Ankit Ranjan

Sample Healthcare | Climbing the heels of giants

[Ankit Ranjan @ankitr_]

@kshithappens congrats!!!!

[Tara Seshan @tarstarr]

@zebriez @paulg I think there is a fundamental difference between them! The goal of the FDE is to make the specific customer deployment successful. The goal of a “Collison install” is to make the product successful. That difference really changes everything.

[Ankit Ranjan @ankitr_]

Indians are about to take some Ls

[William MacAskill @willmacaskill]

In collaboration with Christian Tarsney, I’ve developed a new theory of population ethics, which I call the Saturation View.

I think that, from a purely intellectual perspective, it’s probably the best idea I’ve ever had. It was certainly great fun to work on.

The motivation is that many views of population ethics, like the total view, suffer from some major problems. Some are already widely discussed:

The Repugnant Conclusion: For any utopian outcome, there’s always another outcome containing an enormous number of barely-positive lives that is better.

Fanaticism: For any guaranteed utopian outcome, there’s always some gamble with a vanishingly small probability of an even better outcome that has higher expected value.

Infinitarian Paralysis: Given that the universe contains an infinite number of both positive and negative lives, no finite or infinite change to the world makes any difference to overall value.

These are pretty bad!

But there’s another less-discussed problem, too:

The Monoculture Problem: Given fixed resources, the best-possible future consists essentially only of qualitatively identical replicas of a small number of lives.

Essentially all extant impartial accounts of population ethics suffer from the monoculture problem. It follows from Pareto and Anonymity alone — you don't need totalism. And perfectly-replicable digital minds mean this is a real issue that future generations will face.

But a monoculture seems far from ideal. Endless galaxies containing nothing but the same blissful experience, repeated and repeated, seem impoverished; like a song with only one note.

The Saturation view deals with all these problems at once, using broadly the same machinery for all of them.

The core idea is that the realisation value of a type of life (or experience) is determined by both the wellbeing of that life, and by how many very similar lives there are in the world. Endlessly creating replicas of the same identical life becomes progressively less valuable, tending to an upper bound. The total value of a world is given by the integral of realisation value over the space of types.

Think of types of life as forming a landscape. Adding different types of life lights up different parts of the landscape. The value of the world is given by how fully illuminated the landscape is.

Why does this help? In brief:

Monoculture: Because there are diminishing returns to increasing wellbeing of very similar types, there’s greater value in having a diversity of lives.

Repugnant Conclusion: The classic path to the Repugnant Conclusion requires trading a utopian world for an enormous population of barely-positive lives. But, on the Saturation view, barely-positive lives can only illuminate a tiny corner of the landscape. The path to the Repugnant Conclusion is blocked.

Fanaticism: Total achievable value is bounded above. That means no tiny-probability gamble can have arbitrarily high expected value.

Infinite ethics: In any infinite universe, the value of a world is finite and well-defined — even if some locations have infinite wellbeing. Unlike other approaches, this does not depend on spatiotemporal structure or choice of ultrafilter.

Separability: Like nearly all non-totalist views, Saturationism is non-separable — background populations can affect how we rank options. But the violations are tame: populations with sufficiently different populations simply add, and at small scales the view behaves just like totalism.

If the Saturation View is right, then the best future isn't the one where we've found the optimal experience and copy-pasted it across the cosmos. The best future is the one where we've gone exploring, and we've fully lit up the landscape of possible experiences.

[Ankit Ranjan @ankitr_]

@kevinakwok when's the blogpost?

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

Introducing workspace agents in ChatGPT—shared agents that can handle complex tasks and long-running workflows across tools and teams.

[Ankit Ranjan @ankitr_]

@rayefull What was annoying about it?

[Ankit Ranjan @ankitr_]

@OpenAI Google Translate could never

[Ankit Ranjan @ankitr_]

@owl_posting @charlesxjyang

[Ankit Ranjan @ankitr_]

Viruses kill ~14% of marine biomass daily(!)

"A teaspoon of seawater typically contains about fifty million viruses. […] It is estimated marine viruses kill 20% of the microorganism biomass every day."

https://t.co/o8eF2Hak75

[Ankit Ranjan @ankitr_]

The Genesis Mission should allow models to be trained on the FDA’s corpus of drug applications.

The US Government has, by far, the largest collective dataset of human clinical evidence. We should use this evidence to learn what works.

[Dean W. Ball @deanwball]

Very excited to see this AI for Science Executive Order—the Genesis Mission. The Administration has appropriately ambitious goals here; we may be on the verge of world-changing breakthroughs. Congratulations to all involved!

[Ankit Ranjan @ankitr_]

TIL about git push --force-with-lease

https://t.co/PHFT20q2af

[Ankit Ranjan @ankitr_]

@aditabrm what does this get me

[Ankit Ranjan @ankitr_]

Over 40% of oncology patients in the US are treated by a provider using Sample.

[Ankit Ranjan @ankitr_]

Filter coffee benefits from individual attention while cold brew benefits from economies of scale

[Ankit Ranjan @ankitr_]

@ashleydzhang Different part of Asia but the Western Ghats are beautiful

[Ankit Ranjan @ankitr_]

@spikebrehm we moved from nextjs to pure vite + router because next dev was unusably slow (10+ second navigation speeds in dev). pita to migrate, but huge uplift in dev speed

[Ankit Ranjan @ankitr_]

@kitvolta injury lawyers beware

[Ankit Ranjan @ankitr_]

Am I missing a faster approach in the in the Google Docs -> https://t.co/f0fm8yhtHv -> o3 loop?