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All of Andrew Clough's Comments + Replies

"Diamondoid bacteria" nanobots: deadly threat or dead-end? A nanotech investigation
Andrew Clough7mo1
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I think it's wrong to think of using a construction obeying the normal English rules of word construction as creating a new term.  If I said that a person was "unwelcomable" that wouldn't really be inventing a new term despite the fact that it doesn't appear in a dictionary.  It's still a normal English word because it's a normal English construction.  

Yes, diamondoid as referring to the adamantane family might go back to the 1960s but in practice how many people understand it that way, 100,000?  In theory everyone who has taken high sc... (read more)

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"Diamondoid bacteria" nanobots: deadly threat or dead-end? A nanotech investigation
Andrew Clough7mo3
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Thanks for the write up and I think I learned a lot of stuff.  But at the same time I think you're getting a bit hung up on the particular word "diamondoid".  It's normal in language for words to have different meanings in a base-level language versus in particular specialized jargons.  For instance "speed" and "velocity" are synonyms in normal English but in physics jargon they're distinct.  As Kuhn famously noted whether a lone helium atom counts as a "molecule" or not depends on whether one is speaking chemistry jargon or physics jar... (read more)

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7mo
I think you've entirely missed my actual complaint here. There would have been nothing wrong with inventing a new term and using it to describe a wide class of structures. The problem is that the term already existed, and already had an accepted scientific definition since the 1960's (adamantane family materials). If a term already has an accepted jargon definition in a scientific field, using the same term to mean something else is just sloppy and confusing. 
Kelsey Piper's recent interview of SBF
Andrew Clough1y3
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I think this is an area where induction is important?  If my previous interactions with someone are friendly conversation, it makes sense to interpret a request that they ask me questions as an invitation to more friendly conversation.  If they've previously interviewed me professionally and haven't had friendly conversations with me, it make sense to interpret that as an interview.

As to SBF's tweet, I think we should bear in mind that he sometimes lies.

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Overreacting to current events can be very costly
Andrew Clough2y7
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Also,  even if the secret information that decision makers have isn't decisive there will still be a tendency for people with secret information to discount the opinions of people without access to that information.

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Comments for shorter Cold Takes pieces
Andrew Clough2y1
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I'm curious about when the FDA's expedited flu vaccine approval came to be.  It seems plausible to me that this is something grandfathered in from the early days and that the modern FDA wouldn't be flexible enough to start something like it.

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