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.
Feb 9, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
@selentelechia nah
stuff that is prototypically Occult comes from a particular time and place (late-19th early-20th century) and is about re-enchanting a world that has already been "disenchanted" by science/technology/modernity
@selentelechia occultism is a subset of the "modernity ruined everything" memeplex
in particular it is the subset that says "...and we can resurrect or reinvent magic and give you the power to make your dreams come true"
Feb 9, 2023 • 20 tweets • 5 min read
What's pegylated interferon-lambda anyway? 🧵
NYT says: "A new drug quashes all coronavirus variants. But regulatory hurdles and a lack of funding make it unlikely to reach the U.S. market anytime soon."
nytimes.com/2023/02/08/hea…
Interferons are cytokines, signaling molecules produced by the body in response to inflammation.
As transistors get smaller, so long as power density stays constant, you can just pack them tighter and get proportional increases in compute speed & power.
This is not true at modern transistor sizes.
Feb 1, 2023 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
@johntrified for personal goals: just find women who already find it appealing
for societal goals: “explore the galaxies” is already great, “merge with machines” needs work
@johntrified GPT-3 prompt: “Here's why merging with machines and exploring the galaxies will benefit women.”
Jan 25, 2023 • 23 tweets • 4 min read
I've been playing around with GPT-3 beta.openai.com and finding it's remarkably good at rephrasing tweets to be less inflammatory.
Using the prompt "Rephrase the following example to be more neutral and polite:" generally does result in milder tone!
Some things I've noticed:
1.) SPECIFIC WORDS MATTER. Often replacing or removing a single inflammatory word is effective at making a tweet read as "milder."
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