Fernand Khnopff, I Lock My Door Upon Myself, 1891. Neue Pinakothek, Munich.
One of my favorite classes was a philosophy of science seminar on forms of explanation, where we were asked: what is the relationship between explanation, prediction, and understanding? The standard view being that understanding comes first, you learn the mechanism, and then you can explain it and predict what it will do. Working through the class, I came to think that this view is incomplete.
AlphaFold predicts the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence. At the 2020 CASP14 competition, it achieved accuracy comparable to experimental determination, effectively resolving a problem that had been open for fifty years. But AlphaFold has no theory of how proteins fold that is legible to us. It learned patterns from millions of known structures in the Protein Data Bank, predicting new structures with extraordinary precision without being able to explain to us why a given sequence folds the way it does.…
Emerson Hancock was a first-round pick by the Mariners in 2020 who, until about a month ago, hadn't looked like an impactful pitcher:
SEIDLER: Look, Emerson Hancock has broken out — it already happened. We can already pretty confidently call that based on his pitch data. I've been considering writing about Hancock this week because this is a really fascinating player development story. This is a guy who looked terrible for five years after getting drafted, then all of a sudden there's a mechanical change and everything's just fine. He's back to basically the prospect he was when he was drafted.
PATERNOSTRO: The Mariners are top ten — you could probably argue top five — pitching development team in baseball. They had this guy for five years and didn't figure it out until they did.
— For All You Kids Out There, Episode 573
Clark argues that "what we are dealing with is a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine." The word that caught me was creature. In context, the word carries weight in three directions: you lose if you underestimate what you have built; moral consideration may be warranted; and something genuinely new exists.…
I have done a poor job of curating the Sudan community page on Metaculus. I was pulled back into humanitarian policy work. But here is something I have been thinking about since October.
Sudan's Emergency Response Rooms were front-runners for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. They led Polymarket at 33% through October 9, topped the PRIO Director's shortlist, and won both "alternative Nobels": the Rafto Prize and the Right Livelihood Award. They lost to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado.…
"If you have a director of football, I still think the director has to defer to the manager/head coach. In the end, it's quite simple, right? You live or die by your results. And how do you get results? Through the players."— Jamie Jackson, on the Amorim firing and United dysfunction
"It's a good system. It can be adversarial, but it creates accountability. Whether a team are playing well or not, it puts those who are truly responsible for the side's construction under the spotlight. They are the people best equipped to answer most transfer-related questions."— Sebastian Stafford-Bloor, on German sporting directors in the mixed zone
There was an era when running player personnel was not a full-time job. A manager could lead both coaching and recruitment because neither demanded what they demand today. That era is over.
The player market has become bigger and more efficient. The best players find their way to top clubs at a higher clip, from more origins, than ever before. Missing on a player costs more than it used to. Hitting on one is a bigger reward. Personnel now requires full-time, specialized attention…
Sudan faces five concurrent disease epidemics, with cholera spreading fastest. The combination of displacement, armed conflict, flooding, and collapsed infrastructure has created strong conditions for transmission.…
For the past few months, I've been neglecting the Sudan community page on Metaculus. I think it's important that I be a more active curator and push the user base's talent towards the most important dimensions of the war: hunger, displacement, and the peace process.
This platform could be a strong complement to the uptick in interest because information gaps (like the lack of data on food security and nutrition outcomes) and disagreement about the scale of need is the sort of uncertainty forecasters can help cut through.…
