Field · 6 posts

Science & Method

How discovery actually works. Below, everything that touches this field, including pieces that live mostly in neighboring territory.

The collection

All of Science & Method

Science & Method

Types of Scientific Discovery

A discovery is not one kind of event. It helps to place any breakthrough on two axes at once: which stage of inquiry it belongs to, and what it does to the surrounding framework. The stage runs from noticing a…

1 min · Science & Method
Artificial Intelligence

Reeks and Wrecks does not have to be the future

Kurt Vonnegut’s 152 novel, Player Piano, feels terrifyingly prescient: a dystopian society where machines and computers have replaced most human workers, leaving only engineers and managers with meaningful…

3 min · Artificial Intelligence
Biology

Reading Derek Lowe with Perplexity

Always stimulated by Derek Lowe's writings (in spite of an average 50% agreement rate), I tried (a condensed version of) his OpenAI Deep Research prompt on the toxic effects of thalidomide with Perplexity Deep…

2 min · Biology
Biotech & Pharma

Could Life Insurance become the new Health Insurance?

One of the most unexpectedly and delightfully insightful sessions at DOC, the warm and curiously strong gathering curated by Jordan Shlain, MD and John Battelle on the theme of Truth in Medicine, was the one…

1 min · Biotech & Pharma
Innovation & Discovery

AHA

The conviction that hashtagserendipity can be, if not systematized, at least harnessed for augmented scientific discovery, has fueled my (obviously nonlinear) professional trajectory. As we saw with Fleming's…

1 min · Innovation & Discovery
Artificial Intelligence

Techbio Foundation Models

Thank you Compound and Dr. Shelby for maintaining this repository of hashtagtechbio foundation models. I don't know whether to be excited by a Cambrian explosion of LLMs for bio or deflated by the emerging…

1 min · Artificial Intelligence
The newsletter

New connections, in your inbox

One irregular dispatch when a new piece lands: notes on AI, evolution, complexity, and the biology of discovery. No noise.

Delivered with Buttondown · unsubscribe anytime