directevolve

I think the article’s argument depends on Amazon having a great search engine that can surface the Pareto frontier of air friers, not just a single universal best. Then contaminating that great engine with ads that strictly make it worse.

But as you point out, there’s reason to think Amazon’s search engine is imperfect, especially for new products. Ads are the messy, side-effect-laden solution for that problem.

Claude will sometimes claim that my prompt contained implicit assumptions, then argue against them.

That can be annoying, but it also happens in debates between people, and sometimes the implicit assumptions are real and (sorry) load-bearing. So it can be an appropriate conversational tack.

As a US citizen who takes our country’s free speech norms seriously, I don’t think Meta should be aiming to deplatform even the hateful content I vehemently disagree with.

I think government should work more on helping people find alternatives to social media. The “town square effect” that makes people feel forced to use these apps is real and pernicious. That feels like a better target for regulation and taxation than content. If your business moat is based on network effects, perhaps there should be the equivalent of a land value tax on your network.

Taxes, debt, loss of shareholder value, and infrastructure buildouts are all highly visible to large swathes of the American population.

Republicans are an anti-tax and to some extent anti-debt constituency. Liberals are also fairly anti-tax, unless it’s limited to taxing the rich. There’s opposition now to all forms of new energy infrastructure: to oil/gas/nuclear from the left and many liberals, to wind/solar from the right.

There are no “easy ways.” Only hard fights, against both sometime allies and longtime political opponents.

> 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.

They haven’t raised a cent. They’re asking for pledges, not actual cash contributions.

Not that this isn’t a scam, but they’re currently asking for pledges to contribute, not cash.

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.