Comparing our cycles: PGT-A, then Orchid PGT-WGS A few months ago I looked back at the PGT-A my wife and I received for our first IVF cycle in 2019, and found that low-quality PGT-A results resulted in our clinic discarding possibly viable embryos — 2 embryos with chaotic results, and 1 extremely low-level mosaicism (here s a Continue reading Our family s IVF cycle using whole-genome embryo…
Embryo screening is a lightning rod for constructive criticism, most recently in the context of Orchid s embryo screening for predisposition to severe mental health disease, namely Schizophrenia (Orchid screens for both monogenic and polygenic disease)[1]. I want to talk about one quote which specifically bothers me: To me, it s not. The point of studying the Continue reading I think it’s OK to…
Jurassic park is a vividly entertaining movie, but few people watch it for the chaos theory. At most watchers come away with a first-order “bioengineering is dangerous and we shouldn’t play God” message. Which isn’t completely unintended, but is a very shallow version of the lesson Crichton wrote into the (more thoughtful, but less flashy) Continue reading Jurassic Park is a bad bioengineering…
The conversation around “high information” vs “low information” voters hypothesizes a world where voters lie somewhere on a spectrum of “well-informed” to “uninformed”: Those who fret about “low-information voters” dislike that low-information and high-information voters all count the same at the ballot box, feeling this dilutes the opinions of those who are well-informed about the Continue…
There are net-positive legislative policies which legislators won’t enact, because they only help people in the medium to far future. For example: Climate change policy Infrastructure investments and mass-transit projects Debt control and social security reform Child tax credits The (infrequent) times reforms on these issues are legislated — which happens rarely compared to their Continue reading…
There is a huge gap between the benefits of Artificial Intelligence the public is being sold, the benefits of AI which are being marketed to corporate adopters, and the actual motivations of AI researchers. Tech providers pitch AI as a driver of innovation (self-driving cars) and global good (mitigating global warming). But the B2B case-studies Continue reading The corporate / academic / public AI…
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt explains the link between our conscious, calculating mind and our subconscious, instinctive mind with a metaphor: The Elephant and the Rider: The rider is our “conscious”, reasoning mind, which uses explainable logic to reason about the world, our own behavior, and our preferences The elephant is the momentum of Continue reading GPT-3 is the Elephant, not the…
Bad Blood is the history of Theranos. It’s written by John Carreyrou. John is not just some random journalist-turned-novelist — he’s the same Wall Street Journal reporter who blew Theranos open like a microwaved egg, with his bombshell yet hilariously understated expose in 2015: Hot Startup Theranos Has Struggled With Its Blood-Test Technology” (understatement of Continue reading Bad Blood:…
Or: I Thought I was a Programmer but now I m worried I m a High Modernist. Seeing like a State by James C. Scott is a rallying cry against imperialist high modernism. Imperialist high modernism, in the language of the book, is the thesis that: Big projects are better, organized big is the only good big, Continue reading The Imperial High Modernist Cathedral vs The Bazaar
Blueprint by Nicholas Christakis posits that humans are all fundamentally the same. Except under unusual circumstances, humans build societies full of good people, with instincts inclined towards kindness and cooperation. I read it. This book is a grab-bag which combines lab-grown sociology (much of it from Nicholas’s own team) with down-and-dirty research about common foundational Continue…