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Daniel Van Zant

@danielvanzant.bsky.social

Building AI that amplifies human expertise instead of diminishing it. Founder at www.sylvum.com PhD Student at www.mpcrlab.com

Posts Replies Media

Daniel Van Zant @danielvanzant.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

3/ I call this the coarse-graining problem, borrowing from Stephen Wolfram. Funding agencies are computationally bounded observers. They cannot track every investigation in detail, so they rely on proxy indicators. Transformative research often resists this. The details matter.

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Daniel Van Zant @danielvanzant.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

2/ There is an explanation. Public research funding in a democracy requires public justification. Agencies defend budgets to legislators who defend votes to constituents. This creates pressure toward research that can demonstrate understandable progress within politically relevant timeframes.

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Daniel Van Zant @danielvanzant.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

1/ I did a historical analysis of five transformative technologies from 1950 to now. Research periods with long time horizons and high uncertainty were about three times more likely to experience sustained underfunding.

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Daniel Van Zant @danielvanzant.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

When I find an interesting article/paper/etc I don't read it right away, I save it in a folder on my computer. Once I have enough, I run a small script to get it printed as a glossy magazine with an AI-designed cover (here's the latest) and read through everything at my leisure.

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Daniel Van Zant @danielvanzant.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

One minute clip from a short talk with Dr. Elan Barenholtz about how he uses AI in his work. Check out the full video here: www.danielvanzant.com/p/an-extra-c... . Also worth checking out an interview he did with Curt Jaimungal of Theories of Everything: curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/the-theory...

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Daniel Van Zant @danielvanzant.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

4/7 Breakthrough Incentive Markets create outcome pools for specific scientific problems. Investors buy positions, fund promising research, and earn returns when breakthroughs happen.

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Daniel Van Zant @danielvanzant.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

2/7 Science today is trapped: academic funding favors incremental progress over radical ideas, while industry only invests where profits exist. Critical research falls through this gap.

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Daniel Van Zant @danielvanzant.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

1/7 Have been trying to understand self-organizing map U-matrices recently. (Example image below of a U-matrix based on hyperdimensional pain data). I am using them to visualize text embedding space.

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Daniel Van Zant @danielvanzant.bsky.social · 02/12/2023

Made this table for a presentation. I would (and have) bet that this technology has strong potential to be the successor to CMOS in the next 10 years or so. Sources: CMOS: ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/983... Nanomagnetic QCA: doi.org/10.1126/scie... Molecular QCA: arxiv.org/abs/1711.08153

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Daniel Van Zant @danielvanzant.bsky.social · 16/11/2023

This book is one of the reasons I am where I am today. I read it as a teenager, and I ended up falling in love with mathematics as a whole. Wonderful and accessible work on appreciating the beauty of pure mathematics.

The book, "The Divine Proportion" by H.E. Huntley

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Daniel Van Zant @danielvanzant.bsky.social · 13/10/2023

Wild to see the Scaling Hypothesis (gwern.net/scaling-hypo...) mentioned all the way back in 1966. From "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine" by IJ Good: doi.org/10.1016/S006...

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