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Seeds of Science

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Publishing independent research and curating the best science writing from across the blogosphere. Click to read Seeds of Science, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

ScienceEssays / personal

Posts
197 from 28 Sep 2022 to 28 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (47 in the last year)
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magazine
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2026 41

  1. The hard problem of AI therapy
  2. How to get 7th graders to smoke
  3. You'll forget most of what you learn. What should you do about that?
  4. Three Dumb Studies for your consideration
  5. How to make more prodigies
  6. Where Do the Children Play?
  7. Michael Levin made me believe in gods
  8. Are the Brooms Multiplying Yet?
  9. There is a path to meat without misery
  10. How to build a cancer vaccine, and whether they will work this time
  11. The Shape of a Thought
  12. AI and The Geometry of Thought
  13. I Am Going To Hit AI With A Hammer And See What Happens
  14. Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned
  15. Destroying the universe: How hard can it be?
  16. When Suffering Is Not Pathology
  17. How American Gray Wolves and Integrated Pest Management Explain a New Way To Treat Prostate Cancer
  18. The Many Foundational Issues of Lab-grown Meat
  19. Biases Don't Exist, and Humans Are Not Irrational
  20. What is Naturalistic Decision Making?
  21. Psychology Experiments Are Gardens, Not Digsites
  22. AI Allows More Diversity in the Forms of Social Science
  23. Experiments as Performance Art
  24. What Will Schizophrenia Become?
  25. Why Is Schizophrenia So Hard to Tackle?
  26. Reasons to be pessimistic (and optimistic) on the future of biosecurity
  27. Cultural Evolution Works in Not-So-Mysterious Yet Often Misunderstood Ways
  28. The Color of the Future
  29. Autoimmunity on the Brain: Part 1
  30. My journey to the microwave alternate timeline
  31. Physics as Optimal Compression: What If Laws Are Not Unique?
  32. There has to be a better way to make titanium
  33. Questions to ask when evaluating neurotech approaches
  34. Canada Lost Its Measles Elimination Status Because We Don't Have Enough Nurses Who Speak Low German
  35. A Brief History of Biohacking
  36. Update on our Subscription Revenue Sharing Program
  37. The key implication of Cosmological Natural Selection
  38. In cosmology, all our errors lean the same way. The implications are... interesting
  39. The Blowtorch Theory: A New Model for Structure Formation in the Universe
  40. Book Review: The Mind of a Bee
  41. Is terminal lucidity real?

2025 47

  1. A Future History of Biomedical Progress
  2. Spirits and the incompleteness of physics
  3. Equations that demand beauty
  4. Great scientists follow intuition and beauty, not rationality (the unreasonable effectiveness of aesthetics in science)
  5. Sweet Child O' Mine
  6. Hallucinated Gods
  7. Why aren't smart people happier?
  8. The radical idea that people aren't stupid
  9. Learned pain as a leading cause of chronic pain
  10. Neurons Gone Wild
  11. Accepting Deviant Minds
  12. Mr. Jaynes' Wild Ride
  13. Unreliable parts make a reliable whole
  14. Mouth Taping: The Plot Thickens
  15. The Cognitive Architecture of Religion
  16. Intrinsic Motivation: a deep dive
  17. The Consensus Construct: unifying quantum, social and scientific realities
  18. Coordination Problems: Why Smart People Can't Fix Anything
  19. The Great Disembedding
  20. The Evolutionary Theory of Cancer (podcast)
  21. The truth about happiness
  22. A primer on the current state of longevity research
  23. The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns
  24. Is Precognition Real?
  25. Will protein design tools solve the snake antivenom shortage?
  26. There aren't enough smart people in biology doing something boring
  27. Alchemy is ok
  28. Why Psychology Hasn’t Had a Big New Idea in Decades
  29. Can Bioelectrical Signals Reverse Aging? | Dr. Michael Levin
  30. Eau de Vagina & Eau de Homme
  31. Age and the Nature of Innovation
  32. Conservatism in Science
  33. Learning to Be: how learning strengthens the emergent nature of collective intelligence in a minimal agent
  34. How to Make SuperBabies
  35. 134 Orgasms in an Hour? Questioning the Methodology of the Orgasm World Records
  36. The Journal of Dangerous Ideas
  37. Epistemic Hell
  38. Music in Human Evolution
  39. A Natural History of Beauty
  40. Cold humans and warm machines (on the seductions of AI conversations)
  41. Your IQ isn't 160. No one's is.
  42. IQ discourse is increasingly unhinged
  43. An Innovation Agenda for Addiction
  44. Maybe it's just YOUR testosterone that's low
  45. Bucks for Science Blogs: Announcing the Subscription Revenue Sharing Program
  46. Genetically edited mosquitoes haven't scaled yet. Why?
  47. A brief analysis of the PlasticList report

2024 50

  1. Trauma Exposure across the News Cycle and the Case for Biotypes of PTSD in War Journalists
  2. What factors allow societies to survive a crisis?
  3. Mapping out collapse research: understanding the ways societies end
  4. Scientific Charlatans and Where to Find Them
  5. Prediction and control in natural and social systems
  6. The Eve Theory of Consciousness
  7. A Controlled Experiment Testing the Effect of Unconditional 100% Exam Scores on Long-Term Retention
  8. A New Therapeutic For Schizophrenia
  9. The invincible human moth
  10. Homo sapiens vampiris
  11. Fictional parasites very different from our own
  12. Life on the Grid (part 2)
  13. Life on the Grid (part 1)
  14. Psychofauna Studies: A Neo-Animist Manifesto
  15. GLP-1 for Addiction: the Medical Evidence for Opioid, Nicotine, and Alcohol Use Disorder
  16. A Paradigm for the 21st Century: Introducing A Unified Process Theory of Meaning
  17. The SoS Library
  18. A Revolution in Biology
  19. Age Before Beauty
  20. How the Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation
  21. The rise and fall of peer review
  22. The game theory of seduction and marriage... with Jane Austen
  23. The game theory of strategic ambiguity explained with Seinfeld
  24. Strategic Altruism: The Machiavellian Roots of Human Kindness
  25. Against the Burden of Knowledge
  26. What even is ADHD anyway? Opening the Pandora’s Box of Clinical Psychiatry
  27. A Paradigm for AI Consciousness
  28. Hawking was wrong: Philosophy is not dead, and it has kept up with modern science
  29. Stuff I Love Making Students Read
  30. Conservation of Ignorance: A New Law of Nature
  31. Why don't hummingbirds get diabetes? A glycolytic mystery
  32. Is longevity a choice? How about obesity?
  33. Exit the Supersensorium
  34. Personal Science Week - Genetics
  35. How a Citizen Scientist Will Win a Nobel Prize
  36. Making every researcher seek grants is a broken model
  37. Why Are Bacteria So Simple?
  38. Doing the Science Ourselves
  39. There is way too much serendipity
  40. Attitudes Toward Artificial General Intelligence: Results from American Adults in 2021 and 2023
  41. Let’s build a fleet and change the world
  42. Dopamine: Everything you need to know
  43. SciSpace: AI Powerhouse for Academic Research
  44. "Diamondoid bacteria" nanobots: deadly threat or dead-end? A nanotech investigation
  45. Amateur Hour: a thinking guide for independent researchers (and academics thinking independently)
  46. Announcing the SoS Research Collective
  47. Research Papers used to have style. What happened?
  48. Scientific Theories and Their Psychological Corollaries: The Ecological Crisis as a Case Study in the Need for Synthesis
  49. Geoengineering Now!
  50. Visualizing researchers’ scientific contributions with radar plot

2023 48

  1. The Economics of Time Travel
  2. We Rarely Lose Technology
  3. Crazy Science Idea: Tell People Something Is Possible When You Actually Have No Clue
  4. Does Gratitude Increase Happiness?
  5. Underrated Reasons to be Thankful
  6. From Clinic to Genome and Back Again: Cowden Syndrome and PTEN
  7. Cilia Disorders in the Genomics Era: Historical Overview and Commentary on Ciliopathy Diagnostics
  8. The Business of Extracting Knowledge from Academic Publications
  9. Taxonomies of Intelligence: A Comprehensive Guide to the Universe of Minds
  10. Science is a strong-link problem
  11. The talk: a brief explainer of sexual dimorphism
  12. All Placebos are not created equal
  13. Case Study: The Clinical Translation of MRI
  14. An invitation to a secret society (or: why you should be a lizard)
  15. Forager Facts
  16. The Last Questions (part 2)
  17. The Last Questions (part 1)
  18. A Catalog of Big Visions for Biology
  19. Science Links and Thoughts (August '23)
  20. What should science cost? Hacking the economics of scientific equipment
  21. Principles of Categorization: A Synthesis
  22. We See The Sacred From Afar, To See It The Same
  23. Why do most popular science books suck?
  24. The Alien ER and the Amyloid Hypothesis
  25. Time for a Change: How Scientific Publishing is Changing For The Better
  26. Perspective: Focused-Ultrasound Guided Neuropeptide Delivery as a Novel Therapeutic Approach in Psychiatry
  27. A Report on Scientific Branch-Creation: How the Rockefeller Foundation helped bootstrap the field of molecular biology
  28. Bombs, Brains, and Science
  29. The Need for Long-term Research
  30. How many people die from snakebites?
  31. Nurturing Non-Traditional Science (SoS Update)
  32. How we adapted to milk, and how we adapted it to us
  33. Underrated ideas in psychology
  34. Ideas aren’t getting harder to find and anyone who tells you otherwise is a coward and I will fight them
  35. Is a Qualitative Metric of Falsifiability Possible?
  36. How to Escape From the Simulation
  37. The Seeds of Science Manifesto
  38. PNAS is Not a Good Journal (and Other Hard Truths about Journal Prestige)
  39. The Muscle-Readers, a Historical Sketch
  40. In Defense of Basic Science
  41. On Not Reading Papers
  42. The Cult Deficit: Analysis and Speculation
  43. Why Proposal Review Should Be More Like Meteorology
  44. The Rise and Fall of the Dot-Probe Task: Opportunities for Metascientific Learning
  45. The Prospect of Extracting Brain-Region-Specific Exosomes in the Human Bloodstream
  46. Book Review: Making Nature
  47. Underrated Research Areas
  48. Will general antiviral protocols always be science fiction?

2022 11

  1. Energetic Aliens
  2. Notes on the Inexact Sciences
  3. The Mystery of the Miracle Year
  4. The Difference Between Science and the Humanities Is Reading the Classics
  5. Moral Weights of Animals, Considering Viewpoint Uncertainty
  6. Drug Addicts and Deceptively Aligned Agents - a Comparative Analysis
  7. Market Failures in Science
  8. Young Blood, Old Monsters and Rejuvenated Rodents
  9. Building a Brain: An Introduction to Narrative Complexity, a language & internal dialogue-based theory of human consciousness
  10. Randomness in Science
  11. What are the Red Flags for Neural Network Suffering?