Are ideas getting harder to find? (2020) by Nicholas Bloom, Chad Jones, John van Reenen and Michael Webb repeatedly pops up in discussions of technological progress, the great stagnation and related topics. They take a different angle from the usual, rather than debating whether there is stagnation or not in a range of metrics (Like TFP, Moore's law, crop yields), they instead opt for taking the optimistic view (That those metrics are advancing as usual, in some of their models) and calculate instead how mu…

In my Bloom's Two sigma essay, in section 12, What should you learn I was thinking about a problem that comes before the question of the optimal learning method. Once one has decided, say, that one wants to start practicing SRS (Space Repetition Systems, the use of), what should one SRS? Should a software engineer SRS their programming language of choice? Of course not: They are using it all the time. Spaced repetition works, but knowledge or skills you use every day are effectively built in SRS. There is a…

In the science policy world a term often heard is "high-risk, high-reward" activities; funding initiatives, projects, or researchers that individually are likely to fail but that also hold potential for truly radical, breakthrough discoveries. But what about "low-risk, high-reward", wouldn't that be nice? One more of Stripe Press' beautifully edited tomes, Scientific Freedom: the elixir of civilization, is Donald Braben's theoretical case for the existence of such scientific opportunitie…

I just finished reading Vinay Prasad's Malignant, a book on the current state of oncology, covering everything from the way clinical trials are run to the myriad of ways cancer therapies can be administered (as neoadjuvants, adjuvants, in a metastatic setting etc). I jokingly described Prasad's take as "cancer therapiesnihilism" on Twitter in the same way that John Ioannidis has been described as a methodological terrorist. It is nihilistic in that relative to what one would hear from the pharma…

Deriving multiple aging clocks out of looking at blood plasma; also includes nice table of proteins that accumulate (or decrease their frequency) with age and what they might be doing. Bryan Caplan on Matt Yglesias' One Billion Americans In the same way that the secretome of stem cells can ameliorate Alzheimer in a mouse model(See previous links), stem cells may not be needed to help regenerate injuries to the heart (in this case, in pigs), just what they secrete, as if telling cells "hey there are ste…

What follows is an unedited guest post by the author of Applied Divinity Studies about Substack. While I don't necessarily endorse everything said in the text that follows, I thought it was an interesting post and the author asked me to guest-post it here. Some thoughts of my own as a prologue: Looking at things I read in my RSS I notice first that indeed I look at my RSS reader (Feedly), and not at my mailbox. RSS is a civilized way of following updates from disparate sites you like, aggregating them in o…