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…
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 yo…
In a previous post in the Fund People, not Projects series I talked about a potential new structure for a hypothetical funding agency. That was just one proposal among many one could make. This post has a set of other such proposals, along with a brief justification for why it might be a good idea. The proposals are not fully fleshed out but they are meant to be inspirational, and intended to be more broadly in the right direction than precisely ready for implementation.
The Young Researchers Research Insti…
In my Fund People, Not Projects post series I discussed various reforms that have been proposed to change the way science is funded. NIH is the world's largest science-funding entity (or entities), singlehandedly funding 60% of global non-private life sciences research in 2013. Given the possibilities of the life sciences, it is of interest to understand what one would have to do if one wanted to implement these reforms at NIH. Do you just need to convince the Director of an Institute to get changes approve…
Back in 2015-2016 I wrote a series of posts criticizing the book "The Entrepreneurial State" by Mariana Mazzucato. While I'm not going to add much new to what I wrote back then, here I wanted to clarify what the critique amounts to in a concise way, providing a guide for all those posts. The earlier posts of the series are in Spanish and you can find them linked there but in what follows I'll just link to the English ones.
First, read this to understand the context in which the book appeared. One …