while I don’t think DeepSeek’s strong performance was caused by export controls, I also think we can’t make strong claims in the other direction like “if we have these export controls, Chinese AI will be such-and-such amount far behind American AI”. Progress towards more cost-efficient and compute-efficient models is something everyone expects, but it’s very hard to predict how fast it will happen, or whether it’ll be steady or bursty, or how it will be implemented.
if what we really care about, as Dario claims, is ensuring victory in a potential US-China war, rather than economically immiserating the Chinese, then I think it is also very questionable whether the AI that wins wars is the most “advanced” AI.
People like Dario whose bread-and-butter is model performance invariably over-index on model performance, especially on benchmarks. But practical value comes from things besides the model; what tasks you use it for and how effective you are at deploying it.
If you want to win a war, does it help to have an AI that can win math Olympiads? I dunno. All things equal, I’d bet on the country that’s three years behind on the benchmarks and has a functional military procurement system.
we should also note that this is a push from the CEO of a private company who wants to outlaw selling advanced chips to his competitors. there’s a self-interested motive here.
https://explorer.globe.engineer/ AI tool for learning about topics; generates heavily nested, illustrated “intros”. I don’t love the workflow; it’s overwhelming rather than sequential. If I’m trying to learn something in earnest, I need to go through it systematically rather than bopping around.
then I think it is also very questionable whether the AI that wins wars is the most “advanced” AI. / People like Dario whose bread-and-butter is model performance invariably over-index on model performance, especially on benchmarks. But practical value comes from things besides the model; what tasks you use it for and how effective you are at deploying it.
Dario is about the last AI CEO you should be making this criticism of. Claude has been notable for a while for the model which somehow winds up being the most useful and having the best ‘vibes’, even when the benchmarks indicate it’s #2 or #3; and meanwhile, it is the Chinese models which historically regress the most from their benchmarks when applied (and DeepSeek models, while not as bad as the rest, still do this and r1 is already looking shakier as people try out heldout problems or benchmarks).
sadly, these are not policies! they are editorials making arguments for why smaller government would be a good idea, and why certain tactics are worth consideration (like sunset provisions). zero object-level deregulation policy work (i.e. identifying which regulations to cut and who can cut them) has been done here. I am beginning to see why people complain about think tanks not actually dOiNg PoLicY.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-are-vortex-crystals-zhsBX93zTdOxMh5sg3nWAw#3 Perplexity explains superfluids; they are frictionless, have extremely high thermal conductivity, and exhibit “quantized vortices”, where the speed of the spinning fluid is an integer multiple of a constant and the vortex can keep spinning literally forever. Liquid helium is a superfluid. This has been known since 1937!
https://www.sympatheticopposition.com/p/risk-averse-women-rarely-birth-royalty Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus notes four Biblical women—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba—who took sexual risks to secure their children’s legacy. I love this piece and think we talk too little about the fact that women take calculated risks sexually. To live a good life, you have to risk intimacy and decide when to bet that it won’t put you in danger or ruin your future. That’s true in both ancient societies and today, though of course the risk landscape is very different.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/01/the_stranger.html I like this old Bryan Caplan post on what we owe strangers. Common sense ethics says we should not aggress upon strangers but we don’t usually owe them much positive help; yet this is a radical and uncommon position in politics.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16075 a case for formal verification + AI hybrid systems in mathematics, and a roadmap for future progress, by leading AI-for-math researchers Kaiyu Yang, Gabriel Poesia, Jingxuan He, Wenda Li, Kristin Lauter, Swarat Chaudhuri, and Dawn Song. Excellent, detailed, this is the survey paper to reference for the next while!
countries that make long-range drones (basically unmanned planes): USA, UK, France, China, Turkey, Russia
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/morris-chang-and-the-origins-of-tsmc TSMC founder Morris Chang’s autobiography; lots of false starts along the way. TSMC’s big innovation was being the world’s first foundry. They did not start with the latest and best equipment; but they were the first to offer semiconductor manufacturing as a service, and Asian semi manufacturers were already more reliable at quality than US ones (going back to the 60′s! wonder what’s up with that.)
surprising-to-me claim that there’s no crime (Chinese friend claims much the opposite!)
“The biggest surprise from talking to Chinese VCs people at AI labs was how capital constrained they felt.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lighthouse_in_Economics back in 1974 Ronald Coase pointed out that lighthouses, long a prototypical example of a public good, were actually privately provided in England during the 17th-19thc. Critics said they went out of business, which proved the market couldn’t actually incentivize lighthouse production; Coase replied that the British government made a policy choice to take over the lighthouse industry.
if self-interested people are negotiating (say, dividing up a pie), obviously everybody will want the most for themselves; but we also have an interest in eventually settling the negotiation, saving ourselves time and effort (and gaining safety, if the “negotiation” is violent).
If one arrangement stands out as “natural” or unique, it can be a Schelling point for where to stop negotiating and accept the arrangement. “Push back if they ask for more than the Schelling point, acquiesce if they ask for no more than the Schelling point” is a stable strategy. (analogous to “contrite Tit for Tat” which performs very well in evolutionary game theory experiments, though Friedman doesn’t mention that.)
the status quo ante always makes a great Schelling point; laws, contracts, and other common-knowledge establishment of who has a right to what, can become stably self-enforcing even without a formal enforcement mechanism. (eg there is no world government but national borders are usually respected.)
the fact that people can, empirically, control their own bodies much more easily than other people’s bodies, and can better defend property they can hide and territory they live in, than objects and land not literally in their current possession, also makes concepts like self-ownership and property ownership “natural” Schelling points.
though of course the exact boundaries of how property rights work are not given a priori and different societies can define them differently.
https://zhengdongwang.com/2024/12/29/2024-letter.html “The model does the eval”: as soon as we come up with an evaluation for an AI capability and a dataset to train on, human ingenuity will find ways to make the AI hit the benchmark. If it’s not model scaling, it’ll be inference-time compute, or mixture-of-experts, or something else.
AI progress, like Moore’s Law progress, isn’t due to a single technological innovation. Once an industry has a moving quantitative target and a strong economic incentive (and social expectation) to keep hitting that moving target, it’ll develop multiple technologies with overlapping S-curves that keep improving performance, potentially for a very long time.
https://trevorklee.com/want-to-reverse-aging-try-reversing-graying-first/ Trevor Klee on reversing gray hair. There are isolated case studies of people whose gray hair has regained pigmentation; lots of these are associated with the use of immunosuppressants, which suggests that something in the aged immune system may be attacking the melanocytes (or their precursors) which produce hair pigmentation.
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-biggest-community-development-program-youve-never-heard-of Clara Collier looks into the history of a giant attempt to improve India’s agricultural productivity in the 1950′s-60′s, by letting village leaders ask for what their village needs most, while the org would provide technological know-how to solve their problems. It worked great when founder Albert Mayer was running it; not so much when the Indian government tried to scale up nationally. Mostly because of common scale-up issues: difficulty finding talented staff, too big for the founder to personally go to all the villages and fix problems, etc.
today, global development experts would consider relying on village “leaders” to be an inherently biased approach; these would invariably be male, high-caste, and relatively rich, and the rest of the village wouldn’t necessarily buy into what they proposed.
despite this flaw, it worked fine in the pilot, because while Mayer didn’t have modern egalitarian language to describe it, he was de facto insisting that village discussions included all sorts of people. But when he was no longer micromanaging the program and using his own elbow grease to fix problems, the explicit/formal protocol of the program naturally devolved into “only village elites get a say” and villages indeed failed to follow through on the proposed reforms/improvements.
https://zoogle.arcadiascience.com/about search for model organisms whose genes are especially good matches for a given human gene after controlling for phylogeny (so it’s not all monkeys all the time)
the frog Xenopus tropicalis seems to make an especially strong showing
I’m really not convinced that public markets do reliably move in the predictable (downward) direction in response to “bad news” (wars, coups, pandemics, etc).
Sometimes subsidies to big companies mask risks/damage to the real economy.
Sometimes the “bad news” was already priced in by the time it happens.
Would be good to research past examples of governments making sharp authoritarian turns and see what happened to markets then.
anecdotally, some professional risk evaluators *have* upgraded their risk estimates for the US recently.
somebody said ChatGPT told her that pain and swelling in her lip indicated a vascular infection… pretty sure that’s crazy talk. vascular infections will have systemic symptoms.
I’m really not convinced that public markets do reliably move in the predictable (downward) direction in response to “bad news” (wars, coups, pandemics, etc).
Also, market movements are hard to detect. How much would Trump violating a court order decrease the total (time-discounted) future value of the US economy? Probably less than 5%? And what is the probability that he violates a court order? Maybe 40%? So the market should move <2%, and evidence about this potential event so far has come in slowly instead of at a single dramatic moment so this <2% drop could have been spread over multiple weeks.
https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/invitations like so many visions, whether i’d actually like this or not depends on execution. AI-powered smart devices? no thank you. Interpretive “power tools” with lots of configurable options, that allow me to do a lot of media analysis and view embedding coordinates? i’d like that. AI tools to interface with bureaucracies, or to assemble a media diet based on custom preferences, or to resolve disputes, or to provide traditional governmental functions where those are absent or defective? I begin to be intrigued. but you need taste. and taste is a little orthogonal to being at the leading edge of the zeitgeist; the zeitgeist-surfer always wants to “embrace” the direction we’re going, whereas the tasteful person is opinionated and likes some new things but not others, and doesn’t always favor the new things that are destined to be the biggest.
https://psychcrisis.org/mania-guide/ this is the best guide to how to handle a friend or loved one with mania I’ve ever seen. It offers lots of options for getting professional help that are less risky & restrictive than “call 911” which is most people’s first and only thought about what to do when someone has suddenly “gone crazy”.
https://meltingasphalt.com/a-codebase-is-an-organism/ a clear intro to “what do people mean about code “rotting” anyway? (spoiler: big codebases, unlike school programming assignments, get used and changed by many people. this introduces many new problems because you can’t singlehandedly control everything everyone does.)
Data structures may be haphazardly constructed, or even next to non-existent. Everything talks to everything else. Every shred of important state data may be global.
why is this bad?
Claude explains:
it’s bad if “everything talks to everything else” or “all state data is global” because if you change one part of the code everything else may break
it’s bad if there are no data structures or if they’re chosen randomly, because the right data structure is much more time & space efficient to search/sort/etc than the wrong one
“complicated, convoluted” code that’s hard to read
does he apply this insight to himself? does he try to avoid over- focusing on the negative? i’m not sure...
possibly someone who’s constitutionally non-neurotic will never be able to really understand negative contagion risks. they’ll say things that they assume are fine, and have no real intuition for what stressed-out people are hearing.
https://mises.org/mises-daily/defending-miser not only is the “miser” who invests productively benefiting others, but so is the “hoarder” who takes money out of circulation to put under a mattress—hoarders lower prices.
ehhh, shouldn’t lowering prices and raising prices be seen as equally neutral in real terms?
you are in a hurry to replace human thought at the highest levels, when there’s a tremendous amount left to be done in developing AIs to replace tedious grunt work.
why??? why do you want to put the PI out of a job? There aren’t that many PIs. why are you starting here? it’s so backwards.
what they’re actually doing at FutureHouse is pretty cool: “write an accurate and cited Wikipedia-style article for nearly every protein-coding gene in the human genome.” I think accelerating lit review is a useful function of LLMs. there’s a lot of information out there! using automation to synthesize it is a win!
but my god, man, why are you framing this as “I really want the machine to do all the thinking for me” rather than “I want everyone to have a research assistant in their pocket so they can more efficiently explore hypotheses with the context of the whole scientific literature.” do you not like thinking and learning? do you wish you could quit or something???
“We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies.” Ok, this is a real prediction (that we can grade him on later) and it certainly seems technologically possible today—it remains to be seen whether it’ll be organizationally possible, useful in the first contexts where it’s used, or whether it’ll cause catastrophic errors.
if i had to guess, i think commercial AI agents will be launched by OpenAI, and their economic impact will be ambiguous, by end of 2025.
not sure why I keep bouncing off this. it’s recommended by friends, I’m excited by the promise of interesting conceptual things being done with the superhero-genre system, but my god there are many chapters of “boring”-to-me stuff (action scenes, description of city politics & class dynamics that doesn’t feel true to life, etc)
this is the Gable et al study mentioned in the StatPearls article
it mentions that the rodent LD50 for ketamine is 600 mg/kg, and divides by 10 (which is apparently a standard rule of thumb for converting between species) to get 4.2 g for a 70 kg human
they say a typical recreational dose is 175 mg, and so get a “safety ratio” (lethal dose/effective dose) of 25, safer than alcohol.
StatPearls may have misquoted this paper...I’m not sure where they’re getting their 678 mg number.
if the lethal dose really is only about twice the effective dose, as in the StatPearls article, that’s a very tight window.
for context:
the median lethal dose (LD50) of ethanol is the equivalent of about 25-40 standard drinks
the LD50 of aspirin is about 43 aspirin tablets
the LD50 of amphetamine is between 20-200 times a typical prescription ADHD dose
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouJrOQfkeok how a Kite cell therapy (autologous) is manufactured (they ship your blood sample to a facility, and process/expand your cells in 5 days).
suicide note of a DeepMind researcher who took ketamine for depression, developed psychosis and then very severe depression unlike anything he’d experienced before; “the emergency alarm continues to strike blind panic and fear into my mind every second” for two years with no change.
having started a nonprofit myself and screwed some of this up, i want to endorse taking a lot of care with legal compliance and administrative processes.
an “ordinary” middle-class person, in their personal life, usually doesn’t have to worry too much about accidentally breaking laws. a founder (of a nonprofit or small business) can ABSOLUTELY do illegal stuff by accident and get burned for it.
it’s also very easy to accidentally be the kind of terrible boss you hear horror stories about...just screw up payroll!
neuroblastoma and embryonic kidney cell lines exhibit the “massed-spaced” effect discovered in neurons by Hermann Ebbinghaus where a repeated spaced stimulus has a stronger response than a “massed” (clumped) stimulus, almost as though “learning” the difference between an event that recurs and a (potentially erroneous) one-off.
in non-neural cells, instead of looking at neuron firing we’re looking at a particular cell signaling pathway engineered to carry a luciferase gene that glows when the CRE gene is transcribed.
The chemical TPA directly activates protein kinase C (PKC)
the chemical forskolin activated protein kinase A (PKA) via raising cAMP levels, which activate PKA
PKA and PKC both phosphorylate the transcription factor protein CREB1
CREB1 causes lots of genes, including our reported gene CRE, to be transcribed more
this pathway was selected to be similar to the way serotonin activates a signaling cascade during memory via PKA and PKC
people are sharing around popular articles claiming that this proves kidney cells have memory, but it really doesn’t.
it proves that the mechanisms of neuronal memory have shared properties with cell signaling mechanisms present throughout the body, which is what you’d expect; neurons necessarily evolved as a variation on some other kind of cell.
now, understanding exactly how this works is interesting! but no, it doesn’t mean you think with your kidneys.
An idea: make LLM create a wiki version of Sci-Hub. Each paper is a separate link. There is one screen of an automatically generated summary, followed by referred and referring papers, all of them hyperlinks (with a preview window), and a short automatically generated explanation how specifically the papers are related.
This might even be legal.
I’m excited by the promise of interesting conceptual things being done with the superhero-genre system, but my god there are many chapters of “boring”-to-me stuff (action scenes, description of city politics & class dynamics that doesn’t feel true to life, etc)
For me, the last 1⁄3 is boring (no surprising development anymore, just battles that feel endless). But the descriptions of bullying seem quite realistic (triggering) to me.
https://www.syllabi.directory/ “syllabi” or informational resources for getting up to speed on various topics: so far topics include clinical trial design, cities, English literature, and housing supply.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Langley Early pioneer of aviation; in 1903 his steam-powered airplane actually flew farther than the Wright Brothers’ famous attempt later that year, but crashed in the Potomac due to poor controllability.
an online acquaintance argued recently that the reason the Wright Brothers are celebrated as pioneers of flight is not because they were “first” to achieve sustained powered flight, but that they were the first to start an airplane company, to continue the project and iteratively improve and teach others. Lots of people claim competing “first flight” stories, but (including Langley’s) they were all one-off stunts that didn’t leave a legacy.
also (according to him), controllability is a key piece of the puzzle, and there’s a tradeoff between controllability and stability (too “controllable” and the plane will respond all-too-vigorously to small random pilot movements) and the Wrights’ three-axis control setup was the most successful and the one that came to be the ancestor of modern flight control mechanisms.
EMILY’s List, founded in the 1980′s, fundraises for pro-choice female political candidates. I’d heard of it but was surprised how successful it had been.
he introduces a concept called a “nacknick”, where things that are “suitably similar in shape” to a given example object are nacknicks, but things that are very differently shaped are not. he thinks this is logically incoherent and goes on to argue that “person” is a concept of this form.
but...most concepts work this way! they are approximate, not amenable to rigorous definition, defined by similarity to a prototypical example. I can live with this!
...this seems to be a big factor in David Chapman’s thinking, why he feels he has to decisively reject things like “philosophy” and “rationalism”, because he apparently fell into severe clinical depression due to the idea that non-rigorous definitions are unacceptable?
this is idiosyncratic. now, i don’t think it’s necessarily avoidable or at all bad for one’s intellectual output to be a mirror of one’s personal concerns. but most depressed people are not depressed about non-rigorous definitions, and most people can handle hearing about non-rigorous definitions without getting depressed. this isn’t some kind of universal root cause of the unhappiness of intellectuals!
speaking as an often-unhappy intellectual, I am FINE with some things not being amenable to rigorous definition but still being real things.
if anything, studying mathematics taught me that the rigorously formalizable and provable is a very tiny slice of the world.
history of AI in the 80′s and 90′s—after the expert systems bust, we got embodied intelligence, genetic algorithms, artificial life (aka cellular automata & evolutionary game theory), Bayesian networks, hidden Markov models, and of course the revival neural nets w/ backprop.
yes, our founding ideas came from a so-called “AI winter”.
they have (AI-enabled) debate mapping, decision making toolkit, educational programs, and something called “Internet Government” which doesn’t exist yet. https://www.internetgovernment.org/
American MTurkers don’t prefer male to female politicians in a simulated voting task; Republicans and male Democrats are about as likely to “vote” for a female as male politician, while female Democrats are more likely to vote for a woman.
it’s mostly IFS-based, which i find not especially useful.
I don’t think it makes sense to conceptualize myself as made of stable sub-personalities, like an internal “cast of characters”.
i can certainly go into a hypnagogic/imaginative trance state and allow such entities to emerge, but if I do a subsequent session, they do not “naturally” emerge the same way again, and it seems like a bad idea to deliberately force or train myself to have sub-personalities.
i either want to observe my mind impartially, seeing it as it is, or I want to shape myself to be be better.
If I don’t naturally already have multiple sub-personalities, artificially inducing them doesn’t seem like an improvement.
I do sometimes find it useful to think of myself as having fluctuating moods, motives, and concerns, and do “dialogue” between the ones that are active at any one time.
but unlike IFS, I don’t expect them to be necessarily permanent, and I don’t necessarily need them to be character-like (having a distinctive appearance, personality, etc.)
moods are styles/vibes that encompass my whole experience of life while I’m in them
motives feel like pressures or inclinations to move/act in a certain direction;
not like little inner people, if anything more like little “simulated/anticipated” muscle movements
concerns might be a type of motive, “i gotta remember to track/account-for/care-about this thing”
again, it’s either an abstract thought or a pattern of muscle-tension/planned-movement/etc. it just is not like a little inner person.
most industrial enzyme generation is fermentation of filamentous fungi—molds like Aspergillus and Penicillium. this is done somewhat differently than yeast or bacterial culture.
https://www.elidourado.com/p/personal-aviation Eli Dourado notes that “light-sport” aircraft FAA certification requirements have expanded, allowing something more like a 4-seat “flying car”-like personal aircraft, with extensive autopilot, to be affordable and legal to fly with an amateur pilot’s license.
he thinks Kamala Harris was an “empty shell” and unlikable and he felt the campaign was manipulative and deceptive.
he didn’t like that she seemed to be a “DEI hire”, but doesn’t have a problem with black or female candidates generally, it’s just that he resents cynical demographic box-checking.
this is a coherent POV—he did vote for Obama, after all. and plenty of people are like “I want the best person regardless of demographics, not a person chosen for their demographics.”
hm. why doesn’t it seem natural to portray Obama as a “DEI hire”? his campaign made a bigger deal about race than Harris’s, and he was criticized a lot for inexperience.
One guess: it’s laughable to think Obama was chosen by anyone besides himself. He was not the Democratic Party’s anointed—that was Hillary. He’s clearly an ambitious guy who wanted to be president on his own initiative and beat the odds to get the nomination. He can’t be a “DEI hire” because he wasn’t a hire at all.
another guess: Obama is clearly smart, speaks/writes in complete sentences, and welcomes lots of media attention and talks about his policies, while Harris has a tendency towards word salad, interviews poorly, avoids discussing issues, etc.
another guess: everyone seems to reject the idea that people prefer male to female candidates, but I’m still really not sure there isn’t a gender effect! This is very vibes-based on my part, and apparently the data goes the other way, so very uncertain here.
Seems to me that Obama had the level of charisma that Hillary did not. (Neither do Biden or Harris). Bill Clinton had charisma, too. (So did Bernie.)
Also, imagine that you had a button that would make everyone magically forget about the race and gender for a moment. I think that the people who voted for Obama would still feel the same, but the people who voted for Hillary would need to think hard about why, and probably their only rationalization would be “so that Trump does not win”.
I am not an American, so my perception of American elections is probably extremely unrepresentative, but it felt like Obama was about “hope” and “change”, while Hillary was about “vote for Her, because she is a woman, so she deserves to be the president”.
I’m still really not sure there isn’t a gender effect!
I guess there are people (both men and women) who in principle wouldn’t vote for a woman leader. But there are also people who would be happy to give a woman a chance. Not sure which group is larger.
But the wannabe woman leader should not make her campaign about her being a woman. That feels like admitting that she has no other interesting qualities. She needs to project the aura of a competent person who just happens to be female.
In my country, I have voted for a woman candidate twice (1, 2), but they never felt like “DEI hires”. One didn’t have any woke agenda, the other was pro- some woke topics, but she never made them about her. (It was like “this is what I will support if you elect me”, not “this is what I am”.)
i have tended to think that the stuff with “intellectual-glamour” or “visionary” branding is actually pretty close to on-target. not always right, of course, often overhyped, but often still underinvested in even despite being highly hyped.
(a surprising number of famous scientists are starved for funding. a surprising number of inventions featured on TED, NYT, etc were never given resources to scale.)
I also am literally unconvinced that “Europe’s kindergarten” was less sophisticated than our own time! but it seems like a fine debate to have at leisure, not totally sure how it would play out.
he’s basically been proven right that energy has moved “underground” but that’s not a mode i can work very effectively in. if you have to be invited to participate, well, it’s probably not going to happen for me.
at the institutional level, he’s probably right that it’s wise to prepare for bad times and not get complacent. again, this was 2019; a lot of the bad times came later. i miss the good times; i want to believe they’ll come again.
https://www.celinehh.com/aging-field Celine Halioua on what the aging field needs—notably, more biotech companies that are prepared to run their own clinical trials specifically for aging-related endpoints.
a typical new biotech company never runs its own clinical trials—they license, partner, or get bought by pharma. but pharma’s not that into aging (yet) and nobody really has expertise in running aging-focused clinical trials, so that may need to happen first in a startup context. which means some investors have to be willing to put up more cash than usual....
it’s a “brown-yellow” pigmented substance (first observed under the microscope in the 19th century) that accumulates in post-mitotic cells with age.
it’s not one substance; it’s a mixture of “garbage” (mostly protein and lipid) that accumulates around the lysosome but can’t be disposed of through exocytosis.
it’s “autofluorescent”—it fluoresces in various wavelengths of light without being stained.
it accumulates more under conditions of oxidative stress like high-oxygen environments or in the presence of iron (which catalyzes oxidation reactions); it accumulates less in the presence of antioxidants and under caloric restriction.
evidence that lipofuscin accumulation causes disease or dysfunction seems a lot shakier in this paper.
I was a little self-conscious about her dissatisfaction with “San Francisco courtier culture”—of course she’s much better at the hustle than I ever was, but I actually love it. If anything, I’ve more often felt hurt that so many people I know got sick of the game before I ever really figured out how to play it.
https://dafny.org/ ”Dafny is a verification-aware programming language that has native support for recording specifications and is equipped with a static program verifier.”
Dafny’s formal verification is based on automated SMT solvers; compared to proof assistants like Coq/Lean/etc it’s less powerful
Dafny can be compiled to familiar languages such as such as C#, Java, JavaScript, Go and Python
wow. this is a very close parallel (and historically contemporaneous) with the conquistadors and privateers of England, Spain, and Portugl in the Age of Exploration...except we don’t make movies and novels about it in the West. But the swashbuckling potential is amazing.
I’ll kind of give him Kipling and Cummings; those are genuine anti-communist, anti-monarchical-absolutism, and anti-war sentiments. Yeats is doing a different thing; I love him but he is Not Our Friend.
their latest album Only God Was Above Us is wrenching and it’s kind of getting to me lately.
most of the commentary in interviews is about how Koening, now 40 with a 5-year-old kid, has matured and found peace (though if you listen to the lyrics it’s an extremely nihilistic sort of being “at peace” with a terrible world and giving up on trying to change it)
nobody is remarking on what I see as pretty explicit themes like:
last album’s “Harmony Hall” was about a sense of betrayal regarding Ivy-League antisemitism
this album is pretty clearly a rejection of the backlash, the Gen-X (“Gen X Cops”), ex-Eastern-Bloc (“Pravda”), or specifically Jewish (in the [[Bari Weiss]]/Tablet-mag vein) “vibe shift”.
there’s a lot of reflection on heritage and generation gaps, there’s the sense that someone (his elders? his family?) is pushing him in a direction and he doesn’t want to go that way, he thinks it doesn’t make sense in his generation, in this era, but he does care enough to be conflicted and to yearn over the pain of people still (mistakenly, he thinks) struggling (“Capricorn”).
not so much. this is examining the difference in survival between vaccine responders and nonresponders. It’s substantial! but only 8⁄16 treated patients responded. not clear how it stacks up to other pancreatic cancer treatments.
but there are lovely single-cell sequencing techniques to see that the vaccine can induce long-lived T cells
endometriosis only occurs spontaneously in primates
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muir_Woods_National_Monument Muir Woods, home of the old-growth coast redwoods, was originally preserved by politician William Kent. But when a water company planned to build a dam (which would flood the woods) and threatened to use eminent domain when Kent objected, he had to donate the park to the federal government in order to actually preserve it as a place of natural beauty.
surrogate endpoints in clinical trials are generally evaluated with a meta-analysis, in which the trial-level correlation between the surrogate and “gold standard” endpoint is compared. Do trials that find a larger treatment vs. control effect on the surrogate endpoint also find greater effects on the “gold standard” endpoint? Mostly these are done in only a handful of diseases, primarily cancer where things like response rate or progression-free survival are compared to the “gold standard” of overall survival.
https://etherospharma.com/our-team/ Laura Dugan, whom I funded for her work on carboxyfullerene SOD mimetics extending lifespan and preventing neurodegeneration, has a biotech company now; and Jack Scannell, the predictive validity guy, is the CEO!
Jack Scannell’s thesis: we have more and more ways to screen targets and drug candidates, but they have lower predictive validity, so more drugs fail in the clinic and the cost per successful drug keeps rising.
solution: care more about what screens, animal models, etc you use! just because it’s “industry standard” doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck!
It seems like many people propose “generalization from their own example” as a model for the entire humanity. And it can be quite annoying when people around you agree on a model that doesn’t fit you at all… and when you point it out, they dismiss it by saying that you are in a denial. Because they have examined their own minds deeply, and found out that it was true… yeah, possibly so, but that doesn’t necessarily make it true about the others.
everyone likes whatever popular people around them like—no I don’t
if we legalize gay sex, everyone will want gay sex and families will fall apart—no I don’t feel tempted at all
people are only charitable to other people if they expect them to reciprocate—no I often don’t expect that
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholecystokinin_antagonist can you treat anxiety by blocking CCK receptors? looks like this line of research was abandoned because peptides are hard to get into the brain. i think we may have better ways around this problem now?
John II, the king, set an objective for his admirals to find a route to India that bypassed the usual middlemen for the spice trade (the Mamluks & Venetians). 16 years later, Vasco da Gama did it. Nice example of “goals and plans can work”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchlock there seems to be an unfortunate definitional overload where “handgun” in the early modern period refers to a gun held by a human as opposed to a cannon? but in the late 15th century all “handguns” were long guns, it seems.
this means verifying multiple things. the compiler, the parser, the debugger, etc. all relative to a formal specification of what they’re supposed to do.
do you write a different specification for each thing you’re checking? this introduces lots of wasted/duplicated/inconsistent work. maybe you should just have a single specification for the language.
this is what K is: a framework for writing language specifications.
symbolic execution—don’t plug in values, map out branches of how the program behaves with any possible input. good for testing and verification.
biology is multiscale and multimodal. genes! proteins! cells! tissues!
in particular we have dynamical spatial systems that govern developmental processes:
cell division & microtubules
neurite branching
mitochondrial fission & fusion
plant organogenesis in shoot & root growth
neural tube closure.
what happens (over time) is a function of what’s going on nearby in space;
macro geometry (the shapes of organs, bodies, etc) is a consequence of micro, local dynamics
declarative modeling:
one example of a bio dynamical system is differential equations defined by diffusion operators on the concentrations of chemical species (as functions of spatial position and time).
an abstract syntax tree (AST) is a way of representing the symbols of a mathematical expression (tree depth corresponds to order of operations, nested functions, that thing)
you could define a declarative modeling language as a space of ASTs that define models, a mapping between ASTs and dynamical systems (the mathematical objects that correspond to the symbolic objects) and transformations between ASTs.
for example one transformation is: you start with a chemical reaction; you reverse the arrow to get the reverse reaction; or, you change the rate constant to get a different reaction rate.
now, when do these manipulations commute? there is a quantum-inspired “operator algebra” for chemistry
each chemical species is a “state”; there are transition probabilities between them
mass action laws define relationships between the equilibrium concentrations of each species (as a function of the chemical reaction & the reaction constant)
“operators” for each species destroy or create particles of that species; what happens if you hit the system with an “operator”? add these up and you get the “chemical master equation” that defines the dynamical system and the enforced probability preservation (probabilities must sum to 1)...(again i don’t totally get it)
now we can also add parameters to these models. for instance a model governing cell division might depend on the size of the cell.
now we can start talking about cell division as a function of things like position, cell type, concentrations of signaling molecules, and so on, with invariants (like “1d growth”)
and we can do similar operator stuff based on probability distributions of what values parameters can take...
ok so what’s the point of all this?
normally in mathematical modeling of biological processes, you pick out a priori which variables to care about.
but alternatively, you could start with a finer model that throws in everything and the kitchen sink, and automatically discern which variables don’t really affect the result much no matter what values you plug in, and then “reduce” to a coarser model.
...but you could also do that statistically? i hate to be the “but how is this practical” guy but this literally is applied mathematics...
it’s pretty though. wish i had time to go through more carefully.
https://qntm.org/devphilo i love his short stories; his “developer philosophy” also seems sensible, though might be hard to make work in a real business with customer/deadline pressure?
if some governmental policy seems Not Fair, to people like you and me, we don’t actually have much of a (perceived) affordance to change it through collective civic action.
conventional political activism is more like a zero-sum negotiation between interest groups.
“it’s not fair” doesn’t move the needle by itself, even if everybody you tell can see it’s true.
organized political violence to achieve goals isn’t much of a thing these days either; the closest thing is disorganized violence (rioting, lone shooters)
the courts sort of are an avenue to push back against unfair policies, but civil courts are declining drastically in use.
I like this. she’s not a theorizer! she’s just Some Guy, actually expressing her thoughts on current events. do I agree with everything she says? maybe not.
But it’s normal-ass blogging rather than inhibited silence or sloppy thoughts packaged as a Grand Narrative, and I think that’s healthy. we need normal-ass blogging.
Scott Alexander is a normal-ass blogger who kept up a regular schedule and has a gift for puns and a fairly high appetite for books and research papers.
like, that’s all it is, it’s being yourself in public, consistently year over year, while having a healthy (but not extraordinary!) degree of interest in the world around you.
It doesn’t show that; it shows that black, Latino, and Asian people have lower “trust” than white people.
also correlated with lower trust: poor neighborhoods; high-crime neighborhoods; high-density neighborhoods; neighborhoods where most people moved in recently; neighborhoods with lots of renters; neighborhoods with few US citizens
also correlated with higher trust: individual income, bachelor’s degree, homeownership
this just reduces to socioeconomic status. there’s not a separate thing going on here about diversity.
obviously you can increase the average of many quality-of-life metrics in a community by restricting it to people of higher socioeconomic status. but then those same metrics would (mathematically) decline outside the elite community.
this does not support claims like “everybody on average would be better off under residential segregation”.
in order to meet requirements to be 25% woman-and-minority owned, they went around to black churches to offer an extremely misleading “investment deal” to working-class people who cannot afford it and won’t understand the fine print.
the financial structure includes saddling these “investors” with a surprise enormous tax bill that only kicks in years after purchase.
of course, anybody can get in on special “women and minorities only” financial opportunities, even if they’re a white man; set up a shell company “owned” by a woman and/or minority, who is your wife, or an associate of yours willing to serve as your front. this happens ALL THE TIME.
the inference is that someone in city government said “nope, not this time, no more shell games, when we say minority owned we mean you’re gonna have to funnel the profits into our actual community.” So, this time around, the casino people did go to the community! but what the community gets is not gonna be profit.
A friend asked me a good question: what was the UK’s DARPA-equivalent before?
UKRI https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Research_and_Innovation was the older UK science-and-tech funding org, which ARIA is unaffiliated with; it brought together nine older funding bodies, most of which were founded in the 21st century, and none of which could plausibly be the bodies that funded the bulk of UK nationally-funded (non-medical) science and engineering through the mid-20th-century.
so...what was the UK’s DARPA, or for that matter its NSF, in 1945-1990?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigismondo_Pandolfo_Malatesta amazing guy. mercenary. murdered two out of three wives. first person that the Pope explicitly “canonized into Hell.” patron of Piero della Francesca and Leon Battista Alberti. rehabilitated in literature several times, including by Ezra Pound, which figures.
if you successfully convince the world that AI is potentially very powerful (and dangerous), this does not make people go “ok let’s not build AI then”, it makes people think “i want to be powerful and dangerous!!!”
i’m not on board with everything in this article but i think i largely agree.
when you’re an idealistic nerd who despises playing politics and isn’t very good at it, it will probably end badly if you dive enthusiastically into politics.
“so how can you do anything helpful at all?”
provide true information. don’t optimize too aggressively for mass appeal.
this doesn’t mean actively hide or be deliberately cryptic—i think that’s often going too far. i think clarity and open communication are, where possible, good practices.
but maybe don’t make it your full-time job to strategically maximize the number of humans who believe a given thing.
focus your efforts on goals that you’re quite confident will be beneficial and that can be done without coercion. beware of making your job about “what the government should do”.
do not develop an identity around being an expert at strategic adversarial thinking.
you may be a literal chessmaster (like, at the game of chess);
you may be very skilled at things that would be useful to a modern military;
but if you are, in the colloquial sense, “kind of aspie”, you are not an expert in detecting when somebody’s about to screw you over. do not be over-eager to swim in shark-infested waters.
oxidized LDL is a marker of inflammation and atherosclerosis. It’s also a protein (the acronym is for Low Density Lipoprotein) so you can target it with an antibody!
regulatory T cells (Treg) genetically modified to contain one of these anti-OxLDL antibodies prevents the OxLDL from getting into macrophages and turning them into foam cells.
inject them into live mice on a high-fat diet and they also get less atherosclerosis than control mice
interestingly they make Tregs from CD4 (helper) T-cells by getting them to express FOXP3. this will be useful for human clinical application, since natural Tregs are rare and it can be difficult to extract them in sufficient quantity.
https://talentmarket.org/cato-psych-policy-analyst/ ugh. they basically have already written the bottom line on what they want a new hire to think about the “psychology of progress”, and it’s mostly talking points that have been made ad infinitum already.
surely if you were serious about overcoming psychological barriers in the general public that make them ill-disposed to objectively beneficial economic/technological changes, you’d want to look for new ideas (since clearly past ones haven’t worked). you’d also want to focus on starting with empathy and common ground, if the hope is to actually change minds. this is a job description that, ironically, guarantees stasis, not progress.
https://stephenmalina.com/post/2023-11-04-biologizing-the-stack/ I’m glad he admits this is a contrarian position because the straightforward lesson of the past several decades is that you want as few things to be biomanufactured as possible, living things make incredibly cost-inefficient factories and should be a last resort.
1st Amendment Law seems much more practical in protecting all political opinions and having exceptions only for “true threats” or narrow “incitement to violence”. Saying “don’t read this book, it’s by a fascist” is intolerance by Popper’s definition, but it’s straightforwardly protected speech under US law and I think it should be; we don’t trust a government agency to adjudicate questions of epistemic vice.
1st Amendment law has almost a refreshingly nihilistic attitude to discussion—all “opinion”, including iirc all discussion on social media, is assumed to be neither true or false, so it can’t be considered defamatory. basically, under the law, “this is all just yapping, people get to yap, call me when they make a false factual claim that costs you money, or make an actual plan to physically hurt someone”. sometimes, in addition to being a safer standard for one’s government to hold, this is a healthy attitude to adopt oneself!
first, we visualize how values at the nodes of a neural network (during inference) change based on the inputs. complicated!
then we look at how weights on edges change as a neural network is trained. also complicated! though you can see the changes getting smaller as the network approaches convergence.
a mesh neural net—each node is only connected to its neighbors in a grid—is a cellular automaton. Cellular automata are a special case of neural networks, in other words.
you can do an analogue of “training a model to fit a function” with something called a “rule array”—you have a grid, and each square can have a local update rule relative to its neighbors, cellular-automata style, but the rule might be different for different squares. If your “input” is a black square at the top row, then “running” the automata rule repeatedly may propagate down a black-and-white pattern on the grid. you can then “adapt” the rule array iteratively to get a desired pattern, like “generate one that lasts for exactly 30 steps”. or a function: you want to get something that gives certain “outputs” on the bottom row, given an “input” at the top row. then “mutate” cells at random, keeping only the results where the distance from the “training examples” doesn’t change.
you can observe which cells mutate along the training runs; they seem to be the ones along the “ideal path” between x (at the top) and f(x) (at the bottom).
doing mutations at random is inefficient; you can do an equivalent of “steepest descent” in cellular automata too, but this tends to get stuck
there’s an equivalent of “backpropagation” in automata-land too
in general, why translate to automata? he says they’re easier to “inspect” because simpler, but I kinda don’t get it.
he even builds a discrete analog of a transformer!
“It could have been that machine learning would somehow “crack systems”, and find simple representations for what they do. But that doesn’t seem to be what’s going on at all. Instead what seems to be happening is that machine learning is in a sense just “hitching a ride” on the general richness of the computational universe. It’s not “specifically building up behavior one needs”; rather what it’s doing is to harness behavior that’s “already out there” in the computational universe.”
yep this is a convergent idea. the secret sauce in machine learning is just having a rich enough space of possible functions, and a means of variation and selection. you can get similar results using things like genetic algorithms or cellular automata that aren’t “neural networks” at all.
you can also visualize the dependency graph of lemmas.
sometimes the “high-degree nodes” are legible things like commutativity
but often they, and “commonly used lemmas” in randomly generated proofs, are weird elaborate non-human-interpretable things.
What about proof-to-proof equivalences?
this is where the “homotopy” metaphors come from. you could find a “path” from one proof to another...but what if there are “holes” in proof-space? “Then a “continuous deformation” of one proof into another will get stuck, and even if there is a much shorter proof, we’re liable to get “topologically stuck” before we find it.”
https://kordinglab.com/about/ an approach to figuring out what neurons do by mapping between simulations, electrophysiology data, and psychophysics. “what algorithm is being implemented here?”
this doesn’t “smell” aggressive enough to me—the projects look fine but i’m surprised they’d be unfundable elsewhere—but maybe it’s just an insufficiently pointed communication style.
“Being a person is too hard a job to leave to a single person. We can’t do it on our own, not even as adults. Figuring out how to be a person is a group project, and we have to help each other. But the catch is that we don’t really know what we are doing, so sometimes we end up hurting each other instead. When you are weird, you experience this hurt. Social categories have been poorly constructed and fail to conduce to human happiness. The weird person is a record of the mistakes we have made.”
it sounds like her own “weirdness” is experienced as a source of pain, not as a stable and beloved personal identity. and that she’s uncomfortable with public celebration of “weirdness”.
admittedly it is a bit paradoxical that contemporary culture celebrates “weirdos” in a not-very-individualistic way. the nonconformists who are celebrated do, actually, conform to their own little club rules.
this never particularly bothered me, though!
if i find a club i want to be a member of, that’s fantastic. i’m not attached to being literally unique.
if i find that existing “labels” or “groups” don’t entirely suit me as an individual, that can be a bummer, but i don’t think i would be better off if no fine-grained identity categories existed and i was expected to conform with everyone in my geographical location.
there’s a very natural explanation about why children’s books star alienated weirdos: writers are not typical people!
beloved children’s book authors were writing to children like me, the children who read a lot of books and might grow up to be writers ourselves.
this isn’t some paradoxical thing.
what is “normal” (both common and normative) in the world of books is what is “normal” for text-native obligate readers and writers, which does in fact mean being different from the majority! Bookishness is a minority trait!
Bookish people, as a rule, are glad we are this way, and eager to acculturate potential kindred spirits into bookishness. This seems generally healthy to me.
sure, be a little thoughtful about not making depictions of alienation into self-fulfilling prophecies, but I think a little bit of care and taste suffices. no need to angst about “what if we are BAD ROLE MODELS”. it’s okay to like your own quirks.
if he, making inferences from public information, said that he believed specific banks were insolvent when that was not yet public knowledge, he’d be accused by the press of deliberately causing a financial crisis or destroying banks.
the government lied about banks being fine, which were not fine, in the interests of preventing the crisis from getting worse.
i dunno whether this is outrageous because the culture that is finance is so unfamiliar to me; afaik saying true negative things about banks will make them fail faster and maybe spread the “contagion” more broadly in the economy? maybe it is in the public’s best interest for the government to lie in such cases?
but at any rate, this implies you should not necessarily believe announcements that a bank is fine.
“Don’t spend time alone with one minor away from the group or conduct private interactions with minors in enclosed spaces or behind closed doors”, “Don’t relate to minors as if they were peers, conduct private correspondence, or take on the role of “confidant” (outside of a professional counseling relationship)” and “Don’t privately email, text, or engage with minors through social media. Group messages and posts are acceptable and must be viewable by all participants” are the objectionable rules here.
obviously the motive was to avoid child sexual abuse, which is important, and I’m even on board with erring on the side of avoiding the appearance of impropriety. indeed, don’t sext the minors or offer them alcohol/drugs.
but a normal, appropriate mentorship relationship will involve one-on-one meetings and emails. teachers talk to students. how can you ban this???
it’s especially outrageous because this is MIT. child prodigies need opportunities to do real things in the world; this will generally involve working with adults. rules like this mean “no more Terence Taos.”
only relevant Google result I could find for a James Joyce quote I remembered part of:
Joyce made a specific comparative observation in his notes: “Europe is weary even of the Scandinavian women (Hedda Gabler, Rebecca Rosmer, Asta Allmers) whom the poetic genius of Ibsen created when the Slav heroines of Dostoievsky and Turgenev were growing stale. On what woman will the light of the poet’s mind now shine? Perhaps at last on the Celt. Vain question. Curl the hair how you will and undo it again as you will” (E 125).
this is from the notes/stage directions of Exiles. The play has “full text” versions online but they don’t include the notes.
interestingly I’m reading this just as I’m hearing other people discuss how fruitless it is to write publicly, because nobody will understand you and take action based on your words. I think it probably depends how you write and what concepts you’re trying to get across, and what your bar is for “action.” People who think essays are useful are probably trying to reach across shorter inferential distances and make smaller nudges to people’s behavior.
https://www.rationalistjudaism.com/p/the-kezayis-post what is the minimum amount of matzah one is required to eat on Passover? traditionally it’s “the size of an olive.” but some people claim it’s about the size of a large pizza...because Biblical olives were huge??? (spoiler: no, they were not. we literally have thousand-year-old olive trees producing normal-sized olives.)
https://www.read.ai/ this is a fascinating app. Link it to your calendar and Zoom and it will accompany on you on all your meetings, summarize them, generate action items, and grade you on things like how fast you speak and how much other people seem to like you.
“bias” is their word for “how much positive emotion do you show”, which is a terrible word for that! did they let the statisticians do too much product design?
they will also keep track of how many “non-inclusive” things you say, apparently. i’m still at zero, not being much for slurs myself.
transcription accuracy is pretty good, but the app is often wrong about who’s speaking.
they pivoted to low-volume, high-price beauty & personal care ingredients, which actually generated a bunch of revenue, but not enough to cover costs. and then also bought a ton of celebrity beauty brands, which didn’t. 2022 stock plunge, 2023 bankruptcy.
there are kind of...zero large profitable firms founded after 2000 that specialize in industrial fermentation/biomanufacturing, EXCEPT a couple of biotechs that make enzyme drugs.
there’s plenty of biomanufactured products but pretty much all from very large old boring firms at sorta commodity prices?
plain glass box skyscrapers were, in fact, more cost-effective for developers. it’s not all about architectural tastes. architects in real life are very far from all-powerful.
in fact, I really think people should stop writing books/movies/etc about auteur architects; it only encourages more young people to go into architecture and become unemployed. I’m looking at you, Francis Ford Coppola
pointing in the right direction, but overstated/inflammatory. women don’t go around being “disgusted” by every man they interact with socially.
rather, most women find the idea of having sex with a randomly selected unfamiliar man disgusting, even if there’s nothing particularly the matter with him. typical straight women are cautious/selective about sex and fairly slow to warm up sexually to new people. not much “lust at first sight.”
but yeah, getting rejected when you ask women out does not in fact mean you are inadequate or unattractive! getting rejections in dating is normal, just like every author gets rejected manuscripts and every job applicant gets rejected from jobs. the average man gets a lot of “no”s and at least one “yes”, and eventually marries a “yes.”
also i share Bryan Caplan’s view that women shouldn’t be offended by being asked out by someone they aren’t interested in. sure, persistent harassment can be a problem, but a simple question isn’t.
I agree with most of this, but “you don’t need much sleep” is very individual. some of us very much need plenty of sleep and our lives improve dramatically when we face that fact.
women don’t go around being “disgusted” by every man they interact with socially. rather, most women find the idea of having sex with a randomly selected unfamiliar man disgusting, even if there’s nothing particularly the matter with him.
Well, in context of dating (or OkCupid), I guess the idea is that sex is supposed to happen, sooner or later. And if there is no “lust at first sight”, I guess that means swipe left. (I am not sure; I don’t use dating apps.)
OK, I guess I got some assumption wrong, but please explain to me which one.
people use dating apps such as OkCupid with the intention of finding a potential sexual partner (as opposed to e.g. trying to find a platonic friend)
if someone is looking for a potential sexual partner, and finds someone such that the idea of having sex with him feels disgusting, she swipes left or whatever is the UI action for “go away” (as opposed to keeping the contact just in case the feeling might change in future)
For most dating app users, I’m genuinely uncertain how representative both assumptions are, and I’d be curious to see more data regarding both (Aella’s surveys maybe?)
For me, neither assumption holds; I suspect this makes me un-representative of most users:
I decouple dating from sex, and do use these apps to find platonic acquaintances
I swipe right mostly if I predict the person is interesting to meet up with, and swipe left on the majority of “lust at first sight” profiles
Is that officially supported by the apps? Like, is there a selection like: “I am looking for… someone to marry / a one-night stand / a platonic friend”? Do you do something specific to indicate that platonic friends are what you are looking for?
I am asking because if there is such option, then probably many people use it that way. If not, then maybe your approach is unusual. (But maybe not too unusual, because otherwise people would not respond to you, or would be disappointed after meeting you?)
Depends on the app. Tinder for instance has a section called “What are you looking for?” that everyone else can see, whose selectable options include “New friends”, “Still figuring it out”, “Short-term fun”, “Long-term partner”, and a mix of the last two. People in my area use a pretty even mix of these, and their signaling is usually honest.
claims that the Securitate continued to exist de facto, even after the revolution that ended the Ceausescu dictatorship.
“This influence distorts democracy, says Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, a Romanian civic activist and a leading scholar on corruption. “There’s long been ample evidence of a ‘deep state’ in Romania with roots in the former security services,” she maintains.”
“The Securitate was declared defunct and, with no admission of previous crimes – including those committed in the revolution – or internal vetting, was chopped into nine separate services that corresponded to the Securitate’s organizational substructure. The new services were staffed and directed by virtually the same people as the old Securitate.”
“During the 1990s, the Securitate’s successors, the domestic SRI, the Foreign Intelligence Service, SIE, and others, exploited their wide-ranging resources and security monopoly to become oligarchs and form cartels in the post-Communist economy. So vast was their intelligence that they could blackmail compromised politicians, media professionals and judges. In post-communist Romania, just about everyone had something to hide.”
they failed to manufacture their first product to customers’ specifications, lost the orders, overstated the market for it (which the SEC sued them for), and admitted they had no revenue & would not be profitable for the foreseeable future shortly after their IPO.
ultimately the issue may be that they specialized in only one piece of the manufacturing process, strain optimization. they outsourced downstream processing and manufacturing scale-up to third party contractors, and those are often places where hiccups arise for new biomanufactured products.
“not enough controlled burns” and “climate change” are the causes of forest fires.
what’s going on in LA right now is a chaparral fire. controlled burns aren’t appropriate for chaparral. these are “wind-driven” fires spread by the Santa Ana winds, which are unusually strong this year, but the wind severity isn’t driven by climate change.
the human-preventable cause of these fires isn’t climate change or Smokey the Bear, but too many human-caused fires, in particular due to power lines, since PG&E has not adequately maintained the lines in California as population has risen and the power grid has grown.
https://topos.institute/work/ Topos Institute builds collaborative modeling tools based on category theory, useful for formalizing mathematics, system dynamics, epidemiology, etc.
claims that the Securitate continued to exist de facto, even after the revolution that ended the Ceausescu dictatorship
This is what seems to generally happen in post-communist countries, the difference is probably only in degree.
You have a secret police, which is an organization that exists for decades and is full of amoral people cooperating to keep a rule over the country. Then the regime is over, and...
Do you kill those people? Nope.
Do you at least put them on some kind of blacklist, saying “these people should never be allowed to get into any position of power”? Aaah… there were some feeble attempts, but generally no.
Well, guess what happens next. Many of those people get into the new positions of power (it’s not like their skills are useless now, so they can e.g. join the non-secret police), and they know they have a network of former colleagues they can trust, who are also seeking positions of power. Together they can take over some institutions, the only question is which ones and how completely.
In worst case, even large parts of the old institutions remain, only rebranded.
“The recent mapping of an entire adult fruit fly brain—a watershed achievement that made headlines worldwide—offers a glimpse of what’s possible. But this breakthrough almost didn’t happen. It required the serendipitous alignment of support from three non-traditional funders: Scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus imaged the complete fly brain; the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity drove the development of tools for scalable neural-circuit mapping through its MICrONS program; and the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative provided sustained support for data analysis.”
it might cost $1B to fully map & model the brain. ARPA-style and FRO-style research orgs are essential.
optogenetically perturb each neuron in C. elegans and see what happens to neural output in all 302 neurons
fit this as a simple multivariate dynamical system—each neuron’s output at time t is a linear function of all the neurons’ output at time t-1, plus a linear function of the neurons’ history of optogenetic stimulation, plus error.
compare to a simpler, connectome-constrained model, where each neuron’s output is only a function of its presynaptic input neurons (and direct optogenetic stimulation). this is actually a good approximation!
in fact, it’s better than a fully-connected model, OR a “shuffled-connectome” model based on a made-up C. elegans connectome with similar topological properties to the real one. the true connectome matters.
if you train a connectome model without one neuron, it predicts something about what activity “should” be there. correlation at 0.30 with the real one, much higher than a “fake” connectome model’s correlation with reality.
model weights don’t reflect synapse counts, though. “multi-hop” trajectories have significant influence on correlations (i.e. neuron A and neuron B’s activity may still be highly correlated even if A and B are more than one step away on the “connectome graph”).
it would be shocking if connectomes didn’t matter, so in a sense this is not a surprising set of results; but this is a first example of collecting data with the optogenetic perturbation method, which is a major step towards true neural simulations.
a simulation should be able to predict what every neuron would do under various circumstances.
gathering data on the worms in varying behavioral/environmental contexts could approximate this, but manipulating each neuron one at a time gives a much more thorough picture of the input-output relationships of the nervous system.
NMDA receptors (for glutamate) are important in long-term potentiation, in which “a neuron becomes highly sensitive to excitatory transmission for days or weeks” following recurrent stimulation.
long-term potentiation is important in associative memory. it “strengthens” a neural connection that has been sufficiently strongly/repeatedly made.
NMDAr inhibitor drugs reduce this effect.
so does schizophrenia
Neurons have “summation” effects.
“spatial summation”—if two neurons stimulate a third, the effect is stronger than if only one did.
“temporal summation”—repeated stimulation has a stronger effect than a one-off.
it is a form of coincidence detection; multiple “simultaneous” events are treated as a bigger deal, less likely to be flukes or errors.
the NMDAr inhibitor dexmethorphan inhibits this effect.
so does schizophrenia.
normal subjects have “prepulse inhibition”, aka the reaction to a loud startling noise is less intense if preceded by a small pulse sound.
this is a form of temporal summation; signals generated by the prepulse accumulate and prepare the brain for further sound, preventing the startle response.
schizophrenics don’t have this; they get startled both ways, indicating (?) that the prepulse sound doesn’t “accumulate” properly.
“desummation” or “cognitive atomization” is like a failure to anticipate; new stimuli are fresh, not expected.
this coincides with the subjective effects of NMDAr inhibitors: at low doses there is “increasing perceptual acuity for things usually unnoticed” and at high doses there is “inability to notice a lot of previously learned meaning”, “inability to recognize familiar stimuli”, added “noise”, and loss of “definition and meaning.”
visual agnosias are a common reported ketamine effect
NMDAr inhibition causes amnesia effects in patients
patients on low-dose ketamine do not retain things they learned while on the drug
“PsychonautWiki lists ‘memory suppression’ as a distinct effect from amnesia as a side effect of NMDAr antagonists. In the description of this effect it notes that short-term memory is suppressed much earlier than long-term memory. At very high doses, the Wiki suggests that one may even forget who they are, where they live, or even a failure to remember what humans are”
impaired short-term memory relates to sensations of unfamiliarity and dissociation (if you can’t remember stuff, you don’t know what it is)
notice that these are plausibly fatal accidents or suicides while under the influence. this is a potential danger of recreational use that won’t show up in stats about medical use or experimental administration to animals.
“from the very first announcement of successes in cloning DNA (the foundational technology of recombinant insulin) in 1973, the first reaction of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Institute of Medicine was to try to stop research into it and, simultaneously, to prevent any patenting of it. The National Institute of Health followed shortly thereafter with their own restrictions, as did a number of cities, including Cambridge and Berkeley, the towns where the universities most likely to do the research were located”
Genentech, a tiny garage startup, was able to escape those restrictions.
https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/whats-alprazolams-deal alprazolam (Xanax) is reputed to have a fast onset and fast diminution of its anti-anxiety effect, compared to lorazepam (Ativan), making it more abusable and less useful for anxiety disorders. but why? all the theories seem wrong!
also, diazepam (Valium) has exactly the same fast onset/fast diminution, but doctors don’t seem to worry about it the same way!
it looks like the difference isn’t about half-life, elimination, or the blood-brain barrier, but something about ligand-receptor binding.
The Myth of Er is the final scene of Plato’s Republic.
it is a very strange story. in the afterlife, the good are rewarded in heaven and the bad are punished in hell; and then everyone lines up to choose their new reincarnated life. they get to see how each possible life will play out. people who have led unhappy lives often prefer to reincarnate as animals. people who were only virtuous out of habit and went to heaven often choose to be all-powerful tyrants, not realizing how this will backfire and hurt them. people who have learned philosophy are more likely to choose lives of virtue; they also “forget less” about their past lives by drinking from Lethe.
so in one sense it’s straightforwardly a pitch for philosophy...but it has more moving parts than would seem to be necessary just to make that point.
most myths/stories about “good is rewarded, evil is punished” don’t have this homeostatic mechanism where the good are most likely to turn bad (since Heaven makes them complacent) and the bad are more likely to turn good (since Hell makes them wish for a better next life.) why put that in?
how does this whole reincarnation thing relate to the rest of the Republic, which is ambiguous between being a plan for an ideal city and a metaphor for the ideal internal organization of the soul?
first of all, their stock price crashed after short seller Scorpion Capital reported that most of their “revenue” was from self-funded “related parties” that often had the same staff and office space...aka they weren’t “really” selling to other companies much at all.
but what was the underlying technical problem? why couldn’t they sell biomanufactured compounds profitably?
one possibility: they were focusing on compounds that could be synthesized chemically, much more cheaply, that you would only grow from microbes if you wanted some sort of “all-natural” label
another possibility: their service was limited to (parallelized, automated) yeast strain optimization in very small samples -- 384-well plates. they didn’t do scale-up (growing the yeast in large reactors) and they didn’t do downstream processing (extracting the product from the yeast). this may have lowered their rate of generating successful products, because many failures happen in the parts of the process they didn’t specialize in.
this is the manufacturing equivalent of what, in drug discovery, would be a CRO that only does a certain range of in-vitro screens. obviously many things that pass the screens will fail in animals or clinical trials. and obviously the value of an early screening service is quite low compared to the value of a successful end product.
https://foundrytheory.substack.com/ I’m gonna be real with you—for all the bad results, I love Gingko’s marketing. It makes me sad when people slam “hype” because this is so beautiful. Aesthetically tasteful, intellectually stimulating, emotionally inspiring. Everything they’ve done on the marketing front is just the best. and tbh it’s worked for them—the one thing even the damning reports show is how great they are at starting early-stage conversations with Fortune 500 companies. (they just rarely get all the way to actual products, revenue, and happy customers.) I’ll be sad if the end of the ZIRP era means the end of pretty design and delightful copy.
I’m sure Daniel Golliher is doing a healthy thing but I struggle to get on board myself.
I think he’s probably right that in order to actually make a political impact you have to pick a very small issue (like basketball courts in your city) to spend a lot of time on and you have to, um, have friends.
I looked into public art one time—how do people get their murals etc into public spaces? -- and the answer was, simply, that they are full time on that project. they live eat sleep and breathe public art. now, do I like pretty things? yes. do I care so much about public art in particular that i would want to be full time on it? no.
Given that I don’t want to spend my life on the issues “small enough” that i could actually shift them, it is absolutely rational for me not to participate in politics and to find it an uncongenial place! i can make a way bigger impact, much faster, with the reputational capital (and literal money) I’ve built up in more SV-adjacent circles than I can by grinding on NYC neighborhood issues.
Is connectomics actually useful for anything? here’s strong evidence for “yes.”
Mapping how neurons connect and using graph clustering gives you (anatomically sensible) functional distinctions into systems like “oculomotor” (which governs eye movements) and “axial” (which governs movements along the body axis.)
Looking at the spectrum of the graph also predicts a chunky “wiring diagram”. Simulating the dynamics of this wiring diagram recapitulates real electrophysiology. In other words, just doing mathy graph stuff allowed the researchers to infer a modular organization at an intermediate scale between neurons and gross anatomy, a useful scale for predicting neural behavior. This is literally “cutting reality at the joints”.
One thing that has frustrated me as an amateur learning neuroscience is that we have a microscale (cells) and a macroscale (brain anatomy) but function — the brain’s ability to carry out specific tasks — has to happen at some kind of meso-scale regarding the interaction of groups of neurons. Clearly there’s redundancy — it’s possible for two different neuron-by-neuron patterns of activity to reflect “the same” functional behavior — so we need a “unit of function” that’s “all the activity patterns that do the same thing” — probably that coincides somewhat with spatial co-location, similar cell type, etc, but not at all necessarily! Only once you have “units of function” can you talk about the brain like a machine, know what its “state” is and how that “state” would change under specific interventions, simulate it efficiently, etc.
To understand brain function, we’d need to be able to discern human-interpretable “parts” of brain activity, like “remembering your grandmother just is the fizz blorking the buzz”…but we don’t seem to know what the “fizz”, the “buzz” or “blorking” are. We’d need to have “chunky things” in the brain-activity space, the way molecules, cells, or anatomical structures are “chunky things” at the micro and macro scales. And I felt like “what am I missing? does anybody in neuroscience even care about chunky-things? am I wrong to care? or do I just have the wrong keyword?”
This paper definitely seems like an example of “chunky things neuroscience”, which is encouraging!
It’s been a while since I’ve read Plato’s Republic, but isn’t the Myth of Er just a abstraction of the way people make decision based on (perceived) justice and injustice in their everyday life? Just in the same way that Socrates says it is easier to read large print than small print, so he scales up justice from an individual to the titular Kallipolis, so too the day to day determinism of choices motivated by what we consider is ‘fair’ or ‘just’ is easier seen if multiplied over endless cycles of lives, than days and nights.
Is it possible that Plato was saying that day to day we experience this homeostatic mechanism? (if you are rational enough to observe the patterns of how your choices affect your personal circumstances?).
An example from the Republic itself: if I remember correctly the entire dialogue starts because Socrates is in effect kidnapped after the end of a festival because his interlocutors find him so darn entertaining. This would appear to be unjust—but not unexpected because he is Socrates which he has this reputation for being engaging and wise even if it is not the ‘right’ or ‘just’ way to treat him. How then should he behave in future, knowing that this is the potential cost of his social behavior? And the Myth of Er says that Odysseus kept to himself, sought neither virtue nor tyranny. That’s probably the wrong reading. It’s been a while since I’ve read it.
this doesn’t seem to be a coherent argument—author claims both that LLMs will indeed be used by chip design companies to save on human labor, and that they’re not very good and can only replace the more routine parts of a chip designer’s work. But...this isn’t “YC is wrong, there is not a startup opportunity in using LLMs for chip design!” even if it’s true it’s just a more measured and realistic picture of what LLMs will be doing in chip design!
and they even make sure to shill their own AI-for-chip-hardware startup, which they claim is working on challenges that nobody else is: https://www.normalcomputing.com/
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-death-and-life-of-prediction-markets-at-google the tl;dr: Google’s first internal prediction market was intended to go public and stalled as the regulatory environment remained unfriendly; its successor focused on predictions about competitor activity rather than Google’s own activity (which is less subject to “office politics” considerations blocking an honest assessment of Google’s chances of success etc) and never intended to be public-facing, and is still in active use.
“who was that woman who was an influential mistress to the King of France, politically savvy and queen in all but name”? “which one? this just keeps happening”
https://nintil.com/dont-assume this is Jose Luis Ricon life advice, which unsurprisingly tells you to be less afraid of things and talk to people more.
https://endpts.com/biotech-industry-worries-over-potential-for-rfk-jr-ally-as-fda-pick/ Casey Means has been floated as the new pick for FDA head; apparently she’s expressed concerns about vaccines and over-medication on the Joe Rogan podcast and has written a book about how most chronic diseases can be prevented by healthy lifestyles (which probably overstates the case)
“FRET is a non-radiative transfer of energy from an excited donor fluorophore molecule to a nearby acceptor fluorophore molecule...When the biomolecule of interest is present, it can cause a change in the distance between the donor and acceptor, leading to a change in the efficiency of FRET and a corresponding change in the fluorescence intensity of the acceptor. This change in fluorescence can be used to detect and quantify the biomolecule of interest.”
advantages:
real-time
non-destructive
sensitive to very low concentrations (picomolar and nanomolar)
highly specific because it detects conformational changes in biological molecules
this article is from a not-great journal and the author clearly does not have English as a first language… at some point i will need a more reputable source, this was from googling FRET quickly
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-case-against-proposition-36 Clara Collier gives the narrow, evidence-based case that shorter jail sentences didn’t cause California’s property crime wave or drug overdose death epidemic, and longer jail sentences won’t fix those problems
I’m pretty convinced but I don’t follow this topic in great detail
metastatic malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumor is pretty bad—median survival is only 8 months after metastases are detected. but one M.O. that seems to help in several case studies is “sequence the tumor, find a mutation, use a drug that’s approved for other cancer types with the same mutation.”
PD-L1 overexpression? use a PD-1 inhibitor! checkpoint immunotherapy stays winning.
chemo is...not great but better than nothing. some partial responses, no complete responses, survival extended by maybe a few months. mostly it seems best to have doxorubicin in the mix.
mech-interp seems like straightforwardly real and good work from a variety of perspectives on AI. helps with many risk scenarios including some x-risk scenarios; helps make the technology stronger & more reliable, which is good for the industry in the long run.
I...guess this isn’t wrong, but it’s a kind of Take I’ve never been able to relate to myself. Maybe it’s because I found Legit True Love at age 22, but I’ve never had that feeling of “oh no the men around me are too weak-willed” (not in my neck of the woods they’re not!) or “ew they’re too interested in going to the gym” (gym rats are fine? it’s a hobby that makes you good-looking, I’m on board with this) or “they’re not attentive and considerate enough” (often a valid complaint, but typically I’m the one who’s too hyperfocused on my own work & interests) or “they’re too show-offy” (yeah it’s irritating in excess but a little bit of show-off energy is enlivening).
Look: you like Tony Soprano because he’s competent and lives by a code? But you don’t like it when a real-life guy is too competitive, intense, or off doing his own thing? I’m sorry, but that’s not how things work.
Tony Soprano can be light-hearted and always have time for the women around him because he is a fictional character. In real life, being good at stuff takes work and is sometimes stressful.
My husband is, in fact, very close to this “Tony Soprano” ideal—assertive, considerate, has “boyish charm”, lives by a “code”, is competent at lots of everyday-life things but isn’t too busy for me—and I guarantee you would not have thought to date him because he’s also nerdy and argumentative and wouldn’t fit in with the yuppie crowd.
Also like. This male archetype is a guy who fixes things for you and protects you and makes you feel good. In real life? Those guys get sad that they’re expected to give, give, give and nobody cares about their feelings. I haven’t watched The Sopranos but my understanding is that Tony is in therapy because the strain of this life is getting to him. This article doesn’t seem to have a lot of empathy with what it’s like to actually be Tony...and you probably should, if you want to marry him.
a framework for thinking about aging: “1st gen” is delaying aging, which is where the field started (age1, metformin, rapamycin), while “2nd gen” is pausing (stasis), repairing (reprogramming), or replacing (transplanting), cells/tissues. 2nd gen usually uses less mature technologies (eg cell therapy, regenerative medicine), but may have a bigger and faster effect size.
“function, feeling, and survival” are the endpoints that matter.
biomarkers are noisy and speculative early proxies that we merely hope will translate to a truly healthier life for the elderly. apply skepticism.
Psychotic “delusions” are more about holding certain genres of idea with a socially inappropriate amount of intensity and obsession than holding a false idea. Lots of non-psychotic people hold false beliefs (eg religious people). And, interestingly, it is absolutely possible to hold a true belief in a psychotic way.
I have observed people during psychotic episodes get obsessed with the idea that social media was sending them personalized messages (quite true; targeted ads are real) or the idea that the nurses on the psych ward were lying to them (they were).
Preoccupation with the revelation of secret knowledge, with one’s own importance, with mistrust of others’ motives, and with influencing others’ thoughts or being influenced by other’s thoughts, are classic psychotic themes.
And it can be a symptom of schizophrenia when someone’s mind gets disproportionately drawn to those themes. This is called being “paranoid” or “grandiose.”
But sometimes (and I suspect more often with more intelligent/self-aware people) the literal content of their paranoid or grandiose beliefs is true!
sometimes the truth really has been hidden!
sometimes people really are lying to you or trying to manipulate you!
sometimes you really are, in some ways, important! sometimes influential people really are paying attention to you!
of course people influence each others’ thoughts—not through telepathy but through communication!
a false psychotic-flavored thought is “they put a chip in my brain that controls my thoughts.” a true psychotic-flavored thought is “Hollywood moviemakers are trying to promote progressive values in the public by implanting messages in their movies.”
These thoughts can come from the same emotional drive, they are drawn from dwelling on the same theme of “anxiety that one’s own thoughts are externally influenced”, they are in a deep sense mere arbitrary verbal representations of a single mental phenomenon...
but if you take the content literally, then clearly one claim is true and one is false.
and a sufficiently smart/self-aware person will feel the “anxiety-about-mental-influence” experience, will search around for a thought that fits that vibe but is also true, and will come up with something a lot more credible than “they put a mind-control chip in my brain”, but is fundamentally coming from the same motive.
There’s an analogous but easier to recognize thing with depression.
A depressed person’s mind is unusually drawn to obsessing over bad things. But this obviously doesn’t mean that no bad things are real or that no depressive’s depressing claims are true.
When a depressive literally believes they are already dead, we call that Cotard’s Delusion, a severe form of psychotic depression. When they say “everybody hates me” we call it a mere “distorted thought”. When they talk accurately about the heat death of the universe we call it “thermodynamics.” But it’s all coming from the same emotional place.
In general, mental illnesses, and mental states generally, provide a “tropism” towards thoughts that fit with certain emotional/aesthetic vibes.
Depression makes you dwell on thoughts of futility and despair
Anxiety makes you dwell on thoughts of things that can go wrong
Mania makes you dwell on thoughts of yourself as powerful or on the extreme importance of whatever you’re currently doing
Paranoid psychosis makes you dwell on thoughts of mistrust, secrets, and influencing/being influenced
You can, to some extent, “filter” your thoughts (or the ones you publicly express) by insisting that they make sense. You still have a bias towards the emotional “vibe” you’re disposed to gravitate towards; but maybe you don’t let absurd claims through your filter even if they fit the vibe. Maybe you grudgingly admit the truth of things that don’t fit the vibe but technically seem correct.
this does not mean that the underlying “tropism” or “bias” does not exist!!!
this does not mean that you believe things “only because they are true”!
in a certain sense, you are doing the exact same thing as the more overtly irrational person, just hiding it better!
the “bottom line” in terms of vibe has already been written, so it conveys no “updates” about the world
the “bottom line” in terms of details may still be informative because you’re checking that part and it’s flexible
“He’s not wrong but he’s still crazy” is a valid reaction to someone who seems to have a mental-illness-shaped tropism to their preoccupations.
eg if every post he writes, on a variety of topics, is negative and gloomy, then maybe his conclusions say more about him than about the truth concerning the topic;
he might still be right about some details but you shouldn’t update too far in the direction of “maybe I should be gloomy about this too”
Conversely, “this sounds like a classic crazy-person thought, but I still separately have to check whether it’s true” is also a valid and important move to make (when the issue is important enough to you that the extra effort is worth it).
Just because someone has a mental illness doesn’t mean every word out of their mouth is false!
(and of course this assumption—that “crazy” people never tell the truth—drives a lot of psychiatric abuse.)
link: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/71kfTFGmK
I once saw a video on Instagram of a psychiatrist recommending to other psychiatrists that they purchase ear scopes to check out their patients’ ears, because:
1. Apparently it is very common for folks with severe mental health issues to imagine that there is something in their ear (e.g., a bug, a listening device)
2. Doctors usually just say “you are wrong, there’s nothing in your ear” without looking
3. This destroys trust, so he started doing cursory checks with an ear scope
4. Far more often than he expected (I forget exactly, but something like 10-20%ish), there actually was something in the person’s ear—usually just earwax buildup, but occasionally something else like a dead insect—that was indeed causing the sensation, and he gained a clinical pathway to addressing his patients’ discomfort that he had previously lacked
This reminds me of dath ilan’s hallucination diagnosis from page 38 of Yudkowsky and Alicorn’s glowfic But Hurting People Is Wrong.
It’s pretty far from meeting dath ilan’s standard though; in fact an x-ray would be more than sufficient as anyone capable of putting something in someone’s ear would obviously vastly prefer to place it somewhere harder to check, whereas nobody would be capable of defeating an x-ray machine as metal parts are unavoidable.
This concern pops up in books on the Cold War (employees at every org and every company regularly suffer from mental illnesses at somewhere around their base rates, but things get complicated at intelligence agencies where paranoid/creative/adversarial people are rewarded and even influence R&D funding) and an x-ray machine cleanly resolved the matter every time.
Tangential, but...
Schizophrenia is the archetypal definitely-biological mental disorder, but recently for reasons relevant to the above, I’ve been wondering if that is wrong/confused. Here’s my alternate (admittedly kinda uninformed) model:
Psychosis is a biological state or neural attractor, which we can kind of symptomatically characterize, but which really can only be understood at a reductionistic level.
One of the symptoms/consequences of psychosis is getting extreme ideas at extreme amounts of intensity.
This symptom/consequence then triggers a variety of social dynamics that give classic schizophrenic-like symptoms such as, as you say, “preoccupation with the revelation of secret knowledge, with one’s own importance, with mistrust of others’ motives, and with influencing others’ thoughts or being influenced by other’s thoughts”
That is, if you suddenly get an extreme idea (e.g. that the fly that flapped past you is a sign from god that you should abandon your current life), you would expect dynamics like:
People get concerned for you and try to dissuade you, likely even conspiring in private to do so (and even if they’re not conspiring, it can seem like a conspiracy). In response, it might seem appropriate to distrust them.
Or, if one interprets it as them just lacking the relevant information, one needs to develop some theory of why one has access to special information that they don’t.
Or, if one is sympathetic to their concern, it would be logical to worry about one’s thoughts getting influenced.
But these sorts of dynamics can totally be triggered by extreme beliefs without psychosis! This might also be related to how Enneagram type 5 (the rationalist type) is especially prone to schizophrenia-like symptoms.
(When I think “in a psychotic way”, I think of the neurological disorder, but it seems like the way you use it in your comment is more like the schizophrenia-like social dynamic?)
Also tangential, this is sort of a “general factor” model of mental states. That often seems applicable, but recently my default interpretation of factor models has been that they tend to get at intermediary variables and not root causes.
Let’s take an analogy with computer programs. If you look at the correlations in which sorts of processes run fast or slow, you might find a broad swathe of processes whose performance is highly correlated, because they are all predictably CPU-bound. However, when these processes are running slow, there will usually be some particular program that is exhausting the CPU and preventing the others from running. This problematic program can vary massively from computer to computer, so it is hard to predict or model in general, but often easy to identify in the particular case by looking at which program is most extreme.
Thank you, this is interesting and important. I worry that it overstates similarity of different points on a spectrum, though.
In a certain sense, yes. In other, critical senses, no. This is a case where quantitative differences are big enough to be qualitative. When someone is clinically delusional, there are a few things which distinguish it from the more common wrong ideas. Among them, the inability to shut up about it when it’s not relevant, and the large negative impact on relationships and daily life. For many many purposes, “hiding it better” is the distinction that matters.
I fully agree that “He’s not wrong but he’s still crazy” is valid (though I’d usually use less-direct phrasing). It’s pretty rare that “this sounds like a classic crazy-person thought, but I still separately have to check whether it’s true” happens to me, but it’s definitely not never.
I imagine they were obsessed with false versions of this idea, rather than obsession about targeted advertising?
no! it sounded like “typical delusion stuff” at first until i listened carefully and yep that was a description of targeted ads.
For a while I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about specifically the versions of the idea where I couldn’t easily tell how true they were… which I suppose I do think is the correct place to be paying attention to?
One has to be a bit careful with this though. E.g. someone experiencing or having experienced harassment may have a seemingly pathological obsession on the circumstances and people involved in the situation, but it may be completely proportional to the way that it affected them—it only seems pathological to people who didn’t encounter the same issues.
If it’s not serving them, it’s pathological by definition, right?
So obsessing about exactly those circumstances and types of people could be pathological if it’s done more than will protect them in the future, weighing in the emotional cost of all that obsessing.
Of course we can’t just stop patterns of thought as soon as we decide they’re pathological. But deciding it doesn’t serve me so I want to change it is a start.
Yes, it’s proportional to the way it affected them—but most of the effect is in the repetition of thoughts about the incident and fear of future similar experiences. Obsessing about unpleasant events is natural, but it often seems pretty harmful itself.
Trauma is a horrible thing. There’s a delicate balance between supporting someone’s right and tendency to obsess over their trauma while also supporting their ability to quit re-traumatizing themselves by simulating their traumatic event repeatedly.
This seems way too strong, otherwise any kind of belief or emotion that is not narrowly in pursuit of your goals is pathological.
I completely agree that it’s important to strike a balance between revisiting the incident and moving on.
This seems partially wrong. The thoughts are usually consequences of the damage that is done, and they can be unhelpful in their own right, but they are not usually the problem. E.g. if you know that X is an abuser and people don’t believe you, I wouldn’t go so far as saying your mental dissonance about it is the problem.
Some psychiatry textbooks classify “overvalued ideas” as distinct from psychotic delusions.
Depending on how wide you make the definition, a whole rag-bag of diagnoses from the DSM V are overvalued ideas (e.g, anorexia nervosa over valuing being fat).
“Most people succumb to peer pressure”, https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/u3919iPfj
Most people will do very bad things, including mob violence, if they are peer-pressured enough.
It’s not literally everyone, but there is no neurotype or culture that is immune to peer pressure.
Immunity to peer pressure is a rare accomplishment.
You wouldn’t assume that everyone in some category would be able to run a 4-minute mile or win a math olympiad. It takes a “perfect storm” of talent, training, and motivation.
I’m not sure anybody “just” innately lacks the machinery to be peer-pressured. That’s a common claim about autistics and loners, but I really don’t think it fits observation. Lots of people “don’t fit in” in one way, but are very driven to conform in other social contexts or about other topics.
Evidence that any culture (or subculture), present or past, didn’t have peer pressure seems really weak.
there are environments where being independent-minded or high-integrity is valorized, but most of them still have covert peer-pressure dynamics.
Possibly all robust resistance to peer pressure is intentionally cultivated?
In other words, maybe it’s not enough for a person to just not happen to feel a pull towards conformity. That just means they haven’t yet encountered the triggers that would make them inclined to conform.
If someone really can’t be peer-pressured, maybe they have to actually believe that peer pressure is bad and make an active effort to resist it. Even that doesn’t always succeed, but it’s a necessary condition.
upshot #1: It may be appropriate to be suspicious of claims like “I just hang out with those people, I’m not influenced by them.” Most people, in the long run, do get influenced by their peer group.
otoh I also don’t think cutting off contact with anyone “impure”, or refusing to read stuff you disapprove of, is either practical or necessary. we can engage with people and things without being mechanically “nudged” by them.
maybe the distinction between engaging in any way and viewing someone as your ingroup is important?
or maybe we just have to Get Good at resisting peer pressure (even though that’s super hard and rare.) Otherwise the next time some terrible thing happens to be popular, we’ll go along with it.
like...basic realism here. most things don’t last forever, it is an extraordinary claim to say that your virtue would survive any change in your culture.
upshot #2: “would probably have been a collaborator in Nazi Germany” is not actually that serious an accusation. it just means “like the majority of the population, not at all heroic.” in good circumstances, non-heroes make perfectly fine friends and neighbors. in bad circumstances, they might murder you. that’s what makes the circumstances bad!
and don’t be too quick to assume that someone who’s never been in bad circumstances would be a hero. it’s just hard to tell ahead of time.
I think the reason not to do this is because of peer pressure. Ideally you should have the bad pressures from your peers cancel out, and in order to accomplish this you need your peers to be somewhat decorrelated from each other, and you can’t really do this if all your peers and everyone you listen to is in the same social group.
What is categorized as “peer pressure” here? Explicit threats to report you to authorities if you don’t conform? I’m guessing not. But how about implicit threats? What if you’ve heard (or read in the news) stories about people who don’t conform—in ways moderately but not hugely more extreme than you—having their careers ruined? In any situation that you could call “peer pressure”, I imagine there’s always at least the possibility of some level of social exclusion.
The defining questions for that aspect would appear to be “Do you believe that you would face serious risk of punishment for not conforming?” and “Would a reasonable person in your situation believe the same?”. Which don’t necessarily have the same answer. It might, indeed, be that people whom you observe to be “conformist” are the ones who are oversensitive to the risk of social exclusion.
We call it “peer pressure” when it is constraining the individual (or at least some of them) without providing perceived mutual value. It is the same mechanism that leads to people collaborating for the common good. The interesting question is which forces or which environments lead to a negative sum game.
I kinda agree with the claim, but disagree with its framing. You’re imagining that peer pressure is something extraneous to the person’s core personality, which they want to resist but usually fail. Instead, the desire to fit in, to be respected, liked and admired by other people, is one of the core desires that most (virtually all?) people have. It’s approximately on the same level as e.g. the desire to avoid pain. So, people don’t “succumb to peer pressure”, they (unconsciously) choose to prioritize social needs over other considerations.
At the same time, the moral denouncing of groupthink is mostly a self-deception defense against hostile telepaths. With two important caveats:
Having “independent thinking” as part of the ethos of a social group is actually beneficial for that group’s ability to discover true things. While the members of such a group still feel the desire to be liked by other members, they also have the license to disagree without being shunned for it, and are even rewarded for interesting dissenting opinions.
Hyperbolic discount seems to be real, i.e. human preferences are time-inconsistent. For example, you can be tempted to eat candy when one is placed in front of you, while also taking measures to avoid such temptation in the future. Something analogous might apply to peer pressure.
I think the comparison to pain is correct in the sense that some part of the brain (brainstem) is responding to bodily signals in the same mechanistic way as it is to pain signals. The desire to fit in is grounded in something. Steven Byrnes suggests a mechanism in Neuroscience of human social instincts: a sketch.
I won’t claim to be immune to peer pressure but at least on the epistemic front I think I have a pretty legible track record of believing things that are not very popular in the environments I’ve been in.
As for a specific group of people resistant to peer pressure—psychopaths. Psychopaths don’t conform to peer pressure easily—or any kind of pressure, for that matter. Many of them are in fact willing to murder, sit in jail, or otherwise become very ostracized if it aligns with whatever goals they have in mind. I’d wager that the fact that a large percentage of psychopaths literally end up jailed speaks for itself—they just don’t mind the consequences that much.
This is easily explained due to psychopaths being fearless and mostly lacking empathy. As far as I recall, some physiological correlates exist—psychopaths have a low cortisol response to stressors compared to normies. On top of the apparent fact that they are indifferent towards others’ feelings, some brain imaging data supports this as well.
What they might be more vulnerable to is that peer pressure sometimes goes hand in hand with power and success. Psychopaths like power and success, and they might therefore play along with rules to get more of what they want. That might look like caving in to peer pressure, but judging by how the pathology is contemporarily understood, I’d still say it’s not the pressure itself, but the benefits aligned with succumbing to it.
Seems like the sort of thing that would correlate pretty robustly to big-5 agreeableness, and in that sense there are neurotypes immune to peer pressure.
Edit: One may also suspect a combination of agreeableness and non-openness
“Peer pressure” is a negatively-valanced term that could be phrased more neutrally as “social consequences”. Seems to me it’s good to think about what the social consequences of doing or not doing a thing will be (whether to “give in to peer pressure”, and act in such a way as to get positive reactions from other people/avoid negative reactions, or not), but not to treat conforming when there is social pressure as inherently bad. It can lead to mob violence. Or, it can lead to a simplified social world which is easier for everyone to navigate, because you’re doing things that have commonly understood meanings (think of teaching children to interact in a polite way). Or it can lead to great accomplishments, when someone internalizes whatever leads to status within their social hierarchy. Take away the social pressure to do things that impress other people, and lots of people might laze about doing the minimum required to have a nice life on the object-level, which in a society as affluent as the modern industrialized world is not much. There are of course other motivations for striving for internalized goals, but like, “people whose opinion I care about will be impressed” is one, and it does mean some good stuff gets done.
Someone who is literally immune to peer pressure to the extent that social consequences do not enter their mind as a thing that might happen or get considered at all in their decision-making, will probably face great difficulties in navigating their environment and accomplishing anything. People will try fairly subtle social pressure tactics, they will be disregarded as if they hadn’t happened, and the person who tried it will either have to disengage from the not-peer-pressurable person, or escalate to more blunt control measures that do register as a thing this person will pay attention to.
Even if I’m right about “is immune to peer pressure” not being an ideal to aim for, I still do acknowledge that being extremely sensitive to what others may think has downsides, and when taken to extremes you get “I can’t go to the store because of social anxiety”. A balanced approach would be aiming to avoid paranoia while recognizing social pressure when someone is attempting to apply some, without immediately reacting to it, and be able to think through how to respond on a case-by-case basis. This is a nuanced social skill. “This person is trying to blackmail me by threatening social exclusion through blacklisting or exposing socially damaging information about me if I don’t comply with what they want” requires a different response than “this person thinks my shirt looks tacky and their shirt looks cool. I note their sense of fashion, and how much importance they attach to clothing choices, and may choose to dress so as to get a particular reaction from them in future, without necessarily agreeing with/adopting/internalizing their perspective on the matter”, which in turn is different from “everyone in this room disagrees with me about thing X (or at least says they disagree, preference falsification is a thing) should I say it anyway?”.
The key, I would think, is to raise people to understand what social pressure is and its various forms, and that conformance is a choice they get to make rather than a thing they have to do or they’ll suffer social death. Choices have consequences, but the worst outcomes I’ve seen from peer pressure are when people don’t want to do the thing that is being peer-pressured towards, but don’t treat “just don’t conform” as an option they can even consider and ask what the consequences would be.
Is there a particular reason to believe this? Or is it more of a hope?
it’s an introspection/lived-experience/anecdotes from other people kind of thing, i don’t have data, but yes i do believe this is true.
I think what might help is engaging with different kinds of people. A group’s pressure is weaker if you also meet people who openly believe that the group is a group of idiots. You can voice your concerns without fearing disapproval; but even if some things are difficult to explain to outsiders, at least you have a mental model of someone who would disagree.
But I also suspect that some people would just develop a different persona for each group, and let themselves be peer-pressured towards different extremes on different occasions.
That is possible but maybe only more likely if the groups are very clearly separate, such as when you are in a faraway country for a long time. But if you are e.g. in a multi-cultural city where there are many maybe even overlapping groups or where you can’t easily tell which group it is, it is more difficult to “overfit” and easier to learn a more general strategy. I think universal morality is something of the more general case of this.
Julian Jaynes would say that this is how human consciousness as we know it today has evolved.
Which makes me wonder, what would he say about the internet bubbles we have today. Did we perhaps already reach peak consciousness, and now the pendulum is swinging back? (Probably not, but it’s an interesting thought.)
Shouldn’t this be weighted against the good things people do if they are peer-pressured? I think there’s value in not conforming but if all cultures have peer-pressure there needs to be a careful analysis of the pros and cons instead of simply strifing for immunity from it.
My first thought here aren’t autists but psychopaths.
My fear is that this will extend to many aspects of the Trump administration (just look at how it’s vetting people based on who they voted for/if they believe in the 2020 election results), esp b/c some people who work in the government are now deleting their old tweets...
“we” can’t steer the future.
it’s wrong to try to control people or stop them from doing locally self-interested & non-violent things in the interest of “humanity’s future”, in part because this is so futile.
if the only way we survive is if we coerce people to make a costly and painful investment in a speculative idea that might not even work, then we don’t survive! you do not put people through real pain today for a “someday maybe!” This applies to climate change, AI x-risk, and socially-conservative cultural reform.
most cultures and societies in human history have been so bad, by my present values, that I’m not sure they’re not worse than extinction, and we should expect that most possible future states are similarly bad;
history clearly teaches us that civilizations and states collapse (on timescales of centuries) and the way to bet is that ours will as well, but it’s kind of insane hubris to think that this can be prevented;
the literal species Homo sapiens is pretty resilient and might avoid extinction for a very long time, but have you MET Homo sapiens? this is cold fucking comfort! (see e.g. C. J. Cherryh’s vision in 40,000 in Gehenna for a fictional representation not far from my true beliefs — we are excellent at adaptation and survival but when we “survive” this often involves unimaginable harshness and cruelty, and changing into something that our ancestors would not have liked at all.)
identifying with species-survival instead of with the stuff we value now is popular among the thoughtful but doesn’t make any sense to me;
in general it does not make sense, to me, to compromise on personal values in order to have more power/influence. you will be able to cause stuff to happen, but who cares if it’s not the stuff you want?
similarly, it does not make sense to consciously optimize for having lots of long-term descendants. I love my children; I expect they’ll love their children; but go too many generations out and it’s straight-up fantasyland. My great-grandparents would have hated me. And that’s still a lot of shared culture and values! Do you really have that much in common with anyone from five thousand years ago?
Evolution is not your friend. God is not your friend. Everything worth loving will almost certainly perish. Did you expect it to last forever?
“I love whatever is best at surviving” or “I love whatever is strongest” means you don’t actually care what it’s like. It means you have no loyalty and no standards. It means you don’t care so much if the way things turn out is hideous, brutal, miserable, abusive… so long as it technically “is alive” or “wins”. Fuck that.
I despise sour grapes. If the thing I want isn’t available, I’m not going to pretend that what is available is what I want.
I am not going to embrace the “realistic” plan of allying with something detestable but potent. There is always an alternative, even if the only alternative is “stay true to your dreams and then get clobbered.”
Link to this on my Roam
How does “this is so futile” square with the massive success of taxes and criminal justice? From what I’ve heard, states have managed to reduce murder rates by 50x. Obviously that’s stopping people from something violent rather than non-violent, but what’s the aspect of violence that makes it relevant? Or e.g. how about taxes which fund change to renewable energy? The main argument for socially-conservative cultural reform is fertility, but what about taxes that fund kindergartens, they sort of seem to have a similar function?
The key trick to make it correct to try to control people or stop them is to be stronger than them.
I think this prompts some kind of directional update in me. My paraphrase of this is:
it’s actually pretty ridiculous to think you can steer the future
It’s also pretty ridiculous to choose to identify with what the future is likely to be.
Therefore…. Well, you don’t spell out your answer. My answer is “I should have a personal meaning-making resolution to ‘what would I do if those two things are both true,’ even if one of them turns out to be false, so that I can think clearly about whether they are true.”
I’ve done a fair amount of similar meaningmaking work through the lens of Solstice 2022 and 2023. But that was more through lens of ‘nearterm extinction’ than ‘inevitability of value loss’, which does feel like a notably different thing.
So it seems worth doing some thinking and pre-grieving about that.
I of course have some answers to ‘why value loss might not be inevitable’, but it’s not something I’ve yet thought about through an unclouded lens.
Therefore, do things you’d be in favor of having done even if the future will definitely suck. Things that are good today, next year, fifty years from now… but not like “institute theocracy to raise birth rates”, which is awful today even if you think it might “save the world”.
Ah yeah that’s a much more specific takeaway than I’d been imagining.
I honestly feel that the only appropriate response is something along the lines of “fuck defeatism”[1].
This comment isn’t targeted at you, but at a particular attractor in thought space.
Let me try to explain why I think rejecting this attractor is the right response rather than engaging with it.
I think it’s mostly that I don’t think that talking about things at this level of abstraction is useful. It feels much more productive to talk about specific plans. And if you have a general, high-abstraction argument that plans in general are useless, but I have a specific argument why a specific plan is useful, I know which one I’d go with :-).
Don’t get me wrong, I think that if someone struggles for a certain amount of time to try to make a difference and just hits wall after wall, then at some point they have to call it. But “never start” and “don’t even try” are completely different.
It’s also worth noting, that saving the world is a team sport. It’s okay to pursue a plan that depends on a bunch of other folk stepping up and playing their part.
I would also suggest that this is the best way to respond to depression rather than “trying to argue your way out of it”.
I’m not defeatist! I’m picky.
And I’m not talking specifics because i don’t want to provoke argument.
What about influencing? If, in order for things to go OK, human civilization must follow a narrow path which I individually need to steer us down, we’re 100% screwed because I can’t do that. But I do have some influence. A great deal of influence over my own actions (I’m resisting the temptation to go down a sidetrack about determinism, assuming you’re modeling humans as things that can make meaningful choices), substantial influence over the actions of those close to me, some influence over my acquaintances, and so on until very extremely little (but not 0) influence over humanity as a whole. I also note that you use the word “we”, but I don’t know who the “we” is. Is it everyone? If so, then everyone collectively has a great deal of say about how the future will go, if we collectively can coordinate. Admittedly, we’re not very good at this right now, but there are paths to developing this civilizational skill further than we currently have. So maybe the answer to “we can’t steer the future” is “not yet we can’t, at least not very well”?
Agree, mostly. The steering I would aim for would be setting up systems wherein locally self-interested and non-violent things people are incentivized to do have positive effects for humanity’s future. In other words, setting up society such that individual and humanity-wide effects are in the same direction with respect to some notion of “goodness”, rather than individual actions harming the group, or group actions harming or stifling the individual. We live in a society where we can collectively decide the rules of the game, which is a way of “steering” a group. I believe we should settle on a ruleset where individual short-term moves that seem good lead to collective long-term outcomes that seem good. Individual short-term moves that clearly lead to bad collective long-term outcomes should be disincentivized, and if the effects are bad enough then coercive prevention does seem warranted (E. G., a SWAT team to prevent a mass shooting). And similarly for groups stifling individuals ability to do things that seem to them to be good for them in the short term. And rules that have perverse incentive effects that are harmful to the individual, the group, or both? Definitely out. This type of system design is like a haiku—very restricted in what design choices are permissible, but not impossible in principle. Seems worth trying because if successful, everything is good with no coercion. If even a tiny subsystem can be designed (or the current design tweaked) in this way, that by itself is good. And the right local/individual move to influence the systems of which you are a part towards that state, as a cognitively-limited individual who can’t hold the whole of complex systems in their mind and accurately predict the effect of proposed changes out into the far future, might be as simple as saying “in this instance, you’re stifling the individual” and “in this instance you’re harming the group/long-term future” wherever you see it, until eventually you get a system that does neither. Like arriving at a haiku by pointing out every time the rules of haiku construction are violated.
I disagree a lot! Many things have gotten better! Is sufferage, abolition, democracy, property rights etc not significant? All the random stuff eg better angels of our nature claims has gotten better.
Either things have improved in the past or they haven’t, and either people trying to “steer the future” in some sense have been influential on these improvements. I think things have improved, and I think there’s definitely not strong evidence that people trying to steer the future was always useless. Because trying to steer the future is very important and motivating, i try to do it.
Yes the counterfactual impact of you individually trying to steer the future may or may not be insignificant, but people trying to steer the future is better than no one doing that!
“Let’s abolish slavery,” when proposed, would make the world better now as well as later.
I’m not against trying to make things better!
I’m against doing things that are strongly bad for present-day people to increase the odds of long-run human species survival.
Proposal: For any given system, there’s a destiny based on what happens when it’s developed to its full extent. Sight is an example of this, where both human eyes and octopus eyes and cameras have ended up using lenses to steer light, despite being independent developments.
“I love whatever is the destiny” is, as you say, no loyalty and no standards. But, you can try to learn what the destiny is, and then on the basis of that decide whether to love or oppose it.
Plants and solar panels are the natural destiny for earthly solar energy. Do you like solarpunk? If so, good news, you can love the destiny, not because you love whatever is the destiny, but because your standards align with the destiny.
People who love solarpunk don’t obviously love computronium dyson spheres tho
That is true, though:
1) Regarding tiling the universy with computronium as destiny is Gnostic heresy.
2) I would like to learn more about the ecology of space infrastructure. Intuitively it seems to me like the Earth is much more habitable than anywhere else, and so I would expect sarah’s “this is so futile” point to actually be inverted when it comes to e.g. a Dyson sphere, where the stagnation-inducing worldwide regulation regulation will by-default be stronger than the entropic pressure.
More generally, I have a concept I call the “infinite world approximation”, which I think held until ~WWI. Under this approximation, your methods have to be robust against arbitrary adversaries, because they could invade from parts of the ecology you know nothing about. However, this approximation fails for Earth-scale phenomena, since Earth-scale organizations could shoot down any attempt at space colonization.
Are you saying this because you worship the sun?
I would more say the opposite: Henri Bergson (better known for inventing vitalism) convinced me that there ought to be a simple explanation for the forms life takes, and so I spent a while performing root cause analysis on that, and ended up with the sun as the creator.
It seems like it makes some difference whether our civilization collapses the way that the Roman Empire collapsed, the way that the British Empire collapsed, or the way that the Soviet Union collapsed. “We must prevent our civilization from ever collapsing” is clearly an implausible goal, but “we should ensure that a successor structure exists and is not much worse than what we have now” seems rather more reasonable, no?
This post reads like it’s trying to express an attitude or put forward a narrative frame, rather than trying to describe the world.
Many of these claims seem obviously false, if I take them at face value at take a moment to consider what they’re claiming and whether it’s true.
e.g., On the first two bullet points it’s easy to come up with counterexamples. Some successful attempts to steer the future, by stopping people from doing locally self-interested & non-violent things, include: patent law (“To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries”) and banning lead in gasoline. As well as some others that I now see that other commenters have mentioned.
Is it too much to declare this the manifesto of a new philosophical school, Constantinism?
wait and see if i still believe it tomorrow!
I don’t think it was articulated quite right—it’s more negative than my overall stance (I wrote it when unhappy) and a little too short-termist.
I do still believe that the future is unpredictable, that we should not try to “constrain” or “bind” all of humanity forever using authoritarian means, and that there are many many fates worse than death and we should not destroy everything we love for “brute” survival.
And, also, I feel that transience is normal and only a bit sad. It’s good to save lives, but mortality is pretty “priced in” to my sense of how the world works. It’s good to work on things that you hope will live beyond you, but Dark Ages and collapses are similarly “priced in” as normal for me. Sara Teasdale: “You say there is no love, my love, unless it lasts for aye; Ah folly, there are episodes far better than the play!” If our days are as a passing shadow, that’s not that bad; we’re used to it.
I worry that people who are not ok with transience may turn themselves into monsters so they can still “win”—even though the meaning of “winning” is so changed it isn’t worth it any more.
I do think this comes back to the messages in On Green and also why the post went down like a cup of cold sick—rationality is about winning. Obviously nobody on LW wants to “win” in the sense you describe, but more winning over more harmony on the margin, I think.
The future will probably contain less of the way of life I value (or something entirely orthogonal), but then that’s the nature of things.
I think 2 cruxes IMO dominate the discussion a lot that are relevant here:
Will a value lock-in event happen, especially soon in a way such that once the values are locked in, it’s basically impossible to change values?
Is something like the vulnerable world hypothesis correct about technological development?
If you believed 1 or 2, I could see why people disagreed with Sarah Constantin’s statement on here.
I have been having some similar thoughts on the main points here for a while and thanks for this.
I guess to me what needs attention is when people do things along the lines of “benefit themselves and harm other people”. That harm has a pretty strict definition, though I know we may always be able to give borderline examples. This definitely includes the abuse of power in our current society and culture, and any current risks etc. (For example, if we are constraining to just AI with warning on content, https://www.iwf.org.uk/media/q4zll2ya/iwf-ai-csam-report_public-oct23v1.pdf. And this is very sad to see.) On the other hand, with regards to climate change (can also be current too) or AI risks, it probably should also be concerned when corporates or developers neglect known risks or pursue science/development irresponsibly. I think it is not wrong to work on these, but I just don’t believe in “do not solve the other current risks and only work on future risks.”
On some comments that were saying our society is “getting better”—sure, but the baseline is a very low bar (slavery for example). There are still many, many, many examples in different societies of how things are still very systematically messed up.
You seem to dislike reality. Could it not be that the worldview which clashes with reality is wrong (or rather, in the wrong), rather than reality being wrong/in the wrong? For instance that “nothing is forever” isn’t a design flaw, but one of the required properties that a universe must have in order to support life?
“weak benevolence isn’t fake”: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/ic5Xitb70
there’s a class of statements that go like:
“fair-weather friends” who are only nice to you when it’s easy for them, are not true friends at all
if you don’t have the courage/determination to do the right thing when it’s difficult, you never cared about doing the right thing at all
if you sometimes engage in motivated cognition or are sometimes intellectually lazy/sloppy, then you don’t really care about truth at all
if you “mean well” but don’t put in the work to ensure that you’re actually making a positive difference, then your supposed “well-meaning” intentions were fake all along
I can see why people have these views.
if you actually need help when you’re in trouble, then “fair-weather friends” are no use to you
if you’re relying on someone to accomplish something, it’s not enough for them to “mean well”, they have to deliver effectively, and they have to do so consistently. otherwise you can’t count on them.
if you are in an environment where people constantly declare good intentions or “well-meaning” attitudes, but most of these people are not people you can count on, you will find yourself caring a lot about how to filter out the “posers” and “virtue signalers” and find out who’s true-blue, high-integrity, and reliable.
but I think it’s literally false and sometimes harmful to treat “weak”/unreliable good intentions as absolutely worthless.
not all failures are failures to care enough/try hard enough/be brave enough/etc.
sometimes people legitimately lack needed skills, knowledge, or resources!
“either I can count on you to successfully achieve the desired outcome, or you never really cared at all” is a long way from true.
even the more reasonable, “either you take what I consider to be due/appropriate measures to make sure you deliver, or you never really cared at all” isn’t always true either!
some people don’t know how to do what you consider to be due/appropriate measures
some people care some, but not enough to do everything you consider necessary
sometimes you have your own biases about what’s important, and you really want to see people demonstrate a certain form of “showing they care” otherwise you’ll consider them negligent, but that’s not actually the most effective way to increase their success rate
almost everyone has a finite amount of effort they’re willing to put into things, and a finite amount of cost they’re willing to pay. that doesn’t mean you need to dismiss the help they are willing and able to provide.
as an extreme example, do you dismiss everybody as “insufficiently committed” if they’re not willing to die for the cause? or do you accept graciously if all they do is donate $50?
“they only help if it’s fun/trendy/easy/etc”—ok, that can be disappointing, but is it possible you should just make it fun/trendy/easy/etc? or just keep their name on file in case a situation ever comes up where it is fun/trendy/easy and they’ll be helpful then?
it’s harmful to apply this attitude to yourself, saying “oh I failed at this, or I didn’t put enough effort in to ensure a good outcome, so I must literally not care about ideals/ethics/truth/other people.”
like...you do care any amount. you did, in fact, mean well.
you may have lacked skill;
you may have not been putting in enough effort;
or maybe you care somewhat but not as much as you care about something else
but it’s probably not accurate or healthy to take a maximally-cynical view of yourself where you have no “noble” motives at all, just because you also have “ignoble” motives (like laziness, cowardice, vanity, hedonism, spite, etc).
if you have a flicker of a “good intention” to help people, make the world a better place, accomplish something cool, etc, you want to nurture it, not stomp it out as “probably fake”.
your “good intentions” are real and genuinely good, even if you haven’t always followed through on them, even if you haven’t always succeeded in pursuing them.
you don’t deserve “credit” for good intentions equal to the “credit” for actually doing a good thing, but you do deserve any credit at all.
basic behavioral “shaping”—to get from zero to a complex behavior, you have to reward very incremental simple steps in the right direction.
e.g. if you wish you were “nicer to people”, you may have to pat yourself on the back for doing any small acts of kindness, even really “easy” and “trivial” ones, and notice & make part of your self-concept any inclinations you have to be warm or helpful.
“I mean well and I’m trying” has to become a sentence you can say with a straight face. and your good intentions will outpace your skills so you have to give yourself some credit for them.
it may be net-harmful to create a social environment where people believe their “good intentions” will be met with intense suspicion.
it’s legitimately hard to prove that you have done a good thing, particularly if what you’re doing is ambitious and long-term.
if people have the experience of meaning well and trying to do good but constantly being suspected of insincerity (or nefarious motives), this can actually shift their self-concept from “would-be hero” to “self-identified villain”
which is bad, generally
at best, identifying as a villain doesn’t make you actually do anything unethical, but it makes you less effective, because you preemptively “brace” for hostility from others instead of confidently attracting allies
at worst, it makes you lean into legitimately villainous behavior
OTOH, skepticism is valuable, including skepticism of people’s motives.
but it can be undesirable when someone is placed in a “no-win situation”, where from their perspective “no matter what I do, nobody will believe that I mean well, or give me any credit for my good intentions.”
if you appreciate people for their good intentions, sometimes that can be a means to encourage them to do more. it’s not a guarantee, but it can be a starting point for building rapport and starting to persuade. people often want to live up to your good opinion of them.
Sounds like it’s time for a reboot of the ol’ “join the dark side” essay.
I want to register in advance, I have qualms I’d be interested in talking about. (I think they are at least one level more interesting than the obvious ones, and my relationship with them is probably at least one level more interesting than the obvious relational stance)
The picture I get of Chinese culture from their fiction makes me think China is kinda like this. A recurrent trope was “If you do some good deeds, like offering free medicine to the poor, and don’t do a perfect job, like treating everyone who says they can’t afford medicine, then everyone will castigate you for only wanting to seem good. So don’t do good.” Another recurrent trope was “it’s dumb, even wrong, to be a hero/you should be a villain.” (One annoying variant is “kindness to your enemies is cruelty to your allies”, which is used to justify pointless cruelty.) I always assumed this was a cultural anti-body formed in response to communists doing terrible things in the name of the common good.
links 10/25/24: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-25-2024
https://theoryandpractice.org/2024/10/Yes,%20we%20did%20discover%20the%20Higgs!/ CERN’s statistical methods are good actually. compare this to any other stats-heavy area of natural or social science and they come out impressively rigorous. blinded data analyses? whoa.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_engine a siege engine is any machine you use against the city you’re besieging—from towers to catapults to flamethrowers to artillery.
there’s a new field of “pan-cancer” where you make (mostly molbio) comparisons across cancers, including vulnerability screens where you use CRISPR or RNAi to knock down each gene and see which ones kill the cancer cells when absent.
https://aacrjournals.org/clincancerres/article/24/9/2182/81290/Pan-Cancer-Molecular-Classes-Transcending-Tumor representative paper
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13528-0 you can also do it with the proteome
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41422-020-0355-0 you can single-cell it
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe6474 you can profile the TILs cell by cell
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s13059-023-03020-w.pdf CRISPR and RNAi both have their strengths and weaknesses but if you look at the overlap there are still a bunch of “pan-essential” genes that all cancers need to survive. (do healthy cells also need those, or are they good therapeutic targets? we just don’t know.)
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yize-Li/publication/354641293_Moving_pan-cancer_studies_from_basic_research_toward_the_clinic/links/615f5d570bf51d4817512465/Moving-pan-cancer-studies-from-basic-research-toward-the-clinic.pdf?_sg%5B0%5D=started_experiment_milestone&_sg%5B1%5D=started_experiment_milestone&origin=journalDetail by “towards the clinic” we mean “very gingerly”, apparently
https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108(20)30656-5 when you target pan-essential genes you are in the chemo zone, where by default the therapeutic index is low (kills cancer AND healthy cells) and you need to put more work in to handling toxicity.
tumors—most tumors—get coated with IgG, much more than other tissues. is this a systemic defense against cancer or a tumor-secreted IgG? hard to say.
https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(22)00192-1.pdf mostly ovarian carcinoma but they also compare to a bunch of other tumor types
https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/21/11597 could be tumor-derived
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep05088.pdf this is Sanford Simon—endogenous IgG concentrates around mouse tumors of many types
James Watson’s vision for cancer research—this is what he originally became a “controversial figure” for, before the race thing. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsob.120144
basically, this is a few things:
a call to work harder dammit and treat it like a true war on cancer, not a sedate and bureaucratic academic field
a call for more pan-cancer RNAi vulnerability screens
a call to focus on transcription factors as targets, particularly things like Myc and BRD4 that are particularly involved in the transition to metastasis—we don’t yet have any good drug therapies that work well on metastatic cancers
transcription factors are obviously causally upstream of what makes cancer cancer—its invasiveness, its metastatic potential, its evasion of immune surveillance, etc
they are hard to drug though, because they’re in the nucleus, not on the cell surface. but we can start to do hard things now!
cell surface growth factors (think EGFR) are the easiest to target but the associated drugs have unimpressive clinical effects in most patients because targeting growth factors only slows growth, it doesn’t kill cancer cells. usually just slightly delays the inevitable.
a statement of his redox hobbyhorse—ROS is good, ROS is how the body fights cancer, etc.
not sure how to operationalize this as a strategy. it might, as it turns out, be redundant with immunotherapy.
a couple specific targets/mechanisms he thinks deserve more attention—apparently the circadian regulator PER2 is a tumor suppressor. i’m always down for more attention to circadian stuff.
the Halifax Project researched the hypothesis that low-dose combinations of environmental carcinogens might synergistically increase cancer risk:
https://www.ewg.org/research/rethinking-carcinogens
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/reveh-2020-0033/html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CpG_oligodeoxynucleotide this is the inflammatory molecule on bacteria that’s the reason bacterial infections sometimes cause complete regressions of very difficult tumors (like sarcoma—we have no drugs for sarcoma! it’s either surgery or death!). fortunately the immunooncology people are On It and researching this as an immunostimulant.
if you’ve heard of “Coley Toxins”, they’re kind of an alt-med thing with a tantalizing grain of truth—but we don’t need to inject bacteria into tumors any more, we know how they work, we can replicate the effect with well-defined compounds now.
https://www.cell.com/cell-chemical-biology/fulltext/S2451-9456(23)00221-0?rss=yes#mmc1 this is AOH1996, the mindblowingly selective new pan-cancer drug candidate.
basically this is using the same principle as old-fashioned chemo—hit it in the DNA replication—but with a new target, and with modern structural-biology-based rational drug design to hit the cancer version of the target rather than the healthy-cell type.
would I have guessed there was room for optimism here a priori? no way.
but apparently we have not explored this space sufficiently. now try it with AlphaFold.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/new-mode-cancer-treatment and Derek Lowe is impressed.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41419-021-04468-z inducible caspase 9 allows conditional apoptosis. it’s incredibly powerful. unfortunately it doesn’t always work and this raises drug resistance concerns.
I haven’t yet seen many examples of “put the iCasp9 in the cell if-and-only-if the cell has some molecular marker” but that’s the obvious place to go.
you can kinda reduce the drug resistance thing by putting a promotor to increase iCasp9 expression. buddy if this is where we are in 2022 i’m going to predict there is a LOT of potential value in continuing to work out the kinks in this system. get in on the ground floor!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteolysis_targeting_chimera a PROTAC is “this protein? kill it.” uses the ubiquitin system.
sadly, the Warburg Effect is not as cool as I once thought.
glucose deprivation is just not that deadly across tumor lines: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0899900720300319
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3237863/ i mean, 2DG + metformin might do a thing?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5095922/#BST-2016-0094C20 yeah...it’s not what you think.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006291X0302504X if you actually measure what % of ATP comes from glycolysis, cancers cover a wide range, and the distribution overlaps substantially with the distribution of healthy cells. glycolysis dominance is not a distinguishing characteristic of all or even most cancers.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2310/7290.2015.00021 heavy glucose uptake is enough of a thing for PET imaging to be used clinically though
are cancer cells selectively vulnerable to mechanical stress? kinda, but also it sometimes stimulates them to go metastatic so beware.
https://analyticalsciencejournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/elsc.201900154 vibrate em and they apoptose
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168365915302819 just mcfuckin spin some tiny magnets around in your brain tumor. apparently it works in rodents but aaaaaah
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167488913003224 laminar but not oscillatory shear stress kills em? no non-cancer comparison
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2949907024000585 vibrations to kill prostate cancer? no non-cancer comparison
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2015/nr/c5nr03518j/unauth magnetic particle vibration against renal cancer? no non-cancer comparison
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-023-01383-y.epdf?sharing_token=jICYt2mKBMQ0GsetiWodv9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0PPtLuduvirY9e9lvJJx5Q_iJTfP9UCvLlXVOkNBly5J-gi3DlHLxMYWqsmEJBOrH0s7RbtQm1UREc3FbrfF2vDNLzTfS250KEAwBdVsczhxamax0pSp4TP23jM_ehG703560use7dJ6hnsaVLpnXsWU1n14UplHLGvaXHsJ444z96C3IEcjmnjMZvijAgkKsQ%3D&tracking_referrer=www.genengnews.com “vibronic molecular jackhammers”? still no non-cancer comparison, but at least they tried some mice
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41413-020-00111-3 vibration to reduce metastatic potential of breast cancer cells. no non-cancer comparison.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp7206 gently ultrasound the tumor to sensitize it to chemo or induce an immune anti-tumor response.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10068349/ Piezo1 might be involved in an apoptotic response to mechanical stress?
https://analyticalsciencejournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/elsc.201900154 vibrate some cancer cells and they go apoptotic but not necrotic. no non-cancer comparison.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4703126 more ultrasound, including in vivo, Piezo1 mediated.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8274378/ mechanical stress is also a natural feature of cancer—tumors get more rigid and experience pressure. in fact this stress can be a trigger for increased proliferation or metastasis, so watch out!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5992512/ oops shear stress can promote metastasis
https://www.cell.com/biophysj/fulltext/S0006-3495(22)00367-8 substrate stiffness promotes invasion and metastasis
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pharmacology/articles/10.3389/fphar.2022.955595/full “mechanoptosis” (mechanical pressure causing cancer apoptosis)
https://elifesciences.org/for-the-press/12916d1e/migrating-through-small-spaces-makes-cancer-cells-more-aggressive squish cancer cells through tight spaces (eg on a microfluidic chip) and you get more invasive/metastatic potential
are cancer cells selectively vulnerable to electrical stress? also kinda yeah
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6694/13/9/2283 “tumor treating fields”, just an oscillating electric field, are actually an approved therapy in glioblastoma that extends life a few months. (not saying much though...glioblastoma is so deadly that it’s easy mode from an FDA standpoint)
of course you can just kill *cells* with pulsed electric fields, cancer or not: https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1096/fj.02-0859fje
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2475446 more electrical fields for glioblastoma
https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/article/64/9/3288/517864/Disruption-of-cancer-Cell-Replication-by ah this actually IS a differential effect in tumor vs. non cancer cell lines. plus in vivo, in mice.
i don’t even know man. somebody who knows physics explain this. little nanoelectrodes with some chemical functionalization kill cancer cells? “quantum biological tunneling?” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-023-01496-y
https://nyulangone.org/news/coping-mechanism-suggests-new-way-make-cancer-cells-more-vulnerable-chemotherapies “stress granules” as a form of chemo resistance, driven by KRAS?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41420-022-01202-2 cancer can be selectively vulnerable to proteotoxic stress. they’re worse at expressing heat shock proteins.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pietro-Taverna-2/publication/221748736_The_Novel_Oral_Hsp90_Inhibitor_NVP-HSP990_Exhibits_Potent_and_Broad-spectrum_Antitumor_Activities_In_Vitro_and_In_Vivo/links/56d0a18708ae059e375d4920/The-Novel-Oral-Hsp90-Inhibitor-NVP-HSP990-Exhibits-Potent-and-Broad-spectrum-Antitumor-Activities-In-Vitro-and-In-Vivo.pdf heat shock protein inhibitor reduces tumor growth in many cell lines
cancer cells have depolarized membranes—you can literally distinguish them from healthy cells by voltage alone.
this is a Michael Levin thing. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3528107/ you can give a frog a tumor—or make the tumor go away—through manipulating voltage alone! it does not matter what ion channel you use, it’s about the voltage.
more Michael Levin https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4267524/#R250
apparently Wnt signaling is involved. https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1113/JP278661 in general you get alterations in membrane voltage potential by changing the behavior of ion channels
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstract/591620#google_vignette depolarization occurs early in the development of colon cancer in mice exposed to a carcinogen.
https://www.medigraphic.com/pdfs/hepato/ah-2017/ah172s.pdf cancer stem cells are depolarized relative to normal stem cells
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92951-0.pdf here’s math modeling if you care.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physiology/articles/10.3389/fphys.2013.00185/full a lot of ion channels are involved
https://karger.com/tbi/article-abstract/15/3/147/299607/Electrical-Potential-Measurements-in-Human-Breast breast cancers vs non-cancer tumors show up differently on an external volt meter!!!!
literally, you can try this at home! stick a voltmeter across your boob!
https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/article/40/6/1830/484668/Cellular-Potentials-of-Normal-and-cancerous cancerous cells have lower membrane potential than their healthy counterparts
https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1749-6632.1974.tb26808.x even in non-cancer cells membrane potential correlates negatively with proliferation
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9652252/ cancer membrane potentials also fluctuate more than healthy cell membrane potentials
https://aacrjournals.org/amjcancer/article/32/2/240/679553/Bio-Electric-Properties-of-Cancer-Resistant-and going back to 1938, if you put a volt meter across a mouse’s body you can tell the ones with tumors from the ones without. it is literally that simple and has been known that long.
something in (some of?) the neutrophils in (some) humans and a cancer-resistant strain of mice can kill cancer, including when transferred. a Zheng Cui research program.
my take is, he’s not an immunologist and modern methods could elucidate the specific clonal population a LOT better than this, but I like the thought process.
https://www.cell.com/heliyon/fulltext/S2405-8440(17)31693-6 they did some infusions from young blood donors into 3 patients with advanced metastatic cancer got a bunch of tumor necrosis and a cytokine release syndrome. all died within 3 months though.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1475-2867-11-26 healthy controls’ leukocytes are better at killing cancer in vitro than cancer patients’. this is as expected.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1471-2407-10-179 SR/CR cancer resistant mice seem to need the leukocytes to physically home to the cancer cells. again, not news; neutrophils infiltrate tumors.
Cui has been beating this drum since before immunotherapy was cool, so let’s not blame him too much, but we do very much know this bit independently
eg https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/immunology/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2019.01710/full—sometimes neutrophils promote cancer actually!
eg https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/pdfExtended/S2211-1247(22)00984-6 we can determine the “good guy” neutrophil subpopulation that infiltrates tumors and promotes an anti-tumor immune response: it’s HLA-DR+CD80+CD86+ICAM1+PD-L1-. in metastasis these guys become PD-L1+ and immunosuppressive.
so like...the secret to replicating Zheng Cui’s miracle mice...might be nivolumab?? don’t get me wrong it’s a good drug but this is anticlimactic.
a great example of the mundanity of success
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0059995&type=printable the Danes do not replicate quite as much cancer resistance from SR/CR mice as Cui’s lab
https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.0602382103 whatever the SR/CR mice are doing, you can transfer it to other mice and get cancer resistance. Lloyd J. Old is a coauthor!!!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4544930/ independent description of anti-tumor neutrophils extracted from mice
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0171298510000033 more evidence of anti-tumor granulocytes(which include neutrophils)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.4161/cbt.7.9.6417 cancer patients’ granulocytes are less active
more Zheng Cui: cancer cells are negatively charged, such that positively charged nanoparticles can detect them VERY specifically. this is legit IMO.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41048-018-0080-0 works on 22 different cancer cell lines. absolutely no affinity for healthy cells, quite a bit for all cancer cells.
https://www.thno.org/v06p1887.htm
can’t do it in vivo though
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12951-019-0491-1?fromPaywallRec=false detects four CTCs per 1 mL blood!!!!
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm5551#supplementary-materials sadly these guys think positive nanoparticles are too toxic to use as treatments—the entire paper is about negative nanoparticles, which do sometimes add to the tumor uptake of chemotherapies
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1879625715000413 oncolytic virus BHV1 kills cancer cells in a variety of tumor types?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-47478-x.pdf broad-spectrum metastasis suppressing compounds targeting a lncRNA. scary-big chemical structures though.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1349-7006.2010.01834.x broad spectrum effectiveness of a survivin inhibitor + tumor regressions in vivo.
survivin is pan-essential, i got a good feeling about this
https://aacrjournals.org/cancerimmunolres/article/2/6/510/467367/VISTA-Is-a-Novel-Broad-Spectrum-Negative VISTA is another negative checkpoint regulator like PD1 and CTLA4 (which are both major successful drug targets)
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/scitranslmed.3007646 alkylphosphocholine is a type of lipid especially present in cancer cells, across cancer types, via lipid rafts. a synthetic analog has preferential uptake in basically all rodent & human tumors. usable for imaging and radiotherapy.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41568-023-00554-w Sanford Simon’s personal journey against fibrolamellar hepatocellular carcinoma
they found a fusion transcript and a corresponding fusion protein—the root cause
they did the reasonable thing: screen a compound library against tumor samples.
one hit is napabucasin, usually known as a STAT3 inhibitor (but that’s not the mechanism here) but somebody owns it
another was irinotecan. and navitoclax...but navitoclax has platelet toxicity
irinotecan + a BcrX PROTAC is being investigated though
or you can just. shRNA the fusion transcript. that’s a thing you can do now.
apparently Elana wanted to do that in 2013 but her dad said “pshaw RNA breaks down in the body.” now Spinraza is a thing (antisense oligonucleotide.) not to mention the mRNA world. truly these are the days of miracle and wonder.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/oncology/articles/10.3389/fonc.2018.00126/full redox balance is tricky, since cancers are both more prone to ROS and prone to develop coping mechanisms to regain redox balance.
https://www.nature.com/articles/cdd2017180 there’s nothing like TP53. mutated in 50-60% of cancers. the tumor suppressor gene par excellence.
https://nousresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Hermes-3-Technical-Report.pdf the Hermes 3 model is fine-tuned to be more responsive to prompts, such that prompt engineering suffices for “in-character” writing style (which IME does not work on most Instruct models)
neutrality (notes towards a blog post): https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/Ql9YwmLas
“neutrality is impossible” is sort-of-true, actually, but not a reason to give up.
even a “neutral” college class (let’s say a standard algorithms & data structures CS class) is non-neutral relative to certain beliefs
some people object to the structure of universities and their classes to begin with;
some people may object on philosophical grounds to concepts that are unquestionably “standard” within a field like computer science.
some people may think “apolitical” education is itself unacceptable.
to consider a certain set of topics “political” and not mention them in the classroom is, implicitly, to believe that it is not urgent to resolve or act on those issues (at least in a classroom context), and therefore it implies some degree of acceptance of the default state of those issues.
our “neutral” CS class is implicitly taking a stand on certain things and in conflict with certain conceivable views. but, there’s a wide range of views, including (I think) the vast majority of the actual views of relevant parties like students and faculty, that will find nothing to object to in the class.
we need to think about neutrality in more relative terms:
what rule are you using, and what things are you claiming it will be neutral between?
what is neutrality anyway and when/why do you want it?
neutrality is a type of tactic for establishing cooperation between different entities.
one way (not the only way) to get all parties to cooperate willingly is to promise they will be treated equally.
this is most important when there is actual uncertainty about the balance of power.
eg the Dutch Republic was the first European polity to establish laws of religious tolerance, because it happened to be roughly evenly divided between multiple religions and needed to unite to win its independence.
a system is neutral towards things when it treats them the same.
there lots of ways to treat things the same:
“none of these things belong here”
eg no religion in “public” or “secular” spaces
is the “public secular space” the street? no-hijab rules?
or is it the government? no 10 Commandments in the courthouse?
“each of these things should get equal treatment”
eg Fairness Doctrine
“we will take no sides between these things; how they succeed or fail is up to you”
e.g. “marketplace of ideas”, “colorblindness”
one can always ask, about any attempt at procedural neutrality:
what things does it promise to be neutral between?
are those the right or relevant things to be neutral on?
to what degree, and with what certainty, does this procedure produce neutrality?
is it robust to being intentionally subverted?
here and now, what kind of neutrality do we want?
thanks to the Internet, we can read and see all sorts of opinions from all over the world. a wider array of worldviews are plausible/relevant/worth-considering than ever before. it’s harder to get “on the same page” with people because they may have come from very different informational backgrounds.
even tribes are fragmented. even people very similar to one another can struggle to synch up and collaborate, except in lowest-common-denominator ways that aren’t very productive.
narrowing things down to US politics, no political tribe or ideology is anywhere close to a secure monopoly. nor are “tribes” united internally.
we have relied, until now, on a deep reserve of “normality”—apolitical, even apathetic, Just The Way Things Are. In the US that means, people go to work at their jobs and get paid for it and have fun in their free time. 90′s sitcom style.
there’s still more “normality” out there than culture warriors tend to believe, but it’s fragile. As soon as somebody asks “why is this the way things are?” unexamined normality vanishes.
to the extent that the “normal” of the recent past was functional, this is a troubling development...but in general the operation of the mind is a good thing!
we just have more rapid and broader idea propagation now.
why did “open borders” and “abolish the police” and “UBI” take off recently? because these are simple ideas with intuitive appeal. some % of people will think “that makes sense, that sounds good” once they hear of them. and now, way more people are hearing those kinds of ideas.
when unexamined normality declines, conscious neutrality may become more important.
conscious neutrality for the present day needs to be aware of the wide range of what people actually believe today, and avoid the naive Panglossianism of early web 2.0.
many people believe things you think are “crazy”.
“democratization” may lead to the most popular ideas being hateful, trashy, or utterly bonkers.
on the other hand, depending on what you’re trying to get done, you may very well need to collaborate with allies, or serve populations, whose views are well outside your comfort zone.
neutrality has things to offer:
a way to build trust with people very different from yourself, without compromising your own convictions;
“I don’t agree with you on A, but you and I both value B, so I promise to do my best at B and we’ll leave A out of it altogether”
a way to reconstruct some of the best things about our “unexamined normality” and place them on a firmer foundation so they won’t disappear as soon as someone asks “why?”
a “system of the world” is the framework of your neutrality: aka it’s what you’re not neutral about.
eg:
“melting pot” multiculturalism is neutral between cultures, but does believe that they should mostly be cosmetic forms of diversity (national costumes and ethnic foods) while more important things are “universal” and shared.
democratic norms are neutral about who will win, but not that majority vote should determine the winner.
scientific norms are neutral about which disputed claims will turn out to be true, but not on what sorts of processes and properties make claims credible, and not about certain well-established beliefs
right now our system-of-the-world is weak.
a lot of it is literally decided by software affordances. what the app lets you do is what there is.
there’s a lot that’s healthy and praiseworthy about software companies and their culture, especially 10-20 years ago. but they were never prepared for that responsibility!
a stronger system-of-the-world isn’t dogmatism or naivety.
were intellectuals of the 20th, the 19th, or the 18th centuries childish because they had more explicit shared assumptions than we do? I don’t think so.
we may no longer consider some of their frameworks to be true
but having a substantive framework at all clearly isn’t incompatible with thinking independently, recognizing that people are flawed, or being open to changing your mind.
“hedgehogs” or “eternalists” are just people who consider some things definitely true.
it doesn’t mean they came to those beliefs through “blind faith” or have never questioned them.
it also doesn’t mean they can’t recognize uncertainty about things that aren’t foundational beliefs.
operating within a strongly-held, assumed-shared worldview can be functional for making collaborative progress, at least when that worldview isn’t too incompatible with reality.
mathematics was “non-rigorous”, by modern standards, until the early 20th century; and much of today’s mathematics will be considered “non-rigorous” if machine-verified proofs ever become the norm. but people were still able to do mathematics in centuries past, most of which we still consider true.
the fact that you can generate a more general framework, within which the old framework was a special case; or in which the old framework was an unprincipled assumption of the world being “nicely behaved” in some sense; does not mean that the old framework was not fruitful for learning true things.
sometimes, taking for granted an assumption that’s not literally always true (but is true mostly, more-or-less, or in the practically relevant cases) can even be more fruitful than a more radically skeptical and general view.
an *intellectual* system-of-the-world is the framework we want to use for the “republic of letters”, the sub-community of people who communicate with each other in a single conversational web and value learning and truth.
that community expanded with the printing press and again with the internet.
it is radically diverse in opinion.
it is not literally universal. not everybody likes to read and write; not everybody is curious or creative. a lot of the “most interesting people in the world” influence each other.
everybody in the old “blogosphere” was, fundamentally, the same sort of person, despite our constant arguments with each other; and not a common sort of person in the broader population; and we have turned out to be more influential than we have ever been willing to admit.
but I do think of it as a pretty big and growing tent, not confined to 300 geniuses or anything like that.
“The” conversation—the world’s symbolic information and its technological infrastructure—is something anybody can contribute to, but of course some contribute more than others.
I think the right boundary to draw is around “power users”—people who participate in that network heavily rather than occasionally.
e.g. not all academics are great innovators, but pretty much all of them are “power users” and “active contributors” to the world’s informational web.
I’m definitely a power user; I expect a lot of my readers are as well.
what do we need to not be neutral about in this context? what belongs in an intellectual system-of-the-world?
another way of asking this question: about what premises are you willing to say, not just for yourself but for the whole world and for your children’s children, “if you don’t accept this premise then I don’t care to speak to you or hear from you, forever?”
clearly that’s a high standard!
I have many values differences with, say, the author of the Epic of Gilgamesh, but I still want to read it. And I want lots of other people to be able to read it! I do not want the mind that created it to be blotted out of memory.
that’s the level of minimal shared values we’re talking about here. What do we have in common with everyone who has an interest in maintaining and extending humanity’s collective record of thought?
lack of barriers to entry is not enough.
the old Web 2.0 idea was “allow everyone to communicate with everyone else, with equal affordances.” This is a kind of “neutrality”—every user account starts out exactly the same, and anybody can make an account.
I think that’s still an underrated principle. “literally anybody can speak to anybody else who wants to listen” was an invention that created a lot of valuable affordances. we forget how painfully scarce information was when that wasn’t true!
the problem is that an information system only works when a user can find the information they seek. And in many cases, what the user is seeking is true information.
mechanisms intended to make high quality information (reliable, accurate, credible, complete, etc) preferentially discoverable, are also necessary
but they shouldn’t just recapitulate potentially-biased gatekeeping.
we want evaluative systems that, at least a priori, an ancient Sumerian could look at and say “yep, sounds fair”, even if the Sumerian wouldn’t like the “truths” that come out on top in those systems.
we really can’t be parochial here. social media companies “patched” the problem of misinformation with opaque, partisan side-taking, and they suffered for it.
how “meta” do we have to get about determining what counts as reliable or valid? well, more meta than just picking a winning side in an ongoing political dispute, that’s for sure.
probably also more “meta” than handpicking certain sources as trustworthy, the way Wikipedia does.
if we want to preserve and extend knowledge, the “republic of letters” needs intentional stewardship of the world’s information, including serious attempts at neutrality.
perceived bias, of course, turns people away from information sources.
nostalgia for unexamined normality—“just be neutral, y’know, like we were when I was young”—is not a credible offer to people who have already found your nostalgic “normal” wanting.
rigorous neutrality tactics—“we have so structured this system so that it is impossible for anyone to tamper with it in a biased fashion”—are better.
this points towards protocols.
h/t Venkatesh Rao
think: zero-knowledge proofs, formal verification, prediction markets, mechanism design, crypto-flavored governance schemes, LLM-enabled argument mapping, AI mechanistic-interpretability and “showing its work”, etc
getting fancy with the technology here often seems premature when the “public” doesn’t even want neutrality; but I don’t think it actually is.
people don’t know they want the things that don’t yet exist.
the people interested in developing “provably”, “rigorously”, “demonstrably” impartial systems are exactly the people you want to attract first, because they care the most.
getting it right matters.
a poorly executed attempt either fizzles instantly; or it catches on but its underlying flaws start to make it actively harmful once it’s widely culturally influential.
OTOH, premature disputes on technology and methods are undesirable.
remember there aren’t very many of you/us. that is:
pretty much everybody who wants to build rigorous neutrality, no matter why they want it or how they want to implement it, is a potential ally here.
the simple fact of wanting to build a “better” world that doesn’t yet exist is a commonality, not to be taken for granted. most people don’t do this at all.
the “softer” side, mutual support and collegiality, are especially important to people whose dreams are very far from fruition. people in this situation are unusually prone to both burnout and schism. be warm and encouraging; it helps keep dreams alive.
also, the whole “neutrality” thing is a sham if we can’t even engage with collaborators with different views and cultural styles.
also, “there aren’t very many of us” in the sense that none of these envisioned new products/tools/institutions are really off the ground yet, and the default outcome is that none of them get there.
you are playing in a sandbox. the goal is to eventually get out of the sandbox.
you will need to accumulate talent, ideas, resources, and vibe-momentum. right now these are scarce, or scattered; they need to be assembled.
be realistic about influence.
count how many people are at the conference or whatever. how many readers. how many users. how many dollars. in absolute terms it probably isn’t much. don’t get pretentious about a “movement”, “community”, or “industry” before it’s shown appreciable results.
the “adjacent possible” people to get involved aren’t the general public, they’re the closest people in your social/communication graph who aren’t yet participating. why aren’t they part of the thing? (or why don’t you feel comfortable going to them?) what would you need to change to satisfy the people you actually know?
this is a better framing than speculating about mass appeal.
Things that many people consider controversial: evolution, sex education, history. But even for mathematical lessons, you will often find a crackpot who considers given topic controversial. (-1)×(-1) = 1? 0.999… = 1?
In general, unschooling.
In my opinion, the important functionality of schools is: (1) separating reliable sources of knowledge from bullshit, (2) designing a learning path from “I know nothing” to “I am an expert” where each step only requires the knowledge of previous steps, (3) classmates and teachers to discuss the topic with.
Without these things, learning is difficult. If an autodidact stumbles on some pseudoscience in library, even if they later figure out that it was bullshit, it is a huge waste of time. Picking up random books on a topic and finding out that I don’t understand the things they expect me to already know is disappointing. Finding people interested in the same topic can be difficult.
But everything else about education is incidental. No need to walk into the same building. No need to only have classmates of exactly the same age. The learning path doesn’t have to be linear, could be a directed oriented graph. Generally, no need to learn a specific topic at a specific age, although it makes sense to learn the topics that are prerequisites to a lot of knowledge as soon as possible. Grading is incidental; you need some feedback, but IMHO it would be better to split the knowledge into many small pieces, and grade each piece as “you get it” or “you don’t”.
...and the conclusion of my thesis is that a good educational system would focus on the essentials, and be liberal about everything else. However, there are people who object against the very things I consider essential. The educational system that would seem incredible free for me would still seem oppressive to them.
That means you can have a system neutral towards selected entities (the ones you want in the coalition), but not others. For example, you can have religious tolerance towards an explicit list of churches.
This can lead to a meta-game where some members of the coalition try to kick out someone, because they are no longer necessary. And some members strategically keeping someone in, not necessarily because they love them, but because “if they are kicked out today, tomorrow it could be me; better avoid this slippery slope”.
Examples: Various cults in USA that are obviously destructive but enjoy a lot of legal protection. Leftists establishing an exception for “Nazis”, and then expanding the definition to make it apply to anyone they don’t like. Similarly, the right calling everything they don’t like “communism”. And everyone on internet calling everything “religion”.
Or the opposite of that: “the world is biased against X, therefore we move towards true neutrality by supporting X”.
So, situations like: the organization is nominally politically neutral, but the human at an important position has political preferences… so far it is normal and maybe unavoidable, but what if there are multiple humans like that, all having the same political preference. If they start acting in a biased way, is it possible for other members to point it out.. without getting accused in turn of “bringing politics” into the organization?
They can easily create a subreddit r/anti-some-specific-way-things-are and now the opposition to the idea is forever a thing.
Basically, we need a “FAQ for normality”. The old situation was that people who were interested in a topic knew why things are certain way, and others didn’t care. If you joined the group of people who are interested, sooner or later someone explained it to you in person.
But today, someone can make a popular YouTube video containing some false explanation, and overnight you have tons of people who are suddenly interested in the topic and believe a falsehood… and the people who know how things are just don’t have the capacity to explain that to someone who lacks the fundamentals, believes a lot of nonsense, has strong opinions, and is typically very hostile to someone trying to correct them. So they just give up. But now we have the falsehood established as an “alternative truth”, and the old process of teaching the newcomers no longer works.
The solution for “I don’t have a capacity to communicate to so many ignorant and often hostile people” is to make an article or a YouTube video with an explanation, and just keep posting the link. Some people will pay attention, some people won’t, but it no longer takes a lot of your time, and it protects you from the emotional impact.
There are things for which we don’t have a good article to link, or the article is not known to many. We could fix that. In theory, school was supposed to be this kind of FAQ, but that doesn’t work in a dynamic society where new things happen after you are out of school.
Yeah, I often feel that having some kind of functionality would improve things, but the functionality is simply not there.
To some degree this is caused by companies having a monopoly on the ecosystem they create. For example, if I need some functionality for e-mail, I can make an open-source e-mail client that has it. (I think historically spam filters started like this.) If I need some functionality for Facebook… there is nothing I can do about it, other than leave Facebook but there is a problem with coordinating that.
Sometimes this is on purpose. Facebook doesn’t want me to be able to block the ads and spam, because they profit from it.
Yeah, if we share a platform, we may start examining some of its assumptions, and maybe at some moment we will collectively update. But if everyone assumes something else, it’s the Eternal September of civilization.
If we can’t agree on what is addition, we can never proceed to discuss multiplication. And we will never build math.
Sometimes this is reflected by the medium. For example, many people post comments on blogs, but only a small part of them writes blogs. By writing a blog you join the “power users”, and the beauty of it is that it is free for everyone and yet most people keep themselves out voluntarily.
(A problem coming soon: many fake “power users” powered by LLMs.)
There is a difference between reading for curiosity and reading to get reliable information. I may be curious about e.g. Aristotle’s opinion on atoms, but I am not going to use it to study chemistry.
In some way, I treat some people’s opinions as information about the world, and other people’s opinions as information about them. Both are interesting, but in a different way. It is interesting to know my neighbor’s opinion on astrology, but I am not using this information to update on astrology; I only use it to update on my neighbor.
So I guess I have two different lines: whether I care about someone as a person, and whether I trust someone as a source of knowledge. I listen to both, but I process the information differently.
Thinking about the user experience, I think it would be best if the protocol already came with three default implementations: as a website, as a desktop application, and as a smartphone app.
A website doesn’t require me to install anything; I just create an account and start using it. The downside is that the website has an owner, who can kick me out of the website. Also, I cannot verify the code. A malicious owner could probably take my password (unless we figure out some way to avoid this, that won’t be too inconvenient). Multiple websites talking to each other in a way that is as transparent for the user as possible.
A smartphone app, because that’s what most people use most of the day, especially when they are outside.
A desktop app, because that provides most options for the (technical) power user. For example, it would be nice to keep an offline archive of everything I want, delete anything I no longer want, export and import data.
links 12/10/24: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-10-2024
https://hedy.org/hedy Hedy, an educational Python variant that works in multiple languages and has tutorials starting from zero
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunking/ Patrick McKenzie on “debanking”
tl;dr: yes, lots of legal businesses get debanked; no, he disagrees with some of the crypto advocates’ characterization of the situation
in more detail:
you can lose bank account access, despite doing nothing unethical, for mundane business/credit-risk related reasons like “you are using your checking account as a small business bank account and transferring a lot of money in and out” or “you are a serial victim of identity theft”.
this is encouraged by banking regulators but fundamentally banks would do something like this regardless.
FINCEN, the US treasury’s anti-money-laundering arm, shuts down a lot of innocent businesses that do some kind of financial activity (like buying and selling gift cards) without proper KYC/AML controls. A lot of bodegas get shut down.
this is 100% a gov’t-created issue and it’s kind of tragic.
FDIC, which guarantees bank deposits in the event of a bank run, is also tasked with making rules against banks doing things that might lead to bank runs.
You know what might cause a run on a bank? A bunch of crypto-holders suddenly finding out their assets are worthless or gone, and wanting to cash out. To some extent, FDIC’s statutory mandate does entitle it to tell banks not to serve the crypto sector too heavily, because crypto is risky.
Another thing the FDIC is entitled to do is regulate banking products to ensure that consumers are not misled into thinking their money is in an FDIC-insured institution when it isn’t. Under that mandate, a lot of crypto-based consumer banking/trading products have gotten shut down.
This does amount to “FDIC doesn’t like crypto”, but it is in fact FDIC’s job to regulate banking in ways related to preventing consumers from losing their savings. Patrick McKenzie is fine with this; given the picture he presents, if you are not fine with this, it basically means you’re not fine with the existence of the FDIC. (Which is not an unheard-of position; it belongs in the same category as objecting to other New Deal innovations like going off the gold standard and creating the welfare state.)
Separately, In the Obama administration, Operation Chokepoint happened. the FDIC claimed that a wide variety of politically disfavored businesses (guns, pornography, fireworks, etc) were risky...because of the regulatory risk of FDIC disapproving of them.
unlike the crypto regulation, this is totally unrelated to things like bank run risk that are in FDIC’s official mandate. It is simply using FDIC to punish businesses that someone in the government doesn’t like. Patrick McKenzie considers it a “lawless” abuse of power.
The Fed & Treasury’s refusal to allow Facebook to issue the Libra cryptocurrency was similarly politically motivated. Senators blamed Facebook (and the Cambridge Analytica scandal) for Trump’s election and warned the CEOs of Visa, MasterCard, and Stripe not to engage with Libra. Patrick McKenzie also views this as the “naked exercise of power.”
Politically motivated debanking of individuals is clearly possible—it happened in Canada with the truckers’ convoy. However, Patrick McKenzie does not think it is routine in the US today. It is a risk rather than a common reality.
However, he wants to insist that the “crypto agenda” of “crypto should be treated on an equal playing field with USD by the banking sector” is not going to protect ordinary people from getting debanked for being, say, bodega owners or gun enthusiasts or conservatives or pornographers. He views it as a crypto-specific lobbying agenda, pretty much separate from the civil-rights/authoritarianism issue of political debanking.
https://austinvernon.site/blog/datacenterpv.html Austin Vernon’s outline of how off-grid, solar-powered datacenters could work and be cost-effective
Another interesting part from the “debanking” article:
This is talking about dem voters or generally progressive citizens, not dem politicians, correct?
Nope, politicians. SBF donated tons of money to Democrats (and a smaller ton of money to Republicans, just to be sure).
links 12/13/2024:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.00695 Minimo, an RL agent for jointly learning both conjectures and proofs in Peano from “intrinsic motivation”
what is “intrinsic motivation” in RL?
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.02298 intrinsic motivation mechanisms include:
reward shaping, i.e. comparing the expected value of two possible states, so that the agent gets an incremental “reward” when it moves to a state with higher expected value
rewards based on novelty rather than expected success, such as assigning more reward to visiting novel states, or assigning more reward to states with high prediction error relative to the agent’s model of the world
https://github.com/p-doom/gc-minimo gc-Minimo, the “goal-conditional” version that involves subgoals
https://pdoom.org/ AI organization, research aimed at AGI; young, educated European team, they seem smart (to my unsophisticated eye) and idealistic (they want to share/open-source as much as possible, in contrast to secretive for-profit AI labs)
https://news.mit.edu/2024/noninvasive-imaging-method-can-penetrate-deeper-living-tissue-1211 new non-invasive laser imaging technique; label free; 700 nm deep.
aka, not useful for subcutaneous imaging in living mammals, but possibly quite useful for non-destructive imaging of organoids (mentioned in the article) or maybe invertebrates, embryoids, other small living things;
maybe also nondestructive imaging of surface cells in live mammals:
skin
eyes
surgically exposed tissues
when you’re operating on a tumor, it’s important to make sure you have clean margins; would tumor cells look different under this sort of “metabolic” imaging?
https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2024/12/11/fermats-last-theorem-how-its-going/ ongoing project to translate a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem into Lean.
https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/what-is-the-xena-project/ the Xena Project is a project to get undergraduate math majors to formalize things in Lean.
“One could imagine things like formally verified course notes, which would later turn into some searchable database, and then to a tool which attempts example sheet questions by applying theorems from the course”.
“No available system currently has all of an undergraduate pure mathematics degree, so undergraduates can even contribute to research projects. Over ten Imperial maths undergraduates have contributed to Lean’s maths library, and there are plenty of students at other universities in the UK and beyond who have also got involved.”
https://reactormag.com/the-vampire-p-h-lee/ eerie, touching short story: what if, in early-2010′s Tumblr, there were active vampire and werewolf communities?
https://www.za-zu.com/blog/playbook how to cold-email at scale. apparently if you just send a bajillion emails from one account it can get marked as spam; there are methods to circumvent this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kray_twins celebrity-esque 1960′s British gangsters.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03306-x
today in What Can’t The Hypothalamus Do: stimulate the lateral hypothalamus and you get improved walking in recovery from spinal cord injury in mice, rats, and 2 humans.
appears to be specific to Vglut2 neurons (as shown by optogenetics)
got the patients to be able to climb stairs and walk 50 m, when they couldn’t before, after 3 months of rehab (they had both had their spinal injury for many years prior without being able to walk/climb).
you can see from the emg data that both patients have way more leg muscle activation when trying to walk or raise their knees from a lying position when the DBS is on vs off
how crazy is this? the standard lists of things the lateral hypothalamus does don’t include motor function. mostly it’s autonomic stuff, arousal, hunger, and motivation/mood.
otoh it does directly innervate the motor cortex, spinal cord, cerebellum, etc
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2021.639313/full and there’s some evidence that stimulating orexin neurons in the lateral hypothalamus induces movement (in mice) and hypothalamic orexin neurons are necessary for motor adaptation to sensory feedback https://www.jneurosci.org/content/42/32/6243
https://www.cognition.ai/blog/devin-generally-available this worries me from a mundane security point of view, though maybe I’m excessively paranoid; do you really want an AI agent autonomously mucking about in your code repo and pushing changes? I’ve heard the argument that this doesn’t really introduce more risk than a new junior developer (who might likewise be error-prone or even a crook) but my mind is not at ease.
https://ideaharbor.xyz/ a cute site where people can post project ideas. some of them are not, y’know, possible. “Batteries that can store the internet in them for when your connection goes down.”
I’ve long had a tentative rule-of-thumb that:
medial hypothalamus neuron groups are mostly “tracking a state variable”;
lateral hypothalamus neuron groups are mostly “turning on a behavior” (especially a “consummatory behavior”).
(…apart from the mammillary areas way at the posterior end of the hypothalamus. They’re their own thing.)
State variables are things like hunger, temperature, immune system status, fertility, horniness, etc.
I don’t have a great proof of that, just some indirect suggestive evidence. (Orexin, contiguity between lateral hypothalamus and PAG, various specific examples of people studying particular hypothalamus neurons.) Anyway, it’s hard to prove directly because changing a state variable can lead to taking immediate actions. And it’s really just a rule of thumb; I’m sure there’s exceptions, and it’s not really a bright-line distinction anyway.
The literature on the lateral hypothalamus is pretty bad. The main problem IIUC is that LH is “reticular”, i.e. when you look at it under the microscope you just see a giant mess of undifferentiated cells. That appearance is probably deceptive—appropriate stains can reveal nice little nuclei hiding inside the otherwise-undifferentiated mess. But I think only one or a few such hidden nuclei are known (the example I’m familiar with is “parvafox”).
plausible...but surely walking isn’t “consummatory”? And turning on the DBS doesn’t cause “automatic/involuntary” walking movements.
Yeah, the word “consummatory” isn’t great in general (see here), maybe I shouldn’t have used it. But I do think walking is an “innate behavior”, just as sneezing and laughing and flinching and swallowing are. E.g. decorticate rats can walk. As for human babies, they’re decorticate-ish in effect for the first months but still have a “walking / stepping reflex” from day 1 I think.
There can be an innate behavior, but also voluntary cortex control over when and whether it starts—those aren’t contradictory, IMO. This is always true to some extent—e.g. I can voluntarily suppress a sneeze. Intuitively, yeah, I do feel like I have more voluntary control over walking than I do over sneezing or vomiting. (Swallowing is maybe the same category as walking?) I still want to say that all these “innate behaviors” (including walking) are orchestrated by the hypothalamus and brainstem, but that there’s also voluntary control coming via cortex→hypothalamus and/or cortex→brainstem motor-type output channels.
I’m just chatting about my general beliefs. :) I don’t know much about walking in particular, and I haven’t read that particular paper (paywall & I don’t have easy access).
“three cultures of self-criticism” https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/zzRZnCLd_
non-self-critical culture (Barbarians):
baseline assumptions:
people generally think they are okay and good, and they are generally right.
self-criticism is rare.
if someone is being self-critical, guilty, ashamed, etc, that indicates an unusual problem.
implications:
intense self-criticism will be taken as evidence of something actually wrong with the person—either they really did screw up quite badly, or they have poor judgment.
criticism is direct and overt.
if someone objects to what you’ve done, they’ll tell you straight out, and expect that this will clear the air and lead to a resolution of the problem.
“negative” judgments are not necessarily intended, or expected, to be painful; the listener may very well disagree with the judgment or find it helpful feedback.
as a corollary, nobody assumes that an ambiguous comment or facial expression is a hint at criticism or disapproval. The default assumption is that people are fine with you, that you’re fine, and if there’s a problem it’ll become obvious.
pro-self-criticism culture (Puritans):
baseline assumptions:
people are generally deeply flawed; we are constantly screwing up, sinning, etc. this is the universal or near-universal human condition, not something limited to unusually bad people. but it really is genuinely Bad and Not Okay.
people tend to be complacent—by default we engage in far too little self-criticism. We are screwing up without knowing it. We let ourselves off the hook, make excuses for ourselves, ignore warning signs. It takes active, continual effort to be vigilant against our own flaws.
implications:
intense self-criticism and guilt is normative. virtuous people will not think well of themselves. in fact, if someone does think well of themselves, that means they’re lazy and have low standards.
corollary: an intensely self-critical or guilty person is not assumed to be an unusually bad person or to have a mental health problem; they are just doing what we’re all supposed to do!
criticism can be harsh and intentionally painful, because the assumption is that it needs to be “strong enough” to overcome natural human complacency
it’s also common to read criticism into subtle or ambiguous signs. the assumption is that there are always more problems than the obvious ones; it’s never safe to presume things are fine.
counter-self-criticism culture (Therapy Patients):
baseline assumptions:
people generally are too self-critical. most people are basically fine but torture themselves over minutiae.
complacency—failing to self-criticize enough about genuine faults—is literally monstrous. complacent people are rare, and pathological; we might call them sociopaths. you absolutely would not want to be one, and you’re almost certainly not.
“healing” or “growth” means learning to quiet the overactive inner critic. this is very difficult; people need help with it.
everybody always needs validation and reassurance that they’re ok, and the kindest thing you can do for anyone is give them permission not to worry or self-criticize. the cruelest thing you can do is trigger their insecurities and intensify their (already painful) self-criticism.
implications:
self-criticism is not normative; it’s an affliction we all suffer from and long to be freed from.
like sin in pro-self-criticism cultures, misery in counter-self-criticism culture is seen as Genuinely Terrible, Deeply Not Okay, but also a part of the human condition, not a sign that something has gone unusually wrong with you. you’re mentally ill, like everyone else.
criticism is mild and gentle, or suppressed altogether, because it’s assumed everybody is already torturing themselves and doesn’t need other people piling on.
corollary: it’s common to read a lot of criticism or disapproval into subtle or ambiguous signals because it’s assumed that people are holding back their true negative opinions. The absence of reassurance or validation is considered a sign of severe, harsh disapproval.
relationships:
Barbarians see Puritans as totally excessive, and see Therapy Patients as trying to counteract a problem that one can just...not have.
Puritans see both Barbarians and Therapy Patients as dangerously complacent.
Therapy Patients see Puritans as a familiar enemy—something they understand but reject and want to get away from, like an unhappy childhood home—and see Barbarians as incomprehensible, alien, insane, not-even-human.
links 12/03/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-03-2024
https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/my-mind-transformed-completely-and Sasha Chapin on how meditation changed him
it doesn’t seem clear to me whether this is better or not!
reduced anxiety seems great, but reduced sense of narrative drama is a big cost. part of what makes life seem meaningful to me is the sense of being part of a story, and if anything i feel like my current arc involves gaining abilities to envision myself as inside a narrative.
https://www.wired.com/story/murderbot-she-wrote-martha-wells/ Martha Wells seems like a lovely person
https://www.orcasciences.com/articles recommended by Ben Reinhardt, great example of rigorous analyses of potential future technologies.
https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/checking-my-prejudices-on-materials-decarbonization eg: where does it make economic sense to use electrochemical or biological manufacturing? (compared to “thermochemical”, fossil-fuel-powered). For biomanufacturing, only for complex molecules like proteins; for electrochemical processing, mostly metals and things with big voltage potentials in the chemical reaction (zinc, cobalt, copper, lithium, etc) but not simple organic molecules (methane, ethanol, etc)
https://www.biotech.senate.gov/press-releases/interim-report/ “US National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology”, a congressional advisory committee led by Jason Kelly of Gingko Bioworks
their purpose seems to be getting biotech-friendly policies through congress, with the rationale that this is good for national security/defense.
a lot of naive boosterism about biomanufacturing without engaging with the question of “is this better than alternative manufacturing techniques?”
https://www.aria.org.uk/request-for-opps/ new opportunities for program managers at ARIA: lead a scientific research program!
links 12/4/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-04-2024
https://substack.com/home/post/p-149058187 Gena Gorlin hosts a discussion on “psychological safety”
https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.21080800 new antidepressant just dropped: bupropion + dexmethorphan, appears to be more effective than bupropion alone
registering my concern that someday we will find that NMDA inhibitors do something bad to cognition. but all these recent studies are 6-week only and don’t report any side effects that look like cognitive impairment, but maybe wouldn’t have been able to pick it up even if it existed.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/13/things-that-sometimes-work-if-you-have-anxiety/ Scott Alexander on anxiety treatments.
“Azapirones (example: BuSpar) is, unusually, a rare drug which is specifically targeted at anxiety, rather than a being a repurposed antidepressant or something. BuSpar is very safe, not at all addictive, and rarely works. Every so often somebody comes out with a very cheerful study saying something like “Buspar just as effective as benzodiazepines if given correctly!” and everybody laughs hysterically and goes back to never thinking about it.”
gabapentin for anxiety—meh, some positive results but they’re not extraordinary.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-021-01386-6
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1155/2017/6045017
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1155/2017/6045017
Good point in comments, that different people see different (sometimes opposite) things necessary for psychological safety. For some, it means they can speak candidly about whatever they think and feel. For others, it means that some things cannot be said in their presence.
I think, you can make it both, as long as it is one-sided, e.g. in a therapy, where the client could say anything, and the therapist would be careful about their feedback.
But this wouldn’t work at a workplace or any other larger group… unless you split people into “those who are safe” and “those who have a duty to make them feel safe”, and even then, maybe someone in the former group could make someone else from the same group feel unsafe.
You make a good point that it is not enough for your boss to tell you “you can speak freely”, you must also believe that it is true. (I also have a negative experience here: I was told to speak freely; I did; it had consequences.) This would probably sound more credible if other colleagues are already speaking freely. Also, if you generally don’t feel like your job is at risk somehow. For example, if your performance is below the average (and by definition, half of the team is like that), you might believe that neither your performance nor the candor alone would get you fired, but their combination would.
links 1/3/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-03-2025
https://thisgenomiclife.substack.com/p/this-weeks-finds-in-genomics-and-4bd “More than half of [a new dataset of 2.35 million candidate regulatory DNA] elements are not close to the transcription start sites of genes, meaning they act at a distance to control gene expression”
https://www.ams.org/notices/202501/rnoti-p6.pdf Terence Tao on machine-assisted proof
https://www.cato.org/blog/national-security-hoax Joe Biden blocked a Japanese company’s acquisition of U.S. Steel on “national security” grounds...even though Japan is a US ally and this would be an investment into America-based steelmaking facilities
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/12/the-future-of-the-scientist-in-a-world-with-advanced-ai.html Tyler Cowen thinks that all the hypothesis generation in science will be done by AI and humans will only gather data (via lab work or confidentiality/data access negotiations.). This is...pretty backwards from what I expect the best uses of AI vs. creative humans are. I’m much more interested in AIs for lab automation and faster idea-generation/lit-review loops.
https://kyunghyuncho.me/i-sensed-anxiety-and-frustration-at-neurips24/ interesting perspective. as we’re entering the “productization” phase of AI, says the article, the days of PhDs getting fat industry salaries to do research are ending.
this...does not match my experience, though maybe I was seeing a different side of the elephant. In the mid-2010s, ML people knew that “deep learning” was the best at the benchmarks, but it was fiendishly hard to get business results from it in most contexts, so startups would typically aspire to use it and then...quietly not. in my corner of startupland, machine learning PhDs were definitely not being paid to do freeform research; these were the days of “feature engineering is king” and “data munging” and “let’s just use a logistic regression, it works better”
article’s probably right that it’s not a great time to be in non-LLM fields of ML, though there are exceptions
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01286-3.epdf?sharing_token=FmzVoOJu5aSIdLKxYEmbs9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0Mqd2apSCbVNCoLnGZzPpZgrhSB6F3n6W7UifVpls202s_RwJ4kTaNjSgIQzVnS6hGeSq41cU3dWAYR23ygDu7de3fh4_6F6XJA2pD3xNO3c8hyjtnc_kr6GV5YDuwIdFQ%3D it’s very easy for grant funding schemes to be net negative in societal value.
“if the cumulative work that goes into an average grant application adds up to considerably more than a couple of days, these grant schemes draw more resources from the scientific community than they add.” in reference to two (actually existing) grant programs awarding €50,000 and €30,000 with success rates of 5% and 2.5%, respectively.
in other words: if grants are small, selective, and time-consuming, they’re using up more scientist-hours on grant applications than they are funding scientist-hours of research.
https://poetryarchive.org/poem/fiddler-dooney/ one of my favorites
https://www.feraleyes.xyz/p/god-written-by-a-girl personal essay, I don’t totally understand but it’s heartfelt
https://viaseparations.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Via-Separations-White-Paper-Dec.-2024.pdf Via Separations produces membrane separations for industry that replaces (combustion-powered) evaporators, using 75% less energy without yield loss and with favorable economics without subsidies.
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/113721192051328193 Terence Tao on getting his papers declined; it happens to him about once a year. rejections are not unusual in math journals and even good mathematicians get them.
links 12/18/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-18-2024
https://hearth.ai/thesis keeping track of people you know. as an inveterate birthday-forgetter and someone too prone to falling out of touch with friends, I bet there are ways for AI tools to do helpful things here.
https://www.statista.com/chart/33684/number-of-confirmed-human-h5n1-cases-by-exposure-source H5N1 cases by state. mostly California, mostly livestock handlers. 61 cases so far.
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/consciousness-is-a-great-mystery Eric Hoel says that “consciousness researchers” straightforwardly agree on what consciousness is.
Consciousness is:
the subjective experience of perceiving; Thomas Nagel’s “what it is like to be a bat”; qualia
awake states (as opposed to dreamless sleep, anaesthesia, coma, etc)
things we are mentally aware of (perceptions, thoughts, emotions, etc) as opposed to things we are not aware of (most autonomic processes, blindsight, “subconscious” motives)
the fact that we do not have a scientific account of what consciousness is made of, doesn’t mean consciousness doesn’t exist or is inherently mystical or incoherent. Isaac Newton had never heard of “H20” but he knew what water is. The point of science is to give explanations for the things we know about experientially but don’t fully understand.
A “theory of consciousness” would allow us to, given some monitoring data of brain activity in an organism, determine whether the organism is conscious or not, and what it is conscious of.
is the anaesthesia patient conscious?
is the locked-in patient conscious?
which animals have consciousness?
I’ve long had a vague sense of suspicion around consciousness research and the idea of qualia, but I’ve never really been able to put my finger on why.
When defined crisply like this, it does seem clear that consciousness is a real, mundane thing (if a nurse says “the patient is unconscious” there’s no confusion about what that means).
But why is consciousness mysterious? why is it a “hard problem”?
David Chalmers’ “hard problem of consciousness” refers to the difficulty of explaining how physical processes give rise to subjective experiences. Even if you explained a lot of brain mechanisms that have to go on for us to consciously experience something, would that really cross the explanatory gap?
I think this is what has turned me off “consciousness”, because I don’t get why there’s supposed to be a gap.
If we had some full explanation based on patterns of brain activity, like “you consciously perceive a bright light precisely when when the foo blergs the bar”, then...I think there wouldn’t be any mystery left!
I agree that e.g. “you see a bright light when the visual cortex is stimulated” is not enough, because you don’t see it if you’re unconscious, and we don’t have a necessary-and-sufficient physical correlate of consciousness. but, like, Eric Hoel and apparently a lot of mainstream neuroscientists are saying that we could find such a thing.
I guess you could keep asking “ok, the foo blerging the bar produces the phenomenon we experience as consciousness, but why does it?” and it would be hard to come up with any experimental way to even approach that question...
but that’s an “explanatory gap” that comes up everywhere and we’re usually happy to live with.
it also depends what kind of “why” you want.
if you’re asking “why does it produce consciousness” as in “what’s the efficient cause?” or “how does it work to produce consciousness?” then I think all how-does-it-work questions are going to have to be about physical (or algorithmic) processes. and if you say “well but my subjective experience is not even really commensurate with these kinds of objectively observable processes, it’s a different sort of thing, how can it ever emerge from them” then...you are SOL? “how” questions will never satisfy you?
if you’re asking “why does it produce consciousness” in a final-cause sense, like what is the use of consciousness, then I think we can have fruitful ideas. “why don’t organisms operate on pure blindsight” is an interesting question! (pace Peter Watts, i think it must have some evolutionary function or we wouldn’t have it.)
I think p-zombies are stupid, obviously just because you can verbally say you’re “imagining” something exactly the same down to every physical detail, but magically different in its properties, doesn’t mean it’s possible!
ok, so: my beef with “consciousness studies” is primarily with the non-physicalists who say that even if we had a perfect neural correlate of consciousness, we still wouldn’t understand consciousness as a subjective experience. but what I didn’t realize, is that there are neuroscientists interested in consciousness who just want to find that neural correlate, and don’t necessarily have any weird philosophical assumptions.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abj3259
The global neuronal workspace theory of consciousness says that consciousness is produced by an “interconnected network of prefrontal-parietal areas and many high-level sensory cortical areas.”
early sensory processing is unconscious.
stimuli are sometimes attended to (made conscious), a process which involves sending (pre-processed) signals about the stimuli through the prefrontal and parietal areas which control executive function, and distributing them to a bunch of other areas of the brain as part of the current working context.
IIT is an information-theoretic theory of consciousness; it says that consciousness is measured by the power of a neuronal network to influence itself. “The more cause-effect power a system has, the more conscious it is.”
Facebook already reminded me when my friends had birthdays, but recently I noticed that it also offers to write a congratulation comment for me, I just need to make a single click to send it. Now, Facebook has an obvious incentive to keep me returning to their page every day, so they are not going to fully automate this.
The next necessary functionality would be to write automated replies. I think that could be achieved by LLMs, I just need some service to do it automatically. That way I could have a rich social life, without the need to interact with humans.
I don’t want automatic messages; that seems too inhuman. I do want things like reminders to follow up with people I haven’t talked to for a while, with context awareness for social appropriateness. like, i wouldn’t know how to reach out to my roommate/best friend from college; we haven’t talked in 16 years! but maybe the right app could keep that from happening in the first place, or create a new normalized type of social behavior that’s “reaching out after a long time apart” or whatever.
The description on the page you linked—“augments the brain’s ability to reason on a) who am I, b) who are you, and c) who are you to me, now and over time”—leaves a lot to imagination. Sounds like a chatbot that will talk to you about your contacts?
Maybe try finding out their birthday (on social networks, by online research, or maybe ask a mutual friend), and then set up a reminder. “Happy birthday, we haven’t seen each other for a while, how are you?” Sounds to me like a socially appropriate thing (but I am not an expert).
Also, spend 5 minutes by the clock writing a list of people you would like to stay in contact with.
Now, I guess the question is how to set up a system that will let you store the data and provide the reminders. The easiest version would a spreadsheet where you enter the names and birthdays, and some system that will read it and prepare notifications for you. A more complicated version would allow you to write more data about the person (how do we know each other, what kinds of activities did we do together, when was the last time we talked), and group the people by categories. You could make an AI go through your e-mail archive and compile an initial report on the person.
I would probably feel very uncomfortable doing this online, because it would feel like I am making reports on people, and the owner of the software will most likely sell the data to any third party. I would want this as a desktop application, maybe connected to a small phone app, to set up the reminders. But many people seem to prefer online solutions as more convenient, privacy be damned.
(The phone reminders could be like: “Today, XY has a birthday; you have their phone number, e-mail, and Less Wrong account. You relationship status is: you have met a few times at a LW meetup. Topics you usually discuss: AI, kitten videos.”)
links, 10/14/2024
https://milton.host.dartmouth.edu/reading_room/pl/book_1/text.shtml [[John Milton]]’s Paradise Lost, annotated online [[poetry]]
https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace [[AI]] [[biotech]] [[Dario Amodei]] spends about half of this document talking about AI for bio, and I think it’s the most credible “bull case” yet written for AI being radically transformative in the biomedical sphere.
one caveat is that I think if we’re imagining a future with brain mapping, regeneration of macroscopic brain tissue loss, and understanding what brains are doing well enough to know why neurological abnormalities at the cell level produce the psychiatric or cognitive symptoms they do...then we probably can do brain uploading! it’s really weird to single out this one piece as pie-in-the-sky science fiction when you’re already imagining a lot of similarly ambitious things as achievable.
https://venture.angellist.com/eli-dourado/syndicate [[tech industry]] when [[Eli Dourado]] picks startups, they’re at least not boring! i haven’t vetted the technical viability of any of these, but he claims to do a lot of that sort of numbers-in-spreadsheets work.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/shapley-values [[EA]] [[economics]] how do you assign credit (in a principled fashion) to an outcome that multiple people contributed to? Shapley values! It seems extremely hard to calculate in practice, and subject to contentious judgment calls about the assumptions you make, but maybe it’s an improvement over raw handwaving.
https://gwern.net/maze [[Gwern Branwen]] digs up the “Mr. Young” studying maze-running techniques in [[Richard Feynman]]’s “Cargo Cult Science” speech. His name wasn’t Young but Quin Fischer Curtis, and he was part of a psychology research program at UMich that published little and had little influence on the outside world, and so was “rebooted” and forgotten. Impressive detective work, though not a story with a very satisfying “moral”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cary_Elwes [[celebrities]] [[Cary Elwes]] had an ancestor who was [[Charles Dickens]]′ inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge!
https://feministkilljoys.com/2015/06/25/against-students/ [[politics]] an old essay by [[Sara Ahmed]] in defense of trigger warnings in the classroom and in general against the accusations that “students these days” are oversensitive and illiberal.
She’s doing an interesting thing here that I haven’t wrapped my head around. She’s not making the positive case “students today are NOT oversensitive or illiberal” or “trigger warnings are beneficial,” even though she seems to believe both those things. she’s more calling into question “why has this complaint become a common talking point? what unstated assumptions does it perpetuate?” I am not sure whether this is a valid approach that’s alternate to the forms of argument I’m more used to, or a sign of weakness (a thing she’s doing only because she cannot make the positive case for the opposite of what her opponents claim.)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10080017/ [[cancer]][[medicine]] [[biology]] cancer preventatives are an emerging field
NSAIDS and omega-3 fatty acids prevent 95% of tumors in a tumor-prone mouse strain?!
also we’re targeting [[STAT3]] now?! that’s a thing we’re doing.
([[STAT3]] is a major oncogene but it’s a transcription factor, it lives in the cytoplasm and the nucleus, this is not easy to target with small molecules like a cell surface protein.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLARITY [[biotech]] make a tissue sample transparent so you can make 3D microscopic imaging, with contrast from immunostaining or DNA/RNA labels
https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/frequency-edges/ [[AI]] [[neuroscience]] a type of neuron in vision neural nets, the “high-low frequency detector”, has recently also been found to be a thing in literal mouse brain neurons (h/t [[Dario Amodei]]) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10055119/
https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/israel-zionism/2024/10/the-failed-concepts-that-brought-israel-to-october-7/ [[politics]][[Israel]][[war]] an informative and sober view on “what went wrong” leading up to Oct 7
tl;dr: Hamas consistently wants to destroy Israel and commit violence against Israelis, they say so repeatedly, and there was never going to be a long-term possibility of living peacefully side-by-side with them; Netanyahu is a tough talker but kind of a procrastinator who’s kicked the can down the road on national security issues for his entire career; catering to settlers is not in the best interests of Israel as a whole (they provoke violence) but they are an unduly powerful voting bloc; Palestinian misery is real but has been institutionalized by the structure of the Gazan state and the UN which prevents any investment into a real local economy; the “peace process” is doomed because Israel keeps offering peace and the Palestinians say no to any peace that isn’t the abolition of the State of Israel.
it’s pretty common for reasonable casual observers (eg in America) to see Israel/Palestine as a tragic conflict in which probably both parties are somewhat in the wrong, because that’s a reasonable prior on all conflicts. The more you dig into the details, though, the more you realize that “let’s live together in peace and make concessions to Palestinians as necessary” has been the mainstream Israeli position since before 1948. It’s not a symmetric situation.
[[von Economo neurons]] are spooky [[neuroscience]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Economo_neuron
only found in great apes, cetaceans, and humans
concentrated in the [[anterior cingulate cortex]] and [[insular cortex]] which are closely related to the “sense of self” (i.e. interoception, emotional salience, and the perception that your e.g. hand is “yours” and it was “you” who moved it)
the first to go in [[frontotemporal dementia]]
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14952-3 we don’t know where they project to! they are so big that we haven’t tracked them fully!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3953677/
https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline-brilliant-young-coder/ the founder of Cloudflare had [[frontotemporal dementia]] [[neurology]]
[[frontotemporal dementia]] is maybe caused by misfolded proteins being passed around neuron-to-neuron, like prion disease! [[neurology]]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6838634/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06548-9.pdf inject the bad protein into a mouse and it really does spread!
https://researchfeatures.com/cell-cell-transmission-proteins-core-neurodegenerative-disease/ something similar might be happening in [[Alzheimer’s]] as well
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3943211/ the spread of [[ALS]] through the brain is consistent with cell-to-cell transmission of misfolded proteins
It is good to have one more perspective, and perhaps also good to develop a habit to go meta. So that when someone tells you “X”, in addition to asking yourself “is X actually true?” you also consider questions like “why is this person telling me X?”, “what could they gain in this situation by making me think more about X?”, “are they perhaps trying to distract me from some other Y?”.
Because there are such things as filtered evidence, availability bias, limited cognition; and they all can be weaponized. While you are trying really hard to solve the puzzle the person gave you, they may be using your inattention to pick your pockets.
In extreme cases, it can even be a good thing to dismiss the original question entirely. Like, if you are trying to leave an abusive religious cult, and the leader gives you a list of “ten thousand extremely serious theological questions you need to think about deeply before you make the potentially horrible mistake of damning your soul by leaving this holy group”, you should not actually waste your time thinking about them, but keep planning your escape.
Now the opposite problem is that some people get so addicted to the meta that they are no longer considering the object level. “You say I’m wrong about something? Well, that’s exactly what the privileged X people love to do, don’t they?” (Yeah, they probably do. But there is still a chance that you are actually wrong about something.)
tl;dr—mentioning the meta, great; but completely avoiding the object level, weakness
So, how much meta is the right amount of meta? Dunno, that’s a meta-meta question. At some point you need to follow your intuition and hope that your priors aren’t horribly wrong.
The situation is not symmetric, I agree. But also, it is too easy to underestimate the impact of the settlers. I mean, if you include them in the picture, then the overall Israeli position becomes more like: “Let’s live together in peace, and please ignore these few guys who sometimes come to shoot your family and take your homes. They are an extremist minority that we don’t approve of, but for complicated political reasons we can’t do anything about them. Oh, and if you try to defend yourself against them, chances are our army might come to defend them. And that’s also something we deeply regret.”
It is much better than the other side, but in my opinion still fundamentally incompatible with peace.
kinda meta, but I find myself wondering if we should handle Roam [[ tag ]] syntax in some nicer way. Probably not but it seems nice if it managed to have no downsides.
It wouldn’t collide with normal Markdown syntax use. (I can’t think of any natural examples, aside from bracket use inside links, like
[[editorial comment]](URL), which could be special-cased by looking for the parentheses required for the URL part of a Markdown link.) But it would be ambiguous where the wiki links point to (Sarah’s Roam wiki? English Wikipedia?), and if it pointed to somewhere other than LW2 wiki entries, then it would also be ambiguous with that too (because the syntax is copied from Mediawiki and so the same as the old LW wiki’s links).And it seems like an overloading special case you would regret in the long run, compared to something which rewrote them into regular links. Adds in a lot of complexity for a handful of uses.
I thought about manually deleting them all but I don’t feel like it.
I don’t know how familiar you are with regular expressions but you could do this with a two-pass regular expression search and replace: (I used Emacs regex format, your preferred editor might use a different format. notably, in Emacs [ is a literal bracket but ( is a literal parenthesis, for some reason)
replace “^(https://.? )([[.?]] )*” with “\1″
replace “[[(.*?)]]” with “\1″
This first deletes any tags that occur right after a hyperlink at the beginning of a line, then removes the brackets from any remaining tags.
RE Shapley values, I was persuaded by this comment that they’re less useful than counterfactual value in at least some practical situations.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/part-ii-the-failed-rebrand-of-kamala Nate Silver on the failures of the Harris campaign
tl;dr: he thinks they defaulted to a weak message of “generic Democrat” because they lacked the conviction to push any other distinctive brand (and in some cases the situation made alternatives infeasible).
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.08.29.610411v1 you can generate novel proteins with RFDiffusion and a new model called ChemNet by selecting for properties of a reaction site that indicate a better catalyst of a particular chemical reaction.
We’re getting closer to designing new proteins to solve particular (chemical reaction) problems.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-world-of-tomorrow/ excellent Virginia Postrel article on progress aesthetics and why we have to go beyond nostalgia for the retro-future.
https://minjunes.ai/posts/sleep/index.html how could we mimic the effects of the “short sleeper gene” so that everyone could get by on less sleep?
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/defrauding-government-jetson-leder-luis/ Patrick McKenzie and Jetson Leder-Luis on defrauding the government.
the optimal amount of fraud is not zero; anti-fraud enforcement trades off against ease of use and we (as a nation) generally don’t want to make it super hard to get government benefits
nonetheless benefits fraud does indeed happen. kind of a lot. “let’s bill Medicare for stuff we don’t do” or “let’s take unemployment insurance for fake SSNs” or “let’s take PPP funds for anything and everything, they literally said that we wouldn’t have to pay back the “loan”″
the US government is much more upset about any amount of money going to terrorists or foreign enemies than it is about larger amounts of money going to ordinary crooks or just people who are ineligible for the benefits in question. we almost have two processes for these types of “fraud”?
Jetson thinks government fraud-detection agencies are underfunded.
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/fraud-choice-patrick-mckenzie/ Patrick McKenzie on fraud
most fraud prevention is managed by the financial sector, which is generally a good thing (far less expensive than court cases)
though it does often lead to the industry not really caring whether you are a fraudster or a fraud victim. either way you’re a risk, which the bank doesn’t like.
“one reason to buy services from the financial industry and not from the government is that the financial industry finds the statement “stealing from businesses is wrong” to be straightforwardly uncontroversial. A business owner would need to put some thought into whether they trust your local police department or district attorney to have the same belief. I apologize to non-American readers of this piece who believe I am spouting insanity. It has been an interesting few years in the United States.”
I am an American and this sounds kind of Big If True to me too.
the reason firms put up annoying hurdles for their customers is often to screen for fraudsters. I already knew this, but somehow i did not realize that when they ask you for a phone call, they are not doing this because they hate you for being shy/neurodivergent, that too is a way to screen out scammers using fake identities.
https://chrislakin.blog/p/bounty-your-bottleneck Chris Lakin claims he can completely solve (psychological) insecurity through coaching. He’s very young and new at this, but the pay-for-results model is unusually client-friendly.
https://screwworm.org/ these people want to use gene drives to eradicate screwworm, a parasite that infects animals in South America.
https://christopherrufo.com/p/counterrevolution-blueprint Chris Rufo is a troll on Twitter, but this is a pretty sober/earnest proposal for how all affirmative action, racial quotas, etc can be eliminated from the Federal Government. I am not qualified to opine on whether this is feasible or whether it will have harmful unintended consequences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adragon_De_Mello example of a “child prodigy” who was pushed into it by his emotionally abusive father and didn’t like it at all
https://parthchopra.substack.com/p/what-i-learned-working-at-a-high somewhere hidden behind the business-speak of this article, there is clearly an actual story about some Shit That Went Wrong. but unfortunately he is likely not free to disclose it and I am not familiar enough with this company to know what it was.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.16.24307494v1.full.pdf this is the OpenWater tFUS study on depression. Not sham-controlled, things like this fail to replicate all the time, but they do register an effect.
https://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/heilmeier-catechism good advice for how to write proposals
I guess it is difficult to promote the brand of Tough No-Nonsense Prosecutor in the age of Defund The Police.
Which is really unfortunate, because it seems like “defund the police” was actually what woke white people wanted. Black people were probably horrified by the idea of giving up and letting the crime grow exponentially at the places they live. Unfortunately, the woke do not care about the actual opinions of the people they speak for.
A part of this is the natural “hype—disappointment” cycle. The 21st century is better, but we were promised that it would be 100x better, and it is only maybe 10x better, so now we feel that it sucks. What we would need, psychologically, is probably some disaster that would first threaten to destroy us, but then we would overcome it, and then feel happy that now the future is better than we expected.
But we had covid, which kinda fits this pattern, except the popular reaction was opposite: instead of “thanks to the amazing science and technology of the 21st century, we have eradicated a pandemic in a year” the popular wisdom of the cool people became “it was never dangerous in the first place, the evil Americans just tried to scare us”. Instead of admiring the mRNA vaccines, people seem outraged that we didn’t let more people die naturally instead.
Another thing is that people are bad at noticing gradual change. If you could teleport 10 or 20 years in the future, you would be shocked. But if you advance to the future one day at a time, it mostly feels like nothing happens. (Even the proverbial flying cars would be a huge disappointment if we at first got cars that can only fly 1 cm above the surface, and then every year they could get 1 cm higher.)
Maybe the people who profit from the fraud want it that way, and lobby against the funding?
Uhm, our experience in Eastern Europe is that police was never optimizing for us, and quite often against us.
links 11/22/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-22-2024
https://www.slowboring.com/p/can-we-have-a-family-friendly-high Matt Yglesias designs a family-friendly high rise. i want this!
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/underrated-ways-to-change-the-world
links 1/7/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-07-2025
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-making-of-community-notes the team behind Community Notes describes how they do it
it’s people who were working on “Birdwatch” before Musk bought Twitter, and they use algorithms derived from PageRank.
these guys are not, even a little bit, “based.” Yet the Twitter userbase loves Community Notes!
if you have a capable team that firmly believes in “fairness”, in auditable, open, participatory processes that don’t put a top-down thumb on the scale on controversial issues, and they get to actually use the neutral algorithm instead of being pressured to make exceptions, you get solid results and community trust!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7132523/ 90% of bronchitis is viral. doctors are cautioned not to give antibiotics for it, even for long-lasting coughs.
https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2010/1201/p1345.html no really. bronchitis symptoms typically last three weeks. it’s still not bacterial. antibiotics do not work.
https://harmonic.fun/ AI for formal mathematical reasoning
it’s Lean based! https://web.archive.org/web/20241230145058/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/technology/ai-chatbots-chatgpt-math.html
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-FFa6nMVg18m1zPtoAQrFalwpx2YaGK4/view Tim Gowers’ research manifesto on AI for mathematics
it’s not machine-learning based; it’s a version of GOFAI that’s formalizing the types of “tactics” or “moves” that a human goes through in a proof, trying to get the formalism right such that a computer proceduralization only has a modest, human-like amount of trial-and-error & backtracking rather than vast amounts of brute-force search.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240514445088/en/Multiply-Labs-and-Retro-Biosciences-Announce-an-85-Million-Partnership-to-Advance-Cell-Therapy-Manufacturing-for-Age-Related-Diseases cell therapy manufacturing automation robots from Multiply Labs, used at Retro Bio.
https://gopiandcode.uk/pdfs/sisyphus-pldi23.pdf
“proof repair” is the problem of updating formally verified software; if you have a library of provably correct code, and you make any kind of software updates to the library, now you also have to update the proofs such that it’s still verifiably correct (assuming the update didn’t break anything.) Progress towards automating this.
https://openreview.net/pdf?id=RtTNbJthjV the Karp Dataset, 90 reduction-based NP-hardness proofs (in natural language) for training LLMs to write proofs.
https://web.stanford.edu/~jlmcc/ Jay McClelland, co-inventor (with Rumelhart of backprop fame) of the Parallel Distributed Processing theory of cognition, has been doing a lot with LLMs lately
https://web.stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/ChanEtAl22DataDistPropsDriveInContextLearning.pdf in-context learning works better when the training data is bursty and has lots of sparsely presented elements
https://web.stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/DasguptaLampinenEtAl22LMsShowHumanLikeContentEffectsInReasoning.pdf LLMs, like humans, show belief-bias effects on Wason and syllogism tests
https://web.stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/McClelland22CapturingAdvCogAbilitiesWithDeepNets humans learn human-made formal systems (like mathematics, computer science, logic) in order to solve certain kinds of difficult problems. perhaps AIs should also “go to school”, being trained on math problems, in particular with diagrams as well as text. also, goal-directed motivation may require fundamentally different architecture from the usual LLM transformer setup.
https://web.stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/NamEtAl22LearningToReasonWRelationalAbstractions.pdf an empirical example of “taking the AI to school”—fine-tuning on a McClelland-designed dataset intended to teach “relational abstractions” makes models perform better at math problems
https://web.stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/NamMcC21RapidLearningGeneralizationInHumansArxiv.pdf human mTurkers are better at abstract problem-solving tasks if they’ve taken high school algebra and geometry (no effect for other educational variables). they split pretty bimodally into people who learn a strategy and people who guess at random. this points towards “basic math education teaches systematic thought.” also, small RNNs generalize much worse than humans, but who cares.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_set_programming ASP is used for difficult search & combinatorics or optimization problems. I’m struggling to understand whether it is in wide industrial use or if it’s more of a research specialization.
Then it is quite sad that the neutral algorithm was introduced as the same time as Xitter started losing popularity. (At least, it seems that it loses popularity? Maybe that’s just some bubble. I don’t know what to trust anymore.)
Could these things be related? It seems like the opposition against Xitter is mostly because Musk is hanging out with Trump recently. But hypothetically, it could be a combination of that and the fact that the Community Notes may be inconvenient for people who instead could have the content policed by members of their tribe.
Sorry for getting political, but at least until recently it seemed like one political tribe practically owned all the “mainstream” parts of the internet; not necessarily most of the users, but most of the mods and admins. They didn’t need to try finding a neutral ground, because instead, they could simply have it all.
I have seen a few attempts to make a neutral place where both sides could discuss, and those usually didn’t work well. The dominant tribe had no incentive to participate, if they could win the debate by avoiding the place and from outside declaring it to be full of horrible people who should be banned. You could only attract them by basically conceding to many of their demands (declaring their norms and taboos to be the rules of the group), which already made an equal debate impossible (stating your disagreement already meant breaking some of the rules), which made the debate kinda pointless (you could only make your point by diluting it to homeopathic levels, and then the other side yelled at you for a while, and then everyone congratulated themselves for being so tolerant and open-minded). I don’t want to give specific examples, but instead I will point to how Scott Alexander’s blog was handled e.g. by Wikipedia—despite the fact that most of its readers (and Scott himself) actually belonged to the dominant tribe, the fact that dissent was allowed was enough for some admins to call him names.
It is usually the weaker side that calls for fairness. Yes, it is amazing that you can implement it algorithmically, but the people who have the power to make this decisions, are usually not the ones who want it made.
So I wonder what will happen in future. Will more web platforms adopt the neutral algorithm? Or will it be instead something like “a neutral algorithm, but our trusted moderators can override its results if they don’t like them”?
links 12/30/24:
Andy Gilmore art https://www.agilmore.com/
https://quarter—mile.com/ life & business advice, from an excellence-oriented, rather startuppy perspective
https://www.persuasion.community/p/propaganda-almost-never-works contrary to popular belief, propaganda (including advertising) does not have extraordinary abilities to manipulate people into believing or doing things they would not otherwise do. I believe this.
propaganda is important (and potentially dangerous) primarily for functions besides directly causing people to believe/do what the propaganda says, such as:
creating common knowledge and coordination points
eg emboldening people who already agree with the propaganda
crowding out non-propaganda communication and creating confusion about what the real, non-propaganda story is
demonstrating the propagandist’s power
but people are generally not easy to manipulate in the manipulator’s intended direction.
this comports with all the failure to replicate the claims that simple priming/context cues (from power poses to stereotype threat) can “nudge” human behavior in a predictable direction.
I believe people are, of course, influenced by culture and communication, but we are relatively robust to single persuasive/manipulative interventions. People are agents; we often ignore or defy people’s attempts to change us.
the marketing literature also shows that advertising is usually ineffective, that most people are indifferent to almost all products, and that the most effective advertising (in terms of increasing sales) isn’t about inducing passionate enthusiasm for a product but rather informing/reminding the marginal potential customer that it exists and is conveniently available.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-024-00738-w a brain and body model of C. elegans that recapitulates realistic zigzag foraging behavior
like many C. elegans simulation models, it’s specific to a subset of neurons and body components. We don’t yet have a “whole-worm simulation” that does everything a worm does, but we have lots of special-purpose models.
A priori, it’s worth being suspicious of special-purpose models that “succeed” in the sense of recapitulating a particular worm behavior, since there are lots of ways to (intentionally or unintentionally) set up complex statistical models to guarantee you get the outcome you want.
But these guys (from the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, https://eng.bigai.ai/) do eventually want to build a whole-worm, multipurpose simulation.
https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-core-argument-for-small-l-liberalism
I didn’t love this. It presents liberalism as a “compromise” for allowing people with different views to live together in peace, which is not exactly wrong but seems a bit ahistorical. Liberalism, as it was born in the 1600s in the Dutch Republic and then England, was indeed a truce between conflicting religions, but it was also conceived, by its advocates, as a positive good that was necessary for true religion, and later as a worldview of its own that represented values like civilization, humaneness, lawful justice, and reason.
The linked post is written from within liberalism; it uses concepts that wouldn’t be natural for an illiberal (say, someone today who’s sympathetic to Hamas, Putin, or Xi.) I don’t necessarily think you need to successfully persuade such a person, but you should be able to write to them and say “this is what we believe & value; it is different from what you believe & value, but I can convey why it appeals to us, why it’s a continuing passion and not just an unexamined default.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalonymus_ben_Kalonymus
https://www.businessinsider.com/evaporated-people-disappearing-from-japan-2017-4 in Japan, the “johatsu” disappear and change their names/identities after a shameful failure like a lost job or divorce.
https://twittersaudreyhorne.substack.com/p/audrey-hornes-ultimate-gift-guide & https://twittersaudreyhorne.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-mens-gift-guide-2024
excellent gift guides for men (taught me about Pendleton blankets, which are Western-style patterns in luxurious high-quality wool)
Great!
I liked:
Fake Experts
No Regrets
Ways To Fix Your Day
Change Your Life In 30 Days
I guess I like lists. (Or maybe the ideas in their articles are not that good, so I’d rather have 30 ideas sketched than 1 idea written long.)
Sounds almost like a glass half full / half empty distinction. It is almost impossible for propaganda to create something from scratch, but given that conflicts of interest exist almost everywhere, and you have all kinds of people almost everywhere (likely including someone who already supports your agenda), amplification of existing things seems sufficient. The lesson is for propagandists to look at what is already there and work with that, rather than start your own thing from scratch. It may be not exactly what you wanted, but if your goal is to create chaos, it is probably good enough.
If you take a group of crazy people, give them money to buy a place for their community to meet, create for them a website to share their ideas (webhosting, technical support, proofreading, editing, photos—simply, if you make it appear professional without needing a shred of talent on work on their side), and then you buy for them web advertising and billboards, arrange the logistics of their meetings, provide catering… the thing will explode. And almost everyone around them will be paralyzed.
As the article says, “Russian operatives behave as if they want to watch the world burn”. Exactly this, they have a zero-sum approach. (It even seems to me, at least in my part of the world, that zero-sum perspective is a good predictor of how pro-Russian a person will be.) Russians only feel safe when the places around them are in ruins; they have no friends, only servants and enemies. But for that purpose, propaganda is sufficient.
possibly-intrusive question: are you Russian?
haha no, Slovak
(an interesting hypothesis though)
links 1/21/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-21-2025
https://sammatey.substack.com/p/the-weekly-anthropocene-interviews-84c news is about entertainment rather than information...yeah i guess, but i’m not sure what to do about that, i probably don’t actually need to know most of what’s going on!
https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/as-above-so-garage I kind of liked this Venkatesh Rao essay. the “garage project” sort of hackerish engineering is a “hobby” project that has potential to connect to the “big story” of advanced technology (unlike, say, woodworking, which may be personally or artistically fulfilling but is clearly opting out of the race towards the cutting edge) but also is a sort of “pure” personal project that has no obligation to deliver a result or make a profit or please anyone but oneself. it’s that intersection of “probably nothing” but “could be something”, limitless potential at the far horizon but tiny in the here-and-now/
“tinkering in your garage” is the tech equivalent of “starting a band” in the days where rock bands had a shot at stardom
there’s a Fun Theory thing here. it’s not Fun to do things that you know are trivial/meaningless and will definitely never “matter” in a big or deep sense; it’s also not Fun to be burdened with expectations and obligations. Fun thrives in the zone of “playing around that could someday grow into Something”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities
NYC is only ranked 35, behind Moscow??
things I looked up while reading about Venice
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombard_(weapon)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cr%C3%A9cy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Zeno
Venetian admiral
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hawkwood
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Company
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dandolo
doge
https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagano_Doria
Genoese admiral
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Pisani
Venetian admiral
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_Gothic_architecture
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Polo
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ashraf_Khalil
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saladin
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamluk_Sultanate
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/books/NBK559170/
https://www.thepopverse.com/movies-nosferatu-count-orlok-bill-skarsgard-voice-robert-eggers yep, Count Orlok in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is speaking Dacian
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/28/trump-zuckerberg-election-book-00176639 is this a serious threat? who can tell any more. i suppose if people respond to it, it’s an effective threat.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-mark-zuckerberg-threats-meta-political-content-changes-2025-1
https://substack.com/home/post/p-154556883 Dan Davies on the problem of governments that outsource everything to contractors and NGOs, which then fail to do the job and can’t be held accountable or monitored because the government no longer has the staff or the expertise to oversee the project in detail.
outsourcing was, itself, a response to the high cost (and overspending and overstaffing) of governments running programs directly through civil service departments. the hope was that outsourcing would impose market discipline through competition.
from this point of view i’m not sure what one can do.
if the government refuses to provide public services at all, people might overthrow it?
or at least vote it out in elections
if the government provides public services itself, it will predictably overcharge, underdeliver, and engage in direct abuses of power
if the government hires third parties to provide public services, those parties will predictably overcharge and underdeliver, except more opaquely and in ways that are less amenable to being changed when voters get disgruntled.
http://okayfail.com/2025/i-met-pg-once.html heartfelt and says something I’ve been concerned about myself. when you say you’re “anti-woke”, how can we tell whether that means you’re against specific, recent types of administrative overreach or whether e.g. you actually want to drive gender-nonconforming people out of public life? I’m sure there’s some of both going on, but there’s also a lot of uncomfortable (or strategic) ambiguity, which is a much more pressing concern for those with personal reason to worry whether they’re going to experience a huge rise in discrimination.
I have seen this happen, both in government and in private companies. It’s like people don’t realize the full extent of the principal-agent problem. The solution seems easy “just outsource the task to someone else, and if you are not happy about the outcome, fire them and hire someone else”. Here is what sometimes happens instead:
you have actually no idea whether the outcome is good or bad; different people give you contradictory strong opinions, and of course the contractor says that it’s good and that the people who say it’s bad are merely trying to deceive you into taking their services instead;
it turns out that firing the contractor is impossible, because they have built a large and complex project no one else understands, and if they stop maintaining it for a moment, it will all fall apart, with all responsibility being yours;
it turns out that the outcome kinda sucks but you can live with it, and trying to replace the contractors and rebuild the solution would be possible but too expensive (also in terms of political capital: some important guy has approved of the project, now he would look like an idiot);
the outcome sucks and you could fire the contractor and hire a new one, but you realize that you actually have no way to make sure that the next contractor is any better, so maybe you should stick with the devil you know, and hope that they will get more competent as they keep working for you.
There are even contractors out there who create such situations on purpose; that is their actual business model. Like, they will provide you excellent customer service first, so you switch to their system, then they make sure that switching back would be too expensive for you, and then the customer service becomes crappy. (That’s basically how SAP works. You pay for their system and e.g. 5 developers to help you. The first year, they will give your their best 5 developers, and the system does everything you want. So you switch your entire company to SAP. From then on, they will give you 5 junior developers—for the same price—and every little change you want now requires buying a new module and expensive customization.
With government, another problem is that the election cycle means no one is interested in making things work long-term. Switch to contractors can be done overnight (and someone can collect a bribe for that), growing your own team of experts from zero is difficult and takes years, so it almost never happens. And even if it happens by a miracle, again with a proper bribe the system can revert back overnight.
This feels like a false dilemma, are there no options in between? For example, I would be against specific administrative overreaches or whatever, but I am also against the general atmosphere of hate aimed at white men. I don’t want to drive anyone out of anything, but I want the same courtesy to be extended to myself. What happened to the idea of fucking equality? I didn’t choose my race or gender any more than any other person, so if you are going to hold that against me, expect some pushback.
It sucks that politics often becomes a battle of wide coalitions, where your choices are limited to choosing a group that includes those who hate X, or choosing a group that includes those who hate Y. Not sure what can be done about it.
links 12/16/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-16-2024
https://people.mpi-sws.org/~dg/teaching/lis2014/modules/ifc-1-volpano96.pdf the Volpano-Smith-Irvine security type system assigns security levels to variables (like “high” and “low” security). You can either use type checking or information theory inequalities to verify properties like “information can’t flow from low to high security.”
https://romyholland.substack.com/p/what-nobody-told-me-about-abortion a personal essay about the experience of abortion
tbh I was pretty alienated by this. this was mostly an essay about grief. I feel bad for her, of course, but I was kind of curious about the details of the physical/procedural experience and we don’t get much of that.
some people feel grief about abortion, some don’t. I’ve never had an abortion or miscarriage, but I’ve had children, and I can tell you, I didn’t feel a seismic unprecedented maternal love in early pregnancy. I looked forward to having kids while pregnant, but in my mind a fetus has no lovable characteristics; it’s all imagination and my own bodily symptoms! I felt love when my kids were born and loved/appreciated them increasingly over time as they gradually developed distinctive personalities. Some mothers don’t even feel love towards newborns; it often “grows in” later.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/fifth-season-makeready-1236069133/ apparently there’s a new script deal for an AI-based movie called Alignment
https://mtlynch.io/human-code-reviews-1/ advice on being polite in code reviews
https://www.rosemarykirstein.com/ Rosemary Kirstein’s blog, author of the Steerswoman series. I love the books; the blog is mostly travel/event updates but she seems like a lovely person and has many SFF book recommendations.
links 12/9/24
https://gasstationmanager.github.io/ai/2024/11/04/a-proposal.html
a proposal that tentatively makes a lot of sense to me, for making LLM-generated code more robust and trustworthy.
the goal: give a formal specification (in e.g. Lean) of what you want the code to do; let the AI generate both the code and a proof that it meets the specification.
as a means to this end, a crowdsourced website called “Code With Proofs: The Arena”, like LeetCode, where “players” can compete to submit code + proofs to solve coding challenges. This provides a source of training data for LLMs, producing both correct and incorrect (code, proof) pairs for each problem specification. A model can then be trained “given a problem specification, produce code that provably meets the specification”.
In real life, the model would probably use the proof assistant’s verifier directly at inference time, to ensure it only returned code + proofs that the automatic verifier confirmed were valid. It could use the error messages and intermediate feedback of the verifier to more efficiently search for code + proofs that were likely to be correct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography I know nothing about this field but it sure looks like the cryptography people have come a long way towards being ready, if and when quantum computers start being able to break RSA
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freik%C3%B6rperkultur the German tradition of public nudity
https://theconversation.com/japanese-scientists-were-pioneers-of-ai-yet-theyre-being-written-out-of-its-history-243762 this piece is gratuitously anti-Big Tech, but does present an interesting part of the history of neural networks.
In general I wonder why Americans tend to be blind to Japanese scientific/technological innovation these days! A lot of great stuff was invented in Japan!
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/editor/?tutorial=getStarted a popular kids’ programming language designed for making games and animations.
https://bayesshammai.substack.com/p/conditional-on-getting-to-trade-your Ricki Heicklen on adverse selection
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/teaching-trading-ricki-heicklen/ Patrick McKenzie and Ricki Heicklen on teaching trading. (It’s mostly focused on the kind of quant finance you might see at a firm like Jane Street, not about managing your personal stock portfolio.)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-024-02523-znew nucleotide transformer model just dropped. Can be fine-tuned to do things like predict whether a sequence is a promoter, enhancer, or splice site.
https://thecausalfallacy.com/p/disorder-at-the-starbucks I’m more civil-libertarian, but Charles Fain Lehman seems to be the thoughtful tough-on-crime advocate to keep an eye on.
I tend to think that the public will demand a certain level of safety and pleasantness in their environments no matter what, and it’s the civil libertarian’s job to find a way to deliver that without infringing anybody’s rights and while avoiding undue cruelty/harm to those suspected of crime or viewed as “disorderly.” If the public is unsatisfied, they will demand “tough on crime” policies sooner or later; we need to ensure that when they do, we end up with something reasonable and effective rather than overkill.
In that context, Lehman does seem concerned with using the least-harsh solutions where available. He recognizes that usually, if you want to deter a fairly mild public nuisance, you don’t need to arrest or jail anybody, you just have cops and ordinary citizens tell troublemakers to knock it off, with escalating to tougher enforcement being an option that’s usually not needed. We’re on the same page that (valid) rules should be enforced, and that enforcement ultimately has to be backed by physical force, but ideally we wouldn’t resort to force often. That’s a reasonable basis for beginning to negotiate on policy.
OTOH his picture of reducing crime is entirely about calling for more enforcement, rather than addressing other points of failure like the lack of accountability (eg qualified immunity) for police generally. Lack of funding and tight restrictions on enforcement activities are not the only reason police might fail to enforce laws and catch criminals; sometimes they are gang-affiliated themselves, or are not bothering to do their jobs, in the fashion typical of any employee with infinite job security. When a police department is seriously dysfunctional, you’re not going to get better public safety by giving it more funding and more freedom to operate.
Scratch is awesome for kids. My kids love it. My older daughter has afternoon lessons at school, and I help her debug her projects if there is a problem. I am not sure how I would teach her, if I had to start from zero.
I found a few videos on how to make games in Scratch, and I learned a lot about Scratch from them, but sometimes the author uses in the algorithm a mathematical expression that seems a bit too complicated for a small child. For example, how to make a moving object stop right before the wall. Like, if it moves 10 pixels each turn, and the wall is 5 pixels ahead, you want it to go 5 pixels at the last step; neither 10 nor 0. The author’s solution is to go 10 pixels forward, and then “repeat 10 times: if there is a collision with the wall, go 1 pixel back”. (Collisions of pictures are a primitive operation in Scratch.) That sounds trivial, but because the speed could be 10 pixels per turn or −10 pixels for turn, and it’s not even guaranteed to be an integer, the algorithm becomes “repeat ceil(abs(V)) times: if there is a collision with the wall, go V/ceil(abs(V)) pixels back”, and which point my daughter just says “I don’t get it”. (This is not a problem with Scratch per se; you could limit the speed to integer, and maybe avoid the absolute value by using an if-statement and doing the positive and negative values separately; and maybe ceil(abs(V)) could be a local variable. I am just saying that the videos are generally great… but you get one or two moments of this per video.)
In a bookstore I found a translation of Carol Vorderman’s Computer Coding For Kids, which seems good (so it’s going to be a Christmas present); the first 1⁄3 of the book is Scratch, the remaining 2⁄3 are Python.
.
I like the definition of disorder as domination of public space for private purposes. As I see it, the problem with informal systems of preventing disorder is that some people are resistant to shame; specifically:
assholes
criminals
homeless
mentally ill
drug addicts
teenagers, when encouraged by other teenagers (unless you happen to know their parents)
Once your neighborhood becomes a favorite place of these, you either need a strong community (the kind that can summon a group of adult men with baseball bats, who would ask the disorderly people to kindly leave and never set their foot in this neighborhood again), or you have to call the police. Or you give up your public space.
links 11/25/2024
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/17/how-to-survive-the-broligarchy-20-lessons-for-the-post-truth-world-donald-trump
I was looking forward to a genuine practical how-to, but this isn’t really it; while I can’t argue with the value of “stick to your principles even in the face of authoritarianism” and “people who think they’ll be targeted by authoritarians need to be especially mindful of communications & payments privacy” I think this author is envisioning scenarios worse than I think are likely.
https://nadia.xyz/jhanas unusually straightforward explanation of one person’s experience learning the jhanas
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shop_Around_the_Corner
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/drug-development-ross-rheingans-yoo/ Ross Rheingans-Yoo on drug development
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/13/what-do-we-know-about-the-north-korean-troops-joining-russias-war North Korean troops are now supporting Russia in the Ukraine war.
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/money-movement-erik-torenberg/ Erik Torenberg on finance
https://drdevonprice.substack.com/p/i-dont-feel-safe-around-cis-women a rant about a particular kind of cis women who feel entitled to be extremely rude and intrusive because they assume “women = inherently benign”.
reading about the Inca:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_cuisine
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_mythology
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_Empire
https://www.wrecka.ge/against-the-dark-forest/ not very solution-oriented piece about problems with the internet
ok, you blame Big Tech, and you see “Dark Forest” discourse as insufficiently hard on Big Tech.
you also think that retreat to “private” nooks is not adequate (I agree) and that different cultures around the world should get to choose their own forms of online networking instead of being lumped into a US-centric paradigm (sure) and that we need ways to connect around the world (yes)...but what do you propose and who will pay for it etc are the questions coming to my mind
https://endpts.com/trump-picks-hopkins-researcher-marty-makary-to-lead-the-fda/
moderately reformist, critical of COVID-19 response but not of vaccines per se
Seems to me that some women believe that when they do something, it is fundamentally different from when a man does exactly the same thing. (Something like the fundamental attribution error, or xkcd#385 but with reversed genders.) For example, if the woman gets angry and yells at someone, it is because that person was really annoying, or she was tired, etc. Simply, she acted that way because of external reasons. But if she sees a man get angry and yell at someone, it’s obvious: men are inherently aggressive. (Or maybe, if she is a good feminist, it’s because men are privileged.) This way, she can condemn a certain type of behavior and be really emotional about it… and then go and do exactly the same thing—because in her mind, it is not the same thing at all.
Or to use the example from the article, men are inherently rude and intrusive; she faced an interesting situation and was naturally curious about it. To be curious about an interesting thing is a perfectly normal and healthy human reaction.
EDIT: I find it interesting—and sad—how the author insists, also in other articles, that their unpleasant experiences must be related to being trans, as opposed to simply being things that sometimes happen to men.
For example, “when a cis woman tells a trans person to follow sexist societal rules, she does so to demonstrate her own power”. In my experience (as a cis man), when someone reminds me to follow societal rules, it is typically a woman; men usually don’t give a fuck about societal rules, they only warn you if you annoy them personally. Just remember the elementary school; who was the first to tell the teachers when someone did something improper?
links 11/08/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-08-2024
https://agingbiotech.info/about/ a database of aging biotech companies compiled by Karl Pfleger
https://longevitylist.com/longevity-industry-database/ a database of aging biotech companies compiled by Nathan Cheng, includes somewhat different picks
GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs reduce all-cause mortality—so what diseases or causes of death do they prevent?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50199-y kidney disease (in type-2 diabetes patients with kidney disease)
https://www.ajmc.com/view/glp-1s-reduce-cardiovascular-risk-equally-in-patients-with-overweight-obesity-regardless-of-diabetes cardiovascular disease (in overweight or obese patients)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/17562864241281903
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adn4128 (sadly I couldn’t find the full article)
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ben/cdr/2018/00000014/00000003/art00008 cardiovascular disease (in diabetics)
https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D176;jsessionid=C53D7110417D14C262ECD70F0091 what are the leading causes of death in 2023?
heart disease, cancer, accidents, stroke, COPD, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, kidney disease, liver disease, COVID-19, suicide, influenza & pneumonia, hypertension, septicemia, Parkinson’s
surprised suicide was so high and that COVID-19 was still so deadly (I assume mostly in the elderly)
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/bioage-brings-almost-200m-ipo-obesity-biotech-joins-nasdaq BioAge IPO
I forgot that Sam Altman invested in Retro Bio
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069523/sam-altman-investment-180-million-retro-biosciences-longevity-death/
the man has good taste. like, it’s not blindingly original to appreciate Retro, but it is eminently reasonable.
there’s a lot of moderate-Democrat post-election resignation to the effect of “this is what the country wanted; the median voter is in fact pretty OK with Trump” and “the progressive apparatus was more interested in staying in its comfort zone than winning elections”
https://substack.com/home/post/p-151278372 Jesse Singal
he was saying similar things all along: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/democrats-should-acknowledge-reality
I’m also seeing a fair number of women going “ok, sure, there are things to criticize about feminist dogma, but actually I have experienced traditionalist religious mores and they were Not Good”, which I think is a needed corrective these days
https://substack.com/home/post/p-141175575 here’s Audrey Horne
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/incompetence-is-a-form-of-bias Dan Davies says incompetence is a form of bias—the people who have the social skills and clout to get their problems fixed, will.
Dan Davies on politics and populism...i’m not sure where he’s going here but this is intriguing.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-151264334
https://esmeralda.org/ Esmerelda, Devon Zeugel’s Chautauqua-inspired village in California
links 11/6/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-06-2024
https://angrystaffofficer.com/2018/09/19/if-the-hoth-crash-was-an-air-force-investigation/
this taught me the phrase “mishap pilot”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5656536/ this is measles virus used against relapsed multiple myeloma; one complete response out of 32 patients.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41375-020-0828-7.pdf the one patient with the CR had strong T-cell responses to measles virus proteins. suggests that when this works it’s via immune response.
https://ajronline.org/doi/pdf/10.2214/AJR.09.3672 it works on mouse pancreatic cancer
https://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/JCO.2022.40.6_suppl.509 seems to be able to treat bladder cancer?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3018921/ blocks medulloblastoma growth in mice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD46 the receptor for measles virus is also frequently expressed by cancer cells
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/oncology/articles/10.3389/fonc.2023.1095219/full targeting CDKs in sarcomas—there are some clinical trials happening
https://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/PO.24.00219 palcociclib: one partial response out of 42 sarcoma patients
https://aacrjournals.org/clincancerres/article/29/17/3484/728559 suggestive in-vitro/animal evidence
targeting FGFRs in advanced solid tumors with FGFR mutations/overexpression: https://dial.uclouvain.be/pr/boreal/object/boreal%3A285422/datastream/PDF_01/view
3% complete response, 25% partial response with erdafitinib
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8231807/ FGFR inhibitors are typically toxic
MPNSTs cluster into two distinct types of genomic alteration with different drug vulnerabilities https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38432-6.pdf
targeting MDM2 in advanced solid tumors: there’s a trial. https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT03611868
https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.2022.40.16_suppl.9517 2 complete responses in melanoma, 1 PR each in liposarcoma, urothelial, and NSCLC, but none in MPNST.
http://www.annclinlabsci.org/content/46/6/627.full it’s being explored as a target in cancer
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959804920313228 21% partial response in soft tissue sarcoma to a XPO1 inhibitor + chemo
review article on XPO1 inhibition https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-020-00442-4
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2024/11/05/vegas-puzzling-disk/ the star Vega looks like it has a disc but no planets
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-58899-7 CD74 in cancer is an indicator for M1 macrophage infiltration, across cancer types
https://bibliome.ai/ is a resource for looking up specific genome variants and their references in the literature and open-access databases.
when i click through to references they’re often inaccurate (they are claimed to reference a variant that they do not, in fact, contain) but tbh this is also true of Google Search and Google Scholar when it comes to rare variants.
links 11/05/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-05-2024
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMM-101 a heat-killed bacterial preparation that might actually work (with chemo) for metastatic pancreatic cancer?
https://www.annalsofoncology.org/article/S0923-7534(19)64297-3/fulltext not bad in metastatic melanoma either
https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.2022.40.16_suppl.9554 melanoma: 18% CR in treatment-naive patients when combined with nivolumab. (meh, nivolumab alone is comparable)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4731256/ this is one patient, but it’s metastatic pancreatic cancer, this is super hard mode
made by these guys. https://www.immodulon.com/about-us/ they don’t look crazypants
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles_virus_encoding_the_human_thyroidal_sodium_iodide_symporter measles virus can be made oncolytic!
https://www.lymphomainfo.net/lifestyle/treatment/engineered-measles-virus-puts-myeloma-patient-into-remission
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01544-x peptide vaccines have a terrible track record overall but this one (on metastatic melanoma, combined with nivolumab) looks good
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2018/summary/ James Allison and Tasuku Honjo got the Nobel Prize for discovering the immune checkpoints CTLA4 and PD1 respectively
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0055 Carl Hart argues against viewing addiction as a “brain disease”:
we have not found a physiological difference between the brains of addicts and non-addicts
people are more likely to get addicted to drugs when their lives are terrible; only focusing on biomedical angles on tackling drug addiction means that it’s not considered “real” drug-addiction work to try to improve underlying social problems like poverty or injustice
in particular drug-war policies are often part of the problem, and biomedical addiction research can’t critique laws
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.abb5920 this one didn’t make the cutoff for my success-story post (only 1/10 patients had a CR) but it’s astonishing that it does anything at all; a fecal matter transplant resulted in a complete response (and two partial responses) upon reintroduction of PD1 immunotherapy, in metastatic melanoma patients who had failed it before.
i am so disillusioned with FMTs that i might still chalk this up to a fluke, but who knows
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imiquimod is a weird, weird drug, used for genital warts and cutaneous cancers.
it’s a TLR7 activator.
(more innate immune stuff!!)
sarah do you just like the innate immune system because it’s comprehensible? yes. yes i do. and you should too.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaoncology/fullarticle/2598488 works on cutaneous breast cancer metastatses.
note that it is TOPICAL.
really high complete response rates in metastatic cancers almost only occur when you have a topical/intratumoral/etc treatment physically localized to the tumor, frequently using an innate-immune mechanism.
that’s also the literal majority of all historical cases of spontaneous tumor regressions—they tend to happen when there’s an infection at the tumor site, causing a powerful (innate! fever, inflammation, sepsis!) immune reaction.
the innate immune system is potent, and it is nasty, which is why you want to confine it.
immune checkpoint inhibitors are real good for metastatic cancer:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2162402X.2016.1214788#abstract combined with radiotherapy, on melanoma brain metastases
https://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/JCO.2018.36.15_suppl.9537 on Merkel cell carcinoma, a skin cancer
https://www.nature.com/articles/npjgenmed201637 on liver and lung metastases of basal cell carcinoma
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/oncology/articles/10.3389/fonc.2023.1078915/full in colon cancer
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/oncology/articles/10.3389/fonc.2020.615298/full in penile cancer
https://europepmc.org/article/med/36916116 in kidney cancer
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11099454/ in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (whoa)
cell immunotherapies can also be amazing for metastatic cancer:
https://ar.iiarjournals.org/content/30/2/575.short this is a complete remission in metastatic renal cell carcinoma with adoptive gamma-delta T-cells (and IL-2; the innate immune system strikes again)
https://ascopubs.org/doi/full/10.1200/JCO.2014.58.9093 in cervical cancer, with tumor-infiltrating T cells
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2028485 here’s an antibody-drug conjugate for metastatic breast cancer. not enough complete responses to make it into my post, but look at that sweet Kaplan-Meier curve.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1245/s10434-018-07143-4 isolated limb perfusion for melanoma: get higher doses of chemo into the tumor than the patient could survive otherwise, by cutting off circulation to the limb. when this sort of thing is possible, it really, really works.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1245/s10434-011-2030-7 and more.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40425-018-0337-7 this is an oncolytic virus (intratumoral!) for metastatic melanoma.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40425-018-0337-7 more oncolytic viruses that work! (also metastatic melanoma, also intralesional).
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10549-022-06678-1 I hate on growth factor-targeted therapies a lot, but there are exceptions. Herceptin is a real drug. Look at this. 69 HER2+ patients presenting with metastatic breast cancer and treated with trastuzumab as part of their initial treatment, 54% get a complete response. 41% survived 5+ years after diagnosis. This is really, really solid.
electrochemotherapy is injecting tumors with cytotoxic drugs and electroporating the tumor so the drugs get in better.
It’s only possible when you can physically access the tumor, i.e. when it’s on the skin or when you’re operating anyway (but can’t surgically remove the tumor, because if you could, you would just do that).
it also, really, really works. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jso.23625
https://cccblog.org/2018/06/13/the-surprising-security-benefits-of-end-to-end-formal-proofs/
if you can prove your computer program does what it’s supposed to—for almost any reasonable interpretation of “what it’s supposed to”—you will, as a side effect, also prove it doesn’t have common security flaws like buffer overflows.
people I looked up while reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_of_Ansbach
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_Charlotte_of_Hanover
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Eleonore_Erdmuthe_of_Saxe-Eisenach
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_of_Hanover
https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-11-2024
https://www.mindthefuture.info/p/why-im-not-a-bayesian [[Richard Ngo]] [[philosophy]] I think I agree with this, mostly.
I wouldn’t say “not a Bayesian” because there’s nothing wrong with Bayes’ Rule and I don’t like the tribal connotations, but lbr, we don’t literally use Bayes’ rule very often and when we do it often reveals just how much our conclusions depend on problem framing and prior assumptions. A lot of complexity/ambiguity necessarily “lives” in the part of the problem that Bayes’ rule doesn’t touch. To be fair, I think “just turn the crank on Bayes’ rule and it’ll solve all problems” is a bit of a strawman—nobody literally believes that, do they? -- but yeah, sure, happy to admit that most of the “hard part” of figuring things out is not the part where you can mechanically apply probability.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YZvyQn2dAw4tL2xQY/rationalists-are-missing-a-core-piece-for-agent-like [[tailcalled]] this one is actually interesting and novel; i’m not sure what to make of it. maybe literal physics, with like “forces”, matters and needs to be treated differently than just a particular pattern of information that you could rederive statistically from sensory data? I kind of hate it but unlike tailcalled I don’t know much about physics-based computational models...[[philosophy]]
https://alignbio.org/ [[biology]] [[automation]] datasets generated by the Emerald Cloud Lab! [[Erika DeBenedectis]] project. Seems cool!
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306453015009014?via%3Dihub [[psychology]] the forced swim test is a bad measure of depression.
when a mouse trapped in water stops struggling, that is not “despair” or “learned helplessness.” these are anthropomorphisms. the mouse is in fact helpless, by design; struggling cannot save it; immobility is adaptive.
in fact, mice become immobile faster when they have more experience with the test. they learn that struggling is not useful and they retain that knowledge.
also, a mouse in an acute stress situation is not at all like a human’s clinical depression, which develops gradually and persists chronically.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1359644621003615?via%3Dihub the forced swim test also doesn’t predict clinical efficacy of antidepressants well. (admittedly this study was funded by PETA, which thinks the FST is cruel to mice)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_Exactly! [[semiconductors]] the Wiki doesn’t mention that Copy Exactly was famously a failure. even when you try to document procedures perfectly and replicate them on the other side of the world, at unprecedented precision, it is really really hard to get the same results.
https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/research/funded-research/optimization-african-killifish-platform-rapid-drug-screening-aggregate [[biology]] you know what’s cool? building experimentation platforms for novel model organisms. Killifish are the shortest-lived vertebrate—which is great if you want to study aging. they live in weird oxygen-poor freshwater zones that are hard to replicate in the lab. figuring out how to raise them in captivity and standardize experiments on them is the kind of unsung, underfunded accomplishment we need to celebrate and expand WAY more.
https://www.nature.com/articles/513481a [[biology]] [[drug discovery]] ever heard of curcumin doing something for your health? resveratrol? EGCG? those are all natural compounds that light up a drug screen like a Christmas tree because they react with EVERYTHING. they are not going to work on your disease in real life.
they’re called PAINs, pan-assay interference compounds, and if you’re not a chemist (or don’t consult one) your drug screen is probably full of ’em. false positives on academic drug screens (Big Pharma usually knows better) are a scourge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-assay_interference_compounds
sadly, while they make automated PAINs alerts, they don’t work for shit. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5411023/ sorry, shut-ins and cheapskates; you might have to talk to an actual chemist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_bovine_serum [[biotech]] this cell culture medium is just...cow juice. it is not consistent batch to batch. this is a big problem.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-021-00372-0 [[biology]] mice housed at “room temperature” are too cold for their health; they are more disease-prone, which calls into question a lot of experimental results.
https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm [[science]] the famous [[Richard Feynman]] “Cargo cult science” essay is about flawed experimental methods!
if your rat can smell the location of the cheese in the maze all along, then your maze isn’t testing learning.
errybody want to test rats in mazes, ain’t nobody want to test this janky-ass maze!
https://fastgrants.org/ [[metascience]] [[COVID-19]] this was cool, we should bring it back for other stuff
https://erikaaldendeb.substack.com/cp/147525831 [[biotech]] engineering biomanufacturing microbes for surviving on Mars?!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8278038/ [[prediction markets]] DARPA tried to use prediction markets to predict the success of projects. it didn’t work! they couldn’t get enough participants.
https://www.citationfuture.com/ [[prediction markets]] these guys do prediction markets on science
https://jamesclaims.substack.com/p/how-should-we-fund-scientific-error [[metascience]] [[James Heathers]] has a proposal for a science error detection (fraud, bad research, etc) nonprofit. We should fund him to do it!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Bik [[metascience]] [[Elizabeth Bik]] is the queen of research fraud detection. pay her plz.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-149791027 [[archaeology]] it was once thought that Gobekli Tepe was a “festival city” or religious sanctuary, where people visited but didn’t live, because there wasn’t a water source. Now, they’ve found something that looks like water cisterns, and they suspect people did live there.
I don’t like the framing of “hunter-gatherer” = “nomadic” in this post.
We keep pushing the date of agriculture farther back in time. We keep discovering that “hunter-gatherers” picking plants in “wild” forests are actually doing some degree of forest management, planting seeds, or pulling undesirable weeds. Arguably there isn’t a hard-and-fast distinction between “gathering” and “gardening”. (Grain agriculture where you use a plow and completely clear a field for planting your crop is qualitatively different from the kind of kitchen-garden-like horticulture that can be done with hand tools and without clearing forests. My bet is that all so-called hunter-gatherers did some degree of horticulture until proven otherwise, excepting eg arctic environments)
what the water actually suggests is that people lived at Gobekli Tepe for at least part of the year. it doesn’t say what they were eating.
One of the interesting things I found when I finally tracked down the source is that one of the improved mazes before that was a 3D maze where mice had to choose vertically, keeping them in the same position horizontally, because otherwise they apparently were hearing some sort of subtle sound whose volume/direction let them gauge their position and memorize the choice. So Hunter created a stack of T-junctions, so each time they were another foot upwards/downwards, but at the same point in the room and so the same distance away from the sound source.
links 1/31/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-31-2025
https://hareesh.org/blog/2016/2/5/the-real-story-on-the-chakras the pop-culture chakra model comes from modern Theosophical books, not ancient Indian scripture.
https://solarfoods.com/ solar-powered industrial-fermentation food? they have a microbial protein called Solein. it’s made from bacteria, probably Cupriavidus necator.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8719805/
is this competitive with whey, legume, or fungal protein, from a cost or sustainability standpoint? haven’t checked yet
https://vetmed.illinois.edu/i-tick/2019/08/09/iceman-lyme-mummy-tattle-the-tick-blog/Otzi the iceman had Lyme disease??
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthan_gum is made from bacteria
the inventor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allene_Jeanes, also pioneered mass production of dextran (from industrial fermentation) which saved many lives as an ingredient in an emergency blood substitute in the Korean and Vietnam wars
https://emalliaraki.com/
Kind of true, although the core of it is a system of 6 or 7 chakras which the author acknowledges (way down in the comments) was dominant in India “by 1500”.
This made me curious about the credentials of Transcendental Meditation, the system espoused by David Lynch (RIP) and Jerry Seinfeld among others. Turns out their guru was a student of the head of one of the four big Vedic monasteries founded over 1000 years ago by the Kant of Hinduism (that’s just my name for him), Adi Shankara. So at least in this case, there are no troubling Russian or British intermediaries. :-)
links 1/30/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-30-2025
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-recurring-dream-themes Scott Alexander on recurring dreams
https://darioamodei.com/on-deepseek-and-export-controls Dario Amodei on DeepSeek and export controls
he’s right that efficiency improvements in AI training shouldn’t reduce demand for chips; In This House We Believe in Jevon’s Paradox
I believe him if he says he’s priced in efficiency improvements into his estimates for time and cost to human-level AI performance. it would be stupid not to, and he’s not stupid.
the case he’s making is “no, DeepSeek doesn’t show that export controls backfire by motivating Chinese AI researchers to pursue efficiency.”
I think I agree narrowly.
China’s top AI researchers aren’t stupid either; they’re pursuing efficiency anyhow. So is everyone.
I think it’s never wise to bet on the best people in a competitive field being complacent, even when they can “afford to be.”
Poverty is a cost, not a benefit. It’s not clear to me that China’s chip-poverty (or overall poverty) made DeepSeek more innovative than its American counterparts.
I know there are DeepSeek stans out there who think everything about American culture is toxic, but the world is big, you have not read every AI paper under the sun, and you simply do not have enough information to conclude that they are uniquely innovative.
also, whether we have export controls or not right now, it is Known that the US-China relationship is chilly and that it’s in both countries’ national interest to pursue independent tech stacks.
otoh, while I don’t think DeepSeek’s strong performance was caused by export controls, I also think we can’t make strong claims in the other direction like “if we have these export controls, Chinese AI will be such-and-such amount far behind American AI”. Progress towards more cost-efficient and compute-efficient models is something everyone expects, but it’s very hard to predict how fast it will happen, or whether it’ll be steady or bursty, or how it will be implemented.
if what we really care about, as Dario claims, is ensuring victory in a potential US-China war, rather than economically immiserating the Chinese, then I think it is also very questionable whether the AI that wins wars is the most “advanced” AI.
People like Dario whose bread-and-butter is model performance invariably over-index on model performance, especially on benchmarks. But practical value comes from things besides the model; what tasks you use it for and how effective you are at deploying it.
If you want to win a war, does it help to have an AI that can win math Olympiads? I dunno. All things equal, I’d bet on the country that’s three years behind on the benchmarks and has a functional military procurement system.
we should also note that this is a push from the CEO of a private company who wants to outlaw selling advanced chips to his competitors. there’s a self-interested motive here.
stuff I looked up while reading about Venice
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euboea
home of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgios_Papanikolaou, father of the Pap smear. apparently, as with so many scientists, his wife was his unpaid lab tech.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Thessaloniki
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Thessaloniki
former Salonika; second largest city in the Byzantine Empire; crucial port
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Loredan_(admiral)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Veronese
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murad_II
https://explorer.globe.engineer/ AI tool for learning about topics; generates heavily nested, illustrated “intros”. I don’t love the workflow; it’s overwhelming rather than sequential. If I’m trying to learn something in earnest, I need to go through it systematically rather than bopping around.
https://www.emilybynight.com/p/why-makeup-works
frustratingly, not a detailed how-to.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213671118304776 I don’t know how to compare this to anything, but indeed surface microenvironment makes a big difference for mammalian cell culture & cell differentiation.
3D culture is hard; 2D culture can’t get big; solution: tuuuuuubes.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46314-8 possibly the solution to the high cost of cultured meat is by using edible fungi instead.
https://nintil.com/why-so-few-women-in-cs-the-google-memo-is-right Jose Luis Ricon back in 2017 on the Damore memo
Dario is about the last AI CEO you should be making this criticism of. Claude has been notable for a while for the model which somehow winds up being the most useful and having the best ‘vibes’, even when the benchmarks indicate it’s #2 or #3; and meanwhile, it is the Chinese models which historically regress the most from their benchmarks when applied (and DeepSeek models, while not as bad as the rest, still do this and r1 is already looking shakier as people try out heldout problems or benchmarks).
links 1/2/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-02-2025
https://reason.com/2024/11/14/abolish-the-small-business-administration/ the case for abolishing the Small Business Administration, which subsidizes small businesses
https://www.mercatus.org/doge the Mercatus center’s wishlist for DOGE on budget cuts and deregulation
sadly, these are not policies! they are editorials making arguments for why smaller government would be a good idea, and why certain tactics are worth consideration (like sunset provisions). zero object-level deregulation policy work (i.e. identifying which regulations to cut and who can cut them) has been done here. I am beginning to see why people complain about think tanks not actually dOiNg PoLicY.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-are-vortex-crystals-zhsBX93zTdOxMh5sg3nWAw#3 Perplexity explains superfluids; they are frictionless, have extremely high thermal conductivity, and exhibit “quantized vortices”, where the speed of the spinning fluid is an integer multiple of a constant and the vortex can keep spinning literally forever. Liquid helium is a superfluid. This has been known since 1937!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfluidity
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adn5694 a passively radiative aerogel that reflects >100% of solar radiation through fluorescence and phosphorescence
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26050-z 0.5% of European GDP reduced by heat waves in the 21st century
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-orleans-killed-mass-casualty-bourbon-street-car-crowd-rcna185914 “Texas man kills 14 on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street after driving truck with ISIS flag through crowd.” Police believe he did not act alone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shotgun_cartridge A shotgun cartridge is filled with tiny little metal balls called shot, or a single projectile called a slug. Smaller shot goes farther than bigger shot, and slugs go farther still.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_You_Ever_Forgive_Me movie (I haven’t seen it but saw it recommended) about a woman who forged letters from dead celebrities
https://www.sympatheticopposition.com/p/risk-averse-women-rarely-birth-royalty Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus notes four Biblical women—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba—who took sexual risks to secure their children’s legacy. I love this piece and think we talk too little about the fact that women take calculated risks sexually. To live a good life, you have to risk intimacy and decide when to bet that it won’t put you in danger or ruin your future. That’s true in both ancient societies and today, though of course the risk landscape is very different.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/01/the_stranger.html I like this old Bryan Caplan post on what we owe strangers. Common sense ethics says we should not aggress upon strangers but we don’t usually owe them much positive help; yet this is a radical and uncommon position in politics.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16075 a case for formal verification + AI hybrid systems in mathematics, and a roadmap for future progress, by leading AI-for-math researchers Kaiyu Yang, Gabriel Poesia, Jingxuan He, Wenda Li, Kristin Lauter, Swarat Chaudhuri, and Dawn Song. Excellent, detailed, this is the survey paper to reference for the next while!
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/01/africa-facts-of-the-day.html “Africa is now experiencing more conflicts than at any point since at least 1946”. Prediction: more immigration from African countries.
what are the current military drones models?
https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/25712-worlds-best-military-drones
https://www.ssbcrack.com/2024/06/top-military-drones.html
https://inphoenixaviation.com/top-10-military-drones-ruling-the-skies-in-2024/
countries that make long-range drones (basically unmanned planes): USA, UK, France, China, Turkey, Russia
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/morris-chang-and-the-origins-of-tsmc TSMC founder Morris Chang’s autobiography; lots of false starts along the way. TSMC’s big innovation was being the world’s first foundry. They did not start with the latest and best equipment; but they were the first to offer semiconductor manufacturing as a service, and Asian semi manufacturers were already more reliable at quality than US ones (going back to the 60′s! wonder what’s up with that.)
https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/notes-on-china Dwarkesh Patel visits China.
surprising-to-me claim that there’s no crime (Chinese friend claims much the opposite!)
“The biggest surprise from talking to Chinese VCs people at AI labs was how capital constrained they felt.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lighthouse_in_Economics back in 1974 Ronald Coase pointed out that lighthouses, long a prototypical example of a public good, were actually privately provided in England during the 17th-19thc. Critics said they went out of business, which proved the market couldn’t actually incentivize lighthouse production; Coase replied that the British government made a policy choice to take over the lighthouse industry.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html David Friedman argues that property rights come to be as a result of Schelling points.
if self-interested people are negotiating (say, dividing up a pie), obviously everybody will want the most for themselves; but we also have an interest in eventually settling the negotiation, saving ourselves time and effort (and gaining safety, if the “negotiation” is violent).
If one arrangement stands out as “natural” or unique, it can be a Schelling point for where to stop negotiating and accept the arrangement. “Push back if they ask for more than the Schelling point, acquiesce if they ask for no more than the Schelling point” is a stable strategy. (analogous to “contrite Tit for Tat” which performs very well in evolutionary game theory experiments, though Friedman doesn’t mention that.)
the status quo ante always makes a great Schelling point; laws, contracts, and other common-knowledge establishment of who has a right to what, can become stably self-enforcing even without a formal enforcement mechanism. (eg there is no world government but national borders are usually respected.)
the fact that people can, empirically, control their own bodies much more easily than other people’s bodies, and can better defend property they can hide and territory they live in, than objects and land not literally in their current possession, also makes concepts like self-ownership and property ownership “natural” Schelling points.
though of course the exact boundaries of how property rights work are not given a priori and different societies can define them differently.
https://sense-nets.xyz/ proposals for better science social media networks
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/12/the-cows-in-the-coal-mine.html are we neglecting H5N1?
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-japan-opened-itself-up-to-immigration Noah Smith argues that Japan tried being ethnically homogeneous, found it couldn’t (due to labor shortages), and has allowed big increases in immigration, with the approval of most Japanese voters.
https://zhengdongwang.com/2024/12/29/2024-letter.html “The model does the eval”: as soon as we come up with an evaluation for an AI capability and a dataset to train on, human ingenuity will find ways to make the AI hit the benchmark. If it’s not model scaling, it’ll be inference-time compute, or mixture-of-experts, or something else.
AI progress, like Moore’s Law progress, isn’t due to a single technological innovation. Once an industry has a moving quantitative target and a strong economic incentive (and social expectation) to keep hitting that moving target, it’ll develop multiple technologies with overlapping S-curves that keep improving performance, potentially for a very long time.
https://ontheones.wordpress.com/2019/06/29/on-denpa-a-guest-article-by-kenji-the-engi/ Denpa, the anime genre that Neon Genesis Evangelion was from, was prevalent in the 1990′s and early 2000′s; these were disturbing, experimental meditations on the theme of social misfits who retreated from reality.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KSguJeuyuKCMq7haq/is-vnm-agent-one-of-several-options-for-what-minds-can-grow [[Anna Salamon]] asks if “utility optimizers” are what all sufficiently “smart” minds will end up being, or if there are other options
https://trevorklee.com/want-to-reverse-aging-try-reversing-graying-first/ Trevor Klee on reversing gray hair. There are isolated case studies of people whose gray hair has regained pigmentation; lots of these are associated with the use of immunosuppressants, which suggests that something in the aged immune system may be attacking the melanocytes (or their precursors) which produce hair pigmentation.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10461778/ Can you make an organoid of hairy skin? Yes you can!
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-biggest-community-development-program-youve-never-heard-of Clara Collier looks into the history of a giant attempt to improve India’s agricultural productivity in the 1950′s-60′s, by letting village leaders ask for what their village needs most, while the org would provide technological know-how to solve their problems. It worked great when founder Albert Mayer was running it; not so much when the Indian government tried to scale up nationally. Mostly because of common scale-up issues: difficulty finding talented staff, too big for the founder to personally go to all the villages and fix problems, etc.
today, global development experts would consider relying on village “leaders” to be an inherently biased approach; these would invariably be male, high-caste, and relatively rich, and the rest of the village wouldn’t necessarily buy into what they proposed.
despite this flaw, it worked fine in the pilot, because while Mayer didn’t have modern egalitarian language to describe it, he was de facto insisting that village discussions included all sorts of people. But when he was no longer micromanaging the program and using his own elbow grease to fix problems, the explicit/formal protocol of the program naturally devolved into “only village elites get a say” and villages indeed failed to follow through on the proposed reforms/improvements.
links 2/17/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-17-2025
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_panda
the word “panda” is not Chinese for panda. it came to English through French; nobody knows where it came from originally.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/emergent-ventures-winners-40th-cohort.html Emergent Ventures winners
https://journals.aps.org/prapplied/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.14.011002 portable outdoor magnetometry—could we get around the need for shielding in magnetoencephalography?
links 02/13/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-13-2025
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/american-strong-gods
this isn’t my perspective at all but it is a solid descriptive account of how people seem to be thinking
https://www.isac.bio/about organization to prevent (cyber)attacks on biotech/pharma facilities
https://pepfarreport.org/ an excellent analysis of the cost-effectiveness of PEPFAR
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2025/02/10/retraction-request-denied/ Patrick McKenzie stands by his “debanking” piece against a crypto bank CEO’s request for him to “retract” it (that word is often a prelude to a libel lawsuit)
https://www.owlposting.com/p/how-do-you-make-a-250x-better-vaccine the story of PopVax, ultra-cheap developed-in-India vaccine
https://zoogle.arcadiascience.com/about search for model organisms whose genes are especially good matches for a given human gene after controlling for phylogeny (so it’s not all monkeys all the time)
the frog Xenopus tropicalis seems to make an especially strong showing
and some people think it should be used more often as a model for human genetic disorders. https://journals.biologists.com/dmm/article/17/5/dmm050754/352283/Modelling-human-genetic-disorders-in-Xenopus
https://www.argmin.net/p/the-department-of-frictionless-reproducibilty “frictionless reproducibility” as a valuable norm in quantitative/data-based research; idea due to David Donoho of compressed sensing fame
https://markusstrasser.org/extracting-knowledge-from-literature.html Markus Strasser on why it’s hard to build a business around extracting knowledge from the biomedical literature
https://calvinmccarter.substack.com/p/the-new-morality-by-paul-elmer-more essay by Paul Elmer More about leftism as a secular version of Christianity, from a conservative perspective. Early 20th century essay—its villain is Jane Addams!
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/the-danger-of-trump-disobeying-court-orders.html Tyler Cowen isn’t worried about Donald Trump violating the Constitution because if there were a real problem markets would move.
I’m really not convinced that public markets do reliably move in the predictable (downward) direction in response to “bad news” (wars, coups, pandemics, etc).
Sometimes subsidies to big companies mask risks/damage to the real economy.
Sometimes the “bad news” was already priced in by the time it happens.
Would be good to research past examples of governments making sharp authoritarian turns and see what happened to markets then.
anecdotally, some professional risk evaluators *have* upgraded their risk estimates for the US recently.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK1_receptor_antagonist Substance P is involved in fear, rage, and pain; can you treat anxiety or pain disorders by blocking it? ehh, so far we mostly seem to have gotten anti-vomiting meds.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eltoprazine this serotonergic drug was claimed to have a specific effect against aggression; it seems to have failed in trials though.
miniaturized, low-cost mass spectrometry: where are we?
https://www.soci.org/chemistry-and-industry/cni-data/2012/5/mass-spec-for-the-masses in progress as of 2012
https://www.bayspec.com/product-category/mass-spectroscopy/ Bayspec will sell em, but you have to request a quote
https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/industry/092121/nautilus-founder-unspirals-a-new-approach-to-prote Parag Mallick is doing proteomics with a benchtop and algorithms, which doesn’t necessarily mean you can do general-purpose chemical analysis with the same machine
https://www.pharmasalmanac.com/articles/bringing-mass-spectrometry-out-of-the-lab-and-to-the-point-of-need 908 Devices has a portable mass spec that gets around the need for a vacuum by using a “microscale ion trap”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/398696/degrowth-economy-trump-right-poverty indeed, tariffs are harmful
https://www.unbundle-the-university.com/ Ben Reinhardt’s manifesto on unbundling the university
https://convergentresearch.substack.com/p/how-to-build-essential-technology Adam Marblestone on building scientific technology—FROs, startup-like teams
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_magnetic_resonance_spectroscopy_of_proteins
i still don’t understand how this works but it’s what they use to analyze intrinsically disordered proteins
see also https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.3c11614
https://bindresearch.org/fro/2025/02/11/press.html new FRO for studying intrinsically disordered proteins
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16734424/ transcription factors are overwhelmingly proteins with disordered regions
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha-synuclein alpha-synuclein, the key aggregate protein in Parkinson’s, is an intrinsically disordered proteins
https://stripe.com/guides/atlas/pitching this is sound advice but, like so many things, it only works if you’re, like, super good at your job.
https://www.medstarhealth.org/services/vascular-infections-complications
somebody said ChatGPT told her that pain and swelling in her lip indicated a vascular infection… pretty sure that’s crazy talk. vascular infections will have systemic symptoms.
Also, market movements are hard to detect. How much would Trump violating a court order decrease the total (time-discounted) future value of the US economy? Probably less than 5%? And what is the probability that he violates a court order? Maybe 40%? So the market should move <2%, and evidence about this potential event so far has come in slowly instead of at a single dramatic moment so this <2% drop could have been spread over multiple weeks.
links 01/23/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-23-2025
https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/invitations like so many visions, whether i’d actually like this or not depends on execution. AI-powered smart devices? no thank you. Interpretive “power tools” with lots of configurable options, that allow me to do a lot of media analysis and view embedding coordinates? i’d like that. AI tools to interface with bureaucracies, or to assemble a media diet based on custom preferences, or to resolve disputes, or to provide traditional governmental functions where those are absent or defective? I begin to be intrigued. but you need taste. and taste is a little orthogonal to being at the leading edge of the zeitgeist; the zeitgeist-surfer always wants to “embrace” the direction we’re going, whereas the tasteful person is opinionated and likes some new things but not others, and doesn’t always favor the new things that are destined to be the biggest.
https://psychcrisis.org/mania-guide/ this is the best guide to how to handle a friend or loved one with mania I’ve ever seen. It offers lots of options for getting professional help that are less risky & restrictive than “call 911” which is most people’s first and only thought about what to do when someone has suddenly “gone crazy”.
https://meltingasphalt.com/a-codebase-is-an-organism/ a clear intro to “what do people mean about code “rotting” anyway? (spoiler: big codebases, unlike school programming assignments, get used and changed by many people. this introduces many new problems because you can’t singlehandedly control everything everyone does.)
http://www.laputan.org/mud/ what do people mean when they say code is “sloppy”, “spaghetti code”, or whatever?
poor performance at large scale
Data structures may be haphazardly constructed, or even next to non-existent. Everything talks to everything else. Every shred of important state data may be global.
why is this bad?
Claude explains:
it’s bad if “everything talks to everything else” or “all state data is global” because if you change one part of the code everything else may break
it’s bad if there are no data structures or if they’re chosen randomly, because the right data structure is much more time & space efficient to search/sort/etc than the wrong one
“complicated, convoluted” code that’s hard to read
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/07/an-overly-simple-model-of-positive-and-negative-contagion.html Tyler Cowen: negative emotions are contagious & so focusing on the negative (even to critique bad ideas) has harmful externalities
does he apply this insight to himself? does he try to avoid over- focusing on the negative? i’m not sure...
possibly someone who’s constitutionally non-neurotic will never be able to really understand negative contagion risks. they’ll say things that they assume are fine, and have no real intuition for what stressed-out people are hearing.
links 1/6/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-06-2025
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Fiennes descended from Norman nobility
https://meltingasphalt.com/wealth-the-toxic-byproduct/ nice essay on how (money) earnings generally represent your benefit to others while consumption spending is a cost to others
https://mises.org/mises-daily/defending-miser not only is the “miser” who invests productively benefiting others, but so is the “hoarder” who takes money out of circulation to put under a mattress—hoarders lower prices.
ehhh, shouldn’t lowering prices and raising prices be seen as equally neutral in real terms?
https://timmermanreport.com/2025/01/ai-needs-natural-language-to-give-structure-to-biology/ I’m sorry, you just named three discoveries in the latest table of contents of Science or Nature, and complained that biological “foundation models” can’t come up with them, and that instead you need LLMs? what are you even thinking???
you are in a hurry to replace human thought at the highest levels, when there’s a tremendous amount left to be done in developing AIs to replace tedious grunt work.
why??? why do you want to put the PI out of a job? There aren’t that many PIs. why are you starting here? it’s so backwards.
what they’re actually doing at FutureHouse is pretty cool: “write an accurate and cited Wikipedia-style article for nearly every protein-coding gene in the human genome.” I think accelerating lit review is a useful function of LLMs. there’s a lot of information out there! using automation to synthesize it is a win!
but my god, man, why are you framing this as “I really want the machine to do all the thinking for me” rather than “I want everyone to have a research assistant in their pocket so they can more efficiently explore hypotheses with the context of the whole scientific literature.” do you not like thinking and learning? do you wish you could quit or something???
https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections
“We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies.” Ok, this is a real prediction (that we can grade him on later) and it certainly seems technologically possible today—it remains to be seen whether it’ll be organizationally possible, useful in the first contexts where it’s used, or whether it’ll cause catastrophic errors.
if i had to guess, i think commercial AI agents will be launched by OpenAI, and their economic impact will be ambiguous, by end of 2025.
https://parahumans.wordpress.com/ trying to read this, again, for the fourth? time.
not sure why I keep bouncing off this. it’s recommended by friends, I’m excited by the promise of interesting conceptual things being done with the superhero-genre system, but my god there are many chapters of “boring”-to-me stuff (action scenes, description of city politics & class dynamics that doesn’t feel true to life, etc)
ketamine overdose risks:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3168228/
typical recreational doses are 200-300 mg (orally) or 50-100mg IV, roughly 50x the effective IV dose for general anaesthesia.
https://www.psychiatrist.com/jcp/oral-ketamine-for-depression-practical-considerations/
similarly, oral ketamine for depression is given in doses ranging from 25mg to 300 mg
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK541087/ this StatPearls claims that the median lethal dose for a 70kg human is 678 mg, but references a study not cited
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert-Gable/publication/8167013_Acute_Toxic_Effects_of_Club_Drugs/links/55d4419d08ae7fb244f59d58/Acute-Toxic-Effects-of-Club-Drugs.pdf
this is the Gable et al study mentioned in the StatPearls article
it mentions that the rodent LD50 for ketamine is 600 mg/kg, and divides by 10 (which is apparently a standard rule of thumb for converting between species) to get 4.2 g for a 70 kg human
they say a typical recreational dose is 175 mg, and so get a “safety ratio” (lethal dose/effective dose) of 25, safer than alcohol.
StatPearls may have misquoted this paper...I’m not sure where they’re getting their 678 mg number.
if the lethal dose really is only about twice the effective dose, as in the StatPearls article, that’s a very tight window.
for context:
the median lethal dose (LD50) of ethanol is the equivalent of about 25-40 standard drinks
the LD50 of aspirin is about 43 aspirin tablets
the LD50 of amphetamine is between 20-200 times a typical prescription ADHD dose
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouJrOQfkeok how a Kite cell therapy (autologous) is manufactured (they ship your blood sample to a facility, and process/expand your cells in 5 days).
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-jBoSEVlryiX1IaSzV4vKuihDfm_LgXUznvSpl1T1kg/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.vnjrknmu0cff
suicide note of a DeepMind researcher who took ketamine for depression, developed psychosis and then very severe depression unlike anything he’d experienced before; “the emergency alarm continues to strike blind panic and fear into my mind every second” for two years with no change.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/01/simple-points-on-immigration.html Tyler Cowen remains pro-high-skilled immigration.
https://impact-ops.notion.site/11c061ba6c7880b38073e8ddfb4f1db0?v=11c061ba6c788137aa62000c8aa8918b an instruction manual for setting up a nonprofit.
having started a nonprofit myself and screwed some of this up, i want to endorse taking a lot of care with legal compliance and administrative processes.
an “ordinary” middle-class person, in their personal life, usually doesn’t have to worry too much about accidentally breaking laws. a founder (of a nonprofit or small business) can ABSOLUTELY do illegal stuff by accident and get burned for it.
it’s also very easy to accidentally be the kind of terrible boss you hear horror stories about...just screw up payroll!
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53922-x
neuroblastoma and embryonic kidney cell lines exhibit the “massed-spaced” effect discovered in neurons by Hermann Ebbinghaus where a repeated spaced stimulus has a stronger response than a “massed” (clumped) stimulus, almost as though “learning” the difference between an event that recurs and a (potentially erroneous) one-off.
in non-neural cells, instead of looking at neuron firing we’re looking at a particular cell signaling pathway engineered to carry a luciferase gene that glows when the CRE gene is transcribed.
The chemical TPA directly activates protein kinase C (PKC)
the chemical forskolin activated protein kinase A (PKA) via raising cAMP levels, which activate PKA
PKA and PKC both phosphorylate the transcription factor protein CREB1
CREB1 causes lots of genes, including our reported gene CRE, to be transcribed more
this pathway was selected to be similar to the way serotonin activates a signaling cascade during memory via PKA and PKC
people are sharing around popular articles claiming that this proves kidney cells have memory, but it really doesn’t.
it proves that the mechanisms of neuronal memory have shared properties with cell signaling mechanisms present throughout the body, which is what you’d expect; neurons necessarily evolved as a variation on some other kind of cell.
now, understanding exactly how this works is interesting! but no, it doesn’t mean you think with your kidneys.
An idea: make LLM create a wiki version of Sci-Hub. Each paper is a separate link. There is one screen of an automatically generated summary, followed by referred and referring papers, all of them hyperlinks (with a preview window), and a short automatically generated explanation how specifically the papers are related.
This might even be legal.
For me, the last 1⁄3 is boring (no surprising development anymore, just battles that feel endless). But the descriptions of bullying seem quite realistic (triggering) to me.
links 12/23/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-23-2024
a bunch of detailed (and still debated) fan meta about what’s even going on in Neon Genesis Evangelion
https://forum.evageeks.org/thread/20093/Kaworu-and-SEELE-Gendos-Plans-Angel-Rebirth/
https://forum.evageeks.org/thread/20116/Questions-about-SEELEs-Gendos-Angels-goals/
https://wiki.evageeks.org/Theory_and_Analysis:Kaworu%27s_Agenda
https://www.reddit.com/r/evangelion/comments/1ech72/what_does_seele_actually_want_ive_only_watched/
https://www.syllabi.directory/ “syllabi” or informational resources for getting up to speed on various topics: so far topics include clinical trial design, cities, English literature, and housing supply.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Langley Early pioneer of aviation; in 1903 his steam-powered airplane actually flew farther than the Wright Brothers’ famous attempt later that year, but crashed in the Potomac due to poor controllability.
an online acquaintance argued recently that the reason the Wright Brothers are celebrated as pioneers of flight is not because they were “first” to achieve sustained powered flight, but that they were the first to start an airplane company, to continue the project and iteratively improve and teach others. Lots of people claim competing “first flight” stories, but (including Langley’s) they were all one-off stunts that didn’t leave a legacy.
also (according to him), controllability is a key piece of the puzzle, and there’s a tradeoff between controllability and stability (too “controllable” and the plane will respond all-too-vigorously to small random pilot movements) and the Wrights’ three-axis control setup was the most successful and the one that came to be the ancestor of modern flight control mechanisms.
https://nyuu.page/essays/solidity/ extremely detailed analysis of one type of crypto scam that was popular in 2021 with smart contracts
https://www.fuisz.xyz/blog blog by generally creative biotech guy Richard Fuisz
links 11/20/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-20-2024
https://www.desmos.com/calculator an online graphing calculator
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/warp-speed-joshua-morrison/ Patrick McKenzie and Joshua Morrison of OneDaySooner on pandemic preparedness
https://ifp.org/the-case-for-clinical-trial-abundance a bunch of policy proposals from the Institute for Progress on reforming clinical trial rules to reduce the cost of bringing drugs to market
links 11/21/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-21-2024
https://goodscienceproject.org/articles/how-to-actually-reduce-the-administrative-burden-on-research/ instead of needing a majority to repeal rules (public choice works against you) we could instead have a national commission empowered to repeal rules unless vetoed by Congress by a deadline (public choice works for you!)
https://wellcomeleap.org/dr/ Lynne Cox’s program on frailty & resilience
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMILY%27s_List
EMILY’s List, founded in the 1980′s, fundraises for pro-choice female political candidates. I’d heard of it but was surprised how successful it had been.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1475-4975.1979.tb00377.x
Peter Unger, “Why there are no people.”
he introduces a concept called a “nacknick”, where things that are “suitably similar in shape” to a given example object are nacknicks, but things that are very differently shaped are not. he thinks this is logically incoherent and goes on to argue that “person” is a concept of this form.
but...most concepts work this way! they are approximate, not amenable to rigorous definition, defined by similarity to a prototypical example. I can live with this!
...this seems to be a big factor in David Chapman’s thinking, why he feels he has to decisively reject things like “philosophy” and “rationalism”, because he apparently fell into severe clinical depression due to the idea that non-rigorous definitions are unacceptable?
this is idiosyncratic. now, i don’t think it’s necessarily avoidable or at all bad for one’s intellectual output to be a mirror of one’s personal concerns. but most depressed people are not depressed about non-rigorous definitions, and most people can handle hearing about non-rigorous definitions without getting depressed. this isn’t some kind of universal root cause of the unhappiness of intellectuals!
speaking as an often-unhappy intellectual, I am FINE with some things not being amenable to rigorous definition but still being real things.
if anything, studying mathematics taught me that the rigorously formalizable and provable is a very tiny slice of the world.
https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/between-the-booms-ai-in-winter/
history of AI in the 80′s and 90′s—after the expert systems bust, we got embodied intelligence, genetic algorithms, artificial life (aka cellular automata & evolutionary game theory), Bayesian networks, hidden Markov models, and of course the revival neural nets w/ backprop.
yes, our founding ideas came from a so-called “AI winter”.
https://www.societylibrary.org/ has gotten a lot bigger with a recent funding infusion.
they have (AI-enabled) debate mapping, decision making toolkit, educational programs, and something called “Internet Government” which doesn’t exist yet. https://www.internetgovernment.org/
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11414.pdf
American MTurkers don’t prefer male to female politicians in a simulated voting task; Republicans and male Democrats are about as likely to “vote” for a female as male politician, while female Democrats are more likely to vote for a woman.
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qXZLFGqpD7aeEgXGL Richard Ngo’s “Replacing Fear” sequence.
it’s mostly IFS-based, which i find not especially useful.
I don’t think it makes sense to conceptualize myself as made of stable sub-personalities, like an internal “cast of characters”.
i can certainly go into a hypnagogic/imaginative trance state and allow such entities to emerge, but if I do a subsequent session, they do not “naturally” emerge the same way again, and it seems like a bad idea to deliberately force or train myself to have sub-personalities.
i either want to observe my mind impartially, seeing it as it is, or I want to shape myself to be be better.
If I don’t naturally already have multiple sub-personalities, artificially inducing them doesn’t seem like an improvement.
I do sometimes find it useful to think of myself as having fluctuating moods, motives, and concerns, and do “dialogue” between the ones that are active at any one time.
but unlike IFS, I don’t expect them to be necessarily permanent, and I don’t necessarily need them to be character-like (having a distinctive appearance, personality, etc.)
moods are styles/vibes that encompass my whole experience of life while I’m in them
motives feel like pressures or inclinations to move/act in a certain direction;
not like little inner people, if anything more like little “simulated/anticipated” muscle movements
concerns might be a type of motive, “i gotta remember to track/account-for/care-about this thing”
again, it’s either an abstract thought or a pattern of muscle-tension/planned-movement/etc. it just is not like a little inner person.
most industrial enzyme generation is fermentation of filamentous fungi—molds like Aspergillus and Penicillium. this is done somewhat differently than yeast or bacterial culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_fermentation it’s most efficient and cheapest to grow these filamentous fungi on solid plant matter with only a little bit of fluid.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9025306/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7123961/
https://microbialcellfactories.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2859-10-68
https://www.redalyc.org/journal/1871/187158163062/html/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5358476/
https://defoortconsultant.com/bio-economy-and-technology-the-challenges-of-industrial-fermentation/
https://www.susupport.com/knowledge/fermentation/challenges-microbial-fermentation-manufacturing
https://www.davidmoore.org.uk/21st_Century_Guidebook_to_Fungi_PLATINUM/REPRINT_collection/Pandy_solid-state-fermentn2003.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452072116300144
https://www.elidourado.com/p/personal-aviation Eli Dourado notes that “light-sport” aircraft FAA certification requirements have expanded, allowing something more like a 4-seat “flying car”-like personal aircraft, with extensive autopilot, to be affordable and legal to fly with an amateur pilot’s license.
links 11/15/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-15-2024
https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1gleyhg/people_like_me_are_the_reason_trump_won/ a moderate/swing-voter (Obama, Trump, Biden) explains why he voted for Trump this time around:
he thinks Kamala Harris was an “empty shell” and unlikable and he felt the campaign was manipulative and deceptive.
he didn’t like that she seemed to be a “DEI hire”, but doesn’t have a problem with black or female candidates generally, it’s just that he resents cynical demographic box-checking.
this is a coherent POV—he did vote for Obama, after all. and plenty of people are like “I want the best person regardless of demographics, not a person chosen for their demographics.”
hm. why doesn’t it seem natural to portray Obama as a “DEI hire”? his campaign made a bigger deal about race than Harris’s, and he was criticized a lot for inexperience.
One guess: it’s laughable to think Obama was chosen by anyone besides himself. He was not the Democratic Party’s anointed—that was Hillary. He’s clearly an ambitious guy who wanted to be president on his own initiative and beat the odds to get the nomination. He can’t be a “DEI hire” because he wasn’t a hire at all.
another guess: Obama is clearly smart, speaks/writes in complete sentences, and welcomes lots of media attention and talks about his policies, while Harris has a tendency towards word salad, interviews poorly, avoids discussing issues, etc.
another guess: everyone seems to reject the idea that people prefer male to female candidates, but I’m still really not sure there isn’t a gender effect! This is very vibes-based on my part, and apparently the data goes the other way, so very uncertain here.
https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/if-langurs-can-drink-seawater-can Trevor Klee on adaptations for drinking seawater
Seems to me that Obama had the level of charisma that Hillary did not. (Neither do Biden or Harris). Bill Clinton had charisma, too. (So did Bernie.)
Also, imagine that you had a button that would make everyone magically forget about the race and gender for a moment. I think that the people who voted for Obama would still feel the same, but the people who voted for Hillary would need to think hard about why, and probably their only rationalization would be “so that Trump does not win”.
I am not an American, so my perception of American elections is probably extremely unrepresentative, but it felt like Obama was about “hope” and “change”, while Hillary was about “vote for Her, because she is a woman, so she deserves to be the president”.
I guess there are people (both men and women) who in principle wouldn’t vote for a woman leader. But there are also people who would be happy to give a woman a chance. Not sure which group is larger.
But the wannabe woman leader should not make her campaign about her being a woman. That feels like admitting that she has no other interesting qualities. She needs to project the aura of a competent person who just happens to be female.
In my country, I have voted for a woman candidate twice (1, 2), but they never felt like “DEI hires”. One didn’t have any woke agenda, the other was pro- some woke topics, but she never made them about her. (It was like “this is what I will support if you elect me”, not “this is what I am”.)
I voted for Hillary and wouldn’t need to think hard about why: she’s a democrat, and I generally prefer democrat policies.
links 9/14/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-14-2024
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine retro magazines
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2019/09/17/weirding-diary-10/#more-6737 Venkatesh Rao on the fall of the MIT Media Lab
this stung a bit!
i have tended to think that the stuff with “intellectual-glamour” or “visionary” branding is actually pretty close to on-target. not always right, of course, often overhyped, but often still underinvested in even despite being highly hyped.
(a surprising number of famous scientists are starved for funding. a surprising number of inventions featured on TED, NYT, etc were never given resources to scale.)
I also am literally unconvinced that “Europe’s kindergarten” was less sophisticated than our own time! but it seems like a fine debate to have at leisure, not totally sure how it would play out.
he’s basically been proven right that energy has moved “underground” but that’s not a mode i can work very effectively in. if you have to be invited to participate, well, it’s probably not going to happen for me.
at the institutional level, he’s probably right that it’s wise to prepare for bad times and not get complacent. again, this was 2019; a lot of the bad times came later. i miss the good times; i want to believe they’ll come again.
links 11/13/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-13-2024
https://amaranth.foundation/bottlenecks-of-aging the Amaranth Foundation’s bottlenecks of aging
https://www.celinehh.com/aging-field Celine Halioua on what the aging field needs—notably, more biotech companies that are prepared to run their own clinical trials specifically for aging-related endpoints.
a typical new biotech company never runs its own clinical trials—they license, partner, or get bought by pharma. but pharma’s not that into aging (yet) and nobody really has expertise in running aging-focused clinical trials, so that may need to happen first in a startup context. which means some investors have to be willing to put up more cash than usual....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye_movement_sleep_behavior_disorder is the rare sleep disorder that almost always progresses to Parkinson’s about 20 years later
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12208347/ lipofuscin = cross-links.
it’s a “brown-yellow” pigmented substance (first observed under the microscope in the 19th century) that accumulates in post-mitotic cells with age.
it’s not one substance; it’s a mixture of “garbage” (mostly protein and lipid) that accumulates around the lysosome but can’t be disposed of through exocytosis.
it’s “autofluorescent”—it fluoresces in various wavelengths of light without being stained.
it accumulates more under conditions of oxidative stress like high-oxygen environments or in the presence of iron (which catalyzes oxidation reactions); it accumulates less in the presence of antioxidants and under caloric restriction.
evidence that lipofuscin accumulation causes disease or dysfunction seems a lot shakier in this paper.
https://barnacles.substack.com/p/understanding-as-an-art Laura Deming on visualization and the spiritual side of science
I was a little self-conscious about her dissatisfaction with “San Francisco courtier culture”—of course she’s much better at the hustle than I ever was, but I actually love it. If anything, I’ve more often felt hurt that so many people I know got sick of the game before I ever really figured out how to play it.
https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-019-1824-y some critiques of methylation clocks; the first one actually seems to have been an artifact of different distributions of cell types between old and young samples.
https://www.science.org/content/article/scientific-showdown-seeks-biological-clock-best-tracks-aging a contest for the best aging clock at predicting future mortality.
https://www.exactsciences.com/ cancer prognostic/diagnostic biomarker company
https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.04872 Epoch AI’s new math benchmark of original, very hard problems
https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.08467 a new benchmark for formal verification “hint” generation in the Dafny programming language
https://dafny.org/ ”Dafny is a verification-aware programming language that has native support for recording specifications and is equipped with a static program verifier.”
Dafny’s formal verification is based on automated SMT solvers; compared to proof assistants like Coq/Lean/etc it’s less powerful
Dafny can be compiled to familiar languages such as such as C#, Java, JavaScript, Go and Python
https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1fs12l9/what_do_you_rustaceans_think_of_dafny_language/ Rust users don’t think Dafny is practical for programming “real” things in.
https://manifund.org/projects/hire-a-dev-to-finish-and-launch-our-dating-site Shreeda Segan’s OKC-clone dating site needs $10,000 to build an MVP
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eubulides the guy who brought you lists of paradoxes
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epimenides_paradox “Epimenides the Cretan says, all Cretans are liars”
as my 6-year-old son Simon pointed out, this is not actually a paradox; to be a “liar” doesn’t mean every statement you utter is a lie.
Epimenides himself didn’t intend it to be a paradox. Apparently he disagreed with his fellow Cretans about the immortality of the god Zeus.
They fashioned a tomb for thee, O holy and high one
The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies!
But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever,
For in thee we live and move and have our being.
— Epimenides, Cretica
Wikipedia seems to trace the idea that this is a “paradox” to Bertrand Russell.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_the_Great
this is really badly written for a Wikipedia page. i suspect some kind of nationalist vandalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_conquest_of_Siberia most of the conquest of Siberia actually happened before Peter the Great
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yermak_Timofeyevich the Cossack ataman who began the conquest of Siberia, under the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the 1500s.
why conquer Siberia? the fur trade.
why did it work? the khans didn’t have firearms.
he was hired by a powerful merchant family, the Stroganovs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroganov_family
wow. this is a very close parallel (and historically contemporaneous) with the conquistadors and privateers of England, Spain, and Portugl in the Age of Exploration...except we don’t make movies and novels about it in the West. But the swashbuckling potential is amazing.
i mean there was also genocide, to be fair.
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/libertarian-poems
I’ll kind of give him Kipling and Cummings; those are genuine anti-communist, anti-monarchical-absolutism, and anti-war sentiments. Yeats is doing a different thing; I love him but he is Not Our Friend.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/24/majority-of-americans-arent-confident-in-the-safety-and-reliability-of-cryptocurrency/ wow—a full 17% of Americans have ever owned crypto.
links 10/28/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-28-2024
Vincent deVita, chemotherapy pioneer, reflecting on how cancer research has changed (and become more bureaucratic) since the 1960s:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrclinonc.2009.51
https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/article/68/21/8643/541799/A-History-of-Cancer-Chemotherapy
https://cancerhistoryproject.com/article/vince-devita-on-the-history-of-chemotherapy/
https://www.yalemedicine.org/podcasts/cancer-answers-the-history-of-chemotherapy-july-6-2008
https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/where-we-are-in-the-war-on-cancer/
https://vincenttdevitajrmdoncancer.blogspot.com/
Michael Levin has his own team (of ~20) at Tufts working on morphogenetics: https://allencenter.tufts.edu/
with a $10M founding grant from the Allen Foundation, which I expect will not be enough to complete this research program. https://alleninstitute.org/news/the-paul-g-allen-frontiers-group-announces-allen-discovery-center-at-tufts-university/
links 10/8/24 https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-08-2024
links 11/01/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-01-2024
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neats_and_scruffies a typology of AI researchers
https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes Andy Matuschak’s working notes, mostly about educational technology (but not educational games!)
https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zUVBJdPc4kBud5fsLmPFpbw
https://notes.manjarinarayan.org/ Manjari Narayan’s notes, mostly about statistics
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/05/06/ultrasound-addiction-treatment/ ultrasound being used as an addiction treatment—the full study results aren’t published yet, but the anecdotes suggest very dramatic effects.
all drugs for neuropathic pain have poor success rates.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2769608#google_vignette
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6452908/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10711341/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24291734/ lots of people—maybe 6-10% of the world population—have neuropathic pain.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3201926/ chronic pain generally affects about 20% of adults worldwide.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK553030/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3201926/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6676152/
roughly half of opioid addicts treated with buprenorphine or methadone manage to abstain for 30 days after treatment: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26599131/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/ondcp/briefing-room/2021/05/28/biden-harris-administration-calls-for-historic-levels-of-funding-to-prevent-and-treat-addiction-and-overdose/ the Biden-Harris administration has allocated $41B to preventing and treating drug addiction; hard to extract from that exactly how much is spent on rehab/treatment vs. anti-drug campaigns or law enforcement
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danmunro/2015/04/27/inside-the-35-billion-addiction-treatment-industry/ US addiction treatment spending was estimated at $35B/year back in 2015
Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig:
their latest album Only God Was Above Us is wrenching and it’s kind of getting to me lately.
most of the commentary in interviews is about how Koening, now 40 with a 5-year-old kid, has matured and found peace (though if you listen to the lyrics it’s an extremely nihilistic sort of being “at peace” with a terrible world and giving up on trying to change it)
nobody is remarking on what I see as pretty explicit themes like:
last album’s “Harmony Hall” was about a sense of betrayal regarding Ivy-League antisemitism
this album is pretty clearly a rejection of the backlash, the Gen-X (“Gen X Cops”), ex-Eastern-Bloc (“Pravda”), or specifically Jewish (in the [[Bari Weiss]]/Tablet-mag vein) “vibe shift”.
there’s a lot of reflection on heritage and generation gaps, there’s the sense that someone (his elders? his family?) is pushing him in a direction and he doesn’t want to go that way, he thinks it doesn’t make sense in his generation, in this era, but he does care enough to be conflicted and to yearn over the pain of people still (mistakenly, he thinks) struggling (“Capricorn”).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Koenig
https://people.com/vampire-weekend-ezra-koenig-finally-feels-adult-exclusive-8625179
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/20/bernie-sanders-vampire-weekend-grizzly-bear-endorsements
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/mar/23/ezra-koenig-vampire-weekend-interview
https://www.thejc.com/life-and-culture/music/vampire-weekend-dont-call-us-white-c3xbezac
links 10/1/24
https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-01-2024
links 02/27/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-27-2025
https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/sentinel-minutes-for-week-82025 blog of Sentinel, a team of forecasters concerned about catastrophic risks; might be a good news digest for straightforward politics/war/etc
https://eristicstest.com/ everyone’s favorite new personality test
https://benexdict.io/p/empathy-hardware Benedict Hsieh personal essay
https://www.shinzen.org/resources/articles/ Shinzen Young on meditation
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2025/2/17/the-deep-research-problem OpenAI’s Deep Research spot-check; it’s error prone. sources don’t always say what the bot says they say.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08508-4 is this a mRNA cancer vaccine that works? on pancreatic cancer???
not so much. this is examining the difference in survival between vaccine responders and nonresponders. It’s substantial! but only 8⁄16 treated patients responded. not clear how it stacks up to other pancreatic cancer treatments.
but there are lovely single-cell sequencing techniques to see that the vaccine can induce long-lived T cells
endometriosis only occurs spontaneously in primates
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0021997512000072 mandrill
https://pb.copernicus.org/articles/4/77/2017/ rhesus monkey
https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article-abstract/27/8/2341/712472 olive baboon (this one is induced)
https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article-abstract/10/3/558/648290#google_vignette baboons with endometriosis have reduced NK activity
https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article-abstract/22/1/272/2939374 it can get into the colon in baboons
https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article-abstract/11/9/2022/616104 baboons with endometriosis have more retrograde menstruation (but not all baboons with retrograde menstruation get endometriosis)
what works on endometriosis in primate studies?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1642431X17302498 Icon immunoconjugate
https://academic.oup.com/endo/article-abstract/151/4/1846/2456726 pioglitazone
https://academic.oup.com/biolreprod/article-abstract/97/1/32/3869077 simvastatin
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0015028212024338 aromatase inhibitors
can you selectively kill ectopic endometrial cells in endometriosis?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1933719113485298 the endometrial stromal cells are CD10+
more on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neprilysin
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10815-023-02772-5 yes they’re thinking about cell therapies
https://www.publicbenefitinnovationfund.org/ Public Benefit Innovation Fund, accepting applications for AI projects that benefit social services
links 2/25/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-25-2025
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation blue glow from particles moving faster than the speed of light in a medium (like water)
https://dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/article/view/5824/4684
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muir_Woods_National_Monument Muir Woods, home of the old-growth coast redwoods, was originally preserved by politician William Kent. But when a water company planned to build a dam (which would flood the woods) and threatened to use eminent domain when Kent objected, he had to donate the park to the federal government in order to actually preserve it as a place of natural beauty.
https://www.osv.llc/our-fellows O’Shaunessy Ventures fellows
surrogate endpoints in clinical trials are generally evaluated with a meta-analysis, in which the trial-level correlation between the surrogate and “gold standard” endpoint is compared. Do trials that find a larger treatment vs. control effect on the surrogate endpoint also find greater effects on the “gold standard” endpoint? Mostly these are done in only a handful of diseases, primarily cancer where things like response rate or progression-free survival are compared to the “gold standard” of overall survival.
https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0072082 lesion count as a surrogate for relapse rate in [MS
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0895435608001698 LDL as a surrogate in statin trials
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/bjh.18217 PET complete response as a surrogate in follicular lymphoma
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003496724224262 serum urate is a poor surrogate for gout flares!
https://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/jco.2005.08.156 PSA is a poor surrogate for survival in prostate cancer
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272638616002146 protein urea as a surrogate in kidney disease
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(18)30314-0/abstract albuminuria isn’t great as a surrogate in kidney disease
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666168322026842 progression-free survival is ok as a surrogate in metastatic urothelial cancer
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/375/bmj-2021-066381.full.pdf pathological complete response is a terrible surrogate for survival in early breast cancer
https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/eclinm/PIIS2589-5370(21)00010-9.pdf event-free survival is a much better surrogate in early breast cancer
https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/in-vitro-diagnostics/list-cleared-or-approved-companion-diagnostic-devices-in-vitro-and-imaging-tools list of FDA-cleared companion diagnostics for determining who should use a therapeutic. these are almost all genetic tests for cancer mutations.
https://research.manjarinarayan.org/ Manjari Narayan’s personal website
https://etherospharma.com/our-team/ Laura Dugan, whom I funded for her work on carboxyfullerene SOD mimetics extending lifespan and preventing neurodegeneration, has a biotech company now; and Jack Scannell, the predictive validity guy, is the CEO!
Jack Scannell’s thesis: we have more and more ways to screen targets and drug candidates, but they have lower predictive validity, so more drugs fail in the clinic and the cost per successful drug keeps rising.
solution: care more about what screens, animal models, etc you use! just because it’s “industry standard” doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck!
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41573-022-00552-x
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a03f3f9a-c8d0-47b0-9ced-7473fdcf6ca8/files/r8336h262x
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00059-3
https://goldlabfoundation.org/presentations/damn-compass-full-speed-ahead-quality-beats-quantity-drug-rd/
melanocortin/leptin-related hereditary obesity
https://www.cell.com/trends/endocrinology-metabolism/abstract/S1043-2760(99)00213-1?large_figure=true
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304394098004017
https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/abs/10.1148/radiology.168.2.3393649 you can measure liver iron overload with imaging in thalassemia
James M. Wilson discovered the AAV, the family of viruses most used in gene therapy
https://www.med.upenn.edu/apps/faculty/index.php/g275/p9746
discoveries of cancer genes/mutations:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1349-7006.2008.00972.x a chromosomal translocation with ALK in solid tumors (which was unknown before 2008)
Monica Hollstein discovered TP53 mutations and EGFR amplification in cancer
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1905840
https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/article/48/18/5119/492885/Amplification-of-Epidermal-Growth-Factor-Receptor
Robert A. Weinberg seems to have done a LOT of discoveries of oncogenes
https://biology.mit.edu/profile/robert-a-weinberg/
https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/0092-8674(83)90017-X NRAS
https://www.nature.com/articles/312513a0 HER2
Michael Stratton discovered BRAF and RAS and BRCA2 mutations in cancer; also established the Cancer Genome Project
https://www.sanger.ac.uk/person/stratton-mike/
https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/article/62/23/6997/509398/BRAF-and-RAS-Mutations-in-Human-Lung-Cancer-and
Mary-Claire King discovered the BRCA1 susceptibility mutation for breast cancer
Mark Skolnick, founder of Myriad Genetics, sequenced BRCA1 and BRCA2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Skolnick
Jose Baselga developed Herceptin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Baselga
John Mendelsohn developed cetuximab
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mendelsohn_(doctor)
Garth Powis discovered KRAS
https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article-abstract/104/3/228/973198#google_vignette
https://www.appliedinvention.com/ Danny Hillis’s company
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Hillis
https://gsb-faculty.stanford.edu/benoit-monin/topics/do-gooder-derogation-moral-social-comparison/ people are especially eager to derogate “do-gooders” to alleviate feelings of comparative inadequacy. These are the sorts of studies that don’t replicate but I find the theory plausible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Washington
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Patriot_Game
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bull symbol of the UK
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_Jonathan precursor of Uncle Sam, symbol of New England
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Broadwick pioneering female aviator and parachutist
https://www.panoramaortho.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/History-of-DXA-2107-PDF.pdf bone density DXA scans date back to the 1980s
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-022-02101-z Claude Bachmann discovered NAGS deficiency, a genetic disease
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4757-6903-6_6
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13023-016-0406-2 it’s treatable!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-Acetylglutamate_synthase_deficiency
https://everythingstudies.com/2022/05/24/the-political-is-personal/
It seems like many people propose “generalization from their own example” as a model for the entire humanity. And it can be quite annoying when people around you agree on a model that doesn’t fit you at all… and when you point it out, they dismiss it by saying that you are in a denial. Because they have examined their own minds deeply, and found out that it was true… yeah, possibly so, but that doesn’t necessarily make it true about the others.
everyone likes whatever popular people around them like—no I don’t
if we legalize gay sex, everyone will want gay sex and families will fall apart—no I don’t feel tempted at all
people are only charitable to other people if they expect them to reciprocate—no I often don’t expect that
...probably many other examples like that.
links 1/21/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-21-2025
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurofilament_light_polypeptide a marker of axonal degeneration in Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, ALS, MS
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1471-4159.1996.67052013.x study linking levels of NfL to ALS: 1996
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-1331.2012.03777.x study linking levels of NfL to ALS severity/progression: 2012
https://www.nature.com/articles/312757a0 sequencing the HIV-1 virus -- 1984
https://www.nature.com/articles/324691a0 same group at the Pasteur Institute sequenced the HIV-2 virus in 1986
xhttps://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(96)05283-X/fulltext earliest trial (1996) I could find using viral load as an endpoint for HIV vaccines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitosterolemia lipid metabolic disorder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibrodysplasia_ossificans_progressiva rare disease that turns muscle and tendons to bone
https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1783 gene for fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva
https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/publications-and-special-projects/the-research-legacy-of-penn-medicine/orthopaedics/fop history of research on the disease
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Houghton discovered hepatitis C
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_M._Kunkel discovered dystrophin, the protein deficient in muscular dystrophy
https://www.discoverymedicine.com/Eric-P-Hoffman/2013/11/08/orphan-drug-development-in-muscular-dystrophy-update-on-two-large-clinical-trials-of-dystrophin-rescue-therapies/ trials using dystrophin as a biomarker in trials for muscular dystrophy
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(11)60756-3/fulltext?keepThis=true&width=850&height=650&rss=yes&TB_iframe=true dystrophin used as a surrogate endpoint in muscular dystrophy trial
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/10425179109008433 cytomegalovirus sequenced in 2009
https://www2.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/bart-barrell-1944-2023/ Bart Barrell
https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/1277-stephan-beck Stephan Beck
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/62/9/1154/1745383 first study I could find (2016) using viral load as an endpoint for CMV antivirals
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2730307/ standard anthrax immunoassay, from 2002
https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2003715 SOD1 used as an endpoint in a trial for ALS
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1243292 first description of activated PI3K-δ syndrome, 2013
https://ashpublications.org/blood/article/130/21/2307/36662/Effective-activated-PI3K-syndrome-targeted-therapy lymph node size and naive B cells as endpoints in activated PI3K-δ syndrome trial
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activated_PI3K_delta_syndrome
https://www.nejm.org/doi/abs/10.1056/NEJM197911223012102 IGF-1 as a biomarker for acromegaly, 1979
more on IGFs in acromegaly: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0026049594901996
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/257810 Niemann-Pick first described in 1928
https://www.fda.gov/drugs/development-resources/table-surrogate-endpoints-were-basis-drug-approval-or-licensure list of surrogate endpoints that the FDA accepted for drug approval/licensing
https://charlesyang.substack.com/p/2-years-at-doe what it’s really like at DOE
https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/2022-59-02/S0273-0979-2022-01759-4/S0273-0979-2022-01759-4.pdf this is the closest I could find to an exposition of the Bellman function method
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berl_Katznelson early Zionist; does not appear to be related to the mathematician
people often claim that the “female orgasm” is exclusive to humans, or cannot be detected in animals, but this is false
https://kinseyinstitute.org/pdf/womens%20orgasm%20annual%20review.pdf female orgasm has numerous objectively verifiable signs, from characteristic changes in breathing/heart rate to rhythmic vaginal contractions.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajp.1350010104 females of many species of primates make facial expressions and noises associated with pleasure during sex, and also show the characteristic vaginal contractions of female orgasm when stimulated
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.3402/snp.v6.31883 evidence that female rats experience sexual pleasure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leroy_Hood nvented the DNA sequencer, the protein sequencer, the peptide synthesizer, and many other methods
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleftherios_Diamandis biochemist who first skeptically investigated Theranos’s claims and prompted John Carreyrou to do his famous investigative expose
links 02/19/2025
https://hyperphor.com/ammdi/How-to-be-less-agentic Michael Traven
I don’t exactly agree or disagree with this
https://aok.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/aokcgi/display.cgi?action=st&fn=22&tn=44725&st=10#post11
very funny! internet personalities as factions in various strategy games
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/09/automating-math good post by Adam Marblestone on AI-for-math
links 02/14/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-14-2025
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomeronasal_organ
organ in the nasal septum of many animals that helps them “smell” non-volatile compounds like pheromones
it’s supposed to be “vestigial” in humans, but I’ve also heard claims that it’s still functional! intriguing!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flehmen_response when animals “sneer” or flare their lips, it’s to expose their vomeronasal organ and pick up pheromones.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholecystokinin hormone used in bile release, satiety, and fear. very reliably induces fear/panic in humans and animals.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholecystokinin_antagonist can you treat anxiety by blocking CCK receptors? looks like this line of research was abandoned because peptides are hard to get into the brain. i think we may have better ways around this problem now?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12789687/ more on CCK antagonists
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenocorticotropic_hormone ACTH is a hormone involved in the HPA axis, including anxiety. but not something you want to inhibit across the board.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypopituitarism this is what would happen, giving results kind of like:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addison%27s_disease
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenal_crisis
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%91-Melanocyte-stimulating_hormone?searchToken=d8yek3asorql89td1t0fy80ay alpha-MSH is what makes some reptiles and fish turn dark when frightened, and is chemically related to ACTH, but in mammals is less a fear thing, more related to pigmentation, appetite, and sexuality.
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/zeke-faux-stablecoins-tether/ Patrick McKenzie on his usual crypto-skeptic beat
https://genders.wtf/
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfZf8MsW31eer-VruxpNmVGjiwZAdPk_akKVA-owo8DQqwgPA/viewform apply to intern at Alexandria AI, translating public domain books into as many languages as possible.
https://www.alexlib.org/
https://makesunsets.com/blogs/news/climate-outlaws Make Sunsets’ case that their solar radiation management geoengineering is legal and safe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Lewin I <3 this guy. this is what made the Long Nineteenth Century great. his accomplishments range from:
characterizing the traditional use, psychoactive effects, and active compounds of ayahuasca, peyote, kava, betel, and possibly others
exposing the causal connection between dental amalgam fillings and mercury poisoning
analyzing the effect of aconite on the heart
various medical and toxicological works
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%92-Carboline some of the beta-carboline alkaloids are anxiogenic
some other beta-carbolines function as MAOIs in ayahuasca, allowing the DMT to be active when taken orally
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmaline
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmine
also is a fluorescent pH indicator!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-Methyl-%CE%B2-carboline does things to the brain maybe. also MAOI.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/334068 “bubble bath cystitis”, paper from 1967 -- not that interesting, just that some ingredient in a bubble bath soap led to irritation of the urethra in several diabetic women.
https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/1097-0142(196904)23:4%3C791::AID-CNCR2820230408%3E3.0.CO;2-Y instead of mammograms, xerox your breast! 1969 paper
old papers on cheaply testable electrical properties of tumors:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3181/00379727-15-174 1918, tumors are lower in resistance than healthy tissue, and fast-growing tumors more so than slow-growing ones; this is true both for plants and animals!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2599246/pdf/yjbm00323-0079.pdf electrical potential across a mouse tumor (in millivolts) is quite a bit higher than across healthy tissue, and more so for fast-growing than slow-growing tumors
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2246588/pdf/brjcancer00131-0037.pdf rat tumors generally have a more acidic pH than healthy tissue, but malignant vs. benign tumors have similar pH. the more epithelial tissue there is in a tumor, whether malignant or benign, the more acidic it is.
https://aacrjournals.org/jcancerres/article/10/3/340/449670/The-Electric-Capacity-of-Tumors-of-the-Breast1 1926 paper, human malignant breast cancer tumors have about 2-3x the capacitance of normal breast tissue or benign tumors—about 2000-3000 microfarads vs 1000 microfarads.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Bio-Electric-Properties-of-Cancer-Resistant-and-Burr-Smith/dd717f464d7eb79bbd1930ba6e83e6e8d3892826 1938 paper, also finding much higher electrical potential across spontaneous rodent mammary tumors vs. healthy tissue.
https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/39776631/Electropotential_measurements_as_a_new_d20151107-4851-h89ivn-libre.pdf?1446919144=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DElectropotential_measurements_as_a_new_d.pdf&Expires=1739483830&Signature=FXOzcLf25~bmWK7rQ0d2KFBbNubAEv7aj7IxPlvHWDKqtv1kvCFXxrKrJyuFTtkS9iRVzddlnzVuNVuGWhURe-LgRl~cTqW8npUzCrTxLsBU3NutUu6e7gkPKPqlOzZy6Ds0UKuzFbu-ZIGLzty1BBSAT8SpjNNpOiocx5hFDCxz~z6CZOzG4tr0jFwE65B04F9nHIcoPipwN42D6tsG5Kd-SaFev55RlZhnHqv5tF0Lnd0puEwvUv3FXkYeVoLbgZDzD~PPLiuup7wDuInZj-SfDbK5pEWbj4GXnnjsTIOrmw-5YxUav1GHYkgoZs94OLUw~OHg5ar8ZizSai1~Fw__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA 1998 polarization score for detecting breast cancers
https://www.marinanitze.com/ works on reforming/solving tech problems in government.
https://reason.com/2023/07/23/foster-parent-red-tape-hurts-families-and-taxpayers/
https://reason.com/2025/02/13/i-tried-to-fix-government-tech-for-years-im-fed-up/
https://sloan.org/programs/digital-technology/aipostdoc-rfp Sloan Foundation is looking for social science postdocs to study the implications of AI For Science.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11654 Nico McCarty and others’ roadmap for an AI virtual cell.
links 2/4/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-04-2025
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-025-00269-y/index.htmlmitochondria are thread-shaped not bean-shaped. I truly do not understand these critters.
things i learned while reading about Venice:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedetto_Pesaro brutal, successful admiral who held off the Turks for a bit
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasco_da_Gama
John II, the king, set an objective for his admirals to find a route to India that bypassed the usual middlemen for the spice trade (the Mamluks & Venetians). 16 years later, Vasco da Gama did it. Nice example of “goals and plans can work”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchlock there seems to be an unfortunate definitional overload where “handgun” in the early modern period refers to a gun held by a human as opposed to a cannon? but in the late 15th century all “handguns” were long guns, it seems.
https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/new-york-finally-claims-a-small-victory-in-forever-war-on-rats-m7x230sg8
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iXda2NyGzKVWxkd02IlXj5Tq5cOM_gNd/view
a “verified” programming language would be cool!
this means verifying multiple things. the compiler, the parser, the debugger, etc. all relative to a formal specification of what they’re supposed to do.
do you write a different specification for each thing you’re checking? this introduces lots of wasted/duplicated/inconsistent work. maybe you should just have a single specification for the language.
this is what K is: a framework for writing language specifications.
symbolic execution—don’t plug in values, map out branches of how the program behaves with any possible input. good for testing and verification.
K does this. (I don’t understand details)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.11044 very interesting and ambitious concept!
biology is multiscale and multimodal. genes! proteins! cells! tissues!
in particular we have dynamical spatial systems that govern developmental processes:
cell division & microtubules
neurite branching
mitochondrial fission & fusion
plant organogenesis in shoot & root growth
neural tube closure.
what happens (over time) is a function of what’s going on nearby in space;
macro geometry (the shapes of organs, bodies, etc) is a consequence of micro, local dynamics
declarative modeling:
one example of a bio dynamical system is differential equations defined by diffusion operators on the concentrations of chemical species (as functions of spatial position and time).
an abstract syntax tree (AST) is a way of representing the symbols of a mathematical expression (tree depth corresponds to order of operations, nested functions, that thing)
you could define a declarative modeling language as a space of ASTs that define models, a mapping between ASTs and dynamical systems (the mathematical objects that correspond to the symbolic objects) and transformations between ASTs.
for example one transformation is: you start with a chemical reaction; you reverse the arrow to get the reverse reaction; or, you change the rate constant to get a different reaction rate.
now, when do these manipulations commute? there is a quantum-inspired “operator algebra” for chemistry
each chemical species is a “state”; there are transition probabilities between them
mass action laws define relationships between the equilibrium concentrations of each species (as a function of the chemical reaction & the reaction constant)
“operators” for each species destroy or create particles of that species; what happens if you hit the system with an “operator”? add these up and you get the “chemical master equation” that defines the dynamical system and the enforced probability preservation (probabilities must sum to 1)...(again i don’t totally get it)
now we can also add parameters to these models. for instance a model governing cell division might depend on the size of the cell.
now we can start talking about cell division as a function of things like position, cell type, concentrations of signaling molecules, and so on, with invariants (like “1d growth”)
and we can do similar operator stuff based on probability distributions of what values parameters can take...
ok so what’s the point of all this?
normally in mathematical modeling of biological processes, you pick out a priori which variables to care about.
but alternatively, you could start with a finer model that throws in everything and the kitchen sink, and automatically discern which variables don’t really affect the result much no matter what values you plug in, and then “reduce” to a coarser model.
...but you could also do that statistically? i hate to be the “but how is this practical” guy but this literally is applied mathematics...
it’s pretty though. wish i had time to go through more carefully.
https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/ I don’t seem to have access yet but this is intriguing
https://qntm.org/devphilo i love his short stories; his “developer philosophy” also seems sensible, though might be hard to make work in a real business with customer/deadline pressure?
https://alicemaz.substack.com/p/commentary-on-xunzis-enriching-the Alice Maz on Xunzi. insightful political philosophy.
https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/si-no-se-puede/ Ben Hoffman seems straightforwardly correct here.
if some governmental policy seems Not Fair, to people like you and me, we don’t actually have much of a (perceived) affordance to change it through collective civic action.
conventional political activism is more like a zero-sum negotiation between interest groups.
“it’s not fair” doesn’t move the needle by itself, even if everybody you tell can see it’s true.
organized political violence to achieve goals isn’t much of a thing these days either; the closest thing is disorganized violence (rioting, lone shooters)
the courts sort of are an avenue to push back against unfair policies, but civil courts are declining drastically in use.
links 02/03/25:
Jasmine Sun on the Tech Right
https://jasmi.news/p/tech-right
https://jasmi.news/p/arjun-ramani
I like this. she’s not a theorizer! she’s just Some Guy, actually expressing her thoughts on current events. do I agree with everything she says? maybe not.
But it’s normal-ass blogging rather than inhibited silence or sloppy thoughts packaged as a Grand Narrative, and I think that’s healthy. we need normal-ass blogging.
Scott Alexander is a normal-ass blogger who kept up a regular schedule and has a gift for puns and a fairly high appetite for books and research papers.
like, that’s all it is, it’s being yourself in public, consistently year over year, while having a healthy (but not extraordinary!) degree of interest in the world around you.
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/why-did-silicon-valley-turn-right this is cited in her piece; i’m also not sure what i think of this, might be a piece of the puzzle
https://meetmeoffline.com/ nice, Shreeda Segan’s dating app is live
https://lambda.chat/ nice hosting platform for multiple models including the DeepSeek ones.
note that the DeepSeek phone app is reputed to have a keylogger and location tracker; web apps are preferable.
https://www.betonit.ai/p/trust_and_diverhtml Bryan Caplan close-reads the famous Robert Putman paper that purportedly shows that “more ethnic diversity leads to lower social trust.”
It doesn’t show that; it shows that black, Latino, and Asian people have lower “trust” than white people.
also correlated with lower trust: poor neighborhoods; high-crime neighborhoods; high-density neighborhoods; neighborhoods where most people moved in recently; neighborhoods with lots of renters; neighborhoods with few US citizens
also correlated with higher trust: individual income, bachelor’s degree, homeownership
this just reduces to socioeconomic status. there’s not a separate thing going on here about diversity.
obviously you can increase the average of many quality-of-life metrics in a community by restricting it to people of higher socioeconomic status. but then those same metrics would (mathematically) decline outside the elite community.
this does not support claims like “everybody on average would be better off under residential segregation”.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/sundry-observations-on-the-trump-tariffs.html Tariffs harm economies, news at 11.
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/the-landmines-buried-in-the-fine-print-of-chicagos-new-casino-deal/ Patrick McKenzie has details (lots of details) about the new casino being built in Chicago.
in order to meet requirements to be 25% woman-and-minority owned, they went around to black churches to offer an extremely misleading “investment deal” to working-class people who cannot afford it and won’t understand the fine print.
the financial structure includes saddling these “investors” with a surprise enormous tax bill that only kicks in years after purchase.
of course, anybody can get in on special “women and minorities only” financial opportunities, even if they’re a white man; set up a shell company “owned” by a woman and/or minority, who is your wife, or an associate of yours willing to serve as your front. this happens ALL THE TIME.
the inference is that someone in city government said “nope, not this time, no more shell games, when we say minority owned we mean you’re gonna have to funnel the profits into our actual community.” So, this time around, the casino people did go to the community! but what the community gets is not gonna be profit.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Research_and_Invention_Agency ARIA was founded in 2021.
A friend asked me a good question: what was the UK’s DARPA-equivalent before?
UKRI https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Research_and_Innovation was the older UK science-and-tech funding org, which ARIA is unaffiliated with; it brought together nine older funding bodies, most of which were founded in the 21st century, and none of which could plausibly be the bodies that funded the bulk of UK nationally-funded (non-medical) science and engineering through the mid-20th-century.
so...what was the UK’s DARPA, or for that matter its NSF, in 1945-1990?
https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/on-the-responsibility-of-size this is a nice, slightly oblique thought by Trevor Klee. do I agree? maybe. i don’t expect to form considered opinions on All This until years later, if at all.
things I learned while reading about Venice:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigismondo_Pandolfo_Malatesta amazing guy. mercenary. murdered two out of three wives. first person that the Pope explicitly “canonized into Hell.” patron of Piero della Francesca and Leon Battista Alberti. rehabilitated in literature several times, including by Ezra Pound, which figures.
https://www.palladiummag.com/2025/01/31/the-failed-strategy-of-artificial-intelligence-doomers/ critical take on the ineffectiveness of “AI safety” as a political strategy.
if you successfully convince the world that AI is potentially very powerful (and dangerous), this does not make people go “ok let’s not build AI then”, it makes people think “i want to be powerful and dangerous!!!”
i’m not on board with everything in this article but i think i largely agree.
when you’re an idealistic nerd who despises playing politics and isn’t very good at it, it will probably end badly if you dive enthusiastically into politics.
“so how can you do anything helpful at all?”
provide true information. don’t optimize too aggressively for mass appeal.
this doesn’t mean actively hide or be deliberately cryptic—i think that’s often going too far. i think clarity and open communication are, where possible, good practices.
but maybe don’t make it your full-time job to strategically maximize the number of humans who believe a given thing.
focus your efforts on goals that you’re quite confident will be beneficial and that can be done without coercion. beware of making your job about “what the government should do”.
do not develop an identity around being an expert at strategic adversarial thinking.
you may be a literal chessmaster (like, at the game of chess);
you may be very skilled at things that would be useful to a modern military;
but if you are, in the colloquial sense, “kind of aspie”, you are not an expert in detecting when somebody’s about to screw you over. do not be over-eager to swim in shark-infested waters.
links 01/29/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-29-2025
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/01/its-time-to-build-the-peptidome.html link of a piece I’ve already read by Maxwell Tabarrok about the value of building a dataset of peptides and their sequences, structures, and properties, for training models that can discover peptides that can be used pharmacologically (for instance, as antimicrobials).
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.24.634830v1 using modified T-regulatory cells can be turned against the macrophage foam cells that produce atherosclerosis plaque, reducing heart disease (in mice).
how do they do it?
oxidized LDL is a marker of inflammation and atherosclerosis. It’s also a protein (the acronym is for Low Density Lipoprotein) so you can target it with an antibody!
regulatory T cells (Treg) genetically modified to contain one of these anti-OxLDL antibodies prevents the OxLDL from getting into macrophages and turning them into foam cells.
inject them into live mice on a high-fat diet and they also get less atherosclerosis than control mice
interestingly they make Tregs from CD4 (helper) T-cells by getting them to express FOXP3. this will be useful for human clinical application, since natural Tregs are rare and it can be difficult to extract them in sufficient quantity.
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-lackeys-office-personnel-management-opm-neuralink-x-boring-stalin/
https://talentmarket.org/cato-psych-policy-analyst/ ugh. they basically have already written the bottom line on what they want a new hire to think about the “psychology of progress”, and it’s mostly talking points that have been made ad infinitum already.
surely if you were serious about overcoming psychological barriers in the general public that make them ill-disposed to objectively beneficial economic/technological changes, you’d want to look for new ideas (since clearly past ones haven’t worked). you’d also want to focus on starting with empathy and common ground, if the hope is to actually change minds. this is a job description that, ironically, guarantees stasis, not progress.
https://stephenmalina.com/post/2023-11-04-biologizing-the-stack/ I’m glad he admits this is a contrarian position because the straightforward lesson of the past several decades is that you want as few things to be biomanufactured as possible, living things make incredibly cost-inefficient factories and should be a last resort.
https://unstableontology.com/2022/05/02/on-the-paradox-of-tolerance-in-relation-to-fascism-and-online-content-moderation/ I like this post, but on the general topic, how could you possibly implement Popper’s standard of “we must not tolerate speech that incites people to not listen to arguments”? That would, itself, require an extensive censorship apparatus.
1st Amendment Law seems much more practical in protecting all political opinions and having exceptions only for “true threats” or narrow “incitement to violence”. Saying “don’t read this book, it’s by a fascist” is intolerance by Popper’s definition, but it’s straightforwardly protected speech under US law and I think it should be; we don’t trust a government agency to adjudicate questions of epistemic vice.
1st Amendment law has almost a refreshingly nihilistic attitude to discussion—all “opinion”, including iirc all discussion on social media, is assumed to be neither true or false, so it can’t be considered defamatory. basically, under the law, “this is all just yapping, people get to yap, call me when they make a false factual claim that costs you money, or make an actual plan to physically hurt someone”. sometimes, in addition to being a safer standard for one’s government to hold, this is a healthy attitude to adopt oneself!
Stephen Wolfram on machine learning: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/08/whats-really-going-on-in-machine-learning-some-minimal-models/
first, we visualize how values at the nodes of a neural network (during inference) change based on the inputs. complicated!
then we look at how weights on edges change as a neural network is trained. also complicated! though you can see the changes getting smaller as the network approaches convergence.
a mesh neural net—each node is only connected to its neighbors in a grid—is a cellular automaton. Cellular automata are a special case of neural networks, in other words.
you can do an analogue of “training a model to fit a function” with something called a “rule array”—you have a grid, and each square can have a local update rule relative to its neighbors, cellular-automata style, but the rule might be different for different squares. If your “input” is a black square at the top row, then “running” the automata rule repeatedly may propagate down a black-and-white pattern on the grid. you can then “adapt” the rule array iteratively to get a desired pattern, like “generate one that lasts for exactly 30 steps”. or a function: you want to get something that gives certain “outputs” on the bottom row, given an “input” at the top row. then “mutate” cells at random, keeping only the results where the distance from the “training examples” doesn’t change.
you can observe which cells mutate along the training runs; they seem to be the ones along the “ideal path” between x (at the top) and f(x) (at the bottom).
doing mutations at random is inefficient; you can do an equivalent of “steepest descent” in cellular automata too, but this tends to get stuck
there’s an equivalent of “backpropagation” in automata-land too
in general, why translate to automata? he says they’re easier to “inspect” because simpler, but I kinda don’t get it.
he even builds a discrete analog of a transformer!
“It could have been that machine learning would somehow “crack systems”, and find simple representations for what they do. But that doesn’t seem to be what’s going on at all. Instead what seems to be happening is that machine learning is in a sense just “hitching a ride” on the general richness of the computational universe. It’s not “specifically building up behavior one needs”; rather what it’s doing is to harness behavior that’s “already out there” in the computational universe.”
yep this is a convergent idea. the secret sauce in machine learning is just having a rich enough space of possible functions, and a means of variation and selection. you can get similar results using things like genetic algorithms or cellular automata that aren’t “neural networks” at all.
Stephen Wolfram on formal verification: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2025/01/who-can-understand-the-proof-a-window-on-formalized-mathematics/
Wolfram Language allows proof verification!
you can also visualize the dependency graph of lemmas.
sometimes the “high-degree nodes” are legible things like commutativity
but often they, and “commonly used lemmas” in randomly generated proofs, are weird elaborate non-human-interpretable things.
What about proof-to-proof equivalences?
this is where the “homotopy” metaphors come from. you could find a “path” from one proof to another...but what if there are “holes” in proof-space? “Then a “continuous deformation” of one proof into another will get stuck, and even if there is a much shorter proof, we’re liable to get “topologically stuck” before we find it.”
https://kmill.github.io/informalization/ucsc_cse_talk.pdf
nice explanation of formalization (in Lean), auto-formalization and auto-informalization
if you just throw ChatGPT at this, it sucks.
so let’s do a little ontology hard-coding.
https://moreisdifferent.blog/p/german-scientific-paternalism how Germany in the late 19th-early 20th century trained scientists
https://kordinglab.com/about/ an approach to figuring out what neurons do by mapping between simulations, electrophysiology data, and psychophysics. “what algorithm is being implemented here?”
https://www.hypothesisfund.org/ a Reid Hoffman project: funds breakthrough research, mostly life sciences.
this doesn’t “smell” aggressive enough to me—the projects look fine but i’m surprised they’d be unfundable elsewhere—but maybe it’s just an insufficiently pointed communication style.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Duggan_(venture_capitalist)trange fellow. apparently he’s a Scientologist and knows nothing about biology but has a knack for picking winners. picked up ibrutinib!!!
links 01/27/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-27-2025
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/09/where-the-wild-things-arent Agnes Callard is strange and unsettling here. I wonder what this is “really” about.
“Being a person is too hard a job to leave to a single person. We can’t do it on our own, not even as adults. Figuring out how to be a person is a group project, and we have to help each other. But the catch is that we don’t really know what we are doing, so sometimes we end up hurting each other instead. When you are weird, you experience this hurt. Social categories have been poorly constructed and fail to conduce to human happiness. The weird person is a record of the mistakes we have made.”
it sounds like her own “weirdness” is experienced as a source of pain, not as a stable and beloved personal identity. and that she’s uncomfortable with public celebration of “weirdness”.
admittedly it is a bit paradoxical that contemporary culture celebrates “weirdos” in a not-very-individualistic way. the nonconformists who are celebrated do, actually, conform to their own little club rules.
this never particularly bothered me, though!
if i find a club i want to be a member of, that’s fantastic. i’m not attached to being literally unique.
if i find that existing “labels” or “groups” don’t entirely suit me as an individual, that can be a bummer, but i don’t think i would be better off if no fine-grained identity categories existed and i was expected to conform with everyone in my geographical location.
there’s a very natural explanation about why children’s books star alienated weirdos: writers are not typical people!
beloved children’s book authors were writing to children like me, the children who read a lot of books and might grow up to be writers ourselves.
this isn’t some paradoxical thing.
what is “normal” (both common and normative) in the world of books is what is “normal” for text-native obligate readers and writers, which does in fact mean being different from the majority! Bookishness is a minority trait!
Bookish people, as a rule, are glad we are this way, and eager to acculturate potential kindred spirits into bookishness. This seems generally healthy to me.
sure, be a little thoughtful about not making depictions of alienation into self-fulfilling prophecies, but I think a little bit of care and taste suffices. no need to angst about “what if we are BAD ROLE MODELS”. it’s okay to like your own quirks.
https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202502/noti3114/noti3114.html anatomy of a Lean proof
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Sade
he sounds genuinely awful, though i haven’t read his writing
links 1/24/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-24-2025
https://traditionsofconflict.substack.com/p/traditional-methods-of-black-magic maybe “black magic” beliefs persist because the “cursed” person gets scared, contacts a shaman/magician/etc for help, and “recovers”
https://tori.gg/ AI productivity browser extension?
https://www.biospace.com/isomorphic-labs-announces-strategic-multi-target-research-collaboration-with-novartis only a year ago, Isomorphic Labs announced this partnership, for developing small molecules with AI (via in silico screens or ab initio)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-21/deepmind-expects-clinical-trials-for-ai-designed-drugs-this-year now they’re announcing they’re going to hit the clinic this year?! that is fast. and it’s a bit surprising that it’s small molecules rather than antibodies, when the literature really seems to point to protein structure/affinity prediction being stronger than small molecule binding prediction
https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/ they don’t want to tell us anything. no disease indication. bupkis.
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/banking-crisis-two-years-later/ Patrick McKenzie says the things he couldn’t say in 2023 about the banking crisis
if he, making inferences from public information, said that he believed specific banks were insolvent when that was not yet public knowledge, he’d be accused by the press of deliberately causing a financial crisis or destroying banks.
the government lied about banks being fine, which were not fine, in the interests of preventing the crisis from getting worse.
i dunno whether this is outrageous because the culture that is finance is so unfamiliar to me; afaik saying true negative things about banks will make them fail faster and maybe spread the “contagion” more broadly in the economy? maybe it is in the public’s best interest for the government to lie in such cases?
but at any rate, this implies you should not necessarily believe announcements that a bank is fine.
https://minors.mit.edu/policies-guidelines/dos-and-donts-of-working-with-minors/#overlay-context=institute-programs/training
“Don’t spend time alone with one minor away from the group or conduct private interactions with minors in enclosed spaces or behind closed doors”, “Don’t relate to minors as if they were peers, conduct private correspondence, or take on the role of “confidant” (outside of a professional counseling relationship)” and “Don’t privately email, text, or engage with minors through social media. Group messages and posts are acceptable and must be viewable by all participants” are the objectionable rules here.
obviously the motive was to avoid child sexual abuse, which is important, and I’m even on board with erring on the side of avoiding the appearance of impropriety. indeed, don’t sext the minors or offer them alcohol/drugs.
but a normal, appropriate mentorship relationship will involve one-on-one meetings and emails. teachers talk to students. how can you ban this???
it’s especially outrageous because this is MIT. child prodigies need opportunities to do real things in the world; this will generally involve working with adults. rules like this mean “no more Terence Taos.”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/44162589
only relevant Google result I could find for a James Joyce quote I remembered part of:
Joyce made a specific comparative observation in his notes: “Europe is weary even of the Scandinavian women (Hedda Gabler, Rebecca Rosmer, Asta Allmers) whom the poetic genius of Ibsen created when the Slav heroines of Dostoievsky and Turgenev were growing stale. On what woman will the light of the poet’s mind now shine? Perhaps at last on the Celt. Vain question. Curl the hair how you will and undo it again as you will” (E 125).
this is from the notes/stage directions of Exiles. The play has “full text” versions online but they don’t include the notes.
links 1/17/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-17-2025
https://davekasten.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-essay-meta Dave Kasten, known Washington Insider and Dangerous Professional, says that the way to increase the chance your ideas make it into policy is to write essays online.
interestingly I’m reading this just as I’m hearing other people discuss how fruitless it is to write publicly, because nobody will understand you and take action based on your words. I think it probably depends how you write and what concepts you’re trying to get across, and what your bar is for “action.” People who think essays are useful are probably trying to reach across shorter inferential distances and make smaller nudges to people’s behavior.
https://www.rationalistjudaism.com/p/the-kezayis-post what is the minimum amount of matzah one is required to eat on Passover? traditionally it’s “the size of an olive.” but some people claim it’s about the size of a large pizza...because Biblical olives were huge??? (spoiler: no, they were not. we literally have thousand-year-old olive trees producing normal-sized olives.)
https://www.read.ai/ this is a fascinating app. Link it to your calendar and Zoom and it will accompany on you on all your meetings, summarize them, generate action items, and grade you on things like how fast you speak and how much other people seem to like you.
“bias” is their word for “how much positive emotion do you show”, which is a terrible word for that! did they let the statisticians do too much product design?
they will also keep track of how many “non-inclusive” things you say, apparently. i’m still at zero, not being much for slurs myself.
transcription accuracy is pretty good, but the app is often wrong about who’s speaking.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/the-culture-of-guns-the-culture-of-alcohol.html old Tyler Cowen post saying that if we blame guns for homicide/suicide we should, with equal or greater emphasis, also be blaming alcohol. Believable!
links 1/15/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-15-2025
https://www.proteinatlas.org/ seems like a good resource. Swedish.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_cloning human cloning was first discussed by JBS Haldane in a 1969 speech!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protalix_BioTherapeutics they seem pretty successful. enzyme replacement for Gaucher disease. Israeli.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillip_Frost interesting guy. “served as a lieutenant commander, U.S. Public Health Service at the National Cancer Institute, from 1963 to 1965.” Major pharma investor.
What happened to Amyris?
they used to be a biofuel company but couldn’t get production up and costs down:
https://web.archive.org/web/20241122084330/https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/05/10/2851/the-scientist-still-fighting-for-the-clean-fuel-the-world-forgot/
https://www.technologyreview.com/2012/02/10/20483/amyris-gives-up-making-biofuels-update/
https://www.fastcompany.com/1680328/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-company-that-was-going-to-have-us-all-using-biofuels
they pivoted to low-volume, high-price beauty & personal care ingredients, which actually generated a bunch of revenue, but not enough to cover costs. and then also bought a ton of celebrity beauty brands, which didn’t. 2022 stock plunge, 2023 bankruptcy.
https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/beauty/amyris-filed-for-bankruptcy/
https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/11/09/why-amyris-stock-was-driven-into-the-ground-on-wed/
https://www.retaildive.com/news/amyris-files-chapter-11-bankruptcy-lays-off-260-workers/690636/
https://www.voguebusiness.com/beauty/why-amyris-chapter-11-bankruptcy-is-the-latest-beauty-casualty
they’re not terrible at industrial fermentation (compared to other synbio unicorns) and have some lessons learned
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7695652/
they got in trouble with the SEC for recognizing more revenue than they actually made (according to standard accounting)
https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/administrative-proceedings/34-93341-s
https://www.science.org/content/article/synthetic-biology-once-hailed-moneymaker-meets-tough-times bad times for biomanufacturing/synbio overall
there are kind of...zero large profitable firms founded after 2000 that specialize in industrial fermentation/biomanufacturing, EXCEPT a couple of biotechs that make enzyme drugs.
there’s plenty of biomanufactured products but pretty much all from very large old boring firms at sorta commodity prices?
links 1/13/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-13-2025
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-skyscrapers-became-glass-boxes
plain glass box skyscrapers were, in fact, more cost-effective for developers. it’s not all about architectural tastes. architects in real life are very far from all-powerful.
in fact, I really think people should stop writing books/movies/etc about auteur architects; it only encourages more young people to go into architecture and become unemployed. I’m looking at you, Francis Ford Coppola
https://www.betonit.ai/p/the-typical-man-disgusts-the-typical
pointing in the right direction, but overstated/inflammatory. women don’t go around being “disgusted” by every man they interact with socially.
rather, most women find the idea of having sex with a randomly selected unfamiliar man disgusting, even if there’s nothing particularly the matter with him. typical straight women are cautious/selective about sex and fairly slow to warm up sexually to new people. not much “lust at first sight.”
but yeah, getting rejected when you ask women out does not in fact mean you are inadequate or unattractive! getting rejections in dating is normal, just like every author gets rejected manuscripts and every job applicant gets rejected from jobs. the average man gets a lot of “no”s and at least one “yes”, and eventually marries a “yes.”
also i share Bryan Caplan’s view that women shouldn’t be offended by being asked out by someone they aren’t interested in. sure, persistent harassment can be a problem, but a simple question isn’t.
https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/principles Nabeel Qureshi
I agree with most of this, but “you don’t need much sleep” is very individual. some of us very much need plenty of sleep and our lives improve dramatically when we face that fact.
things I googled while reading about Venice
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festa_della_Sensa
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_II_Orseolo
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Manzikert
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Innocent_III
Well, in context of dating (or OkCupid), I guess the idea is that sex is supposed to happen, sooner or later. And if there is no “lust at first sight”, I guess that means swipe left. (I am not sure; I don’t use dating apps.)
Not sure how representative your guess is of most dating app users. Certainly isn’t the case for me.
OK, I guess I got some assumption wrong, but please explain to me which one.
people use dating apps such as OkCupid with the intention of finding a potential sexual partner (as opposed to e.g. trying to find a platonic friend)
if someone is looking for a potential sexual partner, and finds someone such that the idea of having sex with him feels disgusting, she swipes left or whatever is the UI action for “go away” (as opposed to keeping the contact just in case the feeling might change in future)
I should’ve been clearer, my bad.
For most dating app users, I’m genuinely uncertain how representative both assumptions are, and I’d be curious to see more data regarding both (Aella’s surveys maybe?)
For me, neither assumption holds; I suspect this makes me un-representative of most users:
I decouple dating from sex, and do use these apps to find platonic acquaintances
I swipe right mostly if I predict the person is interesting to meet up with, and swipe left on the majority of “lust at first sight” profiles
Is that officially supported by the apps? Like, is there a selection like: “I am looking for… someone to marry / a one-night stand / a platonic friend”? Do you do something specific to indicate that platonic friends are what you are looking for?
I am asking because if there is such option, then probably many people use it that way. If not, then maybe your approach is unusual. (But maybe not too unusual, because otherwise people would not respond to you, or would be disappointed after meeting you?)
Depends on the app. Tinder for instance has a section called “What are you looking for?” that everyone else can see, whose selectable options include “New friends”, “Still figuring it out”, “Short-term fun”, “Long-term partner”, and a mix of the last two. People in my area use a pretty even mix of these, and their signaling is usually honest.
links 1/10/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-10-2025
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Romania
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamangia_culture
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni%E2%80%93Trypillia_culture
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armand_C%C4%83linescu
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Antonescu
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana_Pauker
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gheorghe_Gheorghiu-Dej
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C8%99escu
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_rural_systematization_program
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitate
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gheorghe_Pintilie
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pite%C8%99ti_Prison
https://balkaninsight.com/2021/02/03/long-shadow-how-romanias-securitate-turned-the-revolution-into-riches/
claims that the Securitate continued to exist de facto, even after the revolution that ended the Ceausescu dictatorship.
“This influence distorts democracy, says Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, a Romanian civic activist and a leading scholar on corruption. “There’s long been ample evidence of a ‘deep state’ in Romania with roots in the former security services,” she maintains.”
“The Securitate was declared defunct and, with no admission of previous crimes – including those committed in the revolution – or internal vetting, was chopped into nine separate services that corresponded to the Securitate’s organizational substructure. The new services were staffed and directed by virtually the same people as the old Securitate.”
“During the 1990s, the Securitate’s successors, the domestic SRI, the Foreign Intelligence Service, SIE, and others, exploited their wide-ranging resources and security monopoly to become oligarchs and form cartels in the post-Communist economy. So vast was their intelligence that they could blackmail compromised politicians, media professionals and judges. In post-communist Romania, just about everyone had something to hide.”
what went wrong at Zymergen?
https://manufacturingchemist.com/news/article_page/Where_Zymergen_went_wrong_a_biomanufacturing_perspective_for_synthetic_biology/204177
https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelauyeung/2021/08/03/as-biology-manufacturing-company-zymergen-implodes-correspondence-with-sec-showed-early-doubts/
https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2024/33-11303.pdf
https://polymerist.substack.com/p/zymergens-implosion
https://web.archive.org/web/20240423050337/https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2021/10/13/the-inside-story-of-how-softbank-backed-zymergen-imploded-four-months-after-its-3-billion-ipo/?sh=3df6dc87c2e0
https://www.bclplaw.com/en-US/events-insights-news/sec-penalizes-company-for-unsupported-hype.html
they failed to manufacture their first product to customers’ specifications, lost the orders, overstated the market for it (which the SEC sued them for), and admitted they had no revenue & would not be profitable for the foreseeable future shortly after their IPO.
ultimately the issue may be that they specialized in only one piece of the manufacturing process, strain optimization. they outsourced downstream processing and manufacturing scale-up to third party contractors, and those are often places where hiccups arise for new biomanufactured products.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rastafari
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haile_Selassie
https://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4140798-10-years-of-dubstep-by-subliminal-transmissions-digest
https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2023/controlled-burns-california-wildfire
“not enough controlled burns” and “climate change” are the causes of forest fires.
what’s going on in LA right now is a chaparral fire. controlled burns aren’t appropriate for chaparral. these are “wind-driven” fires spread by the Santa Ana winds, which are unusually strong this year, but the wind severity isn’t driven by climate change.
the human-preventable cause of these fires isn’t climate change or Smokey the Bear, but too many human-caused fires, in particular due to power lines, since PG&E has not adequately maintained the lines in California as population has risen and the power grid has grown.
https://www.npr.org/2006/12/15/6630791/name-calling-in-michael-crichtons-next amusing story about Michael Crichton putting an unflattering portrait of a journalist who criticized him in his (fiction) book.
https://topos.institute/work/ Topos Institute builds collaborative modeling tools based on category theory, useful for formalizing mathematics, system dynamics, epidemiology, etc.
try their tool CatColab here: https://catcolab.org/analysis/f79f1894-601f-49cf-9da1-00a2ebcc0792
textbook about these concepts: http://davidjaz.com/Papers/DynamicalBook.pdf
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2023/11/18/formalizing-the-proof-of-pfr-in-lean4-using-blueprint-a-short-tour/
https://github.com/PatrickMassot/leanblueprint the Blueprint library allows you to visualize the dependency graph of a proof in Lean
This is what seems to generally happen in post-communist countries, the difference is probably only in degree.
You have a secret police, which is an organization that exists for decades and is full of amoral people cooperating to keep a rule over the country. Then the regime is over, and...
Do you kill those people? Nope.
Do you at least put them on some kind of blacklist, saying “these people should never be allowed to get into any position of power”? Aaah… there were some feeble attempts, but generally no.
Well, guess what happens next. Many of those people get into the new positions of power (it’s not like their skills are useless now, so they can e.g. join the non-secret police), and they know they have a network of former colleagues they can trust, who are also seeking positions of power. Together they can take over some institutions, the only question is which ones and how completely.
In worst case, even large parts of the old institutions remain, only rebranded.
links 1/8/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-08-2025
https://neuromatch.io/ company courses & networking opportunities in fields like neuroscience, climate science, AI, etc; matching collaborators
https://birdflurisk.com/ H5N1 risk dashboard
https://www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/solving-intelligence-requires-new-research-and-funding-models/ the case for big funding of brain mapping & modeling, by David A. Markowitz
“The recent mapping of an entire adult fruit fly brain—a watershed achievement that made headlines worldwide—offers a glimpse of what’s possible. But this breakthrough almost didn’t happen. It required the serendipitous alignment of support from three non-traditional funders: Scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus imaged the complete fly brain; the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity drove the development of tools for scalable neural-circuit mapping through its MICrONS program; and the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative provided sustained support for data analysis.”
it might cost $1B to fully map & model the brain. ARPA-style and FRO-style research orgs are essential.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.02.13.580186v4.full if you just use neural nets to model the output of C. elegans’ 302 neurons, bigger networks are better.
continuous-time RNNs scale the best—even better than transformers.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.22.614271v2.full
optogenetically perturb each neuron in C. elegans and see what happens to neural output in all 302 neurons
fit this as a simple multivariate dynamical system—each neuron’s output at time t is a linear function of all the neurons’ output at time t-1, plus a linear function of the neurons’ history of optogenetic stimulation, plus error.
compare to a simpler, connectome-constrained model, where each neuron’s output is only a function of its presynaptic input neurons (and direct optogenetic stimulation). this is actually a good approximation!
in fact, it’s better than a fully-connected model, OR a “shuffled-connectome” model based on a made-up C. elegans connectome with similar topological properties to the real one. the true connectome matters.
if you train a connectome model without one neuron, it predicts something about what activity “should” be there. correlation at 0.30 with the real one, much higher than a “fake” connectome model’s correlation with reality.
model weights don’t reflect synapse counts, though. “multi-hop” trajectories have significant influence on correlations (i.e. neuron A and neuron B’s activity may still be highly correlated even if A and B are more than one step away on the “connectome graph”).
it would be shocking if connectomes didn’t matter, so in a sense this is not a surprising set of results; but this is a first example of collecting data with the optogenetic perturbation method, which is a major step towards true neural simulations.
a simulation should be able to predict what every neuron would do under various circumstances.
gathering data on the worms in varying behavioral/environmental contexts could approximate this, but manipulating each neuron one at a time gives a much more thorough picture of the input-output relationships of the nervous system.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.06578
roadmap document for full reverse-engineering simulation of the C. elegans nervous system, by Adam Marblestone and many others
includes perturbation!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asha Zoroastrian concept of “truth” or “right”
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/outside-view-yatharth/ Patrick McKenzie interviewed by Yatharth
https://mad.science.blog/2020/07/07/desummation/ theory that NMDA receptor antagonists’ hallucinogenic and “psychotomimetic” effects come from inhibition of memory.
NMDA receptors (for glutamate) are important in long-term potentiation, in which “a neuron becomes highly sensitive to excitatory transmission for days or weeks” following recurrent stimulation.
long-term potentiation is important in associative memory. it “strengthens” a neural connection that has been sufficiently strongly/repeatedly made.
NMDAr inhibitor drugs reduce this effect.
so does schizophrenia
Neurons have “summation” effects.
“spatial summation”—if two neurons stimulate a third, the effect is stronger than if only one did.
“temporal summation”—repeated stimulation has a stronger effect than a one-off.
it is a form of coincidence detection; multiple “simultaneous” events are treated as a bigger deal, less likely to be flukes or errors.
the NMDAr inhibitor dexmethorphan inhibits this effect.
so does schizophrenia.
normal subjects have “prepulse inhibition”, aka the reaction to a loud startling noise is less intense if preceded by a small pulse sound.
this is a form of temporal summation; signals generated by the prepulse accumulate and prepare the brain for further sound, preventing the startle response.
schizophrenics don’t have this; they get startled both ways, indicating (?) that the prepulse sound doesn’t “accumulate” properly.
“desummation” or “cognitive atomization” is like a failure to anticipate; new stimuli are fresh, not expected.
this coincides with the subjective effects of NMDAr inhibitors: at low doses there is “increasing perceptual acuity for things usually unnoticed” and at high doses there is “inability to notice a lot of previously learned meaning”, “inability to recognize familiar stimuli”, added “noise”, and loss of “definition and meaning.”
visual agnosias are a common reported ketamine effect
NMDAr inhibition causes amnesia effects in patients
patients on low-dose ketamine do not retain things they learned while on the drug
“PsychonautWiki lists ‘memory suppression’ as a distinct effect from amnesia as a side effect of NMDAr antagonists. In the description of this effect it notes that short-term memory is suppressed much earlier than long-term memory. At very high doses, the Wiki suggests that one may even forget who they are, where they live, or even a failure to remember what humans are”
impaired short-term memory relates to sensations of unfamiliarity and dissociation (if you can’t remember stuff, you don’t know what it is)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereogram
excellent explanation of how “magic eye” pictures work; i can now see them for the first time in my life!
https://smoothbrains.net/posts/2023-08-01-ketamine.html personal experience with ketamine
effects:
visual agnosias, “2D vision”, loss of “egocentric coordinates” in spatial perception, “expanded” awareness
music perception is different—complex music is confusing, repetitive drones are hypnotic
tactile feelings are pleasurable, muscle tension is strongly reduced
aversions are dampened, in particular by making them slower—from the usual “100 ms” to “500 ms”.
celebrity cases of ketamine deaths:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/arrests-made-connection-accidental-death-actor-matthew-perry-rcna166676 Matthew Perry, found face down in a heated pool
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Frisch Gary Frisch, found dead beneath an 8th floor window with ketamine in his blood and liver
notice that these are plausibly fatal accidents or suicides while under the influence. this is a potential danger of recreational use that won’t show up in stats about medical use or experimental administration to animals.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/elliptic-curve-murmurations-found-with-ai-take-flight-20240305/ wavy “murmurations” found in elliptic curves with machine-learning algorithms
https://www.quantamagazine.org/behold-modular-forms-the-fifth-fundamental-operation-of-math-20230921/ modular forms!
https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/regulators-almost-killed-biotech
“from the very first announcement of successes in cloning DNA (the foundational technology of recombinant insulin) in 1973, the first reaction of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Institute of Medicine was to try to stop research into it and, simultaneously, to prevent any patenting of it. The National Institute of Health followed shortly thereafter with their own restrictions, as did a number of cities, including Cambridge and Berkeley, the towns where the universities most likely to do the research were located”
Genentech, a tiny garage startup, was able to escape those restrictions.
https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/whats-alprazolams-deal alprazolam (Xanax) is reputed to have a fast onset and fast diminution of its anti-anxiety effect, compared to lorazepam (Ativan), making it more abusable and less useful for anxiety disorders. but why? all the theories seem wrong!
also, diazepam (Valium) has exactly the same fast onset/fast diminution, but doctors don’t seem to worry about it the same way!
it looks like the difference isn’t about half-life, elimination, or the blood-brain barrier, but something about ligand-receptor binding.
links 11/26/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-26-2024
https://chrislakin.blog/archive sensible, but not actionable for me, advice on becoming less insecure.
https://abundance.institute pro-progress think tank, where Eli Dourado works
The Myth of Er is the final scene of Plato’s Republic.
it is a very strange story. in the afterlife, the good are rewarded in heaven and the bad are punished in hell; and then everyone lines up to choose their new reincarnated life. they get to see how each possible life will play out. people who have led unhappy lives often prefer to reincarnate as animals. people who were only virtuous out of habit and went to heaven often choose to be all-powerful tyrants, not realizing how this will backfire and hurt them. people who have learned philosophy are more likely to choose lives of virtue; they also “forget less” about their past lives by drinking from Lethe.
so in one sense it’s straightforwardly a pitch for philosophy...but it has more moving parts than would seem to be necessary just to make that point.
most myths/stories about “good is rewarded, evil is punished” don’t have this homeostatic mechanism where the good are most likely to turn bad (since Heaven makes them complacent) and the bad are more likely to turn good (since Hell makes them wish for a better next life.) why put that in?
how does this whole reincarnation thing relate to the rest of the Republic, which is ambiguous between being a plan for an ideal city and a metaphor for the ideal internal organization of the soul?
https://beccatarnas.com/2013/10/17/the-myth-of-er/
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/the-spindle-of-necessity/
war in the Middle East
https://www.fairobserver.com/politics/fo-exclusive-the-israel-iran-conflict-is-getting-more-dangerous/
https://indianexpress.com/article/world/iran-vows-response-israeli-airstrikes-escalating-tensions-9688373/
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/2/khamenei-warns-israel-us-of-crushing-response-for-actions-against-iran
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/26/israel-strikes-iran-what-we-know-so-far-and-whats-next
what went wrong with Gingko Bioworks?
first of all, their stock price crashed after short seller Scorpion Capital reported that most of their “revenue” was from self-funded “related parties” that often had the same staff and office space...aka they weren’t “really” selling to other companies much at all.
but what was the underlying technical problem? why couldn’t they sell biomanufactured compounds profitably?
one possibility: they were focusing on compounds that could be synthesized chemically, much more cheaply, that you would only grow from microbes if you wanted some sort of “all-natural” label
another possibility: their service was limited to (parallelized, automated) yeast strain optimization in very small samples -- 384-well plates. they didn’t do scale-up (growing the yeast in large reactors) and they didn’t do downstream processing (extracting the product from the yeast). this may have lowered their rate of generating successful products, because many failures happen in the parts of the process they didn’t specialize in.
this is the manufacturing equivalent of what, in drug discovery, would be a CRO that only does a certain range of in-vitro screens. obviously many things that pass the screens will fail in animals or clinical trials. and obviously the value of an early screening service is quite low compared to the value of a successful end product.
https://www.reddit.com/r/biotech/comments/1cwlpj3/whats_wrong_with_ginkgo_bioworks/
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/24/1032308/is-ginkgos-synthetic-biology-story-worth-15-billion/
https://www.pagetwentyone.com/post/ginkgo-bioworks-rise-and-fall-of-15-billion-biotech-unicorn
https://www.reddit.com/r/ginkgobioworks/comments/qgx2t1/updated_ginkgo_partner_tracker/
https://healthandwealth.substack.com/p/ginkgo-bioworks-part-2
https://www.living.tech/articles/ginkgo-bioworks-original-sin
https://www.nanalyze.com/2023/03/ginkgo-bioworks-bait-switch/
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4691850-ginkgo-bioworks-broken-narrative
https://medium.com/@kahunacapbio/ginkgo-bioworks-cell-program-success-and-failure-7eb988c6d549
https://scorpioncapital.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/reports/DNA1.pdf
https://foundrytheory.substack.com/ I’m gonna be real with you—for all the bad results, I love Gingko’s marketing. It makes me sad when people slam “hype” because this is so beautiful. Aesthetically tasteful, intellectually stimulating, emotionally inspiring. Everything they’ve done on the marketing front is just the best. and tbh it’s worked for them—the one thing even the damning reports show is how great they are at starting early-stage conversations with Fortune 500 companies. (they just rarely get all the way to actual products, revenue, and happy customers.) I’ll be sad if the end of the ZIRP era means the end of pretty design and delightful copy.
https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/ AI-for-bio company
https://www.maximumnewyork.com/p/political-capital-savings-plan
I’m sure Daniel Golliher is doing a healthy thing but I struggle to get on board myself.
I think he’s probably right that in order to actually make a political impact you have to pick a very small issue (like basketball courts in your city) to spend a lot of time on and you have to, um, have friends.
I looked into public art one time—how do people get their murals etc into public spaces? -- and the answer was, simply, that they are full time on that project. they live eat sleep and breathe public art. now, do I like pretty things? yes. do I care so much about public art in particular that i would want to be full time on it? no.
Given that I don’t want to spend my life on the issues “small enough” that i could actually shift them, it is absolutely rational for me not to participate in politics and to find it an uncongenial place! i can make a way bigger impact, much faster, with the reputational capital (and literal money) I’ve built up in more SV-adjacent circles than I can by grinding on NYC neighborhood issues.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-024-01784-3
Is connectomics actually useful for anything? here’s strong evidence for “yes.”
Mapping how neurons connect and using graph clustering gives you (anatomically sensible) functional distinctions into systems like “oculomotor” (which governs eye movements) and “axial” (which governs movements along the body axis.)
Looking at the spectrum of the graph also predicts a chunky “wiring diagram”. Simulating the dynamics of this wiring diagram recapitulates real electrophysiology. In other words, just doing mathy graph stuff allowed the researchers to infer a modular organization at an intermediate scale between neurons and gross anatomy, a useful scale for predicting neural behavior. This is literally “cutting reality at the joints”.
One thing that has frustrated me as an amateur learning neuroscience is that we have a microscale (cells) and a macroscale (brain anatomy) but function — the brain’s ability to carry out specific tasks — has to happen at some kind of meso-scale regarding the interaction of groups of neurons. Clearly there’s redundancy — it’s possible for two different neuron-by-neuron patterns of activity to reflect “the same” functional behavior — so we need a “unit of function” that’s “all the activity patterns that do the same thing” — probably that coincides somewhat with spatial co-location, similar cell type, etc, but not at all necessarily! Only once you have “units of function” can you talk about the brain like a machine, know what its “state” is and how that “state” would change under specific interventions, simulate it efficiently, etc.
To understand brain function, we’d need to be able to discern human-interpretable “parts” of brain activity, like “remembering your grandmother just is the fizz blorking the buzz”…but we don’t seem to know what the “fizz”, the “buzz” or “blorking” are. We’d need to have “chunky things” in the brain-activity space, the way molecules, cells, or anatomical structures are “chunky things” at the micro and macro scales. And I felt like “what am I missing? does anybody in neuroscience even care about chunky-things? am I wrong to care? or do I just have the wrong keyword?”
This paper definitely seems like an example of “chunky things neuroscience”, which is encouraging!
It’s been a while since I’ve read Plato’s Republic, but isn’t the Myth of Er just a abstraction of the way people make decision based on (perceived) justice and injustice in their everyday life? Just in the same way that Socrates says it is easier to read large print than small print, so he scales up justice from an individual to the titular Kallipolis, so too the day to day determinism of choices motivated by what we consider is ‘fair’ or ‘just’ is easier seen if multiplied over endless cycles of lives, than days and nights.
Is it possible that Plato was saying that day to day we experience this homeostatic mechanism? (if you are rational enough to observe the patterns of how your choices affect your personal circumstances?).
An example from the Republic itself: if I remember correctly the entire dialogue starts because Socrates is in effect kidnapped after the end of a festival because his interlocutors find him so darn entertaining. This would appear to be unjust—but not unexpected because he is Socrates which he has this reputation for being engaging and wise even if it is not the ‘right’ or ‘just’ way to treat him. How then should he behave in future, knowing that this is the potential cost of his social behavior? And the Myth of Er says that Odysseus kept to himself, sought neither virtue nor tyranny. That’s probably the wrong reading. It’s been a while since I’ve read it.
links 11/18/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-18-2024
[[links]]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Roerich I like his art; he seems to have led an interesting life
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Quentin_de_La_Tour Rococo portraits
https://www.zach.be/p/yc-is-wrong-about-llms-for-chip-design
this doesn’t seem to be a coherent argument—author claims both that LLMs will indeed be used by chip design companies to save on human labor, and that they’re not very good and can only replace the more routine parts of a chip designer’s work. But...this isn’t “YC is wrong, there is not a startup opportunity in using LLMs for chip design!” even if it’s true it’s just a more measured and realistic picture of what LLMs will be doing in chip design!
and they even make sure to shill their own AI-for-chip-hardware startup, which they claim is working on challenges that nobody else is: https://www.normalcomputing.com/
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/how-chaotic-is-trump-ii-going-to speculation about Donald Trump’s foreign policy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Defoe i want to read his nonfiction
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotex sanitary pads have been around since 1920
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-death-and-life-of-prediction-markets-at-google the tl;dr: Google’s first internal prediction market was intended to go public and stalled as the regulatory environment remained unfriendly; its successor focused on predictions about competitor activity rather than Google’s own activity (which is less subject to “office politics” considerations blocking an honest assessment of Google’s chances of success etc) and never intended to be public-facing, and is still in active use.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7oise_d%27Aubign%C3%A9,_Marquise_de_Maintenon
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_de_Pompadour patroness of the French Enlightenment.
“who was that woman who was an influential mistress to the King of France, politically savvy and queen in all but name”? “which one? this just keeps happening”
https://nintil.com/dont-assume this is Jose Luis Ricon life advice, which unsurprisingly tells you to be less afraid of things and talk to people more.
shan’t.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Monroe
https://calisphere.org/item/0bc1137c37161874ded76c71bf982409/ scary guys
It would have been nice to read A Journal of the Plague Year during covid.
links 11/07/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-07-2024
on Donna Karan
https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/donna-karan-seven-career-highlights-cold-shoulder
https://www.vogue.com/article/donna-karan-vintage
https://du42p.r.a.d.sendibm1.com/mk/mr/sh/1f8JAEjGcfF85pENVqcuM6hh5D/tiVMw3KFimvC?fbclid=IwY2xjawGZnpRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHdHszEMzS3x1Xda2tTh60KMighJEJKDe30rsduQmFydSSyfTpK8mwG50vg_aem_IjjUQWdiwZf2AdgdLo9azA opinion on how hormonal contraception should be done differently—I’m intrigued but I haven’t yet checked these claims out
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8720 Eric S. Raymond on “user stories” done right and wrong
https://endpts.com/biotech-industry-worries-over-potential-for-rfk-jr-ally-as-fda-pick/ Casey Means has been floated as the new pick for FDA head; apparently she’s expressed concerns about vaccines and over-medication on the Joe Rogan podcast and has written a book about how most chronic diseases can be prevented by healthy lifestyles (which probably overstates the case)
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-tyranny-of-climate-targets Matt Yglesias on why a lot of aggressive climate targets are impossible to actually meet.
why do people try anyway? if it’s “cheap talk”, why is there so much costly, substantive follow-through? incentive misalignment, I suppose?
https://www.gordian.bio/blog/the-in-vivo-screening-revolution/ Martin Borch Jensen on in-vivo screening
links 10/30/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-30-2024
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10136898/ FRET is a biosensor modality.
“FRET is a non-radiative transfer of energy from an excited donor fluorophore molecule to a nearby acceptor fluorophore molecule...When the biomolecule of interest is present, it can cause a change in the distance between the donor and acceptor, leading to a change in the efficiency of FRET and a corresponding change in the fluorescence intensity of the acceptor. This change in fluorescence can be used to detect and quantify the biomolecule of interest.”
advantages:
real-time
non-destructive
sensitive to very low concentrations (picomolar and nanomolar)
highly specific because it detects conformational changes in biological molecules
this article is from a not-great journal and the author clearly does not have English as a first language… at some point i will need a more reputable source, this was from googling FRET quickly
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-case-against-proposition-36 Clara Collier gives the narrow, evidence-based case that shorter jail sentences didn’t cause California’s property crime wave or drug overdose death epidemic, and longer jail sentences won’t fix those problems
I’m pretty convinced but I don’t follow this topic in great detail
metastatic malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumor is pretty bad—median survival is only 8 months after metastases are detected. but one M.O. that seems to help in several case studies is “sequence the tumor, find a mutation, use a drug that’s approved for other cancer types with the same mutation.”
PD-L1 overexpression? use a PD-1 inhibitor! checkpoint immunotherapy stays winning.
https://www.spandidos-publications.com/10.3892/ol.2024.14556 sintilimab
https://aacrjournals.org/cancerimmunolres/article/7/9/1396/470072/PD-1-Inhibition-Achieves-a-Complete-Metabolic pembrolizumab
https://scholars.uthscsa.edu/en/publications/pembrolizumab-achieves-a-complete-response-in-an-nf-1-mutated-pd- pembrolizumab
https://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/PO.18.00375 nivolumab
BRAF V600E mutation? try a BRAF inhibitor!
https://jnccn.org/view/journals/jnccn/11/12/article-p1466.xml vemurafenib
other Raf stuff: maybe sorafenib?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.4161/cbt.7.6.5932
shit that doesn’t work:
sirolimus https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1155/2020/5784876
chemo is...not great but better than nothing. some partial responses, no complete responses, survival extended by maybe a few months. mostly it seems best to have doxorubicin in the mix.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1155/2017/8685638
https://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/JCO.2024.42.16_suppl.11583
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0923753419377907
https://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/jco.2010.28.15_suppl.e20512
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1155/2011/705345 ok here’s a complete response to chemo + surgery. it can ever happen.
https://ar.iiarjournals.org/content/40/3/1619.short case of long-term survival after keeping chemotherapy going a *really long time* at gradually decreasing dose and widening inter-treatment interval.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ijc.33201 pazopanib, an angiogenesis inhibitor, similarly has a low response rate but can extend survival a bit
https://proof-scaling-meeting.vercel.app/ formal verification conference
https://chalmermagne.substack.com/p/death-by-a-thousand-roundtables what it’s actually like to work in UK policy. sounds dismal.
https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/ AI bombing. critical perspective on Israel.
https://goingon.org/ a timeline-based, “citizen journalism” news site.
https://statistics.berkeley.edu/about/news/steinhardt-announces-co-founding-transluce-non-profit-ai-research-lab AI interpretability nonprofit, Jacob Steinhardt
mech-interp seems like straightforwardly real and good work from a variety of perspectives on AI. helps with many risk scenarios including some x-risk scenarios; helps make the technology stronger & more reliable, which is good for the industry in the long run.
https://blog.benjaminreinhardt.com/young-people-technical-training this is straightforwardly true, yes, you should learn technical stuff.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezos-washington-post-trust/ Jeff Bezos on why the Washington Post isn’t endorsing a Presidential candidate. this is a solidly written persuasive essay; it seemed legit to me, but I could be persuaded otherwise.
links 10/29/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-29-2024
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/oct/29/acute-psychosis-inner-voices-avatar-therapy-psychiatry a therapist acting out the voices in your head might be an effective treatment for psychosis
https://www.futurehouse.org/research-announcements/wikicrow SOTA (?) paper summarization from FutureHouse
links 10/23/24:
https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-23-2024
https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2024/10/21/i-got-dysentery-so-you-dont-have-to/ personal experience at a human challenge trial, by the excellent Georgia Ray
https://catherineshannon.substack.com/p/the-male-mind-cannot-comprehend-the
I...guess this isn’t wrong, but it’s a kind of Take I’ve never been able to relate to myself. Maybe it’s because I found Legit True Love at age 22, but I’ve never had that feeling of “oh no the men around me are too weak-willed” (not in my neck of the woods they’re not!) or “ew they’re too interested in going to the gym” (gym rats are fine? it’s a hobby that makes you good-looking, I’m on board with this) or “they’re not attentive and considerate enough” (often a valid complaint, but typically I’m the one who’s too hyperfocused on my own work & interests) or “they’re too show-offy” (yeah it’s irritating in excess but a little bit of show-off energy is enlivening).
Look: you like Tony Soprano because he’s competent and lives by a code? But you don’t like it when a real-life guy is too competitive, intense, or off doing his own thing? I’m sorry, but that’s not how things work.
Tony Soprano can be light-hearted and always have time for the women around him because he is a fictional character. In real life, being good at stuff takes work and is sometimes stressful.
My husband is, in fact, very close to this “Tony Soprano” ideal—assertive, considerate, has “boyish charm”, lives by a “code”, is competent at lots of everyday-life things but isn’t too busy for me—and I guarantee you would not have thought to date him because he’s also nerdy and argumentative and wouldn’t fit in with the yuppie crowd.
Also like. This male archetype is a guy who fixes things for you and protects you and makes you feel good. In real life? Those guys get sad that they’re expected to give, give, give and nobody cares about their feelings. I haven’t watched The Sopranos but my understanding is that Tony is in therapy because the strain of this life is getting to him. This article doesn’t seem to have a lot of empathy with what it’s like to actually be Tony...and you probably should, if you want to marry him.
https://fas.org/publication/the-magic-laptop-thought-experiment/ from Tom Kalil, a classic: how to think about making big dreams real.
https://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html Paul Graham’s business case studies!
https://substack.com/home/post/p-150520088 a celebratory reflection on the recent Progress Conference. Yes, it was that good.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hecuba in some tellings (not Homer’s), Hecuba turns into a dog from grief at the death of her son.
https://www.librariesforthefuture.bio/p/lff
a framework for thinking about aging: “1st gen” is delaying aging, which is where the field started (age1, metformin, rapamycin), while “2nd gen” is pausing (stasis), repairing (reprogramming), or replacing (transplanting), cells/tissues. 2nd gen usually uses less mature technologies (eg cell therapy, regenerative medicine), but may have a bigger and faster effect size.
“function, feeling, and survival” are the endpoints that matter.
biomarkers are noisy and speculative early proxies that we merely hope will translate to a truly healthier life for the elderly. apply skepticism.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-143303463 I always like what Maxim Raginsky has to say. you can’t do AI without bumping into the philosophy of how to interpret what it’s doing.
links 10/9/24 https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/yI03T5V6t
links 8/7/2024
https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/yI03T5V6t
links 10/4/2024
https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-04-2024
links 10/2/2024:
https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-02-2024