I am now on Farcaster permanently warpcast.com/dfern.eth and trying out Bluesky bsky.app/profile/danielferna…

After my PhD, I switched to cancer research because of stories like this. I wanted to use science to make a difference in people’s lives. Reading Susie’s story brings me back to that decision and the hope behind it. When someone shares something so personal and painful, we owe them more than sympathy. We owe them honesty about what we know, what we don’t, and what our scientific research can realistically accomplish. Patients’ experiences should never become fundraising appeals that serve institutions more than the people whose suffering gives those appeals their urgency. Their stories should push us to ask harder questions about where the money goes and whether the work deserves the promises made on its behalf. That includes pursuing basic science whose benefits we cannot yet predict. We need room to discover things we don’t understand. But we should make that case honestly, rather than promise patients or the government that every project is bringing us to a cure. Stories like Susie’s still inspire me to believe that science can make a difference. They also remind me that our responsibility is to earn that hope through the work we do.

Send this to her and say "us"

"Don't think for a second that because you are an 'alarmist' that you are doing a social good." Amen.

Crazy that this policy existed in the first place!

Even Anthropic doesn't believe this Effective Altruism performative histrionics deep down inside. Watch what they do, not what they say.

>be me >discover effective altruism >apparently normal charity is inefficient >why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing >fair enough >buy mosquito nets >save lives >numbers look good >feel powerful >couple years later >someone asks an innocent question >why only count people alive today >huh >future people matter too >obviously >my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet >reasonable.jpg >keep following logic >what about their grandchildren >also yes >what about people in 500 years >sure >5000 years >why not >500 million years >starting to get weird but morality is morality >open calculator >humanity could survive for an astronomically long time >could colonize galaxy >could have trillions upon trillions of descendants >maybe digital people too >maybe simulated civilizations >maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds >calculator starts smoking >realize currently living humans are rounding error >8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta >future contains potentially 10^something people >can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets >new moral priority unlocked >protect the long-term future >stop thinking in units of "people helped" >start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved" >malaria? >terrible >but only kills existing humans >AI extinction could delete the entire light cone >nuclear war could permanently derail civilization >bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years >someone invents wrong constitution in 2140 >quadrillions suffer >better fund governance workshop now >friend says maybe we should improve hospitals >explain opportunity cost >friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people >explain scope sensitivity >friend stops inviting me to dinner >need to decide what to fund >easy >expected value >suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction >sounds tiny >but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives >multiply >mother of god >$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies >charity evaluation complete >someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from >expert judgement >which expert >us >how calibrated >extremely thoughtfully >reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative >still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude >epistemic robustness achieved >someone says maybe project doesn't work >assign 20% chance >still astronomical >maybe project makes problem worse >assign 5% chance >still astronomical >why 5 >because 30 felt pessimistic >publish 46-page report >contains seventeen sensitivity analyses >every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign >critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities >yes >that's literally why it's important >critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical >make probability smaller >critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong >make probability smaller again >critic begins rubbing temples >discover AI safety >perfect longtermist cause >AI might kill everyone >or create utopia >or seize galaxy >or tile universe with paperclips >or create billions of conscious software minds >finally a problem with numbers big enough for me >start AI safety nonprofit >mission: prevent dangerous AI >hire smartest people available >smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI >interesting >we must understand capabilities to understand safety >we must scale models to study alignment >we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first >we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong >we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous >outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies >complicated field >company releases stronger model >very concerned >company begins training even stronger model >extremely concerned >company raises $14 billion >concern reaches unprecedented levels >need to influence government >future is at stake >normal democratic process too slow >politicians don't understand exponential curves >public doesn't understand x-risk >experts must guide them >who counts as expert >people who understand x-risk >who understands x-risk >our friends >someone objects that this seems politically convenient >explain we're representing future generations >future generations unavailable for comment >develop concept of value lock-in >terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever >therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in >whose values >let's circle back >begin with impartial morality >end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want >beautiful arc >meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things >voting wrong >having parochial attachments >loving family more than strangers >caring about local community >getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible >evolutionary biases everywhere >explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted >except intuition that future digital people count >and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad >and intuition that our probability estimates are sane >and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future >those intuitions survived peer review >someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter >inefficient >could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher >think of all the simulated people you just killed >okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly >PR team says "future generations deserve a voice" >much better >journalist asks what longtermism means >say "future people matter" >everyone agrees >great >journalist asks what follows from that >well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures >journalist raises eyebrow >return to "future people matter" >motte has entered the chat >critic: of course future people matter >me: glad we agree >critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them >me: why do you hate our grandchildren >eventually notice uncomfortable implication >if future value dominates everything >then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future >education matters because future institutions >health matters because future productivity >democracy matters because future trajectory >human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy >see starving child >feel compassion >check spreadsheet >child's direct welfare contribution negligible >but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality >compassion restored >tell myself this is impartial altruism >one day assistant asks obvious question >"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?" >silence >open spreadsheet >increase column width >add confidence interval >assistant asks again >"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?" >stare into cosmic light cone >10^50 people staring back >none of them exist >none of them can tell me >none of them can falsify my assumptions >realize I have invented the perfect constituency >infinitely important >completely silent >and always represented by me

It is hard to convince a man the world is not ending when his self-importance depends upon the idea that it is

This could be a wake up call to accelerate open source AI in biotech: Biology, more than almost any other field, needs fewer gatekeepers. Furthermore, filling out a form & putting a target on yourself so they can post-train on your prompts is obviously a terrible idea.

I’ve expected this for a while but it still hurts. The “Life Sciences Verification Program.” It breaks my heart to know that biological knowledge will be locked down and gatekept like this. I want to take a moment to mourn, because I believe this marks an end for open science as I knew it. I think back to my education. I owe so much to the open-access literature. I'm so deeply thankful to the culture of transparency among scientists. All the free knowledge I've been given. The free GenBank sequences. The free PDB structures. The education and know-show that my colleagues shared with me for the pure love of learning. The Life Sciences Verification Program will kill that spirit. The most important biology tools of the next decade will be locked down and controlled. Some fragments of the old literature will remain free, but the real heart of where science happens will not be free. Frontier knowledge will belong only to people who the authorities decide deserve it. I want to fight this, but I don’t think I can. I don’t believe bioterrorism is a serious threat, but convincing people of that is not realistic. The fear is embedded too deep in the psyche. If I tried, there are armies of internet trolls eager to accuse me of evil things. It would become my entire online life. There is a growing and well funded fear-industrial complex dedicated to the idea that Bio-AI is a terrible risk and the people who practice it need to be monitored and policed. Hundreds of full-time professionals whose salary depends on their belief that biology presents a dire threat. What hope do I have of arguing with them? On the other side, the traditional defenders of free information are historically weak. Biology professors are struggling just to keep the lights on. The last thing they want is to be called reckless enemies of national security. They aren’t going to fight this - I’m sure many of them are already signing up to ask for permission to be on the list. So I’m writing this to bear witness. This is how it ended. Biology isn’t going to be free going forward. That was an idea of the pre-AI era and it is over now. The fight now isn’t over free access to information. It’s over who gets verified access to the closed information. Big pharma companies get permission, of course. So do professors at elite universities. But we can petition Anthropic to expand that list. Maybe they might allow access for high school teachers, medical students and nurses? I hope they will approve farmers, iGEM teams, community biolabs, birdwatchers, park rangers and community gardens. Will Anthropic allow those people to study biology at the frontier? As of today, the power officially belongs to them. We can only ask.

Finally, the Bay Area has a good amaro bar: Bitterbuck!

Guy who makes a living from YouTube is against datacenters now What are we even doing here man

One of the things that gets slept on: Texas has no official green policy, but simply says make things at the cheapest price, and that turns out to be a lot greener than all the other states or countries that have official green policies. Prices. They work!

China’s rise in biotech has been fast. Really, really fast. By 2024, for the first time, Chinese companies launched more novel medicines than any other country. And by novel medicines, I mean a new active substance launched for the first time anywhere in the world. The hard part of drug development. Not generics, not a new indication for an existing drug, not a “simple me-too” molecule. This would have been hard to imagine even a decade ago. Until recently, China was largely known for supplying the ingredients to build medicines. Not the actual novel medicines changing treatment paradigms. That's completely changed. We estimate China hit roughly four times the efficiency rate of the US in 2023, with ~16 novel drugs per $10B of R&D. In 2020, the two were at rough parity. And big pharma is rushing to license what China is producing. In 2020, China's share of big pharma licensing deals was just 2%. By 2025 that was 39%. And for 1Q26 it's tracking at 50%. My take is there's a mounting sense of urgency for reform in the US: restoring and improving funding, incentives, and efficiency in drug discovery and development. Indeed, the competitive pressure from China could be one of the most important catalysts for reform of the American biotech industry. Read my full take in @ARKInvest's weekly newsletter 👇

It's nice to see that being incredibly annoying remains a bad campaign strategy

RT @sreeramkannan: x.com/i/article/206159774558…

The past is a foreign country

Had a Jane Street phone interview in 2016. "Price a 6-month forward on carrots." There's no carrot futures market, so I build one from scratch: seasonal harvest cycles, USDA demand elasticity, cold storage decay rates. One trader stops me. "Your storage cost function– you're modeling the carrot as dead inventory. Like grain in a silo." He asks me the metabolic respiration rate of a post-harvest carrot at 2°C. I estimate. "Your forward is overpriced by exactly that shrinkage. The underlying is consuming its own sugars. It's alive." Good correction. I adjust the model. I think I've recovered. Rejection email comes the next morning. Subject: "Ethical Review." My framework, they write, "relied on the severance of the root organism from its growth medium." The question about respiration was a test. The carrot was still alive and I'd built an entire derivatives structure on top of its death without questioning whether harvest was an acceptable act. I pull up the recruiter's original email. It doesn't say Jane Street. It says Jain Street– a non-violent quantitative commodities fund. The carrot was never supposed to be priced. It was supposed to be refused. I later learn the only candidate who passed that round was a former monk from Gujarat who sat in silence for eleven minutes and said, "I cannot put a price on life." He's now a partner.

Me on Unofficial St. Patrick's Day

I came back to the United States, hearing about a very sad news: Craig Venter passed away today. He is a pioneer, successfully sequenced the first Human genome, and tried to create Synthetic Cells. We lost a giant in Science. RIP. @JCVenterInst

The real party is on FB Events