Senior writer at Vox's Future Perfect. We're not doomed, we just have a big to-do list.
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Sep 23 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Going to get this in before the SB 1047 decision is made, so that it doesn't just come across as commentary on the decision: this was the California legislative process I've reported on most closely and it actually made me feel notably more proud of California democracy.
The state politicians I talked to all seemed pretty smart, they'd talked to a lot of different people and could articulate several different perspectives, they did a good job of having their eye on the ball and seeing what the most important questions and disagreements were.
Aug 26 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
A bunch of people learned about Don Poldermans' use of fictitious data in the DECREASE trial series that informed European surgical guidelines from my newsletter last Friday. I got a bunch of questions, in particular about the estimated fatalities (🧵)
And I wanted to talk a bit more baout whether Poldermans really killed 800,000 people. Here's what I wrote in the newsletter:
Aug 12 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Okay I'm sorry but I absolutely despise the 'elite hypocrisy' line here. No society has ever done more than ours to require poor people to live like the elite do, and this is often really bad for them. We ban cheap housing because it's better for people to live in nicer housing.
We ban (as child neglect, for which the punishment is stochastic 'never seeing your child again') having your upper elementary school aged children walk home from school, let themselves in, and work on their homework until their parents get home. Hire a babysitter!
Jul 16 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I think "there was a deal and it has broken down" is an incredibly powerful and pervasive sentiment in tech, not just among Trump supporters but among committed and sincere liberals too.
What was the deal? Hard to pin down exactly but something like - we will build ambitious things and pay high taxes and donate lots of money and mostly not play politics and you will treat us as valued pillars of our community, make our cities livable, stay mostly out of the way.
Jul 8 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
I was surprised by this, as the last official count I'd heard was around 35,000, so I clicked through to see what happened. What happened is that they argue that for every direct death in conflict there are often > 4 indirect deaths. So they multiplied the death toll by 4.
I am worried this is not a very good methodology for estimating civilian deaths in Gaza. I had some trouble figuring out what they're citing for the rate of direct to indirect deaths in conflict zones, because the Lancet editorial links an unrelated UN pdf about the drug trade..
May 22 • 25 tweets • 7 min read
Scoop: OpenAI's senior leadership says they were unaware ex-employees who didn't sign departure docs were threatened with losing their vested equity. But their signatures on relevant documents (which Vox is now releasing) raise questions about whether they could have missed it. vox.com/future-perfect…
Vox reviewed separation letters from multiple employees who left the company over the last five years. These letters state that employees have to sign within 60 days to retain their vested equity. The letters are signed by former VP Diane Yoon and general counsel Jason Kwon.
May 17 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
I'm getting two reactions to my piece about OpenAI's departure agreements: "that's normal!" (it is not; the other leading AI labs do not have similar policies) and "how is that legal?" It may not hold up in court, but here's how it works:
OpenAI like most tech companies does salaries as a mix of equity and base salary. The equity is in the form of PPUs, 'Profit Participation Units'. You can look at a recent OpenAI offer and an explanation of PPUs here: levels.fyi/blog/openai-co…
May 17 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
When you leave OpenAI, you get an unpleasant surprise: a departure deal where if you don't sign a lifelong nondisparagement commitment, you lose all of your vested equity: vox.com/future-perfect…
Equity is part of negotiated compensation; this is shares (worth a lot of $$) that the employees already earned over their tenure at OpenAI. And suddenly they're faced with a decision on a tight deadline: agree to a legally binding promise to never criticize OpenAI, or lose it.
Mar 19, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
You may have seen the story that GPT-4 told a taskrabbit it was blind in order to solve a captcha. The team that conducted safety testing, ARC evaluations, has a blog post out now about how that test went down: evals.alignment.org/blog/2023-03-1…
The big things that confused me about the original story were: why was GPT-4 asking a Taskrabbit for help instead of using a service like 2Captcha? Which steps here did GPT-4 do independently? The blog post was helpful for explaining those things.
Nov 3, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
People might think Matt is overstating this but I literally heard it from NYT reporters at the time. There was a top-down decision that tech could not be covered positively, even when there was a true, newsworthy and positive story. I'd never heard anything like it.
For the record, Vox has never told me that my coverage of something must be 'hard-hitting' or must be critical or must be positive, and if they did, I would quit. Internal culture can happen in more subtle ways but the thing the NYT did is not normal.
Oct 22, 2022 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
I have now had someone *impersonate a virologist* (badly) in order to, I assume, learn what emails I'm sending to schedule interviews about the Covid preprint claiming to find a synthetic lab origin. Setting aside that this is insane behavior, happy to show my work.
When I learned that this preprint had been released, I read it, talked to my editor about it, decided it was worth digging into deeply to understand the analysis and any flaws in it and deliver a full explainer on the claims in the paper and whether they stand up to scrutiny.
Aug 16, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Okay, very important sociology question. Someone is talking and you know where they're going with the sentence. You gesture or interrupt or finish the sentence for them as a way of indicating they should move on to the next one:
Answer this one ONLY IF YOU ARE CULTURALLY JEWISH (whatever that means to you). Same question as above.
Aug 15, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Preview of tomorrow's Future Perfect newsletter: to get to the bottom of why Meta's new chatbot is so bad, I spent hours talking to it. It turned out to be, uh, a Genghis Khan apologist???
Aug 10, 2022 • 236 tweets • >60 min read
With effective altruism in the news absolutely everyone has been publishing their takes on the movement, and I keep thinking of things I want to say in response to all of them but don't have time. So let's try this: 1 like = 1 opinion on effective altruism and its critics.
Global health interventions totally save peoples' lives and many of them won't be funded unless individual donors decide to donate money. There's lots of clever contrarian second-order stuff which just doesn't really touch this core fact about the world.
Aug 9, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Meta's free, open BlenderBot is remarkably bad compared to GPT-3 or other top-of-the-line language models I've played with. I'm confused about why they released something so much worse than the state of the art.
There's something about playing with a true SOTA language model that is terrifying and compelling. They're clever; they have the occasional beautiful turn of phrase; even when something they say is basically word salad, it takes a reread to *notice*.
May 7, 2022 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
I wrote for Vox about viral discovery, going out into nature to find lots of viruses and maybe find one that'll cause a future pandemic: vox.com/future-perfect…. When I first started writing about pandemics, I was pretty excited about viral discovery work.
Intuitively, it seems like a clever idea. If we know what's coming, we can design vaccines and treatments before it even arrives, and not be caught off guard. Imagine if you could go back to 2017 with the Covid-19 genome and have everyone know exactly what to look out for!
Mar 15, 2022 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
The top-line result of this study of microlending is that it helps women start businesses and earn income. But unfortunately, the businesses they are starting are often multilevel marketing businesses, where you mostly make money by signing up other people. (1/7)
I read the 18-month mid-experiment report for this a year and a half ago and was really concerned about the prevalence of MLMs among the 'success stories' of women starting jobs, but it was unclear from the mid-experiment data whether the microloans caused the women to join MLMs.
Nov 9, 2021 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Related to this, there is some horrifying pathos in the story of the meltdown of entrepreneur Steve Kirsch, who founded the Covid-19 Early Treatment Fund and then alienated basically everyone in it.
Another piece of advice for thinking about ivermectin: think of a specific question that is about physical reality NOT about social reality. ie, not "is ivermectin being unjustly censored on YouTube" or "are the horse goo people stupid" or "do people want us scared of Covid".
It's not that those questions don't matter. But trying to reason about social reality without figuring out the actual ground-level truth is a great recipe to be miserable and confused and have no propositional beliefs that aren't reactive affiliation stuff.
Sep 16, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
If you're trying to make sense of the ivermectin evidence base, one thing I recommend is briefly researching a drug that works well against Covid, like dexamethasone.
It's hard to guess from first principles how good an evidence base "should" look if the drug has sizable benefits. Sure, the ivm evidence base contains tons of terrible studies and fraud, but maybe that's just a common problem w/ science in a pandemic?
Sep 14, 2021 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
c19ivermectin.com is a gorgeous website with a beautiful UI that makes stunningly illiterate statistical claims about the case for ivermectin. Right now I'm mad about the claim (in the chart below) that the chance of these results if ivm didn't work is "a trillion to one".
As far as I can tell, that's derived by multiplying the p-values of all the studies in the database. If this study finds only a 1% chance of getting results as strong or stronger if ivermectin had no effects, and this study finds only a 10% chance, then the chance of both is .01.
