Links
Environment
- The decreasing cost of renewables unlikely to plateau any time soon (Ars Technica, 2021)
- UN: Weather disasters soar in numbers, cost, but deaths fall (2021)
- NASA: Extra carbon boosts forest growth which in turn slows down climate change (2021)
- Recent CO₂ emissions flattened out by revised forest data (related to the previous link, Ars Technica, 2021)
- Microplastics are everywhere — but are they harmful? (Nature, 2021)
- Fossil fuel combustion kills more than 1 million people every year, study says (Ars Technica, 2021-12, original study). The study examins PM2.5 pollution. 80% of the deaths are in South and East Asia. 50% of them are due to coal and the rest due to oil and natural gas.
- AI analysed 1,500 policies to cut emissions Different combinations of policies worked better than stand-alone policies. Except for taxation. "Taxation was the only policy that achieved nearly equal or larger emission reductions as a stand-alone policy, as opposed to a policy mix, in all four sectors." (Nature, 2024-08)
- A Twitter thread with a story of publication bias in climate science (2023) — The researcher wasn't able to add some aspects of the study in his article because that would make it less publishable.
Health
- Covid: Unvaccinated are 5X more likely to catch delta, 11X more likely to die (Ars Technica, 2021-11)
- COVID vaccines cut the risk of transmitting Delta — but not for long (Nature, 2021-10)
- There is no conclusive evidence about relative effect of glucose vs fructose
- Aspartame: Once more unto the breach (Dynomight, 2022-06) On the safety of Aspartame sweetener. Spoiler: it's pretty safe.
- Caffeine and exercise performance (30 page study summary) (2022-09) A summary of a meta-study about benefits and side-effects of caffeine. It's not recommended to consume more than 400 mg of caffeine per day (5 Red Bulls).
- Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children. "A study of nearly 2,000 children found that those who reported playing video games for three hours per day or more performed better on cognitive skills tests involving impulse control and working memory compared to children who had never played video games." (2022-10)
- Is Social Media bad for your mental health? — based on the summary on ACX, yes, but mostly for teenage girls. (2023-03)
- A memory prosthesis could restore memory in people with damaged brains (2022) — Researchers are trying to make a memory prosthesis by recording and replaying brain signals.
- Diet sodas are not actually good for your diet, WHO guidance suggests (Ars Technica, 2023-05, based on a WHO study) A metastudy run by WHO found that replacing sugary drinks by artificially sweetened ones has only short-term positive effect on BMI. Long term the effect is neutral (or even negative). Sweeteners use is also associated with increased risk of Type 2 Diabetes and death, but it might be due to reversed causation.
- Study finds no “smoking gun” for mental health issues due to Internet usage (Ars Technica, 2023-11) A study with 2 million participants didn't find any link between online activities such as browsing social media and gaming and mental health issues.
- Optimal dietary patterns for healthy aging (Nature Medicine, 2025-03) A big study finding the correlations between different types of food that the person includes in their diet and the probability of reaching a healthy old age. Spoiler: a bit like mediterranean diet, legumes and nuts. Red meat = bad.
Programming
Machine Learning
AI
Technology
Economy
Physics
Misc
- "Facebook Papers" (leak from 2021)
- Top 10 Replicated Findings From Behavioral Genetics (2016)
- Bounded Distrust – Scott Alexander on how much we can actually trust experts or media that we don't trust. His main take: for most sources there are levels at which they can lie/warp the truth, but there are also lines they will not cross. E.g. a scientist normally will not blatanly lie about their area of expertise. (2022-01)
- Russian's why don't you protest? (2022-09) A Twitter thread the responds to a common criticism that Russian opposition should do more to stop the war.
- How we could stumble into AI catastrophe (Holden Karnofsky, 2023-01-13) An overview of possible scenarios of AI safety failures.
- Visual design rules you can safely follow every time (2023) A set of easy to understand and implement advices for visual design.
- "What counts as death?" (2021-12) — Holden Karnofsky on what constitutes a person. His view is that we are constantly being replaced by different versions of us, so weird questions about simulation and teleportation are not that weird.
- The Most Dangerous Writing App — a text editor that deletes all your progress if you stop writing for 5 seconds.
- The XY Problem (2023) — a description of a fallacy/bad strategy in which a person that needs to solve problem X actually looks for solution to problem Y which as he thinks would help with solving X.
- Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration (Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2023) — An advesarial collaboration study into sexism in academia. Found no significant gender-based differences in some areas and little in others.
- Accent of Evil (Youtube, 2023-06-17) Dr Geoff Lindsey on why and how English RP (received pronounciation) is associated with villains in Hollywood movies.
- When did people stop being drunk all the time? (Substack, 2023-07-18) In Europe before 18th century most of the people consumed at least ~1 litre of beer a day. In wine-drinking countries people drunk an equivalent amount of wine. The alcohol consumption reduced with the start of industrialization.
- Animated Knots (2023) — A big collection of knots with instructions of how to tie them.
- Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started: Evidence from 350,757 Flips (2023) — Turns out a fair coin lands on the same side from which it was launched 50.8% of the time.
- Do elephants have names for each other? (Nature, 2024) — Elephants seem to use proper names to address their fellows — a habit that appears to otherwise be unique to humans. Scientists used machine learning to analyse 469 deep rumbles made by wild female African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) and their families in Kenya. They found patterns that indicate that calls are specific to individuals. The researchers also played recorded calls to elephants out in the field and watched how the animals responded. “They could tell if a call was addressed to them just by hearing that call,” says behavioural ecologist and study co-author Michael Pardo.
- You Don’t Need Words to Think (Scientific American, 2024-10-17) — Brain studies show that language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
- Computational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction — An exploration of various computation systems that can give rise to life-like behaviors.
- Personality Tests Aren’t All the Same. Some Work Better Than Others (Scientific American, 2024-02-28) — Compares the predictive power of different personality tests when it comes to predicting the life outcomes. The results range from Astrology which has 0 predictive power to Big 5, which accounts for 24% of variability.
- Do Ethicists Steal More Books? — The article compares the rates of missing library books on Ethics compared to other philosophical disciplines and fins that they are 25% more likely to be missing. For some categories of books the difference in rate reaches 2x.