Best of Twitter - Week of January 11, 2021
I used to think "anyone who wants to be be powerful is unfit to wield power."
After watching a couple decades where more and more of society gets controlled by people who are allergic to the appearance of power and the aesthetic of personal authority, I no longer think this.
If you give power to people who "don't want power", then they'll just persuade themselves that they're not powerful. The cognitive dissonance means they won't even feel shame at their corruption.
Where people are from, where they do ML research
"The illustration above describes a global population of ~5k researchers whose papers were accepted to the leading 2019 conference in deep neural nets."
infoproc.blogspot.com/2021/01/global…
It is @Wikipedia 's 20th anniversary today. It is hard to remember from today's perspective how viciously the idea of a publicly edited encyclopedia was mocked by many traditional gatekeepers of knowledge. It is hard to imagine a better refutation.
What are the classics of the "Science of Science" or "Meta Science"? If you were teaching a class on the subject, what would go in the syllabus?
^ thread with lots of interesting links and highlights
3 years ago: I was advised to refrain from posting a manuscript to @biorxivpreprint b/c risk of scooping & not all journals accepting preprinted manuscripts.
Today: I was advised to post to biorxiv and wait a month to get comments before submitting to a journal.
👌
A new brilliant post from @AlvaroDeMenard: Are Experts Real? fantasticanachronism.com/2021/01/11/are…
Eric Lander of Broad Institute named White House science adviser to president elect Joe Biden.
A short thread w/ a few observations about Eric Lander who i have previously called "the single most influential and powerful scientist in America."
1/n
14/sidenote: You may have noticed that the Broad Institute appears with unusual regularity as glowing subject of stories in The New Yorker. I am told this is because Eric Lander ('78) went to Princeton and so did NYR editor David Remnick ('81). Some kind of supperclub deal.
If you have been feeling like stock prices seem arbitrary and not reflective of any logical story about economic value, well, they're probably going to become more so
Shiv @this__is__shiv
I recommend @matt_levine's “boredom markets hypothesis”: while most other forms of fun have disappeared during the pandemic, the stock market is a casino that happens to still be open.
Morgan Kelly suggests that some of the literature on long-run persistence might confuse ‘deep origins’ with spatial autocorrelation.
AMAZING: A blind man has regained his sight after receiving the first implant worldwide of an artificial cornea developed by Israeli startup CorNeat Vision. Wonderful news which will impact millions of lives
^ link
Quarantined section
Toldya, scientists will eagerly embrace ideas they used to fight tooth and nail. After they annihilated those who first postulated the ideas. @Ayjchan @R_H_Ebright
Antonio Regalado @antonioregalado