Two scientists may look at the same data and draw different conclusions. Faced with a problem to solve they may see different solutions as the obvious way to go. The cause of this is scientific taste: one's crystalized collection of priors about how the slice of nature of interest works.
I like to think of taste as tinted glasses: you can look at a phenomenon through different lenses and notice different things with each. These views are not to be thought of as right or wrong in isolation. Rather, they may …
What is aging and how to measure it is an everpresent question in the field of aging research. Given the complexity of biology many give up on the task, proclaiming that "we" (either the field or humanity) don't understand aging. I don't. To me, what aging is is clear enough, and we can understand it as a fractal and emergent phenomenon within a system: there's aging of DNA, aging of cells, aging of organs, aging of organisms.
To understand aging and measure it we have to be reasonably acquainted…
Lithium orotate seems to help with Alzheimer's
Electronics components have gotten very very cheap in the past few decades
On LLM adoption from Zvi Mowshowitz
On the wild stories where someone that gets an organ transplant sometimes experience personality changes, and single cell learning.
HIV drugs as potential anti-aging drugs
Upcoming book about industrial efficiency
Alternative to LASIK coming?
A first person report of participating in a Phase 1 clinical trial
In defense of the Amyloid hypothesis (See pr…
Good post on what the meaning of heritability.
Only a crazy person should do any given job
A while back I noted that everything sleeps. Now here some recent work on the why.
Memory in cells
As I noted a while back, inflammaging is not an intrinsic feature of aging; rather it is a byproduct of industrialized lifestyles and most likely just obesity (which increases with age in industrialized countries)
On China's shipbuilding industry
SSC reviews Steven Byrne's work on AI
Against outsourcing, for vertical in…
So I went down to the beach. "Kinda nice", I thought. The sky had a particularly vibrant blue color, the waves had 'the right size', their roar was pleasant. I started to walk around trying to continue meditating. I focused my awareness on an arising sensation of open heartedness and then I noticed my eyes tearing up ("Huh? I thought"). I looked again at the ocean and then I saw it. It was fucking amazing. So much color and detail: waves within waves, the fractal structure of the foamy c…
The term "agency" is popular these days. Though the term gets many definitions depending on who you ask, I'll define someone agentic as someone that both:
Is aware of what's possible, beyond the obvious next step
Gets what they want, if that's different from what their environment wants
And I'll define an action as agentic if it's vastly more predictable from knowing the individual than from knowing the environment in which the individual is immersed.
It's possible to have one, both, or neither.…