Congrats, bud! For the first time since I just graduated college I have a job I don't really care for. It's a weird feeling, and one that I promised myself I'd never tolerate. I took my current job in the beginning of 2021 to learn something about the pharma business. I enjoyed it for a while, but I think I've accomplished everything I set out to accomplish and now it's just becoming tedious. So I hope to join you in the new job club soon. Difference is that I have to raise some serious cash to get my next thing going!

Glad to see Bender cite Wittgenstein, because he already settled this debate 100 years ago while fighting against the descriptivists whose basic argument was that you can understand anything if you describe it in sufficient detail, and that our lack of understanding of any topic derives from our not having enough facts about the subject (as an aside I see a very strong analogy to the descriptivists and those who think AI is "alive"). Wittgenstein made a lot of good counterarguments, but the one that turned out to be most famous and most illustrative was where he said that the way we learn what the color red is is by someone else pointing to a red object and saying "this is red." He was trying to argue that meaning derives from agreement about meaning and nothing more.

We use language, at least in part, to give others access to our inner thoughts, and without agreement on words' meanings, then others completely lack access to our inner selves. Where I think that the Mannings of the world completely lose me is in statements of this sort:

he allowed, humans do express emotions with their faces and communicate through things like head tilts, but the added information is “marginal.”

Um, what? What if I said in response, "Fuck you." It would probably taken as being pretty hostile, right? But I can think of a at least three other use cases that lack any hostility. Say, gentle ribbing; an expression of disbelief; and an expression of desire. One could think of almost any phrase, but especially any idiomatic phrase, for which there are many, many meanings, and the only way to disambiguate the meaning is by the "marginal" information.

I think this point has been made explicit in the age of text-based communication. How easy is it to interpret an email or a statement on social media as crass or aggressive, when the author was trying to be lighthearted? There's a famous experiment in neuroscience where you apply a force to a transducer, and that exact force is then applied to another person sitting across from you by another transducer. Then the person to whom the force was applied is asked to replicate exactly what they felt, which is in turn felt by person 1, who does the same, and so on. It spirals. Every time. Because we're hard wired to perceive things to be worse than they are when they're done to us and we respond in kind. The marginal information is the only thing that keeps us from not killing each other.

I literally can't even wrap my head around someone believing that non-verbal context around verbal information doesn't just inform but in many cases defines the meaning of the verbal information. It's like not agreeing on the color red. What kind of world will we live in where we can't agree on the meaning of words, because the speaker (i.e. the robot) doesn't have an inner self to try to give access to?

Edit: Just to add, I've recently begun using ChatGPT. I like it. It does some wonderful things. It helped me to design an experiment by cutting my overall search time from probably 5-10 hours on PubMed and Google to like 15-20 minutes of chat. I'm not against GPT specifically or AI generally. I'm against calling it conscious or anything other than really powerful computer code. It's the moral equivalent of MS Word to me, which also boosts my productivity immensely relative to pen and paper.

Thought when I left academic life that I'd never have to write another grant proposal in my life. But I just put the finishing touches on the first draft of a small business grant to support by new drug company. Feels pretty good, actually. Free money is the best kind, so here's hoping. My friend who's on the Science and Tech committee (the committee who reauthorizes the SBIR grant program) is writing me a letter of support, so I doubt that hurts my chances. Good to know people, kids. Targeting quitting my job by summer's end, but that's still a hard sell to my wife. She's warming up though since she's seeing some success starting to trickle in. I've all but quit mentally however, and I'm more or less doing the bare minimum to not get fired (or to get fired by not in the next 3-5 months!). Never been the type to phone it in, but it doesn't feel that bad, tbh.

Been working on a new guitar build over the last 6 weeks or so. I’m nearing completion save for a few touch up spots, etc. Ridiculous but cool, I hope.

Got the terms of a lease worked out to start a business. Certain members of the Hubski community may or may not be helping me along, but I'll let them identify themselves if they choose to. Really exciting and terrifying. Haven't exactly figured out how to approach my current company to try to hang on as a part time consultant for the foreseeable future, but they need me as much as I need a paycheck...well, maybe they don't need me that much, but I can at least grease a lot of skids for them. My boss is a sociopath-narcissist though, so I'm preparing for the worst.

I really like the confusion of snorting with smelling. I get that it's probably a mistranslation, but it's making me laugh thinking of smelling the sweet, sweet organic blow.

I've been optimistic at every turn in the pandemic, and basically been proven wrong at every turn, but the news out of South Africa today is that Omicron cases are falling. It hasn't even been a month since identification and they're on the other side of it. Maybe it's a blip, but hopefully it's a harbinger.

My wife and I got in an argument about what to do for Christmas last night. I basically said, "Life isn't risk free." And she basically said, "Fuck you I don't want to accidentally kill our parents." Good points, all!

One of these days by pure chance my rosy prediction is going to come true.

Yeah I knew what your issue was. You guys are too easy to trigger. Before any policy consideration, I'll vote for the anti-illiberal candidate. Democrats are the default for that right now, but they're creeping steadily toward full Thought Police territory. There's so much I haven't said even on this site for fear of getting shouted down for an idea. And I'll tell you it's never our couple token conservatives doing the shouting. So yeah, I'll tenuously vote democrat as a bulwark against the current brand of conservatism, but I'm not gonna feel good about either party until their illiberal demons are exercised.

But this all makes a ton of sense when you stop to consider that Zuckerberg is the archetypal badguy from bad Marvel-level sci fi. It's as if he saw the Matrix and really sympathized with the robots who were giving all those useless, ungrateful humans food and shelter.

If lithium is part of the problem, then it's about to get a whole lot worse.

I actually laughed out loud at the teddy bear line, because it's exactly the type of thing that I would want someone to say to me and also exactly the type of thing I could see a bunch of oversensitive types (such as you might find among doctor's office staff) having a pissy fit about. It's perferct.

I have this weird thing where my boss always writes me mean messages while I'm giving presentations, sometimes through slack and sometimes through the PM function on the video chat service we use. Sometimes the messages are only a little mean and sometimes they're pretty hostile. I can't tell if she's testing me to see how well I'd do in a pressure situation, or if she thinks she's being helpful, or something else entirely. She once said to me, "I have no empathy," so that's something to consider, too, I guess (and that was years before I agreed to work for her, so it's not like I wasn't warned!).

Fortunately for me I have pretty thick skin, but even one of the other people in the company who I was talking to about it, was like, "Yeah that's not normal." If I didn't know better I'd think it was some form of attempted bullying, but I actually think she thinks it's her version of leadership. Gonna keep my mouth shut for now, which is something I'm inherently good at, and see if it lasts.

Too many U.S. institutions throughout the pandemic have shown little interest in the act of learning while doing.

This statement, while ostensibly about covid, applies to so much more.

It's the little things :)

Fuck. I feel horrible for you, but I still kinda want to see a pic.

I'll preface this by saying that I'm not nearly as bullish on EVs as is popular these days. Gates is definitely right that batteries are heavy--I think a model S weighs as much or more than a full size pickup. However, he is making a mistake by thinking that all the power needs to be on board at the start of the trip. It's not as if an 18-wheeler carries all the diesel it needs to go from LA to Chicago without stopping. They fuel up. And that's easy with diesel, because distribution is widespread and delivery is easy with a pump. Batteries obviously can't be charged quickly even with a "super charger" or whatever. But I think that there are probably ways around that (e.g. modular batteries, super high voltage chargers, etc). However, each of those solutions, while probably technically feasible, will require a lot of infrastructure to realize. And if the industry is smart, they will work together to try to make scalable solutions that work across platforms. There's no such thing as a Toyota gas station or a Volvo diesel station, and we wouldn't tolerate it if there was. So I think Gates is correct in the short term, but he could be wrong were the technology to advance to a point where it's no more burdensome to use electric than diesel or gas.

It's never comforting to think about the fact that other people have it worse. They do, but that doesn't make your feelings invalid. Tennis is great. Hoping to play this weekend myself.

What I don't know about vaccine development dwarfs what I do know. But in the interest of being one more dude on the internet with an opinion about something, I'll share my thoughts. In general, vaccine development follows the same trajectory as other drug development, at least in its phasing. A phase I study is a pure safety study. A phase II study is a preliminary efficacy study whose goal is mainly to find a target population for a real efficacy study. A phase I/II combined study, such as this one was, is one in which the regulating agency deems it inappropriate to do a pure safety study (this happens for a lot of reasons). I don't exactly know the reason here, but I suspect that the problem is that vaccines are almost always safe for most people, but sometimes, for some minority of people, they're really, really dangerous. Probably to get an initial safety profile they had to include a lot of patients, so they figure they can mine those data also for an efficacy signal.

The good news here is that they didn't see any serious adverse events that could be linked to the vaccine. The downside of that is that with 1000 patients, I'm sure, even without seeing the data, that their confidence interval is weak. If this vaccine kills 1/1,000,000, then your odds of detecting that in a 1,000 person study are vanishingly small, but 1/1,000,000 is going to be enough people in American that the vaccine crazies will lose their shit about it, I'm sure (you know, even if that makes the expected value of deaths like <350, whereas covid has already killed what, like, 150,000 people as a low end estimate?). So I think safety is a real question mark, despite the apparently good data. (And for what it's worth, I talked to a good buddy who is a former AZ exec and he basically said there's no way they aren't cutting corners, here. The timeline just doesn't make sense otherwise, in his opinion. But hopefully he's wrong, even though I have no reason to doubt him.)

On the efficacy side, I think it's still anyone's guess. As I understand it, the efficacy endpoint they're using is immune reaction (antibody formation and T-cell response). As I understand it, the fact that they saw a robust immune reaction is a necessary but not sufficient condition for efficacy, again probably they did it that way due to low patient numbers. The upside is that so long as its manufacturable they should be able to get the next study up and running really quickly. I don't know what the odds of success are for this particular vaccine, but I'm hopeful that given that there are several vaccines that are progressing that we'll get enough bites at the apple for a hit. Anyway, like most scientists when they start jaw flapping, that was a really long way of saying I have no fucking clue.

I'm of the opinion that Hubski is just fine and the thing that needs fixing is the internet. Most of us don't have your pugilistic style, so it's easier just to fuck off than to deal with it.

16 sounds about right to me. It's when you're entrusted to drive, which is probably the biggest responsibility most of us exercise in an average day (save for like airline pilots and care providers). I feel like that makes you a participant in society at large. Also, I think when you're 18 you start getting slapped in the face with public policy, so it would be nice to have a small runway to try to get engaged beforehand.

I did not enjoy that trip down memory lane, but I was wrong. You can only fight dangerous opinions with empathy, and without empathy you can't ever understand where those opinions come from. I have learned in the intervening almost decade how to try to see the world from others' point of view. It is not always possible to do with clarity, but it is always possible to do at least a little bit. But it does take a certain willingness to challenge your own assumptions about the world. That's not something I was good at in my 20's. Mostly I had my nose stuck in a textbook 16 hours/day, which is not conducive to understanding of anything but the topic of study.