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- 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 chemical reaction.
- We're getting closer to designing new proteins to solve particular (chemical reaction) problems.
- https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-world-of-tomorrow/ excellent Virginia Postrel article on progress aesthetics and why we have to go beyond nostalgia for the retro-future.
- https://minjunes.ai/posts/sleep/index.html how could we mimic the effects of the "short sleeper gene" so that everyone could get by on less sleep?
- https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/defrauding-government-jetson-leder-luis/ Patrick McKenzie and Jetson Leder-Luis on defrauding the government.
- the optimal amount of fraud is not zero; anti-fraud enforcement trades off against ease of use and we (as a nation) generally don't want to make it super hard to get government benefits
- nonetheless benefits fraud does indeed happen. kind of a lot. "let's bill Medicare for stuff we don't do" or "let's take unemployment insurance for fake SSNs" or "let's take PPP funds for anything and everything, they literally said that we wouldn't have to pay back the "loan""
- the US government is much more upset about any amount of money going to terrorists or foreign enemies than it is about larger amounts of money going to ordinary crooks or just people who are ineligible for the benefits in question. we almost have two processes for these types of "fraud"?
- Jetson thinks government fraud-detection agencies are underfunded.
- https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/fraud-choice-patrick-mckenzie/ Patrick McKenzie on fraud
- most fraud prevention is managed by the financial sector, which is generally a good thing (far less expensive than court cases)
- though it does often lead to the industry not really caring whether you are a fraudster or a fraud victim. either way you're a risk, which the bank doesn't like.
- "one reason to buy services from the financial industry and not from the government is that the financial industry finds the statement “stealing from businesses is wrong” to be straightforwardly uncontroversial. A business owner would need to put some thought into whether they trust your local police department or district attorney to have the same belief. I apologize to non-American readers of this piece who believe I am spouting insanity. It has been an interesting few years in the United States."
- I am an American and this sounds kind of Big If True to me too.
- the reason firms put up annoying hurdles for their customers is often to screen for fraudsters. I already knew this, but somehow i did not realize that when they ask you for a phone call, they are not doing this because they hate you for being shy/neurodivergent, that too is a way to screen out scammers using fake identities.
- most fraud prevention is managed by the financial sector, which is generally a good thing (far less expensive than court cases)
- https://chrislakin.blog/p/bounty-your-bottleneck Chris Lakin claims he can completely solve (psychological) insecurity through coaching. He's very young and new at this, but the pay-for-results model is unusually client-friendly.
- https://screwworm.org/ these people want to use gene drives to eradicate screwworm, a parasite that infects animals in South America.
- https://christopherrufo.com/p/counterrevolution-blueprint Chris Rufo is a troll on Twitter, but this is a pretty sober/earnest proposal for how all affirmative action, racial quotas, etc can be eliminated from the Federal Government. I am not qualified to opine on whether this is feasible or whether it will have harmful unintended consequences.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adragon_De_Mello example of a "child prodigy" who was pushed into it by his emotionally abusive father and didn't like it at all
- https://parthchopra.substack.com/p/what-i-learned-working-at-a-high somewhere hidden behind the business-speak of this article, there is clearly an actual story about some Shit That Went Wrong. but unfortunately he is likely not free to disclose it and I am not familiar enough with this company to know what it was.
- https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.16.24307494v1.full.pdf this is the OpenWater tFUS study on depression. Not sham-controlled, things like this fail to replicate all the time, but they do register an effect.
https://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/heilmeier-catechism good advice for how to write proposals
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