Kyle Roth

Update 2022-04-27: The beta is over, but the apk is still installable with the instructions below and any feedback sent from inside the app will be received by me. I’m going to be working on this more over the summer, and eventually publishing it on the app store. :) Ever since learning Spanish, it has been a dream of mine to create a vocabulary study app that meets my needs. Duolingo won’t cover advanced vocabulary, Anki requires manually-generated decks, and other apps have expensive subscription plans.

Here are some snippets from a Lex Fridman interview with John Abramson, outspoken critic of Big Pharma. Lex: Are people corrupt? Are people malevolent? Are people ignorant that work at the low level and at the high level, at Pfizer for example? How is this possible? I believe that most people are good, and I actually believe if you join Big Pharma your life trajectory often involves dreaming, wanting, and enjoying helping people. And then we look at the outcomes that you’re describing and that’s why the narrative takes hold that Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla is malevolent. The sense is that these companies are evil. So if the different parts are people that are good and they want to do good, how are we getting these outcomes?

How much of brain structure is coded for in the genome? For example, the hippocampus is generally thought to be responsible for consolidating long-term memories. Is the specialization of this region an epigenetic phenomenon due to optimization in the environment, or is it coded more directly? Will we eventually see these structures emerge in artificial networks with sufficient scale and good optimization, or will we need to code it more directly?

Often when someone (usually a professor) is sharing their screen I see that their browser has so many tabs open that the descriptions are lost: That was my best impersonation as a Firefox user. Chrome will let you go a lot further (like ~113 tabs) before starting to provide a dropdown to show you the list of open tabs: Besides the obvious fact that this makes it hard to find a tab you’re looking for, you also waste computer memory and add to your cognitive load while you’re working.

Here are some snippets from a Lex Fridman interview with Philip Goff, a panpsychist. The Enlightenment ideal is to follow the evidence and the arguments where they lead, but it’s very hard for human beings to do that. I think we get stuck in some conception of how we think science ought to look. People talk about religion as a crutch, but I think a certain kind of scientism, a certain conception of how science is supposed to be, gets into people’s identity and their sense of themselves and their security.