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Writer and author of All the Wrong Moves; his newsletter covers meditation, relationships and creativity, and he co-runs a perfume line.

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  Meditation is more powerful than psychedelic drugs, not milder as commonly assumed.

  Their words

  The moment when you realize that you thought drugs were powerful and meditation was mild, but you now realize the opposite is true.

  Average moments of a long-term meditatorsashachapin.substack.com

Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.

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  Many fit-looking people achieve their physique with performance-enhancing drugs (TRT, steroids, HGH), more than is commonly assumed.

  Their words

  I think people really underestimate how many people are on gear (TRT, Tren, HGH etc) and are not natural

  @levelsio on Xx.com

Criminal defence lawyer in New York; writes Simple Justice, mostly about how criminal law works in practice rather than in theory.

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  Killing suspected drug smugglers at sea without trial is murder, because smuggling is not a capital offence.

  America

  Their words

  Even if it turned out that they were drug smugglers, as claimed, and even if it turned out that they were bringing drugs to the United States, a dubious proposition, the penalty for smuggling drugs is not summary execution.

  Lawyers In The Cheap Seatsblog.simplejustice.us

Co-founded Neuralink and founded Science Corp, which is building a retinal implant; writes about neural interfaces and biology.

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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  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.

  youtube.com

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  Treating brain-computer interfaces as one investment category is like having a single "drug bet" -- the field is as varied as pharma.

  Their words

  Yeah, I mean I think BCI is a category kind of like how pharma is a category. I think sometimes you I I'll talk to VCs and like, "Oh, we have a BCI bet." I'm like, "Do you have a drug bet? You made one bet on a drugs? Like that's that's how you think about the category?"

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Genomics researcher and writer on science, biotech and the culture of research.

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  Pharmaceutical R&D productivity has fallen for decades: far more money spent per drug, with no matching improvement in the odds a candidate reaches the market.

  Their words

  Take Eroom’s Law: the number of new drugs approved per dollar of R&D has fallen for decades, even as our scientific tools have grown vastly more powerful, the exact opposite of what the existence of more raw capability would predict.

  Intelligence is not the main bottleneckwritingruxandrabio.com

Physician focused on longevity; wrote Outlive and hosts The Drive.

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  A supplement or drug should be judged on well-defined benefits for well-defined problems in well-defined populations, never on a vague promise of slowing ageing.

  Their words

  That’s a lesson we could all learn about our approach to supplements and even drugs: not to fall for hazy promises that a single molecule will deliver vaguely-defined benefits for all aging persons, but to demand rigorous evidence for well-defined benefits for well-defined problems in well-defined populations.

  Metformin and cancer: active surveillance neededpeterattiamd.com

Genomics researcher and writer on science, biotech and the culture of research.

From one piece A response to Dario Amodei on AI & clinical trials 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Better drug candidates do not shorten clinical trials, because a trial's duration is set by operational and regulatory friction rather than by how good the drug is.

  Their words

  Even if AI can help design more effective drugs, timelines will not compress until we solve the operational and regulatory bottlenecks of trials.

  writingruxandrabio.com

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  About ninety per cent of drugs that enter clinical trials fail.

  Their words

  The current success rate for a drug entering clinical trials is only about ten percent, meaning 90 percent of all drugs fail.

  writingruxandrabio.com

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  How long a trial takes decides which diseases get drugs at all, because capital flows to the indications whose endpoints can be measured quickly.

  Psychotherapy

  Their words

  Lastly, the duration of a clinical trial does not merely determine how fast an individual therapy reaches patients. It also shapes which diseases attract serious investment and which do not.

  writingruxandrabio.com

Researcher and science writer. Co-founder and editor at Works in Progress magazine, formerly a researcher at Our World in Data, and author of the Scientific Discovery newsletter on science, global health and medical innovation.

• Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app

  Hard Drugs

  Their words

  And if you prefer podcasts, may I suggest Hard Drugs

  scientificdiscovery.dev

German writer and historian; wrote Blitzed, on drug use in Nazi Germany, and Tripped.

From one piece Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  The idea of driving the whole German army through the Ardennes, not the methamphetamine, is what won the campaign in the West.

  Their words

  That was the victorious idea. So it's not the drugs. Actually, that idea to go through the Ardennes Mountains, if you think monocausal, you would say that's the reason. That idea was genius, and Hitler immediately understood it, because before, the plan was to attack in the north of Belgium, which is the same as World War I.

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  The German Navy, which insisted afterwards that it had kept its ethics, bought concentration camp prisoners from the SS to test methamphetamine-and-cocaine combinations on them.

  Their words

  So the Navy hired the shoe runners unit from the SS, paid them money, and then gave them drugs, different kinds of drug combinations, methamphetamine combined with cocaine and chewing gum and all kinds of things. So this is a big thing, you know. And there are documents to it.

  youtube.com

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  Drugs are the missing link historians never had for the one thing they could not explain: why Hitler went from militarily effective to disastrous.

  Their words

  And he said this is actually the missing link that historians did not have, especially to explain Hitler's degeneration as a leader. He made very good decisions, good in meaning militarily effective decisions in the beginning of the war, and very bad decisions for the German war effort towards the end. And you can link that to drugs.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and chief executive of Sierra, chairman of the board of OpenAI, and formerly co-chief executive of Salesforce and chief technology officer of Facebook.

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  Even generalised superintelligence will change society more slowly than the AGI community expects, because intelligence is not the only rate limiter.

  AGIAI alignment

  Their words

  I don't think all parts of the economy can absorb intelligence equally. So let's just say we develop fairly generalized super intelligence. I always use the analogy like you can invent a lot of drugs, but if clinical trials still take a long time, you're not necessarily going to get new therapies rapidly.

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Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany

  Their words

  However, after reading a few pages my original inhibitions were overturned and I bought the book.

  branko2f7.substack.com

Runs global health R&D at Open Philanthropy; writes about the science and medicine that could exist and does not.

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  Designing candidate molecules already feels like magic, but the arrival of new drugs at a doctor's prescription pad will not be sudden.

  Their words

  The design of the initial molecules to test is pretty magic-feeling, and is happening already – but the arrival of new drugs prescribed by your doctor will not be magical and sudden.

  AI could help lead to an Alzheimer's cureblog.jacobtrefethen.com

Fellow at the Manhattan Institute writing on crime, drugs and policing; writes The Causal Fallacy.

From one piece What Was The War on Drugs? Part V 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Drug enforcement cut casual use and barely touched heavy users, who account for most of the drugs consumed.

  Addiction

  Their words

  But by the available evidence, the War on Drugs was far less successful at reducing use among the “hard core” of users, mostly meaning people addicted to their drug of choice.

  What Was The War on Drugs? Part Vthecausalfallacy.substack.com

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  The war on drugs is not the main cause of American mass incarceration, because drug offenders were never a large share of the prison population.

  America

  Their words

  Drug offenders never accounted for a particularly large fraction of the U.S. prison population, peaking at about 22 percent of state prisoners in 1990.

  What Was The War on Drugs? Part Vthecausalfallacy.substack.com

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  After two decades of the war on drugs, drugs were cheaper and more potent than when it began.

  Their words

  After two decades of the War on Drugs, in other words, drugs were much cheaper and more potent than they were when the War on Drugs began.

  What Was The War on Drugs? Part Vthecausalfallacy.substack.com

Writes about the biotech industry, drug development and forecasting — “I write to learn, mostly about biotech.”

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  The West has not yet internalised that China is a source of genuinely new drugs, not just a maker of ingredients and copies.

  China

  Their words

  I don’t think many in the West have yet fully internalized a mental model of China as a source of genuine innovation.

  Will all our drugs come from China?atelfo.github.io

Archaeologist of the Maya and the ancient Americas; directs the Maya Exploration Center and presents the ArchaeoEd podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Hallucinogens shaped religion in the Americas in a way they could not elsewhere, because almost every psychotropic plant is American.

  America

  Their words

  In fact, strangely, the majority of plants that are actually psychotropic, not just mood altering, are from here in the Americas. There are very few drugs that will make you hallucinate outside of the Americas.

  youtube.com

Medicinal chemist; has written In the Pipeline, the drug-discovery blog, since 2002, and the “Things I Won’t Work With” posts about chemicals that try to kill you.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The drugs advertised as having AI-discovered targets are aimed at targets people already knew about.

  Their words

  What you will see is that in almost every case, these targets were already known to be implicated in the disease under investigation.

  AI Drugs So Farweb.archive.org

Writes about the biotech industry, drug development and forecasting — “I write to learn, mostly about biotech.”

• Our readingkorrents.com

  How long a trial takes decides which diseases get drugs at all, because capital flows to the indications whose endpoints can be measured quickly.

  Their words

  Because patents have fixed term lengths, with small extensions to compensate for the year or so when the drug is under regulatory review, drug developers are incentivized to go after conditions where clinical trials can be completed quickly, all else being equal.

  atelfo.github.io

Medicinal chemist; has written In the Pipeline, the drug-discovery blog, since 2002, and the “Things I Won’t Work With” posts about chemicals that try to kill you.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  No AI system today reduces either of the two risks that sink most drugs in the clinic: picking the wrong target, and human toxicity.

  Their words

  There are no existing AI/ML systems that mitigate clinical failure risks due to target choice or toxicology.

  AI and the Hard Stuffweb.archive.org

Medicinal chemist; has written In the Pipeline, the drug-discovery blog, since 2002, and the “Things I Won’t Work With” posts about chemicals that try to kill you.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  About ninety per cent of drugs that enter clinical trials fail.

  Their words

  Even under all the constraints and controls that I've been describing here, 90% of our drugs fail in the clinic: can you imagine the failure rate if we tried to go faster and noisier?

  Why Are Clinical Trials So Complicated?web.archive.org