The Venture Capitalist - whose personal name would be Ashre, if he was asking anybody in this social context already juggling complicated problems to remember him as anything except The Venture Capitalist - has done a lot of organizing and quietyelling and spent really a lot of money, for a plan that prediction markets currently give only a 20% chance of working.

He had his initial set of 20 custom proteins four hours ago, in fact.  And then his people killed a number of rats, testing the new protocol on them, and asked for 8 of the custom proteins and 7 of the off-the-shelf proteins to get replaced - this being when the patient's survival probability dropped from 30% to 20% - and now they've tried it on rats and a few precious monkeys.  The basic story seems to be that whether you get a flood of damaged-neuron cell signals (followed in fact by actual brain damage) depends on how much the monkey actually got damaged beforehand, and it's hard to tell in advance how much actual damage happened beforehand.  They have debugged every bug about this protocol that is scrutable on a few hours of work by very smart people, and which 'Exception Handling's mysterious protein-design capabilities' think they can possibly fix in hours rather than weeks.

It is obviously not the best possible protocol.  It is not even a very good protocol.  But the patient is not incredibly stable, right now, and doing another design-observation iteration on the protocol would add another 4 hours to timeline and probably not be worth it, all of which is playing out pretty much as the prediction markets expected.  The entire research timeline, at this point, looked like cooling and rewarming some rats while applying 80 proteins and peptides and a handful of lesser chemicals already known in the literature, the rats getting brain damage, writing back for 20 more proteins, getting those, new round of testing, asking to fix remaining errors if possible; there is an old saying in dath ilan that what you can't solve by killing two groups of rats you are unlikely to solve by killing three.  It's usually taken as a metaphor for correcting first-order errors and then correcting second-order errors, but it's also often literally true.

They've killed two rounds of rats and observed half of a third group die, already run out all their most promising nitwit ideas on the first two rounds, and now it's time to roll.

The Venture Capitalist - whose personal name would be Ashre, if he was asking anybody in this social context already juggling complicated problems to remember him as anything except The Venture Capitalist - has done a lot of organizing and quietyelling and spent really a lot of money, for a plan that prediction markets currently give only a 20% chance of working.

He got his initial set of 20 custom proteins hours ago.  And then his people killed a number of rats, testing the new protocol on them, and asked for 8 of the custom proteins and 7 more of the off-the-shelf proteins to get replaced - this being when the patient's survival probability dropped from 30% to 20% - and now they've tried it on rats and a few precious monkeys.  The basic story seems to be that whether you get a flood of damaged-neuron cell signals (followed in fact by actual brain damage) depends on how much the monkey got cold-damaged beforehand, and it's hard to tell in advance how much damage happened beforehand.  They have debugged every bug about this protocol that is scrutable on a few hours of work by very smart people, and which 'Exception Handling's mysterious protein-design capabilities' think they can possibly fix in hours rather than weeks.

It is obviously not the best possible protocol.  It is not even a very good protocol.  But the patient is not incredibly stable, right now, and doing another design-observation iteration on the protocol would add another 4 hours to timeline and probably not be worth it, all of which is playing out pretty much as the prediction markets expected.  The entire research timeline, at this point, looked like cooling and rewarming some rats while applying 80 proteins and peptides and a handful of lesser chemicals already known in the literature, the rats getting brain damage, writing back for 20 more proteins, getting those, new round of testing, asking to fix remaining errors if possible; there is an old saying in dath ilan that what you can't solve by killing two groups of rats you are unlikely to solve by killing three.  It's usually taken as a metaphor for correcting first-order errors and then correcting second-order errors, but it's also often literally true.

They've killed two rounds of rats and observed half of a third group die, already run out all their most promising nitwit ideas on the first two rounds, and now it's time to roll.

The Venture Capitalist - whose personal name would be Ashre, if he was asking anybody in this social context already juggling complicated problems to remember him as anything except The Venture Capitalist - has done a lot of organizing and quietyelling and spent really a lot of money, for a plan that prediction markets currently give only a 20% chance of working.

He got his initial set of 20 custom proteins hours ago.  And then his people killed a number of rats, testing the new protocol on them, and asked for 8 of the custom proteins and 7 more of the off-the-shelf proteins to get replaced - this being when the patient's survival probability dropped from 30% to 20% - and now they've tried it on rats and a few precious monkeys.  The basic story seems to be that whether you get a flood of damaged-neuron cell signals (followed in fact by actual brain damage) depends on how much the monkey got cold-damaged beforehand, and it's hard to tell in advance how much damage happened beforehand.  They have debugged every bug about this protocol that is scrutable on a few hours of work by very smart people, and which 'Exception Handling's mysterious protein-design capabilities' think they can possibly fix in hours rather than weeks.

It is obviously not the best possible protocol.  It is not even a very good protocol.  But the patient is not incredibly stable, right now, and doing another design-observation iteration on the protocol would add another 4 hours to timeline and probably not be worth it, all of which is playing out pretty much as the prediction markets expected.  The entire research timeline, at this point, looked like cooling and rewarming some rats while applying 80 proteins and peptides and a handful of lesser chemicals already known in the literature, the rats getting brain damage, writing back for 20 more proteins, getting those, new round of testing, asking to fix remaining errors if possible; there is an old saying in dath ilan that what you can't solve by killing two groups of rats you are unlikely to solve by killing three.  It's usually taken as a metaphor for correcting first-order errors and then correcting second-order errors, but it's also often literally true.

They've killed two rounds of rats and observed half of a third group die, already run out all their most promising nitwit-ideas and improved-nitwit-ideas on the first two rounds, and now it's time to roll.

The Venture Capitalist - whose personal name would be Ashre, if he was asking anybody in this social context already juggling complicated problems to remember him as anything except The Venture Capitalist - has done a lot of organizing and quietyelling and spent really a lot of money, for a plan that prediction markets currently give only a 20% chance of working.

He got his initial set of 20 custom proteins hours ago.  And then his people sacrificed a number of rats, testing the new protocol on them and checking results in lethal detail.  After which they asked for 8 of the custom proteins and 7 more of the off-the-shelf proteins to get replaced - this being when the patient's survival probability dropped from 30% to 20% - and now they've tried the second round on rats and a few precious monkeys.

The basic story seems to be that whether you get a flood of damaged-neuron cell signals (followed in fact by actual brain damage) depends on how much the monkey got cold-damaged beforehand, and it's hard to tell in advance how much damage happened beforehand.  They have debugged every bug about this protocol that is scrutable on a few hours of work by very smart people, and which Exception Handling's mysterious protein-design capabilities think they can possibly fix in hours rather than weeks.

It is obviously not the best possible protocol.  It is not even a very good protocol.  But the patient is not incredibly stable, right now, and doing another design-observation iteration on the protocol would add another 4 hours to timeline and probably not be worth it, all of which is playing out pretty much as the prediction markets expected.  The entire research timeline, at this point, looked like cooling and rewarming some rats while applying 80 proteins and peptides and a handful of lesser chemicals already known in the literature, the rats getting brain damage, writing back for 20 more proteins, getting those, new round of testing, asking to fix remaining errors if possible; there is an old saying in dath ilan that what you can't solve by killing two groups of rats you are unlikely to solve by killing three.  It's usually taken as a metaphor for correcting first-order errors and then correcting second-order errors, but it's also often literally true.

They've killed two rounds of rats and observed half of a third group end up with unacceptable levels of brain damage, they've already run out all their most promising nitwit-ideas and improved-nitwit-ideas on the first two rounds, it's time to roll.