> Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain
You have an audience willing to give you the benefit of the doubt to learn something they’re unfamiliar with.
It’s specifically the fact that you chose to highlight a topic that makes your audience pay attention. Perhaps nobody else could have gotten their attention and adjusted their perspective the way you can. Not necessarily because you’re intrinsically better, but because they’ve chosen to pay attention to you.
I’m scrolling Hacker News and this post happened to be on the front page. Your comment happened to be the first comment. Im in the audience for OP and for you. If this post or your comment hadn’t been here, I’d have been doing and thinking about something else. Is that good or bad? I don’t know. But it is different. The human tendency to be receptive to convenient information sources, regardless of their novelty or whether they’re of maximum quality, may be adaptive.
Since 1974, when science increasingly underwrote policy, it’s become entwined with politics through the EPA, climate change, treatment of gender and sexuality, public health, mandatory teaching of evolution, and “critical race theory.”
Conservatives don’t have as much of a problem with science when it avoids “impact science” and sticks to topics that don’t conflict with church teachings or business interests.
But trust in science has never been universal. Trust in institutions and experts had to be built painstakingly over generations. The Social Transformation of American Medicine is a great account of this process for American doctors.
IPOs are one-shot, sealed-bid auctions, and the winner’s curse applies. There are separate equilibria where the company maximizes its cash gains or its fully diluted market cap. It can pick which to target.
“Leaving nothing on the table” would mean selling few enough shares at the IPO that you have to overpay to get shares at the IPO. Previous valuations are known, as is that implied by each choice of IPO price when looking at the book. So the skill is just in the company not needing all that much money and being great at generating hype.
Many autistic children have extremely limited diets. For example, a geneticist friend of mine saw a case where an autistic child had been referred for genetic testing because of horrific, chronic, spontaneous wounds on gums and skin. Turned out to be scurvy, because he had exclusively eaten Wheat Thins for the last 3-4 years, which aren’t fortified with vitamin C.
I would fully expect that a monotonous diet leads to a heavy skew in the gut microbiome as specific bacterial species that thrive on that diet are selected for, others against. It makes some sense that a fecal transplant could repair the damage. If the diet has shifted or expanded, the transplant could lead to long term benefits by restoring newly-viable bacterial species, perhaps by facilitating digestion of the new types of food.
I’d be curious to see a factoring out of the diet composition, gut microbiome, genetics, and severity of autism symptoms.
In a study like this, there’s also a difference in motivation. An AI will mechanically “take the study seriously.” I’m not convinced the doctors will.
But when making decisions about a real patient’s care, a doctor will be operating under different motivations.
They can also refer patients to a specialist, defer a diagnosis until they have more information, use external resources, consult with other doctors.
Doctors aren’t chatbots. They are clinical care directors.
Presuming there are no issues with information leakage, it’s genuinely impressive AI can perform this level of success at a specific doctoring skill. That doesn’t make it a replacement for a doctor. It does make it a useful tool for a doctor or a patient, which is exactly what we’re seeing in practice.
PCR (the chemical reaction) isn’t near optimal, but thermocyclers (the device) are hard to improve on.
For PCR, one of the innovations I’m excited about is the development of PCR that preserves chemical properties of the input DNA, like CG methylation. This is a critical epigenetic mark on cytosines (C DNA bases). When cytosine’s followed by guanine (G base), forming the sequence CG, its complement is also CG. There’s an enzyme called a maintenance methyltransferase that copies CG methylation from the template ssDNA strand to the new reverse strand during DNA replication.
Normally this mark gets diluted into invisibility during PCR, because there’s no maintenance methyltransferase to preserve it as the input DNA is copied. A thermostable maintenance methyltransferase can preserve CG methylation throughout PCR. This is brand new technology that’s just making its way into the scientific marketplace now. It’s the kind of PCR innovation my lab’s excited about.
I just want to point out that there’s a huge difference between thoroughly investigating the family after abuse of this magnitude has been proven, and making parents legally culpable for any harm that comes to their children in general.
We can react to the fact that mothers can do more to protect their children from abuse in many ways. We can give them better access to information and support in getting away from abusers. We can create better links between police and communities they serve. We can create more pathways for children to be exposed to healthy adult behavior and connections with healthy adults, even when the family is dysfunctional.
But when we find evidence that existing supports have failed, deeply investigating why is critical.
Good design allows systems to work without anyone knowing how the whole thing works.
AI and humans are labor that can be put to work designing and vetting such systems. The problem with AI isn’t that it builds things we don’t understand. It’s that we do not have much experience with its failure modes, limitations and risks. There are many unknown unknowns.
It’s directly analogous to the problem of hiring, management, outsourcing and contacting. Sure, we know that labor can produce massive, highly reliable systems nobody fully understands. But how do we coordinate labor, AI and human, to successfully produce the systems we actually need? What failure modes and advantages does AI introduce into the mix for specific projects?
That’s where the uncertainty comes from, not the lack of comprehensive knowledge of the systems themselves.
Academia is a huge place, and no, its basic function is absolutely not to suck up to power. Every academic I know sees their function as the opposite, even if few take advantage of the limited protections afforded by tenure to speak truth to powers
But Tyler Cowen’s calling in particular is ABSOLUTELY to suck up to power.
Only in a monopoly situation. If you have several companies with comparable models you can easily switch between, all desperate for revenue to recoup their massive capex. you’re fine.
Will the modal developer of 2030 be much like a dev today?
Writing software was a craft. You learned to take a problem and turn it into precise, reliable rules in a special syntax.
If AI takes off, we'll see a new field emerging of AI-oriented architecture and project management. The skills will be different.
How do you deploy a massive compute budget effectively to steer software design when agents are writing the code and you're the only one responsible for the entire project because the company fired all the other engineers (or never hired them) to spend the money on AI instead?
Are there ways of factoring a software project that mitigate the problems of AI? For example, since AI has a hard time in high-context, novel situations but can crank out massive volumes of code almost for free, can you afford to spend more time factoring the project into low-context, heavily documented components that the AI can stitch together easily?
How do you get sufficient reliability in the critical components?
How do you manage a software project when no human understands the code base?
How do you insure and mitigate the risks of AI-designed products? Can you use insurance and lower prices if AI-designed software is riskier? Can we quantify and put a dollar value on the risk of AI-designed software compared to human-designed?
What would be the most useful tools for making large AI-generated codebases inspectable?
When I think about these questions, a lot of them sound like things an manager or analyst might do. They don't sound like the "craft of code." Even if 1 developer in 2030 can do the work of 10 today, that doesn't mean the typical dev today is going to turn into that 10x engineer. It might just be a very different skillset.
It’s less prestigious because it doesn’t judge papers on novelty, only on technical accuracy. For incremental research like this, it is an appropriate choice. The lower prestige has no bearing on the accuracy of their findings.
A point I think is crucial to mention is that “effect size” is just standardized mean difference.
If a minority of patients benefit hugely and most get no benefit, then you get a modest effect size.
This is probably why this discussion always has a lot of people saying “yeah, it didn’t help me at all” and a few saying “it changed my life.”
I believe we should be focusing on more relevant statistical methods for assessing this hypothesis formally. Basically, using mean differences is GIGO if you assume you’re comparing a bimodal or highly skewed distribution to a bell curve.
I will say that my LMHNP ordered a blood test for me during my ADHD evaluation. I live in the Pacific Northwest and had a serious vitamin D deficiency, apparently like everyone else who doesn’t supplement. also got me started monitoring my blood pressure.
I can definitely tell that the Adderall I was prescribed had an immediate, huge benefit. Not sure about the vitamin D.
But I really appreciated that he took a wide angle look at my health.
The point is that the overwhelming majority of the country isn’t facing down ICE brutality right now, not the way Minneapolis is. So yes, most are much less immediately and violently affected by Trump. Hence, calm.
The question I was getting at is why those of us disgusted by Trump are protesting less vigorously, despite his government being much worse this time around. It’s a phenomenon widely noted.
For me, that largely comes down to the fact Trump not only won 2024 fair and square, Biden really was manifestly not up to the task of governing. Biden, and careerist Democrats hoping to ride on Biden’s coattails to another term in the White House failed utterly at the critical moment.
A democracy or republic isn’t guaranteed to deliver good governance. The primary goal is to enable peaceful transitions of power.
Trump is threatening that, explicitly. But how to actually address that threat is less clear.
In 2016, we were outraged to see a turd like Trump win. But at that time, the story wasn’t about electoral threats and fascism, it was his disgusting personal character.
The election threat only really manifested on Jan 6. It failed, he exited office, and was facing prosecution. It looked potentially done and dusted, and like the Democrats in federal government were successfully dealing with the problem, as is their role. We were ridin’ with Biden.
Then they slow walked the prosecution that mattered. Biden got on stage to debate Trump and we were absolutely horrified. Then we noticed how vacant he was at other public appearances. It was “my god, he’s not just sleepy, he is incapacitated, and they’ve been lying about it to us for who knows how long?”
Then there was the last ditch effort to field Kamala instead, another weak candidate who wasn’t even liked in the Biden admin. That was pathetic.
So we got Trump. And it wasn’t “we could have had ultra-qualified Hillary, but we got this POS from out of nowhere” like in 2016. It was “holy shit, I am extremely disappointed in my own party.” Nothing added up. We lost trust in our own party and leadership, and it hasn’t come back. Nobody’s excited for any Democrat. We all just know Trump’s gotta go and we’ll line up for Any Democrat (TM). But that doesn’t mean we are proud to do so. It’s a bitter, demoralizing pill to swallow.
Of course fundamentally, we are dealing with all the normal politics problems. Bad voting system, fake news, social media brainwashing, economic illiteracy, checked out voters. American presidential history (and its history as a whole) is full of depressing candidates and terrible shit, political violence, and disenfranchisement we’ve only even approximated eliminating for the last 61 years, since the Voting Rights Act.
So I am hopeful that in the grand sweep of things, we will pull through and keep finding ways to make progress. I think the main thing right now is to keep your energy, hope and belief in the future. They’d like to take that away, and I just won’t let them.
You have an audience willing to give you the benefit of the doubt to learn something they’re unfamiliar with.
It’s specifically the fact that you chose to highlight a topic that makes your audience pay attention. Perhaps nobody else could have gotten their attention and adjusted their perspective the way you can. Not necessarily because you’re intrinsically better, but because they’ve chosen to pay attention to you.
I’m scrolling Hacker News and this post happened to be on the front page. Your comment happened to be the first comment. Im in the audience for OP and for you. If this post or your comment hadn’t been here, I’d have been doing and thinking about something else. Is that good or bad? I don’t know. But it is different. The human tendency to be receptive to convenient information sources, regardless of their novelty or whether they’re of maximum quality, may be adaptive.