The Science of Science, a book Dominic Cummings on the Sisyphean struggle of getting things done quickly within a government bureaucracy Stripe and Scale Ise Jingu After the new structures are built (and the fidelity of the copy has been confirmed), the previous buildings are then torn down, and any undecayed timber is saved for future rebuilding or repair. The requirement to use traditional techniques, combined with the number of buildings rebuilt, means that rebuilding Jingu is less of a cultural tradit…

California has a habit of going up in flames on a yearly basis, leaving Cyberpunk-worthy scenes as a result. Why does this happen and where is it going is the topic of this post. How many acres burn every year? Is it getting worse? There is broad consensus in the scientific community that wildfire behavior is changing across the American West in general, and in California in particular. Figure 2.3 highlights trends in wildfire activity in California since 1990. All indicators shown—wildfire occurrence, tot…

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 en…

Answers to this question can be found online in the forms of shorter and longer term roadmaps. One could infer an answer from SENS or get a list of ideas from Celine Halioua's recent take on the matter (On what the field needs rather than how to deal with the problem itself). This is just my view. An important question for anyone wanting to answer "How to solve aging" is "If aging is solved, have we then made a given individual, in normal conditions, immortal?" Or "Have we thus made…

Want to own the Longevity FAQ as an NFT? You can bid for it here. Why has nuclear power been a flop? Construction costs around the world: How does the US compare? Coming full circle, from endless complexity to simplicity and back again (On the history of cancer research) What evidence do we need for biomarker qualification (at the FDA)? How was it found that lithium works as a psychiatric drug? Roundtable on Richard Hamming Review of "The Kill Chain" Why is everything liberal (as in leftist)? Beca…

Last year I tweeted about something I called cozy futurism; Cool-shit futurism (space colonization, moon telescopes, tech for the sake of tech to some extent) vs cozy futurism (urban reform, renewable energy, solving climate change; focusing on specific problems and having tech as an ends) are categories I've been thinking about recently— José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente (@ArtirKel) November 10, 2020 Recently there were a series of tweets that got me thinking again about the same idea; Spac…