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Elliot Hershberg Newsletter
The the words it uses that this site has seen least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone — nothing here is a summary of this one.
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17 September
15 September
11 September
2 September
1 September
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korrents.com
Curing disease is not worth it if the price is the permanent deprecation of most human beings' existence.Their words
As someone coming from a biology background, who considers “curing disease” as a very noble mission, I still believe that the vague promise of “curing disease” is fundamentally not worth it if it comes with a form of permanent deprecation of most humans’ existence.
24 August
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Their words
The left is on a project to enforce equality, despite biology and markets. The goal of equality gives claim to the moral high ground, but contradicting biology and markets requires censorship and violence, which makes the whole project immoral.
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Their words
it was only about 15 years ago I started beginning to be aware that there may be a an important biology underlying motivation and when that biology goes wrong, it can lead to loss of motivation and even pathological apathy.
20 August
From one piece From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Humanity is not good enough at molecular biology to make drugs that restore vision or hearing or stop Parkinson's.Their words
People have spent huge amounts of time and money looking for drugs to restore vision or to restore hearing or to stop Parkinson's or to to help paralyzed people move again. Understanding the like the biology and the molecular detail required to make a drug has been very difficult. Humanity just isn't that good at that, to be totally honest.
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korrents.com
Putting a device into the brain works in an hour, which makes it far more amenable to biology than drug discovery.Their words
It's like if I put electrodes in M1, you will probably be using a computer in an hour. Um and so it's just it's easier, it's more amenable to biology in many ways.
16 August
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and WorstTheir words
What a great book! A lot of interesting research and anecdotal data. Changes your perception of human behavior quite a bit. There’s also an audio version narrated by the author. And a series of free Stanford lectures available on Youtube.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Selfish GeneTheir words
Having an interest in genetics and molecular biology, I was completely enchanted by the narrative.
11 August
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Likedrcmnd.app
Multi-Paradigm Design for C++Their words
Multi-Paradigm Design for C++ by James O. Coplien. Twenty years after reading this, the core techniques are still with me. These are commonality analysis, where the purpose is to identify families of systems, and variability analysis, which focuses on capturing the domain parameters that vary. In essence: the foundation of great software design.
9 August
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korrents.com
Ireland's colonial wars helped set the template Britain later applied elsewhere in its empireTheir words
The brutal war and its aftermath set some of the parameters for what Britain did later in other parts of the world.
6 August
30 July
From one piece Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And the nice thing about that is that information is really clear to the model, unlike the training data the model was trained on where it's all kind of like trillions of tokens stirred together into a soup of of hundreds of billions or trillions of parameters, but it's all less clear than the actual context uh that the model sees directly for this particular problem or uses use case.
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Their words
And often you can actually make the model work better and succeed at that kind of problem by not just adjusting the model parameters which is hard to do from the outside but from you know creating better guidelines for the model you know writing skills for the model to know how to use different tools that would be incredibly useful for solving this particular class of problem.
26 July
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korrents.com
The simple work gets automated away, but the hard sciences and the places where they intersect never will.Their words
I think the simple stuff is going to get automated away, but the hard problems, the hard sciences, um physics, chemistry, biology, uh you know, computer science, uh computer engineering, systems thinking, uh you know, all and and particularly the domains that are intersecting, uh those hard problems will never go away.
24 July
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Likedtheir ownrcmnd.app
Claude Opus 5Their words
Opus 5 is a great model for coding, data analysis, design, biology, knowledge work.
21 July
From one piece Intelligence is not the main bottleneck 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Drug companies pile onto the same few already-validated targets, so far less of biology gets explored than could be.Their words
In biomedicine we have a problem called target herding: most companies chase the same biological targets because they are de-risked, which means we explore far less of the biological space than we could.
Intelligence is not the main bottleneckwritingruxandrabio.com
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Their words
The patent system then further disincentivizes companies from taking target risk, because it rewards novel chemical matter, not novel biology.
Intelligence is not the main bottleneckwritingruxandrabio.com
9 July
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
A History of BiologyTheir words
The chapter on medieval Islam wasn't very deep, otherwise this is truly excellent, particularly when covering the very complicated 20th century. I don't have much more to say, because it is so good, except that I should try to get my brother to review it.
21 June
10 June
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korrents.com
Manufacturing and batch-release requirements, not biology, are what kill most promising cell and gene therapies.Their words
Excessive manufacturing requirements are a pervasive problem, especially in the field of cell and gene therapy and they are killing countless of promising medicines before they ever reach patients.
From one piece “Curing All Disease by next century is too conservative" - Mark Zuckerberg 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Open-sourcing biology models is right in principle but has to be balanced against biosafety.Their words
In terms of science, I think it really makes sense and we're deeply committed to open source. Um, there are obviously interesting considerations on this that are important too because there's a lot of considerations around biosafety and things like that that we're going to need to balance and think through how to how to handle.
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korrents.com
Biology models are smaller than language models only because there is less data, not because biology is simpler.Their words
I think in a lot of ways the data is actually even more of a constraint and um because if you look at like the scale of these models compared to language models they're smaller but they're smaller because the amount of data is less
8 May
From one piece David Reich – Bronze Age shock, the Neanderthal puzzle, & the sudden spread of farming 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
So, the cognitive resources for doing this must have all been in place, but it's a very long fuse.
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Their words
But, what's not been successful is learning about uh biology and biological change. And one big reason for that has been that the sample sizes have been too small.
7 April
From one piece Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
and in some sense Darwin's genius wasn't in having that idea. It was understanding just how central it was uh to to to biology.
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Their words
we've been gifted uh just this incredible variety of machines which we don't understand really at all and we just have to go and sort of try and understand them on a you know, one-by-one basis.
28 February
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Their words
Trials serve two distinct functions: validation — confirming whether a drug works and is safe — and learning, or generating biological data to refine our understanding of a disease, a compound, and the relationship between the two.
29 January
From one piece How Until is Engineering Away Time in Organ Transplants | Laura Deming 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Temperature is a rare conceptual lever that lets you use physics to reason usefully about a biological problem.Their words
Basically what that gives you is like you can apply a lot of theoretical sort of um a lot of theoretical toolkit used in physics to model parts of this question in ways that are actually useful. And it is just not true that you can use like equations from physics to think usefully about almost any other problem in biology.
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Their words
you can make your life easier on the biology front by building better engineering tooling and the fact that that's possible is a huge deal. Like that is that is not true for most problems in biology and it gives you a lot of leverage on the problem.
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Their words
and I think most people experience it as like flat triangles and squares in a biology textbook where it's like you know there's an arrow between like this triangle and this triangle is just like doesn't make any conceptual sense and is like confusing and annoying
28 November 2025
17 October 2025
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Their words
the reason that I think this is kind of tricky is quite subtle. And it's the fact that anytime you use an LLM to assign a reward, those LLMs are giant things with billions of parameters and they're gameable.
5 October 2025
27 September 2025
19 August 2025
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Their words
I'm now fairly pessimistic about ambitious interpretability (i.e. complete reverse-engineering), and I'm excited about model biology (studying qualitative high-level properties of models) and applied interpretability (rigorously doing useful things with interp).
2 August 2025
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Their words
Some models could be used both for good and ill, yes. Diffusion models in particular could be used by bad actors to hallucinate toxins or other harmful proteins.
AI could help lead to an Alzheimer's cureblog.jacobtrefethen.com
22 July 2025
1 July 2025
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Their words
Even if late 30s eventually find love, the reproductive window is much smaller. Cash incentives can’t trump biology.
1 October 2024
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korrents.com
Powerful AI will compress the biological and medical progress of the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years.Their words
To summarize the above, my basic prediction is that AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years.
19 September 2024
From one piece AI and Biology 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
So for these reasons, I (unfortunately) do not expect any big AI-driven breakthroughs in biological understanding any time soon.
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Their words
Most proteins are essentially unannotated, with their functions completely or mostly unknown.
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korrents.com
Biology keeps turning up whole classes of things nobody knew existed, and that is what defeats attempts to model it.Their words
The "unknown unknown" problem makes hash (in retrospect) of many attempts at biological theorizing and modeling, and I think that this problem will still accrue to ML models until we know an awful lot more.
3 July 2024
11 June 2024
23 May 2024
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Likedtheir ownrcmnd.app
Decent DE1Their words
In the early days, the DE1 was considered "unforgiving" by many. I didn't mind, as the DE1's ability to control shot parameters more than made up for its early challenges.
8 May 2024
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Their words
Our experiment demonstrates that the immense potential benefits of biotechnology are profoundly vulnerable to misuse.
5 May 2024
22 April 2024
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Their words
What a large language model is trying to do is to predict text. That’s what it does. And it is leveraging the fact that we human beings for very good evolutionary biology reasons, attribute intentionality and intelligence and agency to things that act like human beings.
25 March 2024
18 February 2024
23 December 2023
From one piece The pharma industry from Paul Janssen to today: why drugs got harder to develop and what we can do about it 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Biology is unpredictable, especially when the immune system is involved, and there is no guarantee that a drug that appears safe in animals will be safe in humans.
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Their words
The most significant factor preventing us from taking better molecules into clinical trials is not our ability to design arbitrary molecules, but our (lack of) understanding of underlying disease biology. In other words, we often know how to make something, but not what to make.
3 December 2023
20 November 2023
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Song of the CellTheir words
If I had been able to read The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee in school, I might have fallen in love with biology a lot earlier.
1 September 2023
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Their words
What we don't want to happen with AGI, we want to happen with synthetic biology. What we don't want to happen online and software with language, we want for it to happen with bio-based materials.
16 August 2023
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Their words
Physics, chemistry and biology can point out problems, but we need history, economics and philosophy to solve them.
24 June 2023
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Their words
At the same time, in order to reduce the probability of someone intentionally or unintentionally bringing about a rogue AI, we need to increase governance and we should consider limiting access to the large-scale generalist AI systems that could be weaponized, which would mean that the code and neural net parameters would not be shared in open-source and some of the important engineering tricks to make them work would not be shared either.
8 September 2022
7 September 2022
From one piece Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The Cambrian explosion is no longer much of a mystery; the big mystery left in biology is consciousness.Their words
I don’t think there’s a big mystery. There’s lots of details that need to be filled in. The big mystery in biology is consciousness.
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Their words
And frankly biologists, most biologists are still very reluctant to even get themselves tangled up in questions like electrical fields influencing development. It seems like mumbo jumbo to a lot of biologists and it should not be because this is the 21st century biology.
20 July 2022
1 January 2022
6 October 2021
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Their words
Like nuclear physics, with its potential for global catastrophe when put to destructive ends, the proliferation of pandemic biology ought to be considered a matter of international security.
2 April 2021
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Their words
Having done the sums before hitting the keys, I was a skeptic. It just didn’t work, even with optimistic assumptions around the parameters for the aircraft and its batteries.
28 October 2020
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Biomimicry: Innovation InspiredTheir words
Who are the best engineers and designers in the world? Nature. This book is an interesting, science-heavy look at some really interesting properties in nature we could use to learn from as we try to design new technology. Benyus takes us across the spectrum from photosynthesis, to agriculture, to spiders. If you want to geek out on a little biology while applying it to technology this is a good read.
11 June 2020
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Likedrcmnd.app
Molecular Biology of the CellTheir words
undergoing some of these experiments was incredibly fun and a great excuse to study a number of textbooks on biochemistry (I liked "Molecular Biology of the Cell"), biology (I liked Campbell's Biology), human nutrition (I liked "Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism"), etc.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Campbell's BiologyTheir words
undergoing some of these experiments was incredibly fun and a great excuse to study a number of textbooks on biochemistry (I liked "Molecular Biology of the Cell"), biology (I liked Campbell's Biology), human nutrition (I liked "Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism"), etc.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Advanced Nutrition and Human MetabolismTheir words
undergoing some of these experiments was incredibly fun and a great excuse to study a number of textbooks on biochemistry (I liked "Molecular Biology of the Cell"), biology (I liked Campbell's Biology), human nutrition (I liked "Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism"), etc.
15 August 2019
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korrents.com
Scientific progress in biology is not slowing down.Their words
My (contrarian, I guess) intuition is that scientific progress in biology is not slowing down.
9 March 2018
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Their words
Neural network pruning techniques can reduce the parameter counts of trained networks by over 90%, decreasing storage requirements and improving computational performance of inference without compromising accuracy.
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Their words
Neural network pruning techniques can reduce the parameter counts of trained networks by over 90%, decreasing storage requirements and improving computational performance of inference without compromising accuracy.
22 December 2017
Nothing matches.
What is a korrent?
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