Aspirin binds to PPARα to stimulate hippocampal plasticity and protect memory [1]
Low-Dose Aspirin Upregulates Tyrosine Hydroxylase and Increases Dopamine Production in Dopaminergic Neurons: Implications for Parkinson’s Disease [2]
Perhaps arrogance should be added to what it takes to be successful.
I'm only half joking; I do think a certain kind of arrogance is conducive to success. Not the kind that screams insecurity and turns off your teammates, rather the kind that goes: "Perhaps I really am the first person who can do this." and then does it.
I admire pg; I don't admire his essays, even though in broad strokes I agree with them. I feel his choice of style works against him; that's where I disagree.
Write like you talk, but if you talk like pg writes you lose your audience. His essays check out line by line, paragraph by paragraph, but they fail to drive at some deeper, more subtle point that can capture the imagination of an audience. I'm sure pg is nothing if not imaginative, but his essays aren't.
Another comment criticizes this essay as just another pg stream of consciousness; I feel it's the opposite: short on many of the details, digressions and emotions that can make an essay come alive, that can give you sense of the author and his world. Often when I read an essay that's what I'm interested in most and I don't think I'm alone in this.
I think I understand why pg has chosen his style; the principles and aesthetic sensibilities that went into his choice and I agree with them. Nevertheless I think it's a poor choice. I hope pg reads this and reconsiders. Innovate!
In the past I read a lot of his essays but I can no longer stomach his obsession with (high) school. He overanalyzes it and relates almost every essay to how things are in school and I'm certain someone has made it into a drinking game by now. Sadly, my tolerance for that kind of game is quite low these days.
Due to having enjoyed his essays 5+ years ago, I still open the new ones and start reading them but I can't help but preface that desire by skimming them for school references now. Additionally, if they're congratulatory of people similar to himself - which they often are - then I also have to say 'no, thanks'.
In the last 20-30 years, American parents and adults have put an enormous amount of focus and pressure on students for educational achievements as indicators for future successes. It's likely because of inequalities in the quality of education between schools, and inequalities of opportunities from schools. Get to a good school -> get good job because went to good school-> get good life. Otherwise, you're a failure. Education is seen as the lynchpin in social mobility.
The lack of social safety net, and a desire for their children to become successful, creates an all or nothing focus on educational achievement.
if you or your parents dedicated a large chunk of resources on said asset (education) it's hard to be detached from it... Ancient China achieved relative stability by pretending thus coercing intellects of the society that the only way out is by studying and become part of government. So yeah, it's quite a sound crowd control mechanism.
I can't yet, sorry! My general research on Tree Languages, as well as a number of products I make, is all open source and public domain, but (sadly since research funding is not so advanced) I do have to be a bit pragmatic and make some money here and there. There might be some bits and pieces out there.
Switzerland has had programs giving methadone and heroin to addicts for more than 20 years now. They've been a success; heroin use has plummeted since it's peak in the 90s.
One reason for the success is that giving out free product kills the local market; many users finance their use by selling to and actively recruiting new users.
My great ant and uncle who were wealthy and lived in Zürich would put 300Fr in cash by the entrance area of their house. The idea being that if a junkie would break in, they would just take that money and leave.
Before the legalization a common stereotype would by junkies breaking into places stealing a few things or destroying things while searching for valuables.
Not sure if this is true or a sensible defense mechanism. However it shows something about the attitude during that time.
If universities were serious about social mobility they would open up their programs, and allow anyone to take the examinations students enrolled in the programs have to take to get their degrees and award equivalent degrees to anyone who passes all the exams, perhaps in exchange for a fee to cover the costs.
They will never do this, because it isn't in their interest.
Doing so would undermine their brand; if people can pass the exams without taking the courses and paying tuition, how can they justify the high cost of tuition?
Degrees are valuable if they are exclusive.
If universities were serious about social mobility, they would record and publicize the lectures.
Some universities publicize some of the lectures, but most lectures aren't publicized.
Again, this will never change, because it isn't in their interest.
(Conversely, many lectures are publicized, because the value of a university to its students lies primarily in the exclusivity of the degrees it awards, not the knowledge it confers.)
I guess all this is obvious, but if it's obvious, why isn't it discussed? Why aren't there OpEds pressuring universities into opening up their programs, as I outlined above?
It's the critical question. The time frame is critical for reasoning about alignment and what to do now.
If you expect AGI to happen tomorrow, you throw up your hands in despair or exhilaration, if you expect it in a hundred years, you might also throw up your hands, but it's a different picture; a hundred years of development will see the development of new technologies transformative in their own right.
If you're the person deciding weather or not to serve HTTP+HTTPS or just HTTPS, chose to serve HTTP+HTTPS. When chosing a TLS cert authority, consider using sometime other than LetsEncrypt even though they're awesome. Everyone using them is not awesome.
17 firms manage over 40t dollars in assets. Tracing the people on the board of those firms, who actually make the decisions, we arrive at about ~200 people. By making their decisions exclusively based on profitability, they perpetuate things like environmental damaging industries (and of course their lobby to delay any action on climate change, extremely profitable decision), or cigarrete companies (the biggest killer of the 20th century, let that sink in). It's profoundly undemocratic, the disproportionate power those people wield to shape the course of the world.
It's detailed e.g. in this book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40923001-giants , which also includes influent orgs like the group of thirty in its count, and of course heads of state of powerful countries.
Also the well known fact that the eight richest people are worth more than the bottom 3,800,000,000, but that's a separate metric.
[1] https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1802021115 [2] https://doi.org/10.1007/s11481-018-9808-3