Best of Twitter - Week of May 24, 2021
I wrote blog: upside decay. Why some people never get any lucky breaks, and how to avoid being unlucky
This is directly downstream of the difficulty of measuring capital accumulation, particularly for owners of a) real estate and b) small businesses, perhaps exacerbated by economists just not really experiencing reality of not being a W-2 employee that frequently.
Erik Torenberg @eriktorenberg
"You're a really weird case, Patrick."
OK, an easier case:
You owe $250k of student loans, have just finished your medical residency, and have an offer letter in hand guaranteeing a $300k per year salary as a surgeon.
You are a) in poorest 1% or b) richest 1%?
^ hmmmm
UVA study of students who were asked to sit alone in a room for 15 minutes. Percent who decided to give themselves a painful shock.
Men, lol (h/t @idea_soup)
if you feed axolotls a diet of mamalian thyroid tissue, they permanently metamorphose into something which looks a lot like a tiger salamander, even though in nature the entire species is neotenous
Founder driven biotech companies led by people from "non-traditional" backgrounds are the future - great piece by @celinehalioua on her process of raising at Loyal.
The #T2T Consortium is excited to release a series of preprints in the coming weeks that describe the assembly and analysis of the first truly complete human genome! 🎉 I will append the papers as they appear to this 🧵, and you can find all our data here: github.com/marbl/CHM13
"The complete sequence of a human genome" led by @sergeynurk @sergekoren @ArangRhie @MikkoRautiaine3 describes the assembly and initial analysis. We have revealed ~200 Mbp of new sequence, thousands of potentially new genes, and 5 full chromosome arms! biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh…
One reason Vitalik created ETH: he learnt the dangers of centralization after World of Warcraft took away his wizard’s powers.
If the game maker (Blizzard) let him be, *it* could have created ETH instead.
Now, ETH ($300B) is 4x $ATVI ($75B)
Lesson: The customer is always right
Now in @NatureMedicine: Clinical study with #optogenetic #therapy shows partial vision restoration in a blind human nature.com/articles/s4159…
Collaboration to #endBlindness @IOB_ch @InstVisionParis
@Quinze_Vingts @PittTweet @StreetlabVision @GenSightBio
Photo (c) V. Juvin
Stark pattern in the bottom figure: Much more common in poor countries for people to report having no one to count on in times of trouble.
This is useful reminder that the narrative that informal support networks are stronger in poor countries is too pat.
Max Roser @MaxCRoser