iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

We're hiring a data analyst to work with ~*~me~*~ in the American Board of Family Medicine's DC office. We're looking for someone with R/Python/SQL skills, comfort with AI/ML, and a passion for learning. Likely closing 4/6. professionalismandvalue.org/careers/

professionalismandvalue.org

Careers | The Center for Professionalism and Value in Health Care

The American Board of Family Medicine is seeking a curious and resourceful Data Analyst to deepen analyses, improve data resources, and translate findings into publishable insights.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

IHME has just published their latest Global Burden of Disease study in the Lancet with *2,779* listed authors. This piece describes how their very loose authorship criteria distort metrics and artificially inflate contributors’ citation counts:

ikashnitsky.phd

Beyond Fraud: How IHME Distorts Academic Metrics

Dr. Ilya Kashnitsky is a demographer @ Statistics Denmark.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

Donna Haraway: “The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.”

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

The lineup looks incredible. Sad that I won't be able to go!

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

Happy New Claude Day to those who celebrate

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

A favorite John Searle meme, in his memory

A human approaches a woman at her desk and says hello in Chinese. She says, “Aww, you’re sentient.” A computer approaches the same woman and says hello in Chinese. She looks panicked, picks up her phone, and says, “Hello, John Searle?!”

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Reposted by Nathaniel Hendrix

John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

Research active faculty teach classes that are significantly closer to the knowledge frontier.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

There should be a moratorium on calling for "systemic change" unless the person calling for it can plausibly prove that they know how to change systems. Which would of course involve answering the question of why they haven't just changed the system already.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

"It's more and more perilous to be generic in any way--to be a generic writer, or to be a generic person, a generic thinker. Because the machines are very good at analyzing [generic models]. There will be a much *higher* premium on cultivating your own distinctive, inimitable voice."

econtalk.org

Ian Leslie on Being Human in the Age of AI - Econlib

When OpenAI launched its conversational chatbot this past November, author Ian Leslie was struck by the humanness of the computer’s dialogue. Then he realized that he had it exactly backward: In an ag...

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Reposted by Nathaniel Hendrix

Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 18/09/2025

nihilism is cowardice.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

A little bit of good news: NIH has caught up with previous years' funding levels. Their staff deserves tremendous respect.

A chart showing value of NIH grants over calendar months by year. The 2025 level initially lagged far below previous years, but has now caught up to the average.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

"The closed society represented a perennial moral possibility, whose roots are found in every human soul. In its most common expression, the closed society levels a familiar accusation: that the open society is immoral because it jeopardizes the very possibility of living a virtuous life."

firstthings.com

Leo Strauss and the Closed Society - First Things

In the spring of 1941, as Hitler was laying plans for his invasion of the Soviet Union, Leo Strauss gave a lecture at the New School for Social Research...

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

Waymo data from 95M miles finds an 80% reduction in injurious crashes and, esp. noteworthy, a 92% reduction in pedestrian injuries. There should be some real moral urgency behind the wide-spread implementation of self-driving cars (and I mean good systems like Waymo's, not Tesla's FSD).

Text from Waymo's safety report: "91% fewer serious injury or worse crashes. 79% fewer airbag deployment crashes. 80% fewer injury-causing crashes. 92% fewer pedestrian crashes with injuries. 78% fewer cyclist crashes with injuries. 89% fewer motorcycle crashes with injuries."

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 14/09/2025

It seems like people are increasingly using multiplication to indicate a magnitude of diminution: like “20 times smaller than” our “15 times less than”. Isn’t that what we have fractions for? “One twentieth the size” and “one fifteenth of” are so much cleaner.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

“As philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes, the current media environment is like a ‘dictatorship of emotion’ in its ability to torrentially stir up energy and then dissipate practically overnight.”

open.substack.com

The New Vertigo Years

At the start of the 20th century, the world felt anxious and unsettled much like today

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

Current AI models are pretty terrible at Baba Is You, making it an excellent benchmark for future models. (In all fairness, I'm also terrible at Baba Is You.) arxiv.org/pdf/2407.13729

arxiv.org

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

If you’ve been fascinated by the recent UAP videos / testimonies, you might also find this interesting, about the detection of glints of light from earth orbit prior to Sputnik.

overcomingbias.com

Pre-Sputnik Earth-Orbit Glints

IMHO, the strongest evidence so far that (some) UFOs are aliens just dropped.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

It's likely possible to slow aging through medications because evolution didn't optimize for longevity and the fitness landscape around it is relatively unexplored. Really enjoyed these insights from Jacob Kimmel on the Dwarkesh Podcast:

dwarkesh.com

Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel

Is the answer already in our genome?

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

“Technophobia has a body count.”

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

“Pessimism is now a shortcut to intellectual respectability, like using orchestral strings in a pop song or filming in black and white.”

on.ft.com

The audacity of mope

Why pessimism persists in an improving world

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 29/08/2025

My understanding is that authors own the copyright on the text (including post-review edits), but that journals own the copyright to the *formatted* text. Uploading a preprint style text (rather than a copy of the journal article itself) to PubMed Central is therefore just fine.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

The Cracker Barrel rebrand kerfuffle seems well suited for Baudrillard's perspective: "Cracker Barrel is not pointing to a remembered Americana; it directly generates the feeling of Americana through its simulation of old-timey-ness. [I]t was always already a corporate simulation of country life."

unpopularfront.news

The Cracker Barrel Hype(rreality)

Simulation and Simulacrum in America

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

Borges: “I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.”

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

I think we need to distinguish between AI psychosis of a worshipful type and AI psychosis of a despairing type. The former gets much more attention, but I think there are a lot of people entering actual and deep depressions over the fact that other people like to experiment with AI.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

Really internalizing the notion that outcomes are highly unpredictable and only very loosely related to intentions is a way to be both optimistic and rational

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

Marshall McLuhan: "Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment."

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Wiley definitely has the best article submission system. Far nicer to work with than the miserable Manuscript Central. Wiley even has animated confetti when you finalize your submission.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Arnold Toynbee (via @jposhaughnessy.bsky.social): “The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.”

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Is there a possible LLM chatbot that's so charming that it should be illegal? Sort of the interactive equivalent of "The Entertainment" from Infinite Jest.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 08/08/2025

The new trend on Tumblr is making fun of Bluesky

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 08/08/2025

"The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.” -Daniel Dennett

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

There needs to be a plant-based conveyor belt sushi restaurant.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

I've been reading "I Know Who You Are", about how the author used genetic genealogy to catch the Golden State Killer. What's stuck out to me is how the public reaction wasn't to celebrate this, but to fight law enforcement access to DNA sites. And I thought I couldn't be angrier at Luddites!

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is one of the things that made me fall in love with Los Angeles, and it’s recovering from a recent fire. If you’re able to donate to this monument to weirdness, now’s a great time! (Donation site linked in the story)

arstechnica.com

LA’s Museum of Jurassic Technology damaged by fire

The fire gutted the museum’s gift shop and caused significant smoke damage to several exhibits.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

Gemini 2.5 Pro does this really off-putting thing where it writes most of its initial responses as if they were news stories, including my location as if it were a dateline. Can’t we just talk like normal people? All the other LLMs can do it.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

H-index is an interesting metric, but i think it needs a couple improvements: 1) some kind of normalization for overall rate of scientific publication (higher rate = higher P(citation)) 2) some adjustment for proportion of papers with first or senior author status

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

People outside of academic research are SHOCKED by this. I am, sadly, not.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

“People often wonder why so many unthoughtful people end up in gov’t. The answer is easy: Politicians do not win elections to make policies; they make policies to win elections. What’s most persuasive to voters [is] whether it narrates a story that confirms what they see and believe.”

collabfund.com

Different Kinds of Smart

“The older I get the more I realize how many kinds of smart there are.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Received a review request that began, “Dear Data Scientist Hendrix.”

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

Patrick McKenzie: "I think some of the general reaction and the general understanding of things as ‘cringe’ is one of the ways the system protects itself - to describe as deviant the behavior of describing the system."

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

One way that I like to think about agency is as the realization that everything is customizable. Want to change how websites look? Build a plugin. Shirt fits weird? Tailor it. Article you want to read doesn’t exist? Write it.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Just got some bone conduction headphones, and they feel much more… transhuman than AirPods. Partly it’s because they’re so much comfier. Maybe my ear canals are especially delicate, but I max out at maybe an hour with AirPods Pro.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

On the indispensability of markets. “The program assigns points for each type of kill: 20 points for damaging and 40 for destroying a tank; and 6 points for killing an enemy soldier. A new online marketplace […] will allow troops to convert those points into new equipment.”

lesswrong.com

The Ukraine War and the Kill Market — LessWrong

Politico writes: • > The [Ukrainian] program […] rewards soldiers with points if they upload videos proving their drones have hit Russian targets. It…

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