Astral Codex Ten

Bhattacharya

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Bhattacharya

Article

Bhattacharya is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 13, 2022 and February 07, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “This is not really what Bhattacharya is here for”; “According to Bhattacharya”; “Bhattacharya expands on that “lights of civilization” phrase”. It most often appears alongside 1890s, 1DaySooner, ACX.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: July 13, 2022
  • Last seen: February 07, 2025

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.

Book Review: The Man From The Future
July 13, 2022 · Original source
The Man From The Future, by Ananyo Bhattacharya, touches on all these things. But you don’t read a von Neumann biography to learn more about the invention of ergodic theory. You read it to gawk at an extreme human specimen, maybe the smartest man who ever lived.
Inline links: The Man From The Future
This is not really what Bhattacharya is here for. He does not entirely resist gawking. But he is at least as interested in giving us a tour of early 20th century mathematics, framed by the life of its most brilliant practitioner. The book devotes more pages to set theory than to von Neumann’s childhood, and spends more time on von Neumann’s formalization of quantum mechanics than on his first marriage (to be fair, so did von Neumann - hence the divorce).
Bhattacharya quotes von Neumann’s own explanation:
1DaySooner's Trump II Health Policy Proposals
February 07, 2025 · Original source
Regulatory Capacity For Emergencies/Pandemics: In 2020, Makary criticized the FDA’s slow response to COVID. This time, we could try to be ahead of the game by building the FDA’s capacity and expertise in advance. During peacetime, this team could work on a universal flu vaccine and a pandemic equivalent of the START pilot pioneered by FDA biologics director Peter Marks. Jay Bhattacharya: NIH Director Bhattacharya is a rare doctor and medical professor who also has a PhD in economics. His contrarian COVID positions provoked censorship and harassment from Big Tech and the academic establishment; the experience seems to have low-key traumatized him, and his preliminary policy proposals, listed here, focus on using the NIH's grant-giving power to shake up the orthodoxy that wanted him silenced. Here are some other policies we hope he’ll look into:
Inline links: try to be ahead of the game, universal flu vaccine, START, listed here
Bhattacharya is a rare doctor and medical professor who also has a PhD in economics. His contrarian COVID positions provoked censorship and harassment from Big Tech and the academic establishment; the experience seems to have low-key traumatized him, and his preliminary policy proposals, listed here, focus on using the NIH's grant-giving power to shake up the orthodoxy that wanted him silenced. Here are some other policies we hope he’ll look into:
Inline links: listed here
Increase funding for novel research: Bhattacharya co-authored a paper finding that projects which explore new ideas get less government funding than those confirming existing paradigms. The NIH has already been trying to change this with their High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, including the Transformative Research Award, Pioneer Award, New Innovator Award, and Early Independence Award. These remove many of the barriers to typical R01 grant review – preliminary data, budget approvals, and demonstrations of feasibility – and should be expanded.
Inline links: co-authored a paper, High-Risk, High-Reward Research