Best of Twitter - Week of August 16, 2021 [2/2]
We report on a truly astonishing case (open access): D.W., a person, without neurological abnormalities who has learned to change his pupil size voluntarily, as it stands at direct control. (Long but interesting thread following): doi.org/10.1016/j.ijps…
^ STUDY MORE WEIRD PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“In my experience, nudges usually fail to have *any* recognizable impact at all.” thebehavioralscientist.com/articles/the-d… (h/t @Cpranger12)
@ctbeiser This finding has nothing to do with Fast Grants or Covid-19 science and has been ringing in my ears. How do these incorporeal bureaucracies sleep at night?
^ great recommendations
The biotech startup ecosystem is dominated by a culture that requires every executive team to have done it before. Many companies are even created by VCs internally. But a new model is emerging -- the founder-led biotech. Why I think this is the future:
if intelligence increases the odds of a person being correct, but increases the odds of them being a persuasive arguer much more, is it rational to distrust people much more intelligent than you?
^ one of the best posts of all time
Second, we evaluate whether these models can interact with a human to iteratively refine their outputs. We find that 4 turns of dialog with a human can double the number of problems solved by the model.
^ thread
New horrific state of conciousness just dropped
Massimo @Rainmaker1973
Small blobs of human brain grown in a dish have been coaxed into forming rudimentary eyes, which respond to light by sending signals to the rest of the brain tissue [read more: buff.ly/3jZLhEl]
Incredible. German military plane—one that could fit hundreds—sent to Kabul with much fanfare. It leaves with only 7 people on board.
Others weren’t on the official list. German bureaucracy at its finest.
bild.de/politik/auslan…
Erik Marquardt @ErikMarquardt
A lot of finance apps in the US use services such as Plaid to help you connect accounts and make payments
When this is done, Plaid takes your username and password to login to your third-party account. Then they also scrape your transactions and sell them
(yes, when you link your bank accounts via Plaid and alternatives, you are basically being phished; giving out your credentials+2fa to a third party that then uses them to scrape information on you and sell it, while trying to hide this from you. consumer finance is...painful)
Great thread.
tl;dr Clever Econ 101 analysis suggested that war on opium poppy in Afghanistan would mostly raise prices to farmers not reduce quantity and divert production to Taliban controlled regions increasing their tax revenues and power--and that is what happened.
Jeffrey P. Clemens @jeffreypclemens
As documented in a recent report by the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime, Afghan poppy cultivation has if anything drifted gradually upward since the US first ramped up its expenditures on the effort to suppress opium production (roughly in 2005): unodc.org/documents/crop…
9/19
