Articles
Note: As of February 2021, most new articles are being posted on my Substack!
- 2025
- Why are we making so little progress on Long COVID?
- A critical analysis of Microsoft's quantum "breakthrough"
- The golden age of German science (1880 - 1930)
- Why is it so hard to build a quantum computer?
- Quantum computing -- hype vs reality
- 2024
- A pro-progress middle school health textbook from 1929 Progress Studies
- Who should be our next FDA Comissioner? FDA
- (Asimov Press) A Defense of Peer Review
- When "weak links" in science matter -- high profile fraud in Alzheimer's disease research
- An overview of conspiracy theories about transhumanism
- WTH is Cerebrolysin, actually?
- Misc review of my posts and top readings for ~may-june 2024
- Transhumanism has a visual aesthetics problem
- New WHO report - defining "airborne" is very, very complicated
- All of these things about COVID-19 can be true (this is scary)
- Space is hard... Intuitive Machine's lander nearly didn't make it
- FDA devastation during the pandemic FDA
- Why don't we have better over-the-counter sleep aids?
- Weird properties of large language models AI
- Why I'm allergic to AI hype AI
- 2023
- LK-99 red flags and other miscellany
- Why Lawrence Lessig is wrong about Francesca Gino
- How common is scientific fraud?
- Why AI doctors should not be FDA regulated FDA AI
- Book review - "Innovation Breakdown" FDA
- Sorry Dr. Coughlin, “aging” and “old age” are real, and they suck
- How to treat Long Covid as a brain-based (psychosomatic) illness
- The "false fatigue alarm" theory for Long Covid fatigue
- Psychosomatic contributors to Long Covid suffering
- What AI ethicists get wrong – and right – about AI safety
- Could S-modafinil be the new caffeine?
- 2022
- (Medium) Some criticisms of EA-funded AI safety efforts AI
- Notes on applications of AI to kidney stone disease
- The world in 2072
- Kidney stone pain as a potential EA cause area
- AI for medicine is overhyped right now AI
- The deluge of crappy papers must stop
- Notes from "Where is my Flying Car?" Progress Studies
- (LessWrong) How I'm thinking about GPT-N AI
- 2021
- Why the FDA should legalize Pfizer's COVID pill immediately FDA
- Map of Progress Studies Progress Studies
- (LessWrong) Possible research directions to improve the mechanistic explanation of neural networks AI
- Petition to President Joe Biden – Appoint Dr. Martine Rothblatt to Lead the NIH!
- Book review of “The Alignment Problem” by Brian Christian AI
- The FDA almost killed me FDA
- The Case for Leronlimab
- Did the J&J pause boost confidence in vaccines?
- A summary of the USTP FDA Reform Panel I organized
- AI for COVID-19 diagnosis - a case study in bad incentives
- To Maryland Governor Larry Hogan - Liberate Vaccine Doses from the FDA! FDA
- A list of possible FDA reforms FDA
- Europe's reckless precaution FDA
- What happened? A timeline on the development and approval of Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca's vaccines FDA
- Forecasting connectomics - a naive Kurzweilian approach
- Why Clubhouse will be bigger than Twitter
- My comment to the FDA's VRBAC meeting on the J&J vaccine EUA
- The UnclogTheFDA ApproveAstraZeneca social media campaign FDA
- Let's unclog the FDA and save lives! FDA
- How we can judge the safety and efficacy of new vaccines prior to Phase III data and why we must FDA
- 2020
- What would a science of AI look like? AI
- Book review of “Hacking Darwin” by Jamie Metzl
- Summary from the 2020 AGI Strategy Meeting's session on Community Capacity AI
- Basic workflow for creating and using a remote git repository for backup and collaboration
- 2019
- Draft AI Policy Points
- My IamTranshuman manifesto
- (Medium) Supplements list
- (Medium) My experience with psychodynamic therapy vs CBT
- 2018
- Vegan & vegetarian recipes collection
- Motivations for studying how to interpret molecular machine learning models
- 2017
- Open source software on my GitHub
- Resources for learning data science and machine learning
- Geoffrey Hinton on what's wrong with CNNs
- DIY Drug Discovery - using molecular fingerprints and machine learning for solubility prediction
- Condensed notes from “Ethics of AI” at NYU, October 14-15th, 2016
- Debye relaxation in water, aka “how microwaves work” explained at last
- Using nicotine as a cognitive enhancer
- My AI article for middle schoolers: “Robots and Mechanical Men”
- Testing out decision trees, AdaBoosted trees, and random forest
- 2016
- The AI control problem is more pressing than the consciousness question
- Some subtler problems with Wikipedia articles
- What leads to achievement?
- Recursion is slow
- An introduction to the water structure problem
- Our Nature Communications paper – ice-like phonons in liquid water
- Some thoughts on Zoltan Istvan's presidential campaign
- “Accelerando” by Charles Stross
- 2015
- Maximum entropy priors
- More counterintuitive Bayesian reasoning problems
- Exclusion zone water
- A physicist’s visualization of Bayes’ theorem
- Moore's law – Kurzweil vs. Thiel
- Crackpot Nobelists
- Explaining the uncertainty principle correctly
- What’s your evidence threshold?
- Why physicists still use Fortran
- Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception
- Neuromorphic hardware – a path towards human-level artificial intelligence
- Why do we see the frequencies we do?
- The chance that a child will have a severe reaction to the MMR vaccine is less than the chance they will die in a 200 mile car ride
- Tesla’s folly – why Wardenclyffe didn’t work
- Capitalism - an outline
- “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchel
- Is Tesla’s particle beam weapon practical?
- 2014
- “Halting State” by Charles Stross
- “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert A. Heinlein
- “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel
- Some corrections to Matthew Inman’s Tesla puff piece
- Entropy : part I
- 2013
- Digital artwork
- Percolation Theory – the deep subject with the not-so-deep sounding name
- Wasserfadden!
- Periodic Boundary Conditions
- Polyhedra
- A misconception about microwaves
- Does hot water freeze faster than cold? Explaining the Mpemba effect
- What the heck is in this stuff ??
- The human brain is amazing
- On writing well enough
- Quantum effects in water
- More is different
- 2010
- starlog
- Building a Kernel for 3D Shape Recognition Using Neural Networks
- Some energy drink reviews
- Energy drink ingredients – do they work? A science-based review
- Book list
- Neuromancer by William Gibson
- Naked eye observing techniques
- Some Electronic Albums I've Listened to in Times Past
- 2009
- Frequently asked questions at the Hirsch Observatory
- The History of Astronomy at RPI
- Inanimate Objects Party Archive
- Proactive vs. Retroactive Environmentalism
- 2008
- Top 10 Impressionist Piano Albums of All Time
- Astro pics I took at RPI’s Hirsch Observatory
- My Philosophy of Music
- A Critique of the Institution of Football
- Quotes
- Poetry
- 2007
- Trance, Music, and Trance Music
- A review of Spicelab's A Day on Our Planet
- 10 of the greatest electronic albums
- Pet Peeves