Johanna

To show how this might work, let’s take multiple sclerosis as an example. It is a devastating condition in need of better therapies. When testing new drugs in animal studies, researchers measure and report a number of different metrics, including the effects of drug candidates on inflammation, on damage to nerve fibres (axon loss), on damage to the... See more

All of these lines of evidence lead me to the same conclusion: constant growth rates in response to exponentially increasing inputs is the null hypothesis. If it wasn’t, we should be expecting 50% year-on-year GDP growth, easily-discovered-immortality, and the like.

Let yourself become more ambitious—figure out the most interesting version of where what you’re working on could go. Then talk about that big vision and work relentlessly towards it, but always have a reasonable next step. You don’t want step one to be incorporating the company and step two to be going to Mars.

Hire friends and friends of friends. Go after these people like crazy to get them to join. Some other candidate sources are ok, but I always got bad results from technical recruiters.

Ideally, you want to pay people just enough they don’t stress about cash flow. Equity is harder, but a good rule for the first 20 hires seems to be about double what your investors suggest.

Excessive concern about low levels of radiation led to a regulatory standard known as ALARA: As Low As Reasonably Achievable. What defines “reasonable”? It is an ever-tightening standard. As long as the costs of nuclear plant construction and operation are in the ballpark of other modes of power, then they are reasonable.This might seem like a... See more

There is no evidence that sleep was universally segmented, and there is also little evidence that segmented sleep is better. A 2021 meta-analysis of studies on biphasic sleep schedules found that segmented-sleeping subjects actually reported “lower sleep quality … and spent more time in lighter stages of sleep.” One reasonable takeaway is that... See more

My current favorite theory about what's gone wrong since the 1970s is that we stopped innovating to maximize performance and started optimizing for energy (and resource) efficiency. Imagine all the cool shit we're gonna build once we have abundant sources of clean energy...