San Francisco, CA
Joined October 2015
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Yan Liu retweeted
Currently on a train with a group of writers and thinking about how this all started as a random 'what ifâŠ' tweet 3 months ago
This is my favourite part about Twitter. There was plenty of work involved, but also a sense of natural unfolding. You riff with reality, and sometimes reality riffs back
seeing the response from writers in my DMs and replies, iâm increasingly convinced someone should bring this back, even if it isnât amtrak. imagine a grant program that sends writers, technologists, and founders across the US by train, with one requirement to pay attention, talk to people, and publish what you learn
it feels like an unusually good fit for an AI lab or foundation with some capital to splash. one of the most common critiques of SF tech discourse is that it has little sense of what is happening beyond its own bubble. so fund people to leave it
iâd love to read dispatches on how people outside coastal cities are thinking about AI, work, community, and the future, and how technology is actually diffusing beyond SF and NYC. there is a real narrative gulf between the people building these systems and the people encountering them. trains seem like an especially good technology for producing this kind of writing, slow enough to notice things
so, which cool institution or newly rich creative technologist is going to fund it?
Yan Liu retweeted
Calling âYou Can See Everythingâ not a documentary turned out to be a hotter take than I realized. Beyond my original @statnews piece. Hereâs further explanation, on LinkedIn for no character limit
linkedin.com/pulse/great-filâŠ
@matthewherper @rickberke
Yan Liu retweeted
Wow
So @TylerShultz_ as a Theranos whistleblower. And he wrote the piece you need to read about âYou Can See Everything.â
Elizabeth Holmes is still lying, he says. And the filmmakers, while creating a great piece of art, fall short on looking outside the walls of her apartment to document that.
One key detail: "My wife had to squeeze my arm to prevent me from jumping out of my seat in the theater and screaming, THAT IS NOT THE DEVICE."
Again, that device Holmes showed? It's not the one we're talking about!!!!
Having seen the film, I basically agree with Tyler's take.
statnews.com/2026/10/19/elizâŠ
Yan Liu retweeted
Hats off to @WIRED for this candid journalistic self-examination. The last two paragraphs are a gut punch. RIP Joe Rago, whom I interviewed during the reporting and writing of Bad Blood. apple.news/AwgktUs6RRP2bV0NjâŠ
Yan Liu retweeted
She absolutely knew, deliberately started scrambling the eggs with the intention of him eventually taking over and demonstrating that she really doesnât have /control/ over anything, thus communicating to the audience that she couldnât possibly be guilty of what she is accused of because sheâs really just being controlled by whatever man is in her life. She hints at this with regards to her relationship with Sunny, and by extension her culpability in Theranos. Every aspect of their involvement in the doc was intentional. She *pretends* not to understand whoâs on first. She *pretends* that she really doesnât think sheâs ever told a lie, even though that itself is a terribly lie. Everything is meant to communicate that she is just a hapless autist with good intentions who stumbled into this debacle, but is ultimately undeserving of incarceration. This is all very obvious if you have ever encountered someone who you know believes they can manipulate you.
Yan Liu retweeted
I actually enjoyed âYou can see everythingâ but people need to understand that this is not a documentary. And the device Elizabeth showed Nathan WAS NOT THE DEVICE
Yan Liu retweeted
Amid the cinephiles' lofty debates about truth and art, it's worth listening to @TylerShultz_'s take on the film and on Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Holmes is âalmost unrecognizableâ in Nathan Fielderâs documentary, âYou Can See Everything,â to Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz: âThe woman that I saw on screen looked, frankly, like a broken woman.â
Shultz tells @gayleking and @norahodonnell about his reaction to the film, speaking out about Theranos in 2015 and why the documentary is garnering sympathy for Holmes, who is serving a more than 11-year prison sentence for defrauding investors: âShe is not playing victim. She is an actual victim.â
Yan Liu retweeted
A few readers have taken me to task for âmissing the point of the film,â which is apparently that Elizabeth Holmes is unknowable and everything is ambiguous. Hereâs my response: She went after Tyler Shultz and Erika Cheung with everything she had. I was threatened with litigation on a daily basis for months on end. It was a ruthless cover-up of a breathtaking fraud, and she was at the controls. Just a little context for those who have forgotten or didnât follow the original story. By the way, I loved the film. #BestPicture, IMO.
A ton of people have asked me for my thoughts about âYou Can See Everything,â the new Elizabeth Holmes documentary. Here they are: nytimes.com/2026/10/17/busin⊠via @NYTimes
Yan Liu retweeted
Do you live in the San Francisco Bay Area? Are you planning a psychedelic experience? Willing to have an MRI before and a few weeks after? Maybe you're eligible for our study here: carhartharrislab.com/studiesâŠ
đ€ Made with AI
Yan Liu retweeted
A lot of people in AI world come from a Bayesian intellectual tradition. As a result they tend to be very good model-based thinkers. Yet I often find that while they hedge and use probabilities, they rarely question their own modelling in the first place.
This great paper shows that Bayesian updating can only move belief around within the hypotheses you start with - so no amount of hedging will actually tell you you're wrong about the initial assumptions/world model. arxiv.org/abs/1006.3868
Yan Liu retweeted
There is a special cruelty in a generation that pulled up the ladder they told the young to climb. Then kicked aside.
Empires fall when an old generation mistakes its comfort for the nation's stability. Then gives lectures while the youth struggle to find work.
Yan Liu retweeted
The most important 21st century dynamic you need to understand:
Many people and leaders are stuck mentally in the 90s and 00s. They do not understand the current world's dynamics. They do not want to.
That is major political and biz opportunity if you get it.
Yan Liu retweeted
Absolutely agree with this.
One of the great modern tragedies is the switching cost associated with normal life routines has become insanely high.
Wanna quit your job and travel? Good luck, when you come back you'll be searching 6-12 months for a job and might never find one. Then when you look for a rental you'll have the same problem and it'll be 30% more expensive than when you left.
We've made normal living prohibitively expensive for all but the richest people in society, and turned everyone else into a slave.
Yan Liu retweeted
yet you will die. and all your miseries and tragedies and severe catastrophes will die with you. why are you so morbidly serious? youâre in time and time is the ultimate grim reaper. âall, changeâ should be the slogan by which you live. every second you get off a train. every other second, a new journey. why not start appreciating the now? why do you keep misplacing the rights of the now? when will you kill the âwhat ifâs and âmaybe one dayâs? why wait? postponing should be your arch-nemesis. give today what it is owed⊠a huge dose of joy.
Yan Liu retweeted
i was having dinner with someone recently who asked why i spend so much time reading & posting on x. she had a pretty negative perception of the platform mostly shaped by the mainstream narrative around it.
my answer was simple. x is where the future gets beta tested.
you basically get to watch ppl build things, talk through ideas, show off stuff, & argue about where everything is going, way way before it reaches anyone else.
there really isnât another surface on the internet quite like it.
Yan Liu retweeted
some statements describe reality, while others recruit reality into becoming true
beyond any mystical frame of âwords are spellsâ, memes actually can and do change the world. vibes-based claims can become a coordination point
which makes me think we should be careful with the worlds we diagnose into existence. every time we confidently declare âeveryone is lonely nowâ, âdating is doomedâ, ânobody believes in anything anymoreâ, we may be doing more than observing
sometimes naming a world is one way of beckoning it closer. in other words, perhaps we ought to be careful what we wish for, but also what we speak into the world
