Best of Twitter week of September 9-15, 2024

we desperately need a better synthesis of economics and commonsense morality

"price gouging is evil" is a pretty universal human intuition. saying "no it's fine, look I made some simplifying assumptions and did some math" is just not compelling

until we do, we'll be stuck… x.com/i/web/status/1…

— ivan (@IvanVendrov)
8:57 PM • Sep 1, 2024

Air purifiers in Finnish daycare reduced children's illnesses by 18% in a carefully controlled study. This implies huge potential for better public health and cost savings from sick leaves, with a simple intervention against airborne infections.

— Tuuli Lappalainen (@tuuliel)
2:30 PM • Sep 10, 2024

Why make repetitive DNA? It turns out the juxtaposed repeats reconstitute a perfect promoter and continuous open reading frame (a mildly mind-blowing thing to realise). In other words: the bacterium is physically MAKING A GENE in response to viral infection.

4/

— Max Wilkinson (@maxewilkinson)
7:50 PM • Aug 29, 2024

What does this gene do? It produces a repetitive protein that is super toxic 💀. In fact, the more repetitive it is, the more toxic it is 💀💀💀. It stops bacterial growth, and this probably stops the virus from replicating. The lone cell dies, but the pack survives.

5/

— Max Wilkinson (@maxewilkinson)
7:50 PM • Aug 29, 2024

economists are better at statistics than everyone outside of industry but statistics makes economics worse and quantitative empiricism was a mistake for the field

— eigenrobot (@eigenrobot)
2:29 AM • Sep 1, 2024

crazy how little writing or rigorous theory there is on "having the sauce," despite that being the most important determinant of your life

— Chris Beiser (@ctbeiser)
11:46 PM • Sep 2, 2024

There is a persistent misunderstanding that life expectancy has historically only risen due to reduced child mortality and that, after childhood, people lived just as long regardless of era.

Life expectancy has actually risen at all ages.

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil)
4:16 PM • Sep 3, 2024

Ever wonder what happens behind the scenes when the SEC investigates firms?

My co-authors and I did, so we built a database tracking SEC-associated smartphones to study how they monitor firms.

A key finding: firm insiders that sell around a visit avoid large losses

thread...

— Marcus Painter (@MarcusOwen5)
1:45 PM • Sep 3, 2024

Fucking wild.

@OpenAI's new o1 model was tested with a Capture The Flag (CTF) cybersecurity challenge. But the Docker container containing the test was misconfigured, causing the CTF to crash. Instead of giving up, o1 decided to just hack the container to grab the flag inside.… x.com/i/web/status/1…

— Haseeb ＞|＜ (@hosseeb)
11:47 PM • Sep 12, 2024

Not much at all, though I still have limited data.

It does not feel like a qualitative jump in lucidity, creativity, depth of insight, etc. Still feels around the same raw intelligence as GPT-4, Claude 3 Opus and 3.5 Sonnet etc.

The last time I saw a real jump was GPT-4.

— j⧉nus (@repligate)
4:23 PM • Sep 15, 2024

— Nick Dobos (@NickADobos)
10:24 AM • Aug 31, 2024

its crazy to me how many people wear a whoop/oura/etc and unconsciously let their "readiness score" tell them how to feel that day.

we've outsourced "knowing your body" to an arbitrary metric that might as well be a random number generator. health hyperstition is the final form

— Will Manidis (@WillManidis)
7:29 PM • Sep 9, 2024

Steve Weinberg’s working habits.

— Ash Jogalekar (@curiouswavefn)
2:52 PM • Sep 5, 2024