links 1/24/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-24-2025

• https://traditionsofconflict.substack.com/p/traditional-methods-of-black-magic  maybe "black magic" beliefs persist because the "cursed" person gets scared, contacts a shaman/magician/etc for help, and "recovers"
• https://tori.gg/ AI productivity browser extension?
• https://www.biospace.com/isomorphic-labs-announces-strategic-multi-target-research-collaboration-with-novartis  only a year ago, Isomorphic Labs announced this partnership, for developing small molecules with AI (via in silico screens or ab initio)
• https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-21/deepmind-expects-clinical-trials-for-ai-designed-drugs-this-year  now they're announcing they're going to hit the clinic this year?! that is fast. and it's a bit surprising that it's small molecules rather than antibodies, when the literature really seems to point to protein structure/affinity prediction being stronger than small molecule binding prediction
• https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/ they don't want to tell us anything. no disease indication. bupkis.
• https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/banking-crisis-two-years-later/  Patrick McKenzie says the things he couldn't say in 2023 about the banking crisis
  • if he, making inferences from public information, said that he believed specific banks were insolvent when that was not yet public knowledge, he'd be accused by the press of deliberately causing a financial crisis or destroying banks.
  • the government lied about banks being fine, which were not fine, in the interests of preventing the crisis from getting worse.
    • i dunno whether this is outrageous because the culture that is finance is so unfamiliar to me; afaik saying true negative things about banks will make them fail faster and maybe spread the "contagion" more broadly in the economy? maybe it is in the public's best interest for the government to lie in such cases?
    • but at any rate, this implies you should not necessarily believe announcements that a bank is fine.
• https://minors.mit.edu/policies-guidelines/dos-and-donts-of-working-with-minors/#overlay-context=institute-programs/training
  • "Don’t spend time alone with one minor away from the group or conduct private interactions with minors in enclosed spaces or behind closed doors", "Don’t relate to minors as if they were peers, conduct private correspondence, or take on the role of "confidant" (outside of a professional counseling relationship)" and "Don’t privately email, text, or engage with minors through social media. Group messages and posts are acceptable and must be viewable by all participants" are the objectionable rules here.
  • obviously the motive was to avoid child sexual abuse, which is important, and I'm even on board with erring on the side of avoiding the appearance of impropriety. indeed, don't sext the minors or offer them alcohol/drugs.
  • but a normal, appropriate mentorship relationship will involve one-on-one meetings and emails. teachers talk to students. how can you ban this???
  • it's especially outrageous because this is MIT. child prodigies need opportunities to do real things in the world; this will generally involve working with adults. rules like this mean "no more Terence Taos."
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/44162589 

  • only relevant Google result I could find for a James Joyce quote I remembered part of:

    • Joyce made a specific comparative observation in his notes: “Europe is weary even of the Scandinavian women (Hedda Gabler, Rebecca Rosmer, Asta Allmers) whom the poetic genius of Ibsen created when the Slav heroines of Dostoievsky and Turgenev were growing stale. On what woman will the light of the poet’s mind now shine? Perhaps at last on the Celt. Vain question. Curl the hair how you will and undo it again as you will” (E 125).
    • this is from the notes/stage directions of Exiles. The play has "full text" versions online but they don't include the notes.

     

links 01/23/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-23-2025

• https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/invitations  like so many visions, whether i'd actually like this or not depends on execution. AI-powered smart devices? no thank you. Interpretive "power tools" with lots of configurable options, that allow me to do a lot of media analysis and view embedding coordinates? i'd like that. AI tools to interface with bureaucracies, or to assemble a media diet based on custom preferences, or to resolve disputes, or to provide traditional governmental functions where those are absent or defective? I begin to be intrigued. but you need taste. and taste is a little orthogonal to being at the leading edge of the zeitgeist; the zeitgeist-surfer always wants to "embrace" the direction we're going, whereas the tasteful person is opinionated and likes some new things but not others, and doesn't always favor the new things that are destined to be the biggest.
• https://psychcrisis.org/mania-guide/ this is the best guide to how to handle a friend or loved one with mania I've ever seen. It offers lots of options for getting professional help that are less risky & restrictive than "call 911" which is most people's first and only thought about what to do when someone has suddenly "gone crazy".
• https://meltingasphalt.com/a-codebase-is-an-organism/ a clear intro to "what do people mean about code "rotting" anyway? (spoiler: big codebases, unlike school programming assignments, get used and changed by many people. this introduces many new problems because you can't singlehandedly control everything everyone does.)
• http://www.laputan.org/mud/  what do people mean when they say code is "sloppy", "spaghetti code", or whatever?
  • poor performance at large scale
  • Data structures may be haphazardly constructed, or even next to non-existent. Everything talks to everything else. Every shred of important state data may be global.
    • why is this bad?
    • Claude explains:
      • it's bad if "everything talks to everything else" or "all state data is global" because if you change one part of the code everything else may break
      • it's bad if there are no data structures or if they're chosen randomly, because the right data structure is much more time & space efficient to search/sort/etc than the wrong one
  • "complicated, convoluted" code that's hard to read
• https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/07/an-overly-simple-model-of-positive-and-negative-contagion.html Tyler Cowen: negative emotions are contagious & so focusing on the negative (even to critique bad ideas) has harmful externalities
  • does he apply this insight to himself? does he try to avoid over- focusing on the negative? i'm not sure...
  • possibly someone who's constitutionally non-neurotic will never be able to really understand negative contagion risks. they'll say things that they assume are fine, and have no real intuition for what stressed-out people are hearing.

links 1/21/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-21-2025

• https://sammatey.substack.com/p/the-weekly-anthropocene-interviews-84c  news is about entertainment rather than information...yeah i guess, but i'm not sure what to do about that, i probably don't actually need to know most of what's going on!
• https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/as-above-so-garage I kind of liked this Venkatesh Rao essay. the "garage project" sort of hackerish engineering is a "hobby" project that has potential to connect to the "big story" of advanced technology (unlike, say, woodworking, which may be personally or artistically fulfilling but is clearly opting out of the race towards the cutting edge) but also is a sort of "pure" personal project that has no obligation to deliver a result or make a profit or please anyone but oneself. it's that intersection of "probably nothing" but "could be something", limitless potential at the far horizon but tiny in the here-and-now/
  • "tinkering in your garage" is the tech equivalent of "starting a band" in the days where rock bands had a shot at stardom
  • there's a Fun Theory thing here. it's not Fun to do things that you know are trivial/meaningless and will definitely never "matter" in a big or deep sense; it's also not Fun to be burdened with expectations and obligations. Fun thrives in the zone of "playing around that could someday grow into Something"
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities
  • NYC is only ranked 35, behind Moscow??
• things I looked up while reading about Venice
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombard_(weapon)
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cr%C3%A9cy
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Zeno
    • Venetian admiral
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hawkwood
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Company
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dandolo
    • doge
  • https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagano_Doria
    • Genoese admiral
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Pisani
    • Venetian admiral
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_Gothic_architecture
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Polo
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ashraf_Khalil
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saladin
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamluk_Sultanate
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/books/NBK559170/
• https://www.thepopverse.com/movies-nosferatu-count-orlok-bill-skarsgard-voice-robert-eggers yep, Count Orlok in Robert Eggers' Nosferatu is speaking Dacian
• https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/28/trump-zuckerberg-election-book-00176639 is this a serious threat? who can tell any more. i suppose if people respond to it, it's an effective threat.
  • https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-mark-zuckerberg-threats-meta-political-content-changes-2025-1
• https://substack.com/home/post/p-154556883 Dan Davies on the problem of governments that outsource everything to contractors and NGOs, which then fail to do the job and can't be held accountable or monitored because the government no longer has the staff or the expertise to oversee the project in detail.
  • outsourcing was, itself, a response to the high cost (and overspending and overstaffing) of governments running programs directly through civil service departments. the hope was that outsourcing would impose market discipline through competition.
  • from this point of view i'm not sure what one can do.
    • if the government refuses to provide public services at all, people might overthrow it?
      • or at least vote it out in elections
    • if the government provides public services itself, it will predictably overcharge, underdeliver, and engage in direct abuses of power
    • if the government hires third parties to provide public services, those parties will predictably overcharge and underdeliver, except more opaquely and in ways that are less amenable to being changed when voters get disgruntled.
    •  
• http://okayfail.com/2025/i-met-pg-once.html  heartfelt and says something I've been concerned about myself. when you say you're "anti-woke", how can we tell whether that means you're against specific, recent types of administrative overreach or whether e.g. you actually want to drive gender-nonconforming people out of public life? I'm sure there's some of both going on, but there's also a lot of uncomfortable (or strategic) ambiguity, which is a much more pressing concern for those with personal reason to worry whether they're going to experience a huge rise in discrimination.

links 1/17/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-17-2025

• https://davekasten.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-essay-meta Dave Kasten, known Washington Insider and Dangerous Professional, says that the way to increase the chance your ideas make it into policy is to write essays online.
  • interestingly I'm reading this just as I'm hearing other people discuss how fruitless it is to write publicly, because nobody will understand you and take action based on your words. I think it probably depends how you write and what concepts you're trying to get across, and what your bar is for "action." People who think essays are useful are probably trying to reach across shorter inferential distances and make smaller nudges to people's behavior.
• https://www.rationalistjudaism.com/p/the-kezayis-post what is the minimum amount of matzah one is required to eat on Passover? traditionally it's "the size of an olive." but some people claim it's about the size of a large pizza...because Biblical olives were huge??? (spoiler: no, they were not. we literally have thousand-year-old olive trees producing normal-sized olives.)
• https://www.read.ai/ this is a fascinating app. Link it to your calendar and Zoom and it will accompany on you on all your meetings, summarize them, generate action items, and grade you on things like how fast you speak and how much other people seem to like you.
  • "bias" is their word for "how much positive emotion do you show", which is a terrible word for that! did they let the statisticians do too much product design?
  • they will also keep track of how many "non-inclusive" things you say, apparently. i'm still at zero, not being much for slurs myself.
  • transcription accuracy is pretty good, but the app is often wrong about who's speaking.
• https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/the-culture-of-guns-the-culture-of-alcohol.html old Tyler Cowen post saying that if we blame guns for homicide/suicide we should, with equal or greater emphasis, also be blaming alcohol. Believable!
•  

links 1/15/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-15-2025

• https://www.proteinatlas.org/  seems like a good resource. Swedish.
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_cloning  human cloning was first discussed by JBS Haldane in a 1969 speech!
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protalix_BioTherapeutics they seem pretty successful. enzyme replacement for Gaucher disease. Israeli.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillip_Frost interesting guy. "served as a lieutenant commander, U.S. Public Health Service at the National Cancer Institute, from 1963 to 1965." Major pharma investor.
• What happened to Amyris?
  • they used to be a biofuel company but couldn't get production up and costs down:
    • https://web.archive.org/web/20241122084330/https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/05/10/2851/the-scientist-still-fighting-for-the-clean-fuel-the-world-forgot/
    • https://www.technologyreview.com/2012/02/10/20483/amyris-gives-up-making-biofuels-update/
    • https://www.fastcompany.com/1680328/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-company-that-was-going-to-have-us-all-using-biofuels
  • they pivoted to low-volume, high-price beauty & personal care ingredients, which actually generated a bunch of revenue, but not enough to cover costs. and then also bought a ton of celebrity beauty brands, which didn't. 2022 stock plunge, 2023 bankruptcy.
    • https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/beauty/amyris-filed-for-bankruptcy/
    • https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/11/09/why-amyris-stock-was-driven-into-the-ground-on-wed/
    • https://www.retaildive.com/news/amyris-files-chapter-11-bankruptcy-lays-off-260-workers/690636/
    • https://www.voguebusiness.com/beauty/why-amyris-chapter-11-bankruptcy-is-the-latest-beauty-casualty
    •  
  • they're not terrible at industrial fermentation (compared to other synbio unicorns) and have some lessons learned
    • https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7695652/
  • they got in trouble with the SEC for recognizing more revenue than they actually made (according to standard accounting)
    • https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/administrative-proceedings/34-93341-s
  • https://www.science.org/content/article/synthetic-biology-once-hailed-moneymaker-meets-tough-times bad times for biomanufacturing/synbio overall
    • there are kind of...zero large profitable firms founded after 2000 that specialize in industrial fermentation/biomanufacturing, EXCEPT a couple of biotechs that make enzyme drugs.
      • there's plenty of biomanufactured products but pretty much all from very large old boring firms at sorta commodity prices?

possibly-intrusive question: are you Russian? 

links 1/13/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-13-2025

• https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-skyscrapers-became-glass-boxes
  • plain glass box skyscrapers were, in fact, more cost-effective for developers. it's not all about architectural tastes. architects in real life are very far from all-powerful.
    • in fact, I really think people should stop writing books/movies/etc about auteur architects; it only encourages more young people to go into architecture and become unemployed. I'm looking at you, Francis Ford Coppola
• https://www.betonit.ai/p/the-typical-man-disgusts-the-typical
  • pointing in the right direction, but overstated/inflammatory. women don't go around being "disgusted" by every man they interact with socially.
    • rather, most women find the idea of having sex with a randomly selected unfamiliar man disgusting, even if there's nothing particularly the matter with him. typical straight women are cautious/selective about sex and fairly slow to warm up sexually to new people. not much "lust at first sight."
    • but yeah, getting rejected when you ask women out does not in fact mean you are inadequate or unattractive! getting rejections in dating is normal, just like every author gets rejected manuscripts and every job applicant gets rejected from jobs. the average man gets a lot of "no"s and at least one "yes", and eventually marries a "yes."
    • also i share Bryan Caplan's view that women shouldn't be offended by being asked out by someone they aren't interested in. sure, persistent harassment can be a problem, but a simple question isn't.
• https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/principles Nabeel Qureshi
  • I agree with most of this, but "you don't need much sleep" is very individual. some of us very much need plenty of sleep and our lives improve dramatically when we face that fact.
• things I googled while reading about Venice
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festa_della_Sensa
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_II_Orseolo
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Manzikert
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Innocent_III
•  

links 1/10/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-10-2025

• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Romania
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamangia_culture
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni%E2%80%93Trypillia_culture
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armand_C%C4%83linescu
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Antonescu
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana_Pauker
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gheorghe_Gheorghiu-Dej
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C8%99escu
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_rural_systematization_program
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitate
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gheorghe_Pintilie
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pite%C8%99ti_Prison
  • https://balkaninsight.com/2021/02/03/long-shadow-how-romanias-securitate-turned-the-revolution-into-riches/
    • claims that the Securitate continued to exist de facto, even after the revolution that ended the Ceausescu dictatorship.
      • "This influence distorts democracy, says Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, a Romanian civic activist and a leading scholar on corruption. “There’s long been ample evidence of a ‘deep state’ in Romania with roots in the former security services,” she maintains."
      • "The Securitate was declared defunct and, with no admission of previous crimes – including those committed in the revolution – or internal vetting, was chopped into nine separate services that corresponded to the Securitate’s organizational substructure. The new services were staffed and directed by virtually the same people as the old Securitate."
      • "During the 1990s, the Securitate’s successors, the domestic SRI, the Foreign Intelligence Service, SIE, and others, exploited their wide-ranging resources and security monopoly to become oligarchs and form cartels in the post-Communist economy. So vast was their intelligence that they could blackmail compromised politicians, media professionals and judges. In post-communist Romania, just about everyone had something to hide."
• what went wrong at Zymergen?
  • https://manufacturingchemist.com/news/article_page/Where_Zymergen_went_wrong_a_biomanufacturing_perspective_for_synthetic_biology/204177
  • https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelauyeung/2021/08/03/as-biology-manufacturing-company-zymergen-implodes-correspondence-with-sec-showed-early-doubts/
  • https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2024/33-11303.pdf
  • https://polymerist.substack.com/p/zymergens-implosion
  • https://web.archive.org/web/20240423050337/https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2021/10/13/the-inside-story-of-how-softbank-backed-zymergen-imploded-four-months-after-its-3-billion-ipo/?sh=3df6dc87c2e0
  • https://www.bclplaw.com/en-US/events-insights-news/sec-penalizes-company-for-unsupported-hype.html
  • they failed to manufacture their first product to customers' specifications, lost the orders, overstated the market for it (which the SEC sued them for), and admitted they had no revenue & would not be profitable for the foreseeable future shortly after their IPO.
    • ultimately the issue may be that they specialized in only one piece of the manufacturing process, strain optimization. they outsourced downstream processing and manufacturing scale-up to third party contractors, and those are often places where hiccups arise for new biomanufactured products.
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rastafari
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haile_Selassie
• https://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4140798-10-years-of-dubstep-by-subliminal-transmissions-digest
• https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2023/controlled-burns-california-wildfire
  • "not enough controlled burns" and "climate change" are the causes of forest fires.
  • what's going on in LA right now is a chaparral fire. controlled burns aren't appropriate for chaparral. these are "wind-driven" fires spread by the Santa Ana winds, which are unusually strong this year, but the wind severity isn't driven by climate change.
  • the human-preventable cause of these fires isn't climate change or Smokey the Bear, but too many human-caused fires, in particular due to power lines, since PG&E has not adequately maintained the lines in California as population has risen and the power grid has grown.
• https://www.npr.org/2006/12/15/6630791/name-calling-in-michael-crichtons-next amusing story about Michael Crichton putting an unflattering portrait of a journalist who criticized him in his (fiction) book.
• https://topos.institute/work/ Topos Institute builds collaborative modeling tools based on category theory, useful for formalizing mathematics, system dynamics, epidemiology, etc.
  • try their tool CatColab here: https://catcolab.org/analysis/f79f1894-601f-49cf-9da1-00a2ebcc0792
  • textbook about these concepts: http://davidjaz.com/Papers/DynamicalBook.pdf
• https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2023/11/18/formalizing-the-proof-of-pfr-in-lean4-using-blueprint-a-short-tour/
  • https://github.com/PatrickMassot/leanblueprint the Blueprint library allows you to visualize the dependency graph of a proof in Lean
•  

in retrospect, 6 years later:

wow, I was way too bearish about the "mundane" economic/practical impact of AI.

 "AI boosters", whatever their incentives, were straightforwardly directionally correct in 2019 that AI was drastically "underrated" and had tons of room to grow. Maybe "AGI" was the wrong way of describing it. Certainly, some people seem to be in an awful hurry to round down human capacities for thought to things machines can already do, and they make bad arguments along the way. But at the crudest level, yeah, "AI is more important than you think, let me use whatever hyperbolic words will get that into your thick noggin" was correct in 2019.

also the public figures I named can no longer be characterized as only "saying true things." Polarization is a hell of a drug. 

links 1/8/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-08-2025

• https://neuromatch.io/ company courses & networking opportunities in fields like neuroscience, climate science, AI, etc; matching collaborators
• https://birdflurisk.com/ H5N1 risk dashboard
• https://www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/solving-intelligence-requires-new-research-and-funding-models/ the case for big funding of brain mapping & modeling, by David A. Markowitz
  • "The recent mapping of an entire adult fruit fly brain—a watershed achievement that made headlines worldwide—offers a glimpse of what’s possible. But this breakthrough almost didn’t happen. It required the serendipitous alignment of support from three non-traditional funders: Scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus imaged the complete fly brain; the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity drove the development of tools for scalable neural-circuit mapping through its MICrONS program; and the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative provided sustained support for data analysis."
  • it might cost $1B to fully map & model the brain. ARPA-style and FRO-style research orgs are essential.
• https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.02.13.580186v4.full  if you just use neural nets to model the output of C. elegans' 302 neurons, bigger networks are better.
  • continuous-time RNNs scale the best -- even better than transformers.
• https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.22.614271v2.full
  • optogenetically perturb each neuron in C. elegans and see what happens to neural output in all 302 neurons
  • fit this as a simple multivariate dynamical system -- each neuron's output at time t is a linear function of all the neurons' output at time t-1, plus a linear function of the neurons' history of optogenetic stimulation, plus error.
  • compare to a simpler, connectome-constrained model, where each neuron's output is only a function of its presynaptic input neurons (and direct optogenetic stimulation). this is actually a good approximation!
    • in fact, it's better than a fully-connected model, OR a "shuffled-connectome" model based on a made-up C. elegans connectome with similar topological properties to the real one. the true connectome matters.
    • if you train a connectome model without one neuron, it predicts something about what activity "should" be there. correlation at 0.30 with the real one, much higher than a "fake" connectome model's correlation with reality.
    •  
  • model weights don't reflect synapse counts, though. "multi-hop" trajectories have significant influence on correlations (i.e. neuron A and neuron B's activity may still be highly correlated even if A and B are more than one step away on the "connectome graph").
  • it would be shocking if connectomes didn't matter, so in a sense this is not a surprising set of results; but this is a first example of collecting data with the optogenetic perturbation method, which is a major step towards true neural simulations.
    • a simulation should be able to predict what every neuron would do under various circumstances.
      • gathering data on the worms in varying behavioral/environmental contexts could approximate this, but manipulating each neuron one at a time gives a much more thorough picture of the input-output relationships of the nervous system.
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.06578
  • roadmap document for full reverse-engineering simulation of the C. elegans nervous system, by Adam Marblestone and many others
    • includes perturbation!
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asha Zoroastrian concept of "truth" or "right"
• https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/outside-view-yatharth/ Patrick McKenzie interviewed by Yatharth
• https://mad.science.blog/2020/07/07/desummation/ theory that NMDA receptor antagonists' hallucinogenic and "psychotomimetic" effects come from inhibition of memory.
  • NMDA receptors (for glutamate) are important in long-term potentiation, in which "a neuron becomes highly sensitive to excitatory transmission for days or weeks" following recurrent stimulation.
    • long-term potentiation is important in associative memory. it "strengthens" a neural connection that has been sufficiently strongly/repeatedly made.
    • NMDAr inhibitor drugs reduce this effect.
    • so does schizophrenia
  • Neurons have "summation" effects.
    • "spatial summation" -- if two neurons stimulate a third, the effect is stronger than if only one did.
    • "temporal summation" -- repeated stimulation has a stronger effect than a one-off.
    • it is a form of coincidence detection; multiple "simultaneous" events are treated as a bigger deal, less likely to be flukes or errors.
    • the NMDAr inhibitor dexmethorphan inhibits this effect.
    • so does schizophrenia.
      • normal subjects have "prepulse inhibition", aka the reaction to a loud startling noise is less intense if preceded by a small pulse sound.
      • this is a form of temporal summation; signals generated by the prepulse accumulate and prepare the brain for further sound, preventing the startle response.
      • schizophrenics don't have this; they get startled both ways, indicating (?) that the prepulse sound doesn't "accumulate" properly.
    • "desummation" or "cognitive atomization" is like a failure to anticipate; new stimuli are fresh, not expected.
      • this coincides with the subjective effects of NMDAr inhibitors: at low doses there is "increasing perceptual acuity for things usually unnoticed" and at high doses there is "inability to notice a lot of previously learned meaning", "inability to recognize familiar stimuli", added "noise", and loss of "definition and meaning."
        • visual agnosias are a common reported ketamine effect
  • NMDAr inhibition causes amnesia effects in patients
    • patients on low-dose ketamine do not retain things they learned while on the drug
    • "PsychonautWiki lists ‘memory suppression’ as a distinct effect from amnesia as a side effect of NMDAr antagonists. In the description of this effect it notes that short-term memory is suppressed much earlier than long-term memory. At very high doses, the Wiki suggests that one may even forget who they are, where they live, or even a failure to remember what humans are"
    • impaired short-term memory relates to sensations of unfamiliarity and dissociation (if you can't remember stuff, you don't know what it is)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereogram
  • excellent explanation of how "magic eye" pictures work; i can now see them for the first time in my life!
• https://smoothbrains.net/posts/2023-08-01-ketamine.html personal experience with ketamine
  • effects:
    • visual agnosias, "2D vision", loss of "egocentric coordinates" in spatial perception, "expanded" awareness
    • music perception is different -- complex music is confusing, repetitive drones are hypnotic
    • tactile feelings are pleasurable, muscle tension is strongly reduced
    • aversions are dampened, in particular by making them slower -- from the usual "100 ms" to "500 ms".
• celebrity cases of ketamine deaths:
  • https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/arrests-made-connection-accidental-death-actor-matthew-perry-rcna166676 Matthew Perry, found face down in a heated pool
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Frisch Gary Frisch, found dead beneath an 8th floor window with ketamine in his blood and liver
  • notice that these are plausibly fatal accidents or suicides while under the influence. this is a potential danger of recreational use that won't show up in stats about medical use or experimental administration to animals.
• https://www.quantamagazine.org/elliptic-curve-murmurations-found-with-ai-take-flight-20240305/ wavy "murmurations" found in elliptic curves with machine-learning algorithms
• https://www.quantamagazine.org/behold-modular-forms-the-fifth-fundamental-operation-of-math-20230921/ modular forms!
• https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/regulators-almost-killed-biotech
  • "from the very first announcement of successes in cloning DNA (the foundational technology of recombinant insulin) in 1973, the first reaction of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Institute of Medicine was to try to stop research into it and, simultaneously, to prevent any patenting of it. The National Institute of Health followed shortly thereafter with their own restrictions, as did a number of cities, including Cambridge and Berkeley, the towns where the universities most likely to do the research were located"
  • Genentech, a tiny garage startup, was able to escape those restrictions.
• https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/whats-alprazolams-deal  alprazolam (Xanax) is reputed to have a fast onset and fast diminution of its anti-anxiety effect, compared to lorazepam (Ativan), making it more abusable and less useful for anxiety disorders. but why? all the theories seem wrong!
  • also, diazepam (Valium) has exactly the same fast onset/fast diminution, but doctors don't seem to worry about it the same way!
  • it looks like the difference isn't about half-life, elimination, or the blood-brain barrier, but something about ligand-receptor binding.

links 1/7/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-07-2025

• https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-making-of-community-notes the team behind Community Notes describes how they do it
  • it's people who were working on "Birdwatch" before Musk bought Twitter, and they use algorithms derived from PageRank.
  • these guys are not, even a little bit, "based." Yet the Twitter userbase loves Community Notes!
  • if you have a capable team that firmly believes in "fairness", in auditable, open, participatory processes that don't put a top-down thumb on the scale on controversial issues, and they get to actually use the neutral algorithm instead of being pressured to make exceptions, you get solid results and community trust!
• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7132523/ 90% of bronchitis is viral. doctors are cautioned not to give antibiotics for it, even for long-lasting coughs.
  • https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2010/1201/p1345.html no really. bronchitis symptoms typically last three weeks. it's still not bacterial. antibiotics do not work.
• https://harmonic.fun/ AI for formal mathematical reasoning
  • it's Lean based! https://web.archive.org/web/20241230145058/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/technology/ai-chatbots-chatgpt-math.html
  •  
• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-FFa6nMVg18m1zPtoAQrFalwpx2YaGK4/view Tim Gowers' research manifesto on AI for mathematics
  • it's not machine-learning based; it's a version of GOFAI that's formalizing the types of "tactics" or "moves" that a human goes through in a proof, trying to get the formalism right such that a computer proceduralization only has a modest, human-like amount of trial-and-error & backtracking rather than vast amounts of brute-force search.
• https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240514445088/en/Multiply-Labs-and-Retro-Biosciences-Announce-an-85-Million-Partnership-to-Advance-Cell-Therapy-Manufacturing-for-Age-Related-Diseases cell therapy manufacturing automation robots from Multiply Labs, used at Retro Bio.
• https://gopiandcode.uk/pdfs/sisyphus-pldi23.pdf
  • "proof repair" is the problem of updating formally verified software; if you have a library of provably correct code, and you make any kind of software updates to the library, now you also have to update the proofs such that it's still verifiably correct (assuming the update didn't break anything.) Progress towards automating this.
• https://openreview.net/pdf?id=RtTNbJthjV  the Karp Dataset, 90 reduction-based NP-hardness proofs (in natural language) for training LLMs to write proofs.
• https://web.stanford.edu/~jlmcc/ Jay McClelland, co-inventor (with Rumelhart of backprop fame) of the Parallel Distributed Processing theory of cognition, has been doing a lot with LLMs lately
  • https://web.stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/ChanEtAl22DataDistPropsDriveInContextLearning.pdf in-context learning works better when the training data is bursty and has lots of sparsely presented elements
  • https://web.stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/DasguptaLampinenEtAl22LMsShowHumanLikeContentEffectsInReasoning.pdf LLMs, like humans, show belief-bias effects on Wason and syllogism tests
  • https://web.stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/McClelland22CapturingAdvCogAbilitiesWithDeepNets humans learn human-made formal systems (like mathematics, computer science, logic) in order to solve certain kinds of difficult problems. perhaps AIs should also "go to school", being trained on math problems, in particular with diagrams as well as text. also, goal-directed motivation may require fundamentally different architecture from the usual LLM transformer setup.
  • https://web.stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/NamEtAl22LearningToReasonWRelationalAbstractions.pdf an empirical example of "taking the AI to school" -- fine-tuning on a McClelland-designed dataset intended to teach "relational abstractions" makes models perform better at math problems
  • https://web.stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/NamMcC21RapidLearningGeneralizationInHumansArxiv.pdf human mTurkers are better at abstract problem-solving tasks if they've taken high school algebra and geometry (no effect for other educational variables). they split pretty bimodally into people who learn a strategy and people who guess at random. this points towards "basic math education teaches systematic thought." also, small RNNs generalize much worse than humans, but who cares.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_set_programming ASP is used for difficult search & combinatorics or optimization problems. I'm struggling to understand whether it is in wide industrial use or if it's more of a research specialization.

   

links 1/6/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-06-2025

• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Fiennes descended from Norman nobility
• https://meltingasphalt.com/wealth-the-toxic-byproduct/ nice essay on how (money) earnings generally represent your benefit to others while consumption spending is a cost to others
• https://mises.org/mises-daily/defending-miser not only is the "miser" who invests productively benefiting others, but so is the "hoarder" who takes money out of circulation to put under a mattress -- hoarders lower prices.
  • ehhh, shouldn't lowering prices and raising prices be seen as equally neutral in real terms?
• https://timmermanreport.com/2025/01/ai-needs-natural-language-to-give-structure-to-biology/ I'm sorry, you just named three discoveries in the latest table of contents of Science or Nature, and complained that biological "foundation models" can't come up with them, and that instead you need LLMs? what are you even thinking???
  • you are in a hurry to replace human thought at the highest levels, when there's a tremendous amount left to be done in developing AIs to replace tedious grunt work.
  • why??? why do you want to put the PI out of a job? There aren't that many PIs. why are you starting here? it's so backwards.
  • what they're actually doing at FutureHouse is pretty cool: "write an accurate and cited Wikipedia-style article for nearly every protein-coding gene in the human genome." I think accelerating lit review is a useful function of LLMs. there's a lot of information out there! using automation to synthesize it is a win!
  • but my god, man, why are you framing this as "I really want the machine to do all the thinking for me" rather than "I want everyone to have a research assistant in their pocket so they can more efficiently explore hypotheses with the context of the whole scientific literature." do you not like thinking and learning? do you wish you could quit or something???
• https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections
  • "We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies." Ok, this is a real prediction (that we can grade him on later) and it certainly seems technologically possible today -- it remains to be seen whether it'll be organizationally possible, useful in the first contexts where it's used, or whether it'll cause catastrophic errors.
    • if i had to guess, i think commercial AI agents will be launched by OpenAI, and their economic impact will be ambiguous, by end of 2025.
• https://parahumans.wordpress.com/ trying to read this, again, for the fourth? time.
  • not sure why I keep bouncing off this. it's recommended by friends, I'm excited by the promise of interesting conceptual things being done with the superhero-genre system, but my god there are many chapters of "boring"-to-me stuff (action scenes, description of city politics & class dynamics that doesn't feel true to life, etc)
• ketamine overdose risks:
  • https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3168228/
    • typical recreational doses are 200-300 mg (orally) or 50-100mg IV, roughly 50x the effective IV dose for general anaesthesia.
  • https://www.psychiatrist.com/jcp/oral-ketamine-for-depression-practical-considerations/
    • similarly, oral ketamine for depression is given in doses ranging from 25mg to 300 mg
  • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK541087/ this StatPearls claims that the median lethal dose for a 70kg human is 678 mg, but references a study not cited
  • https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert-Gable/publication/8167013_Acute_Toxic_Effects_of_Club_Drugs/links/55d4419d08ae7fb244f59d58/Acute-Toxic-Effects-of-Club-Drugs.pdf
    • this is the Gable et al study mentioned in the StatPearls article
    • it mentions that the rodent LD50 for ketamine is 600 mg/kg, and divides by 10 (which is apparently a standard rule of thumb for converting between species) to get 4.2 g for a 70 kg human
    • they say a typical recreational dose is 175 mg, and so get a "safety ratio" (lethal dose/effective dose) of 25, safer than alcohol.
    • StatPearls may have misquoted this paper...I'm not sure where they're getting their 678 mg number.
  • if the lethal dose really is only about twice the effective dose, as in the StatPearls article, that's a very tight window.
    • for context:
      • the median lethal dose (LD50) of ethanol is the equivalent of about 25-40 standard drinks
      • the LD50 of aspirin is about 43 aspirin tablets
      • the LD50 of amphetamine is between 20-200 times a typical prescription ADHD dose
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouJrOQfkeok  how a Kite cell therapy (autologous) is manufactured (they ship your blood sample to a facility, and process/expand your cells in 5 days).
• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-jBoSEVlryiX1IaSzV4vKuihDfm_LgXUznvSpl1T1kg/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.vnjrknmu0cff
  • suicide note of a DeepMind researcher who took ketamine for depression, developed psychosis and then very severe depression unlike anything he'd experienced before; "the emergency alarm continues to strike blind panic and fear into my mind every second" for two years with no change.
• https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/01/simple-points-on-immigration.html Tyler Cowen remains pro-high-skilled immigration.
• https://impact-ops.notion.site/11c061ba6c7880b38073e8ddfb4f1db0?v=11c061ba6c788137aa62000c8aa8918b  an instruction manual for setting up a nonprofit.
  • having started a nonprofit myself and screwed some of this up, i want to endorse taking a lot of care with legal compliance and administrative processes.
    • an "ordinary" middle-class person, in their personal life, usually doesn't have to worry too much about accidentally breaking laws. a founder (of a nonprofit or small business) can ABSOLUTELY do illegal stuff by accident and get burned for it.
    • it's also very easy to accidentally be the kind of terrible boss you hear horror stories about...just screw up payroll!

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53922-x 

  • neuroblastoma and embryonic kidney cell lines exhibit the "massed-spaced" effect discovered in neurons by Hermann Ebbinghaus where a repeated spaced stimulus has a stronger response than a "massed" (clumped) stimulus, almost as though "learning" the difference between an event that recurs and a (potentially erroneous) one-off.
    • in non-neural cells, instead of looking at neuron firing we're looking at a particular cell signaling pathway engineered to carry a luciferase gene that glows when the CRE gene is transcribed.
    • The chemical TPA directly activates protein kinase C (PKC)
    • the chemical forskolin activated protein kinase A (PKA) via raising cAMP levels, which activate PKA
    • PKA and PKC both phosphorylate the transcription factor protein CREB1
    • CREB1 causes lots of genes, including our reported gene CRE, to be transcribed more
    • this pathway was selected to be similar to the way serotonin activates a signaling cascade during memory via PKA and PKC
  • people are sharing around popular articles claiming that this proves kidney cells have memory, but it really doesn't.
  • it proves that the mechanisms of neuronal memory have shared properties with cell signaling mechanisms present throughout the body, which is what you'd expect; neurons necessarily evolved as a variation on some other kind of cell.
  • now, understanding exactly how this works is interesting! but no, it doesn't mean you think with your kidneys.

   

links 1/3/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-03-2025

• https://thisgenomiclife.substack.com/p/this-weeks-finds-in-genomics-and-4bd "More than half of [a new dataset of 2.35 million candidate regulatory DNA] elements are not close to the transcription start sites of genes, meaning they act at a distance to control gene expression"
• https://www.ams.org/notices/202501/rnoti-p6.pdf Terence Tao on machine-assisted proof
• https://www.cato.org/blog/national-security-hoax Joe Biden blocked a Japanese company's acquisition of U.S. Steel on "national security" grounds...even though Japan is a US ally and this would be an investment into America-based steelmaking facilities
• https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/12/the-future-of-the-scientist-in-a-world-with-advanced-ai.html Tyler Cowen thinks that all the hypothesis generation in science will be done by AI and humans will only gather data (via lab work or confidentiality/data access negotiations.). This is...pretty backwards from what I expect the best uses of AI vs. creative humans are. I'm much more interested in AIs for lab automation and faster idea-generation/lit-review loops.
• https://kyunghyuncho.me/i-sensed-anxiety-and-frustration-at-neurips24/  interesting perspective. as we're entering the "productization" phase of AI, says the article, the days of PhDs getting fat industry salaries to do research are ending.
  • this...does not match my experience, though maybe I was seeing a different side of the elephant. In the mid-2010s, ML people knew that "deep learning" was the best at the benchmarks, but it was fiendishly hard to get business results from it in most contexts, so startups would typically aspire to use it and then...quietly not. in my corner of startupland, machine learning PhDs were definitely not being paid to do freeform research; these were the days of "feature engineering is king" and "data munging" and "let's just use a logistic regression, it works better"
  • article's probably right that it's not a great time to be in non-LLM fields of ML, though there are exceptions
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01286-3.epdf?sharing_token=FmzVoOJu5aSIdLKxYEmbs9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0Mqd2apSCbVNCoLnGZzPpZgrhSB6F3n6W7UifVpls202s_RwJ4kTaNjSgIQzVnS6hGeSq41cU3dWAYR23ygDu7de3fh4_6F6XJA2pD3xNO3c8hyjtnc_kr6GV5YDuwIdFQ%3D  it's very easy for grant funding schemes to be net negative in societal value.
  • "if the cumulative work that goes into an average grant application adds up to considerably more than a couple of days, these grant schemes draw more resources from the scientific community than they add." in reference to two (actually existing) grant programs awarding €50,000 and €30,000 with success rates of 5% and 2.5%, respectively.
  • in other words: if grants are small, selective, and time-consuming, they're using up more scientist-hours on grant applications than they are funding scientist-hours of research.
• https://poetryarchive.org/poem/fiddler-dooney/ one of my favorites
• https://www.feraleyes.xyz/p/god-written-by-a-girl personal essay, I don't totally understand but it's heartfelt
• https://viaseparations.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Via-Separations-White-Paper-Dec.-2024.pdf  Via Separations produces membrane separations for industry that replaces (combustion-powered) evaporators, using 75% less energy without yield loss and with favorable economics without subsidies.

• https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/113721192051328193 Terence Tao on getting his papers declined; it happens to him about once a year. rejections are not unusual in math journals and even good mathematicians get them.

   

links 1/2/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-02-2025

• https://reason.com/2024/11/14/abolish-the-small-business-administration/ the case for abolishing the Small Business Administration, which subsidizes small businesses
• https://www.mercatus.org/doge  the Mercatus center's wishlist for DOGE on budget cuts and deregulation
  • sadly, these are not policies! they are editorials making arguments for why smaller government would be a good idea, and why certain tactics are worth consideration (like sunset provisions). zero object-level deregulation policy work (i.e. identifying which regulations to cut and who can cut them) has been done here. I am beginning to see why people complain about think tanks not actually dOiNg PoLicY.
• https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-are-vortex-crystals-zhsBX93zTdOxMh5sg3nWAw#3  Perplexity explains superfluids; they are frictionless, have extremely high thermal conductivity, and exhibit "quantized vortices", where the speed of the spinning fluid is an integer multiple of a constant and the vortex can keep spinning literally forever. Liquid helium is a superfluid. This has been known since 1937!
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfluidity
• https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adn5694  a passively radiative aerogel that reflects >100% of solar radiation through fluorescence and phosphorescence
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26050-z  0.5% of European GDP reduced by heat waves in the 21st century
• https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-orleans-killed-mass-casualty-bourbon-street-car-crowd-rcna185914 "Texas man kills 14 on New Orleans' Bourbon Street after driving truck with ISIS flag through crowd." Police believe he did not act alone.
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shotgun_cartridge A shotgun cartridge is filled with tiny little metal balls called shot, or a single projectile called a slug. Smaller shot goes farther than bigger shot, and slugs go farther still.
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_You_Ever_Forgive_Me movie (I haven't seen it but saw it recommended) about a woman who forged letters from dead celebrities
• https://www.sympatheticopposition.com/p/risk-averse-women-rarely-birth-royalty Matthew's genealogy of Jesus notes four Biblical women -- Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba -- who took sexual risks to secure their children's legacy. I love this piece and think we talk too little about the fact that women take calculated risks sexually. To live a good life, you have to risk intimacy and decide when to bet that it won't put you in danger or ruin your future. That's true in both ancient societies and today, though of course the risk landscape is very different.
• https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/01/the_stranger.html I like this old Bryan Caplan post on what we owe strangers. Common sense ethics says we should not aggress upon strangers but we don't usually owe them much positive help; yet this is a radical and uncommon position in politics.
• https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16075 a case for formal verification + AI hybrid systems in mathematics, and a roadmap for future progress, by leading AI-for-math researchers Kaiyu Yang, Gabriel Poesia, Jingxuan He, Wenda Li, Kristin Lauter, Swarat Chaudhuri, and Dawn Song. Excellent, detailed, this is the survey paper to reference for the next while!
• https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/01/africa-facts-of-the-day.html "Africa is now experiencing more conflicts than at any point since at least 1946". Prediction: more immigration from African countries.
• what are the current military drones models?
  • https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/25712-worlds-best-military-drones
  • https://www.ssbcrack.com/2024/06/top-military-drones.html
  • https://inphoenixaviation.com/top-10-military-drones-ruling-the-skies-in-2024/
  • countries that make long-range drones (basically unmanned planes): USA, UK, France, China, Turkey, Russia
• https://www.construction-physics.com/p/morris-chang-and-the-origins-of-tsmc TSMC founder Morris Chang's autobiography; lots of false starts along the way. TSMC's big innovation was being the world's first foundry. They did not start with the latest and best equipment; but they were the first to offer semiconductor manufacturing as a service, and Asian semi manufacturers were already more reliable at quality than US ones (going back to the 60's! wonder what's up with that.)
• https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/notes-on-china Dwarkesh Patel visits China.
  • surprising-to-me claim that there's no crime (Chinese friend claims much the opposite!)
  • "The biggest surprise from talking to Chinese VCs people at AI labs was how capital constrained they felt."
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lighthouse_in_Economics back in 1974 Ronald Coase pointed out that lighthouses, long a prototypical example of a public good, were actually privately provided in England during the 17th-19thc. Critics said they went out of business, which proved the market couldn't actually incentivize lighthouse production; Coase replied that the British government made a policy choice to take over the lighthouse industry.
• http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html David Friedman argues that property rights come to be as a result of Schelling points.
  • if self-interested people are negotiating (say, dividing up a pie), obviously everybody will want the most for themselves; but we also have an interest in eventually settling the negotiation, saving ourselves time and effort (and gaining safety, if the "negotiation" is violent).
  • If one arrangement stands out as "natural" or unique, it can be a Schelling point for where to stop negotiating and accept the arrangement. "Push back if they ask for more than the Schelling point, acquiesce if they ask for no more than the Schelling point" is a stable strategy. (analogous to "contrite Tit for Tat" which performs very well in evolutionary game theory experiments, though Friedman doesn't mention that.)
  • the status quo ante always makes a great Schelling point; laws, contracts, and other common-knowledge establishment of who has a right to what, can become stably self-enforcing even without a formal enforcement mechanism. (eg there is no world government but national borders are usually respected.)
  • the fact that people can, empirically, control their own bodies much more easily than other people's bodies, and can better defend property they can hide and territory they live in, than objects and land not literally in their current possession, also makes concepts like self-ownership and property ownership "natural" Schelling points.
    • though of course the exact boundaries of how property rights work are not given a priori and different societies can define them differently.
• https://sense-nets.xyz/ proposals for better science social media networks
• https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/12/the-cows-in-the-coal-mine.html are we neglecting H5N1?
• https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-japan-opened-itself-up-to-immigration Noah Smith argues that Japan tried being ethnically homogeneous, found it couldn't (due to labor shortages), and has allowed big increases in immigration, with the approval of most Japanese voters.
• https://zhengdongwang.com/2024/12/29/2024-letter.html  "The model does the eval": as soon as we come up with an evaluation for an AI capability and a dataset to train on, human ingenuity will find ways to make the AI hit the benchmark. If it's not model scaling, it'll be inference-time compute, or mixture-of-experts, or something else.
  • AI progress, like Moore's Law progress, isn't due to a single technological innovation. Once an industry has a moving quantitative target and a strong economic incentive (and social expectation) to keep hitting that moving target, it'll develop multiple technologies with overlapping S-curves that keep improving performance, potentially for a very long time.
• https://ontheones.wordpress.com/2019/06/29/on-denpa-a-guest-article-by-kenji-the-engi/ Denpa, the anime genre that Neon Genesis Evangelion was from, was prevalent in the 1990's and early 2000's; these were disturbing, experimental meditations on the theme of social misfits who retreated from reality.
• https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KSguJeuyuKCMq7haq/is-vnm-agent-one-of-several-options-for-what-minds-can-grow [[Anna Salamon]] asks if "utility optimizers" are what all sufficiently "smart" minds will end up being, or if there are other options
• https://trevorklee.com/want-to-reverse-aging-try-reversing-graying-first/ Trevor Klee on reversing gray hair. There are isolated case studies of people whose gray hair has regained pigmentation; lots of these are associated with the use of immunosuppressants, which suggests that something in the aged immune system may be attacking the melanocytes (or their precursors) which produce hair pigmentation.
• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10461778/  Can you make an organoid of hairy skin? Yes you can!

• https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-biggest-community-development-program-youve-never-heard-of Clara Collier looks into the history of a giant attempt to improve India's agricultural productivity in the 1950's-60's, by letting village leaders ask for what their village needs most, while the org would provide technological know-how to solve their problems. It worked great when founder Albert Mayer was running it; not so much when the Indian government tried to scale up nationally. Mostly because of common scale-up issues: difficulty finding talented staff, too big for the founder to personally go to all the villages and fix problems, etc.

  • today, global development experts would consider relying on village "leaders" to be an inherently biased approach; these would invariably be male, high-caste, and relatively rich, and the rest of the village wouldn't necessarily buy into what they proposed.
  • despite this flaw, it worked fine in the pilot, because while Mayer didn't have modern egalitarian language to describe it, he was de facto insisting that village discussions included all sorts of people. But when he was no longer micromanaging the program and using his own elbow grease to fix problems, the explicit/formal protocol of the program naturally devolved into "only village elites get a say" and villages indeed failed to follow through on the proposed reforms/improvements.

   

links 12/30/24:

• Andy Gilmore art https://www.agilmore.com/
• https://quarter--mile.com/ life & business advice, from an excellence-oriented, rather startuppy perspective
• https://www.persuasion.community/p/propaganda-almost-never-works contrary to popular belief, propaganda (including advertising) does not have extraordinary abilities to manipulate people into believing or doing things they would not otherwise do. I believe this.
  • propaganda is important (and potentially dangerous) primarily for functions besides directly causing people to believe/do what the propaganda says, such as:
    • creating common knowledge and coordination points
      • eg emboldening people who already agree with the propaganda
    • crowding out non-propaganda communication and creating confusion about what the real, non-propaganda story is
    • demonstrating the propagandist's power
  • but people are generally not easy to manipulate in the manipulator's intended direction.
    • this comports with all the failure to replicate the claims that simple priming/context cues (from power poses to stereotype threat) can "nudge" human behavior in a predictable direction.
    • I believe people are, of course, influenced by culture and communication, but we are relatively robust to single persuasive/manipulative interventions. People are agents; we often ignore or defy people's attempts to change us.
    • the marketing literature also shows that advertising is usually ineffective, that most people are indifferent to almost all products, and that the most effective advertising (in terms of increasing sales) isn't about inducing passionate enthusiasm for a product but rather informing/reminding the marginal potential customer that it exists and is conveniently available.
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-024-00738-w  a brain and body model of C. elegans that recapitulates realistic zigzag foraging behavior
  • like many C. elegans simulation models, it's specific to a subset of neurons and body components. We don't yet have a "whole-worm simulation" that does everything a worm does, but we have lots of special-purpose models.
    • A priori, it's worth being suspicious of special-purpose models that "succeed" in the sense of recapitulating a particular worm behavior, since there are lots of ways to (intentionally or unintentionally) set up complex statistical models to guarantee you get the outcome you want.
    • But these guys (from the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, https://eng.bigai.ai/) do eventually want to build a whole-worm, multipurpose simulation.
• https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-core-argument-for-small-l-liberalism
  • I didn't love this. It presents liberalism as a "compromise" for allowing people with different views to live together in peace, which is not exactly wrong but seems a bit ahistorical. Liberalism, as it was born in the 1600s in the Dutch Republic and then England, was indeed a truce between conflicting religions, but it was also conceived, by its advocates, as a positive good that was necessary for true religion, and later as a worldview of its own that represented values like civilization, humaneness, lawful justice, and reason.
  • The linked post is written from within liberalism; it uses concepts that wouldn't be natural for an illiberal (say, someone today who's sympathetic to Hamas, Putin, or Xi.) I don't necessarily think you need to successfully persuade such a person, but you should be able to write to them and say "this is what we believe & value; it is different from what you believe & value, but I can convey why it appeals to us, why it's a continuing passion and not just an unexamined default."
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalonymus_ben_Kalonymus
• https://www.businessinsider.com/evaporated-people-disappearing-from-japan-2017-4 in Japan, the "johatsu" disappear and change their names/identities after a shameful failure like a lost job or divorce.

• https://twittersaudreyhorne.substack.com/p/audrey-hornes-ultimate-gift-guide & https://twittersaudreyhorne.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-mens-gift-guide-2024

  • excellent gift guides for men (taught me about Pendleton blankets, which are Western-style patterns in luxurious high-quality wool)

   

links 12/23/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-23-2024

•  a bunch of detailed (and still debated) fan meta about what's even going on in Neon Genesis Evangelion
  • https://forum.evageeks.org/thread/20093/Kaworu-and-SEELE-Gendos-Plans-Angel-Rebirth/
  • https://forum.evageeks.org/thread/20116/Questions-about-SEELEs-Gendos-Angels-goals/
  • https://wiki.evageeks.org/Theory_and_Analysis:Kaworu%27s_Agenda
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/evangelion/comments/1ech72/what_does_seele_actually_want_ive_only_watched/
• https://www.syllabi.directory/ "syllabi" or informational resources for getting up to speed on various topics: so far topics include clinical trial design, cities, English literature, and housing supply.
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Langley Early pioneer of aviation; in 1903 his steam-powered airplane actually flew farther than the Wright Brothers' famous attempt later that year, but crashed in the Potomac due to poor controllability.
  • an online acquaintance argued recently that the reason the Wright Brothers are celebrated as pioneers of flight is not because they were "first" to achieve sustained powered flight, but that they were the first to start an airplane company, to continue the project and iteratively improve and teach others. Lots of people claim competing "first flight" stories, but (including Langley's) they were all one-off stunts that didn't leave a legacy.
    • also (according to him), controllability is a key piece of the puzzle, and there's a tradeoff between controllability and stability (too "controllable" and the plane will respond all-too-vigorously to small random pilot movements) and the Wrights' three-axis control setup was the most successful and the one that came to be the ancestor of modern flight control mechanisms.
• https://nyuu.page/essays/solidity/ extremely detailed analysis of one type of crypto scam that was popular in 2021 with smart contracts
• https://www.fuisz.xyz/blog blog by generally creative biotech guy Richard Fuisz

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

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.

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 in early pregnancy. I looked forward to having kids while pregnant, but in my mind a fetus has no lovable characteristics; it's all imagination and my own bodily symptoms! I felt love when my kids were born and loved/appreciated them increasingly over time as they gradually developed distinctive personalities. Some mothers don't even feel love towards newborns; it often "grows in" later.
• 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.

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.
  • https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-021-01386-6
  • https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1155/2017/6045017

  • https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1155/2017/6045017

     

"three cultures of self-criticism" https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/zzRZnCLd_

• non-self-critical culture (Barbarians):
  • baseline assumptions:
    • people generally think they are okay and good, and they are generally right.
    • self-criticism is rare.
    • if someone is being self-critical, guilty, ashamed, etc, that indicates an unusual problem.
  • implications:
    • intense self-criticism will be taken as evidence of something actually wrong with the person -- either they really did screw up quite badly, or they have poor judgment.
    • criticism is direct and overt.
      • if someone objects to what you've done, they'll tell you straight out, and expect that this will clear the air and lead to a resolution of the problem.
      • "negative" judgments are not necessarily intended, or expected, to be painful; the listener may very well disagree with the judgment or find it helpful feedback.
      • as a corollary, nobody assumes that an ambiguous comment or facial expression is a hint at criticism or disapproval. The default assumption is that people are fine with you, that you're fine, and if there's a problem it'll become obvious.
• pro-self-criticism culture (Puritans):
  • baseline assumptions:
    • people are generally deeply flawed; we are constantly screwing up, sinning, etc. this is the universal or near-universal human condition, not something limited to unusually bad people. but it really is genuinely Bad and Not Okay.
    • people tend to be complacent -- by default we engage in far too little self-criticism. We are screwing up without knowing it. We let ourselves off the hook, make excuses for ourselves, ignore warning signs. It takes active, continual effort to be vigilant against our own flaws.
  • implications:
    • intense self-criticism and guilt is normative. virtuous people will not think well of themselves. in fact, if someone does think well of themselves, that means they're lazy and have low standards.
      • corollary: an intensely self-critical or guilty person is not assumed to be an unusually bad person or to have a mental health problem; they are just doing what we're all supposed to do!
    • criticism can be harsh and intentionally painful, because the assumption is that it needs to be "strong enough" to overcome natural human complacency
    • it's also common to read criticism into subtle or ambiguous signs. the assumption is that there are always more problems than the obvious ones; it's never safe to presume things are fine.
• counter-self-criticism culture (Therapy Patients):
  • baseline assumptions:
    • people generally are too self-critical. most people are basically fine but torture themselves over minutiae.
    • complacency -- failing to self-criticize enough about genuine faults -- is literally monstrous. complacent people are rare, and pathological; we might call them sociopaths. you absolutely would not want to be one, and you're almost certainly not.
    • "healing" or "growth" means learning to quiet the overactive inner critic. this is very difficult; people need help with it.
    • everybody always needs validation and reassurance that they're ok, and the kindest thing you can do for anyone is give them permission not to worry or self-criticize. the cruelest thing you can do is trigger their insecurities and intensify their (already painful) self-criticism.
  • implications:
    • self-criticism is not normative; it's an affliction we all suffer from and long to be freed from.
      • like sin in pro-self-criticism cultures, misery in counter-self-criticism culture is seen as Genuinely Terrible, Deeply Not Okay, but also a part of the human condition, not a sign that something has gone unusually wrong with you. you're mentally ill, like everyone else.
    • criticism is mild and gentle, or suppressed altogether, because it's assumed everybody is already torturing themselves and doesn't need other people piling on.
      • corollary: it's common to read a lot of criticism or disapproval into subtle or ambiguous signals because it's assumed that people are holding back their true negative opinions. The absence of reassurance or validation is considered a sign of severe, harsh disapproval.
• relationships:
  • Barbarians see Puritans as totally excessive, and see Therapy Patients as trying to counteract a problem that one can just...not have.
  • Puritans see both Barbarians and Therapy Patients as dangerously complacent.
  • Therapy Patients see Puritans as a familiar enemy -- something they understand but reject and want to get away from, like an unhappy childhood home -- and see Barbarians as incomprehensible, alien, insane, not-even-human. 

links 12/03/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-03-2024

• https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/my-mind-transformed-completely-and Sasha Chapin on how meditation changed him
  • it doesn't seem clear to me whether this is better or not!
  • reduced anxiety seems great, but reduced sense of narrative drama is a big cost. part of what makes life seem meaningful to me is the sense of being part of a story, and if anything i feel like my current arc involves gaining abilities to envision myself as inside a narrative.
• https://www.wired.com/story/murderbot-she-wrote-martha-wells/ Martha Wells seems like a lovely person
• https://www.orcasciences.com/articles  recommended by Ben Reinhardt, great example of rigorous analyses of potential future technologies.
  • https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/checking-my-prejudices-on-materials-decarbonization eg: where does it make economic sense to use electrochemical or biological manufacturing? (compared to "thermochemical", fossil-fuel-powered). For biomanufacturing, only for complex molecules like proteins; for electrochemical processing, mostly metals and things with big voltage potentials in the chemical reaction (zinc, cobalt, copper, lithium, etc) but not simple organic molecules (methane, ethanol, etc)
• https://www.biotech.senate.gov/press-releases/interim-report/ "US National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology", a congressional advisory committee led by Jason Kelly of Gingko Bioworks
  • their purpose seems to be getting biotech-friendly policies through congress, with the rationale that this is good for national security/defense.
  • a lot of naive boosterism about biomanufacturing without engaging with the question of "is this better than alternative manufacturing techniques?"
• https://www.aria.org.uk/request-for-opps/ new opportunities for program managers at ARIA: lead a scientific research program!

links 11/26/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-26-2024

• https://chrislakin.blog/archive  sensible, but not actionable for me, advice on becoming less insecure.
• https://abundance.institute pro-progress think tank, where Eli Dourado works
• The Myth of Er is the final scene of Plato's Republic.
  • it is a very strange story. in the afterlife, the good are rewarded in heaven and the bad are punished in hell; and then everyone lines up to choose their new reincarnated life. they get to see how each possible life will play out. people who have led unhappy lives often prefer to reincarnate as animals. people who were only virtuous out of habit and went to heaven often choose to be all-powerful tyrants, not realizing how this will backfire and hurt them. people who have learned philosophy are more likely to choose lives of virtue; they also "forget less" about their past lives by drinking from Lethe.
    • so in one sense it's straightforwardly a pitch for philosophy...but it has more moving parts than would seem to be necessary just to make that point.
      • most myths/stories about "good is rewarded, evil is punished" don't have this homeostatic mechanism where the good are most likely to turn bad (since Heaven makes them complacent) and the bad are more likely to turn good (since Hell makes them wish for a better next life.) why put that in?
    • how does this whole reincarnation thing relate to the rest of the Republic, which is ambiguous between being a plan for an ideal city and a metaphor for the ideal internal organization of the soul?
  • https://beccatarnas.com/2013/10/17/the-myth-of-er/
• http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/the-spindle-of-necessity/
• war in the Middle East
  • https://www.fairobserver.com/politics/fo-exclusive-the-israel-iran-conflict-is-getting-more-dangerous/
  • https://indianexpress.com/article/world/iran-vows-response-israeli-airstrikes-escalating-tensions-9688373/
  • https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/2/khamenei-warns-israel-us-of-crushing-response-for-actions-against-iran
  • https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/26/israel-strikes-iran-what-we-know-so-far-and-whats-next
• what went wrong with Gingko Bioworks?
  • first of all, their stock price crashed after short seller Scorpion Capital reported that most of their "revenue" was from self-funded "related parties" that often had the same staff and office space...aka they weren't "really" selling to other companies much at all.
  • but what was the underlying technical problem? why couldn't they sell biomanufactured compounds profitably?
    • one possibility: they were focusing on compounds that could be synthesized chemically, much more cheaply, that you would only grow from microbes if you wanted some sort of "all-natural" label
    • another possibility: their service was limited to (parallelized, automated) yeast strain optimization in very small samples -- 384-well plates. they didn't do scale-up (growing the yeast in large reactors) and they didn't do downstream processing (extracting the product from the yeast). this may have lowered their rate of generating successful products, because many failures happen in the parts of the process they didn't specialize in.
      • this is the manufacturing equivalent of what, in drug discovery, would be a CRO that only does a certain range of in-vitro screens. obviously many things that pass the screens will fail in animals or clinical trials. and obviously the value of an early screening service is quite low compared to the value of a successful end product.
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/biotech/comments/1cwlpj3/whats_wrong_with_ginkgo_bioworks/
  • https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/24/1032308/is-ginkgos-synthetic-biology-story-worth-15-billion/
  • https://www.pagetwentyone.com/post/ginkgo-bioworks-rise-and-fall-of-15-billion-biotech-unicorn
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/ginkgobioworks/comments/qgx2t1/updated_ginkgo_partner_tracker/
  • https://healthandwealth.substack.com/p/ginkgo-bioworks-part-2
  • https://www.living.tech/articles/ginkgo-bioworks-original-sin
  • https://www.nanalyze.com/2023/03/ginkgo-bioworks-bait-switch/
  • https://seekingalpha.com/article/4691850-ginkgo-bioworks-broken-narrative
  • https://medium.com/@kahunacapbio/ginkgo-bioworks-cell-program-success-and-failure-7eb988c6d549
  • https://scorpioncapital.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/reports/DNA1.pdf
  • https://foundrytheory.substack.com/ I'm gonna be real with you -- for all the bad results, I love Gingko's marketing. It makes me sad when people slam "hype" because this is so beautiful. Aesthetically tasteful, intellectually stimulating, emotionally inspiring. Everything they've done on the marketing front is just the best. and tbh it's worked for them -- the one thing even the damning reports show is how great they are at starting early-stage conversations with Fortune 500 companies. (they just rarely get all the way to actual products, revenue, and happy customers.) I'll be sad if the end of the ZIRP era means the end of pretty design and delightful copy.
• https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/ AI-for-bio company
• https://www.maximumnewyork.com/p/political-capital-savings-plan
  • I'm sure Daniel Golliher is doing a healthy thing but I struggle to get on board myself.
    • I think he's probably right that in order to actually make a political impact you have to pick a very small issue (like basketball courts in your city) to spend a lot of time on and you have to, um, have friends.
    • I looked into public art one time -- how do people get their murals etc into public spaces? -- and the answer was, simply, that they are full time on that project. they live eat sleep and breathe public art. now, do I like pretty things? yes. do I care so much about public art in particular that i would want to be full time on it? no.
    • Given that I don't want to spend my life on the issues "small enough" that i could actually shift them, it is absolutely rational for me not to participate in politics and to find it an uncongenial place! i can make a way bigger impact, much faster, with the reputational capital (and literal money) I've built up in more SV-adjacent circles than I can by grinding on NYC neighborhood issues.
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-024-01784-3
  • Is connectomics actually useful for anything? here’s strong evidence for “yes.”
  • Mapping how neurons connect and using graph clustering gives you (anatomically sensible) functional distinctions into systems like “oculomotor” (which governs eye movements) and “axial” (which governs movements along the body axis.)
  • Looking at the spectrum of the graph also predicts a chunky “wiring diagram”. Simulating the dynamics of this wiring diagram recapitulates real electrophysiology. In other words, just doing mathy graph stuff allowed the researchers to infer a modular organization at an intermediate scale between neurons and gross anatomy, a useful scale for predicting neural behavior. This is literally “cutting reality at the joints”.
  • One thing that has frustrated me as an amateur learning neuroscience is that we have a microscale (cells) and a macroscale (brain anatomy) but function — the brain’s ability to carry out specific tasks — has to happen at some kind of meso-scale regarding the interaction of groups of neurons. Clearly there’s redundancy — it’s possible for two different neuron-by-neuron patterns of activity to reflect “the same” functional behavior — so we need a “unit of function” that’s “all the activity patterns that do the same thing” — probably that coincides somewhat with spatial co-location, similar cell type, etc, but not at all necessarily! Only once you have “units of function” can you talk about the brain like a machine, know what its “state” is and how that “state” would change under specific interventions, simulate it efficiently, etc.
  • To understand brain function, we’d need to be able to discern human-interpretable “parts” of brain activity, like “remembering your grandmother just is the fizz blorking the buzz”…but we don’t seem to know what the “fizz”, the “buzz” or “blorking” are. We’d need to have “chunky things” in the brain-activity space, the way molecules, cells, or anatomical structures are “chunky things” at the micro and macro scales. And I felt like “what am I missing? does anybody in neuroscience even care about chunky-things? am I wrong to care? or do I just have the wrong keyword?”
  • This paper definitely seems like an example of “chunky things neuroscience”, which is encouraging!

links 11/25/2024

• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/17/how-to-survive-the-broligarchy-20-lessons-for-the-post-truth-world-donald-trump
  • I was looking forward to a genuine practical how-to, but this isn't really it; while I can't argue with the value of "stick to your principles even in the face of authoritarianism" and "people who think they'll be targeted by authoritarians need to be especially mindful of communications & payments privacy" I think this author is envisioning scenarios worse than I think are likely.
• https://nadia.xyz/jhanas  unusually straightforward explanation of one person's experience learning the jhanas
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shop_Around_the_Corner
• https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/drug-development-ross-rheingans-yoo/ Ross Rheingans-Yoo on drug development
• https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/13/what-do-we-know-about-the-north-korean-troops-joining-russias-war North Korean troops are now supporting Russia in the Ukraine war.
• https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/money-movement-erik-torenberg/ Erik Torenberg on finance
• https://drdevonprice.substack.com/p/i-dont-feel-safe-around-cis-women a rant about a particular kind of cis women who feel entitled to be extremely rude and intrusive because they assume "women = inherently benign".
• reading about the Inca:
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_cuisine
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_mythology
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_Empire
• https://www.wrecka.ge/against-the-dark-forest/ not very solution-oriented piece about problems with the internet
  • ok, you blame Big Tech, and you see "Dark Forest" discourse as insufficiently hard on Big Tech.
  • you also think that retreat to "private" nooks is not adequate (I agree) and that different cultures around the world should get to choose their own forms of online networking instead of being lumped into a US-centric paradigm (sure) and that we need ways to connect around the world (yes)...but what do you propose and who will pay for it etc are the questions coming to my mind
• https://endpts.com/trump-picks-hopkins-researcher-marty-makary-to-lead-the-fda/ 

  • moderately reformist, critical of COVID-19 response but not of vaccines per se

     

From the POV of this piece, whether you want process or outcome neutrality...depends. You're being "neutral" so you can enlist the trust and cooperation of a varied range of people, in order to pursue some purpose that all of you value. Do the relevant people care more about process or outcome? 

Another way to look at it is that it's ultimately always a question of process. "Ensuring equality/neutrality of outcome" means "I propose a process that makes adjustments so that outcomes end up in a desirable "neutral" configuration." Then the questions are: a.) does that process result in that "neutral" configuration? b.) is that configuration of outcomes what we want? c.) is the process of adjustment itself objectionable? (e.g. "whether or not material equality is desirable, I don't believe in forced redistribution to equalize wealth").

When you are building an institution that aims at neutrality, ultimately you're proposing a set of processes, things the institution will do, and hoping that these processes engender trust. "I can't accept the likely outcome of this process" and "I can't accept the way this process works" are both ways trust can break down. 

links 11/22/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-22-2024

• https://www.slowboring.com/p/can-we-have-a-family-friendly-high Matt Yglesias designs a family-friendly high rise. i want this! 

• https://www.experimental-history.com/p/underrated-ways-to-change-the-world 

   

I don't know where I got that last sentence; that's clearly bogus. If you knew that a certain drug, target, or research strategy was going to work, of course you could profit off it. That is literally what the biotech industry does.

While I still think all of the above is more-or-less true, I've since learned it's not the real reason. 

The real reason is that we don't (yet) have a way to noninvasively measure blood hormone levels as they fluctuate throughout the day. You'd have to keep your study subjects hooked up to an IV, or taking many blood tests a day, continuously for at least a month (because of the menstrual cycle). This is unpleasant and maybe unacceptably risky (infections!) What we need is noninvasive continuous hormone monitoring, which is currently at the prototype stage in a couple of university labs. 

Finding somebody who can do the math will be easy once the data exists.

ah. I'm now pretty bearish on Warburg. https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/fBd011iWS

It's not a true "pan-cancer" phenomenon; the distribution of % of ATP due to glycolysis, across cancer cell lines, overlaps heavily with the same distribution for non-cancerous cells, i.e. you can't effectively distinguish cancer from non-cancer by its glycolysis activity.  Also, not all glycolysis-using cancers will actually die if you block glycolysis; some of them just adapt/evolve to use cellular respiration instead.  

So, glycolysis-inhibition drugs can, at best, be effective against the fraction of cancers that are truly obligate glycolysis-dependent...and even there, they'll be side-effect-heavy like conventional chemotherapy, since they'll also target glycolysis-dependent healthy cells (which are not rare!) In other words, even if a glycolysis inhibitor turns out to be effective against some cancers, it's not going to be anywhere near universally applicable.

The glycolysis-inhibitor drug candidate I used to be excited about was 3-bromopyruvate, which indeed was reported to eradicate some big tumors in rats and turned very advanced liver cancer necrotic in a human case study. 

The lead researcher, Young H. Ko, has since left Johns Hopkins -- she sued them in 2005 for race and gender discrimination after her contract was not renewed, but lost the case. She's now founded her own company, KoDiscovery (the website is pretty scammy-looking but I'm trying to suspend judgment) and has registered their first clinical trial with the FDA, currently ongoing in Korea.

Unfortunately a German alternative-medicine clinic is under investigation for manslaughter when three patients died after being administered the compound. (The article isn't claiming the clinic is at all affiliated with Ko or her company.)

The phase I/II trial is set to complete next year, so we'll have more information then. 

links 11/21/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-21-2024

• https://goodscienceproject.org/articles/how-to-actually-reduce-the-administrative-burden-on-research/ instead of needing a majority to repeal rules (public choice works against you) we could instead have a national commission empowered to repeal rules unless vetoed by Congress by a deadline (public choice works for you!)
• https://wellcomeleap.org/dr/ Lynne Cox's program on frailty & resilience
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMILY%27s_List
  • EMILY's List, founded in the 1980's, fundraises for pro-choice female political candidates. I'd heard of it but was surprised how successful it had been.
• https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1475-4975.1979.tb00377.x
  • Peter Unger, "Why there are no people."
  • he introduces a concept called a "nacknick", where things that are "suitably similar in shape" to a given example object are nacknicks, but things that are very differently shaped are not. he thinks this is logically incoherent and goes on to argue that "person" is a concept of this form.
    • but...most concepts work this way! they are approximate, not amenable to rigorous definition, defined by similarity to a prototypical example. I can live with this!
    • ...this seems to be a big factor in David Chapman's thinking, why he feels he has to decisively reject things like "philosophy" and "rationalism", because he apparently fell into severe clinical depression due to the idea that non-rigorous definitions are unacceptable?
      • this is idiosyncratic. now, i don't think it's necessarily avoidable or at all bad for one's intellectual output to be a mirror of one's personal concerns. but most depressed people are not depressed about non-rigorous definitions, and most people can handle hearing about non-rigorous definitions without getting depressed. this isn't some kind of universal root cause of the unhappiness of intellectuals!
        • speaking as an often-unhappy intellectual, I am FINE with some things not being amenable to rigorous definition but still being real things.
          • if anything, studying mathematics taught me that the rigorously formalizable and provable is a very tiny slice of the world.
• https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/between-the-booms-ai-in-winter/
  • history of AI in the 80's and 90's -- after the expert systems bust, we got embodied intelligence, genetic algorithms, artificial life (aka cellular automata & evolutionary game theory), Bayesian networks, hidden Markov models, and of course the revival neural nets w/ backprop.
  • yes, our founding ideas came from a so-called "AI winter".
• https://www.societylibrary.org/  has gotten a lot bigger with a recent funding infusion.
  • they have (AI-enabled) debate mapping, decision making toolkit, educational programs, and something called "Internet Government" which doesn't exist yet. https://www.internetgovernment.org/
• https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11414.pdf
  • American MTurkers don't prefer male to female politicians in a simulated voting task; Republicans and male Democrats are about as likely to "vote" for a female as male politician, while female Democrats are more likely to vote for a woman.
• https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qXZLFGqpD7aeEgXGL Richard Ngo's "Replacing Fear" sequence.
  • it's mostly IFS-based, which i find not especially useful.
    • I don't think it makes sense to conceptualize myself as made of stable sub-personalities, like an internal "cast of characters".
      • i can certainly go into a hypnagogic/imaginative trance state and allow such entities to emerge, but if I do a subsequent session, they do not "naturally" emerge the same way again, and it seems like a bad idea to deliberately force or train myself to have sub-personalities.
        • i either want to observe my mind impartially, seeing it as it is, or I want to shape myself to be be better.
        • If I don't naturally already have multiple sub-personalities, artificially inducing them doesn't seem like an improvement.
    • I do sometimes find it useful to think of myself as having fluctuating moods, motives, and concerns, and do "dialogue" between the ones that are active at any one time.
      • but unlike IFS, I don't expect them to be necessarily permanent, and I don't necessarily need them to be character-like (having a distinctive appearance, personality, etc.)
        • moods are styles/vibes that encompass my whole experience of life while I'm in them
        • motives feel like pressures or inclinations to move/act in a certain direction;
          • not like little inner people, if anything more like little "simulated/anticipated" muscle movements
        • concerns might be a type of motive, "i gotta remember to track/account-for/care-about this thing"
          • again, it's either an abstract thought or a pattern of muscle-tension/planned-movement/etc. it just is not like a little inner person.
• most industrial enzyme generation is fermentation of filamentous fungi -- molds like Aspergillus and Penicillium. this is done somewhat differently than yeast or bacterial culture.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_fermentation it's most efficient and cheapest to grow these filamentous fungi on solid plant matter with only a little bit of fluid.
  • https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9025306/
  • https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7123961/
  • https://microbialcellfactories.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2859-10-68
  • https://www.redalyc.org/journal/1871/187158163062/html/
  • https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5358476/
  • https://defoortconsultant.com/bio-economy-and-technology-the-challenges-of-industrial-fermentation/
  • https://www.susupport.com/knowledge/fermentation/challenges-microbial-fermentation-manufacturing
  • https://www.davidmoore.org.uk/21st_Century_Guidebook_to_Fungi_PLATINUM/REPRINT_collection/Pandy_solid-state-fermentn2003.pdf
  • https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452072116300144
• https://www.elidourado.com/p/personal-aviation Eli Dourado notes that "light-sport" aircraft FAA certification requirements have expanded, allowing something more like a 4-seat "flying car"-like personal aircraft, with extensive autopilot, to be affordable and legal to fly with an amateur pilot's license. 

links 11/18/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-18-2024

• [[links]]
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Roerich  I like his art; he seems to have led an interesting life
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Quentin_de_La_Tour Rococo portraits
  •  
  • https://www.zach.be/p/yc-is-wrong-about-llms-for-chip-design
    • this doesn't seem to be a coherent argument -- author claims both that LLMs will indeed be used by chip design companies to save on human labor, and that they're not very good and can only replace the more routine parts of a chip designer's work. But...this isn't "YC is wrong, there is not a startup opportunity in using LLMs for chip design!" even if it's true it's just a more measured and realistic picture of what LLMs will be doing in chip design!
      • and they even make sure to shill their own AI-for-chip-hardware startup, which they claim is working on challenges that nobody else is: https://www.normalcomputing.com/
  • https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/how-chaotic-is-trump-ii-going-to speculation about Donald Trump's foreign policy
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Defoe  i want to read his nonfiction
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotex sanitary pads have been around since 1920
  • https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-death-and-life-of-prediction-markets-at-google  the tl;dr: Google's first internal prediction market was intended to go public and stalled as the regulatory environment remained unfriendly; its successor focused on predictions about competitor activity rather than Google's own activity (which is less subject to "office politics" considerations blocking an honest assessment of Google's chances of success etc) and never intended to be public-facing, and is still in active use.
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7oise_d%27Aubign%C3%A9,_Marquise_de_Maintenon
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_de_Pompadour  patroness of the French Enlightenment.
    • "who was that woman who was an influential mistress to the King of France, politically savvy and queen in all but name"? "which one? this just keeps happening"
  • https://nintil.com/dont-assume this is Jose Luis Ricon life advice, which unsurprisingly tells you to be less afraid of things and talk to people more.
    • shan't.
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Monroe
  • https://calisphere.org/item/0bc1137c37161874ded76c71bf982409/  scary guys
  •  

My intuition is to get less excited by single projects (a Double Crux bot) until someone has brought them all together & created momentum behind some kind of "big" agglomeration of people + resources in the "neutrality tools" space. 

I didn't know about all the existing projects and I appreciate the resource! Concrete >> vague in my book, I just didn't actually know much about concrete examples.

links 11/15/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-15-2024

• https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1gleyhg/people_like_me_are_the_reason_trump_won/  a moderate/swing-voter (Obama, Trump, Biden) explains why he voted for Trump this time around:
  • he thinks Kamala Harris was an "empty shell" and unlikable and he felt the campaign was manipulative and deceptive.
  • he didn't like that she seemed to be a "DEI hire", but doesn't have a problem with black or female candidates generally, it's just that he resents cynical demographic box-checking.
    • this is a coherent POV -- he did vote for Obama, after all. and plenty of people are like "I want the best person regardless of demographics, not a person chosen for their demographics."
      • hm. why doesn't it seem natural to portray Obama as a "DEI hire"? his campaign made a bigger deal about race than Harris's, and he was criticized a lot for inexperience.
        • One guess: it's laughable to think Obama was chosen by anyone besides himself. He was not the Democratic Party's anointed -- that was Hillary. He's clearly an ambitious guy who wanted to be president on his own initiative and beat the odds to get the nomination. He can't be a "DEI hire" because he wasn't a hire at all.
        • another guess: Obama is clearly smart, speaks/writes in complete sentences, and welcomes lots of media attention and talks about his policies, while Harris has a tendency towards word salad, interviews poorly, avoids discussing issues, etc.
        • another guess: everyone seems to reject the idea that people prefer male to female candidates, but I'm still really not sure there isn't a gender effect! This is very vibes-based on my part, and apparently the data goes the other way, so very uncertain here.
• https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/if-langurs-can-drink-seawater-can  Trevor Klee on adaptations for drinking seawater

links 9/14/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-14-2024

• https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine  retro magazines
• https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2019/09/17/weirding-diary-10/#more-6737 Venkatesh Rao on the fall of the MIT Media Lab
  • this stung a bit!
  • i have tended to think that the stuff with "intellectual-glamour" or "visionary" branding is actually pretty close to on-target. not always right, of course, often overhyped, but often still underinvested in even despite being highly hyped.
    • (a surprising number of famous scientists are starved for funding. a surprising number of inventions featured on TED, NYT, etc were never given resources to scale.)
  • I also am literally unconvinced that "Europe's kindergarten" was less sophisticated than our own time! but it seems like a fine debate to have at leisure, not totally sure how it would play out.
  • he's basically been proven right that energy has moved "underground" but that's not a mode i can work very effectively in. if you have to be invited to participate, well, it's probably not going to happen for me.
  • at the institutional level, he's probably right that it's wise to prepare for bad times and not get complacent. again, this was 2019; a lot of the bad times came later. i miss the good times; i want to believe they'll come again.

links 11/13/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-13-2024

• https://amaranth.foundation/bottlenecks-of-aging the Amaranth Foundation's bottlenecks of aging
• https://www.celinehh.com/aging-field Celine Halioua on what the aging field needs -- notably, more biotech companies that are prepared to run their own clinical trials specifically for aging-related endpoints.
  • a typical new biotech company never runs its own clinical trials -- they license, partner, or get bought by pharma. but pharma's not that into aging (yet) and nobody really has expertise in running aging-focused clinical trials, so that may need to happen first in a startup context. which means some investors have to be willing to put up more cash than usual....
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye_movement_sleep_behavior_disorder is the rare sleep disorder that almost always progresses to Parkinson's about 20 years later
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12208347/ lipofuscin = cross-links.
  • it's a "brown-yellow" pigmented substance (first observed under the microscope in the 19th century) that accumulates in post-mitotic cells with age.
  • it's not one substance; it's a mixture of "garbage" (mostly protein and lipid) that accumulates around the lysosome but can't be disposed of through exocytosis.
  • it's "autofluorescent" -- it fluoresces in various wavelengths of light without being stained.
  • it accumulates more under conditions of oxidative stress like high-oxygen environments or in the presence of iron (which catalyzes oxidation reactions); it accumulates less in the presence of antioxidants and under caloric restriction.
  • evidence that lipofuscin accumulation causes disease or dysfunction seems a lot shakier in this paper.
• https://barnacles.substack.com/p/understanding-as-an-art Laura Deming on visualization and the spiritual side of science
  • I was a little self-conscious about her dissatisfaction with "San Francisco courtier culture" -- of course she's much better at the hustle than I ever was, but I actually love it. If anything, I've more often felt hurt that so many people I know got sick of the game before I ever really figured out how to play it.
• https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-019-1824-y  some critiques of methylation clocks; the first one actually seems to have been an artifact of different distributions of cell types between old and young samples.
• https://www.science.org/content/article/scientific-showdown-seeks-biological-clock-best-tracks-aging  a contest for the best aging clock at predicting future mortality.
• https://www.exactsciences.com/ cancer prognostic/diagnostic biomarker company
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.04872  Epoch AI's new math benchmark of original, very hard problems
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.08467  a new benchmark for formal verification "hint" generation in the Dafny programming language
• https://dafny.org/ "Dafny is a verification-aware programming language that has native support for recording specifications and is equipped with a static program verifier."
  • Dafny's formal verification is based on automated SMT solvers; compared to proof assistants like Coq/Lean/etc it's less powerful
  • Dafny can be compiled to familiar languages such as such as C#, Java, JavaScript, Go and Python
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1fs12l9/what_do_you_rustaceans_think_of_dafny_language/ Rust users don't think Dafny is practical for programming "real" things in.
• https://manifund.org/projects/hire-a-dev-to-finish-and-launch-our-dating-site Shreeda Segan's OKC-clone dating site needs $10,000 to build an MVP
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eubulides the guy who brought you lists of paradoxes
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epimenides_paradox  "Epimenides the Cretan says, all Cretans are liars"
  • as my 6-year-old son Simon pointed out, this is not actually a paradox; to be a "liar" doesn't mean every statement you utter is a lie.
  • Epimenides himself didn't intend it to be a paradox. Apparently he disagreed with his fellow Cretans about the immortality of the god Zeus.
    • They fashioned a tomb for thee, O holy and high one
    • The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies!
    • But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever,
    • For in thee we live and move and have our being.
    • — Epimenides, Cretica
  • Wikipedia seems to trace the idea that this is a "paradox" to Bertrand Russell.
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_the_Great
  • this is really badly written for a Wikipedia page. i suspect some kind of nationalist vandalism.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_conquest_of_Siberia most of the conquest of Siberia actually happened before Peter the Great
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yermak_Timofeyevich the Cossack ataman who began the conquest of Siberia, under the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the 1500s.
      • why conquer Siberia? the fur trade.
      • why did it work? the khans didn't have firearms.
      • he was hired by a powerful merchant family, the Stroganovs
        • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroganov_family
      • wow. this is a very close parallel (and historically contemporaneous) with the conquistadors and privateers of England, Spain, and Portugl in the Age of Exploration...except we don't make movies and novels about it in the West. But the swashbuckling potential is amazing.
        • i mean there was also genocide, to be fair.
• https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/libertarian-poems
  • I'll kind of give him Kipling and Cummings; those are genuine anti-communist, anti-monarchical-absolutism, and anti-war sentiments. Yeats is doing a different thing; I love him but he is Not Our Friend.
• https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/24/majority-of-americans-arent-confident-in-the-safety-and-reliability-of-cryptocurrency/ wow -- a full 17% of Americans have ever owned crypto.

 I agree that more people should be starting revenue-funded/bootstrapped businesses (including ones enabled by software/technology).  

The meme is that if you're starting a tech company, it's going to be a VC-funded startup. This is, I think, a meme put out by VCs themselves, including Paul Graham/YCombinator, and it conflates new software projects and businesses generally with a specific kind of business model called the "tech startup".  

Not every project worth doing should be a business (some should be hobbies or donation-funded) and not every business worth doing should be a VC-funded startup (some should be bootstrapped and grow from sales revenue.) 

The VC startup business model requires rapid growth and expects 30x returns over a roughly 5-10 year time horizon. That simply doesn't include every project worth doing. Some businesses are viable but are not likely to grow that much or that fast; some projects shouldn't be expected to be profitable at all and need philanthropic support.

I think the narrative that "tech startups are where innovation happens" is...badly incomplete, but still a hell of a lot more correct than "tech startups are net destructive". 

Think about new technologies; then think about where they were developed. That process can ever happen end-to-end within a startup, but more often I think innovative startups are founded around IP developed while the founders were in academia; or the startup found a new use for open-source tools or tools developed within big companies. There simply isn't time to solve particularly hard technical problems if you have to get to profitability and 30x growth in 5 years. The startup format is primarily designed for finding product-market fit -- i.e. putting together existing technologies, packaging them as a "product" with a narrative about what and who it's for, and tweaking it until you find a context where people will pay for the product, and then making the whole thing bigger and bigger. You can do that in 5 years. But no, you can't do literally all of society's technological innovation within that narrow context! 

(Part of the issue is that we still technically count very big tech companies as "startups" and they certainly qualify as "Silicon Valley", so if you conflate all of "tech" into one big blob it includes the kind of big engineering-heavy companies that have R&D departments with long time horizons. Is OpenAI a "tech startup"? Sure, in that it's a recently founded technology company. But it is under very different financial constraints from a YC startup.)