bokov

I work at a small but feisty research team whose focus is biomedical informatics, i.e. mining biomedical data. Especially anonymized hospital records pooled over multiple healthcare networks. My personal interest is ultimately life-extension, and my colleagues are warming up to the idea as well. But the short-term goal that will...

Let's suppose you start with $1000 to invest, and the only thing you can invest it in is stock ABC. You are only permitted to occupy two states: * All assets in cash * All assets in stock ABC You incur a $2 transaction fee every time you buy or...

Imagine you had the following at your disposal: * A Ph.D. in a biological science, with a fair amount of reading and wet-lab work under your belt on the topic of aging and longevity (but in hindsight, nothing that turned out to leverage any real mechanistic insights into aging). *...

In an unrelated thread, one thing led to another and we got onto the subject of overpopulation and carrying capacity. I think this topic needs a post of its own. TLDR mathy version: let f(m,t) be the population that can be supported using the fraction of Earth's theoretical resource limit...

Update: Thanks everyone for the continuing thought-provoking discussion. I intend to post my decision spreadsheet, and still am looking for suggestions on where to do so. It might come in handy come February. A discussion that I find interesting has branched off on the topic of technological progress versus Malthusian...

This morning I found what I think is an interesting way to explain rationalizing to my son, and I thought I'd share it: * Physical reality has rules that you can game to your advantage (natural laws). * People have another set of rules that you can game to your...

Let's say Bob's terminal value is to travel back in time and ride a dinosaur. It is instrumentally rational for Bob to study physics so he can learn how to build a time machine. As he learns more physics, Bob realizes that his terminal value is not only utterly impossible...