Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten)

OnlyFans encourages models to advertise themselves, often on their own social media accounts, sometimes via scams, which, quote, unlocks human creativity on the problem of bringing new eyeballs to a porn site.

13.

Nate Silver has 113 predictions for Trump's second term.

I'd be interested to see whether making each of these predictions 10% less confident to account for possible game board overturning AI ends up beating Nate.

14.

Sarah Constantin.

What's behind the SynBio bust?

Three of the most promising synthetic biology companies, Ginkgo, Zymergen and Amiris, all crashed between 2021 and 2023.

Why?

Producing chemicals in traditional factories is orders of magnitude more efficient than synthesizing them via microbes, except for the sort of large biomolecules that can't be produced in factories.

These companies had brilliant employees and cool tech, but no clear plan to get around this handicap, and used up their runway before they could figure one out.

They also focused too hard on designing the microbes, and were too willing to outsource the actual manufacturing to other people without being sufficiently paranoid that those other people were doing quality control.

15.

One of the more exciting psychiatric results, which I blogged about a long time ago, was the apparent finding that omega-3 supplementation could prevent high-risk people from having first-break schizophrenia.

A new RCT says this doesn't replicate, and cites two other recent trials showing it didn't replicate.

There's also a new meta-analysis which says it actually does replicate, but usually failing a big RCT is a bad sign, and I'm pretty sceptical.

Thanks to Isaac F. for the links.

ETA?

Thomas Riley says, quote, Although I don't believe omega-3 supplementation has any benefit in psychosis, I also don't think this new trial should shift your opinion much, given the total sample size was N equals 135 and the total number of transitions to psychosis was N equals 8.

16.