Prachee Avasthi

Ok a lot of folks would love to move away from glam publishing but feel tied due to their publishing history and students/PDs who joined because of that. Here’s one possible path to breaking the cycle. A 🧵

Why did Erdos have so many problems?

Finally finished this book about John von Neumann and it was incredible. My other weekend recommendation is the dark wizard docuseries about Dean Potter (on HBO). In the case of both the book and the series, given the ratcheting of achievements, you don’t fully appreciate how unfathomable it all is until it’s over

Fun to play a small part in this new work led by Tsevi Beatus and team: when the lights go off, honeybees simply stop flying and fall! (unlike flies and mosquitoes, which pull off smart maneuvers) Thanks to Richard Terrile for turning the lights off on bees, for science 🐝🪰🦟

what’s the greatest opening line to a song?

New blog post: The third wave of American philanthropy Hundreds of billions of dollars in new philanthropic capital will soon become liquid. The OpenAI Foundation holds 26% of OpenAI, worth about $220B at today’s valuation. Anthropic’s seven co-founders have pledged to give away 80% of their wealth and have instituted the most aggressive donor matching program for employees in tech history. How much does this all add up to? And how meaningful is that in the context of philanthropy today? I was doing some simple napkin math to wrap my head around the scale of what’s coming, and radicalized myself in the process. I had dramatically underappreciated the scale of the philanthropic capital that’s about to become available and the corresponding gap in talent and organizations that will be needed to make the most of it. This piece aims to directionally sketch the scale of what’s coming, the gap in operational capacity needed to absorb it, and what we can do to fill it. (Link to full post in reply)