Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
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User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
You're both dancing around the real issue IMO, which is not salary but research funding. If you offer a professor a million dollar research budget, access to the best students/postdocs and a $75,000 USD salary the vast majority would leap at the opportunity. Besides, there's always the option of commercializing your research and serving on boards and such in the USA.
In aggregate China spends quite a bit on research, but when you look at the actual grant size people are receiving it's quite low. Compare the US situation to Canada; in Canada most labs subsist on a single CIHR grant that awards less than 200k per year, and while the paylines (rates of success) for a single grant are higher, it's very hard to win multiple of the main CIHR grants. In the US, R01s (the bread and butter grant for a research lab) pays 400-500k per year and many people have multiple R01s, program grants, R21s and access to a huge amount of private and philanthropic capital. The same scenario plays out at the postdoc/PhD level; do you want access to that capital to do actual cutting edge work surrounded by the most motivated gunners in the world? Move to the US.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
I agree wholeheartedly with your overall point. Bringing top-tier scientists to the US, keeping them here and convincing them to buy into our system should be a national priority. That being said, depending on precisely what you mean, I disagree with:
The immediate cause is probably the misguided and arguably racist "China initiative" which essentially led to a witch-hunt against ethnic Chinese people.
Chinese intelligence services are clearly targeting Chinese-born nationals who have joined firms doing cutting-edge work not only in defense but any economically valuable industry:
Although China publicly denies engaging in economic espionage, Chinese officials will indirectly acknowledge behind closed doors that the theft of intellectual property from overseas is state policy. James Lewis, a former diplomat now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, recalls participating in a meeting in 2014 or so at which Chinese and American government representatives, including an officer from the People’s Liberation Army, discussed the subject. “An assistant secretary from the U.S. Department of Defense was explaining: Look, spying is OK — we spy, you spy, everybody spies, but it’s for political and military purposes,” Lewis recounted for me. “It’s for national security. What we object to is your economic espionage. And a senior P.L.A. colonel said: Well, wait. We don’t draw the line between national security and economic espionage the way you do. Anything that builds our economy is good for our national security.” The U.S. government’s response increasingly appears to be a mirror image of the Chinese perspective: In the view of U.S. officials, the threat posed to America’s economic interests by Chinese espionage is a threat to American national security.
In the life sciences, it's relatively easy (or was relatively easy, once upon a time) to win investment from Chinese VCs but you might notice a Chinese firm doing the exact same thing as you materialize soon afterwards. Unfortunately, it's difficult for me to find quantitative data on the subject to convince you that it isn't a witch-hunt, but it certainly seems quokka-ish to imagine that the Chinese want to play fair in this one single economic arena - particularly given that their stated goals say otherwise.
I've got a number of ideas bouncing around in my head that I just never have the time to try and make the case for convincingly. Headline followed by tl;dr.
A) Oryx and Crake was an instruction manual for biological research - not the cyperpunk zaibatsu dystopia species-level cuckoldry, but the bioengineering. We'll never understand biological systems until we start trying to build them. Preferably with the help of AI.
B) The Bayh-Dole act gave us a sugar high but led to us eating our seed corn. The startup ecosystem and private industry are dependent on uncommercialized, foundational basic research carried out by underpaid and overworked scientists motivated by furthering humanity and/or ego, not profit.
C) Are we witnessing the birth of two transnational ethnicities? Also, the case for globalization.
D) What I tentatively call 'pregnancy autism,' or maybe an autistic attempt to analyze relationships and relationship conflict. Hard to do a tl;dr, but maybe it's an existential crisis inspired by this quote from 'What to expect when you're expecting':
Don’t take her outbursts personally. And don’t hold them against her. They are, after all, completely out of her control. Remember, it’s the hormones talking - and crying for no apparent reason. Avoid pointing out her moods, too. Though she’s powerless to control them, she’s probably also all too aware of them. And chances are, she’s no happier about them than you are. It’s no picnic being pregnant.
E) Whatever the fuck this bullshit spam is from Nancy Pelosi/DNC that I get daily:
Subject: Trump MORTIFYING loss
This is incredible:
Since Donald Trump announced another hateful, divisive campaign for President…
THOUSANDS of Democrats have stepped up and chipped in to our Defeat Trumpism Fund to ensure he NEVER returns to power.
For that, I’m so grateful.
But my team just alerted me that we’re still 2,403 gifts short of our goal before the End of Week Deadline.
I don’t want to beg, but this couldn’t be more important. We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a statement Monday morning. If we CRUSH our goal before this deadline, we’ll show Trump, Republicans, and the ENTIRE country that our Democrats have what it takes to defeat him and his MAGA allies once again. So I’m asking you to be one of the final 2,403 Democrats I need to chip in so we can start organizing to DEFEAT Trump and every last one of his extremist allies. Please, will you chip in $15?
Complete with 2005 html-era formatting highlighting text in red and blue.
F) Healthy at more weights than you thought. IMO, people overstate the health risks of being overweight and don't sufficiently differentiate between overweight/obese and active/inactive.
G) Criticism is valuable, but easy - standing for something is hard but much more valuable. Tied to my distaste for reactionary thought and experience with pitching scientific ideas.
Numbered lists apparently reset after quotes, unfortunately. Apologies for having to use letters instead.
edit: for my own records, the consciousness blackpill.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
Not to keep ragging on you, but does it give you any pause that your proposal massively advantages your own community in terms of political power while disenfranchising those you dislike? Are you impartially proposing something that would better society or do you have a fairly significant conflict of interest?
It would be like me proposing that only people with advanced degrees could vote and rationalizing it in technocratic terms about how we're the most capable, intelligent, whatever parts of society. A master's degree gets you one vote, a PhD gets you 5, people with dual degrees (MD/PhD, etc) get 10, whatever. Sounds plausible, but do you trust me?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
Edit: Though I guess I'm falling into your "criticism is easy" trap, ha.
You're fine, it's not meant to be a trap to stifle discussion. It's more along the lines of someone proposing policy X or idea Y and getting piled on by haters who don't actually have a better idea.
Not taking the outbursts too personally is correct, not holding them against her mostly also. But you absolutely should point out the moods to her. When the hormones are talking, it can be surprisingly difficult for oneself to notice that you're being unreasonable.
It's more like I start spiraling into questioning when anyone is ever truly 'at fault' for something. Say pregnant, hormonal women aren't in control of their actions due to biological reasons (although therein lies another trap - makes it hard to take their grievances seriously, right?). Do we extend the same charity to testosterone fueled domestic violence or crime? How do we decide when someone is at fault, versus when someone isn't in control due to their biology? And finally, if someone behaves a certain way due to their environment (i.e. bad parents, poverty, etc) are they somehow more at fault for those things that are just as outside their control as their biology?
How about something more minor: I've cultivated pretty robust control over my emotions and reactions so I never really lash out at my partners. They still do things that irritate me sometimes, and it always turns into a choice whether I complain about it. But...why? I suppose one litmus test to raising an issue is whether it's actually possible to change their behavior in some meaningful way, and (here's where the autism dials up to 11) I could model myself as being a part of their environment encouraging themselves to change.
Maybe the moral of the story is what you say, and I've rederived the 'just strive to be a better person bro' that the ancients were talking about. And maybe the corollary is to make sure you find a partner striving to do the same so you don't get steamrolled in every argument.
Anyways, thanks for indulging some navel-gazing cringeworthy discussion. Not something that's easy to bring up in real life aside from nibbling around the edges.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
I don’t know why gun rights advocates don’t just admit that yes, if all guns were confiscated and a very strict licensing regime was put in place gun homicides would likely drop substantially.
Because 'We're the baddies but there's so many of us we'll make it politically impossible for you to take our guns' is a lot less inspirational than 'We're martyrs watering the tree of liberty and defending ourselves from a tyrannical government.'
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
I personally find that even less inspiring but whatever floats your boat man.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
Advice seems highly contextual based on the type of person you and she are, so it seems like a bit of a fool's game to try and give you specific tips. I personally wouldn't worry about 'things' like the cooler, etc - I think you're already ahead of the game if you're at that level of detail. It's probably going to be more about the conversation and who you are - be self-confident without being domineering, try and ask questions until she's talking about something she's passionate about and be interested in it, don't come on too strongly. The classical FORD (Family, Occupation, Recreation, Dreams) don't RAPE (Religion, Abortion, Politics, Economics) worked well for me once upon a time.
Just relax and enjoy yourself, you got this :)
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
I always liked:
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What do you like to do for fun/what to do get up to in your free time? Everyone is excited about something, it's just about finding out what it is. One person got awkward and said something canned about netflix, but when I started talking about houses her face lit up and she went on at length about the real estate market. IMO it's less about filler questions and more about fishing for that thing they're passionate about and then showing interest.
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What books are you reading/have you read lately?
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Sometimes I'd try to have random pop culture stuff to bring up if it's good for a laugh...like when Tiger King was a big thing, if you could to it organically could be good for a laugh and bonding moment. Crazy thing local sports team did, funny local city thing (where were you when the local train caught fire?), etc.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
What comes next?
Tl;dr - Assuming Fukuyama is wrong and it isn’t American-flavored liberal democracy until the heat death of the universe. What comes next, either probabilistically or from a perspective of the ‘next’ thing?
If you’ll let me indulge in some whig history and half-baked, poorly-researched ideas, I’m curious to hear people’s thoughts. Say that modern liberal democratic states represent some form of linear progress over the monarchies of the middle ages, the city states of antiquity and hunter-gatherer tribes that came before that. I will say that they at least represent progress along the axes of complexity and ability to project power; I’d rather sidestep the question of whether they represent true ‘progress’ at the risk of getting bogged down in discussions about what the purpose of human existence is. I’m also more interested in speculating on what the political system/civilization of the future looks like than AI doomerism or ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ style takes, but if you truly believe that’s what’s in the cards for us, I suppose I can’t begrudge you your pessimism.
I confess that my knowledge of history is severely deficient so I’d welcome any corrections here, but essentially: modern elections couldn’t be run without at least writing and widespread literacy, nor could the modern nation-state. It was much harder for London to project power to America in the 18th century when communication involved a round-trip on a sailing vessel than it is for Washington to project power over San Francisco with instantaneous telecom in the 21st. In this vein, I’d contend that western liberal democracies are software written for the hardware of the 18th century. Sea changes of the last two centuries include:
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Huge increase in the amount of data available
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Massive decrease in the amount of time required to transmit information, and the barriers to doing so given the universality of internet access and smartphones
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Significant increases in education levels
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AI
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Insert your thoughts here, not trying to make an exhaustive list
All that preamble to ask, what is the next ‘step’ in the evolution of the political tradition and/or civilization? Sooner or later, some country will develop a system leveraging the above much more effectively than us and we’ll be outcompeted.
For example, if we wanted to, we could relatively easily hold a referendum for every major political decision for truly radical democracy - just have some kind of app on your smartphone connected to your SSN (fraud avoidance strategy TBD), vote on the questions of the day over breakfast. Maybe the mob becomes the fourth branch of congress and new legislation requires a majority vote. Perhaps (and I shudder to think of the logistics or reception this would receive in the current climate) issues are categorized by topic and people are sorted by expertise, but policy is still decided by a much broader group than congress.
The nation-state itself could become obsolete. Many have remarked how the cosmopolitan product manager/twitterati of New York, Toronto and Paris are much more similar to each other than they are to the Freedom Convoy, Gilets Jaunes or Dutch farmers dropping manure in highways and vice-versa. How can the nation-state survive man having more camaraderie for his tribal in-group over his fellow countrymen? The hive system outlined in Too like the Lightning seems interesting if the logistics could ever be worked out.
Contrary to what some think, I don’t have a self-referential fetish for democracy. Maybe the Culture mythos predicted the future and competitive nations in the future will turn all import decisions over to AIs, or else get wrecked by their neighbors. Maybe all the technological progress I’ve discussed is orthogonal to politics, and we could just as easily have a liberal democracy as a Yarvinesque monarcho-corporatism as an authoritarian regime exploit AI/big data and outcompete the rest of us independently of how enfranchised the populace is.
What do you all think?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
I don't think it's necessarily great for everyone, but as an unironic freedom-loving patriot, I always feel happy to come home to the good ol' US of A. Japan is great to visit, but it's stultifying. Much of Europe is nice, but it's so goddamned poor. Australia and Ireland are legitimately pretty close, I think I just like the States better because it's home, but I can see the case.
Seconded. Perhaps I've become too accustomed to vice in America, but in Japan the rampant alcoholism among professionals getting hammered on a Monday night was especially offputting, combined with the gambling dens and maid cafes/strippers on every corner of Tokyo. I'd consider Canada, but there's nowhere to live outside Toronto and Vancouver unless your quebecois is impeccable and for our profession it's boring as hell.
Is New York City the best place to live? No, it's a filthy shithole run by corrupt scum. You should expect to be accosted by Jordan Neely, taxed aggressively to support parasites, and treated like you're the asshole for thinking that bodegas don't make it all worthwhile.
You guys all seem to take this as a given, but again - I've lived in large American cities for over a decade now and I've had literally zero problems. I'll spare you the gory details, but I used to get obnoxiously drunk and walk 4-5 miles across downtown to get home at 2-3am on a fairly regular basis. I've been taking public transit both ways for my daily commute for the last two years without ever witnessing anything close to the Jordan Neely incident, and at least for one of those years, wasn't living in the greatest neighborhood. Ditto for my wife.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
So? How'd it go?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
Hardly. YIMBYism is gaining steam and as doglatine points out, it sure seems like the pendulum is swinging back towards law and order among the left. Perhaps there's a lack of self-awareness in failing to say 'wait a minute, wasn't there a group of people telling us 20 years ago that restricting housing supply/being lax on crime was a bad idea?'
But the question in my mind is, what does updating look like to you? There are no more leftists as we come to Jesus and everyone updates to your narrow slice of the overton window? Do we just set up a new political spectrum shifted far to the right? Or do we update by discarding failed policies while keeping the gestalt intact?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
But how could America have been founded in America if America didn't exist prior to the founding of America?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
As well take a look at the posts in the main thread here and conclude that anti-woke purity spiraling inevitably turns into Stormfront.
Dogmatic adherence to utilitarianism doesn't lead to any better outcomes than dogmatic adherence to the Old Testament. Anything has to be alloyed with common sense and some flexibility for appeals to emotion, otherwise you end up with one Repugnant Conclusion or another. TRVDITION is all fun and games and human flourishing until you have to disown your daughter for marrying the Wrong Sort (oops, guess I've been reading too many of SecureSignals' posts).
There's also an aspect of status signaling, whereby emotion is low status. The more coldblooded, the more points you get for being purely rational and high IQ - thus, nuke the GPUs/kill the degenerates/forced sterilization and eugenics.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
The problem is that the community grants status based on writing long, winding posts, obscure references and vocabulary geared more towards showing off intelligence than legibility or appropriateness for the audience/tone of the post. I'm skeptical that a top-down approach would change any of that.
Aim for concision and distilling your thesis into smallest and most airtight argument possible if you want to avoid overly long posts. Use bullet points. Independent clauses before dependent clauses. etc. Not to imply that you don't already do these things, but it's what I try to tell myself.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
Apologies for the naive question, but I'm largely ignorant of the nuts and bolts of AI/ML.
Many data formats in biology are just giant arrays, with each row representing a biological cell and columns representing a gene (RNA-Seq), parameter (flow cytometry). Sometimes rows are genetic variants and columns are various characteristics of said variant (minor allele frequency, predicted impact on protein function, etc).
Is there a way to feed this kind of data to LLMs? It seems trivial for chatGPT to parse 'This is an experiment looking at activation of CD8+ T cells, generate me a series of scatterplots and gates showcasing the data' but less trivial to parse the giant 500,000x15 (flow) or 10,000x20,000 (scRNA-Seq) arrays. Or is there a way for LLMs to interact with existing software?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
Though to be fair, what little I saw of SNE, for example in analysis of single-cell transcriptomes, and what I heard from objective people familiar with the research, didn't necessarily inspire confidence that the patterns emerging were indicative of anything real.
Interesting. I've spent a lot of time staring at t-SNE plots (or more recently UMAPs took over) and they map pretty well to our underlying understanding of the biology. It got a bit hairy when we asked it to split the data into too many clusters and it was difficult to know if we were looking at some novel, minor cell type or a hallucination.
I think I asked that question poorly and also lack the vocabulary to describe what I'm envisioning. Current software for analyzing this kind of data (flow) exists and the typical workflow is just making a series of scatterplots with 'gates,' or subsets of cells that express a given marker. Here's a basic example.
Verbally, it's all very simple - Gate on singlets, then lymphocytes via forward/side scatter, exclude dead cells, gate on CD3+ and then split into CD4 and CD8 T cells. It's the kind of instruction that should be very easy for chatGPT to parse even with a single sentence outlining the experiment. But how to feed the data? Is there a way for chatGPT to interact with an existing analysis software to draw gates/generate scatterplots...? I assume you wouldn't want to feed the raw array of cells into your prompt, although I don't know.
Maybe I'll back up and zoom out a bit. Most people use flowjo to analyze flow cytometry data. It's a multibillion dollar industry, they haven't updated the software in something like a decade (and that update made it worse than the version I was using before), and you routinely draw the same gates over and over again. Imagine you have 50 samples in your experiment, each sample has 10 gates so you're skimming over 500 scatter plots and then inputting however many readouts you have into other histogram plots to represent the data you got. It's repetitive and the software is clunky. LLMs definitely seem 'smart' enough to understand everything that's going on, but I don't have the first idea how you communicate that kind of data to them...
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
Sorry, I think my description of what I was thinking of was exceptionally poor. I tried to elaborate in this comment.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
Do you want LLMs so you can "talk to" your lab results? Otherwise it's easier to analyse masses of data without the LLM middleman.
Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of grunt work involved in flow cytometry analysis which I was thinking of more than the scRNA-Seq. Machine learning for most basic flow cytometry is slightly overkill because conceptually what you're doing with each gate is conceptually pretty simple. I tried to elaborate/clarify in this comment.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
They probably fear that if they don't, they'll be hounded. They don't want to be associated with Bad People so they go out of their way to make the distinction even in the midst of mourning.
It's Havel's Greengrocer: Family Tragedy Edition.
Is it really so difficult to believe that she might just be a good person who genuinely cares enough about doing what she believes is the right thing despite her grief? You may typical mind her to the point that her speech and feelings can't possibly be genuine, but not everybody processes their emotions in the same way as you.
Tell me, when Fox News regularly interviews families with children murdered by illegal immigrants are you similarly disgusted? Do you cringe and berate them for giving speeches on national television rather than grieving alone at home? How about Trump giving a panel with Bill Clinton's victims?
Most people are fundamentally good and want to do the right thing. I think she's deserving of at least as much charity as you're willing to extend to your tribe.
As an aside, is this comment:
Honesty is alien to the Arab, Chinaman, Indian, etc. They have a difficult time imagining a world in which you can look to a man as your equal and take what he says as a sincere expression of his beliefs. I think Americans have been somewhat orientalized in this regard.
So unremarkable that nobody here even bothers to point it out? I know, don't feed the trolls and all, but that tweet is just funny and self-sabotaging to the point of satire. Not to mention the followup tweet 'Hitler! Hitler! Hitler!'
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
Consider instead that they don't arrest him with the information they have. Six months later, he blows himself up in a mall and takes a dozen people with him. Headlines scream: 'Mall Jihadist on FBI radar and they did NOTHING,' whichever political party not in control of congress spins up an investigation and media frenzy to score points in the next election, people hate the FBI anyways.
It's easy to just say the spooks are doing shady things again, but probably harder and more valuable to think about the systemic incentives we've given them to behave that way.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
As Musk is a certified Very Smart Man^tm (IT must be true, a verified dude in his truck wearing sunglasses told me so!) I bet it's actually a legitimate hail marry attempt to get some money out of the site.
Yet another company run into the ground by an African diversity-hire CEO. When will the woke madness end?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
Seconded, as well as the mods doing God's work, as ever.
The vast majority of cancer therapy will boost your expected lifespan on the order of months to a few years. Cures are quite rare and usually surgical in nature except for some slower growing cancers or newer immunotherapies.
Pharma companies just change their prices accordingly if you're only taking the drug for a few months. It's unfortunately arbitrary and pretty disconnected from actual benefit conferred to the patient.
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