sarahconstantin's Shortform

sarahconstantin

- 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 evidence, of course, but it's unlikely to be placebo, because the placebo effect should have been just as strong for the meds that didn't work. I know what autosuggestion can do, and it's not nothing, but psychopharmacology is much much stronger.
  - the natural conclusion is that psychiatric categories are loose and don't map exactly to who benefits from what medication. Some people with "depression" will respond strongly to a given med, some won't, and it averages out to look like the med has weak or no effect on "depression".
- historical inaccuracies in the HBO Chernobyl show:
  - https://medium.com/@maturin_1813/annotated-script-of-episode-five-vichnaya-pamyat-part-1-3f2d864b0fbe extremely in-depth commentary on the historical accuracy of an episode of BBC Chernobyl
  - https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-hbos-chernobyl-got-right-and-what-it-got-terribly-wrong Masha Gessen on HBO Chernobyl: the show manufactured heroes and villains, painting a misleading view of how late Soviet society actually worked. Most people went along with the repressive state, not because they were literally threatened to be shot on the spot, but because of more indirect social pressure or threat of losing their jobs.
  - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/06/27/how-hbo-got-it-wrong-on-chernobyl/ the HBO Chernobyl show exaggerated the effects of radiation poisoning. The true death toll was 59.
  - https://www.reddit.com/r/chernobyl/comments/oldgu0/list_of_major_inaccuracies/ commentary on inaccuracies in HBO Chernobyl show
- https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/culture-becomes-a-dark-forest Eric Hoel comments on the negative second-order effects of the Navier-Stokes result -- if AI labs spend millions of dollars to scoop researchers upon rumors of a result, nobody will be able to talk about their work in public.
- https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/no-doing-no-learning.html Alex Tabarrok on the cost of preventing new industries from existing

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!

AIs will solve the status scarcity by generating virtual admirers for each of us. Sycophancy is just the first step.

the natural conclusion is that psychiatric categories are loose and don't map exactly to who benefits from what medication. Some people with "depression" will respond strongly to a given med, some won't, and it averages out to look like the med ... (read more)

sarahconstantin's Shortform

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sarahconstantin's Shortform

8