Writes @ https://t.co/R5P3YYtUwT
Married to @oscredwin
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Aug 15 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
@strangestloop there is no Female Experience (TM) and lots of women feel like they're not having the "real" one
i guess read female authors
Anthropology of an American Girl is my favorite novel that most people haven't heard of
@strangestloop Jane Eyre for a perspective on romance and coming-of-age
Joy Luck Club for mother/daughter issues
the Vorkosigan series for what motherhood is like
The Female Man is weird and TERFy but has some very sharp insights
Jul 26 • 17 tweets • 2 min read
there's this concept of "easy mode" I've been rolling around in my head lately.🧵
easy mode is:
you can find a small group of people (friends, family, fans) who will applaud your {blog post, art, speech} even if it's mediocre
Jun 17 • 86 tweets • 20 min read
Liveblog/commentary of that Situational Awareness Leopold Aschenbrenner piece: here goes!
I'm going to quibble with this graph -- the "preschooler"/"smart high schooler" stuff doesn't really describe what's going on at all. situational-awareness.ai/from-gpt-4-to-…
May 12 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Politics is now about Expressing Who You Are.
It didn't use to be; voting was more a matter of where you lived, what your family background was, etc.
Now it really is part of a coherent personal aesthetic.
(And I don't mean "other, dumber people's politics", I mean mine and probably most of yours!)
May 8 • 31 tweets • 6 min read
Had a "viewquake" for the first time in a while
Previously my paradigm was ~informed by history
"think about what usually happens across millennia, everything is temporary, almost no times and places are like our own, expect regression to the mean"
with a corollary that markets and technology are basically fragile & culturally contingent
and 90s-era transhumanist predictions were naively optimistic
and just in general buying into "My Tribe are creative and good but not Worldly"
Mar 22 • 25 tweets • 4 min read
So here’s the deal on “artificial wombs”
🧵
The stuff you’ve seen in the news is basically plumbing.
It’s for circulating and oxygenating the blood of extreme preemies, and it’s going to be tried in humans any day now.
Off topic but I find that I’m very drawn to the premodern “just have rich people fund things they like” model, partly for the embarrassing reason that I *understand* patron-client relationships much more intuitively than more complex & formal institutional dynamics
It’s not that I necessarily think Medici-style patronage is best for science! Clearly the people who have thought about it more than I think it isn’t!
Jan 29 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
@kanzure There were supplement shills in extropian circles since the 90’s and they might have set the tone?
Also “normal” people are very miscalibrated about the fact that developing drugs is hard. Not just in aging/longevity contexts.
@kanzure You see this in the recurrent claim that “pharma just takes discoveries from academia and hoards the profit”…as though industrial R&D and clinical trials are trivial???
Jan 3 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
This is a good rhetorical counterpoint piece to the common sentiment that the comfort and safety of the modern world has made us shallow.
US income tax was virtually impossible to collect until employers were deputized to collect it in the form of withholding
Republicans think making tax filing easier is a stealth tax increase
The IRS thinks the same thing with opposite valence
Dec 7, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Oh I love this.
So, context:
Biology has *dynamics*.
Genes, neurons, and chemical signals like hormones, “upregulate” and “downregulate” each other. You gotta look at them as differential equations (or state machines) not static “levels”.
To be nice is to be, roughly, a person who means no harm, a nonaggressive person.
To be nice is not to be good.
You can be nice and cowardly. You can be nice and never do anything nontrivial to help others.
You can be nice but really incompetent, to the point that you do more harm than good.
Still, being nice is, all else equal, a positive thing.
Aug 27, 2023 • 27 tweets • 4 min read
The psychology studies that got debunked in the replication crisis weren’t random; they were part of a theory or worldview that’s still pervasive, and we need to consider what it means for that worldview to be false.carcinisation.com/2023/08/22/aga…
The blog post calls the worldview “automaticity”.
Automaticity says that we are “automatically” primed, nudged, subliminally or hypnotically suggested, by small cues in our environment, and that these subconscious cues are more powerful than conscious reasoning.
Mar 29, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Everything in this rant is 100% true.
The way math is usually taught (in the US at least) teaches fear, obedience, and faking comprehension.
"The Future Is Radically Uncertain"? Yep, also agree.
"Arguing about the details of AI is a mistake"? WTF no stop red flag bad no no no.
There's a whiff of "tl;dr" about the rhetoric here:
"Especially when you hear a nine-part argument based upon eight new conceptual categories that were first discussed on LessWrong eleven years ago."
that sounds like it's the...length? or the forum? that bothers him
Mar 28, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
What I took away from this poll series:
People overwhelmingly think they prefer entering bad-SOTA fields, but significantly fewer are ok with the usual problems of bad-SOTA fields (worse data, worse tools, less prior work, less appreciation of the need for improvement).
I’m pretty strongly on the “bad-SOTA is more fun/interesting/tractable” side, both at work and at play.
Eg I like ancient over modern history, small literatures over big literatures, don’t mind hand-generating small datasets, think observational sciences are extra cool, etc
Mar 27, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Generated in Midjourney 5:
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Feb 15, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Nostalgebraist has some of the best writing out there thinking critically/technically about LLM potential.
eg this 2021 post arguing that LLMs won't improve as fast as boosters believe *because they already had most core capabilities at GPT-2's scale*. lesswrong.com/posts/pv7Qpu8W…
OTOH I sort-of disagree with this post arguing that GPT-4 "won't be very useful and won't see much practical use" because OpenAI hasn't done much "productizing" of LLMs to date. nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/705192637…
Feb 15, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
@Ben_Reinhardt is awesome and his new organization looks very cool.
They’re working on two natural “paths to real nanotech”: molecular additive manufacturing (with covalent bonds) and nanomodular electronics (an approach to custom microelectronics without silicon etching).
A bunch of studies have found that obese and overweight humans are more likely to be seropositive for AAV36 -- but the studies are smallish (almost all <1000 subjects) and the seroprevalence rates are all over the place.
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