Astral Codex Ten

Stripe

4 min read

Stripe

Article

Stripe is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between December 28, 2022 and October 24, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Patrick McKenzie of Stripe”; “Patrick McKenzie of Stripe and a few of his friends founded a group”; “talented engineers are treated as second-class citizens in research labs, so they work for Stripe”. It most often appears alongside AI, AI Alignment, California.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: December 28, 2022
  • Last seen: October 24, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links For December 2022
December 28, 2022 · Original source
In 1983, Hewitt D. Crane and Thomas P. Piantanida performed tests using an eye-tracker device that had a field of a vertical red stripe adjacent to a vertical green stripe, or several narrow alternating red and green stripes (or in some cases, yellow and blue instead). The device could track involuntary movements of one eye (there was a patch over the other eye) and adjust mirrors so the image would follow the eye and the boundaries of the stripes were always on the same places on the eye's retina; the field outside the stripes was blanked with occluders. Under such conditions, the edges between the stripes seemed to disappear (perhaps due to edge-detecting neurons becoming fatigued) and the colors flowed into each other in the brain's visual cortex, overriding the opponency mechanisms and producing not the color expected from mixing paints or from mixing lights on a screen, but new colors entirely, which are not in the CIE 1931 color space, either in its real part or in its imaginary parts. For red-and-green, some saw an even field of the new color; some saw a regular pattern of just-visible green dots and red dots; some saw islands of one color on a background of the other color. Some of the volunteers for the experiment reported that afterward, they could still imagine the new colors for a period of time.
53: From Works In Progress: The Story Of VaccinateCA, by Patrick McKenzie (@patio11). The very beginning of rolling out COVID vaccines in California was plagued by political and logistical nightmares. Patrick McKenzie of Stripe and a few of his friends founded a group to try to break the logjam, and ended up saving thousands of lives. Highly highly recommended, both as a story about heroic altruism and as a look into how the political sausage gets made (or doesn’t). Don’t worry, there are juicy culture war parts.
Inline links: The Story Of VaccinateCA
Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading
July 21, 2023 · Original source
Third, a technical staff that was held in just as high of an esteem as the PhDs who managed them. This seems to be why there is little innovation in government: talented engineers are treated as second-class citizens in research labs, so they work for Stripe and OpenAI instead. Similarly, one can attribute the lack of innovation in hospitals to doctors holding all of the institutional power. Often, all a hospital needs to save lives is simple practices that other businesses figured out long ago, but the hubris of MDs prevents this from happening. But I digress.
Inline links: simple practices that other businesses figured out long ago
Notes From The Progress Studies Conference
October 24, 2024 · Original source
Tyler Cowen is an economics professor and blogger at Marginal Revolution. Patrick Collison is the billionaire founder of the online payments company Stripe. In 2019, they wrote an article calling for a discipline of Progress Studies, which would figure out what progress was and how to increase it. Later that year, tech entrepreneur Jason Crawford stepped up to spearhead the effort.
Inline links: Marginal Revolution, wrote an article