I am continually amused at people not quite understanding what AlphaFold is actually doing, too.

Yes, a bunch of its performance comes from it learning rules about how proteins fold. But not a majority of its performance. MOST of its performance is it effectively acting as a translator of what evolution knows about protein folding into a form we can understand.

A key part of the system is not just cooking the sequence into a structure. A system running alphafold has a database of terabytes of curated sequence information from all over the tree of life. You put in the sequence you care about, and it first searches that database for anything with homology, and builds a "covariation matrix" - wherever theres anything with even vague sequence relatedness, build a matrix of every position in your sequence and the correlation between variation at position X and variation at position Y. This covariation matrix represents implicit information from the evolutionary process about what parts of a sequence are functionally connected to each other, which has a correlation to positional information, and these correlations are in turn learned by the ML system.

You put in de novo designed proteins or orphan proteins without homologs in the curated dataset and performance does not go away, but it drops precipitously. A bunch of what is going on is finding an evolutionary signal, and translating that evolutionary signal into structural information. So still, evolution knows much much more about protein folding than we do or any machine does, and once again a ML system is revealed to essentially be an information channel that takes in information from an interesting source on one end and turns it into a different form of information on the other.

Depends on what Anthropic wants to do with the poached people.

I am actually in the middle of both trying to advance my career and a project about information theory in evolutionary biology making a bunch of explicit parallels to machine learning. Someone where I work suggested that given the connections I was making I should look to a 'frontier AI lab' as an employer.

He did not see the instant flashbacks to chasing these weirdos across the internet for almost two decades, watching in horror as the religious psychosis gained national prominence and great destructive power. All he got to hear was my instant intonation of "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

Google shut down the AlphaFold team, trying to reassign the people behind the super interesting problem of using ML to predict protein structure from sequence onto chatbot development. A whole bunch left the company.

https://www.engadget.com/2225849/google-shuts-down-alphafold/

The Business Idiots are truly running the asylum.

I truly cannot tell which of them are in religious psychosis and which of them are shameless liars

Oh man, the "Post ASI" epilogue is a trip. Here's what happens in 2040:

Space beyond the solar system is divided into parcels, increasing in size cubically with distance from Earth. Everyone is given their one-ten-billionth share as a portfolio of lottery tickets, each representing the right to one-ten-billionth chance of getting each parcel. So every human gets a ticket representing a one-ten-billionth chance of owning each star in the Milky Way and each distant galaxy.

Before the lottery is drawn, most people who are interested in control over distant space choose to trade their tickets for space properties that suit their interests.

Many people aren’t interested in the space lottery, so when they receive the tickets, they sell their tickets for money on the open market to people who value control over space. Somewhat uncomfortably, this leads to the wealthy having disproportionate control over cosmic resources. But it is hard to avoid: if people are allowed to trade their control over the stars for Earth assets, then people wealthy in Earth assets inevitably end up disproportionately influential, and proposals for extreme redistribution of Earth assets have already been rejected as politically infeasible.

You can, if you want, go to your space property and live there. If your property is outside the solar system, you will need to either go into cryosleep or upload yourself to a computer to survive the journey. If you hate the idea of cryosleep or uploading, or you want to visit Earth regularly, you should get property in the Solar System. If those don’t bother you, but you’re worried about nearby aliens, get property in the Milky Way or a nearby galaxy. Otherwise, why not claim a distant galaxy for maximal space?

Good god, these people have no idea what the universe is or what they even are, do they?

Also, holy capitalist realism Batman

10 bucks each time you turn it off

When I am talking at academic conferences to astrobiologists about how their/my field has been poisoned over time by singularity cults ideas seeping into the literature uncited, their eyes get particularly wide when I get to this part.

Putting aside the sneering and philosophy to nerd for a minute, before getting back to it.

For a long time people were very into the split-consciousness notion of what happened to split-brain people, but a couple things have come around and now some people really think that the better way of thinking of it is still-unitary consciousness with a very difficult time moving around information between different sensory/expression modalities.

First, you get people who are born without a corpus callosum who are behaviorally normal (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13554794.2013.826690). They get a bit of extra connectivity sidways through their deep brain structure as some kind of homeostatic compensation, but the total amount is definitely low. What this says is there's a difference between a brain that grew under a very unusual set of structural constraints, and one that grew normally that gets shredded. Similar with those people you find now and then with a brain that's 90% fluid (though with the actual cortex pushed up against the skull around a big bubble of CSF) and the only neurological findings are things like weakness in one leg and an IQ of 80 (worth noting that this is still very very different from hydranencephaly) (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)61127-1/fulltext).

Second, when you do a wider range of experiments with the split brain people you find that while they cannot verbally say what is in their left visual field (which goes to the right side, while language is usually a left-side phenomenon) they can reliably state that something is there with speech, or either hand, and approximately where in the visual field it is. The low bandwidth awareness of presence is there, but they cannot get their speech capacity to access the details. It's like their sight is now multiple separate sensory modalities, some of which is very difficult to talk about and some of which are very difficult to draw with particular hands.

https://www.uva.nl/shared-content/uva/en/news/press-releases/2017/01/split-brain-does-not-lead-to-split-consciousness.html

https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/140/5/1231/2951052

People argue a lot about what this means

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393221002402

You can also apparently reorganize around very small amounts of remaining fibers to have no deficits like that, with no issues talking about anything in either part of the visual field

https://news.ucsb.edu/2025/022246/new-findings-split-brain-science-even-minimal-fiber-connections-can-unify-consciousness

Now, getting out of the nerd mode, there's a LOT of weird literature from the 60s to 80s about people with very strange brain anatomy who nonetheless developed normally or better than expected

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1469-8749.1965.tb07839.x

"Two cases of hydranencephaly are described in infants. In both these there was evidence of excessive intracranial pressure-as is often the case-and both were operated on to relieve this. The progress of the older child, now 21 months of age, was throughout excellent physically and mentally, and he is considered to be normal. The progress of the second infant was remarkably good for three months, but thereafter mental retardation and spasticity followed; he was also blind. There is no good explanation for the unexpectedly good progress of the first patient."

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.7434023

"...the most severe group, in which ventricle expansion fills 95 percent of the cranium. Many of the individuals in this last group, which forms just less than 10 percent of the total sample, are severely disabled, but half of them have IQ's greater than 100. This group provides some of the most dramatic examples of apparent ly normal function against all odds. Commenting on Lorber's work, Kenneth Till, a former neurosurgeon at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, London, has this to say: "Interpreting brain scans can be very tricky. There can be a great deal more brain tissue in the cranium than is immediately apparent." Till echoes the cautions of many practitioners when he says, "Lorber may be being rather overdramatic when he says that someone has 'virtually no brain.' "

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8749.1999.tb00621.x

"Consciousness in congenitally decorticate children: developmental vegetative state as self-fulfilling prophecy"

"According to traditional neurophysiological theory, consciousness requires neocortical functioning, and children born without cerebral hemispheres necessarily remain indefinitely in a developmental vegetative state. Four children between 5 and 17 years old are reported with congenital brain malformations involving total or near-total absence of cerebral cortex but who, nevertheless, possessed discriminative awareness: for example, distinguishing familiar from unfamiliar people and environments, social interaction, functional vision, orienting, musical preferences, appropriate affective responses, and associative learning. These abilities may reflect ‘vertical’ plasticity of brainstem and diencephalic structures. The relative rarity of manifest consciousness in congenitally decorticate children could be due largely to an inherent tendency of the label ‘developmental vegetative state’ to become a self-fulfilling prophecy"

Worth noting that I looked at that paper and these case studies do have noticeable brian mass around the base of the skull, just not much.

Edit I am also very mad at how people so reductionistically talk about different behaviors being restricted to different parts of brain anatomy. It's different in different creatures. You strip the cortex out of an adult cat and itll still walk around and look at things, though not be all there (yes this was done in the sixties), you strip it from an adult human you get a vegetable. Lots of brain parts are capable of lots of things, its just that as brains get bigger the more peripheral parts are easier to expand faster and grow in importance, their fibers exerting more control over the rest, and I would not be surprised at all at other brain bits being capable of quite a lot when they grow without the influence of the bigger bits.

Anybody ever read the short story "Cutie" by Greg Egan? Very apropos...>

Friend of Ziz and cofounder of the 'rationalist fleet' pops up out of the woodwork trying to clear Ziz's name

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mbrmZmzBdtn4qrSus/re-introduction-of-a-rationalist-dragon-and-clarifications

I find myself noticing things rather detached from the typical Ziz funnybusiness more strongly than I notice the stuff about that whole situation.

"I'm Gwen Danielson, a neuroscientist and bioengineer, who decided as a child that I would end Death (and bring people back if I could) and that I would become a dragon and help generally facilitate a fantastical transhumanist future."

"I dream of non-Euclidean geometries, of countless worlds visible and accessible in the daytime sky, of competent infrastructure, of soul forges continually working to bring back the dead... I dream of reaching through warps in the spacetime fabric to save the dying across time"

"Signed, the dragon of creation Creatrei (cree-AH-trey) also known as Gwen Danielson or as Char and Astria (when referring to my hemis as distinct individuals)"

The reactions are fun. "This post is not actually doing a good job of making me trust you and think this conversation is safe to have[1], and I notice that as I am saying this that I am afraid that this will now somehow result in someone trying to murder me in my sleep"

The Great Leader himself, on how he avoids going insane during the onging End of the World because among other things that's not what an intelligent character would do in a story, but you might not be capable of that.

Gerard and Torres get namedropped in the same breath as Ziz as people who have done damage to the rationalist movement from within

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hun4EaiSQnNmB9xkd/tell-people-as-early-as-possible-it-s-not-going-to-work-out