dekhn

I had to check and he does not seem to have the real qualifications to make his comments. In particular, he did computational neuro, not bioinformatics, and I can't find publications to support his claim.

The way I ask it in public situations with scientists is this: If you had an AI that could output cures for diseases (IE, drugs that pass phase III clinical trial, get approved by the FDA, and are highly effective), but it couldn't explain how it worked, would you use it?

Opinions are mixed. Some folks will say that it's morally imperative to cure people even if we don't understand the specific or general principles. Other folks will insist that it's a terrible idea to hand over the comprehension of medical treatments to LLMs, because in the long term it will leave us helpless and dependent.

Um. Take a look at the authors. Every single one of them is an expert in this field. They did test this in a lab.

If you want to complain about things like this, it really helps to be specific. Given the author list, it's unlikely they made any truly spectacular errors (and also possible the system they studied is not interesting).

I don't think LLMs currently have direct reasoning abilities, but as we make them more complicated (MoE, RL) I think we're getting better at learning an implicit world model that guides the token output distribution towards making good hypotheses.

This is a low-quality comment that doesn't even attempt to understand why I would say what I say.

I was going to say that she wasn't arrested for giving the mayor the middle finger, but I re-read the entire article (which has been updated since this was originally posted) and the citation does in fact say "disrupting the peace... gave mayor the finger". Well, that was dumb (on the part of the cop who wrote that).

Strictly speaking, no impossible from our understanding of physics, but also an enormous scientific and engineering problem. research into that would take away from people working on more reasonable approaches today.

Automated labs are far more challenging to build and run than most people appreciate. If I wanted to make progress quickly in discovery science, I would find good lab techs before building automated labs.

No, the parent post was just using a single example that used an expedited method.

It looks like the researchers just wrote the agentic harness and the rest of the work really was done autonomously by Claude with only extremely limited guidance after.

BTW the first author of the paper worked in the Doudna lab studying the origins of crispr (and after their PhD, joined Anthropic). All of the authors either have, or are going to have, excellent careers. I dont' think they are worried about attribution.

There are many laws of physics that say that cures for cancer- general ones that treat a wide array of cancers and are effectively permanent with no reoccurrence- are a long time away. Cancer is subtle. Cancer is wily. Cancer is tightly integrated with our eukaryotic nature.

AI was decades away, for decades! It took a wide range of conditions to be satisfied before it became clear it was a powerful tool.

Also, medical people rarely use the term "cure cancer", as we have too much experience with recurrence of the "same" cancer (not just in the same location, but a genetic descendent of the original cancer).

They do partner externally. This work is fundamental discovery science, rather than industrial research.

the folks who run anthropic grew up reading scifi with crazy awesome biotech. However, when they look at biotech today, it's just depressing. It's incredibly slow, it takes decadfes to prove out new technologies, and they figure with this new tool, they can just point it at problems and have it emit discoveries. If they show a few high-impact discoveries, that makes a case for them to move biotech forward much faster than its current progress.

Also, anthropic has so much capitalization right now that it's simply easiest to invest it in a wide portfolio that includes both internal and external research.

I don't get what you don't get?

City Councils are business meetings. They typically follow an agenda, and have rules and sometimes there are court cases around people speaking at city council. My fundamental attitude is that if you want to contribute to a city council meeting without being arrested, you cannot assume your free speech rights trump all the other rules and practices being followed. In this case, the individual who was arrested violated a rule. The council acted within its rights (subject to any future court cases); personally I think it was a bit overhanded, but if they hadn't acted, the meeting would very likely have devolved into chaos.

My beliefs are based on standard social studies courses about US civic society combined with watching the Berkeley City Council meeting repeatedly get disrupted by individuals.

For the comment- it was ineffective because it failed to convince the council to vote the way I wanted (and this was so long ago that I can't even remember the topic.). Here's an article from my hometown describing somebody else who was more disruptive: https://www.courant.com/2000/05/16/city-watchdog-sydney-libb.... """City officials used to complain that arresting Libby mattered little because the judicial system seemed not to take him seriously. That changed in April 1997 when an exasperated Superior Court judge, tired of Libby’s courtroom behavior, threw him in jail and ordered Libby to undergo a mental competency exam.""" (we had several other people who would routinely disrupt as well)

They didn't do that, though. They sent it to committee. That doesn't achieve the city council's goals.

Do you truly believe the mayor and city council were trying to attack the first amendment as a core principle?

We don't live in an free speech absolutist society. People don't get to talk about just anything, at any time during a city council meeting without restrictions. Don't attribute to malice what is more easily attribute to getting business done.

I have spoken at public meetings. It was all routine. I signed up, spoke about the topic of interest, kept within the time limit, and was polite. It was also ineffective.

I don't think the individual who was arrested thought they would be arrested. From how I read the article, they were just confused about whether they could speak about the topic they wanted to speak about in that part of the meeting, and then, when things got heated, immediately went to giviing people the finger. It's not really surprising- these events can get very heated and people's instincts take over. I think if she had an indication she was going to be arrested, she likely would have waited until the topic came up in a future meeting.

BTW, from the nature of your questions and my experience on the internet, you may be trying to lay a trap where you use my words to show a logical contradiction (or you could just be asking questions in good faith- hard to tell on the internet these days). If that's your goal, please wrap up, I don't want to sit here answering questions about my beliefs.

Thanks for being polite and thoughtful and laying out your thinking.

The issue is that city council meetings that schedule open discussion on topics often end up running late into the night (after midnight) and the discussion doesn't achieve much.

I don't thikn we can say with certainty that the chair tabled the discussion with the intent of disallowing people their right to discuss it. That's interpreting subjective intent.

Moderately so, and then after this thread started I spent some time checking up on the latest in city council disruptions which helped emphasize that the arrest would hold up in court.

My experience with law enforcement is limited to getting a ticket for using the commuter lane.

The question you're asking is a subtle one. To the extent I can make an absolute statment, it's likely many forms of civil disobedience are not worthy of arrest, but the person being disobedient has to expect the possibility of being arrested anyway (and then possibly getitng a day in court). Note in this case the individual was charged with disrupting the peace, given a ticket, and released- more or less what I'd expect to happen in a case like this.

Yes, they'd be deprived of time and the ability to comment on their own interests (these meetings often drag past midnight due to excessive comments).

Right- if you read the context of our thread, I started talking about Powell.

I think Heider has a much better case, were she to try to sue the city council (which I think is a waste of time if her goal is to prevent Flock cameras), but even then, the laws and cases around people who disrupt city councils are complex, and if the city lost... it would j ust end up costing tax payers more money.

Are you sure the intent of the council was to specifically refuse to listen?

No, I have not. But also, why does that matter? I would fully expect to be arrested if I was civilly disobedient.

Or to assume it's a false positive.

Shortly after 9/11 I was flying out of Hawaii back to the mainland and I watched the screen when they swabbed my bag. It reported as positive for every single type of explosive (to the best of my knowledge, I was not carrying anything even remotely explosive). The tech looked at the results, said "that can't possibly be right" and waved me on.

Well, I think that's a subjective reading of the video, right? We don't actually know the intent.

Can you instead try to see that people who disagree with you may actually not being attempting to subvert the first amendment, but instead are focusing on the necessary business city councils have to achieve? There are clearly limits on what you can say and do in a city council meeting.

Please engage in good faith and write comments that contribute, rather than taking away, from the conversation. [ the above comment was modified to copy mine; this is not good faith ]

Yes, you don't.

We don't live in a world where words literally mean what they say without nuance or context. We live in a world where "public discussion" does not mean "all the people who want to talk about a topic of interest can disrupt a city business meeting". We also live in a world where the city council can table (US meaning) a discussion by sending it to committee.

Have you been to city council meetings, especially in places like Berkeley? They often go well past midnight and are filled with people just endlessly postponing important votes. These are business meetings that follow an agenda and the leaders have a significant amount of power to move the process along.

No, insulting a person is not a petition for redress of grievances. To do so, you must actually state a grievance. In this case Powell just wanted to insult the city council.

The person you're replying to are making factual comments based on experience. You are not; you are working from emotion, and interpreting the article in an unrealistic way.

Many of us on this thread have experience with city councils and are anti-Flock and pro-civil disobedience. We're arguing with you from a point of praticality related to city business meetings. Practicing civil disobedience at a city council meeting is fraught with peril- for example, you're preventing other people from having their topics discussed/voted on. From my perspective, if your goal is to make actual change, getting arrested at a city council meeting speaking on the wrong topic is not a particularly effective method.