incidentally, while I love Mahajan’s informativeness, increasingly i’m getting impatient with his slightly hipsterish tone. “I have been quite harsh on organoids so far, and, just like all forms of hate, doing so has been both fun and corrosive to the soul. Some kindness is in order...How can you tell the difference? You must go on vibe. A good organoid paper treats you kindly, softly. It knows it has hurt you in the past. It must regain your trust.” i didn’t think his criticisms were “hateful” and i’m slightly creeped out that he actually feels hatred! i thought they were just, y’know, limitations of the technology that any responsible professional would own up to! and the “vibe” framing is really weird and squishy for something that really isn’t that squishy at all (whether a paper is overpromising or being appropriately cautious/conservative.) Mahajan seems to be saying that the true biotechnologist is sort of bitter and mean and nihilistic and seeking succour for despair. which is not the same thing as being skeptical. Maybe i am just too neuroatypical for this shit. I *do* still Fucking Love Science even though lots of it is unreliable or limited?! but maybe also actually working in the field beats you down.
i’m not an international-aid/charity person so i have some stupid questions about this. first of all, is this not extremely predictable and partially desirable?
surely the point of rich-world donations to poor countries is that we want to bear some of the burden of helping them, instead of putting it all on them? that means that instead of members of local voluntary organizations “making sacrifices” to help, we are able to ensure that they are paid decent salaries? or that the work is done by by donor-funded foreigners in the first place?
and if it is intrinsically desirable that locals do the work themselves, and do it for free, then it seems weird and tangled to try to donate in ways that minimally distort that—even if that’s technically possible sometimes, surely there would be lots of cases in which the “minimally distorting” course of action is not to donate at all.
i get it when he gives the parallel example of missionary churches trying to set up self-sustaining congregations in other countries. in that case, the purpose is to make the Chinese (or whoever) authentically, autonomously Christian; you as a foreign missionary must ultimately make yourself obsolete, or you have not achieved your goal at all. moreover, the precise work a missionary does (Christian education) is the same as what you ultimately need communities to do for themselves. is this necessarily true where the goal is the delivery of healthcare or the alleviation of poverty?
i can make guesses as to why the author thinks work should be done & funded primarily by locals (cost-effectiveness, national or community sovereignty, the virtues of self-reliance) but he doesn’t actually explicitly make the case, so i don’t know what he thinks is wrong with aid coming entirely from foreigners forever.
links 8/4/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-04-2026
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/6006947-gop-swing-votes-attorney-general/ Trump is trying to get his personal lawyer as attorney general
https://www.owlposting.com/p/why-havent-organoids-solved-all-of limitations of organoids. they’re mostly what you’d expect, but with more detail. an organoid is only a little bit more “realistic” than a cell in culture.
incidentally, while I love Mahajan’s informativeness, increasingly i’m getting impatient with his slightly hipsterish tone. “I have been quite harsh on organoids so far, and, just like all forms of hate, doing so has been both fun and corrosive to the soul. Some kindness is in order...How can you tell the difference? You must go on vibe. A good organoid paper treats you kindly, softly. It knows it has hurt you in the past. It must regain your trust.” i didn’t think his criticisms were “hateful” and i’m slightly creeped out that he actually feels hatred! i thought they were just, y’know, limitations of the technology that any responsible professional would own up to! and the “vibe” framing is really weird and squishy for something that really isn’t that squishy at all (whether a paper is overpromising or being appropriately cautious/conservative.) Mahajan seems to be saying that the true biotechnologist is sort of bitter and mean and nihilistic and seeking succour for despair. which is not the same thing as being skeptical. Maybe i am just too neuroatypical for this shit. I *do* still Fucking Love Science even though lots of it is unreliable or limited?! but maybe also actually working in the field beats you down.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/when-ai-day-of-reckoning Robin Hanson makes quantitative predictions on the economic impact of AI.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sFhW3ZnPMJdnB4Dd6/thousand-dimensional-structure-1 Geoffrey Irving and David Africa on the persona-related research at Resolution
https://adiabatic.garden/ fascinating website of a genuinely curious young hardware hacker
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/breakdown-in-pakistan critique of international aid: once orgs get NGO funding, local volunteering and donation collapses.
i’m not an international-aid/charity person so i have some stupid questions about this. first of all, is this not extremely predictable and partially desirable?
surely the point of rich-world donations to poor countries is that we want to bear some of the burden of helping them, instead of putting it all on them? that means that instead of members of local voluntary organizations “making sacrifices” to help, we are able to ensure that they are paid decent salaries? or that the work is done by by donor-funded foreigners in the first place?
and if it is intrinsically desirable that locals do the work themselves, and do it for free, then it seems weird and tangled to try to donate in ways that minimally distort that—even if that’s technically possible sometimes, surely there would be lots of cases in which the “minimally distorting” course of action is not to donate at all.
i get it when he gives the parallel example of missionary churches trying to set up self-sustaining congregations in other countries. in that case, the purpose is to make the Chinese (or whoever) authentically, autonomously Christian; you as a foreign missionary must ultimately make yourself obsolete, or you have not achieved your goal at all. moreover, the precise work a missionary does (Christian education) is the same as what you ultimately need communities to do for themselves. is this necessarily true where the goal is the delivery of healthcare or the alleviation of poverty?
i can make guesses as to why the author thinks work should be done & funded primarily by locals (cost-effectiveness, national or community sovereignty, the virtues of self-reliance) but he doesn’t actually explicitly make the case, so i don’t know what he thinks is wrong with aid coming entirely from foreigners forever.
https://tfus-page.vercel.app/studies database of transcranial focused ultrasound studies