Scott Alexander on high fat diets
Tyler Cowen contra Tyler Cowen on Stubborn Attachments
Common ownership maybe is fine
Remember those old studies saying that gum disease was linked to Alzheimer's? Now a link has also been suggested for stroke and atherosclerosis.
Guide to DIY biology
Why conventional wisdom on education reform is wrong
How did early american investors fund their ventures?
How much does it cost to develop a drug? 1.3 billion USD, study claims. (Including the cost of failed research)
A few r…
Growth and the case against randomista development
How local control can accelerate housing
One year, 1 lab, 16 spinouts (On the Church Lab)
Fireside chat with Tyler Cowen and Tom Kalil
Glial brain cells do more than thought decades ago
You don't agree with Karl Popper (See also the comments)
Scott reviews a review of Little Soldiers, a book on chinese preschool
Fedophilia: Economists love for central banks
The US is starved for talent: Paper finds very large effect (Perhaps implausibly so) on hiring an H…
You might remember a post I wrote in 2016, No Great Technological Stagnation where I argued various things that are worth repeating and valid today: Technology is not the same as productivity growth, and there is no great stagnation in technology; rather there are localized slowdowns, accelerations, and stagnations1, and of course TFP is more than technology. Also last year I wrote on whether WWII was good for growth, and I linked to some evidence that the rate of growth of population could be behind a stag…
So I just published the Longevity FAQ. This represents my first blogging foray into molecular biology. So it happens, I hadn't really studied biology since high school, so here's how -and why- I went from zero to writing a FAQ on a complex topic.
Why write about it, in the first place? An original motivation is that I've said a bunch of times that I see more progress in the future coming from the life sciences rather than physics, yet my knowledge in biology was very, very lacking, not having ever seriously…
NOTE: This was written in 2020, and if I were to write it again I would probably do differently, add more structure, add some more sections. I also don't have that much time to update this FAQ, so there are other papers worth checking out written post-2020 that will not be here.
Inasmuch as one enjoys being alive, waiting longer until the signs of frailty and old age occur seems an appealing proposition, and so there is an entire field of research dedicated to understand the aging process. A recent summary …
For the first time ever, the US government, through the NOAA will be funding geoengineering research
A few very interesting adversarial collaborations posted at SSC
When does abortion become wrong?
Is eating meat a net harm? (Note that a few of the things mentioned there do not apply to countries other than the US. e.g. gestation crates are banned in the UK, so are battery cages for chicken)
The Heckman curve is shown not to be true once again. Those cost/benefit ratios look off to me though. Can those in…