Policy entrepreneurship at the White House

Mach 12 airplanes

Mach 17 airplanes

A... unique interview? with Marc Andreessen?

Recent interview with Peter Thiel

Gene therapy for elevated LDL cholesterol

I wrote a while back that "everything sleeps". Scientists looked at a new organism that has no brain (but has neurons), the hydra. It also sleeps.

Can you tell fake from true paper abstracts? (Via Scott Alexander)

Why is the Moscow metro so nice given that Soviet buildings are more on the brutalist end (also via Scott)

Curtis Yarvin on AI risk skepticism (Coincidentally, also my argument: diminishing returns to intelligence + inherent unpredictability of the world; though afaik I've never written about this.) [Edit 2022-06-14]: I think some overall points in Yarvin's essay are valid (the world is indeed uncertain and there are diminishing returns to intelligence), but AGIs would still have the advantage of speed and parallelism (Imagine the entirety of Google but no need for meetings, and where workweeks are ran at 100x speed). Even in the absence of superior intelligence, that alone leads to capacities beyond what a human or group thereof can accomplish. I don't know exactly what I was endorsing, but definitely as of today I do not think Curtis Yarvin's post shows there is no reason to worry about AI risk. I might write about AI risk at some point. After all I recently compiled a reading list on the topic!

Reservoir computing

Ada Nguyen on not overthinking

UFO skepticism

From a social scientist that quit Academia: "most social psych research does not matter"

Looking like Covid was a manmade pandemic

Why do we produce LDL, I ask Twitter. Should we aim to have 0 LDL? I get some answers.

An article I wrote for Works in Progress: We don't know how to fix science (but we should try anyway). Read the whole issue here.

One more case of highly credentialed academic shitposting

Going up mountains might be bad for your brain

A bunch of reprogramming papers coming up this week: reprogramming muscles, better understanding reprogramming (including various OSKM combinations as well as non-Yamanaka reprogramming), and reprogramming for lifespan

Partial Vision restoration in a blind patient (retinitis pigmentosa) using an ontogenetic therapy. Check out the videos in the supplementary information as well.

Researchers train a model on citation metrics to predict top papers (and they infer, biotechnologies), and predict what will be the technologies of the future in bio. Some criticism.

Persuading the body to regenerate its limbs, one more Michael Levin piece

Sugar as the dark matter of biology, feat. glycoRNA

Wokeness is just applying the law in the US

Against against SATs

Critique of the Hallmarks of Aging

Martin Borch Jensen's longevity apprenticeship

Calling bullshit, a course