I also learned from this that IHME gave the editor of The Lancet, where they publish most of their big studies, a $100k prize.
13.10.2025 19:02
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I also learned from this that IHME gave the editor of The Lancet, where they publish most of their big studies, a $100k prize.
IHME has just published their latest Global Burden of Disease study in the Lancet with *2,779* listed authors. This piece describes how their very loose authorship criteria distort metrics and artificially inflate contributors’ citation counts:
Donna Haraway: “The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.”
The lineup looks incredible. Sad that I won't be able to go!
Happy New Claude Day to those who celebrate
A human approaches a woman at her desk and says hello in Chinese. She says, “Aww, you’re sentient.” A computer approaches the same woman and says hello in Chinese. She looks panicked, picks up her phone, and says, “Hello, John Searle?!”
A favorite John Searle meme, in his memory
Research active faculty teach classes that are significantly closer to the knowledge frontier.
Spooky is scary + camp.
Kind of like how Burke defined the sublime is viewing danger from a place of safety, spooky is further neutralizing danger so that it doesn't produce awe, but rather feelings like coziness, nostalgia, and a sense of being in on the joke.
There should be a moratorium on calling for "systemic change" unless the person calling for it can plausibly prove that they know how to change systems. Which would of course involve answering the question of why they haven't just changed the system already.
Russell Ackoff: “The educational system is not dedicated to produce learning by students, but teaching by teachers.”
We’re ready
"It's more and more perilous to be generic in any way--to be a generic writer, or to be a generic person, a generic thinker. Because the machines are very good at analyzing [generic models]. There will be a much *higher* premium on cultivating your own distinctive, inimitable voice."
“[T]here is no love after marriage. It's just that marriage is caused by love. And I think most people do not wanna say that. They don't wanna say that there's only a causal link between the thing Taylor Swift is talking about and the thing you're supposed to feel during marriage.”
So good.
Podcast on how Taylor Swift’s engagement represents a crisis for both her songwriting and the popular conception of how love relates to marriage.
How is Paramount+ involved in this? It's not owned by Disney, right?
nihilism is cowardice.
A chart showing value of NIH grants over calendar months by year. The 2025 level initially lagged far below previous years, but has now caught up to the average.
A little bit of good news: NIH has caught up with previous years' funding levels. Their staff deserves tremendous respect.
"The closed society represented a perennial moral possibility, whose roots are found in every human soul. In its most common expression, the closed society levels a familiar accusation: that the open society is immoral because it jeopardizes the very possibility of living a virtuous life."
I mean, the safety data strongly suggests that their system is already superior to human drivers. If you have reason to believe that they’re hiding safety events from regulators/investors/the public, though, you should share that widely.
And I think the problems of automated driving systems are a lot easier to solve than the problems of human drivers. Waymo can fix their cars' response to emergency vehicles with a software update. How do you fix humans who won't look for pedestrians when they're driving in cities?
Sure, human-driven cars should become a lot more automated too. I just see it as pretty obvious that a non-fatiguable robot with extra senses is going to outperform humans who speed while changing lanes and sending text messages.
Before you ask, this is adjusted for road type.
Text from Waymo's safety report: "91% fewer serious injury or worse crashes. 79% fewer airbag deployment crashes. 80% fewer injury-causing crashes. 92% fewer pedestrian crashes with injuries. 78% fewer cyclist crashes with injuries. 89% fewer motorcycle crashes with injuries."
Waymo data from 95M miles finds an 80% reduction in injurious crashes and, esp. noteworthy, a 92% reduction in pedestrian injuries.
There should be some real moral urgency behind the wide-spread implementation of self-driving cars (and I mean good systems like Waymo's, not Tesla's FSD).
Like we just use multiples more than we use fractions in conversation?
It seems like people are increasingly using multiplication to indicate a magnitude of diminution: like “20 times smaller than” our “15 times less than”.
Isn’t that what we have fractions for? “One twentieth the size” and “one fifteenth of” are so much cleaner.
A Threads post stating that the PetSmart point has a stronger exchange rate to the US dollar than the Argentine peso (9,794 points = $18)
Let the PetSmart point float!
Two tuxedo cats and a gray and white cow cat look expectantly at the viewer. They are spaced far apart because they all loathe each other. There is a small, cat-sized couch in the foreground.
Cat tax, in case you’re curious
