sarahconstantin

Karma: 8,068

sarahconstantin 21 Jan 2025 16:18 UTC
6 points
0
on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
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://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.

sarahconstantin 17 Jan 2025 15:28 UTC
2 points
0
on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
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!

sarahconstantin 15 Jan 2025 15:16 UTC
2 points
0
on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
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?

sarahconstantin 14 Jan 2025 18:51 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
possibly-intrusive question: are you Russian?

sarahconstantin 13 Jan 2025 22:15 UTC
2 points
0
on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
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

sarahconstantin 10 Jan 2025 19:37 UTC
2 points
0
on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
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

sarahconstantin 10 Jan 2025 19:36 UTC
56 points
9
in reply to: sarahconstantin’s comment on: The AI Timelines Scam
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.

sarahconstantin 8 Jan 2025 18:31 UTC
2 points
0
on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
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.

sarahconstantin 7 Jan 2025 16:58 UTC
7 points
0
on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
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.

sarahconstantin 6 Jan 2025 17:13 UTC
4 points
0
on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
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.

sarahconstantin 3 Jan 2025 20:42 UTC
11 points
0
on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
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.

sarahconstantin 2 Jan 2025 19:01 UTC
5 points
0
on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
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.

sarahconstantin 30 Dec 2024 17:19 UTC
7 points
0
on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
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)

sarahconstantin 23 Dec 2024 16:31 UTC
4 points
0
on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
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://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

sarahconstantin 20 Dec 2024 20:56 UTC
4 points
0
on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
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

What Goes Without Saying

sarahconstantin20 Dec 2024 18:00 UTC

304 points

26 comments5 min readLW link

(sarahconstantin.substack.com)

sarahconstantin 19 Dec 2024 13:03 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
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.

sarahconstantin 18 Dec 2024 17:01 UTC
10 points
0
on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
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.”

sarahconstantin 16 Dec 2024 18:16 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: Sam Marks’s comment on: Sam Marks’s Shortform
why wouldn’t you want regexes?

sarahconstantin 16 Dec 2024 18:08 UTC
6 points
0
on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
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.