sarahconstantin - LessWrong

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/american-strong-gods
- this isn't my perspective at all but it is a solid descriptive account of how people seem to be thinking
https://www.isac.bio/about organization to prevent (cyber)attacks on biotech/pharma facilities
https://pepfarreport.org/ an excellent analysis of the cost-effectiveness of PEPFAR
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2025/02/10/retraction-request-denied/ Patrick McKenzie stands by his "debanking" piece against a crypto bank CEO's request for him to "retract" it (that word is often a prelude to a libel lawsuit)
https://www.owlposting.com/p/how-do-you-make-a-250x-better-vaccine the story of PopVax, ultra-cheap developed-in-India vaccine
https://zoogle.arcadiascience.com/about search for model organisms whose genes are especially good matches for a given human gene after controlling for phylogeny (so it's not all monkeys all the time)
- the frog Xenopus tropicalis seems to make an especially strong showing
- and some people think it should be used more often as a model for human genetic disorders. https://journals.biologists.com/dmm/article/17/5/dmm050754/352283/Modelling-human-genetic-disorders-in-Xenopus
https://www.argmin.net/p/the-department-of-frictionless-reproducibilty "frictionless reproducibility" as a valuable norm in quantitative/data-based research; idea due to David Donoho of compressed sensing fame
https://markusstrasser.org/extracting-knowledge-from-literature.html Markus Strasser on why it's hard to build a business around extracting knowledge from the biomedical literature
https://calvinmccarter.substack.com/p/the-new-morality-by-paul-elmer-more essay by Paul Elmer More about leftism as a secular version of Christianity, from a conservative perspective. Early 20th century essay -- its villain is Jane Addams!
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/the-danger-of-trump-disobeying-court-orders.html Tyler Cowen isn't worried about Donald Trump violating the Constitution because if there were a real problem markets would move.
- I'm really not convinced that public markets do reliably move in the predictable (downward) direction in response to "bad news" (wars, coups, pandemics, etc).
  - Sometimes subsidies to big companies mask risks/damage to the real economy.
  - Sometimes the "bad news" was already priced in by the time it happens.
  - Would be good to research past examples of governments making sharp authoritarian turns and see what happened to markets then.
- anecdotally, some professional risk evaluators *have* upgraded their risk estimates for the US recently.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK1_receptor_antagonist Substance P is involved in fear, rage, and pain; can you treat anxiety or pain disorders by blocking it? ehh, so far we mostly seem to have gotten anti-vomiting meds.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eltoprazine this serotonergic drug was claimed to have a specific effect against aggression; it seems to have failed in trials though.
miniaturized, low-cost mass spectrometry: where are we?
- https://www.soci.org/chemistry-and-industry/cni-data/2012/5/mass-spec-for-the-masses in progress as of 2012
- https://www.bayspec.com/product-category/mass-spectroscopy/ Bayspec will sell em, but you have to request a quote
- https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/industry/092121/nautilus-founder-unspirals-a-new-approach-to-prote Parag Mallick is doing proteomics with a benchtop and algorithms, which doesn't necessarily mean you can do general-purpose chemical analysis with the same machine
- https://www.pharmasalmanac.com/articles/bringing-mass-spectrometry-out-of-the-lab-and-to-the-point-of-need 908 Devices has a portable mass spec that gets around the need for a vacuum by using a "microscale ion trap"
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/398696/degrowth-economy-trump-right-poverty indeed, tariffs are harmful
https://www.unbundle-the-university.com/ Ben Reinhardt's manifesto on unbundling the university
https://convergentresearch.substack.com/p/how-to-build-essential-technology Adam Marblestone on building scientific technology --FROs, startup-like teams
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_magnetic_resonance_spectroscopy_of_proteins
- i still don't understand how this works but it's what they use to analyze intrinsically disordered proteins
- see also https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.3c11614
https://bindresearch.org/fro/2025/02/11/press.html new FRO for studying intrinsically disordered proteins
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16734424/ transcription factors are overwhelmingly proteins with disordered regions
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha-synuclein alpha-synuclein, the key aggregate protein in Parkinson's, is an intrinsically disordered proteins
https://stripe.com/guides/atlas/pitching this is sound advice but, like so many things, it only works if you're, like, super good at your job.
https://www.medstarhealth.org/services/vascular-infections-complications
- somebody said ChatGPT told her that pain and swelling in her lip indicated a vascular infection... pretty sure that's crazy talk. vascular infections will have systemic symptoms.

sarahconstantin's Shortform

sarahconstantin1mo20

links 2/4/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-04-2025

https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-025-00269-y/index.htmlmitochondria are thread-shaped not bean-shaped. I truly do not understand these critters.
things i learned while reading about Venice:
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedetto_Pesaro brutal, successful admiral who held off the Turks for a bit
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasco_da_Gama
  - John II, the king, set an objective for his admirals to find a route to India that bypassed the usual middlemen for the spice trade (the Mamluks & Venetians). 16 years later, Vasco da Gama did it. Nice example of "goals and plans can work".
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchlock there seems to be an unfortunate definitional overload where "handgun" in the early modern period refers to a gun held by a human as opposed to a cannon? but in the late 15th century all "handguns" were long guns, it seems.
- https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/new-york-finally-claims-a-small-victory-in-forever-war-on-rats-m7x230sg8
- https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iXda2NyGzKVWxkd02IlXj5Tq5cOM_gNd/view
  - a "verified" programming language would be cool!
  - this means verifying multiple things. the compiler, the parser, the debugger, etc. all relative to a formal specification of what they're supposed to do.
  - do you write a different specification for each thing you're checking? this introduces lots of wasted/duplicated/inconsistent work. maybe you should just have a single specification for the language.
  - this is what K is: a framework for writing language specifications.
  - symbolic execution -- don't plug in values, map out branches of how the program behaves with any possible input. good for testing and verification.
    - K does this. (I don't understand details)
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.11044 very interesting and ambitious concept!
  - biology is multiscale and multimodal. genes! proteins! cells! tissues!
  - in particular we have dynamical spatial systems that govern developmental processes:
    - cell division & microtubules
    - neurite branching
    - mitochondrial fission & fusion
    - plant organogenesis in shoot & root growth
    - neural tube closure.
  - what happens (over time) is a function of what's going on nearby in space;
    - macro geometry (the shapes of organs, bodies, etc) is a consequence of micro, local dynamics
  - declarative modeling:
    - one example of a bio dynamical system is differential equations defined by diffusion operators on the concentrations of chemical species (as functions of spatial position and time).
    - an abstract syntax tree (AST) is a way of representing the symbols of a mathematical expression (tree depth corresponds to order of operations, nested functions, that thing)
    - you could define a declarative modeling language as a space of ASTs that define models, a mapping between ASTs and dynamical systems (the mathematical objects that correspond to the symbolic objects) and transformations between ASTs.
      - for example one transformation is: you start with a chemical reaction; you reverse the arrow to get the reverse reaction; or, you change the rate constant to get a different reaction rate.
        now, when do these manipulations commute? there is a quantum-inspired "operator algebra" for chemistry
        each chemical species is a "state"; there are transition probabilities between them
        mass action laws define relationships between the equilibrium concentrations of each species (as a function of the chemical reaction & the reaction constant)
        "operators" for each species destroy or create particles of that species; what happens if you hit the system with an "operator"? add these up and you get the "chemical master equation" that defines the dynamical system and the enforced probability preservation (probabilities must sum to 1)...(again i don't totally get it)
      - now we can also add parameters to these models. for instance a model governing cell division might depend on the size of the cell.
        now we can start talking about cell division as a function of things like position, cell type, concentrations of signaling molecules, and so on, with invariants (like "1d growth")
        and we can do similar operator stuff based on probability distributions of what values parameters can take...
  - ok so what's the point of all this?
    - normally in mathematical modeling of biological processes, you pick out a priori which variables to care about.
      - but alternatively, you could start with a finer model that throws in everything and the kitchen sink, and automatically discern which variables don't really affect the result much no matter what values you plug in, and then "reduce" to a coarser model.
      - ...but you could also do that statistically? i hate to be the "but how is this practical" guy but this literally is applied mathematics...
      - it's pretty though. wish i had time to go through more carefully.
- https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/ I don't seem to have access yet but this is intriguing
- https://qntm.org/devphilo i love his short stories; his "developer philosophy" also seems sensible, though might be hard to make work in a real business with customer/deadline pressure?
- https://alicemaz.substack.com/p/commentary-on-xunzis-enriching-the Alice Maz on Xunzi. insightful political philosophy.
- https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/si-no-se-puede/ Ben Hoffman seems straightforwardly correct here.
  - if some governmental policy seems Not Fair, to people like you and me, we don't actually have much of a (perceived) affordance to change it through collective civic action.
    - conventional political activism is more like a zero-sum negotiation between interest groups.
      - "it's not fair" doesn't move the needle by itself, even if everybody you tell can see it's true.
    - organized political violence to achieve goals isn't much of a thing these days either; the closest thing is disorganized violence (rioting, lone shooters)
    - the courts sort of are an avenue to push back against unfair policies, but civil courts are declining drastically in use.

sarahconstantin's Shortform

sarahconstantin1mo*20

links 02/03/25:

Jasmine Sun on the Tech Right
- https://jasmi.news/p/tech-right
- https://jasmi.news/p/arjun-ramani
- I like this. she's not a theorizer! she's just Some Guy, actually expressing her thoughts on current events. do I agree with everything she says? maybe not.
- But it's normal-ass blogging rather than inhibited silence or sloppy thoughts packaged as a Grand Narrative, and I think that's healthy. we need normal-ass blogging.
  - Scott Alexander is a normal-ass blogger who kept up a regular schedule and has a gift for puns and a fairly high appetite for books and research papers.
  - like, that's all it is, it's being yourself in public, consistently year over year, while having a healthy (but not extraordinary!) degree of interest in the world around you.
- https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/why-did-silicon-valley-turn-right this is cited in her piece; i'm also not sure what i think of this, might be a piece of the puzzle
https://meetmeoffline.com/ nice, Shreeda Segan's dating app is live
https://lambda.chat/ nice hosting platform for multiple models including the DeepSeek ones.
- note that the DeepSeek phone app is reputed to have a keylogger and location tracker; web apps are preferable.
https://www.betonit.ai/p/trust_and_diverhtml Bryan Caplan close-reads the famous Robert Putman paper that purportedly shows that "more ethnic diversity leads to lower social trust."
- It doesn't show that; it shows that black, Latino, and Asian people have lower "trust" than white people.
- also correlated with lower trust: poor neighborhoods; high-crime neighborhoods; high-density neighborhoods; neighborhoods where most people moved in recently; neighborhoods with lots of renters; neighborhoods with few US citizens
- also correlated with higher trust: individual income, bachelor's degree, homeownership
- this just reduces to socioeconomic status. there's not a separate thing going on here about diversity.
  - obviously you can increase the average of many quality-of-life metrics in a community by restricting it to people of higher socioeconomic status. but then those same metrics would (mathematically) decline outside the elite community.
  - this does not support claims like "everybody on average would be better off under residential segregation".
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/sundry-observations-on-the-trump-tariffs.html Tariffs harm economies, news at 11.
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/the-landmines-buried-in-the-fine-print-of-chicagos-new-casino-deal/ Patrick McKenzie has details (lots of details) about the new casino being built in Chicago.
- in order to meet requirements to be 25% woman-and-minority owned, they went around to black churches to offer an extremely misleading "investment deal" to working-class people who cannot afford it and won't understand the fine print.
  - the financial structure includes saddling these "investors" with a surprise enormous tax bill that only kicks in years after purchase.
- of course, anybody can get in on special "women and minorities only" financial opportunities, even if they're a white man; set up a shell company "owned" by a woman and/or minority, who is your wife, or an associate of yours willing to serve as your front. this happens ALL THE TIME.
- the inference is that someone in city government said "nope, not this time, no more shell games, when we say minority owned we mean you're gonna have to funnel the profits into our actual community." So, this time around, the casino people did go to the community! but what the community gets is not gonna be profit.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Research_and_Invention_Agency ARIA was founded in 2021.
- A friend asked me a good question: what was the UK's DARPA-equivalent before?
  - UKRI https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Research_and_Innovation was the older UK science-and-tech funding org, which ARIA is unaffiliated with; it brought together nine older funding bodies, most of which were founded in the 21st century, and none of which could plausibly be the bodies that funded the bulk of UK nationally-funded (non-medical) science and engineering through the mid-20th-century.
  - so...what was the UK's DARPA, or for that matter its NSF, in 1945-1990?
https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/on-the-responsibility-of-size this is a nice, slightly oblique thought by Trevor Klee. do I agree? maybe. i don't expect to form considered opinions on All This until years later, if at all.
things I learned while reading about Venice:
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigismondo_Pandolfo_Malatesta amazing guy. mercenary. murdered two out of three wives. first person that the Pope explicitly "canonized into Hell." patron of Piero della Francesca and Leon Battista Alberti. rehabilitated in literature several times, including by Ezra Pound, which figures.
https://www.palladiummag.com/2025/01/31/the-failed-strategy-of-artificial-intelligence-doomers/ critical take on the ineffectiveness of "AI safety" as a political strategy.
- if you successfully convince the world that AI is potentially very powerful (and dangerous), this does not make people go "ok let's not build AI then", it makes people think "i want to be powerful and dangerous!!!"
- i'm not on board with everything in this article but i think i largely agree.
- when you're an idealistic nerd who despises playing politics and isn't very good at it, it will probably end badly if you dive enthusiastically into politics.
  - "so how can you do anything helpful at all?"
    - provide true information. don't optimize too aggressively for mass appeal.
      - this doesn't mean actively hide or be deliberately cryptic -- i think that's often going too far. i think clarity and open communication are, where possible, good practices.
      - but maybe don't make it your full-time job to strategically maximize the number of humans who believe a given thing.
    - focus your efforts on goals that you're quite confident will be beneficial and that can be done without coercion. beware of making your job about "what the government should do".
    - do not develop an identity around being an expert at strategic adversarial thinking.
      - you may be a literal chessmaster (like, at the game of chess);
      - you may be very skilled at things that would be useful to a modern military;
      - but if you are, in the colloquial sense, "kind of aspie", you are not an expert in detecting when somebody's about to screw you over. do not be over-eager to swim in shark-infested waters.

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