one annoying thing about anti-psychiatry people is that they equivocate between “the person labeled insane is behaving in a valid fashion, and deserves acceptance/respect rather than pathologization” and “the person labeled insane is causing their own problems and ought to stop; they deserve criticism rather than therapeutic treatment”
either of these can, imo, sometimes be true, but it’s weird when someone is trying to pose as both the defender of the misunderstood and the teller of hard truths to malingerers.
he and Paul Christiano deserve credit as the architects and prophets of the age we’re living in. things did, after all, turn out their way. i was always critical of their theories as basically blurring boundaries between “real intelligence” and the thing LLMs do, but in their defense, that boundary has turned out to be blurrier than I expected.
i think i might be at least sympathetic to Anthropic-ism. it turns out that a world with these kinds of gradually-and-quickly-improving AI tools is pretty nifty, and also involves all kinds of novel risks that are short of the “everyone dies instantly” scenario but are still quite worrying. sure, if they had listened to Eliezer they could simply have not chosen to go down this path, and there’s more than a hint of vainglory in the motivations of people who want to build powerful AI, but all in all I’d rather the 2020s had these tools than not. it’s not like the “end of the end of history” wouldn’t have happened anyway, and at least this way we have some powerful opportunities as well as depressing developments.
https://corticallabs.com/ sounds like a joke? you do not want to do any computation on neurons, they are slow and fragile. (you might want to run brain-inspired algorithms, but on semiconductors!)
https://centuryofbio.com/p/sid extreme personalized medicine approach to cancer—it worked! after the standard of care failed, single-cell sequencing exposed a fibroblast-like phenotype, and an anti-fibroblast radiotherapy shrank the tumor enough to be operable.
what I’d really like to see in the health/military space is to take advantage of the DOD’s truly massive biobank resources & make more data accessible to researchers from modern omics techniques.
I read one of their papers (the Pong one, which is featured on the frontpage of their website) and thought it was really bad and p-hacked, see here & here.
…sounds like a joke? you do not want to do any computation on neurons, they are slow and fragile. (you might want to run brain-inspired algorithms, but on semiconductors!)
I find annoying that they take “X is related to something” as a proof that “X does not actually exist”. I’ll try to explain by a parody:
“Doctors sometimes tell you that you have a broken leg. But why is that a problem? Legs naturally come with different shapes and different conditions. It’s just that capitalism requires you to work, and that sometimes involves walking to places, and a broken leg decreases your productivity. If we could for a moment abandon the mindset of capitalism and productivity, we could easily realize that there is simply no such thing as a broken leg.”
But people would care about broken legs even without capitalism, because broken legs hurt, and because people who have broken legs often wish they could walk and run, even for reasons unrelated to productivity.
Basically, most of their arguments feel like this to me, except instead of a broken leg, insert autism or schizophrenia or Down syndrome or whatever. It is completely irrelevant what the condition does to the person and everyone around them. No no no, you are just brainwashed by capitalism to believe that <insert symptom> is a problem.
links 1/27/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-27-2026
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807 last invoked in the 1990s LA riots
https://www.sluggish.xyz/p/are-we-all-just-having-understandable
one annoying thing about anti-psychiatry people is that they equivocate between “the person labeled insane is behaving in a valid fashion, and deserves acceptance/respect rather than pathologization” and “the person labeled insane is causing their own problems and ought to stop; they deserve criticism rather than therapeutic treatment”
either of these can, imo, sometimes be true, but it’s weird when someone is trying to pose as both the defender of the misunderstood and the teller of hard truths to malingerers.
https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology not a lot of news in here; Dario Amodei lays out “Anthropic-ism”, the summary of their research & policy programs of the past several years.
he and Paul Christiano deserve credit as the architects and prophets of the age we’re living in. things did, after all, turn out their way. i was always critical of their theories as basically blurring boundaries between “real intelligence” and the thing LLMs do, but in their defense, that boundary has turned out to be blurrier than I expected.
i think i might be at least sympathetic to Anthropic-ism. it turns out that a world with these kinds of gradually-and-quickly-improving AI tools is pretty nifty, and also involves all kinds of novel risks that are short of the “everyone dies instantly” scenario but are still quite worrying. sure, if they had listened to Eliezer they could simply have not chosen to go down this path, and there’s more than a hint of vainglory in the motivations of people who want to build powerful AI, but all in all I’d rather the 2020s had these tools than not. it’s not like the “end of the end of history” wouldn’t have happened anyway, and at least this way we have some powerful opportunities as well as depressing developments.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/bagehot-lombard-street-a-description-of-the-money-market 1873 classic about central banking
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04 this sounds quite complicated but interesting. multi-agent management system.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/01/a-more-intelligent-comment-than-most-of-the-emotional-reactions-we-are-seeing.html why do comments have to be “intelligent” per se? you can just say the obvious thing that expresses your values! simple things can be correct.
https://epirium.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/GSA2025_Poster_Epirium_MF-300_Phase-1.pdf that sure is a drug for sarcopenia in phase 1 trials
https://www.axios.com/2026/01/24/ice-cbp-shooting-minneapolis-democrats-reaction imagine, congress actually putting checks on the executive branch!
https://writing.antonleicht.me/p/how-ai-safety-is-getting-middle-powers too much inside baseball for me, but probably a useful pointer to what experts think
https://corticallabs.com/ sounds like a joke? you do not want to do any computation on neurons, they are slow and fragile. (you might want to run brain-inspired algorithms, but on semiconductors!)
https://centuryofbio.com/p/sid extreme personalized medicine approach to cancer—it worked! after the standard of care failed, single-cell sequencing exposed a fibroblast-like phenotype, and an anti-fibroblast radiotherapy shrank the tumor enough to be operable.
https://www.sam-rodriques.com/post/the-humanity-project this sounds entirely desirable but insanely expensive. sure, i’d like this, and a pony too. and world peace. can you just do that these days? i’d be delighted if so.
https://defenseanalyses.org/work/the-maha-pentagon/ ehhh like so much DARC stuff it’s hard to tell if they’re serious. biohacking for soldiers?
what I’d really like to see in the health/military space is to take advantage of the DOD’s truly massive biobank resources & make more data accessible to researchers from modern omics techniques.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanfu_Movement historical costume is big in China.
https://www.humanlayer.dev/blog/writing-a-good-claude-md keep it simple, stupid (one perspective)
I read one of their papers (the Pong one, which is featured on the frontpage of their website) and thought it was really bad and p-hacked, see here & here.
Strong agree.
I find annoying that they take “X is related to something” as a proof that “X does not actually exist”. I’ll try to explain by a parody:
“Doctors sometimes tell you that you have a broken leg. But why is that a problem? Legs naturally come with different shapes and different conditions. It’s just that capitalism requires you to work, and that sometimes involves walking to places, and a broken leg decreases your productivity. If we could for a moment abandon the mindset of capitalism and productivity, we could easily realize that there is simply no such thing as a broken leg.”
But people would care about broken legs even without capitalism, because broken legs hurt, and because people who have broken legs often wish they could walk and run, even for reasons unrelated to productivity.
Basically, most of their arguments feel like this to me, except instead of a broken leg, insert autism or schizophrenia or Down syndrome or whatever. It is completely irrelevant what the condition does to the person and everyone around them. No no no, you are just brainwashed by capitalism to believe that <insert symptom> is a problem.