Uku Vainik retweeted
After a long day yesterday I accidentally took the wrong tube line home. Cursing my luck I lifted my eyes to see…
a poem by a beloved Estonian author Jaan Kaplinski - Only at dusk do eyes really begin to see.
So here’s to small miracles restoring our faith in the world. 🇪🇪❤️🇬🇧
Uku Vainik retweeted
Ukraine is a truly extraordinary country.
Just think about it: four authoritarian regimes - Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran - are waging war against Ukraine or supporting the war. Three of them possess nuclear weapons, while Iran has an advanced nuclear program.
And now even the president of the United States, the world’s most powerful nuclear democracy, appears more willing to pressure Ukraine than its aggressor.
All against a country that voluntarily gave up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for security assurances.
What an extraordinary lesson in international politics.
Uku Vainik retweeted
Just discovered a most interesting website telling me what Wikipedia pages a country's people read the most the day before:
- Kazakhstan: Intercession of the Theotokos
- Mongolia: Genghis Khan (lol)
- USA and Australia: Katie Zacharia (no surprises)
- Tuvalu: Toast sandwich
- Kiribati: Tear down this wall! (Ronald Raegan cold war spech)
sheets.works/data-viz/what-e…
Uku Vainik retweeted
Meloni: I do not miss the Russian tanks in Prague and Budapest. I do not miss the Berlin Wall.
If Ukraine stopped defending itself tomorrow, Russia would occupy a European nation and Soviet-style imperialism would return.
Surrender is not peace. It is conquest. 1/
Uku Vainik retweeted
Anthropic is offering a 145k salary for a personal assistant in London.
Responsibilities include:
"Scheduling and managing calendars for leader(s) and their organization"
"Building and maintaining organizational systems for tracking and managing inbound requests"
"Managing the leader's inbox and communications with precise attention to detail"
"Handling travel logistics"
Somebody should really build some sort of tech tool that can handle this stuff autonomously.
Uku Vainik retweeted
I wrote about the recent symposium on Greg Clark's forthcoming book on genetics and social mobility. Clark uses large-scale lineage data to argue that social status in England can be entirely explained by genetic transmission. 🧵
Uku Vainik retweeted
This has to be the most interesting and sobering paper of the year. It estimates the global health impacts across all measurable threats to health to 2100 using amenable disability adjusted life years (DALYs). The leading threat to health? Obesity, including high BMI, poor diet, and low physical activity. Food systems are one of the key ways to address obesity and other leading threats to health in the 21st Century.
thelancet.com/journals/lance…
ALT Horizontal bar chart comparing cumulative expected amenable disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) from 2025 to 2100, in billions, across 17 global health and societal challenges. Obesity has the highest estimate (approximately 23 billion DALYs), followed by low educational attainment (16 billion), income inequality (14 billion), malicious use of AI (10 billion), and nuclear conflict (9 billion). Blue bars represent most challenges, while orange bars highlight AI-related harm and nuclear conflict. Black horizontal error bars indicate uncertainty, which is particularly large for income inequality and nuclear conflict.
Uku Vainik retweeted
A little over a year ago, @cremieuxrecueil shared the results of a bombshell study purporting to demonstrate that Black-White IQ differences in the United Kingdom have a largely genetic basis. In my latest article, I argue that this result is not trustworthy and challenge Crémieux to prove otherwise.
🧵 A Thread
unavailable
Uku Vainik retweeted
Just published @TheLancet
Global threats to health in the 21st century
an opus, 59 page comprehensive dissection of all the threats we face
thelancet.com/journals/lance… @IHME_UW
Uku Vainik retweeted
I've been prototyping an automated peer review project. With current models you get human level peer review for about $0.10 of tokens. For $5 you can rederive every result, check every statistical inference, and audit every paper cited in both directions.
There are about 100m papers in the scientific corpus. Most are not important. Many are sloppy. For structural reasons it's essentially impossible to change published work, even to correct a typo.
For $500m today you can thoroughly audit every paper ever written. Every p-hacked result, every plagiarist, every fabrication, every citation club, everything.
I don't have $500m so instead I build a tree, focusing on the 1% of papers that carry 99% of the signal, doing a cheap first pass looking for obvious problems. I can find 90% of the nonsense for a few hundred dollars of tokens.
Any guesses where the biggest surprises will be found?
Uku Vainik retweeted
🇪🇪🇺🇦 Estonian Prime Minister:
"We should think about whether we can quickly increase assistance to Ukraine so that it can turn Russian oil refineries into ruins."
Uku Vainik retweeted
Would you just look at these beautiful timber blinds in this social housing in Navarra, Spain
In a warming world, shading should be on ALL housing!
The architects are Taller Basico and MRM Arquitectos. Blinds by Saxun Solar
Uku Vainik retweeted
New in Science: we randomized phone-free classrooms for 16,000+ students across 10 institutions in Odisha, India. Students deposited phones in a box at the start of each class, for a full semester.
Uku Vainik retweeted
Norway's controversial 2021–2024 reforms nearly doubled the tax on business wealth. Firms of affected owners did not invest less, and outmigration was limited to the very top, from @Mariusring nber.org/papers/w35854
Uku Vainik retweeted
This document is going to be an assigned reading in college classes that cover this moment in time, there's a lot happening in a few paragraphs... ahmath.org/statements
Uku Vainik retweeted
Update:
Hundreds of papers published (the package) ✅
The author list is "the consortium" ✅
Raw data not released ✅
Within days errors found in multiple publications ✅
One person claims credit for all the work of the consortium and compares himself to Newton ✅
Going to check my mailbox every day now 😅
The new issue of Works in Progress, arriving with subscribers this week, is our best ever and packed with must-read pieces.
Our lead essay is @RobinRivaton and @bswud on how China's cities, and the competition between them, have driven its rise to techno-industrial preeminence.
It also includes:
- @danwwang on Chinese and American second-tier cities,
- @tylercowen on the food of Brazil,
- @vpostrel on the invention of supermarkets,
- @CharlesCMann on the discovery of porcelain,
- @salonium on the myth of accidental scientific discovery,
- Stephen Kotkin on Leninism's fatal flaw,
- @owl_posting on biomedical hedge funds,
- @PMArslanagic on the formula for lovable cities,
- @pietergaricano on Ukraine as the future of war,
- @PatRubenFitz on the Bronze Age Collapse, and
- @SCP_Hughes on the social lives of hard-partying Victorian elites.
Plus: love and shame in Ancient Rome, making mosquitoes extinct, the return of 1930s dating norms, and why Pakistan is home to the world's best architect. And our new crossword, our cocktail column, classifieds, and more!
The new edition has had a massive design upgrade with beautiful, premium matte paper, a larger form factor, and bigger, clearer and more elegant typeography. It is a joy to read.
Copies arrive with subscribers this week: subscribe now or by October 16th to get yours.
worksinprogress.co/print/
Uku Vainik retweeted
I made a site called hotelist.com to fix this, it normalizes ratings from booking sites: for example if it's always 4 to 5, it stretches those ratings to 0 to 5, so a 4 becomes a 0, and a 4.5 becomes a 2.5
It also uses scours the web for actual opinions about hotels instead of booking sites and then rates based on that
Uku Vainik retweeted
New collaboration between @sangerinstitute & @amsterdamumc in @NatureGenet!
The largest study to date on the association between DNA & intelligence.
We reduce ascertainment bias and boost power by imputing missing intelligence scores in @uk_biobank.
nature.com/articles/s41588-0… 👇🏽
