Best of Twitter - Week of December 28, 2020
Happy new year! Please send me you favorite tweets of 2020 and maybe i’ll do a special edition of “best of 2020 according to best of twitter subscribers” or something
It's pretty awesome how dancing makes robots less intimidating. Looking forward to seeing more nontrivial Machine Learning on these robots. Credit: Boston Dynamics.
Greatly enjoyed talking to @eriktorenberg about a variety of science/academia-related topics!
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/vil…
This is a cool experiment, and is a good example of “If you *actually believed* a thing which is widely professed in our industry, you would structure your affairs radically differently than is standard.”
Avichal Garg - Electric Capital ⚡💸 @avichal
@avichal I think that the efficient frontier here is probably at something too radical to contemplate, like e.g. finding a list of all the winners in early-career geeky competitions 5 years ago and hitting a hundred of them with “$100k; take a year off and you do you; 20% if a company.”
The better a purely meritocratic organization is at spotting talented people without a track record, the more the result looks like nepotism. If Harvard, McKinsey, or YC identify literally all the most promising people, from the outside it will look like the network matters most.
this is not news but the time series of US labor force participation for men vs women over the past 70 years is just astonishing.
also astonishing: fastest growing jobs in US today are things like nursing - nurturing service jobs, traditionally considered feminine, jobs many men avoid. male labor force graph then feels like you're looking directly at huge economic cost -to men!- of traditional gender norms.
Quarantined section
In this post, we'll reverse-engineer the actual mRNA code of the @BioNTech_Group/@pfizer SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, character for character. And along the way, this will also explain how the vaccine works. Surprisingly, there are some fun mysteries in there!
When you can't just "trust the science" because the scientists keep lying to you and then saying, "oh, that was just a noble lie, sorry about that."
nytimes.com/2020/12/24/hea…
@_nickdavies @LSHTM We have entered a new phase of this pandemic. On the one hand vaccinations have started, on the other hand this new variant is spreading faster, potentially causing a lot more sickness and death in a short time. Also: more people will need to be immunised to reach herd immunity.
^ thread
My brother works at a hospital that had to throw vaccine doses out because they weren’t able to find anyone to give them to. He asked if they could give it to his gf instead of throwing a dose out and was told no - they would lose their license.
Patrick McKenzie @patio11
vs
Here is a prime example from today to Israel "organized chaos". End of the day in a vaccine center. A few doses left and will expire. Nurses go out, spot a pizza delivery guy, call him "pizza guy wanna vaccine?", jab, and another person has spike mRNA!
נדב איל Nadav Eyal @Nadav_Eyal
^ thread