Best of Twitter - Week of August 16, 2021 [1/2]

Top things I did in college, ranked by ex-post usefulness:
1. Revive an effective altruism student group
2. Start a blog
3. Intern at GiveWell
4. Build a course catalog website
5. Contra dance a lot
6. Fail abjectly at starting a startup
...
~50. Classes

We are releasing an API to turn English into code.
Make a computer game from scratch in a few minutes.
youtube.com/watch?v=SGUCcj…
btw: some people suspect that I am an AI in this video.


Some links to research on how to hack air-gapped systems and more.
A superhuman AI will break your security, no matter what


Related to this @tylercowen column, a graph that (frankly) shocked me when I first saw it:
Teen suicide rates drop by 15-20% in summer months when school is out – whereas for older groups, suicides rise then
(A drop in December during winter break, too)
basilhalperin.com/essays/school-…


tylercowen @tylercowen
^ thread

How good is the West’s model of Chinese tech/politics?
I was intrigued by this thread that circulated through tech Twitter a few months back.
It suggested that China’s unicorn birth rate had fallen to 3 in 2021, relative to 132 YTD in the US.

Rui Ma 马睿 @ruima

This graphic was boosted by many POIs in the western tech sphere (Balaji, P Collison, etc-Rui Ma herself is a China tech reporter/investor which gave cred)

Balaji Srinivasan @balajis

But within a few days it was shown by Chinese sources that the actual Chinese YTD number was ~38!

Rui Ma 马睿 @ruima
^ thread; (I also totally believed the first number of just 3 unicorns…..)

Do you ever walk into a Whole Foods and just marvel at the amount of insane pseudoscience rich people buy into?

@tiredgenerally When I worked at Whole Foods as a teen our big seller was shark cartilage supplements, fueled by a book called "Sharks Don't Get Cancer" that posited that sharks don't get cancer so if you take shark cartilage supplements you won't get cancer either. That's it. That's the science
unrelated tweet:

The fact that Tim Ferriss stopped taking all supplements besides magnesium should tell you everything you need to know.

The F.D.A. approved the first Lyme vaccine in 1998. Then, in a rare occurrence in modern medicine, it disappeared.

Quarantined section

Peter Daszak's letter that started this whole "lab leak is a conspiracy" campaign is very instructive on how elite consensus is formed.
There is no ominous conspiracy in dimly lit rooms. Just a sleazy sociopath smooth talking his gullible colleagues into saving his ass.


Check the time stamp. Have a read. Recall what everyone was saying at the time.

Balaji Srinivasan @balajis
^ Balaji’s tweet is from January 30, 2020