buzbarstow.bsky.social
Some sort of professor, somewhere inside Cornell, doing something. “Clearly no future as a scientist” - Reviewer #1.
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Bryce is only a postdoc in the Barstow lab for about 5 more hours! He's off to start Forage Evolution with @inretrospecht.bsky.social !
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I just feel like they are an impediment to scientific progress. To paraphrase the recent Abundance book: it's like giving me chronic fatigue.
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Congratulations!
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You've got to watch episode 6 of the BBC show The Young Ones! Vivian (militant chemistry student) invents a serum that turns whoever drinks it into a homicidal axe-wielding maniac. Naturally, to ensure no one drinks it he puts it in a can of Coke in the fridge. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFKt...
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I do think this interview gets to something. Marc Andreessen comes across way more thoughtful on this than he does on X.
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That’s a great point! Maybe going for the most salient problem first is not a bad idea though, simply because it tarnishes the Democratic brand so badly.
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Agreed... same's true in science, especially at the cutting edge. For cash, you've got to hustle, hustle, hustle.
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That all being said, I'm way more ok with this than I would be with a human.
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In my limited experience, yes.
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But for formate production it really screws up (even though uncertainty about the answer vaguely saves it).
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But is definitely unable to get a really key concept that we drill into undergrads: potential difference vs. potential.
For H2 production it saves itself....
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Yes, totally agree! I made this slide about how synbio is going to help us climb the Kardashev scale. As civilizations mature they will manipulate their environment with increasing precision.
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Remember that developing a new drug can cost well over $1 billion, sometimes up to ≈ $4 billion. So $1.4 billion without a result is not nice for investors, but also not totally unexpected. Science is at the frontier of knowledge so comes with big risks.
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It's about 50% for US, right?
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Agreed! Honestly it’s a fair critique of academia as well. Expertise in one domain doesn’t equal expertise in all.
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I’m generally of the belief that successful people have done something right. But even with all the smarts and hard work, there’s probably some luck. I worry that opportunity has become so hard to come by that people have been focusing just on the luck part, and neglecting things they might learn.
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Follow me and see what you think. Maybe I’ll surprise you.
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Thanks! I really appreciate it. I put together some recommendations for a provost search committee a few months ago (Pinker says a lot of what I said better). But, I also had some additional points as well that I've tried to articulate here:
buzbarstow.substack.com/publish/post...
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I don’t feel under siege, in fact the first Trump administration was a huge boost to my research, but I do feel an urgent need to massively increase the effectiveness of academia.
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A question for you (in good faith) from inside Ivy League: how would you reform the universities? Could you give say a 5 or 10 point action plan? Could it be implemented inside, especially at department level?
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I totally don't agree. I'd say the biggest limiter on my lab's ability to do science right now is technology! That's why we need to spin out technology and bring it back. I view science and technology as symbiotic. They need each other.
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Actually, I think Drax in the Moonraker book was under government contracts.
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That’s what I thought!
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Some of my colleagues think that assembly theory implies panspermia. But I’m not sure it does. What’s the official word?