sarahconstantin's Shortform

sarahconstantin

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

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

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 s... (read more)

sarahconstantin's Shortform

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sarahconstantin's Shortform

8