When you hear that a pandemic virus is mutating, you feel ___ about its impact on humanity
i'm curious bc i see lots of discussions of mutations by virologists on twitter, but i don't see any "more afraid" responses. i could be very wrong, but from what i can tell from virology 101, it's not uncommon for viruses mutate towards being less fatal (to optimize for spread).
I get wonderful shared delight from hearing others talk abt deep insights that influence/delight them.
I'm also curious what constitutes "depth" (broad implications, surprise, difficulty, etc.).
Would you share a deep insight that influences/delights you + explain why?
Thought sparked by this snippet from @Noahpinion's interview w/ @VitalikButerin where they get into the reasoning behind the coming switch of Ethereum from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake:
#Idea - NLP to do initial clustering/classification of altmetric-aggregated discussion of preprints, to facilitate finding high-signal discussions and critiques of preprints (honestly would want this for any paper!).
Preprint servers already hook into @altmetric to expose mentions of a paper in news/blogs + social media (tweets).
But it links to an undifferentiated list of sources (not titles, citation contexts) - good for signaling "attention", missed opportunity to get real context.
If preprint servers have access to commercial API from @altmetric, classifying (and then clustering, enabling searching by) these mentions is eminently doable (e.g., can frame as a straightforward citation context classification problem, like with @scite and @SemanticScholar)
A striking example of "behind the scenes" of great research: Esther Duflo noted that a crucial enabler of her Nobel-prize-winning work was a masterful synthesis of human resource economics in a handbook chapter.
I... think I tracked down the (141-page!!!) handbook chapter?
And it is indeed wonderful!
What a synthesis indeed of a conclusion!
Clearly identifying progress, and also crucial open problems, deeply grounded in a detailed analysis of the literature.
Started as a "short thread", turned into a longer thing. Hope you find it helpful!
There's been some good discussion on effective search as a core primitive for tools for thought, and the limitations of existing tools, such as @RoamResearch wrt search.