Ben Mann Monthly Feb 2021: cookies, mushrooms, good researchers, bad movies, fake meat, fun sci-fi
Purpose
An index for my memory
A menu of topics for my next conversation with you
A faster way to share what I’m excited about without the barrier of writing a complete blog entry on it
A skimmable way to spread content I found valuable
Experiments and experiences
Random thoughts on what makes a good AI researcher
I wouldn't claim to be an expert since I've only worked for a few companies. That said, I think the 10x engineer/researcher is that not because they do 10x more, but because they work on the right thing at the right time. You can spend a year optimizing your image recognition system, but that won't change the world. Knowing what to work on comes from taste, which you can develop yourself by making lots of bets and mistakes, or develop by copying someone else you trust, which comes with its own challenges: ie, how do you know who has good taste? An obvious thing to look for is people who keep on producing hits, rather than one-hit wonders. That can be tough to analyze for people like Andrej Karpathy whose work is mostly no longer public. A good example is Alec Radford, who keeps churning out huge results (DCGAN, GPT-1,2,3, CLIP). While he's more of a researcher than a research engineer, the most effective people can and do do everything. Vertical integration is powerful. He fearlessly tries 10 things that don't work, every day, and doesn't get discouraged. Going through dataset and model samples by hand one at a time isn't below his pay grade. He often notices important things and notices tiny details to tweak, which make a huge difference to the results. It doesn't hurt that he has incredible recall for every paper he's read. On top of all this he's one of the most humble people I've met. Be like Alec.
Growing Lion's Mane
Diana bought a Lion's Mane mushroom kit. It was very easy to grow! After harvesting, we cut it into 1/2" steaks and pan fried them. It tasted strange. While the reviews comparing it to scallops were understandable, to me it tasted more like... a big pan-fried mushroom. It was edible, but I can't say I'm craving it again anytime soon 😅.
Purim & hamantaschen
While I consider myself a bad Jew, I do love the food. I learned that Purim is a Jewish holiday celebrating the defeat of an evil Persian Empire official, Haman, who wanted to kill all the Jews. What's with the genocide trope in Jewish history? There's a cookie called hamantaschen, which translates to "Haman's pockets", which were supposedly full of bribes, and the shape is like Haman's 3-cornered hat. It's shortbread with jam filling, traditionally poppyseed, apricot or prune. I wanted to buy some, but we couldn't find any in Mission Bay, so we made them ourselves. I probably ate more this month than in the rest of my life combined. No regrets.
Next level no-knead
I've been making no knead bread since I was a kid, but I happened upon this YouTube video explaining the importance of the different steps involved. The biggest update for me was seeing how he handled an extremely wet and sticky dough, fearlessly. The key is to not worry about it sticking and focus on developing the gluten by stretching it out at strategic moments. I was lazy and don't have a dutch oven, so I turned it into foccacia by covering it with olive oil, flattening it onto a pan, and sprinkling some salt and rosemary. A+.
Mask sampling
While the pandemic was coming down from its peak, I tried N95, KN95, KF94, PD100, and surgical masks. Surgical masks ended up being the most comfortable by far since the gussets allow it to stretch up and down as you talk, rather than sliding around and needing constant readjustment.
Emotion rating {-3, 3}: mean 1, std 1
Highs: feeling well rested thanks to intra-nasal breathing aid! Scheduled another turbinate reduction with my ENT for later this month. Long bike rides despite minimal training.
Lows: Cluster instability at work (now fixed!) making it hard to do science. Wanting COVID to be over.
Life updates
Started using intra-nasal breathing aid while sleeping on recommendation from my Dad 👃💯
Two long bike rides followed by long recovery naps immediately afterwards 🚴
Working on front split, not because I actually care about the goal, but to gamify stretching more
Very wet Alamere Falls hike for Valentine's Day, rewarded with Shake Shack
Secret to making your cake beautiful: let it fully cool before frosting AND between frosting the top & sides
Booked Maui mid-April
Training for Bishop 20M race, but might not register
Content
5 point Likert ratings for “I would recommend this content to a friend”, sorted
Excellent short story collection from the author of the Three Body Problem trilogy, h/t Jack Clark, free of most of the worn out plots of scientists ruining things for everyone
In "Contraction", an decorated old physicist tries to explain to everyone that time will reverse, to their disbelief.
In "Cloud of Poems", an intelligent race of dinosaurs enslaves humanity, but then some arrogant aliens made of pure energy decide to rescue because Li Bai is the best poet in the Universe. So whimsical!
In "The Thinker", a neurosurgeon and an astronomer's chance meeting and suppressed love affair leads to a startling discovery.
Lewis Bollard on big wins against factory farming and how they happened 4/5
Plant-based meat is growing like crazy! Even the most successfuly companies have still only spent $200M on R&D. Seems like we're just scratching the surface of quality.
At $2/lb, 70% of the cost of chicken is feed. That's insanely efficient! And not because of government subsidies, but instead because of cutthroat competition. While it's difficult for plant-based meat to compete on price, the price has been dropping steadily and will continue to decrease.
Costco was way ahead of the rest of the industry on cage-free eggs. They don't advertise this because despite this, factory farming practices are tough to stomach. The reason they're ahead was due to effective lobbying against them, which caused their leadership to convert almost 100% of their suppliers.
America is more like Latin American countries than European ones when it comes to animal welfare standards and associated economic regulations.
Can we engineer farm animals to be happy despite their tough lives? And make them grow faster to boot? Seems tough.
South East Asian countries sometimes rip the eyes off shrimp because their bodies grow faster when they don't need to maintain their eyes 😱
Bay Area Plant-Based Meat Reviews 4/5
Didn't expect to enjoy reading this as much as I did
"A Taiwanese-American chef with Hunanese roots invented [General Tso's] chicken in New York and named it after a hometown hero. Wikipedia also informs me that General Tso reconquered Xinjiang for China and ethnic-cleansed thousands of Uighurs and other Chinese Muslims, so maybe he needs to be cancelled. On the other hand, if you believe that eating chicken might be a moral atrocity, maybe one moral atrocity should be named after another. Maybe I would feel less silly ordering from all these mediocre vegetarian restaurants if normal foods had names like “Idi Amin's hamburger special” or “Comrade Stalin’s lamb shank”. Maybe General Tso's chicken is the only dish that's doing it right."
I wasn't at all convinced by the Doomsday Argument, which is trying to guess how surprised we should be that we were born now. My rebuttals are that we don't have effective priors, and even low probability events do happen, so we can't update much on existing now rather than in the future.
Nice overview of how OpenPhil thinks about distributing their funding, AI timelines reports, and the psychological challenges of research.
Main message: don't let society make you afraid to live your life. Take risks! Do things others might call crazy.
I think I'm already living this message, but there were still a few philosophical gems scattered through the text.
Avogadro Corp 3/5
A nice AI alignment science fiction story clearly about Google & Gmail's near future. Style-wise, like a Google engineer tried to emulate Tom Clancy.
Some engineer makes an email extension that rewrites your emails to be effective, but he unwittingly causes mayhem when he allows the program to rewrite emails to benefit the extension's own long term success.
Characters were extremely flat and, other than the main plot, the book constantly referenced the importance of artisinal coffee.
We might be on the path to figuring out antidepressants actually work! But we have good reason to be skeptical.
I probably am in the 99%ile of the lay population in my biology understanding, but this was a little beyond me. Either way, I'm pretty confident we'll figure it out in the next 20 years. Seems like our methods of experimentation and analysis are nearly powerful enough.
Survivor S28 2/5
I'd never watched Survivor, but we watched this with a couple that loves the entire franchise. After the first few episodes, we committed "Series Suicide" by readin the wikipedia summaries. Too much time investment to actually watch them all!
We were impressed by how optimized the show was to create political turmoil among the contestants. It's the kind of timeless human drama Machiavelli loves.
Prometheus 1/5
This movie made a lot of sense if you think of it as 100% optimized to offer maximum density of people getting chased and eaten by aliens in various positions, settings, and degrees of hopelessness. Otherwise made no sense at all. Why do people like watching people getting chased and eaten by aliens?
Many oblique and nonsensical religious references.
Why did "The Engineers" who supposedly created us want to kill us when they came out of cryosleep? Why did the android dude keep surreptitiously interacting with the alien mothership?
Uncut Gems 1/5
Adam Sandler plays a gambling addicted jewlery dealer.
Watching this was like a gruesome multi-car pileup in slow motion, filled with the dread of certain, inevitable catastrophe. Super painful to watch, did not enjoy. Nonetheless, excellent for what it was trying to be. Satisfying ending.