iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Imagine a website that puts every paper in the public domain, with AI-generated grades, re-analyses, and rewrites for each. Think about how easy it would be to tag each paper with replication status.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

A personal statement from an OpenAI researcher who was never a doomer but has become much more concerned recently. docs.google.com/document/d/e...

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

I don’t think these claims are making the point you want them to make. OpenAI is a serious company by the standards of other companies. If you’re chalking this up to OpenAI incompetence (a pander to your audience btw) imagine the possibilities in less competent hands.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

If folate deficiencies really did cause autism, then you would expect to see a sharp drop in the autism-by-birth-year curve in 1997, when folic acid fortification was mandated. Instead, the curve continued its upward trend unabated. chris-said.io/2021/06/27/a...

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Nate identifies three tenets of Blueskyism: Smalltent-ism, Credentialism, and Catastrophism. I wish he hadn't written it in such an antagonistic way, but I think he's right.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Nate unfortunately uses some of the same style he criticizes Bluesky for, but I agree with overall point. People here don't realize how alienating this place is to normal voters. www.natesilver.net/p/what-is-bl...

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

The boring but underappreciated reality is that if you don't want authoritarians taking power, you need to come closer to median voter opinions on crime and immigration.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 27/08/2025

Yup that history is actually a motivation in the article I linked. But keep reading to see why this time might be very different.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

DOGE now doing what it should have been doing instead of firing federal employees randomly for no reason. marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevo...

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

ChatGPT’s water usage is “probably the last worry you should have about either water or AI” www.slowboring.com/p/theres-ple...

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

[Work opportunity] In the wake of OBBB, Propel is opening up a residency program for exceptional mid-career technologists to help states navigate policy implementation around SNAP, Medicaid, TANF, and WIC.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

This might have been the quickest I've gone from "that's an insane conspiracy theory" to "it's plausible".

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

I wrote this a while back. I just don’t think the science should matter as much as we might want it to.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 18/05/2025

I don't know about Ahmari, but @hananiarichard.bsky.social is genuinely disgusted by the stupidity of MAGA (even if he trolls a bit) All his tweets are like this.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 18/05/2025

I don't know about Ahmari, but @hananiarichard.bsky.social is genuinely disgusted by the stupidity of MAGA (even if he trolls a bit) All his tweets are like this.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Many people here say there's no need for Dems to build a bigger tent, since MAGA will destroy the economy and lose elections on fundamentals. Maybe, but I wouldn't bank on it! It's not that hard for Trump to just stop doing dumb things.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 20/04/2025

If you want to beat Trump, the way you respond to these types of posts is an IQ test.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

“Bhutan is unusually happy” is a popular claim that, in retrospect, had all the hallmarks of being false. x.com/ourworldinda...

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

Do the terms "credit" and "debit" add anything other than confusion? Why is an increase to an account a "credit" or "debit" depending on which side of the equation it's on? Why not just say "increase" and "decrease?

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

Interesting prediction on AI and unemployment. www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-...

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

One of the creators of the USDS writes about DOGE. "I care deeply about trans people and immigrants [...] but I could not care less that someone plugged in a server to create a new email list without a Privacy Impact Assessment." reason.com/2025/02/13/i...

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

Shoplifting by political affiliation. I don't want to read too much into this, but I'm not surprised by how this sorts. I got this data from a survey of ACX readers. www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey...

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

Someone should start a GoFundMe for any former administration officials who had their security detail removed.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

If these results are true, standard clinical practice guidelines around NSAIDs for acute back pain have been causing chronic pain for millions of people. I'd love to see a human RCT around this, but in the meantime, I'll stick to Tylenol instead of NSAIDs.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

And similar to the results in humans, analgesics without anti-inflammatory properties (red, purple, blue) were good in the long term. Only the anti-inflammatory (green) was bad in the long term.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

A pure anti-inflammatory diclofenac (green) showed identical results. Just like dexamethasone, it was better than saline in the short term, and worse in the long term.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

If that's not enough evidence, the paper also did a randomized experiment on mice. Compared to saline, a drug with anti-inflammatory properties (dexamethasone) drove short term pain relief but made things worse in the long term.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

This is observational data so obviously there could be residual confounding. But what’s interesting is that there was no increased risk from non-anti-inflammatory like Paracetamol (Tylenol). Only the anti-inflammatories had higher risk.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

This study makes the case that NSAID anti-inflammatories for acute pain can make chronic pain *worse* in the long run. First, among people with acute back pain, taking NSAID anti-inflammatories is associated with 1.76x increased odds of developing chronic pain. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

So for sure my estimates could be wrong, but a couple comments: 1. The belief that cows have net positive lives is not uncommon among animal welfare researchers. See e.g. Shields, and Norwood & Lusk www.mattball.org/2014/07/part...

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

That’s where I’m landing, although that doesn’t mean I’m gonna eat as much as possible! I wrote a bit about this in the Methods doc. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Eating bigger animals means less animal suffering and less welfare lost per calorie. chris-said.io/2025/01/08/b...

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

Give me $500,000 and subpoena power and I will solve this mystery.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

Consumer Reports did its own study of plastic chemicals in food earlier this year, and just like Plasticlist's recent report it's hard to find discernible patterns. Why is Brisk Iced Tea so much worse than Gatorade? www.consumerreports.org/health/food-...

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

Well FWIW they are getting their way today. www.newsweek.com/donald-trump...

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

Nobody really knows how much this matters (BPA limits have changed by a factor of 20,000x in the last year), but at a minimum it is good to have transparency about what's in our food.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

3. Takeout in plastic containers only has a little bit more plastic chemicals than the same food eaten inside a restaurant.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

2. A Whopper from Burger King contains 6 mg of DEHT, about 5 poppy seeds worth 🤯.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

Pretty incredible findings on plastic chemicals in food, from Nat Friedman's Plastliclist report. 1. Boba Guys Black Tea Pearls contain 32,571% of the daily limit for BPA. www.plasticlist.org/report

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

I get that an error of commission should count for more than an error of omission, but people should still familiarize themselves with the “invisible graveyard” @smithdanag.bsky.social marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevo... forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3quCK7...

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

For health charities a good impact metrics is the number of lives saved per dollar. GiveWell does this pretty well (see their logic in this screenshot). www.givewell.org/how-much-doe...

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Some donors say their squishy causes shouldn't be quantified. But when you donate $1 million to restore a painting, while $3,000 can save a life, you are implicitly valuing the painting’s restoration at 333 human lives. That’s *your* quantification, based on your own choices!

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

The author is right that there is value in hard-to-quantify causes, and that giving should reflect a diversity of priorities, including community-based initiatives. But the idea that the global charity budget has shifted too far toward EA is preposterous. Consider the facts in this screenshot

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

Current status: Trying to read this response from a guy I'm talking to on the EA forum.

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

“The most important study in nutrition that’s been done since vitamins”

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

All nutrition research funding should be diverted into this type of study design. Incredibly informative. x.com/KevinH_PhD/s...

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Chris Said @csaid.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Correct both-things-can-be-true synthesis. Gov-funded research is extremely high ROI and almost all of it is useless.

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