Question: Knowing that wrong predictions will lead to a status hit... what's the incentive for potential players who value their status/points over surfacing new/novel ideas? I can imagine there's an incentive to game the system for status/points that would lead to ideas that people think will be safe, or status-assuring, rather than playing the game as intended to eventually surface the most fruitful ideas.
Oh I see your response earlier talking about the 90/10 thing... interesting. So basically just framing it from the perspective of people who DO want to surface good ideas, and how the structure of the attention market supports that, rather than focusing on the outcomes of people who will bandwagon no matter what.
yes, exactly!! The old game is still happening, people can play that if they want. I'm here to explain the rules of the new game. I'm basically playing this new game, any success I have I document. And if I am doing it right, then others should be able to repro and grow this pie. This is I think how a transition to "Game B" will work.
After the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, it was noted that 99% of the human genome was "junk DNA". This was a consensus view. But it was wrong. The ENCODE project for 2008 showed that the "junk DNA" was actually functional. `
presented a hypothesis that the transposons and long non-coding DNA were actually encoding the fine structure of the human body that analog encoding involving morphogens such as the Hox genes could not express. In that 2019 paper, I speculated that schizophrenia might be caused by structural defects, not errors in the protein genes. That is why they find dozens, if not hundreds, of genes supposedly causing mental disorders. The actual truth is that no genes are involved, so these are spurious correlations.
Lately, my speculations have been confirmed in some studies.
Integrating human endogenous retroviruses into transcriptome-wide association studies highlights novel risk factors for major psychiatric conditions
Note that the second study shows that some mental disorders are caused by defective genes making defective proteins, and other disorders are due to structural abnormalities in the brain, presuming that transposons encode structure.
The point is that this was obvious from the preliminary ENCODE studies, but they were ignored because the geneticists are incredibly resistant to new ideas. They are hamstrung by the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology.
This dogma blinds scientists to the alternative that maybe most of the DNA is not encoding proteins but instead is encoding the structure of the body. To this day, the standard viewpoint is that transposons are that they are parasitical DNA. The null hypothesis ("neutral theory") still has its proponents, exemplified by Laurence Moran "What's in you Genome"
Antony I just want to say i REALLY appreciate you being here, particularly because you are someone very “outside of my cluster” (re: your comment about the tpot←→ etymolgynerd story).
they were ignored because the geneticists are incredibly resistant to new ideas
Groupthink is hard to overcome
This is basically exactly the kind of information I have been working to surface. I think all it really takes is just ONE case that people can observe in their lifetimes of (1) a truth being spoken (2) it being fiercely resisted (3) it later being proven correct, and slowly propagating. Then they start to understand how this game of idea propagation works, and their role in it.
It’s like everyone lives under the belief that “if it was a good idea, it will spread” - but missing the fact that SOMEONE has to actually look at it and decide to champion it. And that this is costly (for lots of different reasons & dynamics)
For most things, it’s not like EVERYONE in the world has looked at an idea and decided it was worth it/not worth it, it’s that there’s like, a dozen people who make that decision, and everyone else takes their word for it.
i think a part of this is groups coming together to “rediscover” truths that already exist, on their own terms. This is part of why I have been so obsessed with epistemology. You don’t need to be very smart to have good epistemology. You just need to ask “how do we know this?” → until you get an answer that makes sense to you. Taking the truth on faith, is better than rejecting it in some ways, but it’s still very bad, it’s very “fragile”. It makes it easy for someone else to come along and say a different thing (whether they are malicious, or well meaning but incompetent) and no one corrects them
It's a bit above my head, but it *sounds* promising, like potentially one of those "true but not yet widely accepted" things. If you have the time, I'd love to hear your public review of it, whether this is something worth amplifying.
I read the Substack. I know that gut biome is a Big Thing right now. When I did my poster presentation at the Cell Journal Symposium on the Hallmarks of Cancer, the overwhelming majority of presentations were about immunological approaches to treating cancer. But there were presentations, including keynotes, on how the gut biome is related to cancer outcomes.
So Stephen Skolnick says "Ruminococcus gnavus is—on average—about forty-five times more abundant in the guts of schizophrenics". And Stephen goes on to mention that this bacterium processes "tryptamines and phenethylamines". And that "tryptamine is a full agonist at the 5HT2A receptor—that’s the trippy one. Nanomolar affinity. Phenethylamine acts a lot like amphetamine, which is known to induce delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, and psychosis after prolonged exposure."
So we have a cause (extra levels of a bacteria) and effect (schizophrenia) and a possible explanation for the cause and effect (tryptamines and phenethylamines). This even provides a way of testing the hypothesis by either observing or manipulating the levels of the bacteria.
This sounds pretty good to me.
Note that what we often refer to as diseases are actually symptoms of a bunch of diseases. Put another way, there are underlying causes of different diseases that show up as similiar symptoms. This is true for sore throats, coughs or runny noses. This is also true for cancers. This is likely also true for mental diseases, such as depression, anxiety and even schizophrenia.
So my suggestion that schizophrenia is related to errors in the non-coding sections of the DNA could be one cause of schizophrenia and Stephen Skolnick's hypothesis about Ruminococcus gnavus is another.
My hypothesis relates to the 13% of schizophrenia that is inherited. His hypothesis more than likely realtes to the 87% that is not, because the gut biome could be an environmental effect.
I think the part that makes me most excited about this is as you say that it is testable, and fairly cheaply, so I'll keep my eye out on this.
Also good reminder about how often almost every complex is "multi-causal" / many overlapping factors cause a specific outcome. I think this was one of the big lessons I took away from "dance to the tune of life".
They make an argument there that saying that (in my words/to the best of my understanding): "genes cause X" is not the full story, and that you can just as easily argue "system X uses these genes, in addition to other things, to sustain itself". This reminds me a bit of Michael Levin's work with xenobots (how the same genetic material develops into something completely different and unexpected in a different environment, supporting the view that genes are not a top down perspective thing).
when I get a journal article published (translation into layman's terms) or on some topic that moves me. I address the case where there is a plethora of genes supposedly involved in some disease on this page:
how do good ideas, that are misunderstood by the notable person, get valuable attention when they are dismissed due to misunderstanding, or biased perception?
And how does this deal with the bandwagon effect, where people will sacrifice being correct for being part of an in-group?
And lastly, if the originator of an idea doesn't present their idea in an attention-grabbing way, is it possible this system would allow good ideas to go unnoticed entirely because of bad presentation and thus a lack of attention? Or the opposite, bad ideas, well presented, and appealing to a notable person's bias, will gain heaps of attention?
there is a much simpler version of this you might like, which is basically just: imagine if every twitter/substack account had a page that semantically aggregated notes written to them. Then we could find each other under the lighthouses of notable people (even if we never get the attention of the notable person). But I do think there are many cases where notable people with money/resources ARE looking for us, for our ideas, for our skills, but can't find us in the noise:
> how do good ideas, that are misunderstood by the notable person, get valuable attention when they are dismissed due to misunderstanding, or biased perception?
I described it as (1) 🟢 or (2) 🔴 but this is the third option. I use this as a "levelling" mechanism. If you have an idea that you know is true, and it receives 90% NO, then this shows you the frontier of that community. You're basically giving out participatory tests now.
One way I think about what I do is that I search for these truths that haven't yet propagated. When people review it and say "this can't possibly be true for reasons XYZ" that gives me insight into "where the idea is stuck". It also acts as a signaling mechanism, for me to find the others who believe the unpopular idea. The fact that it's unpopular / there is stigma around it gives me greater signal that those who stand by it care about & can recognize truth.
I think there are a lot of notable people that want to endorse more unpopular things but feel like they would be ostracized.
> if the originator of an idea doesn't present their idea in an attention-grabbing way
this is where I think "champions" of an idea can help. I think it is often the case that the originator is not well versed in communication/signaling. If this system existed, I would be down in there looking for these hidden gems and helping them package it.
> bad ideas, well presented, and appealing to a notable person's bias, will gain heaps of attention?
this is true but I think won't be any worse than the existing algorithms. Right now you can get scott alexander's attention by writing something that appeals to his bias and he will review it/feature it etc. All I need is a way for me to signal my belief of unpopular truths, find the others, and flag it up. Which is somewhat what we do by writing earnestly on substack, what I was doing in "Our Story So Far" (https://defenderofthebasic.substack.com/p/d30535ea-e84d-4b9c-a654-4a4fdfaf0303) by articulating my model of reality, even the crazy parts.
> And how does this deal with the bandwagon effect, where people will sacrifice being correct for being part of an in-group?
I think this is the real reward: what I seek is making a 90/10 prediction market, where I am on the 10% side, AND it ends up being proven correct later. If I had made a market for The Telepathy Tapes going viral, it would have proved that I have good intuition there even if no one else did. If I had made a market for "we're inside a blackhole" it would have been impressive (it appears to be gaining traction now in my circles, where it was ignored/seen as crazy before).
The 90/10 prediction is proof that you are surfacing something novel to the community. Either because you will find the other 10% who already recognize it, OR it will be proven later with time.
Question: Knowing that wrong predictions will lead to a status hit... what's the incentive for potential players who value their status/points over surfacing new/novel ideas? I can imagine there's an incentive to game the system for status/points that would lead to ideas that people think will be safe, or status-assuring, rather than playing the game as intended to eventually surface the most fruitful ideas.
Oh I see your response earlier talking about the 90/10 thing... interesting. So basically just framing it from the perspective of people who DO want to surface good ideas, and how the structure of the attention market supports that, rather than focusing on the outcomes of people who will bandwagon no matter what.
(If I'm understanding that right)
yes, exactly!! The old game is still happening, people can play that if they want. I'm here to explain the rules of the new game. I'm basically playing this new game, any success I have I document. And if I am doing it right, then others should be able to repro and grow this pie. This is I think how a transition to "Game B" will work.
After the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, it was noted that 99% of the human genome was "junk DNA". This was a consensus view. But it was wrong. The ENCODE project for 2008 showed that the "junk DNA" was actually functional. `
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENCODE
https://www.encodeproject.org/
My published work in 2019 "Structure Encoding in DNA"
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2020.110205
presented a hypothesis that the transposons and long non-coding DNA were actually encoding the fine structure of the human body that analog encoding involving morphogens such as the Hox genes could not express. In that 2019 paper, I speculated that schizophrenia might be caused by structural defects, not errors in the protein genes. That is why they find dozens, if not hundreds, of genes supposedly causing mental disorders. The actual truth is that no genes are involved, so these are spurious correlations.
Lately, my speculations have been confirmed in some studies.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-023-02472-9
Evolutionarily recent retrotransposons contribute to schizophrenia
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48153-z
Integrating human endogenous retroviruses into transcriptome-wide association studies highlights novel risk factors for major psychiatric conditions
Note that the second study shows that some mental disorders are caused by defective genes making defective proteins, and other disorders are due to structural abnormalities in the brain, presuming that transposons encode structure.
The point is that this was obvious from the preliminary ENCODE studies, but they were ignored because the geneticists are incredibly resistant to new ideas. They are hamstrung by the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_biology
This dogma blinds scientists to the alternative that maybe most of the DNA is not encoding proteins but instead is encoding the structure of the body. To this day, the standard viewpoint is that transposons are that they are parasitical DNA. The null hypothesis ("neutral theory") still has its proponents, exemplified by Laurence Moran "What's in you Genome"
https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9781487508593
Groupthink is hard to overcome.
Antony I just want to say i REALLY appreciate you being here, particularly because you are someone very “outside of my cluster” (re: your comment about the tpot←→ etymolgynerd story).
they were ignored because the geneticists are incredibly resistant to new ideas
Groupthink is hard to overcome
This is basically exactly the kind of information I have been working to surface. I think all it really takes is just ONE case that people can observe in their lifetimes of (1) a truth being spoken (2) it being fiercely resisted (3) it later being proven correct, and slowly propagating. Then they start to understand how this game of idea propagation works, and their role in it.
It’s like everyone lives under the belief that “if it was a good idea, it will spread” - but missing the fact that SOMEONE has to actually look at it and decide to champion it. And that this is costly (for lots of different reasons & dynamics)
For most things, it’s not like EVERYONE in the world has looked at an idea and decided it was worth it/not worth it, it’s that there’s like, a dozen people who make that decision, and everyone else takes their word for it.
i think a part of this is groups coming together to “rediscover” truths that already exist, on their own terms. This is part of why I have been so obsessed with epistemology. You don’t need to be very smart to have good epistemology. You just need to ask “how do we know this?” → until you get an answer that makes sense to you. Taking the truth on faith, is better than rejecting it in some ways, but it’s still very bad, it’s very “fragile”. It makes it easy for someone else to come along and say a different thing (whether they are malicious, or well meaning but incompetent) and no one corrects them
Oh I forgot to ask, on the topic of schizophrenia, have you seen this?
https://stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/schizophrenia
It's a bit above my head, but it *sounds* promising, like potentially one of those "true but not yet widely accepted" things. If you have the time, I'd love to hear your public review of it, whether this is something worth amplifying.
I read the Substack. I know that gut biome is a Big Thing right now. When I did my poster presentation at the Cell Journal Symposium on the Hallmarks of Cancer, the overwhelming majority of presentations were about immunological approaches to treating cancer. But there were presentations, including keynotes, on how the gut biome is related to cancer outcomes.
So Stephen Skolnick says "Ruminococcus gnavus is—on average—about forty-five times more abundant in the guts of schizophrenics". And Stephen goes on to mention that this bacterium processes "tryptamines and phenethylamines". And that "tryptamine is a full agonist at the 5HT2A receptor—that’s the trippy one. Nanomolar affinity. Phenethylamine acts a lot like amphetamine, which is known to induce delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, and psychosis after prolonged exposure."
So we have a cause (extra levels of a bacteria) and effect (schizophrenia) and a possible explanation for the cause and effect (tryptamines and phenethylamines). This even provides a way of testing the hypothesis by either observing or manipulating the levels of the bacteria.
This sounds pretty good to me.
Note that what we often refer to as diseases are actually symptoms of a bunch of diseases. Put another way, there are underlying causes of different diseases that show up as similiar symptoms. This is true for sore throats, coughs or runny noses. This is also true for cancers. This is likely also true for mental diseases, such as depression, anxiety and even schizophrenia.
So my suggestion that schizophrenia is related to errors in the non-coding sections of the DNA could be one cause of schizophrenia and Stephen Skolnick's hypothesis about Ruminococcus gnavus is another.
My hypothesis relates to the 13% of schizophrenia that is inherited. His hypothesis more than likely realtes to the 87% that is not, because the gut biome could be an environmental effect.
this is great, thank you for the review Antony!!
I think the part that makes me most excited about this is as you say that it is testable, and fairly cheaply, so I'll keep my eye out on this.
Also good reminder about how often almost every complex is "multi-causal" / many overlapping factors cause a specific outcome. I think this was one of the big lessons I took away from "dance to the tune of life".
They make an argument there that saying that (in my words/to the best of my understanding): "genes cause X" is not the full story, and that you can just as easily argue "system X uses these genes, in addition to other things, to sustain itself". This reminds me a bit of Michael Levin's work with xenobots (how the same genetic material develops into something completely different and unexpected in a different environment, supporting the view that genes are not a top down perspective thing).
Thanks for your kind response.
I do not write (yet) on Substack, but when the spirit moves me I will put a small essay on my free Medium page:
https://vandermude.medium.com/
when I get a journal article published (translation into layman's terms) or on some topic that moves me. I address the case where there is a plethora of genes supposedly involved in some disease on this page:
https://vandermude.medium.com/most-inherited-diseases-are-not-caused-by-errors-in-the-genes-28b9eb01cfdf
Most Inherited Diseases Are Not Caused By Errors In The Genes
I hope you find it useful.
Some questions,
how do good ideas, that are misunderstood by the notable person, get valuable attention when they are dismissed due to misunderstanding, or biased perception?
And how does this deal with the bandwagon effect, where people will sacrifice being correct for being part of an in-group?
And lastly, if the originator of an idea doesn't present their idea in an attention-grabbing way, is it possible this system would allow good ideas to go unnoticed entirely because of bad presentation and thus a lack of attention? Or the opposite, bad ideas, well presented, and appealing to a notable person's bias, will gain heaps of attention?
there is a much simpler version of this you might like, which is basically just: imagine if every twitter/substack account had a page that semantically aggregated notes written to them. Then we could find each other under the lighthouses of notable people (even if we never get the attention of the notable person). But I do think there are many cases where notable people with money/resources ARE looking for us, for our ideas, for our skills, but can't find us in the noise:
https://defenderofthebasic.substack.com/p/societys-higher-ups-need-better-q
see also "how to semantic search the internet" (at least the first few minutes, which give you the gist of what I mean by "semantically aggregated") https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=imCad_0pWz0
beautiful questions!!!
> how do good ideas, that are misunderstood by the notable person, get valuable attention when they are dismissed due to misunderstanding, or biased perception?
I described it as (1) 🟢 or (2) 🔴 but this is the third option. I use this as a "levelling" mechanism. If you have an idea that you know is true, and it receives 90% NO, then this shows you the frontier of that community. You're basically giving out participatory tests now.
One way I think about what I do is that I search for these truths that haven't yet propagated. When people review it and say "this can't possibly be true for reasons XYZ" that gives me insight into "where the idea is stuck". It also acts as a signaling mechanism, for me to find the others who believe the unpopular idea. The fact that it's unpopular / there is stigma around it gives me greater signal that those who stand by it care about & can recognize truth.
I think there are a lot of notable people that want to endorse more unpopular things but feel like they would be ostracized.
> if the originator of an idea doesn't present their idea in an attention-grabbing way
this is where I think "champions" of an idea can help. I think it is often the case that the originator is not well versed in communication/signaling. If this system existed, I would be down in there looking for these hidden gems and helping them package it.
> bad ideas, well presented, and appealing to a notable person's bias, will gain heaps of attention?
this is true but I think won't be any worse than the existing algorithms. Right now you can get scott alexander's attention by writing something that appeals to his bias and he will review it/feature it etc. All I need is a way for me to signal my belief of unpopular truths, find the others, and flag it up. Which is somewhat what we do by writing earnestly on substack, what I was doing in "Our Story So Far" (https://defenderofthebasic.substack.com/p/d30535ea-e84d-4b9c-a654-4a4fdfaf0303) by articulating my model of reality, even the crazy parts.
> And how does this deal with the bandwagon effect, where people will sacrifice being correct for being part of an in-group?
I think this is the real reward: what I seek is making a 90/10 prediction market, where I am on the 10% side, AND it ends up being proven correct later. If I had made a market for The Telepathy Tapes going viral, it would have proved that I have good intuition there even if no one else did. If I had made a market for "we're inside a blackhole" it would have been impressive (it appears to be gaining traction now in my circles, where it was ignored/seen as crazy before).
The 90/10 prediction is proof that you are surfacing something novel to the community. Either because you will find the other 10% who already recognize it, OR it will be proven later with time.