Jonathan Berman

“The job ain’t about telling the story you like the most” Bunk Moreland

[Jonathan Berman @JZBerman]

This is an example of an ideological sunk cost. It happens in all areas of life (beliefs about parenting, politics, religion, nutrition, investing, etc.). And though academics are subject to this error, they are likely less prone to it than experts in other domains of life.

[Kevin Bass @kevinnbass]

Imagine spending your whole life becoming an academic expert. Then a random guy online tells you that you are wrong about your own field. And he's right. But you can never admit that. Because it would mean admitting that your life was a lie. That is the dilemma of many academics.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

This has quietly been a miracle month in medicine.

In the last 5 weeks we’ve got news on:

- retatrutide, the triple agonist GLP-1 from Lilly, basically melting fat and body-wide inflammation at record levels
- RevMed’s new pancreatic cancer drug showing unprecedented abilities to extend life
- small trial of a one-and-done PCSK9 gene editing therapy for slashing LDL cholesterol
- Mayo’s AI-assisted radiology showing vastly improved cancer detection
- this new therapy for metastatic solid tumors

This stuff is at varying levels of evidence. Retatrutide is ~100% on its way, other stuff needs more clinical trial data. But put it together and we’re maybe on the verge of majorly reducing the mortality of heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in America.

[Jonathan Berman @JZBerman]

The fact that AI can write fluently and cheaply means that the value of institutional backing goes up. Getting accepted into a prestigious outlet signals that a piece has been vetted as worth your time and isn’t just slop.

[Jonathan Berman @JZBerman]

One problem with this argument is that the negative externalities of creating value are not properly priced into markets. Value creators get away with certain harms that fall on the shoulders of whole societies.

[Boris @bfdkta]

@Noahpinion Rich Americans already paid their debt by creating value for the country. Their personal gain is a small fraction of what they create.

[Peter Wildeford🇺🇸🚀 @peterwildeford]

THE GENIE: I have ten jellybeans. Three contain poison that kills you instantly. The other seven each give you 100 years of good life and good fortune. What do you do?

THE NORMAL PERSON: Ah, no thank you.

THE ACCELERATIONIST: We have to move quickly! *immediately eats all ten jellybeans* *dies*

ME: What if we do science to figure out which jellybeans are poisonous and then not eat those, but do eat the others?

[Jonathan Berman @JZBerman]

One problem is that spaces like these reward for a mix of entertainment quality / celebrity (both of which we care a lot more about humanness) and solid arguments or takes (for which we ought to care less about this). 3/3

[Jonathan Berman @JZBerman]

People care too much on here about whether something is written by a human or LLM. Is it informative? Is it epistemically sound? If so, it is valuable regardless of how it was created. 1/3

[Jonathan Berman @JZBerman]

There should be systems in place that reward informativeness / sound epistemics regardless of how it is written. 2/3

[Dan Goldstein @dggoldst]

Seems like a good time to trot this out again

[Jonathan Berman @JZBerman]

4) Americans are solving some of these problems (restricting fentanyl; self-driving cars) but not others (guns).
5) Europeans are not adopting AC quick enough.
6) GLP-1 drugs will help both, but likely Americans more because they start off with greater obesity to begin with.

[Jonathan Berman @JZBerman]

All of the following can be true at the same time:
1) Europeans live longer than Americans.
2) One mistake Europeans make (no AC) kills them when they are old.
3) The major mistakes Americans make (OD; car crashes; guns) kills them when they are young.

[Tyler John @tyler_m_john]

Annual reminder for the Brits that you can just buy an A/C unit for your house or place of work. You don't have to forego two weeks of sleep and work every year, that's a choice you're making.

[Jonathan Berman @JZBerman]

@RodneyTickle But even for all cuisines, Thai strongly dominates in # of restaurants per people or descendants from that country living in the US. There are too many Mexican, Italian and Greek people/descendants living in the US to get even in the ballpark of Thai.

[Jonathan Berman @JZBerman]

Thai cuisine is an outlier when it comes to popularity in the US. There are approx 4k Thai restaurants in the US per 100k Thai people living in the US. Next closest Asian cuisine is Japanese at 1.5k / 100k Japanese people. 1/2

[Jonathan Berman @JZBerman]

@RodneyTickle I meant to clarify that this is restricted to Asian cuisines.

[Jonathan Berman @JZBerman]

@StefanFSchubert What gives rise to this shoddy reasoning? And how essentially is knowing this to combating it?

[Dan Goldstein @dggoldst]

-Harvard limiting to 20% As
-Princeton going to in-person testing
-Arxiv penalizing fake references

1 Implement a trust-based system
2 Observe it works fine at first
3 Enjoy blissful period of denial
4 Confront evidence
5 Make ruies

[Jonathan Berman @JZBerman]

If you pay them, they will come. Paying talent will attract talent who will then put this money to great use.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

One of the most important and under appreciated trends in the world right now.

1. 100s of billions of dollars will soon be available to solve big problems (making the world resilient to ASI, ending factory farming, etc).
2. The projects and organizations which will turn billions of 2027/28 dollars into impact need to be started NOW.
3. We need really talented people to start and run and work for these new projects. What @nanransohoff calls general managers, who feel personally resposible for solving one of the world’s important problems.

What is especially scarce are detailed visions about what making AI go well looks like. These will help inform what problems these new projects ought to work on.

[Jonathan Berman @JZBerman]

Journals shouldn’t care about formatting until acceptance. They should care about openness, transparency, hallucinated references, and other measures of underlying rigor that actually matter—and whose benefits carry over to every submission.

[John Horton @johnjhorton]

I would be mortified to have a typo---never mind a hallucinated citation---in a paper. But you see from twitter threads that some people think having a tidy bibliography is the definition of good research. They've got a 6th grade report-in-clear-plastic-binder view of the process