Hey everyone!
In October I,
published Neurodiversity, mutants, and organisational design - it’s an email I encountered a while ago that I felt compelled to share. It’s a bit cryptic but I think very much worth the investment:
Test scores are Gaussian.
But that’s only because they squash them onto one - grading on a curve.
The world of mediocristan.
Human capability follows a power law and in that case what matters most as a rule is not what your weaknesses are (provided you have found a way to survive and cover those bases) but what you can do that almost nobody else can.
published a video of my conversation with Brian Skinner (a physicist at Ohio State University, who I know because I discovered his blog back in high school). Some of the topics we discussed:
01:00 - what it's like to apply for college when you don't understand the system and don't understand whether you're actually smart or not
08:00 - on the "27-dimensional vector space" view of intelligence
21:30 - why reading the arXiv is a form of emotional labor
23:20 - how you change personally when you transition from being a postdoc to being a professor
33:00 - Brian's favorite crackpot stories
45:10 - on neuroatypical people in physics and the importance of social skills and having smart friends
54:00 - on getting married young
was just totally blown away by this video: I Built a REAL-LIFE Time Machine!
a reminder that if you do anything related to biology, please reach out, I would love to talk to you, as I continue to think about https://guzey.com/how-life-sciences-actually-work/ a lot
A few of my October tweets:
Tweet doubling as a quote of the month:
also, launching newscience.org in November :) I’m going to be raising money to fund my metascience work and newscience.org soon, but, before I officially announce this, I figured I should let my subscribers know informally - feel free to reach out if you’re interested in potentially helping to fund me; otherwise, more details in December and January..
Have a great November!
Cheers,
Alexey
hey Alexey. Super interesting one this week. Thank you! Metascience is the future! Really enjoyed our chat a few months back. Here is a starting point I found myself roughly 2 years ago (realizing many of the things you did in your piece on how life sciences really work). https://kernels.substack.com/p/coming-soon
Uncomplete ... but expresses some of the ideas faced when making your way thought academia.