Best of Twitter - Week of August 9, 2021
Aug 15, 2021

David Holz@DavidSHolz
Only costs $150Bn (25% USA yrly military budget) to deploy 2000Km of digitally controllable micron-thick solar sunshades which would allow us to variably adjust the temperature of the Earth. Blocks up to 2% of sunlight, controllable instantly from Earth (by rotating shades).

6:28 PM · Feb 14, 2020
210 Reposts · 1.1K Likes

Alexey Guzey (newscience.org/jobs)@alexeyguzey
Probably the craziest thing about all of this for me is that my piece on the book has gotten >250k views by now and still not a single neuroscientist or sleep scientist commented meaningfully on the merits of my accusations. Only Andrew Gelman (a statistician) picked them up.

Alexey Guzey (newscience.org/jobs) @alexeyguzey
Keep thinking about the fact that Walker falsified data and plainly lied about the most basic facts about sleep like the relationships between sleep and mortality and sleep and cancer and yet *nobody gives a fuck* - neither other public intellectuals, nor UC Berkeley, nor media https://t.co/gutGQavCHn
8:03 PM · Aug 13, 2021
19 Reposts · 229 Likes
^ thread

Cold Takes@ColdTakes12
Digital People Would Be An Even Bigger Deal
cold-takes.com
Digital People Would Be An Even Bigger Deal

5:58 PM · Jul 27, 2021
1 Repost · 17 Likes

Hannah Neprash@HNeprash
@Health_Affairs @ml_barnett @AnupamBJena @yhgrad @athenahealth We compared patients treated before vs. after someone with the flu. Patients treated after were more likely to revisit in the next two weeks…with the flu.

8:06 PM · Aug 2, 2021
23 Reposts · 52 Likes

Whyvert@whyvert
In a coin toss, what's the chance of getting two heads in a row?
Someone had the brilliant idea of asking politicians.
77% of UK Labour MPs didn't know, only 23% did.
It was about half and half with Conservatives.

3:11 PM · Aug 6, 2021
151 Reposts · 1.02K Likes

Joscha Bach@Plinz
Considering a donation to Wikipedia? They sure need your money, how else can they keep doubling their budget every three years? But you could also donate to SciHub instead.


Vitamin D 🌞 @DanielleFong
sci-hub is fundraising. if you're a cryptozillionaire, maybe kick in some bitcoin to help free access to scientific papers
https://t.co/tfRuvSKPEc
10:11 PM · Aug 8, 2021
14 Reposts · 114 Likes

Sam Sinai@samsinai
A thing that helped me leave academia was a “normal” review proc where the editor maintained that if “novelty was compromised” before acceptance then they would reject it, and then delayed accept upon pos reviews by months for clerical reasons. Imagine if my future was tied to it https://t.co/3aPx7MdREF

Alex Bisson @Archaeon_Alex
knowing that a friend's paper was rejected after 3 years under review at @Nature is just devastating. Asking for animal data that takes years and just claim "the hypothesis is not novel anymore" is low. It's irresponsible to research money spent. Reviewers also need to do better.
3:22 PM · Aug 8, 2021
48 Likes

Haydn Belfield@HaydnBelfield
71 serious lab accidents.
60 nuclear close-calls papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
With these incredibly dangerous techs, we're playing 'technology roulette' cnas.org/publications/r…

David Manheim @davidmanheim
Are there lab accidents and other anthropogenic disease sources? Yes.
Are some of those events of a severity that could lead to outbreaks? Also yes.
Here's our newly published list of 71 such incidents from 1975-2016 in @F1000Research:
https://t.co/lyOBTOObfz
9:46 PM · Aug 8, 2021
4 Reposts · 16 Likes

John Arnold@JohnArnoldFndtn
The median tenure for superintendent of the 10 largest public school systems is just 4 months. The average tenure is 2 years 9 months.
The median tenure for CEO of the 10 largest corporations is >12 years. The average is >16 years.
1:00 PM · Aug 10, 2021
34 Reposts · 170 Likes

John Arnold@JohnArnoldFndtn
Tenure of CEOs of the 10 largest corporations (mkt cap):
Amazon 1 month
Visa 5 years
Google 6 years
Microsoft 8 years
Apple 10 years
JPM 16 years
Facebook 17 years
Tesla 18 years
Nvidia 28 years
Berkshire 55 years
1:04 PM · Aug 10, 2021
6 Reposts · 27 Likes

Simon E. Fisher@ProfSimonFisher
Remember when you first learned about genetics at school? All those fascinating examples of human traits that are each determined by just a single gene? Time to check in on some of your favourites to see how they’re doing...1/n
1:20 PM · Aug 10, 2021
1.24K Reposts · 3.4K Likes

Nearcyan@Nearcyan
another day in the cryptocurrency world: a group takes $600M worth from a smart contract and encounters an issue attempting to launder it. A user provides a tip to them via the blockchain that helps them, they send the user $45K in ETH back as a thank you
blockworks.co
Hackers Steal Over $600M; Biggest in DeFi History - Blockworks

7:10 PM · Aug 10, 2021
1 Like
Quarantined section

Scott Huston@genuine_doubt
A frustration I have with the 'vaccine hesitancy' discussion is that 99% of people on both sides use the same process to come to their conclusion; find people you trust and listen to them.
8:01 PM · Aug 9, 2021
1 Repost · 7 Likes

Scott Huston@genuine_doubt
If you got the right answer it's either because you got lucky that the people you listen to happened to get this one right, or you're good at figuring out who to trust. But being good at figuring out who to trust is a nebulous and difficult problem.
8:01 PM · Aug 9, 2021
1 Like

Scott Huston@genuine_doubt
So, while I do think getting people vaccinated is critical and I'm frustrated by the current state of things, I don't think it's all that fair to criticize people who are running the same basic algorithm I am to figure out what's true.
8:01 PM · Aug 9, 2021
