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.
sarahconstantin
Karma: 7,813
What Goes Without Saying
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.”
why wouldn’t you want regexes?
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
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.
plausible...but surely walking isn’t “consummatory”? And turning on the DBS doesn’t cause “automatic/involuntary” walking movements.
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.”
“Schizo” as an approving term, referring to strange, creative, nonconformist (and maybe but not necessarily clinically schizophrenic) is a much wider meme online. it’s even a semi-mainstream scientific theory that schizophrenia persists in the human population because mild/subclinical versions of the trait are adaptive, possibly because they make people more creative. And, of course, there’s a psychoanalytic/continental-philosophy tradition of calling lots of things psychosis very loosely, including good things. This isn’t one guy’s invention!
if you are literally worried about the risk of inducing hallucinations, i would be more cautious about things like overusing recreational drugs or not getting enough sleep, and less paranoid (lol) about talking to people or engaging with ideas.
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
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.
“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 agree, and I am a bit disturbed that it needs to be said.
At normal, non-EA organizations—and not only particularly villainous ones, either! -- it is understood that you need to avoid sharing any information that reflects poorly on the organization, unless it’s required by law or contract or something. The purpose of public-facing communications is to burnish the org’s reputation. This is so obvious that they do not actually spell it out to employees.
Of COURSE any organization that has recently taken down unflattering information is doing it to maintain its reputation.
I’m sorry, but this is how “our people” get taken for a ride. Be more cynical, including about people you like.
I’m still on Roam and using it every day. For me, it’s not “a lot of work”, it’s what’s necessary to keep track of my thoughts to the point that I feel like my mental workspace is clean. I’ve journaled a lot since I was a kid. I think better in writing.
This is my permanent diary. I will probably have it for the rest of my life, if they keep supporting it. Twenty years from now, I’ll want to know what I was doing today!
I also log literally all links of “general interest” in my browsing history in my public Roam. does anyone care? Probably not, but it matters to me.
Roam doesn’t make me smarter. To be honest, in my current life I don’t especially need to be smarter. But I do think it makes me more consistent and coherent. It helps me realize when I’ve had a thought before, and what thoughts I keep coming back to. It helps me “listen to my own voice”, which is an antidote to peer pressure. And it helps me see change over time—what things I’ve said in the past that seem foolish now, how long it takes me to emotionally process things (sometimes years!), etc.
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.
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
Funding individuals doesn’t seem at all ruled out by our mission and I agree it’s a good thing.
IANAL and I don’t know much about how that interacts with tax deductibility.
Announcement: AI for Math Fund
The Dream Machine
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.
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