biosecurity, cryptography, meaning, tofu
Boston, MA
Joined April 2021
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@meaningness is one of the thinkers who's influenced me most.
Prompted by @saffronhuang and @humford, I wrote a reader's guide to his work. Topics include the invention of Vipassana, Heideggerian AI, and how to do science. Excerpts:
Max Langenkamp retweeted
Wow, OpenAI created an essentially fake "parents and kids" coalition to advance their policy goals... 👀
OpenAI has been doing some brazen dark arts politics stuff this year. Hard to imagine how this helps build the social preparedness for AI that Altman says he wants...
A bunch of flies are in a capped jar. You place the jar on
a scale. The scale registers the most weight when the
flies are
29%sitting at bottom
0%flying around inside
71%doesn't matter
7 votes • Final results Max Langenkamp retweeted
the mystery of the ‘placebo effect’ dissolves once you seriously consider ourselves as collective intelligences
we coordinate with top down (ie ‘nose is itchy’ → contract bicep) and bottom up (odor molecules → ‘i smell burning).
‘thoughts’ are a placebo effect — you depolarize 30% of your cell membranes because you need to ‘work out’.
someone in a white lab coat is another credible top-down signal to your collective intelligence that you are safe. if you believe you are safe your cells coordinate differently
as benedetti says, words and drugs have the same mechanism of action
"Almost everything is a placebo effect."
Michael Levin (@drmichaellevin) argues our bodies translate thoughts into physical actions as a top-down information processing system.
High-level thoughts must trigger physical changes in our cells. Even simple molecular networks gain beliefs that guide their future reactions.
If thoughts move muscles, how can't we have placebo effects?
Max Langenkamp retweeted
the first human genome took 13 years and $2.3b to sequence.
friends and i sequenced my dna in a bedroom for <$1200.
the first human genome took 13 years and $2.3b to sequence.
friends and i sequenced my dna in a bedroom for <$1200.
to find snps (like lactose tolerance or brca1), you need multiple reads per region.
we mostly had 0–1; not enough for real analysis.
ideal X use case:
giant room with a bulletin board where my timeline’s tweets are printed on literal cardboard and updated hourly.
To post, I write my tweet on paper with a marker and slide it into a slot
something sad about scientists turning to LLMs as source of truth.
no more physical chemistry, just ask chatgpt about the amino acid sequence
seeing the slow enfeeblement of brilliant colleagues
Max Langenkamp retweeted
How I’d source Reddit for solutions to chronic illness:
1. sort by best believable successes (min. time money danger, n>30)
2. interview successes (are they like most people?)
3. articulate mechanism behind solution (is it consistent with sota biology)
cost: 1 FTE, <6mo
Observing some people close to me with chronic health conditions, it's striking how useful Reddit frequently ends up being. I think a core reason is because trials aren’t run for a lot of things, and Reddit provides a kind of emergent intelligence that sits between that which any single physician can marshal and the full rigor of clinical trials.
Why aren’t trials run for a lot of things? Well, they’re of course slow and expensive (median cost of $19M for a pivotal trial in 2015[1]; after adjusting for inflation and other phases, maybe that corresponds to a total of $40M today?). But they’re also hard to fund when the intervention in question lacks IP protection since the ensuing knowledge can’t be monetized. As such, trials for diet, over-the-counter supplements, and lifestyle interventions are under-pursued. To give one prosaic example, lots of people think that magnesium improves sleep, but, as far as I know, no trial has ever been run assessing its ability to improve sleep in non-elderly adults without sleep disorders.
So, Reddit — in a pretty unstructured way — makes a limited kind of “compounding knowledge” possible. Best practices can be noticed and can imperfectly start to accumulate. For people with chronic health problems, this is a big deal, and I’ve heard lots of stories between “I found something that made my condition much more manageable” all the way to “I found a permanent cure in a weird comment buried deep in a thread”. (Of course, one also sees this outside of medical conditions. I’ve enjoyed the recommended routine in the BodyWeightFitness subreddit, as a comparable kind of distilled practical wisdom[2].)
An interesting and somewhat more formalized example of this approach was recently used for long COVID and published earlier this year[3]. After surveying 3,900 individuals, the paper analyzes patient-reported outcomes for 150 different treatments, yielding the figure reproduced below. There are evidently no silver bullets, but it is striking that, say, about half of people find that antihistamines are helpful. I know a number of people who found the learnings from this study to be impactful in improving their daily quality-of-life.
Seeing this paper and the Reddit experience makes me wonder whether the approach could somehow be scaled: is there a kind of observational, self-reported clinical trial that could sit between Reddit and these manual approaches? Should there be a platform that covers all major chronic conditions, administers ongoing surveys, and tracks longitudinal outcomes?
I don’t really know what the best way to go about this would be, but it feels to me that there could be something important here. There’s a lot of latent data in patients’ subjective experiences that is not today being properly gathered or analyzed.
