Sometimes one reads discussions of causality in academic papers. Expressions like "this gene causes that" or "Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is caused by XYZ". Or of course, "We don't know what causes X". Recently I found myself thinking about these three statements:
We don't know what causes Alzheimer's yet (eg here at NIA)
Old age does not cause Alzheimer's, but it is the most important risk factor for the disease (also here at NIA)
Aging causes Alzheimer's (eg here at Fightaging)…
Tales from the patient side of oncology clinical trials
Hackernews compilation of "things that don't scale"
Colonoscopies, do they work?
Future House, new FRO-like organization launches to work at the intersection of AI and biotech
Tattoos are made of macrophages that constantly die and are eaten by other macrophages
A song: Midnight in the Desert
Huh strangely not that much happened this month! This might be the shortest Links post in a while. Maybe I have been rabbitholeing less and a lot of the…
Back in 2020 when I wrote the Longevity FAQ I had a section on telomeres and some cursory examination of how much they might matter for aging. Now that I know more it's time to revisit it, including also some historical notes and some papers that came out after I wrote that FAQ.
The direct reason for writing this post is that often when I say that I work on aging (at Retro Biosciences, we are hiring!) I am asked if "that's the telomeres thing". For some reason, telomeres became tied to aging broad…
Target-based drug discovery hasn't worked that well historically.
Metformin, most likely not a longevity drug
Anduril
Interesting new paper on LLMs being dumb in an weird way: training a model on "A is B" does not necessarily confer the knowedge that "B is A"; another LLMs are less impressive than we thought here.
Scott Alexander comment highlights on his Elon Musk post
Against and For Automaticity
A step towards delivery of gene therapy to the brain: using ultrasound to disrupt the blo…
I recently finished reading Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk. I liked the book's little anecdotes describing the way Elon is in his high and lows. I didn't come out of reading the book thinking that one has to be yelling at people and being obnoxious to get things done, though certainly being willing to have difficult conversations is something one needs.
Rather the main things I took from the book that make Elon Elon are two things:
Questioning life's default settings. If there's an option that others usually…
I've written in the past a couple of blogposts on education and learning: these two on Bloom's two sigma and mastery learning, and spaced repetition systems (SRS) are the main examples.
Something I noticed today is that on the one hand I have these blogposts, and I find SRS valuable in theory but in practice what I do is something quite different: massive input. I refer to this concept in passing in Scaling tacit knowledge
The interesting thing of language learning is how effortless it seems to be for chil…