Alex Ahmed MD

@davidasinclair In other words, what’s normal is not a target or therapeutic endpoint that anyone would choose if they could choose.

Biology doesn’t care what’s “normal.”
It responds to signals. And it can be changed

@cremieuxrecueil What’s your take on vo2 max

I kind of hate biomarkers. There are too many important outcomes for which there probably aren't good biomarkers at all, and most biomarkers thought to be good indicators of important things actually aren't when you put them to the test.

@JebraFaushay She looks like that bad guy from the Mask

Cameron Diaz went on Jimmy Fallon’s show and did a slow head turn and tiny nod. Anyway, people in the comments mostly said it’s nice to see an actress without a tight facelift, Botox, and filler.

@keysmashbandit If narrowAI like stockfish is a 1, and humans are a 10 in terms of general ai. Then current models are somewhere in between, I’d say a 6. Still don’t generalize very well but definitely getting better over time.

My big problem with "AI is only good at solving problems similar/analogous to those they've encountered" is that that statement is just generally true of everyone, which is why we have like, university. And research papers. It's not an interesting thing to say!

@tbunny86 @imjenell Fun fact: Muslim countries (Pakistan, Bangladesh and more) have elected more female leaders than the US ever has

@imjenell His religion does not allow women leaders. What a prick. He’s clearly showing his Islamic take. He would never endorse or say Kamala should be president. NEVER

Kristen to Zohran Mamdani: “Former Vice President Kamala Harris said just last week she is thinking about running for President again. Would you like to see former Vice President run for President again?” 🎥: Meet The Press

@DGlaucomflecken @tracyktownsend

Question for psychiatrists. Where in the depression treatment algorithm would you place psychedelics? Is this kind of like cannabis being roughly the 86th best treatment for glaucoma? It has a very mild effect but you would never actually prescribe it because there are so many better options. This is an honest question.

@DGlaucomflecken @BellevueDoc

@DGlaucomflecken @RCarhartHarris should weigh in here

@DGlaucomflecken There’s a self reinforcing loop in that, many are hesitant to prescribe due to less evidence or clinical experience compared to SSRIs. Which keeps SSRIs as the incumbent. If the research for psychedelics wasn’t there, you could argue it’s hype, but the research IS there

‘How are you so focused under pressure?’ Me in 1995:

@signulll Hmm. I’m not sure I totally sign onto this. Religious and culture based communities I find absorb you in pretty quickly, on the matter of 1-2 months.

wherever you go building real community takes 12 months min, & that’s the optimistic case. but once upon a time community was simply a byproduct of other constraints (proximity, scarcity, shared necessity, etc.) & capitalism/modern life optimized all those constraints away. now it has to be pursued as an end, which is a much harder ask cuz intentional community building often reads as needy in a way that incidental community building never did.

@Kpaxs Long term decisions fall outside their context window, what falls into the context window is “am I willing to do this next thing?” So they do it. They take the test. Check. Put the applications in. Check. Climb up the next rung. Etc etc

People tend to optimize backwards. They'll agonize over a $8 lunch (low stakes, reversible) then make a career choice in 20 minutes (high stakes, path-dependent). The energy expenditure is inverted from the actual importance.

@Timdempv @dwarkesh_sp It’s not in his interest to agree to that analogy, because it implies that he is knowingly strengthening adversaries, the insinuation is understandably taken as an insult on some level.

@dwarkesh_sp Odd to see Jensen exaggerate Dwarkesh's arguments. Comparing AI to uranium, which can be used for power and bombs is a reasonable comparison. Jensen calling that out as unfair seemed odd. As if the comparison would make people dislike ai in the same way nuclear stigma is sticky.

The Jensen Huang episode. 0:00:00 – Is Nvidia’s biggest moat its grip on scarce supply chains? 0:16:25 – Will TPUs break Nvidia’s hold on AI compute? 0:41:06 – Why doesn’t Nvidia become a hyperscaler? 0:57:36 – Should we be selling AI chips to China? 1:35:06 – Why doesn’t Nvidia make multiple different chip architectures? Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. Enjoy!

@MattACrawford @paulg Of course I don’t mean literally everyone. Social networks have social mass, the more of it, the more they bend the fabric of … whatever the social analogy for space time is.

@AlexAhmedMD @paulg But not everyone’s on social. Especially IG

I finally tried to create an Instagram account. (I've managed to avoid it so far.) It was instantly suspended, before I'd even finished the signup process. The final screen of the signup process told me I'd submitted an appeal.

@paulg @MattACrawford Network effect . Everyone’s on it because everyone’s on it

@MattACrawford I learned that my favorite watch dealer posts watches there before they come up for sale on their site.

@davidasinclair @elonmusk He’s saying the only people that can make those claims are the ones actually in the trenches doing the work , not that those claims aren’t true

Most of the self-professed longevity experts predicting we will soon live much longer (or live forever!) haven’t done a single day of aging research or published a peer-reviewed paper on the subject Like @elonmusk, I’m proud of our hardworking teams 👏

@signulll Now that’s a banger quote “every casual encounter trains you to treat intimacy as audition.”. Completely true. Each encounter desensitizes us to the real thing when the real thing eventually does arrive.

i have a friend in nyc that just goes on dates constantly (like 3-4x per week) & i am amazed by her resilience cuz i think mindless dating right now is the highest cost low return activity in modern life. it’s not even close. ppl make it a hobby without realizing the emotional costs are real & they compound silently. every casual encounter trains you to treat intimacy as audition. like turning this into job interview pipeline devalues it almost entirely. ironically you become worse at the thing you’re optimizing for. you can feel ppl who are doing this when you encounter them. what a tragedy.

We spend our lives living in an inferred reality. Your brain is given the raw data, a whole lot of full in the blank processing is done, and then given to you as a useful mental model for action. Your feelings, your thoughts.. just what your brain thinks you need to survive.

It fascinates me how much a human being can do and experience in a single day. All the experiences we can have, and all the causal influence we can have in a 24 hour period. Truly astounding

@pmddomingos @itaisher If a philosophical claim is falsifiable, then it’s a scientific claim? We could just go back to calling science natural philosophy so everyone’s happy.

@itaisher No, philosophy never makes progress because the parts that do become separate fields.

The claim that philosophy makes no progress is clearly false. There has been tremendous development of philosophy since ancient times on many subjects Modern logic is one place where we are much more advanced and a lot flows from that alone.