This is a short story I wrote in mid-2022. Genre: cosmic horror as a metaphor for living with a high p-doom. One The last time I saw my mom, we met in a coffee shop, like strangers on a first date. I was twenty-one, and I hadn’t seen her since...
This post is the first half of a series about my attempts understand Anthropic’s current strategy and lay out the facts to consider in terms of whether Anthropic’s work is likely to be net positive and whether, as a given individual, you should consider applying. (The impetus for looking into...
I got access to DALL-E 2 earlier this week, and have spent the last few days (probably adding up to dozens of hours) playing with it, with the goal of mapping out its performance in various areas – and, of course, ending up with some epic art. Below, I've compiled...
Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto was originally published in 2009. By the time I read it a few years ago, the hard-earned lessons explained in this book had already trickled into hospitals across North America. It’s easy to look at the core concept and think of it as trivial. For...
Medical professionals providing humanitarian aid are divided over whether to hold to medical confidentiality and political neutrality or to speak out about the atrocities they witness. [Note: this is not written as a typical Lesswrong post, and was part of a challenge to write something in the style of a...
Sometimes the history of medicine is very, very surreal. For example, consider that in 1927, a physician named Julius Wagner-Jauregg received the Nobel Prize in medicine, for...deliberately infecting his patients with malaria. As a treatment for psychosis. This often worked. Well, it did kill around 15% of the patients, but...
This the first in a sequence of posts about “operations”. Acknowledgements to Malo Bourgon, Ray Arnold, Michelle Hutchinson, and Ruby for their feedback on this post. My ops background Several years ago, I decided to focus on operations work for my career. From 2017 to 2019 I was one of...