Best of Twitter week of August 19-25, 2024 (1/2)

This article on sports gambling is devastating and is an interesting exploration of how we frame money.

1. The paper claims to have found evidence that for every $1 spent on sports gambling reduces net investments in stocks and other financial instruments dropped by just over… x.com/i/web/status/1…

— Kyla Scanlon (@kylascan)
12:32 PM • Aug 17, 2024

Christianity has historically helped to spread monogamy, exogamy, and consensual marriage around the world. None of these practices, though, originate in the Bible. They are all European traits which have piggybacked on to the Catholic Church. Where, exactly, do they come from?

— Uriah (@crimkadid)
12:58 AM • Jan 23, 2024

A single email by top NIH/NIAID official got caught in @JamesCTobias FOIA.

Resulting subpoenas uncovered a conspiracy to avoid legally mandated oversight by deleting all emails “relating to origin”.

The ranking Democrat called this a “stain on the legacy”.

It’s not partisan.

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep)
3:28 PM • May 24, 2024

U can’t go all-in on ur nature till u find out who ur. And u won’t figure that out till u find who ur not. Not just who ur not. Why ur not it too.  

For that u’ll have to be a phony on occasion. Wear many hats. Be things ur not to explore and rule them out.

On a long enough

— MrE (@MrE_mssg)
5:45 PM • Aug 14, 2024

LLMs can generalize. But "it was in the training data, verbatim" hypothesis keeps being unreasonably powerful for explaining Emergent Abilities of LLMs – especially for SoTA Anthropic models, hyped up by developers like they're their precocious children.

— Teortaxes▶️ (@teortaxesTex)
7:10 PM • Jun 22, 2024

My favorite thing about this interaction is Rogan was 100% right
Thiel incorrectly described pre-human politics as pure violence. But chimps do form alliances and have politics. And Rogan very humbly called him out on it
We stan an intellectually curious philosopher khan

— who. ? (@inflammateomnia)
6:40 PM • Aug 17, 2024

quick argument against reductionism:

you can "intervene" on a person's mental state and thereby affect their neurobiological state (e.g. by talking to them)
you can also intervene on the neurobiological state (e.g. through drugs) to affect their mental state

it's symmetrical

— Nora Belrose (@norabelrose)
8:06 PM • Aug 20, 2024

WILL AI DESTROY YOUR SOFTWARE COMPANY? OR: WHICH SOFTWARE COMPANY SHOULD I BUILD?

I'm a software private equity investor. I look at 10-20 software businesses each week to acquire. I see good, bad, and everything in between.

I keep getting this freaking dm 'Now that I can build… x.com/i/web/status/1…

— carried_no_interest (@carrynointerest)
3:56 PM • Aug 18, 2024

2024: The Eiffel Tower is a romantic symbol of the good old days

1897: The Eiffel Tower is a techno-dystopian vanity project built by a tech-bro engineer

— Pessimists Archive (@PessimistsArc)
12:27 AM • Aug 18, 2024

You have to understand:

China's population is declining at an accelerating rate. Each year will be like losing an entire small European country.

This will change the world.

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil)
1:05 AM • Aug 18, 2024

Nobody will remember:
- your salary
- how “busy you were”
- how many hours you worked  

People will remember:
- that you sold some low-quality copper 3,800 years ago

— Fr. Paul (@BackwardsFeet)
5:45 AM • Aug 21, 2024