A roundtable on Richard Hamming

Combination therapies are very rare, but on my view underrated, outside of oncology. A paper on their origin, in the treatment of tuberculosis. Related work.

Noah Smith interview with Patrick Collison and explainer on inflation

A call for a new World Fair

Some social science bashing coming from social scientists Andrew Gelman

Private cities in China

Fusion startups continue to make progress

Spencer Greenberg on self-control

The New Space Race, with some cost charts

In case you are not a TFP nihilism convert yet (or at least take seriously the idea that TFP is not technology, or innovation), long-lasting negative TFP growth.

Derek Lowe on AI and drug discovery and recent drug approvals

Lowering the cost of the preclinical stages by 20% or making them 20% faster (which to a certain degree are the same thing) does indeed save you money. . .but those are overwhelmed by the savings that you could realize if you could just reduce the clinical failure rate by 20%. The absolute best ways to do that would be through picking better targets and through picking compounds and targets that don’t throw up unexpected toxicity in humans. Those, sadly, are exactly the areas that AI/ML approaches are currently making the least traction in, because it’s so hard to think up a useful way to attack them. Speeding up screening or estimating physical properties, for all their difficulties, are so much more tractable. Which accounts for the press releases talking these up as if they’re removing gigantic stumbling blocks to fast and easy drug discovery.

DNA damage as a major cause of aging (In my original Longevity FAQ I had understated how relevant this could be)

Inequality in the US is decreasing, once once accounts for taxes and transfers

Matt Clancy on science causing more innovation, looking at a series of natural experiments

Brian Heligman's list of important problems to work on

Twitter threads on the limits of Bayesianism

When meditation goes wrong

Sponges don't care about your cancer-inducing doses of radiation

Want some movie recommendations? Thread

Progress in organdies; now we can make cells cry

NIMBY and YIMBY unite! This is a solution I prefer (building more through local empowering) to building more through taking away control and giving it to a entity higher up in the chain

Progress in artificial wombs

How do VCs make decisions?

Being a teenager during the collapse of the USSR

Fixing the scientific back burner

Alon Levy on how to drive down the costs of infrastructure in the US

Michael Nielsen asks: Who is the world's best scientific funder?

Biotech for the Biocurious

The success of NASA's COTS

Why did the covid vaccines take so long?

Interview with Jonathan Blow

Will Rinehart's links pos

I ask Twitter "What is the most inspiring thing you have ever read"

One of the problem with the current scientific environment

I keep waiting for America's libertarian moment. We'll know it has arrived when pay toilets return.

Lots of videos about Tesla's new battery technology

Energy storage right now is mostly about batteries

Book review of "A Thousand Brains"

Beware what sounds insightful

DNA origami: A review

What's wrong with Eric Weinstein's theory of everything

Liquid olives and iPhones

A case against nuclear energy (On the basis of cost). This seems mostly right, but it still makes sense to have a % of the electricity grid be nuclear or geothermal for base loading because when intermittent sources of energy increase in share, they stop being so appealing due to increased energy storage costs.

Capturing scientific knowledge in computable form