2026-03-19

the last one for life

Scott Alexander with a recursive retelling of The Egg in classic whimsical-philosophical style.

Viator in Terra on the structure of Medieval era political economy as the emergence of independent power centers following the inability of the Roman elite to project their influence through their former territories, a good description of what exactly “state capacity” really means. Somewhat related, Benjamin Lyons on living systems as the outcome of an alignment process which produces an identifiable agent capable of unified action.

Free Radicals Podcast interview with Jose Luis Ricón on his views on cellular reprogramming, which pretty unique in being very optimistic while still recognizing how interconnected and complicated the aging process is likely to be. On that note, Michael Levin has an interesting interview with Thomas Seyfried on his theory of cancer as a metabolic disorder. It occurs to me that there’s a way one could fuse the two theories of cancer as a DNA or mitochondrial disorder, if cancer is actually part of an adaptive mechanism for maintaining the quality of mitochondrial DNA, as per the Muller’s ratchet based theories of Nick Lane. That is, if enough mitochondria in a cell have mutated such that they are no longer capable of oxidative phosphorylation, the cell induces apoptosis for the purpose of eliminating its population of defective mitochondria, either directly, or by engaging in behaviors which engage the assistance of the body’s immune system. If so, then cancer results when the process initiated by mutations in mtDNA fails to terminate in apoptosis due to additional mutations in nuclear DNA.

Core Memory Podcast with Paul Conyngham on the story of his custom mRNA cancer vaccine. It’s quite interesting it seems pretty clear that he actually a very limited understanding of what he’s actually doing and the underlying biology, so this is actually in some sense vibe-coded. Personally speaking, this actually makes me feel even more optimistic about extending this approach.

Aella has an interesting piece on attracting disproportionate attention by noticing the methods which other people are not taking advantage of. It seems to me that the general aversion to marketing comes from the sense that this sort of gaming corrupts the heuristic which makes it easy to gauge quality directly from popularity. That is to say, if attention can be obtained “at a discount” to intrinsic quality, then accurate assessment now requires an additional normalization by tracing back to the origin. This isn’t a complaint about Aella, because if anything she is underrated due to the topics that she covers. But it’s not clear to me how effective attention-arbitraging would be for others that do not suffer from similar headwinds to their organic growth.

Aria Schrecker overview of the work of JSanilac. Interesting to read alongside this article by Defending Feminism, which notes the distinction between those who view various forms of expression on the spectrum between entirely personal or fully instrumental.

Roger’s Bacon bragging about his newborn daughter.

Andy McKenzie neurobiology linkthread.

Daniel Frank linkthread linkthread.