All the great breakthroughs in science are, at their core, compression. They take a complex mess of observations and say, "it's all just this simple rule". Symbolic compression, specifically. Because the rule is always symbolic -- usually expressed as mathematical equations. If

i know DEI and wokeism is shunned or whatever but actually looking at this data it's pretty dark the venture industry round-tripped any sort of progress made in funding female founders the past decade

how can you not be romantic about science

Waymo isn’t replacing uber-drivers… it is replacing nannies + parent-chauffeur-job … and the impact is going to be way way bigger than people realize - especially in suburban upper-middle-class.

delian The Egyptians eventually couldn’t read their own hieroglyphics

So this is public now, so: I’m officially starting a Works in Progress-style magazine focusing on the developing world! It is called In Development, and first call for pitches will be coming at the end of the year.

Sharing an interesting recent conversation on AI's impact on the economy. AI has been compared to various historical precedents: electricity, industrial revolution, etc., I think the strongest analogy is that of AI as a new computing paradigm (Software 2.0) because both are

Completely agree with this post about SROs, but what Ryan Puzycki doesn’t get into is that if you’re going to have ultra-cheap market rate housing you do also need to be able to evict problem tenants which cuts against a lot of recent policymaking. open.substack.com/pub/cityofyes/…

I tire of being confused at the state of Chinese LLMs. Supposedly frontier performance, supposedly huge shadow adoption, all under massive compute constraints. So I went digging

Americans got a lot richer since the 70s, but a side effect was that we went from a 3-class society to a 4-class society. This chart doesn't break out people who make above $400k, but I think they're now a separate class.

Really enjoyed this piece from Dan Williams and identify with much of it conspicuouscognition.com/p/on-becoming-…

We are now looking for a fourth colleague to join our team — a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Oxford. It is a great position for a researcher with a broad interest in technology who enjoys carefully building a comprehensive database on technological change. You will be

Some news: Open Philanthropy is now Coefficient Giving! Our mission is unchanged but the new name reflects our growing work with other donors to multiply the impact of their giving. 🧵 on our work to make philanthropy a more efficient "market" and plans going forward:

I love this push by Alexander Berger and his team. One of the core reasons we started Renaissance Philanthropy. We can be much more ambitious about growing the pie.

Here are 30 great essays about biology. I consider these to be my "personal canon," and think that they are all basically perfect in their own ways, despite being different in form and style. All have shaped my own writing considerably. I'm not including links here, but you can

Haseeb ＞|＜ So to recap: - People may be underestimating Q-Day timelines (ironically physicists who had previously been skeptics like Scott have changed their tune) - No migration like this has ever been done in crypto. Ever, ever, ever. ETH 1.0 --> to ETH 2.0 is the closest comp we

There’s no revealed preference stronger than what you do when you’re trying to help save your child I can now say from experience that, in a medical emergency, you can & should use AI a lot more, and if you do, you’ll get tremendous value

Novo just cut self-pay price of Ozempic to $349, down 65% from launch. It stands out bc most drugs get pricier over time and shows the effect when patients, rather than third parties, see costs directly. Patients having more skin in the game is a way to lower healthcare costs.

I am reading Charles Taylor's (absolutely marvellous) "A Secular Age". It encompasses a wide range of different ways of thinking about why human beings are here, what our obligations are, how our sense of morality has changed, and so on One lack in the book is that it doesn't

Excellent norms showcased here by Andy & Karen. Twitter can be good.