2025-08-01
1, 3, 2
Scott Alexander on Herasight exiting stealth. As an aside, apparently it’s a bit of an open secret that Nucleus Genomics has a sort of loose interpretation of the truth, which is unfortunate because I have my genome sequenced with them. But it’s totally unclear to me exactly what that means, whether that’s merely that their analysis is overhyped, or something more problematic like my results actually being imputed and not actually being whole genome sequencing.
Erik Hoel on when children should start to read, as well an anecdotal comment by Kelsey Piper. Speaking of which, apparently something about her role at Future Perfect is changing, which I assume has something to do with PEPFAR, but I have no inside information here.
Lionel Page has a good overview for why people tend not to change their minds in political arguments. Speaking of which, Derek Thompson has more against the antitrust left, and in the ensuing argument both Derek and Matt Stoller describe Lance Lambert's statement as evidence supporting their own positions. As an aside, I wonder what changed since Derek and Ezra described themselves as pathologically agreeable, that’s resulting in such an escalation in the tone of this discourse.
Gabe Menchaca at Eating Policy on government “leading by example”, using internal regulations on minutiae on things like paper versus plastic straws to try to alter broader behavior. Personally, I think it’s really hard to overemphasize the fact that most people can only do one thing at a time.
ChinaTalk notes government directives on AI for education in China. This is something I’ve been thinking about actually, because I think the whole tutoring ban sort of implies that there should be a lot of demand for this, but unfortunately I haven’t found anyone to discuss this with. My impression is that what consumers want here is different from what the government wants, and the extent to which the government tries to micromanage this will determine how things turn out. Somewhat related, Afra Wang hosts an interesting discussion with Du Lei and Han Hua on Chinese attitudes towards technology and the AI ecosystem.
Harnidh Kaur has a post hyping the emerging market for midrange-priced perfumes in India. Which is interesting because my understanding is India is the place for cheap clones of premium scents. Anyway, there’s something I’ve never understood about the marketing for perfumes, which usually imply both association and individualization. But the logical conclusion of this is that you should just learn how scents work and make your own, and indeed this is what they do in TPOT. I feel like if you want demand for perfumes to increase, what you should do is reproduce this pipeline for a more casual crowd, some way to create your own personal scent based on a combination of your preferences and your natural musk. Somewhat related, I saw this interesting tweet on personalized television, but it’s actually unclear to me to what extent the AI-powered future will be highly personalized. It seems to me that for most media, people generally prefer passive consumption, with a certain level of required passion in order for even the desire to create, which will only be limited to one or two areas of each person’s life. If so, then some part of every medium will be personalizable and personalized, but most will probably remain passive and common.
Katherine Dee has a take on plagiarism and originality, and perhaps related, there have been some tweets in TPOT about how imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. While we’re at it, Tommy Blanchard has a summary of ideas around the mechanisms of creativity.
Astral Codex Ten has a reader review of Joan of Arc, la Pucelle1. Much of this review is about the sort of messy relationship between rationalism and religion, something Jessica Hullman has written about today. Personally, I disagree that the areligious are persecutory or dogmatic. According to my model, faith is when one’s justified true belief is at odds versus one’s actual belief, and I think the discomfort people feel in neutral atmospheres is primarily because they are accustomed to using social consensus as a means to deal with the resulting internal dissonance. Many sources note that there are a surprising number of hardcore zealots among scientists or rationalists, presumably a selection effect for those whose opinions rely less on external influence.
Kamal Nahas in Asimov Press, with a description of an interesting biological experiment investigating the behavior of phages, beautiful because it operates like a physics experiment, with results derived from mechanical principles and visual inspection. Also, Niko McCarty biology linkthread.
Works in Progress is hiring for a daily linkthread. Unclear to me that this is a good idea, since I think the best linkthreads represent a sort of personal expression, while those put out by organizations probably require a different editorial focus. Still applied though.
Slutstack on choking discourse.
This topic is also covered pretty entertainingly by Takeover Pod.