bglazer

3 ms·

1.
by bglazer 6d ago
Thanks, I was more asking from your perspective. I’m a working research biologist, and I’m genuinely curious how he became so well known among the hackernews slice of the public. He seems to have hit on some very effective combination of re
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by bglazer 6d ago
How do you keep up to date with his work?
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by bglazer 6d ago
I’m curious how you found Michael’s work? Like what led you to familiarize yourself with his research? He seems to be essentially the only biologist that hackernews knows and he always (always!) comes up in biology discussion. I’m wondering
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by bglazer 8d ago
You might like process philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/
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by bglazer 12d ago
I currently work in a chemical biology lab and I don’t think one disgruntled postdoc could wipe out humanity. Also disgruntled is more or less unnecessary when combined with postdoc. Sort of goes without saying.
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by bglazer 12d ago
Has anyone in the rationalist, doomer community actually seriously engaged the real biology/virology of a “virus that wipes out humanity”? Playing Plague Inc doesn’t count. I mean, we’re talking about real physical things, not first pr
7.
by bglazer 1mo ago
I'm not so sure. I haven't seen a true regional airline class VTOL yet, mostly just demonstrators that carry a few people, at that. The fact that it's larger is actually very important, the economics of a regional jet replace
8.
by bglazer 2mo ago
Yeah I'm begging these authors to at least *read* the LLM generated README's. They're so, so incomprehensible because the LLM has a super limited theory of mind for readers. They always assume that external readers have acces
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by bglazer 2mo ago
Yes this is on the 777x, which is in pre-production and flight testing, seeking approvals from the FAA
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by bglazer 3mo ago
> If we go in and just check the DNA for Downs or Parkinson's You should consider reading the wikipedia page about Parkinson’s disease.
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by bglazer 3mo ago
Yes exactly, there are good and bad things to spend money on. This is a bad way to spend money for the reasons I explained above.
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by bglazer 3mo ago
He's hubristic and selfish. None of his "research" is going to benefit anyone (himself included), making this essentially a huge waste of time and resources. Bryan will die just like all the rest of us, despite being very ric
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by bglazer 4mo ago
You’re probably thinking about non-small cell lung cancers. Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) is still absolutely devastating. The most progress made on SCLC has just been getting people to stop smoking, as its almost exclusively a smoker’s dis
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by bglazer 4mo ago
Gene names aren't really acronyms in the traditional sense. Often they were originally conceived as acronyms at the time of the gene's discovery and naming, but the original acronym frequently reflects an incomplete or factually w
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by bglazer 4mo ago
The whole article is just that someone got a spam political text about the Texas Senate GOP primary.
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by bglazer 5mo ago
This is demonstrably untrue. IQ has increased consistently for decades, far faster than genetic factors can explain. Environmental factors like education, nutrition, and medical care are the obvious explanation.
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by bglazer 5mo ago
Yeah I have been reading a lot of posts like this lately. Technical blog post clearly written by an LLM summarizing something vibe-coded. They always start using project-specific jargon right away and they never give you enough context or b
18.
AI is starting to beat doctors at making correct diagnoses(science.org)
5 points by bglazer 5mo ago|0 comments
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by bglazer 5mo ago
Ah causal data! It’s a shame none of the scientists or statisticians thought of getting causal data. How would we get that? Well maybe we could just inject amyloid into a person’s brain. Or simply remove all the amyloid from a person’s br
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by bglazer 6mo ago
This is insane, I love it.
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by bglazer 6mo ago
I work in this field. It’s more or less correct but kind of lacking in detail. Cancer is a property of all multicellular life. I think it’s best understood as the behavior of a dynamical system that loses the feedback control that keeps cel
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by bglazer 7mo ago
This is quite similar to how eLife does publishing. You still have to submit to them but they basically just add reviewer comments and an “eLife Assessment” that serves as the quality/curation signal rather than a binary publish/r
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by bglazer 7mo ago
> If you're an influential figure at a top-5 department in your field ... you all hate $journal. That's the problem, they don't hate these journals, they love them. Generally speaking they're old people who became inf
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by bglazer 7mo ago
I think we could understand consciousness perfectly and still find it divine. In fact, I think however it arises is probably so beautiful that it would be wrong not to call it divine. Of course not in a literal, theological sense, but I thi
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by bglazer 7mo ago
We absolutely do know about the molecular pathways that cause smoking induced lung cancer. It’s TP53 and RB1 mutations (among many others). There are probably more than a hundred thousand published papers about precisely this question
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by bglazer 7mo ago
> a certain age range your eyes determine they've grown to the correct size based on how well they focus A certain age -> which one? Why? your eyes determine -> How? What molecular growth signaling pathways are involved? How d
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by bglazer 7mo ago
That's a lovely theory, if quite imprecise in terms of the actual biology of eye development. The actually important part of science (the part that requires a lot of expertise and judgement) is figuring out how to make that an actually
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by bglazer 7mo ago
Why does focusing on nearer things cause myopia? See if you're curious at even a basic level, you'd realize that there are important *details* about stuff like this where it actually helps to have some actual subject matter expert
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by bglazer 7mo ago
I occasionally say please and thank you to ChatGPT for my own sake, not for the LLM's. They're sufficiently similar to humans that allowing myself to be a jerk subtly degrades myself and makes it more likely that I'm a jerk t
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by bglazer 9mo ago
Where were you doing this? Were you ever successful? How did you do it, like what were your tactics? So many questions! I’ve never heard about modern people doing serious persistence hunting, except for a stunt that I read about years ago.

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