My best tweets of 2020
created: ; modified:Also see my weekly “Best of Twitter” newsletter.
2020-01
I'm genuinely surprised by the fact that no one refuted my hypothesis that people who sleep for 6 hours have the lowest mortality in my Why We Sleep piece https://t.co/rJBVDIahgH
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) January 1, 2020
Any arguments as to why this is wrong after all? https://t.co/liZKGYb3nG pic.twitter.com/e1VyaiVWsz
"[97–98%] climate scientists...support the consensus on anthropogenic climate change,[2][3] and the remaining 3% of contrarian studies either cannot be replicated or contain errors.[4] A November 2019 study showed that the consensus...had grown to 100%" https://t.co/yixW4IKHbT
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) January 2, 2020
"the tension of increasing alienation and guilt can be relieved by punishment because it is punishment that leads to forgiveness and reconciliation" pic.twitter.com/nvMqt2j0MZ
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) January 4, 2020
https://t.co/EUcoMRI6b4 turns any pdf / epub into an audiobook -- most useful app i installed in years
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) January 4, 2020
A small improvement each day for 10 years can make a big difference pic.twitter.com/Jhg5pDqRzl
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) January 6, 2020
idk yet but i kind of have this suspicion that constantly cycling forward is actually g o o d
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) January 9, 2020
basically always be in a sleep phase advance therapy https://t.co/S30XLtvby9
maybe people are just self-medicating naturally doing that (just like with nicotine)
Most common defense of Walker so far is some version of the "Noble lie" argument: "but he brought the attention of people to sleep which is important, so people now care more about sleep"
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) January 9, 2020
but if sleep is so important, why were so many lies needed for people to care about it?
"But Walker brought the attention to the dangers of sleep loss!"
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) January 9, 2020
"How do you know sleep loss is so dangerous?"
"Well, haven't you read the book?"
Causes of death of Roman Emperors https://t.co/k19TuOWUw2 pic.twitter.com/s76RM6WnMK
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) January 13, 2020
1. Ben Franklin was a massive womanizer who had many mistresses throughout his life https://t.co/jkOEewdzND
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) January 13, 2020
2. A 15,000 word Wikipedia article on Franklin doesn't mention *anything* about this part of his life, yet has a gigantic section on his "virtue" https://t.co/2ZS1sgNFH6 pic.twitter.com/6uoRF1yzEY
"C. ruddii is not completely parasitic in its relationship with its host insect; it supplies the host with some essential amino acids. It is therefore probably in the evolutionary process of becoming an organelle, similar to the mitochondria" https://t.co/q1JoRWVzPI
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) January 14, 2020
Writing essays reminds me a lot about trying to prove theorems in my math classes:
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) January 17, 2020
There's a point I want to make and my task is to systematically explore the paths that lead to that point, find the most elegant of them, and write it up as clearly and concisely as possible.
one of my favorite productivity tricks is putting reminders into the future asking if I continue to follow new... productivity tricks
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) January 20, 2020
it's easy to discover a new trick that *actually works* but then literally just forget about it a week later for no reason - this solves this! pic.twitter.com/iNollrFEJ7
.@MelancholyYuga pic.twitter.com/2SArCrVFJY
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) January 24, 2020
Is McDonald's the single most trusted institution in the entire world? It is for me.
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) January 26, 2020
The only place in any country where for a couple of bucks I can spend a few hours in a safe, clean space and also to get a bunch of tasty and healthy food
(writing this tweet from a McDonald's) pic.twitter.com/u379TkrlRZ
this except for literally every social group. so much social disfunction because people are bad at kicking out/firing sociopaths
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) January 27, 2020
(is it the same phenomenon that is behind difficulty of dumping an abusive partner/spouse?) https://t.co/Oze9zgb3qw
"it seems that what people are convinced is moral to eat just happens to always coincide with what will make one live longer, and delicious things like bacon never get held up as the Fountain of Youth" brilliant anthropology by @gwern https://t.co/kWt2WuY9wF pic.twitter.com/Prei4SjUso
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) January 28, 2020
2020-02
~49 million years ago "the Arctic cooled from an average sea-surface temperature of 13 °C to today's −9 °C, and the rest of the globe underwent a similar change. For perhaps the first time in its history, the planet had ice caps at both of its poles" https://t.co/uOmzkQDSfl pic.twitter.com/2Vr8onF1Ux
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) February 15, 2020
famous tech people: it is OUTRAGEOUS that famous scientists can publish whatever they want in top journals and crowd out young scientists
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) February 17, 2020
also famous tech people writing to their journalist friends: i spent an evening on this project, i want it to appear in techcrunch on friday
am convinced pretty much everyone would improve their long term odds of success massively if they just asked their SO or a close friend to take the responsibility for conducting weekly 1:1s with them https://t.co/qKNpiNFyt9
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) February 19, 2020
can we all just take a moment to appreciate the person who came up with the idea of letting all the most ambitious people build giant companies & improve the lives of everyone instead of murdering millions of people and destroying everything in sight while building actual empires
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) February 19, 2020
can't stop thinking about this https://t.co/DN4H4xSEvt
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) February 20, 2020
>There, on the floor of the men’s room, sitting cross-legged with his head down, was Zuckerberg. And he was crying. “Through his tears he was saying, ‘This is wrong. I can’t do this. I gave my word!’” pic.twitter.com/1FngFYkUni
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) February 21, 2020
science pic.twitter.com/zJLnFDkTeQ
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) March 2, 2020
2020-03
Won't show up in GDP but near-perfect text-to-speech which appeared in the last couple of years and which means that every book is an audiobook now, legit added like 0.5 QALY to my life over the next 50 years https://t.co/lzl67k3DYC
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) March 10, 2020
"After he was evicted from his home, Eminem went to Los Angeles to compete in the 1997 Rap Olympics ... He placed second, and Interscope Records staff in attendance sent a copy of the Slim Shady EP ... Dre recalled, '...When Jimmy played this, I said, 'Find him. Now.' "
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) March 16, 2020
remember how when you were in college when writing any research paper, you first wrote whatever you wanted, and then went fishing for citations, while only reading the abstracts and having no idea if the paper you cite is any good?
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) March 17, 2020
this is exactly what real scientists do as well
writing letters to ourselves in year 2030 in 2 hours!
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) March 29, 2020
(several people asked me what's the purpose of doing this -- honestly it just seems like fun to have a letter from my 2020 self in 2030)https://t.co/fBlFjm3Vxe
2020-04
Scientists- in what % of papers you read does the main body of the paper fail to support the assertions made in the title or abstract?
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) April 4, 2020
a reminder that the vast majority of computer scientists, biologists, psychologists do not have adequate statistical training to understand the statistical methods they use and proper causal inference
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) April 9, 2020
(and no, reading The Book of Why doesn't count)
I always thought I have a pretty good grasp of statistics and was incredibly humbled by the amount of statistical intuition I acquired when designing my sleep experiment (*finally* intuitively grokked the relationship between effect size, sample size, and statistical power!!!)
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) April 9, 2020
"The progress of Science is generally regarded as a kind of clean, rational advance along a straight ascending line; in fact it has followed a zigzag course, at times almost more bewildering than the evolution of political thought." https://t.co/sNA0UP1ZkG by @RichardMCNgo pic.twitter.com/NDhj5EqvBX
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) April 16, 2020
“Do you suppose I liked always reading in the papers that the chairman of the Council of Ministers had done this . . . the chairman had done that?” the tsar [Nicholas II] remarked pathetically to Stolypin’s successor. “Don’t I count? Am I nobody?”" pic.twitter.com/zerBVSFIHp
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) April 18, 2020
If there's one thing that never changes in biology is that everything we know is verifiably completely 100% false:
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) April 20, 2020
"many so-called “noncoding” RNA sequences are being translated into proteins and that these proteins are in fact functional." - @Dereklowe https://t.co/oR20gqqglI pic.twitter.com/gojwgxVPst
these quotes still incredible https://t.co/0G5Xe6Cy0N
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) April 28, 2020
2020-05
sci-hub has been out for just a few years but I literally cannot imagine or remember what life was like before it... did we just not have access to every research paper ever published? what did my weird twitter friends who spend their days reading papers even do?..
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) May 9, 2020
imo one of the craziest facts about the world is that out of almost 8 billion people there's only one elon musk
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) May 12, 2020
This week's best of twitter (1/2): https://t.co/Z3lCrTWptN (following me here but not being a subscriber makes no sense because the average tweet i include in the newsletter is several times better than an average tweet i produce)
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) May 18, 2020
can't stop thinking about this pic.twitter.com/kdIDLUPRY5
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) May 22, 2020
Fiction:
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) May 24, 2020
-Notes from the Underground (Dostoyevsky)
-The Things They Carried (O'Brien)
-Manon Lescaut (Prévost)
Autobiographies:
-To build a castle (Bukovsky)
-Lost On The Treasure Island (Friedman)
Self-help:
-Can't Hurt Me by (Goggins)
-How To Fail at Almost Everything (Adams) https://t.co/9u0rYeR579
Something I wish I understood when I was a teenager:
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) May 26, 2020
90% of adults are utterly unambitious. When they give you life advice, they will suggest things that satisfy their personal ambitions, not your ambitions. Be extra cautious around adults you like and respect (parents, profs..)
this point especially, except generalized: most people only did 1 or 2 things in their life. The probability that (1) this is exactly what you should be doing with your life is very low, (2) they probably know next to nothing about everything elsehttps://t.co/bHUP02OECL
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) May 27, 2020
When you're obsessed with something or have intense pressure to work on something, how much can you work LONG-TERM and feel good?
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) May 29, 2020
Choose the closest.
Format: A, B, C
where
A = hrs of work/day on 5 working days/wk
B = same for 6
C = same for 7
after 2 months in quarantine, wife and I decided to pretend we go to work 9am-6pm (no interaction when we see each other e.g. in the kitchen, call if we want to talk, etc.)--> ↘shallow day interactions and ↗fulfilling evening interactions. Curious if anyone tried doing this..
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) May 29, 2020
2020-06
"VICE created a new preference for me (the preference to know why some people point loaded guns at their dicks), then satisfied it. Overall I have neither gained nor lost utility. This seems different from providing me with a service." https://t.co/wwLzMI8umg
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) June 5, 2020
.@ByrneHobart: "America’s supply of completely insane risk-takers, and the financiers who back them, is a key national advantage" https://t.co/vKhz1C4Whj pic.twitter.com/hXoHeFSAu2
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) June 12, 2020
I also would've benefited a great deal if I realized much much earlier that almost all people I admire the most (scientists & writers) are actually nothing like me and that trying to learn from their life paths is less than useless. https://t.co/ZqslV2LhvD
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) June 13, 2020
I guess the most practical takeaway here is: try to figure out if the person you admire is Type A or Type B personality and if your type is different, avoid benchmarking your life against their life as their lived experience is just fundamentally different https://t.co/RyYzpccd3Y
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) June 13, 2020
Finally wrote about weekly 1:1s (one-on-ones) with my wife in https://t.co/0IT6zqfkEH pic.twitter.com/Jt0HHaWtz6
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) June 17, 2020
can't stop thinking about this
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) June 23, 2020
>why does anyone walk up to a mass-execution trench and kneel to be shot? https://t.co/0mKsPn7Rdx
????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? https://t.co/KczxOH0HC6
"[in] group who read the information on a logarithmic scale...only 40.66%...could respond correctly to a basic question about the graph (whether there were more deaths in one week or another), contrasted to 83.79% of respondents on the linear scale." https://t.co/Q6AGyrGJ2i
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) June 25, 2020
hard to remember a tweet that influenced me more than this one https://t.co/dH09isCCtU
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) June 27, 2020
Wrote a post about this tweet: "Why is there only one Elon Musk? Why is there so much low-hanging fruit?"https://t.co/EMq0bq48ES https://t.co/anLU7hluVt
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) June 30, 2020
2020-07
https://t.co/XfrKCGWNlX pic.twitter.com/edsd8kfhKR
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) July 1, 2020
On days when you set the morning alarm, in which % of cases do you get out of bed and start the day within a minute of hearing it?
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) July 12, 2020
tfw you realize that the best contemporary corroboration of the great man theory comes from a single kazakhstani woman who does crimes https://t.co/FBfaEXFqyb
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) July 14, 2020
How drug addicts are more functional than normal people https://t.co/Wd32pYLKDN pic.twitter.com/GEseM2Vh8O
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) July 18, 2020
apparently this excel file contains all the lessons i learned in the first 18 years of existence pic.twitter.com/AvWaFD1BIZ
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) July 22, 2020
“No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one’s character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.” https://t.co/OgakaELTjH
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) July 25, 2020
it's incredible that you can build a billion dollar company in 6 years or you can work on some old dude's experiments and get a phd
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) July 29, 2020
"Man barely moves for a week, staring at patterns of light [] trying to make [patterns] change. Every 2-4 hours, a stimulus is presented and he records how happy he is. He eats and sleeps as fast as he can []
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) July 30, 2020
It is the happiest week he has ever recorded"https://t.co/ar8srAsk9J
2020-08
age at which interesting (according to @briantimar) companies were founded https://t.co/g9Mmcip1ZY pic.twitter.com/VnvzdcSUT4
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) August 1, 2020
Not gonna make me more friends but... Why We Sleep was basically an integrity test for sleep scientists
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) August 3, 2020
~Everyone knew about the book. I don't know one sleep scientist who tried to correct the public record
All were too happy about the hype, $$$ it brought
That's fucked up
New post: Every thought about giving and taking advice I’ve ever had, as concisely as possible https://t.co/Lm7lyniobi
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) August 10, 2020
years later, still thinking about this paper.. https://t.co/KvcPN07Sql pic.twitter.com/N2i2v5rvp7
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) August 14, 2020
deliberately leaving some links on site broken as a way to find good people who actually try to fix things that are broken and to get them to email you https://t.co/QU1Yy1HvFb
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) August 16, 2020
same for metascience, especially intersection of metascience/biology
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) August 22, 2020
Would especially appreciate really elaborate emails with crazy (or *extremely* reasonable) ways you would organize life science academia if you were starting from scratch today: alexey@guzey.com https://t.co/F9IL2kkqRx
update 3 months later: we're still doing it, it works great. very much recommended. https://t.co/IoHRLZ4YgK
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) August 27, 2020
"I would conservatively estimate that it [a bad hire] costs $100,000 and nine months of your life" https://t.co/Cd1JZaxfDG (links to a great post by @josh_works) pic.twitter.com/x7d7hAw6AU
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) August 19, 2020
randomly remembered how I spent ages 14-16 trying to come up with a good Google Science Fair project, couldn't think of anything, eventually became convinced that I'm a complete idiot, and years later learned that all the winners had university professors "helping" with projects
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) August 30, 2020
2020-09
Are we in the middle of the blog renaissance???? Blogs I'm enjoying reading that launched in 2020:
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) September 5, 2020
Fantastic Anachronism: https://t.co/YDatoos51H
Applied Divinity Studies: https://t.co/MdZoWZfPdZ
Dormin: https://t.co/O94r1tCVgH
"Introspection is as miscalibrated as everyone talks about. I’d repeatedly go to do my Quantified Mind on days on which I felt crappy and be surprised to see my results were basically the same as days on which I’d felt good" by @an1lam https://t.co/iDHpw5qW27
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) September 14, 2020
lmaooooo wtf pic.twitter.com/VntFMAbeDA
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) September 15, 2020
"What happened to all the non-programmers?" by @benskuhn https://t.co/iixdgdztRo pic.twitter.com/a26cgECwqQ
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) September 16, 2020
feel like "cold email more" should be my version of @patio11's "charge more"
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) September 22, 2020
ofc it's wrong to judge someone by credentials and yet I personally find it's incredibly difficult to overcome the prior they set unless the person i'm talking to somehow majorly distinguishes themselves in convo or has outside projects i can base the prior on...
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) September 23, 2020
...and i say this as a person who is so mad at big institutions just refusing to do that and outsourcing talent evaluation and who's entire spiel is trying to evaluate people based on first principles
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) September 23, 2020
file under "the things alexey should probably not discuss on twitter".........
literally the only organization (which includes hospitals) in Moscow where everyone I saw wears masks correctly is McDonald's https://t.co/o6KiD9VqJl
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) September 24, 2020
2020-10
what it's like having a blog pic.twitter.com/neSHrulSge
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) October 2, 2020
biology: "I recently collaborated on a project where initial interpretation of results was wrong simply because putting a glass slip over a sample to inspect it under a microscope caused around 10% of bacterial (B. subtilis) cells to die." https://t.co/xJXtVo10W5
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) October 3, 2020
given that latin didn't have any punctuation this is exactly how i imagine marcus aurelius's meditations sounded like originally https://t.co/uYi0nMWetc
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) October 3, 2020
Enjoying "The Intel Trinity" a lot https://t.co/ZeWmkKsTLr pic.twitter.com/EGFBWNHwPt
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) October 9, 2020
"As it happens, Crime and Punishment and War and Peace were serialized in the same journal at the same time ... This happy accident allowed for allusions across the pages of the journal, and, in fact, Dostoevsky took advantage of the opportunity." https://t.co/LYnI0NkJoC pic.twitter.com/BSb7lP1tcK
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) October 9, 2020
stalin would've fucking loved roam pic.twitter.com/OPSKse20Rm
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) October 10, 2020
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) October 10, 2020
just asked my wife if she'd like to watch a video called "what happened to the legions of the III-V centuries-the reality of late roman empire" w/ me, she couldn't stop laughing for 5mins and then said no......how do we get more women interested in ancient roman military history?
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) October 11, 2020
"It’s not a coincidence that [SpaceX is] ranked #1 for both stress and sense of meaning." https://t.co/UHXu12sC2Uhttps://t.co/0dbvRrUijF
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) October 18, 2020
>“What people can’t understand,” Hiers said ... “is how much fun Vietnam was. I loved it. I loved it, and I can’t tell anybody.”
thought that blind postdoc fellowship review was a great idea, so i shared this tweet with a friend who is not on twitter and got this in response.. thoughts? https://t.co/wNOcWPojBM pic.twitter.com/js8O71L2Qv
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) October 19, 2020
at this point am pretty convinced that several-days-long video game marathons make me more productive longterm by showing exactly what the reference totally-focused-on-singular-goal-glued-to-the-chair-for-12-hours state feels like and by making it easier to achieve it during work
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) October 21, 2020
social search 😍😍😍
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) October 22, 2020
(Gleb updated ampie today to show pages amplified by all users of Ampie to show up in search) https://t.co/TE1lEjgAkj
Neurodiversity, mutants, and organisational design https://t.co/z4kTrY5prm
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) October 22, 2020
2020-11
underappreciated post by @Ben_Reinhardt https://t.co/8BZFrSrF3s
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) November 1, 2020
John sent me this clip NBC made about him and I felt compelled to share it. His life story is extraordinary: raised in a normal family, became a criminal, read 1st book at 25yo, went to college at 29, became a renowned researcher of troubled youth.https://t.co/vTpNy3Z1jV
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) November 14, 2020
a periodic reminder that you should never exclusively rely on Internet Archive. Always archive with https://t.co/sQ4MaUA6yr (https://t.co/MaUvRY6BHu). Sites can pull their Internet Archive at any time and they often do that when the archives are most needed!! e.g. quora
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) November 20, 2020
in general, we underappreciate how political history is. think about caro's treatment of moses: he completely destroyed the man's legacy bc he didn't agree with his politics, while "trying" to be neutral. most historians r even less charitable to their subjects&way more political
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) November 22, 2020
TIL dragging scroll wheel (middle button) click does this in VS code pic.twitter.com/ugcS2lZijd
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) November 27, 2020
every highbrow conversation ever be like taleb is awful but
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) November 27, 2020
my fav the diff post in a long time "Among investors, I’ve noticed a correlation between a) having encyclopedic knowledge of every detail of a given company, and b) having a very simple thesis for why it’s a good or bad investment." https://t.co/oH9LNBMXsz
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) November 30, 2020
2020-12
one thing i recently realized that i think makes my writing good is that i'm willing to be unusually ruthless with it. am ok with throwing out text and rewriting a draft 5-10 times until it becomes good. am ok with sitting there and editing. am ok with cutting everything...
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) December 1, 2020
google docs are a disaster. the comment system forces people into giving small tactical comments bound to specific portions of text, instead of sharing strategic consequential feedback. most of the time i get 20 comments on a doc but have no idea if the commenter even liked it
— alexey (@alexeyguzey) December 2, 2020