Best of Twitter - Week of August 9, 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).

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

^ thread

Cold Takes @ColdTakes12

Digital People Would Be An Even Bigger Deal

cold-takes.comDigital People Would Be An Even Bigger DealAudio also available by searching Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc. for “Cold Takes Audio”Today’s worldTransformative AIDigital peopleWorld ofMisaligned AIWorld run bySomething elseoror Stable, galaxy-widecivilization > This is the third post in a series explaining my view that we could be in…

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.coHackers Steal Over $600M; Biggest in DeFi History - BlockworksHackers exploited Poly Network on DeFi exchanges Polygon, Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain. Poly Network is a cross-chain protocol for swapping tokens across various blockchains.

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.

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.

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.