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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin20

links 1/15/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-15-2025

 

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin20

possibly-intrusive question: are you Russian? 

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin20

links 1/13/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-13-2025

  • https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-skyscrapers-became-glass-boxes
    • plain glass box skyscrapers were, in fact, more cost-effective for developers. it's not all about architectural tastes. architects in real life are very far from all-powerful.
      • in fact, I really think people should stop writing books/movies/etc about auteur architects; it only encourages more young people to go into architecture and become unemployed. I'm looking at you, Francis Ford Coppola
  • https://www.betonit.ai/p/the-typical-man-disgusts-the-typical
    • pointing in the right direction, but overstated/inflammatory. women don't go around being "disgusted" by every man they interact with socially.
      • rather, most women find the idea of having sex with a randomly selected unfamiliar man disgusting, even if there's nothing particularly the matter with him. typical straight women are cautious/selective about sex and fairly slow to warm up sexually to new people. not much "lust at first sight."
      • but yeah, getting rejected when you ask women out does not in fact mean you are inadequate or unattractive! getting rejections in dating is normal, just like every author gets rejected manuscripts and every job applicant gets rejected from jobs. the average man gets a lot of "no"s and at least one "yes", and eventually marries a "yes."
      • also i share Bryan Caplan's view that women shouldn't be offended by being asked out by someone they aren't interested in. sure, persistent harassment can be a problem, but a simple question isn't.
  • https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/principles Nabeel Qureshi
    • I agree with most of this, but "you don't need much sleep" is very individual. some of us very much need plenty of sleep and our lives improve dramatically when we face that fact.
  • things I googled while reading about Venice
  •  
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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin20

links 1/10/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-10-2025

 

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The AI Timelines Scam
sarahconstantin569

in retrospect, 6 years later:

wow, I was way too bearish about the "mundane" economic/practical impact of AI.

 "AI boosters", whatever their incentives, were straightforwardly directionally correct in 2019 that AI was drastically "underrated" and had tons of room to grow. Maybe "AGI" was the wrong way of describing it. Certainly, some people seem to be in an awful hurry to round down human capacities for thought to things machines can already do, and they make bad arguments along the way. But at the crudest level, yeah, "AI is more important than you think, let me use whatever hyperbolic words will get that into your thick noggin" was correct in 2019.

also the public figures I named can no longer be characterized as only "saying true things." Polarization is a hell of a drug. 

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin20

links 1/8/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-08-2025

 

  • https://neuromatch.io/ company courses & networking opportunities in fields like neuroscience, climate science, AI, etc; matching collaborators
  • https://birdflurisk.com/ H5N1 risk dashboard
  • https://www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/solving-intelligence-requires-new-research-and-funding-models/ the case for big funding of brain mapping & modeling, by David A. Markowitz
    • "The recent mapping of an entire adult fruit fly brain—a watershed achievement that made headlines worldwide—offers a glimpse of what’s possible. But this breakthrough almost didn’t happen. It required the serendipitous alignment of support from three non-traditional funders: Scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus imaged the complete fly brain; the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity drove the development of tools for scalable neural-circuit mapping through its MICrONS program; and the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative provided sustained support for data analysis."
    • it might cost $1B to fully map & model the brain. ARPA-style and FRO-style research orgs are essential.
  • https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.02.13.580186v4.full  if you just use neural nets to model the output of C. elegans' 302 neurons, bigger networks are better.
    • continuous-time RNNs scale the best -- even better than transformers.
  • https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.22.614271v2.full
    • optogenetically perturb each neuron in C. elegans and see what happens to neural output in all 302 neurons
    • fit this as a simple multivariate dynamical system -- each neuron's output at time t is a linear function of all the neurons' output at time t-1, plus a linear function of the neurons' history of optogenetic stimulation, plus error.
    • compare to a simpler, connectome-constrained model, where each neuron's output is only a function of its presynaptic input neurons (and direct optogenetic stimulation). this is actually a good approximation!
      • in fact, it's better than a fully-connected model, OR a "shuffled-connectome" model based on a made-up C. elegans connectome with similar topological properties to the real one. the true connectome matters.
      • if you train a connectome model without one neuron, it predicts something about what activity "should" be there. correlation at 0.30 with the real one, much higher than a "fake" connectome model's correlation with reality.
      •  
    • model weights don't reflect synapse counts, though. "multi-hop" trajectories have significant influence on correlations (i.e. neuron A and neuron B's activity may still be highly correlated even if A and B are more than one step away on the "connectome graph").
    • it would be shocking if connectomes didn't matter, so in a sense this is not a surprising set of results; but this is a first example of collecting data with the optogenetic perturbation method, which is a major step towards true neural simulations.
      • a simulation should be able to predict what every neuron would do under various circumstances.
        • gathering data on the worms in varying behavioral/environmental contexts could approximate this, but manipulating each neuron one at a time gives a much more thorough picture of the input-output relationships of the nervous system.
  • https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.06578
    • roadmap document for full reverse-engineering simulation of the C. elegans nervous system, by Adam Marblestone and many others
      • includes perturbation!
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asha Zoroastrian concept of "truth" or "right"
  • https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/outside-view-yatharth/ Patrick McKenzie interviewed by Yatharth
  • https://mad.science.blog/2020/07/07/desummation/ theory that NMDA receptor antagonists' hallucinogenic and "psychotomimetic" effects come from inhibition of memory.
    • NMDA receptors (for glutamate) are important in long-term potentiation, in which "a neuron becomes highly sensitive to excitatory transmission for days or weeks" following recurrent stimulation.
      • long-term potentiation is important in associative memory. it "strengthens" a neural connection that has been sufficiently strongly/repeatedly made.
      • NMDAr inhibitor drugs reduce this effect.
      • so does schizophrenia
    • Neurons have "summation" effects.
      • "spatial summation" -- if two neurons stimulate a third, the effect is stronger than if only one did.
      • "temporal summation" -- repeated stimulation has a stronger effect than a one-off.
      • it is a form of coincidence detection; multiple "simultaneous" events are treated as a bigger deal, less likely to be flukes or errors.
      • the NMDAr inhibitor dexmethorphan inhibits this effect.
      • so does schizophrenia.
        • normal subjects have "prepulse inhibition", aka the reaction to a loud startling noise is less intense if preceded by a small pulse sound.
        • this is a form of temporal summation; signals generated by the prepulse accumulate and prepare the brain for further sound, preventing the startle response.
        • schizophrenics don't have this; they get startled both ways, indicating (?) that the prepulse sound doesn't "accumulate" properly.
      • "desummation" or "cognitive atomization" is like a failure to anticipate; new stimuli are fresh, not expected.
        • this coincides with the subjective effects of NMDAr inhibitors: at low doses there is "increasing perceptual acuity for things usually unnoticed" and at high doses there is "inability to notice a lot of previously learned meaning", "inability to recognize familiar stimuli", added "noise", and loss of "definition and meaning."
          • visual agnosias are a common reported ketamine effect
    • NMDAr inhibition causes amnesia effects in patients
      • patients on low-dose ketamine do not retain things they learned while on the drug
      • "PsychonautWiki lists ‘memory suppression’ as a distinct effect from amnesia as a side effect of NMDAr antagonists. In the description of this effect it notes that short-term memory is suppressed much earlier than long-term memory. At very high doses, the Wiki suggests that one may even forget who they are, where they live, or even a failure to remember what humans are"
      • impaired short-term memory relates to sensations of unfamiliarity and dissociation (if you can't remember stuff, you don't know what it is)
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereogram
    • excellent explanation of how "magic eye" pictures work; i can now see them for the first time in my life!
  • https://smoothbrains.net/posts/2023-08-01-ketamine.html personal experience with ketamine
    • effects:
      • visual agnosias, "2D vision", loss of "egocentric coordinates" in spatial perception, "expanded" awareness
      • music perception is different -- complex music is confusing, repetitive drones are hypnotic
      • tactile feelings are pleasurable, muscle tension is strongly reduced
      • aversions are dampened, in particular by making them slower -- from the usual "100 ms" to "500 ms".
  • celebrity cases of ketamine deaths:
  • https://www.quantamagazine.org/elliptic-curve-murmurations-found-with-ai-take-flight-20240305/ wavy "murmurations" found in elliptic curves with machine-learning algorithms
  • https://www.quantamagazine.org/behold-modular-forms-the-fifth-fundamental-operation-of-math-20230921/ modular forms!
  • https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/regulators-almost-killed-biotech
    • "from the very first announcement of successes in cloning DNA (the foundational technology of recombinant insulin) in 1973, the first reaction of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Institute of Medicine was to try to stop research into it and, simultaneously, to prevent any patenting of it. The National Institute of Health followed shortly thereafter with their own restrictions, as did a number of cities, including Cambridge and Berkeley, the towns where the universities most likely to do the research were located"
    • Genentech, a tiny garage startup, was able to escape those restrictions.
  • https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/whats-alprazolams-deal  alprazolam (Xanax) is reputed to have a fast onset and fast diminution of its anti-anxiety effect, compared to lorazepam (Ativan), making it more abusable and less useful for anxiety disorders. but why? all the theories seem wrong!
    • also, diazepam (Valium) has exactly the same fast onset/fast diminution, but doctors don't seem to worry about it the same way!
    • it looks like the difference isn't about half-life, elimination, or the blood-brain barrier, but something about ligand-receptor binding.
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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin70

links 1/7/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-07-2025

 

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin40

links 1/6/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-06-2025

 

  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Fiennes descended from Norman nobility
  • https://meltingasphalt.com/wealth-the-toxic-byproduct/ nice essay on how (money) earnings generally represent your benefit to others while consumption spending is a cost to others
  • https://mises.org/mises-daily/defending-miser not only is the "miser" who invests productively benefiting others, but so is the "hoarder" who takes money out of circulation to put under a mattress -- hoarders lower prices.
    • ehhh, shouldn't lowering prices and raising prices be seen as equally neutral in real terms?
  • https://timmermanreport.com/2025/01/ai-needs-natural-language-to-give-structure-to-biology/ I'm sorry, you just named three discoveries in the latest table of contents of Science or Nature, and complained that biological "foundation models" can't come up with them, and that instead you need LLMs? what are you even thinking???
    • you are in a hurry to replace human thought at the highest levels, when there's a tremendous amount left to be done in developing AIs to replace tedious grunt work.
    • why??? why do you want to put the PI out of a job? There aren't that many PIs. why are you starting here? it's so backwards.
    • what they're actually doing at FutureHouse is pretty cool: "write an accurate and cited Wikipedia-style article for nearly every protein-coding gene in the human genome." I think accelerating lit review is a useful function of LLMs. there's a lot of information out there! using automation to synthesize it is a win!
    • but my god, man, why are you framing this as "I really want the machine to do all the thinking for me" rather than "I want everyone to have a research assistant in their pocket so they can more efficiently explore hypotheses with the context of the whole scientific literature." do you not like thinking and learning? do you wish you could quit or something???
  • https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections
    • "We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies." Ok, this is a real prediction (that we can grade him on later) and it certainly seems technologically possible today -- it remains to be seen whether it'll be organizationally possible, useful in the first contexts where it's used, or whether it'll cause catastrophic errors.
      • if i had to guess, i think commercial AI agents will be launched by OpenAI, and their economic impact will be ambiguous, by end of 2025.
  • https://parahumans.wordpress.com/ trying to read this, again, for the fourth? time.
    • not sure why I keep bouncing off this. it's recommended by friends, I'm excited by the promise of interesting conceptual things being done with the superhero-genre system, but my god there are many chapters of "boring"-to-me stuff (action scenes, description of city politics & class dynamics that doesn't feel true to life, etc)
  • ketamine overdose risks:
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouJrOQfkeok  how a Kite cell therapy (autologous) is manufactured (they ship your blood sample to a facility, and process/expand your cells in 5 days).
  • https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-jBoSEVlryiX1IaSzV4vKuihDfm_LgXUznvSpl1T1kg/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.vnjrknmu0cff
    • suicide note of a DeepMind researcher who took ketamine for depression, developed psychosis and then very severe depression unlike anything he'd experienced before; "the emergency alarm continues to strike blind panic and fear into my mind every second" for two years with no change.
  • https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/01/simple-points-on-immigration.html Tyler Cowen remains pro-high-skilled immigration.
  • https://impact-ops.notion.site/11c061ba6c7880b38073e8ddfb4f1db0?v=11c061ba6c788137aa62000c8aa8918b  an instruction manual for setting up a nonprofit.
    • having started a nonprofit myself and screwed some of this up, i want to endorse taking a lot of care with legal compliance and administrative processes.
      • an "ordinary" middle-class person, in their personal life, usually doesn't have to worry too much about accidentally breaking laws. a founder (of a nonprofit or small business) can ABSOLUTELY do illegal stuff by accident and get burned for it.
      • it's also very easy to accidentally be the kind of terrible boss you hear horror stories about...just screw up payroll!

  • https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53922-x 

    • neuroblastoma and embryonic kidney cell lines exhibit the "massed-spaced" effect discovered in neurons by Hermann Ebbinghaus where a repeated spaced stimulus has a stronger response than a "massed" (clumped) stimulus, almost as though "learning" the difference between an event that recurs and a (potentially erroneous) one-off.
      • in non-neural cells, instead of looking at neuron firing we're looking at a particular cell signaling pathway engineered to carry a luciferase gene that glows when the CRE gene is transcribed.
      • The chemical TPA directly activates protein kinase C (PKC)
      • the chemical forskolin activated protein kinase A (PKA) via raising cAMP levels, which activate PKA
      • PKA and PKC both phosphorylate the transcription factor protein CREB1
      • CREB1 causes lots of genes, including our reported gene CRE, to be transcribed more
      • this pathway was selected to be similar to the way serotonin activates a signaling cascade during memory via PKA and PKC
    • people are sharing around popular articles claiming that this proves kidney cells have memory, but it really doesn't.
    • it proves that the mechanisms of neuronal memory have shared properties with cell signaling mechanisms present throughout the body, which is what you'd expect; neurons necessarily evolved as a variation on some other kind of cell.
    • now, understanding exactly how this works is interesting! but no, it doesn't mean you think with your kidneys.

     

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin110

links 1/3/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-03-2025

 

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin50

links 1/2/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-02-2025

  • https://reason.com/2024/11/14/abolish-the-small-business-administration/ the case for abolishing the Small Business Administration, which subsidizes small businesses
  • https://www.mercatus.org/doge  the Mercatus center's wishlist for DOGE on budget cuts and deregulation
    • sadly, these are not policies! they are editorials making arguments for why smaller government would be a good idea, and why certain tactics are worth consideration (like sunset provisions). zero object-level deregulation policy work (i.e. identifying which regulations to cut and who can cut them) has been done here. I am beginning to see why people complain about think tanks not actually dOiNg PoLicY.
  • https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-are-vortex-crystals-zhsBX93zTdOxMh5sg3nWAw#3  Perplexity explains superfluids; they are frictionless, have extremely high thermal conductivity, and exhibit "quantized vortices", where the speed of the spinning fluid is an integer multiple of a constant and the vortex can keep spinning literally forever. Liquid helium is a superfluid. This has been known since 1937!
  • https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adn5694  a passively radiative aerogel that reflects >100% of solar radiation through fluorescence and phosphorescence
  • https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26050-z  0.5% of European GDP reduced by heat waves in the 21st century
  • https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-orleans-killed-mass-casualty-bourbon-street-car-crowd-rcna185914 "Texas man kills 14 on New Orleans' Bourbon Street after driving truck with ISIS flag through crowd." Police believe he did not act alone.
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shotgun_cartridge A shotgun cartridge is filled with tiny little metal balls called shot, or a single projectile called a slug. Smaller shot goes farther than bigger shot, and slugs go farther still.
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_You_Ever_Forgive_Me movie (I haven't seen it but saw it recommended) about a woman who forged letters from dead celebrities
  • https://www.sympatheticopposition.com/p/risk-averse-women-rarely-birth-royalty Matthew's genealogy of Jesus notes four Biblical women -- Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba -- who took sexual risks to secure their children's legacy. I love this piece and think we talk too little about the fact that women take calculated risks sexually. To live a good life, you have to risk intimacy and decide when to bet that it won't put you in danger or ruin your future. That's true in both ancient societies and today, though of course the risk landscape is very different.
  • https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/01/the_stranger.html I like this old Bryan Caplan post on what we owe strangers. Common sense ethics says we should not aggress upon strangers but we don't usually owe them much positive help; yet this is a radical and uncommon position in politics.
  • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16075 a case for formal verification + AI hybrid systems in mathematics, and a roadmap for future progress, by leading AI-for-math researchers Kaiyu Yang, Gabriel Poesia, Jingxuan He, Wenda Li, Kristin Lauter, Swarat Chaudhuri, and Dawn Song. Excellent, detailed, this is the survey paper to reference for the next while!
  • https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/01/africa-facts-of-the-day.html "Africa is now experiencing more conflicts than at any point since at least 1946". Prediction: more immigration from African countries.
  • what are the current military drones models?
  • https://www.construction-physics.com/p/morris-chang-and-the-origins-of-tsmc TSMC founder Morris Chang's autobiography; lots of false starts along the way. TSMC's big innovation was being the world's first foundry. They did not start with the latest and best equipment; but they were the first to offer semiconductor manufacturing as a service, and Asian semi manufacturers were already more reliable at quality than US ones (going back to the 60's! wonder what's up with that.)
  • https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/notes-on-china Dwarkesh Patel visits China.
    • surprising-to-me claim that there's no crime (Chinese friend claims much the opposite!)
    • "The biggest surprise from talking to Chinese VCs people at AI labs was how capital constrained they felt."
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lighthouse_in_Economics back in 1974 Ronald Coase pointed out that lighthouses, long a prototypical example of a public good, were actually privately provided in England during the 17th-19thc. Critics said they went out of business, which proved the market couldn't actually incentivize lighthouse production; Coase replied that the British government made a policy choice to take over the lighthouse industry.
  • http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html David Friedman argues that property rights come to be as a result of Schelling points.
    • if self-interested people are negotiating (say, dividing up a pie), obviously everybody will want the most for themselves; but we also have an interest in eventually settling the negotiation, saving ourselves time and effort (and gaining safety, if the "negotiation" is violent).
    • If one arrangement stands out as "natural" or unique, it can be a Schelling point for where to stop negotiating and accept the arrangement. "Push back if they ask for more than the Schelling point, acquiesce if they ask for no more than the Schelling point" is a stable strategy. (analogous to "contrite Tit for Tat" which performs very well in evolutionary game theory experiments, though Friedman doesn't mention that.)
    • the status quo ante always makes a great Schelling point; laws, contracts, and other common-knowledge establishment of who has a right to what, can become stably self-enforcing even without a formal enforcement mechanism. (eg there is no world government but national borders are usually respected.)
    • the fact that people can, empirically, control their own bodies much more easily than other people's bodies, and can better defend property they can hide and territory they live in, than objects and land not literally in their current possession, also makes concepts like self-ownership and property ownership "natural" Schelling points.
      • though of course the exact boundaries of how property rights work are not given a priori and different societies can define them differently.
  • https://sense-nets.xyz/ proposals for better science social media networks
  • https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/12/the-cows-in-the-coal-mine.html are we neglecting H5N1?
  • https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-japan-opened-itself-up-to-immigration Noah Smith argues that Japan tried being ethnically homogeneous, found it couldn't (due to labor shortages), and has allowed big increases in immigration, with the approval of most Japanese voters.
  • https://zhengdongwang.com/2024/12/29/2024-letter.html  "The model does the eval": as soon as we come up with an evaluation for an AI capability and a dataset to train on, human ingenuity will find ways to make the AI hit the benchmark. If it's not model scaling, it'll be inference-time compute, or mixture-of-experts, or something else.
    • AI progress, like Moore's Law progress, isn't due to a single technological innovation. Once an industry has a moving quantitative target and a strong economic incentive (and social expectation) to keep hitting that moving target, it'll develop multiple technologies with overlapping S-curves that keep improving performance, potentially for a very long time.
  • https://ontheones.wordpress.com/2019/06/29/on-denpa-a-guest-article-by-kenji-the-engi/ Denpa, the anime genre that Neon Genesis Evangelion was from, was prevalent in the 1990's and early 2000's; these were disturbing, experimental meditations on the theme of social misfits who retreated from reality.
  • https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KSguJeuyuKCMq7haq/is-vnm-agent-one-of-several-options-for-what-minds-can-grow [[Anna Salamon]] asks if "utility optimizers" are what all sufficiently "smart" minds will end up being, or if there are other options
  • https://trevorklee.com/want-to-reverse-aging-try-reversing-graying-first/ Trevor Klee on reversing gray hair. There are isolated case studies of people whose gray hair has regained pigmentation; lots of these are associated with the use of immunosuppressants, which suggests that something in the aged immune system may be attacking the melanocytes (or their precursors) which produce hair pigmentation.
  • https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10461778/  Can you make an organoid of hairy skin? Yes you can!

  • https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-biggest-community-development-program-youve-never-heard-of Clara Collier looks into the history of a giant attempt to improve India's agricultural productivity in the 1950's-60's, by letting village leaders ask for what their village needs most, while the org would provide technological know-how to solve their problems. It worked great when founder Albert Mayer was running it; not so much when the Indian government tried to scale up nationally. Mostly because of common scale-up issues: difficulty finding talented staff, too big for the founder to personally go to all the villages and fix problems, etc.

    • today, global development experts would consider relying on village "leaders" to be an inherently biased approach; these would invariably be male, high-caste, and relatively rich, and the rest of the village wouldn't necessarily buy into what they proposed.
    • despite this flaw, it worked fine in the pilot, because while Mayer didn't have modern egalitarian language to describe it, he was de facto insisting that village discussions included all sorts of people. But when he was no longer micromanaging the program and using his own elbow grease to fix problems, the explicit/formal protocol of the program naturally devolved into "only village elites get a say" and villages indeed failed to follow through on the proposed reforms/improvements.

     

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