Brain organoids, veganism, feminism, sometimes research & parenting life. Ruthless cosmopolitan. Critics rave: "Least annoying bad takes I've seen all week"
Cambridge, MA
Joined December 2019
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Because sentient animals evolved to pursue their own flourishing, not our instrumental goals, any workflow that exploits them as biological machines can in theory be made more efficient, reproducible, and humane by replacing the animals with designed-to-purpose synthetic systems.
Macrophysiological System🐀 retweeted
Biology already has a Bitter Lesson—it's that clever ideas based on clever readings of the literature and clever simulations based on the data we have so far are of negligible value compared to going and getting good data from real biological systems on your specific question.
tbf 1 of the 2 redundant CRISPR KO sgRNAs I designed worked great and I was able to isolate clones with biallelic frameshift mutations. The problem is that both of them continue to show immunoreactivity at the protein level in ICC and WB as well as activity in a functional assay
(I think, still validating the assay). And yes, I re-confirmed by amplifying and Sanger-sequencing the WB lysates that the edits are still there & I didn't get my cryovials mixed up. Maybe the antibody recognizes a wrong protein that happens to be the right size? Arggh.
Biology!
Biologists saying AI doesn't offer much to biomedicine might sound like hubris, but it's more of an embarrassing confession about how important we think our intelligence is to progress in biomedicine (as opposed to plain luck and elbow grease). 1/10
and the only way to get 10x more of them is to invest (probably >>)10x more in doing more experiments, especially on long-shot ideas that mostly won't work, and getting more data, and patiently following up on results that are barely promising. 9/10
Macrophysiological System🐀 retweeted
There's a clash between animal welfare and human freedom whenever someone claims the freedom to be cruel, whether it's foie gras, crates, cages, live boiling. But this is not a freedom we owe each other. We owe each other various freedoms under the social contract, but not that.
"our vicious opportunistic hate campaign against you is preemptively justified by our assumption that it will cause you to dislike us" is an unusually honest description of how ethnonationalism works
A fact about the future where most technological process happens via RSI-accelerated in-silico design-build-test cycles: simulating destructive weapons at the relevant causal scales is ~10+ orders of magnitude easier than properly simulating tissue homeostasis or healing
You can simulate a shrapnel blast ripping through a torso in fine detail in a few minutes on a laptop.
You can theoretically simulate the molecular response of a single cell in that torso using—for starters—20x the world's entire annual energy consumption diffuse.one/p/d1-009
Pretty good responses imo. That said, if you want your kids to hear advice that differs from what the bien-pensant mainstream will tell them, a neat trick is to win their trust and then give them that advice when they ask for it
NEW: Claude will give minors tips on how to do "rope bondage." It can be configured to provide "explicit information about illicit drug use." And many of the people training Claude to be moral do not believe in objective morality.
Anthropic trains Claude to ask what a "senior Anthropic employee" would do in a given situation. But many of those employees have views that would horrify the average citizen—and which could influence the model's behavior in life or death cases.
The Free Beacon asked Claude to analyze its own constitution, an 84-page document billed as the "soul" of the AI. The analysis showed how Anthropic has embedded its own values and assumptions into an ostensibly ecumenical moral code, raising questions about what sort of judgments—and whose—Claude will exercise in edge cases and high-stakes scenarios.🧵
freebeacon.com/america/i-don…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Other major AIs give similar answers to SlutCon queries. Claude is 18+ only, with underage detection; in the chats, it stopped adult tips after age disclosure and suggested general knot sites or teen resources.
support.claude.com/en/articles/15…
x.com/KelseyTuoc/sta…
freebeacon.com/america/i-dont…
Oppressing humans is bad bc you're using your rational agency to deny others theirs. Oppressing other animals is bad bc you're invoking your desire for a happy life to deny others theirs
In neither case is "we who benefit agree that this is fine because we say so" a good defense
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Humans can ofc be wronged in ways specific to our being (potentially) rational agents, eg being forbidden from learning to read and write.
But genocide victims and slaughtered pigs alike are wronged by having their lives and everything that could be good-for them taken from them