Best of Twitter - Week of January 3, 2022

Adam Marblestone @AdamMarblestone

Why MOST research should NOT be objective-driven. To get to any one objective, you have to build on a library of stepping-stones that were discovered based on subjective interestingness unrelated to that or maybe any objective. youtube.com/watch?v=dKazBM…

Tapa Ghosh @semiDL

If you read no other book in your life, this is the one https://t.co/EAenxzHJMz

December 10th 2020

26 Retweets185 Likes

Ben Reinhardt @Ben_Reinhardt

8. People forget that Elon was basically treated like a crackpot for *years* before SpaceX successfully launched. The question it raises is “how many projects have died because their crackpot leaders weren’t well-connected decamillionaires?”

December 15th 2019

14 Retweets148 Likes

^ thread

Nat Friedman @natfriedman

Originally conceived as a video dating app, YouTube is now the world's greatest classroom.

Pleasant @pleasantech_

@Richard13141293 @VS_deen @natfriedman @github @TechProd_Arch @zeddpay I started by watching YouTube videos to learn

December 31st 2021

13 Retweets125 Likes

Nat Friedman @natfriedman

Original YouTube landing page: web.archive.org/web/2005042801…

December 31st 2021

20 Retweets92 Likes

^ really amazing to me how different many of the biggest companies are from whatever they were in the beginning. Facebook is now a VR company. Airbnb is disrupting mid-term rentals. Google did a 180 on running ads. Only Amazon is doing the thing that Bezos was imagining it doing at the very beginning.

vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin

Conclusions: * My thinking about politics and large-scale human organization was more naive then. Too focused on simple and complete formal models; I did not appreciate challenges of culture and vitalik.ca/general/2021/0… then; I do now.The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacyvitalik.ca

January 1st 2022

188 Retweets2,051 Likes

^ thread by Vitalik on his thinking about everything in the last 10 years

Tom Gara @tomgara

Incredible graphic, from jails to schools and transit, NYC truly leads the world in its ability to spend phenomenal amounts of money on extremely low quality public services nytimes.com/2021/12/31/nyr…

January 2nd 2022

155 Retweets934 Likes

^ NYC spends >$1k per night per detainee. How is this even possible? If it’s corruption, is anyone investigating it?

Nikita S @singareddynm

Viking medicinal recipes were just “take cropleek, garlic, stolen wine, bullocks gall. let stand for 9 days in a steel cauldron” and that actually killed 90% of staph infections and is more effective than half the antibacterials we’ve come up with since

January 2nd 2022

134 Retweets1,154 Likes

Nikita S @singareddynm

I’m really not kidding Anti-biofilm efficacy of a medieval treatment for bacterial infection requires the combination of multiple ingredients - Scientific ReportsScientific Reports - <ArticleTitle Language="En" OutputMedium="All" xml:lang="en">Anti-biofilm efficacy of a medieval treatment...nature.com

January 2nd 2022

17 Retweets261 Likes

^ lol

santi ruiz @rSanti97

Over Christmas, I wrote about the Constitutional Convention, and how the basic political skills that built consensus then are just as applicable to web3 governance today. Governance Lessons from the Constitutional Convention — MirrorBackgroundmirror.xyz

January 3rd 2022

10 Retweets78 Likes

^ unexpectedly insightful

Adam Strandberg @The_Lagrangian

what if your cognitivist problems like "akrasia" and "low executive function" are actually emotional problems like "this scares me" or "i don't actually care"

QC @QiaochuYuan

it feels like i have sort of an “internal queue” of things that it occurs to me to do, and this queue is actually perfectly capable of handling all sorts of things, including normal life stuff and friendships, *unless* the current item brings up feelings i am blocking out

January 3rd 2022

13 Retweets161 Likes

Adam Marblestone @AdamMarblestone

@ArtirKel Tangential but I find it weird you can see Parkinson’s in (images of) skin cells seemingly unrelated to the brain at all biorxiv.org/content/10.110… Meanwhile skin cells from patients w/ bipolar -> iPSC -> neuron and you see a difference. Cell bio is a thing. Differential responses to lithium in hyperexcitable neurons from patients with bipolar disorder - NatureA neuronal model of bipolar disorder based on induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology finds hyperactive action-potential firing and differential responsiveness to lithium in iPSC-derived neurons from patients with bipolar disorder.nature.com

January 4th 2022

5 Likes

Laura Deming @LauraDeming

"When Santiago Ramon y Cajal was 11-years-old, he destroyed a neighbor's gate with a homemade cannon and spent three days in jail" ^ one of the most famous neuroscientists of all time

January 4th 2022

12 Retweets172 Likes

^ i think a lot about the fact that many of the greatest scientists of the past were exactly like this and today ~100% of them are filtered out

Quarantined section

Vinay Prasad, MD MPH 🎙️📷 @VPrasadMDMPH

The FDA EUA for boosting 12 to 15 year olds does not report ANY evidence of efficacy. 👇 Just says they do not yet have reports of myocarditis after 6k shots, which is not surprising if rate for D3 myocard is less than D2 (almost surely it is due to interval) V. low standards

January 3rd 2022

451 Retweets1,305 Likes