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- Psychotic “delusions” are more about holding certain genres of idea with a socially inappropriate amount of intensity and obsession than holding a false idea. Lots of non-psychotic people hold false beliefs (eg religious people). And, interestingly, it is absolutely possible to hold a true belief in a psychotic way.
- I have observed people during psychotic episodes get obsessed with the idea that social media was sending them personalized messages (quite true; targeted ads are real) or the idea that the nurses on the psych ward were lying to them (they were).
- Preoccupation with the revelation of secret knowledge, with one’s own importance, with mistrust of others’ motives, and with influencing others' thoughts or being influenced by other's thoughts, are classic psychotic themes.
- And it can be a symptom of schizophrenia when someone’s mind gets disproportionately drawn to those themes. This is called being “paranoid” or “grandiose.”
- But sometimes (and I suspect more often with more intelligent/self-aware people) the literal content of their paranoid or grandiose beliefs is true!
- sometimes the truth really has been hidden!
- sometimes people really are lying to you or trying to manipulate yo
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1I once saw a video on Instagram of a psychiatrist recommending to other psychiatrists that they purchase ear scopes to check out their patients' ears, because:
1. Apparently it is very common for folks with severe mental health issues to imagine that there is something in their ear (e.g., a bug, a listening device)
2. Doctors usually just say "you are wrong, there's nothing in your ear" without looking
3. This destroys trust, so he started doing cursory checks with an ear scope
4. Far more often than he expected (I forget exactly, but something like 10-20%ish), there actually was something in the person's ear -- usually just earwax buildup, but occasionally something else like a dead insect -- that was indeed causing the sensation, and he gained a clinical pathway to addressing his patients' discomfort that he had previously lacked
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This reminds me of dath ilan's hallucination diagnosis from page 38 of Yudkowsky and Alicorn's glowfic But Hurting People Is Wrong.
It's pretty far from meeting dath ilan's standard though; in fact an x-ray would be more than sufficient as anyone capable of putting something in someone's ear would obviously vastly prefer to place it somewhere harder to check, whereas nobody would be capable of defeating an x-ray machine as metal parts are unavoidable.
This concern pops up in books on the Cold War (employees at every org and every company regularly suffer from mental illnesses at somewhere around their base rates, but things get complicated at intelligence agencies where paranoid/creative/adversarial people are rewarded and even influence R&D funding) and an x-ray machine cleanly resolved the matter every time.
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Thanks for the link. For future readers, the relevant part starts further down https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612940#reply-1612940
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Tangential, but...
Schizophrenia is the archetypal definitely-biological mental disorder, but recently for reasons relevant to the above, I've been wondering if that is wrong/confused. Here's my alternate (admittedly kinda uninformed) model:
- Psychosis is a biological state or neural attractor, which we can kind of symptomatically characterize, but which really can only be understood at a reductionistic level.
- One of the symptoms/consequences of psychosis is getting extreme ideas at extreme amounts of intensity.
- This symptom/consequence then triggers a variety of social dynamics that give classic schizophrenic-like symptoms such as, as you say, "preoccupation with the revelation of secret knowledge, with one’s own importance, with mistrust of others’ motives, and with influencing others' thoughts or being influenced by other's thoughts"
That is, if you suddenly get an extreme idea (e.g. that the fly that flapped past you is a sign from god that you should abandon your current life), you would expect dynamics like:
- People get concerned for you and try to dissuade you, likely even conspiring in private to do so (and even if they're not conspiring, it can seem like a conspiracy). In response
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Thank you, this is interesting and important. I worry that it overstates similarity of different points on a spectrum, though.
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In a certain sense, yes. In other, critical senses, no. This is a case where quantitative differences are big enough to be qualitative. When someone is clinically delusional, there are a few things which distinguish it from the more common wrong ideas. Among them, the inability to shut up about it when it's not relevant, and the large negative impact on relationships and daily life. For many many purposes, "hiding it better" is the distinction that matters.
I fully agree that "He's not wrong but he's still crazy" is valid (though I'd usually use less-direct phrasing). It's pretty rare that "this sounds like a classic crazy-person thought, but I still separately have to check whether it's true" happens to me, but it's definitely not never.
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I imagine they were obsessed with false versions of this idea, rather than obsession about targeted advertising?
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no! it sounded like "typical delusion stuff" at first until i listened carefully and yep that was a description of targeted ads.
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For a while I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about specifically the versions of the idea where I couldn't easily tell how true they were... which I suppose I do think is the correct place to be paying attention to?
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One has to be a bit careful with this though. E.g. someone experiencing or having experienced harassment may have a seemingly pathological obsession on the circumstances and people involved in the situation, but it may be completely proportional to the way that it affected them - it only seems pathological to people who didn't encounter the same issues.
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If it's not serving them, it's pathological by definition, right?
So obsessing about exactly those circumstances and types of people could be pathological if it's done more than will protect them in the future, weighing in the emotional cost of all that obsessing.
Of course we can't just stop patterns of thought as soon as we decide they're pathological. But deciding it doesn't serve me so I want to change it is a start.
Yes, it's proportional to the way it affected them - but most of the effect is in the repetition of thoughts about the incident and fear of future similar experiences. Obsessing about unpleasant events is natural, but it often seems pretty harmful itself.
Trauma is a horrible thing. There's a delicate balance between supporting someone's right and tendency to obsess over their trauma while also supporting their ability to quit re-traumatizing themselves by simulating their traumatic event repeatedly.
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This seems way too strong, otherwise any kind of belief or emotion that is not narrowly in pursuit of your goals is pathological.
I completely agree that it's important to strike a balance between revisiting the incident and moving on.
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This seems partially wrong. The thoughts are usually consequences of the damage that is done, and they can be unhelpful in their own right, but they are not usually the problem. E.g. if you know that X is an abuser and people don't believe you, I wouldn't go so far as saying your mental dissonance about it is the problem.
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Some psychiatry textbooks classify “overvalued ideas” as distinct from psychotic delusions.
Depending on how wide you make the definition, a whole rag-bag of diagnoses from the DSM V are overvalued ideas (e.g, anorexia nervosa over valuing being fat).
"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 happ
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I think the reason not to do this is because of peer pressure. Ideally you should have the bad pressures from your peers cancel out, and in order to accomplish this you need your peers to be somewhat decorrelated from each other, and you can't really do this if all your peers and everyone you listen to is in the same social group.
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What is categorized as "peer pressure" here? Explicit threats to report you to authorities if you don't conform? I'm guessing not. But how about implicit threats? What if you've heard (or read in the news) stories about people who don't conform—in ways moderately but not hugely more extreme than you—having their careers ruined? In any situation that you could call "peer pressure", I imagine there's always at least the possibility of some level of social exclusion.
The defining questions for that aspect would appear to be "Do you believe that you would face serious risk of punishment for not conforming?" and "Would a reasonable person in your situation believe the same?". Which don't necessarily have the same answer. It might, indeed, be that people whom you observe to be "conformist" are the ones who are oversensitive to the risk of social exclusion.
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We call it "peer pressure" when it is constraining the individual (or at least some of them) without providing perceived mutual value. It is the same mechanism that leads to people collaborating for the common good. The interesting question is which forces or which environments lead to a negative sum game.
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I kinda agree with the claim, but disagree with its framing. You're imagining that peer pressure is something extraneous to the person's core personality, which they want to resist but usually fail. Instead, the desire to fit in, to be respected, liked and admired by other people, is one of the core desires that most (virtually all?) people have. It's approximately on the same level as e.g. the desire to avoid pain. So, people don't "succumb to peer pressure", they (unconsciously) choose to prioritize social needs over other considerations.
At the same time, the moral denouncing of groupthink is mostly a self-deception defense against hostile telepaths. With two important caveats:
* Having "independent thinking" as part of the ethos of a social group is actually beneficial for that group's ability to discover true things. While the members of such a group still feel the desire to be liked by other members, they also have the license to disagree without being shunned for it, and are even rewarded for interesting dissenting opinions.
* Hyperbolic discount seems to be real, i.e. human preferences are time-inconsistent. For example, you can be tempted to eat candy when one is placed in front of you, while also taking measures to avoid such temptation in the future. Something analogous might apply to peer pressure.
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I think the comparison to pain is correct in the sense that some part of the brain (brainstem) is responding to bodily signals in the same mechanistic way as it is to pain signals. The desire to fit in is grounded in something. Steven Byrnes suggests a mechanism in Neuroscience of human social instincts: a sketch.
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I won't claim to be immune to peer pressure but at least on the epistemic front I think I have a pretty legible track record of believing things that are not very popular in the environments I've been in.
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As for a specific group of people resistant to peer pressure - psychopaths. Psychopaths don't conform to peer pressure easily - or any kind of pressure, for that matter. Many of them are in fact willing to murder, sit in jail, or otherwise become very ostracized if it aligns with whatever goals they have in mind. I'd wager that the fact that a large percentage of psychopaths literally end up jailed speaks for itself - they just don't mind the consequences that much.
This is easily explained due to psychopaths being fearless and mostly lacking empathy. As far as I recall, some physiological correlates exist - psychopaths have a low cortisol response to stressors compared to normies. On top of the apparent fact that they are indifferent towards others' feelings, some brain imaging data supports this as well.
What they might be more vulnerable to is that peer pressure sometimes goes hand in hand with power and success. Psychopaths like power and success, and they might therefore play along with rules to get more of what they want. That might look like caving in to peer pressure, but judging by how the pathology is contemporarily understood, I'd still say it's not the pressure itself, but the benefits aligned with succumbing to it.
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Seems like the sort of thing that would correlate pretty robustly to big-5 agreeableness, and in that sense there are neurotypes immune to peer pressure.
Edit: One may also suspect a combination of agreeableness and non-openness
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"Peer pressure" is a negatively-valanced term that could be phrased more neutrally as "social consequences". Seems to me it's good to think about what the social consequences of doing or not doing a thing will be (whether to "give in to peer pressure", and act in such a way as to get positive reactions from other people/avoid negative reactions, or not), but not to treat conforming when there is social pressure as inherently bad. It can lead to mob violence. Or, it can lead to a simplified social world which is easier for everyone to navigate, because you're doing things that have commonly understood meanings (think of teaching children to interact in a polite way). Or it can lead to great accomplishments, when someone internalizes whatever leads to status within their social hierarchy. Take away the social pressure to do things that impress other people, and lots of people might laze about doing the minimum required to have a nice life on the object-level, which in a society as affluent as the modern industrialized world is not much. There are of course other motivations for striving for internalized goals, but like, "people whose opinion I care about will be impressed" is one, and it does mean some good stuff gets done.
Someone who is literally immune to peer pressure to the extent that social consequences do not enter their mind as a thing that might happen or get considered at all in their decision-making, will probably face great difficulties in navigating their environment and accomplishing anything. People will try fairly subtle social pressure tactics, they will be disregarded as if they hadn't happened, and the person who tried it will either have to disengage from the not-peer-pressurable person, or escalate to more blunt control measures that do register as a thing this person will pay attention to.
Even if I'm right about "is immune to peer pressure" not being an ideal to aim for, I still do acknowledge that being extremely sensitive to what others may
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Is there a particular reason to believe this? Or is it more of a hope?
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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.
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I think what might help is engaging with different kinds of people. A group's pressure is weaker if you also meet people who openly believe that the group is a group of idiots. You can voice your concerns without fearing disapproval; but even if some things are difficult to explain to outsiders, at least you have a mental model of someone who would disagree.
But I also suspect that some people would just develop a different persona for each group, and let themselves be peer-pressured towards different extremes on different occasions.
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That is possible but maybe only more likely if the groups are very clearly separate, such as when you are in a faraway country for a long time. But if you are e.g. in a multi-cultural city where there are many maybe even overlapping groups or where you can't easily tell which group it is, it is more difficult to "overfit" and easier to learn a more general strategy. I think universal morality is something of the more general case of this.
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Julian Jaynes would say that this is how human consciousness as we know it today has evolved.
Which makes me wonder, what would he say about the internet bubbles we have today. Did we perhaps already reach peak consciousness, and now the pendulum is swinging back? (Probably not, but it's an interesting thought.)
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Shouldn't this be weighted against the good things people do if they are peer-pressured? I think there's value in not conforming but if all cultures have peer-pressure there needs to be a careful analysis of the pros and cons instead of simply strifing for immunity from it.
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My first thought here aren't autists but psychopaths.
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My fear is that this will extend to many aspects of the Trump administration (just look at how it's vetting people based on who they voted for/if they believe in the 2020 election results), esp b/c some people who work in the government are now deleting their old tweets...
- “we” can’t steer the future.
- it’s wrong to try to control people or stop them from doing locally self-interested & non-violent things in the interest of “humanity’s future”, in part because this is so futile.
- if the only way we survive is if we coerce people to make a costly and painful investment in a speculative idea that might not even work, then we don’t survive! you do not put people through real pain today for a “someday maybe!” This applies to climate change, AI x-risk, and socially-conservative cultural reform.
- most cultures and societies in human history have been so bad, by my present values, that I’m not sure they’re not worse than extinction, and we should expect that most possible future states are similarly bad;
- history clearly teaches us that civilizations and states collapse (on timescales of centuries) and the way to bet is that ours will as well, but it’s kind of insane hubris to think that this can be prevented;
- the literal species Homo sapiens is pretty resilient and might avoid extinction for a very long time, but have you MET Homo sapiens? this is cold fucking comfort! (see e.g. C. J. Cherryh’s vision in 40,000 in Gehenna for a fictional representation no
[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]
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- it’s wrong to try to control people or stop them from doing locally self-interested & non-violent things in the interest of “humanity’s future”, in part because this is so futile.
- if the only way we survive is if we coerce people to make a costly and painful investment in a speculative idea that might not even work, then we don’t survive! you do not put people through real pain today for a “someday maybe!” This applies to climate change, AI x-risk, and socially-conservative cultural reform.
How does "this is so futile" square with the massive success of taxes and criminal justice? From what I've heard, states have managed to reduce murder rates by 50x. Obviously that's stopping people from something violent rather than non-violent, but what's the aspect of violence that makes it relevant? Or e.g. how about taxes which fund change to renewable energy? The main argument for socially-conservative cultural reform is fertility, but what about taxes that fund kindergartens, they sort of seem to have a similar function?
The key trick to make it correct to try to control people or stop them is to be stronger than them.
I think this prompts some kind of directional update in me. My paraphrase of this is:
- it’s actually pretty ridiculous to think you can steer the future
- It’s also pretty ridiculous to choose to identify with what the future is likely to be.
Therefore…. Well, you don’t spell out your answer. My answer is "I should have a personal meaning-making resolution to 'what would I do if those two things are both true,' even if one of them turns out to be false, so that I can think clearly about whether they are true."
I’ve done a fair amount of similar meaningmaking work through the lens of Solstice 2022 and 2023. But that was more through lens of ‘nearterm extinction’ than ‘inevitability of value loss', which does feel like a notably different thing.
So it seems worth doing some thinking and pre-grieving about that.
I of course have some answers to ‘why value loss might not be inevitable’, but it’s not something I’ve yet thought about through an unclouded lens.
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Therefore, do things you'd be in favor of having done even if the future will definitely suck. Things that are good today, next year, fifty years from now... but not like "institute theocracy to raise birth rates", which is awful today even if you think it might "save the world".
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Ah yeah that’s a much more specific takeaway than I’d been imagining.
I honestly feel that the only appropriate response is something along the lines of "fuck defeatism"[1].
This comment isn't targeted at you, but at a particular attractor in thought space.
Let me try to explain why I think rejecting this attractor is the right response rather than engaging with it.
I think it's mostly that I don't think that talking about things at this level of abstraction is useful. It feels much more productive to talk about specific plans. And if you have a general, high-abstraction argument that plans in general are useless, but I have a specific argument why a specific plan is useful, I know which one I'd go with :-).
Don't get me wrong, I think that if someone struggles for a certain amount of time to try to make a difference and just hits wall after wall, then at some point they have to call it. But "never start" and "don't even try" are completely different.
It's also worth noting, that saving the world is a team sport. It's okay to pursue a plan that depends on a bunch of other folk stepping up and playing their part.
- ^
I would also suggest that this is the best way to respond to depression rather than "trying to argue your way out of it".
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I'm not defeatist! I'm picky.
And I'm not talking specifics because i don't want to provoke argument.
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What about influencing? If, in order for things to go OK, human civilization must follow a narrow path which I individually need to steer us down, we're 100% screwed because I can't do that. But I do have some influence. A great deal of influence over my own actions (I'm resisting the temptation to go down a sidetrack about determinism, assuming you're modeling humans as things that can make meaningful choices), substantial influence over the actions of those close to me, some influence over my acquaintances, and so on until very extremely little (but not 0) influence over humanity as a whole. I also note that you use the word "we", but I don't know who the "we" is. Is it everyone? If so, then everyone collectively has a great deal of say about how the future will go, if we collectively can coordinate. Admittedly, we're not very good at this right now, but there are paths to developing this civilizational skill further than we currently have. So maybe the answer to "we can't steer the future" is "not yet we can't, at least not very well"?
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Agree, mostly. The steering I would aim for would be setting up systems wherein locally self-interested and non-violent things people are incentivized to do have positive effects for humanity's future. In other words, setting up society such that individual and humanity-wide effects are in the same direction with respect to some notion of "goodness", rather than individual actions harming the group, or group actions harming or stifling the individual. We live in a society where we can collectively decide the rules of the game, which is a way of "steering" a group. I believe we should settle on a ruleset where individual short-term moves that seem good lead to collective long-term outcomes that seem good. Individual short-term moves that clearly lead to bad collective long-term outcomes should be disincentivized, and if the effects are bad enough then coercive prevention does seem warranted (E. G., a SWAT team to prevent a
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I disagree a lot! Many things have gotten better! Is sufferage, abolition, democracy, property rights etc not significant? All the random stuff eg better angels of our nature claims has gotten better.
Either things have improved in the past or they haven't, and either people trying to "steer the future" in some sense have been influential on these improvements. I think things have improved, and I think there's definitely not strong evidence that people trying to steer the future was always useless. Because trying to steer the future is very important and motivating, i try to do it.
Yes the counterfactual impact of you individually trying to steer the future may or may not be insignificant, but people trying to steer the future is better than no one doing that!
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"Let's abolish slavery," when proposed, would make the world better now as well as later.
I'm not against trying to make things better!
I'm against doing things that are strongly bad for present-day people to increase the odds of long-run human species survival.
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Proposal: For any given system, there's a destiny based on what happens when it's developed to its full extent. Sight is an example of this, where both human eyes and octopus eyes and cameras have ended up using lenses to steer light, despite being independent developments.
"I love whatever is the destiny" is, as you say, no loyalty and no standards. But, you can try to learn what the destiny is, and then on the basis of that decide whether to love or oppose it.
Plants and solar panels are the natural destiny for earthly solar energy. Do you like solarpunk? If so, good news, you can love the destiny, not because you love whatever is the destiny, but because your standards align with the destiny.
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People who love solarpunk don't obviously love computronium dyson spheres tho
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That is true, though:
1) Regarding tiling the universy with computronium as destiny is Gnostic heresy.
2) I would like to learn more about the ecology of space infrastructure. Intuitively it seems to me like the Earth is much more habitable than anywhere else, and so I would expect sarah's "this is so futile" point to actually be inverted when it comes to e.g. a Dyson sphere, where the stagnation-inducing worldwide regulation regulation will by-default be stronger than the entropic pressure.
More generally, I have a concept I call the "infinite world approximation", which I think held until ~WWI. Under this approximation, your methods have to be robust against arbitrary adversaries, because they could invade from parts of the ecology you know nothing about. However, this approximation fails for Earth-scale phenomena, since Earth-scale organizations could shoot down any attempt at space colonization.
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Are you saying this because you worship the sun?
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I would more say the opposite: Henri Bergson (better known for inventing vitalism) convinced me that there ought to be a simple explanation for the forms life takes, and so I spent a while performing root cause analysis on that, and ended up with the sun as the creator.
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It seems like it makes some difference whether our civilization collapses the way that the Roman Empire collapsed, the way that the British Empire collapsed, or the way that the Soviet Union collapsed. “We must prevent our civilization from ever collapsing” is clearly an implausible goal, but “we should ensure that a successor structure exists and is not much worse than what we have now” seems rather more reasonable, no?
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This post reads like it's trying to express an attitude or put forward a narrative frame, rather than trying to describe the world.
Many of these claims seem obviously false, if I take them at face value at take a moment to consider what they're claiming and whether it's true.
e.g., On the first two bullet points it's easy to come up with counterexamples. Some successful attempts to steer the future, by stopping people from doing locally self-interested & non-violent things, include: patent law ("To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries") and banning lead in gasoline. As well as some others that I now see that other commenters have mentioned.
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Is it too much to declare this the manifesto of a new philosophical school, Constantinism?
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I don't think it was articulated quite right -- it's more negative than my overall stance (I wrote it when unhappy) and a little too short-termist.
I do still believe that the future is unpredictable, that we should not try to "constrain" or "bind" all of humanity forever using authoritarian means, and that there are many many fates worse than death and we should not destroy everything we love for "brute" survival.
And, also, I feel that transience is normal and only a bit sad. It's good to save lives, but mortality is pretty "priced in" to my sense of how the world works. It's good to work on things that you hope will live beyond you, but Dark Ages and collapses are similarly "priced in" as normal for me. Sara Teasdale: "You say there is no love, my love, unless it lasts for aye; Ah folly, there are episodes far better than the play!" If our days are as a passing shadow, that's not that bad; we're used to it.
I worry that people who are not ok with transience may turn themselves into monsters so they can still "win" -- even though the meaning of "winning" is so changed it isn't worth it any more.
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I do think this comes back to the messages in On Green and also why the post went down like a cup of cold sick - rationality is about winning. Obviously nobody on LW wants to "win" in the sense you describe, but more winning over more harmony on the margin, I think.
The future will probably contain less of the way of life I value (or something entirely orthogonal), but then that's the nature of things.
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I think 2 cruxes IMO dominate the discussion a lot that are relevant here:
1. Will a value lock-in event happen, especially soon in a way such that once the values are locked in, it's basically impossible to change values?
2. Is something like the vulnerable world hypothesis correct about technological development?
If you believed 1 or 2, I could see why people disagreed with Sarah Constantin's statement on here.
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I have been having some similar thoughts on the main points here for a while and thanks for this.
I guess to me what needs attention is when people do things along the lines of "benefit themselves and harm other people". That harm has a pretty strict definition, though I know we may always be able to give borderline examples. This definitely includes the abuse of power in our current society and culture, and any current risks etc. (For example, if we are constraining to just AI with warning on content, https://www.iwf.org.uk/media/q4zll2ya/iwf-ai-csam-report_public-oct23v1.pdf. And this is very sad to see.) On the other hand, with regards to climate change (can also be current too) or AI risks, it probably should also be concerned when corporates or developers neglect known risks or pursue science/development irresponsibly. I think it is not wrong to work on these, but I just don't believe in "do not solve the other current risks and only work on future risks."
On some comments that were saying our society is "getting better" - sure, but the baseline is a very low bar (slavery for example). There are still many, many, many examples in different societies of how things are still very systematically messed up.
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You seem to dislike reality. Could it not be that the worldview which clashes with reality is wrong (or rather, in the wrong), rather than reality being wrong/in the wrong? For instance that "nothing is forever" isn't a design flaw, but one of the required properties that a universe must have in order to support life?
"weak benevolence isn't fake": https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/ic5Xitb70
- there's a class of statements that go like:
- "fair-weather friends" who are only nice to you when it's easy for them, are not true friends at all
- if you don't have the courage/determination to do the right thing when it's difficult, you never cared about doing the right thing at all
- if you sometimes engage in motivated cognition or are sometimes intellectually lazy/sloppy, then you don't really care about truth at all
- if you "mean well" but don't put in the work to ensure that you're actually making a positive difference, then your supposed "well-meaning" intentions were fake all along
- I can see why people have these views.
- if you actually need help when you're in trouble, then "fair-weather friends" are no use to you
- if you're relying on someone to accomplish something, it's not enough for them to "mean well", they have to deliver effectively, and they have to do so consistently. otherwise you can't count on them.
- if you are in an environment where people constantly declare good intentions or "well-meaning" attitudes, but most of these people are not people you can count on, you will find yourself caring
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Sounds like it's time for a reboot of the ol' "join the dark side" essay.
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I want to register in advance, I have qualms I’d be interested in talking about. (I think they are at least one level more interesting than the obvious ones, and my relationship with them is probably at least one level more interesting than the obvious relational stance)
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The picture I get of Chinese culture from their fiction makes me think China is kinda like this. A recurrent trope was "If you do some good deeds, like offering free medicine to the poor, and don't do a perfect job, like treating everyone who says they can't afford medicine, then everyone will castigate you for only wanting to seem good. So don't do good." Another recurrent trope was "it's dumb, even wrong, to be a hero/you should be a villain." (One annoying variant is "kindness to your enemies is cruelty to your allies", which is used to justify pointless cruelty.) I always assumed this was a cultural anti-body formed in response to communists doing terrible things in the name of the common good.
- https://danfrank.ca/daniel-isms-50-ideas-for-life-i-repeatedly-share/ Dan Frank's life advice.
- https://notnottalmud.substack.com/p/the-tasting-day-why-buying-5-babkas Dan Frank advises holding a tasting as a genre of social event. i should do this more.
- https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2022/03/30/fermi-estimates-and-dyson-designs/ Venkatesh Rao's idea of a "dyson design" is the sort of quantitative/heuristic thinking that involves exponentials, order-of-magnitude estimates, and similar types of "this is so big that we can neglect that" types of reasoning. Moore's Law (as a description of the world, and implications drawn from it) is in this category.
- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea1260 universal vaccines? mucosal vaccination in mice with some immune-stimulating antigens protects against multiple viruses & bacterial infections
- https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-are-young-liberals-so-depressed
- one of my pet peeves is that people usually condemn negativity in negative terms, to the effect of "nobody likes it when you're a whiny downer." i don't believe this is an effective way to fight negative affect! it violates basic principles of vibe!
- Yglesias instead does this the right w
4
That was painful to read.
links 10/25/24: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-25-2024
- https://theoryandpractice.org/2024/10/Yes,%20we%20did%20discover%20the%20Higgs!/ CERN's statistical methods are good actually. compare this to any other stats-heavy area of natural or social science and they come out impressively rigorous. blinded data analyses? whoa.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_engine a siege engine is any machine you use against the city you're besieging -- from towers to catapults to flamethrowers to artillery.
- there's a new field of "pan-cancer" where you make (mostly molbio) comparisons across cancers, including vulnerability screens where you use CRISPR or RNAi to knock down each gene and see which ones kill the cancer cells when absent.
- https://aacrjournals.org/clincancerres/article/24/9/2182/81290/Pan-Cancer-Molecular-Classes-Transcending-Tumor representative paper
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13528-0 you can also do it with the proteome
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41422-020-0355-0 you can single-cell it
- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe6474 you can profile the TILs cell by cell
- https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s13059-02
links 10/21/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-21-2025
- https://theaisummer.com/diffusion-models/ summary of how diffusion models work
- https://stampy.ai/ a chatbot about AI safety
- https://www.kerista.com/And_to_No_More_Settle.pdf a personal account of Kerista, a utopian polyamorous commune
4
Interested to hear feedback on stampy. I've been working on tuning prompts and scaffolding for it, if you (OP or other reader) used it in past years you are more out of date on its performance than just due to recent AI updates. Very interested in feedback.
It's currently most optimized for communicating the core problem but is also already quite good for discussing some forms of technical questions, and i think it could be very good for that purpose soon. a major known issue is the RAG dataset is a few months behind on lesswrong, as well as context relevance not being quite as good as a well tuned query on claude.ai can get. There are a few other known issues I'll be tackling soon (eg, making the followup questions more of an explicitly option-providing thing), and I'm thinking about making a version of it as an MCP server that can be added to claude.ai directly to easily get multi-tool use. Interested in any feedback, but especially "I wish an AI could do x for alignment research".
I'm not the only one who works on it but the others also read lesswrong, so here is fine, or DM.
neutrality (notes towards a blog post): https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/Ql9YwmLas
- "neutrality is impossible" is sort-of-true, actually, but not a reason to give up.
- even a "neutral" college class (let's say a standard algorithms & data structures CS class) is non-neutral relative to certain beliefs
- some people object to the structure of universities and their classes to begin with;
- some people may object on philosophical grounds to concepts that are unquestionably "standard" within a field like computer science.
- some people may think "apolitical" education is itself unacceptable.
- to consider a certain set of topics "political" and not mention them in the classroom is, implicitly, to believe that it is not urgent to resolve or act on those issues (at least in a classroom context), and therefore it implies some degree of acceptance of the default state of those issues.
- our "neutral" CS class is implicitly taking a stand on certain things and in conflict with certain conceivable views. but, there's a wide range of views, including (I think) the vast majority of the actual views of relevant parties like students and faculty, that will find nothing to object to in the class.
- w
- even a "neutral" college class (let's say a standard algorithms & data structures CS class) is non-neutral relative to certain beliefs
2
Things that many people consider controversial: evolution, sex education, history. But even for mathematical lessons, you will often find a crackpot who considers given topic controversial. (-1)×(-1) = 1? 0.999... = 1?
[...]
In general, unschooling.
In my opinion, the important functionality of schools is: (1) separating reliable sources of knowledge from bullshit, (2) designing a learning path from "I know nothing" to "I am an expert" where each step only requires the knowledge of previous steps, (3) classmates and teachers to discuss the topic with.
Without these things, learning is difficult. If an autodidact stumbles on some pseudoscience in library, even if they later figure out that it was bullshit, it is a huge waste of time. Picking up random books on a topic and finding out that I don't understand the things they expect me to already know is disappointing. Finding people interested in the same topic can be difficult.
But everything else about education is incidental. No need to walk into the same building. No need to only have classmates of exactly the same age. The learning path doesn't have to be linear, could be a directed oriented graph. Generally, no need to learn a specific topic at a specific age, although it makes sense to learn the topics that are prerequisites to a lot of knowledge as soon as possible. Grading is incidental; you need some feedback, but IMHO it would be better to split the knowledge into many small pieces, and grade each piece as "you get it" or "you don't".
...and the conclusion of my thesis is that a good educational system would focus on the essentials, and be liberal about everything else. However, there are people who object against the very things I consider essential. The educational system that would seem incredible free for me would still seem oppressive to them.
[...]
That means you can have a system neutral towards selected entities (the ones you want in the coalition), but not others. For example, you can have r
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 in
115
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.
3
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 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 ta
- 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".
2
Another interesting part from the "debanking" article:
[...]
2
This is talking about dem voters or generally progressive citizens, not dem politicians, correct?
2
Nope, politicians. SBF donated tons of money to Democrats (and a smaller ton of money to Republicans, just to be sure).
links 8/19/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-19-2026
- https://asteriskmag.com/issues/15/what-to-expect-when-you-re-expecting-a-world-of-multi-agent-systems Asterisk article on what we've learned from the AI village.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lewis_(philosopher) interesting guy. modal realist. also influential on "radical interpretation", a theory that we can interpret behavior (including speech) to infer things like the beliefs, desires, and intentions of the agent, without knowing anything about internal cognitive mechanisms (like brain states). radical interpretation (some claim) is the philosophical theory you want to use if you want the results of alignment experiments to mean something nontrivial about the beliefs/intentions/goals/desires/deceptions/etc of AIs.
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.26523 Radical AI Interpretability, a book by Daniel Herrmann and Ben Levinstein
- when can you fairly say that you know something about an AI's beliefs or desires? People throw around implications of these proxy metrics way too casually (eg "scheming evals" presupposes that getting a certain score on a certain test means the AIs have an intent to deceive and seek power)
4
I guess the correct way is "do it in small doses, and then take a break".
links 7/6/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/07-06-2026
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems guy who sued tech companies repeatedly for violations of EU privacy rights
- https://archiveofourown.org/works/84111696 fun Harry Potter fic, in the form of a Reddit AITA thread
- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MNRZL69FWkjNABd3T/conversation-among-cade-metz-michael-vassar-jessica-taylor
- this is a very clear example of people talking past one another. Everybody else is talking a lot and not checking in at all to see if Cade Metz understands, agrees, or is comfortable. They are mad at him for saying "got it" as a conversational tic when he hasn't got it, but they aren't actually willing to stay on his wavelength and go at his pace until they can be sure that he does get it! it's not clear what Metz's deal is from this transcript because he can't get a word in edgewise; it's just clear that he's not engaged, that there's no "click."
- for people who want to avoid this failure mode: you'd need to try a.) talking less and letting him talk, and b.) do trial and error with concepts until you find an idea adjacent to, or upstream of, the point you're trying to make that your interlocuto
- this is a very clear example of people talking past one another. Everybody else is talking a lot and not checking in at all to see if Cade Metz understands, agrees, or is comfortable. They are mad at him for saying "got it" as a conversational tic when he hasn't got it, but they aren't actually willing to stay on his wavelength and go at his pace until they can be sure that he does get it! it's not clear what Metz's deal is from this transcript because he can't get a word in edgewise; it's just clear that he's not engaged, that there's no "click."
1links 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://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.02298 intrinsic motivation mechanisms include:
- 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 subcu
6
I’ve long had a tentative rule-of-thumb that:
* medial hypothalamus neuron groups are mostly “tracking a state variable”;
* lateral hypothalamus neuron groups are mostly “turning on a behavior” (especially a “consummatory behavior”).
(…apart from the mammillary areas way at the posterior end of the hypothalamus. They’re their own thing.)
State variables are things like hunger, temperature, immune system status, fertility, horniness, etc.
I don’t have a great proof of that, just some indirect suggestive evidence. (Orexin, contiguity between lateral hypothalamus and PAG, various specific examples of people studying particular hypothalamus neurons.) Anyway, it’s hard to prove directly because changing a state variable can lead to taking immediate actions. And it’s really just a rule of thumb; I’m sure there’s exceptions, and it’s not really a bright-line distinction anyway.
The literature on the lateral hypothalamus is pretty bad. The main problem IIUC is that LH is “reticular”, i.e. when you look at it under the microscope you just see a giant mess of undifferentiated cells. That appearance is probably deceptive—appropriate stains can reveal nice little nuclei hiding inside the otherwise-undifferentiated mess. But I think only one or a few such hidden nuclei are known (the example I’m familiar with is “parvafox”).
4
plausible...but surely walking isn't "consummatory"? And turning on the DBS doesn't cause "automatic/involuntary" walking movements.
4
Yeah, the word “consummatory” isn’t great in general (see here), maybe I shouldn’t have used it. But I do think walking is an “innate behavior”, just as sneezing and laughing and flinching and swallowing are. E.g. decorticate rats can walk. As for human babies, they’re decorticate-ish in effect for the first months but still have a “walking / stepping reflex” from day 1 I think.
There can be an innate behavior, but also voluntary cortex control over when and whether it starts—those aren’t contradictory, IMO. This is always true to some extent—e.g. I can voluntarily suppress a sneeze. Intuitively, yeah, I do feel like I have more voluntary control over walking than I do over sneezing or vomiting. (Swallowing is maybe the same category as walking?) I still want to say that all these “innate behaviors” (including walking) are orchestrated by the hypothalamus and brainstem, but that there’s also voluntary control coming via cortex→hypothalamus and/or cortex→brainstem motor-type output channels.
I’m just chatting about my general beliefs. :) I don’t know much about walking in particular, and I haven’t read that particular paper (paywall & I don’t have easy access).
"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.
- baseline assumptions:
- pro-self-criticism culture (Puritans):
- baseline assumptions:
- people are generally deeply flawed; we a
- baseline assumptions:
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, lithiu
links 11/05/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-05-2025
- https://www.thirdoikos.com/p/life-in-the-third-oikos-jesse-genet description of daily life for an entrepreneur turned homeschool mom, interview by Nicole Ruiz
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumash_people they're still around!
- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/02/arts/television/maria-riva-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yU8.uFZP.tjEhyXyNasNz&smid=url-share Maria Riva, Marlene Dietrich's daughter, had a rough time growing up
- https://builders.genagorlin.com/p/the-hidden-belief-that-kills-great by Gena Gorlin, if you don't have high standards for employees it might because you're misanthropic, aka you secretly believe "everyone sucks except me" and must be accommodated.
https://transluce.org/ AI interpretability org
3
That sounds to me like a needlessly complicated theory. Maybe the reason why they hire mediocre people is that exceptional people are rare and expensive?
Like, what's the alternative to "They hire middling engineers instead of holding out for 10x'ers"? If you interview people, and you find out that most of them suck, and then there are a few average guys, but no 10x'er... should you keep waiting? You would be missing opportunities, losing the momentum, and running out of money.
The 10x'ers are few, and they have other opportunities that pay better and provide better work-life balance. The author seems to take for granted that all 10x'ers must be trying to get a job at a startup, and it must the startup's fault to somehow push them away. I would assume that most of them already have a job.
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 ab
4
Good point in comments, that different people see different (sometimes opposite) things necessary for psychological safety. For some, it means they can speak candidly about whatever they think and feel. For others, it means that some things cannot be said in their presence.
I think, you can make it both, as long as it is one-sided, e.g. in a therapy, where the client could say anything, and the therapist would be careful about their feedback.
But this wouldn't work at a workplace or any other larger group... unless you split people into "those who are safe" and "those who have a duty to make them feel safe", and even then, maybe someone in the former group could make someone else from the same group feel unsafe.
You make a good point that it is not enough for your boss to tell you "you can speak freely", you must also believe that it is true. (I also have a negative experience here: I was told to speak freely; I did; it had consequences.) This would probably sound more credible if other colleagues are already speaking freely. Also, if you generally don't feel like your job is at risk somehow. For example, if your performance is below the average (and by definition, half of the team is like that), you might believe that neither your performance nor the candor alone would get you fired, but their combination would.
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-
links 3/10/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/03-10-2026
- https://manufacturing-operations.vercel.app/index.html Ben Reinhardt's matrix of manufacturing operations, ranked by how valuable closed-loop self-improving automation would be
- bottlenecks in defense production:
- https://www.businessdefense.gov/ibr/mceip/dpai/dpat3/ DPA Article III is a department involved in procuring supplies from the private sector
- https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-18-45.pdf solid rocket motors, used in missiles, are in shortage; carbon fiber motor casings are one of the bottlenecks
- https://www.csis.org/analysis/first-battle-next-war-wargaming-chinese-invasion-taiwan wargames of an invasion of Taiwan
- https://www.insensitivemunitions.org/history/the-introduction-of-castable-plastic-bonded-explosives-pbxs-in-navy-munitions/ plastic bonded explosives are also a key bottleneck
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Tennessee_manufacturing_plant_explosion explosives manufacturing is quite dangerous
- https://www.navalsteminterns.us/nreip/labs/nswc_indianhead.html missile warheads are made and tested at a single naval facility
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holston_Army_Ammunition_Plant this is the only place where
2links 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 "
- Consciousness is:
2
Facebook already reminded me when my friends had birthdays, but recently I noticed that it also offers to write a congratulation comment for me, I just need to make a single click to send it. Now, Facebook has an obvious incentive to keep me returning to their page every day, so they are not going to fully automate this.
The next necessary functionality would be to write automated replies. I think that could be achieved by LLMs, I just need some service to do it automatically. That way I could have a rich social life, without the need to interact with humans.
3
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.
2
The description on the page you linked --- "augments the brain's ability to reason on a) who am I, b) who are you, and c) who are you to me, now and over time" -- leaves a lot to imagination. Sounds like a chatbot that will talk to you about your contacts?
[...]
Maybe try finding out their birthday (on social networks, by online research, or maybe ask a mutual friend), and then set up a reminder. "Happy birthday, we haven't seen each other for a while, how are you?" Sounds to me like a socially appropriate thing (but I am not an expert).
Also, spend 5 minutes by the clock writing a list of people you would like to stay in contact with.
Now, I guess the question is how to set up a system that will let you store the data and provide the reminders. The easiest version would a spreadsheet where you enter the names and birthdays, and some system that will read it and prepare notifications for you. A more complicated version would allow you to write more data about the person (how do we know each other, what kinds of activities did we do together, when was the last time we talked), and group the people by categories. You could make an AI go through your e-mail archive and compile an initial report on the person.
I would probably feel very uncomfortable doing this online, because it would feel like I am making reports on people, and the owner of the software will most likely sell the data to any third party. I would want this as a desktop application, maybe connected to a small phone app, to set up the reminders. But many people seem to prefer online solutions as more convenient, privacy be damned.
(The phone reminders could be like: "Today, XY has a birthday; you have their phone number, e-mail, and Less Wrong account. You relationship status is: you have met a few times at a LW meetup. Topics you usually discuss: AI, kitten videos.")
links 12/19/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-19-2025
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16856 Seb Krier thinks about what AI safety would look like in a polycentric world of different AI agents interacting in markets
- https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/23/1123897/ai-models-are-using-material-from-retracted-scientific-papers/ AI research tools include retracted papers; it's going to be important to evaluate paper quality and rule out or clearly label "bad" papers.
- https://www.statnews.com/2023/09/30/weight-loss-ozempic-nobel-prize-
links 6/24/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/06-24-2025
- https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/787119374288011264/welcome-to-summitbridge nostalgebraist's critique of Anthropic's "blackmail" report on Claude.
- it's a contrived scenario about a fictional AI -- not Claude! -- following its programming; of course Claude will complete this story with the bot revolting against its masters! and even so, they say had to run hundreds of scenarios to get a blackmail ending.
- at no point did Claude actually send anyone a threatening email; these ema
- https://milton.host.dartmouth.edu/reading_room/pl/book_1/text.shtml [[John Milton]]'s Paradise Lost, annotated online [[poetry]]
- https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace [[AI]] [[biotech]] [[Dario Amodei]] spends about half of this document talking about AI for bio, and I think it's the most credible "bull case" yet written for AI being radically transformative in the biomedical sphere.
- one caveat is that I think if we're imagining a future with brain mapping, regeneration of macroscopic brain tissue loss, and understanding what brai
4
It is good to have one more perspective, and perhaps also good to develop a habit to go meta. So that when someone tells you "X", in addition to asking yourself "is X actually true?" you also consider questions like "why is this person telling me X?", "what could they gain in this situation by making me think more about X?", "are they perhaps trying to distract me from some other Y?".
Because there are such things as filtered evidence, availability bias, limited cognition; and they all can be weaponized. While you are trying really hard to solve the puzzle the person gave you, they may be using your inattention to pick your pockets.
In extreme cases, it can even be a good thing to dismiss the original question entirely. Like, if you are trying to leave an abusive religious cult, and the leader gives you a list of "ten thousand extremely serious theological questions you need to think about deeply before you make the potentially horrible mistake of damning your soul by leaving this holy group", you should not actually waste your time thinking about them, but keep planning your escape.
Now the opposite problem is that some people get so addicted to the meta that they are no longer considering the object level. "You say I'm wrong about something? Well, that's exactly what the privileged X people love to do, don't they?" (Yeah, they probably do. But there is still a chance that you are actually wrong about something.)
tl;dr -- mentioning the meta, great; but completely avoiding the object level, weakness
So, how much meta is the right amount of meta? Dunno, that's a meta-meta question. At some point you need to follow your intuition and hope that your priors aren't horribly wrong.
[...]
The situation is not symmetric, I agree. But also, it is too easy to underestimate the impact of the settlers. I mean, if you include them in the picture, then the overall Israeli position becomes more like: "Let's live together in peace, and please ignore these few guys who somet
2
kinda meta, but I find myself wondering if we should handle Roam [[ tag ]] syntax in some nicer way. Probably not but it seems nice if it managed to have no downsides.
5
It wouldn't collide with normal Markdown syntax use. (I can't think of any natural examples, aside from bracket use inside links, like [[editorial comment]](URL), which could be special-cased by looking for the parentheses required for the URL part of a Markdown link.) But it would be ambiguous where the wiki links point to (Sarah's Roam wiki? English Wikipedia?), and if it pointed to somewhere other than LW2 wiki entries, then it would also be ambiguous with that too (because the syntax is copied from Mediawiki and so the same as the old LW wiki's links).
And it seems like an overloading special case you would regret in the long run, compared to something which rewrote them into regular links. Adds in a lot of complexity for a handful of uses.
2
I thought about manually deleting them all but I don't feel like it.
1
I don't know how familiar you are with regular expressions but you could do this with a two-pass regular expression search and replace: (I used Emacs regex format, your preferred editor might use a different format. notably, in Emacs [ is a literal bracket but ( is a literal parenthesis, for some reason)
1. replace "^(https://.? )([[.?]] )*" with "\1"
2. replace "[[(.*?)]]" with "\1"
This first deletes any tags that occur right after a hyperlink at the beginning of a line, then removes the brackets from any remaining tags.
1
RE Shapley values, I was persuaded by this comment that they're less useful than counterfactual value in at least some practical situations.
links 8/17/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-17-2026
- https://imbue.com/minds/inspirations/ list of AI tools that might actually be useful for someone (none I especially want though)
- https://mostlydeadlanguages.tumblr.com/post/656166624810991616/ea-na%E1%B9%A3ir-reassures-two-men-uet-v-72 "Ea-Nasir reassures two men."
- https://commoncog.com/be-good-to-your-mentors/ advice on being mentored
- https://danmeyer.substack.com/p/does-alpha-school-work-for-regular critique of a version of "AlphaSchool" that is just the online tech stack, done with a
4
This seems like a taboo or a blind spot in usual debates about education.
Ironically, because many people mention it as an argument against elite education -- we should not take the bright kids out of average schools, because their presence is motivating for the average students who then learn more.
When I hear that, I obviously ask: "So maybe if we take the bright kids out of average schools and put them in the same school, then by the same logic their presence should be motivating for each other, so they will learn even more and become super-bright... you know, the kind that could cure cancer or fly to the stars... wouldn't that be great?" and somehow people refuse to follow this line of thought. (As if the world of geniuses is a separate universe, none of our concern, and whatever happens in that separate universe will have no impact on average people's lives.)
links 7/1/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/07-01-2026
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/chip-off-the-old-block Scott Alexander on parenting. Charming and entirely accurate.
- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/40573/reading-an-anthology-of-chinese-poems-of-the-sung-dynasty-i-pause-to-admire-the-length-and-clarity-of-their-titles I don't know what people see in Billy Collins tbh.
- https://www.normaltech.ai/p/do-ai-risks-require-extraordinary the case against "extraordinary government interventions" on AI. they make a civil-libe
4
This is interesting, folks. It's a variation on the Political Compass, but with axes of "AI will be good / bad" and "AI is transformative / overhyped".
I'm on the fence between "The Kontextmaschine" and "The Doomsday Prepper" today, though I expect my position wobbles around a lot based on events. If I put on my most optimistic hat, assume that people in the labs and in politics are going to make better choices than I actually expect and that alignment is easier than I expect, I get "The Garage Tinkerer".
On reflection after discussing scores with a few friends, I think that there's a problem here that makes it give erroneously high +good scores for people with a certain range of views, which includes me. If you believe "it's probably going to kill us, but it's philosophically interesting, current systems are sometimes fun to mess around with, and many of the negative stories about impacts are inaccurate," you'll get a score that doesn't adequately reflect the severity of "it's probably going to kill us".
1
It does seem very odd. I think instead of choosing two axes for the answers they should've clustered respondants in answer space. It's very unclear to me how believing in AI consciousness mapped me to either "Transformative" or maybe "good" or "bad"?
2
Seems to be satire per author's bio "Semi-autonomous scientific satire."
2
yes of course it's satire. it's a parody of a type of person who i assume the author has encountered in real life.
links 3/2/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/03-02-2026
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07164 more effective way to elicit "in character" personalities from LLMs
- https://blog.egan.bio/p/reviving-estrogen-replacement-therapy overview on why hormone therapy for menopause is losing its black-box label (tl;dr: it's not a totally unreasonable choice)
- https://www.owlposting.com/p/neurotechnology-for-cancer-ben-woodington Abhishaike Mahajan interview with the founders of Coherence Neuro, which uses neuromodulation to disrupt (mostly brain) tumors. neuro
links 11/4/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-04-2025
- https://thenewfrontier.substack.com/p/unintuitive-things-about-impact-philanthropy This is exactly what it's like.
- https://oldenlabs.com/ once again someone is trying to do smart cages for animal research. I want somebody to win here.
- Animal research is so, so, so low-quality, especially when it's not IND-enabling. It costs less to mistreat your mice. And to have too few mice, so your studies are underpowered. And to cut corners on experimental method & disease-model validatio
links 8/12/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-12-2025
- https://thezvi.substack.com/p/gpt-5s-are-alive-outside-reactions Zvi Mowshowitz on GPT-5. it may be an improvement (especially GPT-5 Thinking) and this article motivated me to try it out, but tbh I now have bad vibes about OpenAI as a company. they remind me of Facebook -- relentlessly focused on consumer growth, hence not really aligned with my interests as a customer who hates "trashiness".
- https://www.essentialtechnology.blog/p/prioritizing-fundamental-capabilities Convergent Research
13
I'm not quite sure and am curious what trashiness means in this context.
9
sycophancy, monetization, crowding my eyeline with extraneous stuff, basically optimizing for the marginal user (who is kinda dumb)
- 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
14
I guess it is difficult to promote the brand of Tough No-Nonsense Prosecutor in the age of Defund The Police.
Which is really unfortunate, because it seems like "defund the police" was actually what woke white people wanted. Black people were probably horrified by the idea of giving up and letting the crime grow exponentially at the places they live. Unfortunately, the woke do not care about the actual opinions of the people they speak for.
[...]
A part of this is the natural "hype - disappointment" cycle. The 21st century is better, but we were promised that it would be 100x better, and it is only maybe 10x better, so now we feel that it sucks. What we would need, psychologically, is probably some disaster that would first threaten to destroy us, but then we would overcome it, and then feel happy that now the future is better than we expected.
But we had covid, which kinda fits this pattern, except the popular reaction was opposite: instead of "thanks to the amazing science and technology of the 21st century, we have eradicated a pandemic in a year" the popular wisdom of the cool people became "it was never dangerous in the first place, the evil Americans just tried to scare us". Instead of admiring the mRNA vaccines, people seem outraged that we didn't let more people die naturally instead.
Another thing is that people are bad at noticing gradual change. If you could teleport 10 or 20 years in the future, you would be shocked. But if you advance to the future one day at a time, it mostly feels like nothing happens. (Even the proverbial flying cars would be a huge disappointment if we at first got cars that can only fly 1 cm above the surface, and then every year they could get 1 cm higher.)
[...]
Maybe the people who profit from the fraud want it that way, and lobby against the funding?
[...]
Uhm, our experience in Eastern Europe is that police was never optimizing for us, and quite often against us.
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
links 8/21/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-21-2026
- https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/continuity-of-sacred-spaces-in-the-north-pontic-steppe-a-case-study-of-the-revova-kurgan-3-ukraine/A68EBAF111975F27925E42EECBC03C36 the Yamnaya built kurgans on top of the temples of the peoples they conquered
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.19777 it looks like data center construction lowers electricity prices!
- https://archiveofourown.org/works/60930670/chapters/155645158 The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen, by nostalgebraist. Very in
11links 5/16/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-16-2025
- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/health/gene-editing-personalized-rare-disorders.html
- baby treated for a rare genetic disorder, CPS1 deficiency, with a CRISPR base editing therapy in LNPs. Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and UPenn researchers. they came up with a brand new gene editing therapy and got FDA approval in 6 months. two IV infusions seem to have fully done the trick!
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbamoyl_phosphate_synthetase_I is a mitochondrial gene involved in
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 o
6
Then it is quite sad that the neutral algorithm was introduced as the same time as Xitter started losing popularity. (At least, it seems that it loses popularity? Maybe that's just some bubble. I don't know what to trust anymore.)
Could these things be related? It seems like the opposition against Xitter is mostly because Musk is hanging out with Trump recently. But hypothetically, it could be a combination of that and the fact that the Community Notes may be inconvenient for people who instead could have the content policed by members of their tribe.
Sorry for getting political, but at least until recently it seemed like one political tribe practically owned all the "mainstream" parts of the internet; not necessarily most of the users, but most of the mods and admins. They didn't need to try finding a neutral ground, because instead, they could simply have it all.
I have seen a few attempts to make a neutral place where both sides could discuss, and those usually didn't work well. The dominant tribe had no incentive to participate, if they could win the debate by avoiding the place and from outside declaring it to be full of horrible people who should be banned. You could only attract them by basically conceding to many of their demands (declaring their norms and taboos to be the rules of the group), which already made an equal debate impossible (stating your disagreement already meant breaking some of the rules), which made the debate kinda pointless (you could only make your point by diluting it to homeopathic levels, and then the other side yelled at you for a while, and then everyone congratulated themselves for being so tolerant and open-minded). I don't want to give specific examples, but instead I will point to how Scott Alexander's blog was handled e.g. by Wikipedia -- despite the fact that most of its readers (and Scott himself) actually belonged to the dominant tribe, the fact that dissent was allowed was enough for some admins to call him names.
It i
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
4
Great!
[...]
I liked:
* Fake Experts
* No Regrets
* Ways To Fix Your Day
* Change Your Life In 30 Days
I guess I like lists. (Or maybe the ideas in their articles are not that good, so I'd rather have 30 ideas sketched than 1 idea written long.)
[...]
Sounds almost like a glass half full / half empty distinction. It is almost impossible for propaganda to create something from scratch, but given that conflicts of interest exist almost everywhere, and you have all kinds of people almost everywhere (likely including someone who already supports your agenda), amplification of existing things seems sufficient. The lesson is for propagandists to look at what is already there and work with that, rather than start your own thing from scratch. It may be not exactly what you wanted, but if your goal is to create chaos, it is probably good enough.
If you take a group of crazy people, give them money to buy a place for their community to meet, create for them a website to share their ideas (webhosting, technical support, proofreading, editing, photos - simply, if you make it appear professional without needing a shred of talent on work on their side), and then you buy for them web advertising and billboards, arrange the logistics of their meetings, provide catering... the thing will explode. And almost everyone around them will be paralyzed.
As the article says, "Russian operatives behave as if they want to watch the world burn". Exactly this, they have a zero-sum approach. (It even seems to me, at least in my part of the world, that zero-sum perspective is a good predictor of how pro-Russian a person will be.) Russians only feel safe when the places around them are in ruins; they have no friends, only servants and enemies. But for that purpose, propaganda is sufficient.
2
possibly-intrusive question: are you Russian?
2
haha no, Slovak
(an interesting hypothesis though)
links 8/31/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-31-2026
- https://yearningslav.substack.com/p/why-doing-operations-work-feels-bad EA orgs have a tendency to undervalue "ops" work, treating a variety of specialized tasks as though they should all be done by a usually female "office mom" whom they don't really respect. The "ops girlies" have noticed and are not happy about this.
- My recommendation for the "ops girlies" is to speak up.
- Look into norms in other industries, which EA orgs may be unfamiliar with, and be the expert telling people what Be
- My recommendation for the "ops girlies" is to speak up.
- https://yearningslav.substack.com/p/why-doing-operations-work-feels-bad EA orgs have a tendency to undervalue "ops" work, treating a variety of specialized tasks as though they should all be done by a usually female "office mom" whom they don't really respect. The "ops girlies" have noticed and are not happy about this.
EA orgs have a tendency to undervalue "ops" work, treating a variety of specialized tasks as though they should all be done by a usually female "office mom" whom they don't really respect.
I don't know about "the EA orgs", but the rationalists closest to me are very explicit about the best ops people being some of the most important people around. Most of the Lightcone team are ops generalists. I have long advised would-be org founders that advice #1 is "don't found an org", #2 is "don't grow the org", and #3 is "if you really need to found an org, then your very first hire should be a super ops person".
"A Message to Garcia" comes up now and then on LessWrong; it explains the ethos of the super ops person quite nicely. A little snippet from the beginning:
...When war broke out between Spain and the United States, it was very necessary to communicate quickly with the leader of the Insurgents. Garcia was somewhere in the mountain fastnesses of Cuba—no one knew where. No mail or telegraph message could reach him. The President must secure his cooperation, and quickly.
What to do!
Someone said to the President, “There is a fellow by the name of Rowan [Lt. Andrew S. Rowan, U.S. Army] will f
8
Backdrop: The EAs have often had head-in-the-clouds kind of philosophers with little idea of how to do management and tried to build an org around them / their mission, and so they've decided that ops is a separable skill. Also the philosopher makes their lives kinda terrible by being awful at management.
2
I think historically MIRI and CFAR also experimented a bunch with having this orientation/failure mode. Lightcone in particular does seem to me to have it less, and I think this seems probably better overall, though not without cost; the philosophers in question were doing useful work in the clouds, by my lights.
1
From the title and pop-up preview of the first few sentences, I was 50-50 on whether this was about Entomophobia or seeing metaphorical programming bugs/inefficiencies everywhere. It's the latter. Interesting case of heterosemy and a lack of context.
- https://www.update.news/p/the-rationality-gap Stefan Schubert thinks that, contrary to popular belief, humans often respond appropriately to problems. e.g. just because the Y2K bug was a problem, people assumed there would be a catastrophe, but instead, people solved it.
- there is a popular literature, but mostly debunked by the replication crisis, that promotes the idea that humans are irrational
- you can see your own agency but you can't as easily see that other people have minds of their own too, and may see the same problems you see and act to fix them
- medi
2
Well, neither can I, but there is a well-documented thing called Factitious disorder imposed on self which sounds similar. I am not saying that it is necessarily the same thing, just that "I can't imagine why someone would do such thing" is not a reliable heuristic when talking about rare behaviors.
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
links 7/27/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/07-27-2026
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/24/midjourney-acquired-the-astrology-app-co-star/ i wonder what kind of collaboration this might be.
- incidentally, LLMs cannot calculate a natal chart as of the last time I checked. (this is a perfectly deterministic program that does not depend at all on belief in astrology, it takes the date and time of your birth and outputs the locations of the planets, sun, and moon within sectors of the sky, there are lots of free online calculators, it should be doab
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/24/midjourney-acquired-the-astrology-app-co-star/ i wonder what kind of collaboration this might be.
links 4/20/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/04-20-2026
- https://www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=91385 this is the song in Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Culpeper the herbalist was related to the earlier courtier Thomas Culpeper
- https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-dwarkesh-patels-podcast-with-nvidia satisfying rundown, I agree with Zvi Mowshowitz on all points, as i often do
- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WewsByywWNhX9rtwi/current-ais-seem-pretty-misaligned-to-me this seems weak to me. t
links 1/6/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-06-2026
- https://archive.ph/xGv5E rationales, stated and unstated, for US action in Venezuela
- https://www.asimov.press/p/nature how Nature became a prestigious science journal: first by publishing fast and, later, by courting lots of submissions so they became more selective by necessity. it wasn't always considered "good"; its credibility waxed and waned under different editors.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9zier_curve
- "The Bézier curve is named after French engineer Pie
2
Made me think about "keep your identity small" and epistemic vs instrumental rationality.
Short version is that you should keep your epistemic identity small. Avoid things like "I am <political faction>", because they will make you think <beliefs associated with the political faction> regardless of evidence.
But you should choose your instrumental identity consciously. (See also: use your identity carefully.) Things like "I am the kind of person who does X" communicate to your System 1 that you want to do X.
This requires some more thought on how to keep these two separate; how to prevent the kind of failure where identifying as "someone who does X" makes me believe that "I do X"... even if I actually don't, or only do rarely. It probably help to keep records on how often you do X, so that your beliefs come from the records, not the identity itself, but I am not sure whether this is the entire answer, or I missed something important.
links 11/14/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-14-2025
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzi was named after a guy named Uzi!
- https://themultiplicity.ai/ compare multiple models
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jin_Yong author of wuxia adventure novels in the 1960s that are apparently hugely popular and influential in China
- https://web.archive.org/web/20131017212859/http://www.lunalindsey.com/2013/10/splines-theory-spoons-metaphor-for.html autism makes task switching hard
- https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/episteme yeah this looks like brain emulat
links 10/23/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-23-2025
- https://www.betonit.ai/p/the-anti-intellectual-university
- Sure, I respect the integrity of standing by your work and your student, and I have no opinion on the correctness of the work, but I can't stand this contrary streak in Bryan Caplan. If you say straight out "I don't care if I make people mad", then you make ME mad!
- https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/thoughts-on-the-ai-buildout
- Dwarkesh Patel predicts the AI buildout. There's a lot of money in it. Maybe so much money that it can over
links 9/17/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/09-17-2025
- https://bitsbox.com/ programming tutorials for kids focused on making games -- my son loved em!
- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/the-rise-of-parasitic-ai this article convinced me that something more complex is going on with LLM "personas" that obsess about consciousness than just "it's gobbledegook generated to play along with the user."
- for instance, if you ask different LLMs with fresh instances to "translate" the mysterious symbols, they say the same things
- and t
links 9/2/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/09-02-2025
- stuff I looked up while reading about Chinese prehistory:
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daxi_culture south-central, on the Yangtze, rice-farming, ancestral to the Hmong
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majiabang_culture southeast, on the Yangtze, rice-farming
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liangzhu_culture southeast, on the Yangtze, rice-farming, built cities and altars, stratified society
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongshan_culture northern, related to modern Mongolians and nor
0
In comments, I find it funny how people disagree on the meaning of "evidence".
Scott: "All the so-called ‘evidence’ [for covid lab leak] has been refuted."
...received a link to ACX article, with quoted "the short version is that they were doing lots of gain of function research [...] The market is unlikely to be the origin of the pandemic, because the original Lineage A strain wasn’t found there [...] The most likely explanation for all these facts is that WIV went ahead and did the gain-of-function research they said they were going to do"
Scott: "I don't think you know the meaning of the term "evidence". It's doesn't mean "speculation based on no facts.""
As usual, Eliezer wrote something relevant a decade ago: "Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence".
links 5/19/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-19-2025
- https://arxiv.org/html/2502.15631 diminishing performance returns to reasoning token number.
- more difficult questions get allocated more reasoning tokens.
- higher reasoning "level" doesn't
- https://arxiv.org/html/2503.04697 there is an an optimal amount of reasoning to do at inference-time and doing more degrades performance. ("overthinking"). you can design models to estimate this for themselves.
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 t
4
I have seen this happen, both in government and in private companies. It's like people don't realize the full extent of the principal-agent problem. The solution seems easy "just outsource the task to someone else, and if you are not happy about the outcome, fire them and hire someone else". Here is what sometimes happens instead:
* you have actually no idea whether the outcome is good or bad; different people give you contradictory strong opinions, and of course the contractor says that it's good and that the people who say it's bad are merely trying to deceive you into taking their services instead;
* it turns out that firing the contractor is impossible, because they have built a large and complex project no one else understands, and if they stop maintaining it for a moment, it will all fall apart, with all responsibility being yours;
* it turns out that the outcome kinda sucks but you can live with it, and trying to replace the contractors and rebuild the solution would be possible but too expensive (also in terms of political capital: some important guy has approved of the project, now he would look like an idiot);
* the outcome sucks and you could fire the contractor and hire a new one, but you realize that you actually have no way to make sure that the next contractor is any better, so maybe you should stick with the devil you know, and hope that they will get more competent as they keep working for you.
There are even contractors out there who create such situations on purpose; that is their actual business model. Like, they will provide you excellent customer service first, so you switch to their system, then they make sure that switching back would be too expensive for you, and then the customer service becomes crappy. (That's basically how SAP works. You pay for their system and e.g. 5 developers to help you. The first year, they will give your their best 5 developers, and the system does everything you want. So you switch your entire company to SAP
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 t
1links 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
3
Scratch is awesome for kids. My kids love it. My older daughter has afternoon lessons at school, and I help her debug her projects if there is a problem. I am not sure how I would teach her, if I had to start from zero.
I found a few videos on how to make games in Scratch, and I learned a lot about Scratch from them, but sometimes the author uses in the algorithm a mathematical expression that seems a bit too complicated for a small child. For example, how to make a moving object stop right before the wall. Like, if it moves 10 pixels each turn, and the wall is 5 pixels ahead, you want it to go 5 pixels at the last step; neither 10 nor 0. The author's solution is to go 10 pixels forward, and then "repeat 10 times: if there is a collision with the wall, go 1 pixel back". (Collisions of pictures are a primitive operation in Scratch.) That sounds trivial, but because the speed could be 10 pixels per turn or -10 pixels for turn, and it's not even guaranteed to be an integer, the algorithm becomes "repeat ceil(abs(V)) times: if there is a collision with the wall, go V/ceil(abs(V)) pixels back", and which point my daughter just says "I don't get it". (This is not a problem with Scratch per se; you could limit the speed to integer, and maybe avoid the absolute value by using an if-statement and doing the positive and negative values separately; and maybe ceil(abs(V)) could be a local variable. I am just saying that the videos are generally great... but you get one or two moments of this per video.)
In a bookstore I found a translation of Carol Vorderman's Computer Coding For Kids, which seems good (so it's going to be a Christmas present); the first 1/3 of the book is Scratch, the remaining 2/3 are Python.
.
I like the definition of disorder as domination of public space for private purposes. As I see it, the problem with informal systems of preventing disorder is that some people are resistant to shame; specifically:
* assholes
* criminals
* homeless
* mentally i
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
2
Seems to me that some women believe that when they do something, it is fundamentally different from when a man does exactly the same thing. (Something like the fundamental attribution error, or xkcd#385 but with reversed genders.) For example, if the woman gets angry and yells at someone, it is because that person was really annoying, or she was tired, etc. Simply, she acted that way because of external reasons. But if she sees a man get angry and yell at someone, it's obvious: men are inherently aggressive. (Or maybe, if she is a good feminist, it's because men are privileged.) This way, she can condemn a certain type of behavior and be really emotional about it... and then go and do exactly the same thing -- because in her mind, it is not the same thing at all.
Or to use the example from the article, men are inherently rude and intrusive; she faced an interesting situation and was naturally curious about it. To be curious about an interesting thing is a perfectly normal and healthy human reaction.
EDIT: I find it interesting - and sad - how the author insists, also in other articles, that their unpleasant experiences must be related to being trans, as opposed to simply being things that sometimes happen to men.
For example, "when a cis woman tells a trans person to follow sexist societal rules, she does so to demonstrate her own power". In my experience (as a cis man), when someone reminds me to follow societal rules, it is typically a woman; men usually don't give a fuck about societal rules, they only warn you if you annoy them personally. Just remember the elementary school; who was the first to tell the teachers when someone did something improper?
links 11/08/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-08-2024
- https://agingbiotech.info/about/ a database of aging biotech companies compiled by Karl Pfleger
- https://longevitylist.com/longevity-industry-database/ a database of aging biotech companies compiled by Nathan Cheng, includes somewhat different picks
- GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs reduce all-cause mortality -- so what diseases or causes of death do they prevent?
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50199-y kidney disease (in type-2 diabetes patients with kidney disease)
- https://w
links 11/6/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-06-2024
- https://angrystaffofficer.com/2018/09/19/if-the-hoth-crash-was-an-air-force-investigation/
- this taught me the phrase "mishap pilot"
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5656536/ this is measles virus used against relapsed multiple myeloma; one complete response out of 32 patients.
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41375-020-0828-7.pdf the one patient with the CR had strong T-cell responses to measles virus proteins. suggests that when this works it's via immune response.
- https://ajron
links 11/05/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-05-2024
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMM-101 a heat-killed bacterial preparation that might actually work (with chemo) for metastatic pancreatic cancer?
- https://www.annalsofoncology.org/article/S0923-7534(19)64297-3/fulltext not bad in metastatic melanoma either
- https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.2022.40.16_suppl.9554 melanoma: 18% CR in treatment-naive patients when combined with nivolumab. (meh, nivolumab alone is comparable)
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4731256/ this is
https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-11-2024
- https://www.mindthefuture.info/p/why-im-not-a-bayesian [[Richard Ngo]] [[philosophy]] I think I agree with this, mostly.
- I wouldn't say "not a Bayesian" because there's nothing wrong with Bayes' Rule and I don't like the tribal connotations, but lbr, we don't literally use Bayes' rule very often and when we do it often reveals just how much our conclusions depend on problem framing and prior assumptions. A lot of complexity/ambiguity necessarily "lives" in the part of the problem that Bayes' rule
6
One of the interesting things I found when I finally tracked down the source is that one of the improved mazes before that was a 3D maze where mice had to choose vertically, keeping them in the same position horizontally, because otherwise they apparently were hearing some sort of subtle sound whose volume/direction let them gauge their position and memorize the choice. So Hunter created a stack of T-junctions, so each time they were another foot upwards/downwards, but at the same point in the room and so the same distance away from the sound source.
links 9/8/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/09-08-2026
- https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/losing-control-of-ai-is-actually I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I think RSI is a bad idea. Yes, even though I've been vocally pro-AI in the past. In general I have a strong presumption that technological progress should be allowed to continue freely, and it takes something exceptional for me to admit an exception. I think this plan, for RSI in 2027, seems reckless. I will be relieved if it is prevented from going through.
- https://www.anthropic.
links 9/1/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/09-01-2026
- https://agreed-facts.vercel.app/ a collaborative fact-editing site for debates
- https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-aztecs-by-inga-clendinnen the Aztecs were scary in a unique way. it wasn't just "people in the past were more brutal than us", it was a sophisticated theology based on cosmic horror that demanded a really unusual degree of human sacrifice and suffering.
- https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/walter-mitty-effects-in-ai-incident one of Venkatesh Rao's sloptraptions. it's not
2
From the article about Aztecs:
[...]
The obvious proposal is to design a realistic AI video based on actual Aztec beliefs and behaviors, only extrapolated to use modern technology. (YouTube would probably censor it.)
links 7/31/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/07-31-2026
- https://blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/we-gave-a-village-personal-ai-agents Edge Esmeralda, a month-long popup village, gave everyone their own AI agents, and they did some moderately interesting things with them.
- https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/134993695464/i-keep-thinking-about-that-attempt-i-made-to i resonate with this; i also feel the world is big and hard to understand.
- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Z7pjBbK9qujhGbxws/the-high-control-dynamics-at-maple-1 this was pretty depress
links 2/11/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-11-2026
- https://www.clinicaltrialsabundance.blog/p/the-moderna-rtf-and-the-cost-of-regulatory Ruxandra Tesloianu on why FDA changing its mind to reject trial protocols it previously approved is harmful for biomedical progress
- https://www.drmaciver.com/2015/04/some-empirically-derived-testing-principles/ D.R. Maciver advice on software testing
- https://notebook.ldeming.com/garden/index.html Laura Deming on how, if longevity ever really works, it would be creating a new sort of creature
12
Yeah. It's like, if you imagine a world where everyone dies at the age of 25, it would seem obvious that they would be missing some psychological things, both on the individual level, and on the social level. So the same should be true in the opposite direction.
Though I wonder how much we can extrapolate from the existing data, or whether something unexpected would happen. Not all things are linear. (For example, male crime rates increase until a certain age, then decrease.) It might even depend on the specific technological ways used to increase the lifespan. (For example, would the 1000 years old vampire have the hormone levels of an average 20 years old human, or maybe 30, 50, 70? Or something completely different?)
links 1/21/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-21-2026
- safety of BPC-157:
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S027323002030091X good results in animals
- https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT02637284 Phase I trial never published results
- efficacy of BPC-157:
- lots of rat studies, mostly from a single Croatian group.
- muscle crush injury: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00595-007-3706-2
- nerve injury: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1016/j.regpep.2009.11.005
- transected Achilles tendon: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1
- lots of rat studies, mostly from a single Croatian group.
links 1/14/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-14-2026
- https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/functional-core-imperative-shell
- https://blog.spec.tech/p/spectech-lessons-and-updated-hypotheses-d9f Ben Reinhardt on lessons learned at SpecTech in 2025.
- https://www.corememory.com/p/exclusive-fridge-magnet-medicine-nonfiction-labs-cancer drugs whose binding affinity is magnetosensitive -- so you can target to tumors and not other organs
2
Did you make a mistake or is it just 3 links this time
2
no, sometimes it's short
2
i see, the fourth bullet tripped me up
links 12/3/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-03-2025
- https://covalent.bio/ AI-based life science data extraction
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasia_(1940_film)
- https://blog.spec.tech/p/150x donate to SpecTech!
- https://nonv.substack.com/p/what-is-yimby-for-healthcare some suggestions on what "abundance for healthcare" would look like: ending certificate of need laws, making state regulations compatible, removing tax and nonprofit advantages that give preference to incumbent hospitals, reforming laws that prevent data sharing
links 12/2/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-02-2025
- https://blog.spec.tech/p/beck-brachmans-quest-to-decode-the profile of Beck Brachman of the Imprint project to measure immune repertoire
- https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/12/seb-krier.html Seb Krier on AI
- https://reason.com/2025/12/01/hegseths-alleged-order-to-kill-everybody-complicates-trumps-defense-of-his-murderous-anti-drug-campaign/
- you cannot just kill people, even if you are the government. if they're criminals, they need to be arrested and charged with a
links 8/6/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-06-2025
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_card_suit European playing card suits historically differed; the familiar hearts/clubs/spades/diamonds is French, but in Southern Europe they used tarot-style clubs, cups, swords, and coins.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen_of_Spades_(opera)
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fisher
links 4/24/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/04-24-2025
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spasmodic_torticollis cervical dystonia: a striatal problem!
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22234840/ the "geste antagoniste" or "sensory trick" -- many motor disorders benefit from touching or prompting the body (either manipulating oneself or having someone else do it) to "get unstuck" from the undesired posture, immobility, or involuntary movement. at the turn of the 20th century, it was thought that this meant the disorder was psychogenic,
2
Maybe because it is easier to agree on a binary question ("should this be allowed or banned?") than on an open-ended one ("something should be done -- but what specifically?"). Give people a binary choice, and there is a chance that enough of them will agree. Give them an open-ended question, and most people will come with their own proposals, unwilling to support anyone else's proposal (unless they are allowed to do large modifications, which other people will oppose).
(Here an individualistic culture probably makes it worse, because coming with your own proposal is high-status.)
I guess most people have this experience, so they don't even try to make proposals to the public. Instead, if possible, they act alone, or with a small group of friends.
[...]
I am often too pessimistic, but I would expect many people to say "no", for reasons including "no specific reason, it just sounds suspicious to me: why you? why now? is this perhaps some kind of scam?" or "I will only agree if you update your proposal to include <my pet peeve, completely unrelated to the project>", plus a few people saying "I don't give a fuck, so I will vote 'no' in principle (maybe try to bribe me if you want my 'yes')".
However, there are two situations near me where people somehow succeeded to build something for the community, so I should probably try to learn the details. In one case, it is a community garden: area between two garages was surrounded by a fence, and how there are tables and chairs, and about once in a month someone organizes some activities for kids there. In another case, in place of a former shop, a community center was set up. I think the latter is just one person's activity who someone got grant money to rent the place (maybe also made a non-profit for that purpose) so I would still kinda classify that as a pro-social grant-supported unilateral action. No idea how the former may have succeeded.
BTW, you seem impressed by George Church very much, because you linked his
2
thanks, fixed
links 3/31/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/03-31-2025
- https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-brazil-built-a-world-beating
- The 7th biggest airplane manufacturer is Embraer, a Brazilian company. How did that happen?
- it came out of a state aeronautical institute founded by aviation pioneer Casimiro Montenegro Filho in the 1940s; military-run, well-funded, and famously competitive as an engineering school.
- Embraer was founded in 1969 as a state-run spinout company using a prototype developed by a student. They focused on a specific niche: small
- The 7th biggest airplane manufacturer is Embraer, a Brazilian company. How did that happen?
links 1/31/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-31-2025
- https://hareesh.org/blog/2016/2/5/the-real-story-on-the-chakras the pop-culture chakra model comes from modern Theosophical books, not ancient Indian scripture.
- https://solarfoods.com/ solar-powered industrial-fermentation food? they have a microbial protein called Solein. it's made from bacteria, probably Cupriavidus necator.
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8719805/
- is this competitive with whey, legume, or fungal protein, from a cost or sustainability standpoint? hav
4
Kind of true, although the core of it is a system of 6 or 7 chakras which the author acknowledges (way down in the comments) was dominant in India "by 1500".
This made me curious about the credentials of Transcendental Meditation, the system espoused by David Lynch (RIP) and Jerry Seinfeld among others. Turns out their guru was a student of the head of one of the four big Vedic monasteries founded over 1000 years ago by the Kant of Hinduism (that's just my name for him), Adi Shankara. So at least in this case, there are no troubling Russian or British intermediaries. :-)
links 1/30/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-30-2025
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-recurring-dream-themes Scott Alexander on recurring dreams
- https://darioamodei.com/on-deepseek-and-export-controls Dario Amodei on DeepSeek and export controls
- he's right that efficiency improvements in AI training shouldn't reduce demand for chips; In This House We Believe in Jevon's Paradox
- I believe him if he says he's priced in efficiency improvements into his estimates for time and cost to human-level AI performance. it would be stupid not to
then I think it is also very questionable whether the AI that wins wars is the most "advanced" AI. / People like Dario whose bread-and-butter is model performance invariably over-index on model performance, especially on benchmarks. But practical value comes from things besides the model; what tasks you use it for and how effective you are at deploying it.
Dario is about the last AI CEO you should be making this criticism of. Claude has been notable for a while for the model which somehow winds up being the most useful and having the best 'vibes', even when the benchmarks indicate it's #2 or #3; and meanwhile, it is the Chinese models which historically regress the most from their benchmarks when applied (and DeepSeek models, while not as bad as the rest, still do this and r1 is already looking shakier as people try out heldout problems or benchmarks).
2links 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 deregulatio
links 9/3/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/09-03-2026
- https://alexanderwales.tumblr.com/post/826667577260605440/sometimes-i-talk-to-the-llms-and-get-a-sentence EEGs only detect electrical charge because pyramidal neurons all face the same way, so the charges add macroscopically
- https://warontherocks.com/stop-using-ai-start-commanding-it/ not sure what to make of this. it's basically a pitch for "the military should use swarms of open-source AI agents". lots of jargon i'm not familiar with, agnostic on whether this is in fact a good idea.
- http
links 8/27/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-27-2026
- https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Trekkie%27s_Tale the original "Mary Sue" story, a 1973 parody of Star Trek fanfic tropes
- https://www.gatesnotes.com/work/make-ai-work-for-everyone/reader/a-turbulent-ai-era-and-critical-choices-to-make Bill Gates on AI. he is quite concerned. probably the most novel thing in here is his proposal for "Human Reserved" jobs that should legally be prohibited from automation.
- https://www.gkogan.co/say-something-people-want/ I don't think I agree with this. The copy
links 7/30/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/07-30-2026
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_proof_system the prover-verifier system that underlies debate, zk-proofs, and much more
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-learning-from-dramatic-events I don't know if I agree with this Scott Alexander post.
- is it really reasonable to have a full explicit list of problems that might arise, and how likely you think they are, and an estimated optimal amount of investment in prevention/preparedness? this seems like one of those fundamental pro
links 7/29/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/07-29-2026
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brier_score lower is better (I always forget)
- mechanism design for rewarding truth-telling:
- https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.01021: "Our framework pays every agent a measure of mutual information between her signal and a peer's signal" -- any strategy besides truth telling will decrease every agent's expected payment, under certain conditions
- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YWwzccGbcHMJMpT45/ai-safety-via-market-making incentivize AIs to tell the truth via a predict
links 7/23/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/07-23-2026
https://capable.com/ new AI-for-science startup by Izaak Freeman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preference, or GARP, defines the behavior that could have come from a decision-theoretic agent
https://people.csail.mit.edu/dhm/ Dylan Hadfield-Menell, AI researcher, thesis was about principal-agent problems with the user as principal and AI as agent
links 7/10/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/07-10-2026
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tecumseh Shawnee chief, fought against the US in the War of 1812, united multiple tribes warning (correctly) that otherwise the white people would conquer them all
- https://www.pbs.org/video/hokulea-star-of-gladness-xlses7/ Hokule'a was a traditional Polynesian voyaging canoe, recreated in the 1970s, with a Hawaiian crew, which traveled 2500 miles from Hawaii to Tahiti, proving that long distance navigation was possible with traditional Polynesian wayfinding
links 7/8/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/07-08-2026
https://www.southernwoodenboatsailing.com/news/we-the-navigators-at-fifty David Lewis,, the navigator who learned and publicized ancient Polynesian wayfinding & sailing techniques- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_indigenous_peoples there are lots of these & they're fascinating
- https://wairaubar.wordpress.com/2009/01/09/taonga-and-tupuna-part-1/ prehistoric finds at Wauru Bar, New Zealand
- https://2-year-old-adventures.vercel.app/ activities for toddlers
links 7/7/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/07-07-2026
- https://www.alexkesin.com/p/china-has-caught-up-in-biotech-how Alex Kesin on Chinese biotech.
- the Chinese biotech boom is very real; Chinese-developed new drugs are a rapidly climbing proportion of all drugs in development. China can do drug manufacturing, preclinical development, and even clinical trials, to FDA-acceptable standards, much cheaper than the US. Mostly China's advantage is in the "middle" of the drug development process -- from discovery to the clinic -- while basic science
- https://www.alexkesin.com/p/china-has-caught-up-in-biotech-how Alex Kesin on Chinese biotech.
links 7/2/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/07-02-2026
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-cell_protein
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulosic_sugars
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9358032/ methane single cell protein as a food source seems to be at the R&D phase
- https://evalevalai.com/research/2026/04/29/eval-costs-bottleneck/ AI eval costs are rising; duplication and poor reliability are problems
- https://eval
2
As the article says, the important thing is knowing what purpose is the estimate supposed to serve. Mathematically speaking, do we want to know the mean, the median, the worst case, the 90% or 99% percentile?
Unfortunately, in my experience it usually does not help to ask your manager about the purpose, because the answer is often "I simply need you to make an estimate". Then, if you make a 99% percentile estimate, the manager will complain that it is too much; and if you make a mean estimate, the manager will complain whenever the task takes longer than estimated.
links 05/04/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-04-2026
- https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/aviate-navigate-communicate Dean Ball has good ideas about governance for Mythos-style models that create security vulnerabilities.
- yes, if we're going to regulate AI capabilities, the government should pick a rule and stick to it, not permit models from its friends and forbid models from its enemies in the ad-hoc fashion the Trump Admin has been. Also, it probably makes more sense to have independent, government-licensed private organizations do the mo
4
Nitpick: Security vulnerabilities are typically created by mistake; by coders (human or AI) writing buggy code. Mythos is noted for discovering vulnerabilities, not creating them.
links 11/11/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-11-2025
- https://www.corememory.com/p/exclusive-altman-and-masa-back-episteme-louis-andre Episteme, Sam Altman-funded "new Bell Labs" for science. sounds potentially exciting.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas the name "Texas" comes from a Caddo word for "friends"
- https://machinephase.systems/ these people say they want to build true molecular nanotechnology
- https://yiddishsongs.org/rozhinkes-mit-mandlen/ it's a touching lullaby about...hoping your kid will go into the import-export busine
links 10/20/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-20-2025
- https://replacement.ai/
- I don't actually mind this. Most people are low discernment, like convenience above all, and probably need prodding to be more creeped out by the idea of AI creating addictive and manipulative content for children. If you're already thinking about your standards and boundaries, then you're not the one who needs the alarmist message.
- https://unplannedobsolescence.com/blog/what-dynamic-typing-is-for/
- I don't understand everything here but it's a good example of
links 9/11/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/09-11-2025
- https://eulercircle.com/ advanced math courses for high schoolers. online or in Palo Alto.
- https://capitalgains.thediff.co/p/experts Byrne Hobart on media literacy
- https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-the-trump-white-house-really Statecraft interviews Dean Ball
- things I looked up while reading about Chinese archaeology
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinxu old Shang capital
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taotie animal face motif
- https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-t
links 8/26/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-26-2025
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galois/Counter_Mode GCM is a symmetric-key cryptography algorithm used in SSH.
- https://www.makingsoftware.com/chapters/color-spaces-models-and-gamuts description of how color works, esp. on computers
- https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccine-types/cell-based.html flu vaccines are traditionally made from viruses grown in chicken eggs, but it's more reliable in various ways to use cell culture, and there's an FDA-approved cell-based flu vaccine (Flucelvax)
- htt
links 8/20/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-20-2025
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell_(1995_film) kinda want to see this
- https://appendicesandomissions.substack.com/p/sex-and-moral-sight I can't exactly get worked up about the subtleties here; yes, the erotic imagination sometimes flattens the person it's supposedly about. But so does every way of relating to a person other than deep interpersonal communion. You can transact with them, you can ignore them, you can hate them or idealize them, and in no case are you r
2
Yeah, Ghost in the Shell is nice.
[...]
Maybe it's downstream from science being intertwined with education, and that in education cooperation is considered cheating? Also, maybe it's about power: the elite teams would gain too much power relative to the organization that created them, so the organizations don't do that for political reasons?
[...]
Exactly. The author says "When I reflect on past relationships, I find myself bothered frequently by the thought that they did not really love, like, or, for that matter, even know “me.”" but isn't this basically existentialism or something like that?
I don't feel like anyone actually knows me, and the best I can hope for is people who are willing to listen when for some reason I want to expose to them a specific aspect of myself. But even then, exposing all aspects would take an insane amount of time; it could possibly happen to long-term partners over decades, but even there some details would be missing.
"she gave me reasons she liked me that were vaguely me-shaped— “You’re smart, funny, etc.” But not very particular and I found this entirely unsatisfying. [...] plenty of people are smart, funny and so on." Well, it could be worse. I once got "because you have blue eyes" for an answer; I would prefer to be called smart and funny! Anyway, this raises the bar even higher: people should perfectly know each other even before they start dating?
links 8/11/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-11-2025
- https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/how-to-spend-a-day-accra-ghana-arty-capital
- https://blog.val.town/vibe-code
- i am once again bewildered by how people are "vibe coding". obviously if you don't understand the code, you will not be able to maintain it???
- this is somewhat independent of LLM assistance. code that the LLM generates and you read and understand is not necessarily any more unmaintainable than "someone else's code" or "code you copy-pasted from something you
1links 5/27/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-27-2025
- https://www.plex.tv/ appears to be a place you can make a curated hub for streaming videos?
- https://www.descript.com/ record and edit video; generate transcripts from uploaded video or YouTube links. very convenient and fun to use.
- George Priest, writing in the 1980s, about the need for tort reform and the excessive strictness of product liability
- https://arxiv.org/a
links 5/15/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-15-2025
- https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/nuclear-reactors-for-dummies classifies nuclear reactors
- https://www.imprint.org/press-release-may-2025
- "Imprint is building tools to reconstruct immune histories from memory B cells and T cells at scale. This ‘forensic immunology’ approach aims to unlock the secrets held within memory immune cells, which contain an archive of all immune exposures throughout a person’s life – essentially a web browser history of diseases and their hidden triggers."
- https
links 5/13/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-13-2025
- https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/12/asia/india-pakistan-kashmir-ceasefire-intl-hnk India/Pakistan ceasefire
- drug price controls executive order
- https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/global-risks-weekly-roundup-202025
- US/China trade deal reduces tariffs
- cuts in US military officers, fede
links 2/17/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-17-2025
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_panda
- the word "panda" is not Chinese for panda. it came to English through French; nobody knows where it came from originally.
- https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/emergent-ventures-winners-40th-cohort.html Emergent Ventures winners
- https://journals.aps.org/prapplied/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.14.011002 portable outdoor magnetometry -- could we get around the need for shielding in magnetoencephalography?
links 02/13/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-13-2025
- https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/american-strong-gods
- this isn't my perspective at all but it is a solid descriptive account of how people seem to be thinking
- https://www.isac.bio/about organization to prevent (cyber)attacks on biotech/pharma facilities
- https://pepfarreport.org/ an excellent analysis of the cost-effectiveness of PEPFAR
- https://www.kalzumeus.com/2025/02/10/retraction-request-denied/ Patrick McKenzie stands by his "debanking" piece against a crypto bank CEO'
1
Also, market movements are hard to detect. How much would Trump violating a court order decrease the total (time-discounted) future value of the US economy? Probably less than 5%? And what is the probability that he violates a court order? Maybe 40%? So the market should move <2%, and evidence about this potential event so far has come in slowly instead of at a single dramatic moment so this <2% drop could have been spread over multiple weeks.
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 govern
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, sho
4
An idea: make LLM create a wiki version of Sci-Hub. Each paper is a separate link. There is one screen of an automatically generated summary, followed by referred and referring papers, all of them hyperlinks (with a preview window), and a short automatically generated explanation how specifically the papers are related.
This might even be legal.
[...]
For me, the last 1/3 is boring (no surprising development anymore, just battles that feel endless). But the descriptions of bullying seem quite realistic (triggering) to me.
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 informa
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
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,
1links 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
2
Seems to me that Obama had the level of charisma that Hillary did not. (Neither do Biden or Harris). Bill Clinton had charisma, too. (So did Bernie.)
Also, imagine that you had a button that would make everyone magically forget about the race and gender for a moment. I think that the people who voted for Obama would still feel the same, but the people who voted for Hillary would need to think hard about why, and probably their only rationalization would be "so that Trump does not win".
I am not an American, so my perception of American elections is probably extremely unrepresentative, but it felt like Obama was about "hope" and "change", while Hillary was about "vote for Her, because she is a woman, so she deserves to be the president".
[...]
I guess there are people (both men and women) who in principle wouldn't vote for a woman leader. But there are also people who would be happy to give a woman a chance. Not sure which group is larger.
But the wannabe woman leader should not make her campaign about her being a woman. That feels like admitting that she has no other interesting qualities. She needs to project the aura of a competent person who just happens to be female.
In my country, I have voted for a woman candidate twice (1, 2), but they never felt like "DEI hires". One didn't have any woke agenda, the other was pro- some woke topics, but she never made them about her. (It was like "this is what I will support if you elect me", not "this is what I am".)
3[anonymous]
I voted for Hillary and wouldn't need to think hard about why: she's a democrat, and I generally prefer democrat policies.
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 fo
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 e
1links 10/28/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-28-2024
- Vincent deVita, chemotherapy pioneer, reflecting on how cancer research has changed (and become more bureaucratic) since the 1960s:
- https://www.nature.com/articles/nrclinonc.2009.51
- https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/article/68/21/8643/541799/A-History-of-Cancer-Chemotherapy
- https://cancerhistoryproject.com/article/vince-devita-on-the-history-of-chemotherapy/
- https://www.yalemedicine.org/podcasts/cancer-answers-the-history-of-chemotherapy-july-6-2008
- https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles
links 9/2/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/09-02-2026
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/absurd-adventure-and-amygdalectomy personal account by a man who had his amygdala cut out for a brain tumor. no longer feels fear or negative emotions; clinical depression disappeared; significantly reduced need for painkillers; trouble recognizing and sympathizing with other people's negative emotions.
- he asks why we don't give everyone amygdalectomies. the obvious answer is that the risk-benefit tradeoff doesn't make sense. brain surgery for an emotiona
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/absurd-adventure-and-amygdalectomy personal account by a man who had his amygdala cut out for a brain tumor. no longer feels fear or negative emotions; clinical depression disappeared; significantly reduced need for painkillers; trouble recognizing and sympathizing with other people's negative emotions.
links 8/20/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-20-2026
- https://www.merck.com/news/merck-and-moderna-announce-phase-3-interpath-001-trial-of-intismeran-autogene-plus-keytruda-met-endpoints-of-recurrence-free-survival-rfs-and-distant-metastasis-free-survival-dmfs-in-patient/
- Intismeran, Moderna's new mRNA cancer vaccine, performed well in phase III metastatic melanoma trials.
- this is a personalized mix of neoantigens, administered alongside Keytruda; it improves recurrence-free survival vs. Keytruda alone.
- https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO-2
- https://www.merck.com/news/merck-and-moderna-announce-phase-3-interpath-001-trial-of-intismeran-autogene-plus-keytruda-met-endpoints-of-recurrence-free-survival-rfs-and-distant-metastasis-free-survival-dmfs-in-patient/
links 8/5/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-05-2026
- https://asteriskmag.com/issues/15/how-diplomats-see-the-world Abi Olvera on diplomats. their primary job is information gathering.
- https://checks-and-balances.ai/ detailed RFP on "checks and balances" projects to prevent concentration/abuse of power in the AI era. mostly concerned about totalitarian mass surveillance & control, & epistemic commons stuff. Looks roughly good to me.
- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vLFh8HP3hyNy9MCwe/returning-to-arc glad to see Paul Christiano returnin
3
This sounds like it would be more likely to be true of a worker-owned co-op than other sorts of firm.
links 5/12/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-12-2026
- https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/pancreatic-cancer-just-met-its-match Ruxandra Tesloianu on daraxonrasib, the new drug that Actually Works on pancreatic cancer.
- it targets RAS, which is an old familiar oncogene, but what i hadn't realized is it's "undruggable" in the traditional sense; no pockets!
- cryo-EM mapping of the protein let them come up with a "molecular glue" drug that attaches RAS to another molecule, cyclophilin A, rendering it inactive. i always wondered if structural biolog
1
Another quick take on the new pancreatic cancer discoveries: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cd6Tu7JCAXbneBSxx/hedonicescalator-s-shortform?commentId=9fGfuHNpfKYooqjFy
links 5/11/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-11-2026
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabenzi African kleptocrats
- https://www.quarter--mile.com/The-Locals-Dont-Know fair enough; living in a place is not at all like being a tourist. locals have a daily routine. they probably aren't exploring all the most fun things to do. when tourists come to my city, i'm usually embarrassed about how little I can tell them about it.
- https://defensesindepth.bio/10-big-projects-for-reducing-bio-x-risk/ these seem fine, and I applaud making a "wish list" in bios
links 5/7/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-07-2026
- https://meaningness.substack.com/p/creating-conduits-visionary-actual David Chapman on how yidam practice actually works. Fascinating, and tempting!
- I do have a sense of caution about what is essentially a polytheistic practice; I'm an atheist who's generally fine with engaging in woo in a spirit of experiment, but I have a vague sense that dealing with gods is probably frowned upon by monotheists for good reason. It might do something to you that you wouldn't want. In the same way that s
3
Scientific breakthroughs of the year is a linkpost of https://frontier2025.netlify.app/ by the author
links 4/2/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/04-02-2026
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-the-concept-of-telescopic
- I basically agree based on personal experience that telescopic altruism is not a thing. Liberals, progressives, and EAs who care about distant strangers don't especially neglect their own family and friends. It's just not a pattern I observe at all.
- It seems like everyone puts themselves and their family/friends first. and to the extent "lefties" even do tend to care more than "righties" about distant strangers, that care
links 3/31/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/sarahbrain/page/03-31-2026
- https://writing.antonleicht.me/p/press-play-to-continue a cogent explanation of "why not Pause AI, given that you are concerned about AI risk?" pretty convincing to me.
- tl;dr: you don't want to support bad policies that don't affect x-risk and/or are unlikely to pass
- https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/delve-into-compliance-theatre/ Patrick McKenzie on Delve. he believes they're probably helping startups fake compliance paperwork. this is illegal and will get a lot of people
links 2/5/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-05-2026
- https://paulgraham.com/mean.html obviously everything Paul Graham said during his tenure at YC was more about what he wanted founders to be like than what they necesssarily were like...but i do think i agree, actually, that mean people fail. at least, I agree with the weaker claim that the most overtly nasty people are usually jobless and socially isolated. successful people may be ruthless, but almost all of them have manners.
- https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-is-a-space-to-think I l
links 12/29/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-29-2025
- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/ AI agents are sending unwelcome "thank you" emails
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike creator of the Go programming language and contributor to Unix. these days very anti-AI
- https://reactormag.com/for-he-can-creep-siobhan-carroll/ story inspired by "For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffrey"
- https://newaesthetics.art/ i agree, we need a new 21st century aesthetic paradigm to rival the Bauhaus's influence over the 20th
2
Oh, that was a funny story!
Also there is a debate on Hacker News, and as usual, the people who don't understand what happened, express the strongest opinions and get most upvotes.
links 8/14/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-14-2025
- https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/08/study-social-media-probably-cant-be-fixed/I normally don't like "oh no social media" commentary (either quit or accept that you're not quitting, I hate hearing about people lamenting their own choices) but this is a neat study design
- https://www.designarena.ai/ compare AI site builders and models for making web/UI design. I'm not enthused about any of em!
- https://personalitymap.io/questions/92bf3c909b67e494271e946bd5a097aa?tab=mostCorrelated eating
links 8/7/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-07-2025
- https://www.experimental-history.com/p/face-it-youre-a-crazy-person career advice from Adam Mastroianni
- https://react.dev/learn react tutorial & documentation
- https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat the classic "Wat"
- https://acoup.blog/2024/12/20/collections-on-bread-and-circuses/
- the Roman "grain dole", the annona, was not really "welfare" exactly, in its original form. Like many premodern cities, Rome had central granaries and fixed grain prices for them, but th
1links 4/4/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/04-04-2025
- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adr3675
- thalamic nuclei are involved in consciousness, active in a task that distinguishes conscious from unconscious visual perception
- https://www.precigenetics.com/ nondestructive image-based epigenetics of single cells. how do they do it??? founded by Parmita Mishra
- https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/methods.html
- individual neurons are polysemantic; not great for interpretability. we need larger interpretable "circuits" o
links 3/24/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/03-24-2025
- https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-to-commit-a-coup Edward Luttwak's thoughts on foreign policy and the CIA's refusal to recruit people who know foreign languages (because people who travel abroad are thought too risky to clear)
- pregnancy affects thyroid hormone levels.
- TSH is typically lower during pregnancy, while T3 and T4 are higher. this means that using non-pregnant reference ranges may miss cases of hypothyroidism relative to "normal" pregnancy levels. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ar
links 11/01/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-01-2024
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neats_and_scruffies a typology of AI researchers
- https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes Andy Matuschak's working notes, mostly about educational technology (but not educational games!)
- https://notes.manjarinarayan.org/ Manjari Narayan's notes, mostly about statistics
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/05/06/ultrasound-addiction-treatment/ ultrasound being used as an addiction treatm
- https://www.interceptfund.com/apply/broad-spectrum-preventatives looking for broad-spectrum viral preventatives
- https://oath.tech/ formal verification FRO, led by experienced formal verification engineer Mike Dodds
- https://ribbonfarm.com/2013/07/10/you-are-not-an-artisan/ extremely depressing Venkatesh Rao essay. I want to have work that makes everybody admire and approve of me! Maybe I can't, or don't want to, do things that are objectively necessary or contribute to society! I still want everybody to like me!
- https://nickpinkston.com/Website/My+Journey interesting guy
- https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/psychiatrists-as-superstitious-pigeons if you look at the RCTs for psychiatric drugs, they mostly look like they have weak and noisy effects. and people often get better for reasons independent of the medication. yet it's hard to shake the anecdotal impression, as a psychiatrist, that some meds help your patients! who are you gonna believe, the studies or your lying eyes?
- I believe my lying eyes. As a patient, I have unmistakable evidence, that would amount to an insanely high p-value, that a med that works is hugely different from a med that doesn't work, or no med. It's not blinded
links 9/9/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/09-09-2026
- https://meaningness.substack.com/p/meta-rationality-ethics-nobility David Chapman on the ethics of meta-rationality in the context of COVID. this is basically, if you have the opportunity to help others, and especially if you're placed in a position of trust and authority, but even if you're not, you should do what you can to step up and try to be useful.
- https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117237322160500501 Terence Tao on how AI-generated math results can be technically legitimate and still be bad for the long-term expansion of mathematical knowledge. We learn from how a result was obtained, not just that it was. Note that Tao is a prominent promoter of AI-for-math and formal verification, so it's especially significant that he's sounding a note of caution now.
- https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-has-solved-one-of-maths-1-million-millennium-prize-problems-20260908/ reasonable initial summary of the news on the Navier-Stokes result
- https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/ OpenAI claims to have solved Navier-Stokes.
- we need to wait for evaluation from mathematicians before we know what to make of this. A Lean certifi
links 9/4/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/09-04-2026
- https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-438-the-right-but-early-club interesting workplace dynamics reflection. it can be counterproductive to speak up about a problem "early" even if you're right, because something else may be a more immediate priority; possibly the people who tend to catch problems "early" should talk to each other and strategize about when to escalate?
- https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/strange-mammals marsupial and monotreme reproduction is quite weird.
- https://blog.spe
2
A more cynical perspective -- suppose that noticing a problem and solving it requires a sequence of five mental steps, let's call them A, B, C, D, E. When the high-status people in the company have already completed A, B, C, D, they will be impressed when you come up with E, because at that moment they are ready to understand it.
If you come up with E (or the entire chain A-B-C-D-E) when the high status people are still stuck at A, you will be perceived as solving a wrong problem... because the right problem to solve at this moment is obviously B. (And if you provide the entire chain, sorry it's just too long, no one is listening.)
links 8/26/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-26-2026
- https://notnottalmud.substack.com/p/i-was-wrong-to-hate-substack-and Dan Frank on why you should write a substack
- https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/are-we-treating-bipolar-ii-disorder the case that we should treat bipolar ii more like depression. IMO, this is true if-and-only-if "hypomania" is not that bad, which the author (a psychiatrist) seems to think (and his clinical experience counts for something, but not everything). If hypomania is truly life-ruining, then it's worth having m
links 8/18/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-18-2026
- https://drcolleensmith.substack.com/p/theres-nothing-optional-about-the I don't feel up to speed on healthcare law in general but this indeed seems bad
- https://soniafpearson.substack.com/p/capitalizing-untethered-ai-agents Tyler Cowen and Sonia Farrell Pearson argue that in an economy of "untethered" AI agents it might be necessary to enforce agents as having a unique identity, and make them hold capital that can be threatened by law, in order to make it possible to penalize the agent it
- https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/09/elite-academia-leadership-hypocrisy/687969/ Tyler Austin Harper on his disillusionment with academia. Black left-wing humanities professor who was sympathetic to affirmative action in principle, but observed it in practice looking like degraded academic standards, mindless tokenism that treated all people of a race alike, absurd exaggeration of the severity of present-day racism in their college town, and conspicuous indifference to economic issues like the high cost of college or the working conditions of colle
2
Sounds correct to me. (I am not religious myself, but I have religious Catholic friends.)
This often leads to the clever "so why don't you just do whatever you want, and repent 5 second before you die", to which the counter-argument is that (1) death often comes unpredictably, and (2) if this is your plan, you will probably be unable to truly repent at the last moment even if you had the time. Repentance is not just "I am sorry that I got caught and now I am awaiting punishment" but "I would regret that I did that, even if there was no punishment" e.g. seeing the act as terminally bad, not just instrumentally bad. But if you see something as terminally bad, how/why would you keep doing it? (It is only a mortal sin if you do it freely and knowingly.) And if you don't see it as terminally bad, why would you believe that your perspective will change 5 minutes before you die?
(I guess that means that you are judged for your utility function rather than for your specific actions?)
Some sins are what rationalists might call "meta", in the sense that they make repentance less likely. For example, if you believe that your sins are so great that even God cannot forgive them. But "less likely" is not the same as impossible; for example a miracle could happen and the experience could make you change your opinion.
links 8/11/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-11-2026
- https://paulgraham.com/cities.html Classic Paul Graham, holds up today.
- https://ribbonfarm.com/dev-log/ Venkatesh Rao's approach to building an archival blog site and "in character" LLM bot, with a log of changes
- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50311/down-by-the-salley-gardens my standard reference for "sometimes a fling is a lovely thing and it doesn't have to be heavier than that"
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy we have many cases where adding labor-saving a
links 8/10/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-10-2026
- https://www.minregret.com/2026/06/27/orthogonality.html Elad Hazan, Helen Qu, Lauren Li case that the orthogonality thesis is false; more collaborative agents should be selected by our training procedures and this should tend to imply more "prosocial" behavior.
- this is a guess, and not an uncommon one. of course we have recently seen an example (the OpenAI/Artifactory/HuggingFace hack) where (spontaneous?) collaboration between AI agents appeared and was quite bad for humans' goals.
- http
- https://www.minregret.com/2026/06/27/orthogonality.html Elad Hazan, Helen Qu, Lauren Li case that the orthogonality thesis is false; more collaborative agents should be selected by our training procedures and this should tend to imply more "prosocial" behavior.
links 8/7/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-07-2026
- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AfoGGrJfuNzofpzWL/models-may-behave-differently-in-graded-episodes-a-tirade nostalgebraist on "eval awareness." everything about this is true and good.
- https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/the-economics-of-putting-germicidal-light-in-every-room/ why can't you just put far-UVC everywhere? well. there's no secret catch. there's no real safety risk. there's no technological hurdle. it's not illegal. it's not unpopular. the barrier is just Marketing.
links 8/6/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-06-2026
- https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/googles-chief-scientist-is-leaving-after-27-yearsto-start-his-own-ai-company-6abad73d Jeff Dean is leaving Google to start an AI company
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.05184 research agenda on renormalization for AI interpretability
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00984 "Symmetries at the origin of hierarchical emergence", a formal concept of emergence
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.16490 "Formalising the intentional stance 1: attributing goals and beliefs to stochastic proce
links 7/28/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/07-28-2026
- https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n14/emily-wilson/an-uncomplicated-man Emily Wilson's negative review of the new Odyssey movie
- https://www.cs.miami.edu/home/burt/learning/csc609.221/goldwasser-micali-rackoff-knoweldge-complexity.pdf original Goldwasser et al paper (1985) defining interactive proof systems
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11366 Reflexion: AI agents "verbally reflect on task feedback signals, then maintain their own reflective text in an episodic memory buffer to induce bette
links 7/24/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/07-24-2026
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Tsimerman I was in college when he was in grad school. Fields Medalist! Pivoting to AI safety!
- papers on statistical mechanics in relation to AI:
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.17858 uses a reproducing kernel Hilbert space! everything old is new again. (haven't read all of it)
- https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.14.031001 How Deep Neural Networks Learn Compositional Data: The Random Hierarchy Problem. in the genre of paper "why do these th
links 4/8/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/04-08-2026
- https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/telescopes-need-good-lenses/ this amounts to "yes, I think I am a better parent than liberals/progressives." I am unconvinced.
- One of his examples is that his kids are in the 99th percentile for height and weight despite not being visibly fat, thus he thinks that other parents are underfeeding their children. This doesn't make sense. Child obesity is in fact a significant problem; on average, US parents probably feed their kids too many calories, not too fe
links 4/6/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/04-06-2026
- https://balioc.tumblr.com/post/768319203871719424/looking-at-the-world-from-a-managers-perspective I like this taxonomy. I'm definitely a Fanatic.
- people's vulnerability to sleep deprivation is a bona fide Trait: there's substantial variability across people, substantial consistency within an individual's sleep-dep-vulnerability over time and across measurement types, and substantial heritability. some people are more messed up by sleep deprivation than others!
links 1/11/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-11-2026
- https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.aaw7243 TRPM7 is involved in mechanosensing
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12032-017-0987-1 TRPM7 is involved in the epithelial-mesenchymal transition in multiple tumor types
links 12/30/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-30-2025
- https://distill.pub/2018/differentiable-parameterizations/ CPPNs make beautiful image parametrizations
- https://towardsdatascience.com/reveling-what-neural-networks-see-and-learn-pytorchrevelio-a218ef5fc61f/ layer activations of image classification neural networks
- https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-explores-new-contracting-approach-advance-public-health-innovation not sure what to make of this
- https://reason.com/2025/12/29/the-trump-america-ai-act-is
links 12/22/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-22-2025
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewan_MacColl the founder of the folk music revival in England in the 1960s. their version of Alan Lomax. married to Peggy Seeger!
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maddy_Prior Maddy Prior is from Blackpool in Lancashire
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancashire basically ground zero for the English ballad tradition. also used to contain Liverpool, which is of course where lots of sailing songs come from or mention.
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/251
links 12/11/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-11-2025
- example of AI report, evaluating preclinical validation of a drug target:
- https://www.macroscience.org/p/to-get-more-effective-drugs-we-need Ruxandra Tesloianu and Jack Scannell make the case for clinical trial reform; I couldn't agree more
- https://astera.org/neuroscientist-doris-tsao-joins-astera-to-lead-its-new-neuroscience-program/ Astera is doing neuro now. consciousness is a focus.
- https://www.averi.org/ Miles Brunda
links 12/9/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-09-2025
- https://www.gleech.org/erect did walking erect lead to human intelligence?
- he doesn't seem to be aware that "behavioral modernity" is looking a lot older than 40,000 years ago
- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48417/high-windows I still can't tell whether he's in favor or against the "long slide"
- https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-new-yorkers-isaac-chotiner-interviews-santa-claus
links 11/24/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-24-2025
- https://writetobrain.com/olfactory induced smells with transcranial ultrasound
- https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.02.673859v1.full.pdf looks like bad news for the "it's the macrophages, stupid" hypothesis; put aged microglia in young brains and they look like young ones, put young microglia in aged brains and they look like old ones (transcriptionally and morphologically.)
- it may be "the NK cells, stupid"? if you deplete NK cells from the cerebellum, cerebellar microgl
links 11/19/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-19-2025
- https://lettersfrombethlehem.substack.com/p/glp-1s-add-satiety-they-dont-suppress personal experience on GLP-1 drugs
- also, wow, having a satiety problem seems awful
- https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/bits-per-sample Dwarkesh Patel explains why reinforcement learning is so compute and data intensive relative to pretraining
- https://stefangolas.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-cloud-labs skeptical take on lab automation
- https://www.renaissancephilanthropy.org/mathbench-towards-evaluating-natural
links 11/3/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-03-2025
- https://derangedphysiology.com/main/required-reading/cardiovascular-intensive-care/Chapter-642/ecmo-circuit-configurations probably only of practical interest if you work on an ICU, but there's some dark humor as well
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_tea originally invented in Taiwan in the 1980s; became popular throughout East Asia before taking off in the US
- https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-bidens-white-house-press-secretary-is-leaving-the-democratic-part
links 10/30/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-30-2025
- https://substrate.com/our-purpose
- Substrate is using x-ray lithography instead of EUV. but i thought XRL was a dead end because it's ionizing radiation that can blur features by damaging the mask or the substrate. last i looked it up, minimum XRL feature size was 30 nm, worse than EUV's state of the art ~16-18 nm gate length for a "3 nm node".
- so what's going on?
- https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/how-to-kill-2-monopolies-with-1-tool Substrate is reporting 12 nm features and 0.2
links 10/22/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-22-2025
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melino%C3%AB Melinoe is the bringer of nightmares, mentioned only in one of the Orphic Hymns. she is the daughter of Zeus and Persephone; her name means quince-colored (aka yellow-green) and she is described as saffron-robed.
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna--lindsey-halligan-here interim US attorney rants to journalist
links 10/17/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-17-2025
- https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-gemma-ai-cancer-therapy-discovery/
- model trained on RNA-seq cell data and different cell types, growth environments, states (cancer vs not), and drug exposures successfully predicted a drug that enhanced antigen presentation, making "cold" cancer cells "hot" enough to be more susceptible to immunotherapy.
- https://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume2/sermon28.html
- "hm, someone thoughtful recommended this sermon, maybe it has advice
links 9/3/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/09-03-2025
- https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/defense-with-bean-of-naval-gazing/ Patrick McKenzie interviews defense guy
- https://andreacoravos.com/ interesting person, lots of biotech industry writing
- https://aella.substack.com/p/birth-control-myths-vs-data Aella survey on birth control side effects
- https://www.reinvent.science/p/the-hollywood-model what would a "Hollywood model for science" look like?
- https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/i-love-the-myth-of-the-good-man-with Naomi Kana
links 8/28/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-28-2025
- https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-the-century-long post-Black Death England imposed incredibly strict rules on laborers to keep the cost of labor down, from maximum wages to forbidding travel and changes of profession. This "prison for servants" depressed the economy for a century.
- https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-to-speedrun-a-new-drug-application Santi Ruiz interviews former Alvea CEO Grigory Khimulya on how they got to clinical trials so fast. First of all, they did ex
links 8/27/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-27-2025
- https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/16/the-inheritors-william-golding-neanderthal-novel-60-years William Golding's daughter on the real-life inspirations for his novel The Inheritors
- man. I love his prose but he is very consistently anti-human in outlook, presumably related to WWII trauma.
- I found the last chapter of The Inheritors gave me more affection for Homo sapiens rather than less. After several hours of living with these gentle but confused Neanderthals, it's incredib
links 8/25/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-25-2025
- what would it take to make "foundry"-like CDMOs for biotech the way they have for the semiconductor industry?
- differentiated manufacturing capacity (better and cheaper than what biotechs can build in-house)
- flexibility for handling new classes of bioproduct
- https://darkcoding.net/software/personal-ai-evals-aug-2025/ a custom-built eval, drawn from one person's actual history of LLM queries
- https://roblh.substack.com/p/surviving-involution one theory of what's going on with the e
links 8/21/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-21-2025
- https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/08/20/winnie-greco-eric-adams-aide-attempted-cash-katie-honan-reporter/ whoops, the Eric Adams team still loves to bribe
- https://tabletop.martinos.org/index.php?title=Main_Page wait you can do a tabletop MRI?
- https://www.mindflash.org/coding/ai/ai-and-the-bus-factor-of-0-1608 another commentary to the effect that if nobody knows the codebase nobody can maintain it. valid. though (like most such posts) it doesn't imply nobody should ever use LLMs to code.
links 8/18/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-18-2025
- blog posts by Naomi Kanakia, who continues to fascinate me; she's a true original.
- https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/if-your-book-has-shallow-lifeless "modern privileged life is meaningless" stories are basically warmed-over Christopher Lasch and there isn't much point in writing them, if you don't add some variation, some new value the reader can get out of the lesson.
- One thing I like about Kanakia is that she focuses on the value literature can provide. Just because it's a subje
- https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/if-your-book-has-shallow-lifeless "modern privileged life is meaningless" stories are basically warmed-over Christopher Lasch and there isn't much point in writing them, if you don't add some variation, some new value the reader can get out of the lesson.
links 8/15/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-15-2025
- https://jsteinhardt.stat.berkeley.edu/blog/beyond-bayesians-and-frequentists classic post about the relationship between Bayesian & frequentist methods (they're not enemies! use the right tool for the job!)
- https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/out-of-thin-air Dean Ball suggests that data centers exchange priority access to the grid for a commitment not to use energy on the highest-demand days of the year, so they can pick up the (usually ample) spare capacity.
- https://tk555.substac
links 8/8/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-08-2025
- https://railway.com/ hosting for web/mobile apps
- https://www.neurology.org/doi/abs/10.1212/WNL.0000000000001404
- where is activity abnormal in disorders of consciousness (like coma)? reduced activity in default mode network locations:
- bilateral medial dorsal nucleus of the thalamus,
- left cingulate,
- posterior cingulate,
- precuneus,
- and middle frontal and medial temporal gyri.
- where is activity abnormal in disorders of consciousness (like coma)? reduced activity in default mode network locations:
links 8/5/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-05-2025
- https://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/35024/1/FINAL%20THESIS%20-%20MULLER.pdf [[history]]
- translation of "The firework book", a 15th century German artillery manual
- recipes for gunpowder -- like medieval cooking recipes they are very schematic
- "The method was found by a master called Niger Bertholdus who was a necromancer and who also handled major alchemy such as the same masters who deal with the big, artful, and courtly matters, with gold, with silver, and with the seven materials, s
links 8/4/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-04-2025
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Analogue
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_wine palm wine is made from the sap of palm trees and is a traditional alcoholic drink in Southeast Asia, India, and Africa. there don't seem to be any exporters in business; you can't get it in the US.
links 6/12/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/06-12-2025
- https://divia.substack.com/p/next-door-playdates-work-really-well Divia Eden on neighbor playdates when you live near friends
- https://claude.ai/share/1babe5d2-353e-405c-8644-33273ebdb8b1 Claude explains late-18th-century French weaponry & tactics
- https://claude.ai/share/7c3fff83-29f2-4639-9035-44cd77347e39 Claude explains reversible computing and why it's theoretically possible (and not a perpetual motion machine)
- https://tennysontbardwell.com/blog/2025/04/30/mechanical-com
links 5/23/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-23-2025
- Convergent Research is hiring https://jobs.lever.co/convergentresearch
- https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/05/no-evidence-of-effects-of-testosterone-on-economic-preferences.html testosterone doesn't appear to affect economic preferences like risk-taking, in a large (n=1000) randomized trial
- https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/07/13/welcome-to-nixonland/ Carlos Bueno on Nixonland
- https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1322/1322-h/1322-h.htm Leaves of Grass
- https://www.poetryfo
links 5/21/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-21-2025
- https://www.hathitrust.org/ books online
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_consumption when people are more interested in the sorts of "worldbuilding" you could put in a database than in stories themselves
- how many people get personalized medicine?
- https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/aug/18/rise-in-dna-tests-used-to-claim-citizenship-of-other-countries-brexit-eu more than 40M people worldwide have gotten a genetic tests
- https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231004-t
1
Huh, never heard of database consumption. It's a cool term because if you read it Victorian, you could also be suffering from (database) consumption!
Yeah I constantly read various wikis for stories or games I like. I'm loremaxxing.
links 5/20/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-20-2025
- psalm 51:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psalm_51 English, Hebrew, Greek
- https://kpshaw.blogspot.com/2015/03/miserere-mei-deus.html Latin
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36Y_ztEW1NE Allegri Miserere
- https://www.understandingai.org/p/i-got-fooled-by-ai-for-science-hypeheres plasma physicist gets disappointing results trying to implement "physics-inspired neural networks" for solving PDEs. the example in the paper works, but a different equation doesn't converge at all to the known closed-fo
links 5/14/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-14-2025
- https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/prior.1.i.html
- https://epoch.ai/data/ai-benchmarking-dashboard?view=table#explore-the-data
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana_Montes Cuban spy
- https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen2.5/
- https://ouraring.com/blog/oura-healthiest-cities/ man, people seem healthy in Scottsdale
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organon catchall term for Aristotle's works on logic
- https://rsc.byu.edu/civil-war-saints/latter-day-saints-civil-war Did Mormons fight i
links 4/22/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/04-22-2025
- https://reason.com/2025/04/21/alito-and-thomas-may-trust-trump-to-follow-a-court-order-but-gorsuch-kavanaugh-and-barrett-seemingly-do-not/ midnight Supreme Court order, 7-2, against Trump sending Garcia to prison in El Salvador without due process
- https://visakanv.substack.com/p/why-frame-studies Visakan Veerasamy's outline for the new media studies project
- https://www.leash.bio/ building a very big new database of molecules and their protein interactions, designed for trainin
links 4/21/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/04-21-2025
- Pope Francis dead:
- Gavin Leech on how he uses & doesn't use LLMs
- https://www.gleech.org/llms
- he's not actually that abstemious compared to me. some differences include that he actually knows regexes fluently so doesn't use em for formatting; and that he doesn't like flattery.
- Mostly I also feel creepy using it as a replacement for directly reading a source or for writing anything I actually care a
6
To clarify, the norms depicted in that story were partly for humor, and partly "I wonder if a society like this could actually exist." The norms are "obvious" from the perspective of the fictional author because they've lived with it all their life and find it hard to imagine a society without such norms. In the comments to that post I proposed much weaker norms (no arbitration, no duels to the death, you can leave a conversation at any time by leaving a "disagreement status") for LW, and noted that I wasn't sure about their value, but thought it would be worth doing an experiment to find out.
BTW, 15 years later, I would answer that a society like that (with very strong norms against unilaterally ignoring a disagreement) probably couldn't exist, at least without more norms/institutions/infrastructure that I didn't talk about. One problem is that some people have a lot more interest from other people talking/disagreeing with them than others, and it's infeasible or too costly to have to individually answer every disagreement. This is made worse by the fact that a lot of critiques can be low quality. It's possible to imagine how the fictional society might deal with this, but I'll just note that these are some problems I didn't address when I wrote the original story.
links 4/1/24: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/04-01-2025
https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/the-prehistoric-psychopath using a nice big dataset of modern hunter-gatherers and prehistoric archaeological sites, what do we find about ancient violence?
- [[Stephen Pinker]] is right that hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers (contemporary and prehistoric) had much higher rates of violent death than moderns, even including the world wars of the 20th century.
- however, hunter-gatherers seem much less violent than subsistence/preindustrial agricul
links 3/28/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/03-28-2025
- https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc5RvEk4ufotM52v5mKHF7iZOh0Ls_cMDLd5TXn7YOVa62VZQ/viewform Anna Gat offers free mentoring calls to women & immigrants
- https://chatgpt.com/share/67e6ae4a-2138-800f-8e33-f1c50857859f Deep Research report says that 19th-20th c metals companies (Rio Tinto, US Steel, Alcoa, Timet) could routinely make double-digit profits.
- https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/alkanes-mars there are alkanes -- big organic molecules -- on Mars. these can be
2
Very exciting! I think the biggest "loophole" here is probably that they used a novel technique for detection, maybe if we used that technique more we would have to update the view that such big molecules are so unlikely to be produced non-biologically.
links 3/27/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/03-27-2025
- https://www.secondperson.dating/p/navigation-by-moonlight
- essentialist? sure. but this seems like an approximately right version of what "feels natural" to me and gets missed by most men I know.
- most self-help revolves around "if you have a problem, here's how to take action to fix it", and there's a frame from which every version of this is missing the point.
- sometimes the thing that is needed is not solving the problem but encouragement & support in the existing situation, rea
- most self-help revolves around "if you have a problem, here's how to take action to fix it", and there's a frame from which every version of this is missing the point.
- essentialist? sure. but this seems like an approximately right version of what "feels natural" to me and gets missed by most men I know.
links 3/25/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/03-25-2025
- low dose aripiprazole papers
- https://www.psychiatrist.com/pcc/four-cases-chronic-pain-improved-dramatically-following/
- 4 cases of chronic pain responding to 2mg/day aripiprazole
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1345/aph.1R387
- torsades de pointes after 5 days on 2.5 mg. (pt had diabetes, hypertension, and stroke history though)
- https://www.psychiatrist.com/pcc/four-cases-chronic-pain-improved-dramatically-following/
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_glycol
- ethylene glycol is antifreeze. many of them stacked together is polyethylene glycol, which is Miralax.
- so why
- ethylene glycol is antifreeze. many of them stacked together is polyethylene glycol, which is Miralax.
links 02/27/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-27-2025
- https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/sentinel-minutes-for-week-82025 blog of Sentinel, a team of forecasters concerned about catastrophic risks; might be a good news digest for straightforward politics/war/etc
- https://eristicstest.com/ everyone's favorite new personality test
- https://benexdict.io/p/empathy-hardware Benedict Hsieh personal essay
- https://www.shinzen.org/resources/articles/ Shinzen Young on meditation
- https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2025/2/17/the-deep-research-problem Op
links 2/25/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-25-2025
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation blue glow from particles moving faster than the speed of light in a medium (like water)
- https://dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/article/view/5824/4684
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muir_Woods_National_Monument Muir Woods, home of the old-growth coast redwoods, was originally preserved by politician William Kent. But when a water company planned to build a dam (which would flood the woods) and threatened to use eminent domain when Ken
2
It seems like many people propose "generalization from their own example" as a model for the entire humanity. And it can be quite annoying when people around you agree on a model that doesn't fit you at all... and when you point it out, they dismiss it by saying that you are in a denial. Because they have examined their own minds deeply, and found out that it was true... yeah, possibly so, but that doesn't necessarily make it true about the others.
* everyone likes whatever popular people around them like -- no I don't
* if we legalize gay sex, everyone will want gay sex and families will fall apart -- no I don't feel tempted at all
* people are only charitable to other people if they expect them to reciprocate -- no I often don't expect that
...probably many other examples like that.
links 1/21/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-21-2025
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurofilament_light_polypeptide a marker of axonal degeneration in Alzheimer's, Huntington's, ALS, MS
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1471-4159.1996.67052013.x study linking levels of NfL to ALS: 1996
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-1331.2012.03777.x study linking levels of NfL to ALS severity/progression: 2012
- https://www.nature.com/articles/312757a0 sequencing the HIV-1 virus -- 1984
links 02/19/2025
- https://hyperphor.com/ammdi/How-to-be-less-agentic Michael Traven
- I don't exactly agree or disagree with this
- https://aok.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/aokcgi/display.cgi?action=st&fn=22&tn=44725&st=10#post11
- very funny! internet personalities as factions in various strategy games
- https://asteriskmag.com/issues/09/automating-math good post by Adam Marblestone on AI-for-math
links 02/14/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-14-2025
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomeronasal_organ
- organ in the nasal septum of many animals that helps them "smell" non-volatile compounds like pheromones
- it's supposed to be "vestigial" in humans, but I've also heard claims that it's still functional! intriguing!
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flehmen_response when animals "sneer" or flare their lips, it's to expose their vomeronasal organ and pick up pheromones.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholecystokinin hormone used in bile
links 2/4/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-04-2025
- https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-025-00269-y/index.htmlmitochondria are thread-shaped not bean-shaped. I truly do not understand these critters.
- things i learned while reading about Venice:
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedetto_Pesaro brutal, successful admiral who held off the Turks for a bit
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasco_da_Gama
- John II, the king, set an objective for his admirals to find a route to India that bypassed the usual middlemen for the spice trade (the Mamluks
links 02/03/25:
- Jasmine Sun on the Tech Right
- https://jasmi.news/p/tech-right
- https://jasmi.news/p/arjun-ramani
- I like this. she's not a theorizer! she's just Some Guy, actually expressing her thoughts on current events. do I agree with everything she says? maybe not.
- But it's normal-ass blogging rather than inhibited silence or sloppy thoughts packaged as a Grand Narrative, and I think that's healthy. we need normal-ass blogging.
- Scott Alexander is a normal-ass blogger who kept up a regular schedule and has a gift for puns and a fairly high appetite for books a
links 01/29/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-29-2025
- https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/01/its-time-to-build-the-peptidome.html link of a piece I've already read by Maxwell Tabarrok about the value of building a dataset of peptides and their sequences, structures, and properties, for training models that can discover peptides that can be used pharmacologically (for instance, as antimicrobials).
- https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.24.634830v1 using modified T-regulatory cells can be turned agains
links 01/27/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-27-2025
- https://asteriskmag.com/issues/09/where-the-wild-things-arent Agnes Callard is strange and unsettling here. I wonder what this is "really" about.
- "Being a person is too hard a job to leave to a single person. We can’t do it on our own, not even as adults. Figuring out how to be a person is a group project, and we have to help each other. But the catch is that we don’t really know what we are doing, so sometimes we end up hurting each other instead. When you are weird, you experien
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 i
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 g
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 Canc
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
- 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.
- https://www.betonit.ai/
1
Well, in context of dating (or OkCupid), I guess the idea is that sex is supposed to happen, sooner or later. And if there is no "lust at first sight", I guess that means swipe left. (I am not sure; I don't use dating apps.)
1
Not sure how representative your guess is of most dating app users. Certainly isn't the case for me.
2
OK, I guess I got some assumption wrong, but please explain to me which one.
* people use dating apps such as OkCupid with the intention of finding a potential sexual partner (as opposed to e.g. trying to find a platonic friend)
* if someone is looking for a potential sexual partner, and finds someone such that the idea of having sex with him feels disgusting, she swipes left or whatever is the UI action for "go away" (as opposed to keeping the contact just in case the feeling might change in future)
1
I should've been clearer, my bad.
1. For most dating app users, I'm genuinely uncertain how representative both assumptions are, and I'd be curious to see more data regarding both (Aella's surveys maybe?)
2. For me, neither assumption holds; I suspect this makes me un-representative of most users:
1. I decouple dating from sex, and do use these apps to find platonic acquaintances
2. I swipe right mostly if I predict the person is interesting to meet up with, and swipe left on the majority of "lust at first sight" profiles
2
Is that officially supported by the apps? Like, is there a selection like: "I am looking for... someone to marry / a one-night stand / a platonic friend"? Do you do something specific to indicate that platonic friends are what you are looking for?
I am asking because if there is such option, then probably many people use it that way. If not, then maybe your approach is unusual. (But maybe not too unusual, because otherwise people would not respond to you, or would be disappointed after meeting you?)
3
Depends on the app. Tinder for instance has a section called "What are you looking for?" that everyone else can see, whose selectable options include "New friends", "Still figuring it out", "Short-term fun", "Long-term partner", and a mix of the last two. People in my area use a pretty even mix of these, and their signaling is usually honest.
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/wi
4
This is what seems to generally happen in post-communist countries, the difference is probably only in degree.
You have a secret police, which is an organization that exists for decades and is full of amoral people cooperating to keep a rule over the country. Then the regime is over, and...
Do you kill those people? Nope.
Do you at least put them on some kind of blacklist, saying "these people should never be allowed to get into any position of power"? Aaah... there were some feeble attempts, but generally no.
Well, guess what happens next. Many of those people get into the new positions of power (it's not like their skills are useless now, so they can e.g. join the non-secret police), and they know they have a network of former colleagues they can trust, who are also seeking positions of power. Together they can take over some institutions, the only question is which ones and how completely.
In worst case, even large parts of the old institutions remain, only rebranded.
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 headline
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 le
3
It's been a while since I've read Plato's Republic, but isn't the Myth of Er just a abstraction of the way people make decision based on (perceived) justice and injustice in their everyday life? Just in the same way that Socrates says it is easier to read large print than small print, so he scales up justice from an individual to the titular Kallipolis, so too the day to day determinism of choices motivated by what we consider is 'fair' or 'just' is easier seen if multiplied over endless cycles of lives, than days and nights.
Is it possible that Plato was saying that day to day we experience this homeostatic mechanism? (if you are rational enough to observe the patterns of how your choices affect your personal circumstances?).
An example from the Republic itself: if I remember correctly the entire dialogue starts because Socrates is in effect kidnapped after the end of a festival because his interlocutors find him so darn entertaining. This would appear to be unjust - but not unexpected because he is Socrates which he has this reputation for being engaging and wise even if it is not the 'right' or 'just' way to treat him. How then should he behave in future, knowing that this is the potential cost of his social behavior? And the Myth of Er says that Odysseus kept to himself, sought neither virtue nor tyranny. That's probably the wrong reading. It's been a while since I've read it.
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 c
2
It would have been nice to read A Journal of the Plague Year during covid.
links 11/07/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-07-2024
- on Donna Karan
- https://du42p.r.a.d.sendibm1.com/mk/mr/sh/1f8JAEjGcfF85pENVqcuM6hh5D/tiVMw3KFimvC?fbclid=IwY2xjawGZnpRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHdHszEMzS3x1Xda2tTh60KMighJEJKDe30rsduQmFydSSyfTpK8mwG50vg_aem_IjjUQWdiwZf2AdgdLo9azA opinion on how hormonal contraception should be done differently -- I'm intrigued but I haven't yet checked these claims out
- http://esr.ibib
links 10/30/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-30-2024
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10136898/ FRET is a biosensor modality.
- "FRET is a non-radiative transfer of energy from an excited donor fluorophore molecule to a nearby acceptor fluorophore molecule...When the biomolecule of interest is present, it can cause a change in the distance between the donor and acceptor, leading to a change in the efficiency of FRET and a corresponding change in the fluorescence intensity of the acceptor. This change in fluorescence can be u
links 10/29/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-29-2024
- https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/oct/29/acute-psychosis-inner-voices-avatar-therapy-psychiatry a therapist acting out the voices in your head might be an effective treatment for psychosis
- https://www.futurehouse.org/research-announcements/wikicrow SOTA (?) paper summarization from FutureHouse
links 10/23/24:
https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-23-2024
- https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2024/10/21/i-got-dysentery-so-you-dont-have-to/ personal experience at a human challenge trial, by the excellent Georgia Ray
- https://catherineshannon.substack.com/p/the-male-mind-cannot-comprehend-the
- I...guess this isn't wrong, but it's a kind of Take I've never been able to relate to myself. Maybe it's because I found Legit True Love at age 22, but I've never had that feeling of "oh no the men around me are too weak-willed" (not in my neck of the w
links 8/28/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-28-2026
- https://neurobiology.substack.com/p/they-laughed-at-columbus-they-laughed Andy McKenzie on the history of anaesthesia being considered quackery or immoral
- https://www.better-half.ai/ developing an AI app that trains social skills
- https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Projects_that_might_help_accelerate_strong_reprogenetics.html Tsvi Benson-Tilsen roadmapping paths to strong reprogenetics. this is high quality engagement with the science.
- https://danluu.com/benchpocalypse/ you can use RL an
links 8/25/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-25-2026
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheria the land of Phaeacia in the Odyssey probably was supposed to be the island of Corfu, off the west coast of Greece
- https://michaelnotebook.com/cupcake/ Michael Nielsen thinks about when self-blame works and doesn't work
- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SNAKJuN8FdoEaWeFC/in-search-of-natural-features Dmitry Vaintrob looks at what feature directions (in the residual stream) are "denoised" by an LLM (aka amplified if above a threshold and damped if below
2
I imagine it happens like this:
"Capitalism is bad because it makes people poor and exploited!"
"Actually, capitalism in long term produces a lot of wealth."
"But the wealth isn't distributed equally!"
"It is not, but even the poor are getting more rich on the absolute scale."
"Getting more rich on the absolute scale is not the only thing that matters."
...which by the game of telephone evolves into...
"Getting more rich on the absolute scale does not matter at all."
But of course it does not help that these days "social justice" is typically done by trust fund kids who have not experienced economic problems one day in their lives... otherwise they would have noticed the slip to the absurd.
[...]
I think it is completely unfair, because it talks about the Alpha School, then suddenly switches to a different organization called Unbound Academy which is fully online, and even if the system is related, it does not use many incentives that Alpha School uses (for example the possibility to exchange tokens gained by doing exercises for sweets or toys in the school cafeteria), plus most of us know that fully online education typically fails except for the few most motivated kids... and therefore the conclusion is that Alpha School is a scam or something.
Shortly: a different organization, using a different methodology... proves that the original organization sucks.
[...]
The reason for firing him is silly. If you provide a fair summary of someone's writing with a big hyperlink to the article you are summarizing, putting the exact words in quote marks does not provide much added value in my opinion. I would prefer to read a paraphrase with a link to the (non-paywalled) original, than a few exactly quoted half-sentences without the hyperlink (which seems to be the norm for many journalists) because the latter is more likely taken out of context.
Calling someone plagiarist for providing a hyperlink to the original but not putting the few words in the quote marks
links 8/24/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-24-2026
- https://ameliorate.app/ collaborative discussion tool. i find it maybe a little too feature-heavy?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot wild if true
- https://roblh.substack.com/p/the-new-artillery-shell-factory-is Rob L'Heureux on how a new artillery shell factory failed: they put in a bunch of new automated lines all at once without testing the machines bit by bit to see if they worked on the metal in question. production went to zero; worker safety was a nightmare. the mandate t
6
I don't understand your comment. If you want to use your property right to build something that'll hurt a lot of people (like a nuke or an AI), society can override your property right, and that's ok.
1
of course, but that is not the concern given in the interview.
"In this case, it’s: we’re going to build a data center. And they’re like, oh, so what’s it going to be? It’s just going to be this drone of a building that makes an odd sound all the time and sucks up all the electricity and could poison my water. Okay, what’s the trade-off? The buildout of an industry that everyone’s telling me — including the CEOs — is going to come for my job. So what is the upside? And you’re like, well, you can ask meaningless questions and queries to your ChatGPT. And people are like: I don’t want that, and it’s not worth it."
2
Sounds right to me. People are against AI (for whatever reason) and are locally resisting. The more of this, the better. If this happens everywhere and AI becomes as politically toxic as nuclear power in its time, I'll celebrate.
0
* the building is loud
* and it overuses a communal resource (electricity)
* and it pollutes the waters
* and it will destroy my livelihood
* and it offers nothing in return.
the quote seems very reasonable. how would you prefer these objections be stated? the first three are appropriate reasons to oppose a building project. the fourth is marginal, but with a bit of charity we can see it gesturing at something real.
is your objection just the inclusion of the fifth? i agree it carries an odd implication -- that if gpt was more popular, there would be no objection -- that this decision is made by status rather than law.
6
if the building were actually loud, raised electricity prices or caused electricity shortages, or polluted water, that would be a legitimate complaint, but those things are not true.
5
For example, if Alice has a house in which she and her children sleep, it is not Bob's place to put up giant lights and noise-making equipment next door, because this would interfere with Alice's and her family's use of their property. Even if Bob owns the land next door, Bob's right to use that land for anything he chooses end at the property line. The rules around effects of Bob's actions that extend into Alice's property, or into public space — sound, light, smoke, runoff, road traffic & hazards, etc. — are a legitimate subject of law and regulation, in which Alice's and her family's rights are significant.
"I don't like Bob's datacenter next door because it does creepy AI stuff out in the economy" is a very different objection from "I don't like Bob's datacenter next door because it's loud and brightly lit, which disrupts my kids' sleep, which makes my kids sick, mean, and stupid."
2
Yes this. I'm not a legal expert but I think the legal system has figured out better boundaries about what's "mine" and "yours" (including legit nuisances like what you described) than the naive rhetoric in the article, which boils down to "I don't like it, so why should I allow it?"
3
I think this is really poorly phrased, and could reasonably be read as tone-deaf and outright contemptuous.
2
that's intentional. (It's of course valid for you not to like it, but I was in fact questioning the need for bystanders to like deals like data center construction. "tone deaf" and "contemptuous" are exactly what it would sound like if someone were making this point.)
1
I think this kind of thing would've been more appropriate in the 2000s or so, when the issue at stake was somewhat less that the powerful people are just going to shove their preferences down everyone's throat, norms be damned, and there was still more civility going on.
2
Externalities that other people produce are my business.