I started the year in London, attending later in in early March a private conference in Jackson Hole. Near the end of the conference the travel ban UK->USA was announced but I continued without paying much attention to it. Other than advances in science and technology I tend to pay little attention to current events (noise that repeats itself) and Covid was just the last of them. In a few years I'll look back and see exactly what Covid did in its proper context. So instead of reading and thinking about t…

So there's this paper, Incentives and Creativity: Evidence from the academic life sciences (Azoulay, Graff Zivin, Manso 2011) that shows that Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigators (who are funded for a longer term and in a more open ended way) outperform those of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that have shorter review cycles and more concrete grant proposals. This is seen as a vindication of the "fund people, not projects" paradigm. However, the effect size reported is huge…

DeepMind finally cracks the protein-folding problem at the CASP14 competition (Or rather, is almost there; see here and here for a more sober take). As noted here a while back, it's astonishing to observe how outsiders have come into a field and solved the core problem the field had been working on for decades. Good news in that it means there may be free lunches waiting for us when better equipped outsiders (With money, AI, or anything else) enter new fields. Does this constitute a solution of the static …

Note: I am using Andy Matuschak's new Orbit project to add spaced repetition prompts to the blogpost to help you remember the content. Let me know what you think! Scientists are getting older. Some have expressed concern at that fact. While the motivations for that concern are not always explicit, it usually boils down to two: One, a matter of fairness. Science getting older may mean that it's not making room for younger scientists; older scientists would be sitting in a limited number of chairs for …

One of the points that Braben makes in Scientific Freedom, and one that others have made elsewhere, is that science is not as welcoming of new ideas as it may seem. The process of peer review stands in the way of new breakthroughs, and one man's crankery is another's brilliant insight, or so goes the story. The examples of this that probably come to mind are old: Galileo and heliocentrism or perhaps Semmelweis and hand washing and in general the germ theory of disease. So one may think that science used to …

On the statistics of individual variations of productivity in research laboratories Everything you always wanted to know about saturated fat Peter Mitchell and the ox phos wars, when OXPHOS was controversial Langmuir on pathological science Sydney Brenner "How academia and publishing are destroying scientific innovation" What people don’t realise is that at the beginning, it was just a handful of people who saw the light, if I can put it that way. So it was like belonging to an evangelical sect, …