Best of Twitter - Week of January 3, 2022
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
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?”
^ thread
Originally conceived as a video dating app, YouTube is now the world's greatest classroom.
Pleasant @pleasantech_
^ 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.
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.
^ thread by Vitalik on his thinking about everything in the last 10 years
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…
^ NYC spends >$1k per night per detainee. How is this even possible? If it’s corruption, is anyone investigating it?
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
^ lol
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.
^ unexpectedly insightful
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
@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.
"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
^ 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
