2026-01-16

doberman

Niko McCarty profiles Cultivarium and their electroporation methodology framework in Asimov Press, an interesting example of a biotech services company.

Anastasia Gamick announces Merge Labs, a Sam Altman-backed brain-computer interfaces company, clearly aiming for BCI-mediated human-AI fusion. Related, among the talks at Vitalism Bay 2025 is one by Eon Labs on human brain connectome mapping and emulation.

Erik Hoel against claims of AI consciousness, using what appears to be the lookup table argument. It’s not clear to me that frontier LLMs actually can be emulated using a lookup table; it seems to me that sufficiently broad definition of lookup tables that can incorporate context would have to claim that Alzheimer’s patients are no longer conscious¹.

Jayson Fritz-Stibbe on Neural Foundry. I’m actually pretty fine with this account: firstly because I am “writing for AI”, which in some sense also includes bots; but also because I find it rather difficult to view any online interaction as being “real” in any case, so it’s all the same to me. Anyway, this reminds me of a funny tweet I saw by Sam Hammond recently on detecting bot replies.

Nan Ransohoff on “general managers” for solving ownerless problems. It seems to me a better name for this role might be “consul”, which also explains why such roles are not very common, because the scarce element here is not funding but political legitimacy. Tangentially related, James Montavon on the efficacy of Far-UVC for elimination of microbes, and Cremieux brings his Twitter crusade against pit bulls to Substack.

David Deek on economic reasons behind fertility decline in South Korea². Somewhat related, Naomi Kanakia with a short story about people who consider themselves to be undesirable, and Pandora Delaney on pragmatic methods to filter for potential partners.

Eurydice response to an article by Kitten on “stochastic martyrdom”, part of a broader discussion between her and GoblinOdds on recent political events in Minnesota³.

Rebecca Darley on the evolution of the Justinian Codex.

Alexander Kaplan in Republic of Letters with a review of Unsong.

1. Aaron Zinger makes this argument in the comments

2. I’m rather not a fan of theories that explain low fertility in East Asia as being caused by sexism, because if sexism reduced the replacement all the way down to 0.8, then the environment must be really well and truly unbearable. When in reality, my impression is that the level of gender conservatism I see is more or less similar to that of Eastern or Southern Europe. Similarly, when people describe the tyranny of elevated beauty standards in Korea, to me the most parsimonious explanation is that, as in New York, the number of men there who are considered to be generally marriageable is insufficient to meet the demand. And in that determination of eligibility, it doesn’t seem to me as if one’s willingness to perform household chores is the primary factor in consideration.

Edit (Jan 23): Here’s another example of this sort of claim, by Darby Saxe, who argues that because South Korean fertility is lower than Scandinavian, it must mean that increasing feminism in South Korea will raise their fertility rates. Presumably, if one were to then ask why Saudi Arabian birth rates are higher than both at similar GDP per capita, one would say that’s because the women there are oppressed, and then if one were to ask about Israel there would be some answer about high-fertility subpopulations, but then how is it that one is so certain that between East Asia and Scandinavia the primary issue is actually male chauvinism? The feminist approach to fertility rates smells to me exactly like String Theory and all the other “scientific” just-so stories where the conclusion is already decided ahead of time.

It seems to me that the proper way to test a hypothesis is to isolate a single variable as much as possible, keeping everything else the same. For example, in South Korea, if a man signalled increased willingness to do household chores, would that increase his expected fertility rate? My own hypothesis as to the issue is as following: In Seoul, salaries are low and living costs are sufficiently high that it takes an average full-time job just to barely support a single person. However, expected work hours are also extremely long, meaning that if one were to have children, at least one parent has to leave the workforce. Therefore, it is economically infeasible for most families to have children. One could test this by, for example, giving some families in Seoul free housing and seeing if fertility rates rise; I expect that they would. This is also explanatory for why gender discourse is the way it is, because women who complain about male unwillingness to help out around the house do so expecting to be able to get married and have children, and if one already assumes that the economic issues are already settled, then one negotiates for a better position after the fact. Taking such claims at face value without testing them falls into the classic trap of mobilizing the entire gender to expand the specific causes of upper middle class women. On that note, interesting interview between Richard Reeves and Gloria Steinem.

Usual caveats apply; this is not a claim against feminism or men doing household chores.

3. It seems to me to be a most basic principle of governance that laws which are widely unpopular should not be enforced. There are related arguments against Freddie de Boer’s inductive claim that any intervention in Iran is doomed to fail, because while imposing democracy from above is indeed quite difficult, in Iran there is both organic demand for democracy, as well as significantly more of what Richard Hanania would describe as “elite human capital”, which would be able to see it through.