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…
Stuart Buck's personal metascience history
Heidi Williams on accelerating scientific progress
Claire Hughes Johnson interview
Ben Reinhardt on K-99
The placebo effect, less real than it originally seemed
The allele in the DEC2 gene that lets humans sleep less (which I have!) makes flies also sleep less -and- live longer
Pooled screens meets microscopy
Novo Nordisk (Ozempic, Wegovy)'s market cap is not larger than its home country (Denmark)'s GDP
Self-coercion, a thread
For a long time I assumed calling peop…
Is erithrytol bad? Is aspartame bad?
As I noted in my Alzheimer's series, a promising target to treat the disease is phosphoryated tau (the 'fire' the keeps the disease burning) as opposed to amyloid beta (the 'spark' that triggers AD but does not keep it going). A recent attempt at reducing tau
A reason why microbiome research is widely thought to be not of high quality: Small variations to sample preparation techniques seem to have large effects on the bacteria that end up being analized
"Fake work&q…
Scott's links post. A highlight is (13), an adversarial collaboration on whether there is gender bias in academic science (in hiring, grant funding, teacher ratints, salaries, etc).
Slow, Costly Clinical Trials Drag Down Biomedical Breakthroughs
Sasha Chapin on MDMA therapy
Chalmers wins long time running bet on whether consciousness would be understood by now
Matt Clancy and Tammy Besiroglu on AI and explosive growth
A weird fossil-inspired mansion in Joshua Tree
An economic analysis of Varda, the space ma…
Note: What's discussed in this post will seem extremely niche to most people, but the links throughout the post add the necessary context, so make sure to read those! If you want to read something before reading anything else, read this with particular attention to what is said there about "situational awareness".
AI risk discourse is so back, and I haven't blogged in a while, so now it's a good time, there was something I've been thinking about for months that I had to put in writing at some poin…