Johanna

A lot of things are happening here, including the mess that’s been the 2020s, but also the combination of a) news publisher abundance b) media negativity bias c) social media amplifying high-arousal negativity (eg, outrage) turns the news into a virtual realm... See more

When we cut off the supply and discovery of new drugs, it’s like outlawing the electric motor or the idea of a randomized controlled trial. Without drugs, modern people have stopped making scientific and economic progress. It’s not a dead stop, more like an awful crawl. You can get partway there by mixing redbull, alcohol, and sleep deprivation,... See more

Your internet is not as fast as it could be. Does that matter as long as you can load this article? Arguably not. Our world runs on the functional, not the perfect.

If you want to determine beyond a shadow of a doubt whether someone’s going to be a great hire, give them an audition project — even before having them speak to other employees on your team. I’m not talking about a generic, abstract problem. I’m talking about a real world, honest-to-God unit of work that you need done right now today on your actual... See more

Because scientific papers are not easily accessible, we can’t easily use the data to train generative models like GPT-3 or DALL-E. Can you imagine if a researcher could propose an experiment and an AI model could instantly tell them if it had been done before (and better yet, give them the result)? Because scientific papers are not easily... See more

A mental model is simply a representation of how something works. We cannot keep all of the details of the world in our brains, so we use models to simplify the complex into understandable and organizable chunks.

What they want younger people to know is this: life is short. The older the respondent, the more likely to say that life passes by in what seems like an instant. They say this not to depress younger people, but to get them to be more aware and selective about how they use their time. Older people practice what psychologists call ‘socioemotional... See more

Is the Controlled Substances Act really responsible for the general decline since 1970? We’re not sure, but what is clear is that drugs are foundational technologies, like the motor, combustion engine, semiconductor, or the concept of an experiment. New drugs lead to scientific revolutions. Some of those drugs, like coffee, continue to fuel fields... See more