This reminds me: I remember many years ago hosting a party wherein one of the attendees was skiing and spent the entire time trying to convince everybody at the party that he should be given the opportunity to fight Obama in the Octagon for the position of president. If only you were there, maybe a whole movement would have started that evening.
Unfortunately mad scientist doesn't define academia so much these days, and research funding bodies are typically tied to technocratic agenda. Kevin Carson has some literature on the revolutionary potential of micromanufacturing and homebrew DIY industrial innovation that I'm starting to read as a more promising model of the right sort of approach to push genuinely transformative technological development.
There might be some technological advances that can be made with small teams of dedicated researchers. However, in the field of AI and biotech, I think the complexity involved necessitates an incredible amount of funding to get anywhere.
For biotech, I will write an article about this work more in the future, but from other research I am working on: some of the greatest underutilization in natural resources is the vast quantities of underexplored medicinal and nutraceutical flora in East Africa. Going through the process of isolating chemicals and developing pharmaceuticals takes years and will never cover every potential plant even if you threw loads of money at pharma, yet hundreds of millions of people otherwise too poor to use pharma use the plants to heal many conditions as well as improve performance, etc..
However, as far as human genetics, which I understand to be more your interest with biotech, I cannot comment on this with authority.
As far as I understand your argument, it is that AI is getting more bloated, not more efficient, and this is not producing real gains. I'm sympathetic to this direct argument, but not to the indirect implications. Even if AI isn't innovative in itself, the second-order effects of AI bloat is innovation in other fields.
AI, to me, is like a dictionary or an index. It's not innovative, but it is a time-saving device for other fields.
I'm almost completely disinterested in life-extension and every medical technology except to the extent that these pursuits accidentally lead to genetic research.
Human genetics requires an incredible amount of funding. It's essentially a cryptographic field where we don't have a full reading of the text. The hard part is actually assembling that text for analysis. We need more data, and better quality data, and more structure. So more people need to have their DNA sequenced, and those sequences need to be publicly accessible by researchers, and that research needs to be cross referenced, and it needs to be linked with biological statistics.
Ideally, we would be conducting extremely thorough and fine brain scans of millions of people, logging that data, and cross referencing it with genetic data. We need to map the brain and then see how that map corresponds with our genetic text. Not something you can do in your basement with some friends -- you need to pay people to go into expensive machines many times over.
In the ideal world, perhaps. But in practice in the world right now, the marginal gain in economic productivity from innovation relative to national research dollars has declined precipitously but sharply to being disturbingly near zero.
While I agree that research is a public good, governments are often awful at running things. Rather than going the standard already-well-tried bureacratic route, why not just establish a fund, financed by donations, company participants and, ideally, government, that establishes and maintains this database. People would be paid to provide their data to the fund, and a market can open for institutions to perform the sequencing as well as for companies manufacturing the equipment. This will bring the costs down. The fund also gives contracts to data engineers, bioinformaticians and biostatisticians to issue reports and assist researchers.
A strong incentive needs to be there for establishing a solid genetic database to realize your objectives, yes, but it can take many forms.
I'm not opposed to corporations and private donors helping the effort or setting up parallel institutions. I'm just opposed to those who want to sink government funding. Government funding isn't impeding anything you're talking about. The opportunity cost of requiring efficient investment is high. Better to have low efficiency than low investment.
You can expect soon that a big or hot AI company player will announce they have an idea for a workaround to the SAI + bio engineering => annihilation of humanity problem and they'll need ten billion of additional VC funding to save humanity.
This philosophy is only fit for small high agency city states or companies, not large nations. The problem with a high risk society is that it is highly risky by definition, mess up and you destroy what the risk takers before you built. The soviet union (at least initially) and 3rd Reich were both high risk societies on a scale that makes modern risk enthusiasts look like larpers and it devastated them both. What's the point of making wins today if some cowboy will lose them tomorrow at the altar of "moar risk📈"
Wasn’t Steve Hsu doing real genetical research and got forced to resign by the wokies? Though I think he bounced back in caltech and works in private companies doing genetical stuff too
There is no sector of our society where open political racism is more tolerated than in the field of genetics. I don't know the details of Steve's case but I would assume he got political. I would expect the military to also fire people who get political when their job is to shut up and work. But apparently it hasn't hurt him very much. Lots of performative stuff with very little impact on science.
He also gripes about how we've abstained for decades from collecting or declassifying what amounts to reams of useful genetic data on IQ which could make his embryo selection scheme a lot more powerful, explicitly over fears of the racial dimension of this data.
My point is that Republicans wouldn't do a damn about this with some kind of super-super-duper majority. You're identifying a problem, but not one that Republicans are willing or able to solve. The genetic data that we have thus far is a result of funding, which Republicans are more likely to pull than Democrats.
His main accusation was basically IQ posting on some blog, discussions on podcasts and not wishing to see SAT test deleted.
His second greatest sin according to the list is eugenism: « Hsu has been an outspoken advocate for eugenics, including his eugenic own startup business
Hsu advocates for embryo selection specifically to remove embryos with the possibility of developing an illness/disease/disability » and improving intelligence. That should be extremely bad from the wokes according to your principles.
To be fair, it happened in 2020 which was a peak woke moment. He wouldn’t get canceled again until the next peak woke moment.
We should euthanize all Social Security recipients at the age of 75 if they continue to withdraw from their accounts. As long as you don’t use SS you can live. Also we should probably allow upper-middle class people to use low human-capital working class people as indentured laborers for a set time period, the end of which they can move to Puerto Rico with a pension of 2000 Mexican pesos per month, but once they hit 75 and refuse to stop taking social security and their pension, they get euthanized like everyone else.
Do you consider Thiel and Silicon Valley Bros as part of the Technocracy that Yarvin advocates for, or are they a little bit more closer to your ideological ideal? Are there any high profile figure that fits your liking?
So I agree rule by scientists isn't really all that good an idea. And the old tradition of wanting military service for leaders may have something to recommend it. I get that the whole system of selecting 'excellent sheep' (to take the title of a new book) has real problems in terms of leadership. And I agree the current administration's populism is more show than reality.
However:
"The worst form of government is hysterical and neurotic. A government which bows down before pensioners and corporate parasites, too afraid to stand up against special interests. Specialists are ill-equipped for this task, because it is not one of knowledge, but of character."
I disagree.
The worst forms of government, given recent history, are communist or fascist dictatorships that aren't afraid to boldly innovate and pursue their vision, whether it be Real Socialism or an empire that they don't have the troops to hold, and result in tens of millions of deaths of their own citizens. Mao did a lot more damage to China than our last pack of wimpy neoliberals did to the USA. The current NIH cuts are doing more damage to science than DEI did (not that I am a fan of DEI).
What you really want is more masculinity. But guys like Eisenhower weren't cowboys, really; they were disciplined military officers who worked their way up through the ranks. The peacetime military has many of the problems you claim as well, since politics become a huge part of the promotion process. Of course, that then means we have to start wars to get effective leaders, which seems like more trouble than it's worth nowadays, as it's expensive and sooner or later one could go nuclear.
an important political axis is how much you like or dislike violent mobs. sensible people are moderately against them, whereas Yarvin's worldview represents the maximal extreme of opposition to them.
I love the EOCU idea. Also tack on free speech as a mandate for it. Perhaps make it a branch of the military which would require physical fitness, but make it open to disabled members who have exemptions from the physical tests they can't do. Then dump money into it for superhuman purposes!
The idea that MAGA is preventing anything of the sort is hilarious. You chugged too much Cofnas crack. Science will move faster not slower minus the DEI and woke junk it was being spent on and the tech bros becoming the donor class
I find it ironic you speak against technocracy when your ultimate end goal of genetically engineered supermen taking over would require technocracy, quite an oppressive one to make it work. I know you've talked about "voluntary eugenics" but the only way to reign in the envy of the populous would either be oppression or class genocide.
Wow, a neoliberal with testosterone. What up? Awesome stuff. Just no need to drag the UKR war out longer, allowing still more efficient drone killing machines to be developed (which AI will no doubt later turn on us), simply to control the EU. Better tariff TF out of them, switch off their energy and offer minimal life support when they start to turn blue.
Couple of years, countries be queuing up to get out the EU. Only someone with the brain capacity of a lobotomised slug would have got into a war with Putin in the manner they did. Stone cold guaranteed loser from day one. You can't replace strategic intelligence with ideology and if you try, you lose everything and have to expect that.
Lol, unhinged but funny take as usual. Never change, DLA, never change.
This reminds me: I remember many years ago hosting a party wherein one of the attendees was skiing and spent the entire time trying to convince everybody at the party that he should be given the opportunity to fight Obama in the Octagon for the position of president. If only you were there, maybe a whole movement would have started that evening.
Unfortunately mad scientist doesn't define academia so much these days, and research funding bodies are typically tied to technocratic agenda. Kevin Carson has some literature on the revolutionary potential of micromanufacturing and homebrew DIY industrial innovation that I'm starting to read as a more promising model of the right sort of approach to push genuinely transformative technological development.
There might be some technological advances that can be made with small teams of dedicated researchers. However, in the field of AI and biotech, I think the complexity involved necessitates an incredible amount of funding to get anywhere.
As a professional researcher in AI, I respectfully disagree that economies of scale are needed for AI innovation:
https://philomaticalgorhythms.substack.com/p/stargate-is-a-colossal-waste-of-money
For biotech, I will write an article about this work more in the future, but from other research I am working on: some of the greatest underutilization in natural resources is the vast quantities of underexplored medicinal and nutraceutical flora in East Africa. Going through the process of isolating chemicals and developing pharmaceuticals takes years and will never cover every potential plant even if you threw loads of money at pharma, yet hundreds of millions of people otherwise too poor to use pharma use the plants to heal many conditions as well as improve performance, etc..
However, as far as human genetics, which I understand to be more your interest with biotech, I cannot comment on this with authority.
As far as I understand your argument, it is that AI is getting more bloated, not more efficient, and this is not producing real gains. I'm sympathetic to this direct argument, but not to the indirect implications. Even if AI isn't innovative in itself, the second-order effects of AI bloat is innovation in other fields.
AI, to me, is like a dictionary or an index. It's not innovative, but it is a time-saving device for other fields.
I'm almost completely disinterested in life-extension and every medical technology except to the extent that these pursuits accidentally lead to genetic research.
Human genetics requires an incredible amount of funding. It's essentially a cryptographic field where we don't have a full reading of the text. The hard part is actually assembling that text for analysis. We need more data, and better quality data, and more structure. So more people need to have their DNA sequenced, and those sequences need to be publicly accessible by researchers, and that research needs to be cross referenced, and it needs to be linked with biological statistics.
Ideally, we would be conducting extremely thorough and fine brain scans of millions of people, logging that data, and cross referencing it with genetic data. We need to map the brain and then see how that map corresponds with our genetic text. Not something you can do in your basement with some friends -- you need to pay people to go into expensive machines many times over.
In the ideal world, perhaps. But in practice in the world right now, the marginal gain in economic productivity from innovation relative to national research dollars has declined precipitously but sharply to being disturbingly near zero.
While I agree that research is a public good, governments are often awful at running things. Rather than going the standard already-well-tried bureacratic route, why not just establish a fund, financed by donations, company participants and, ideally, government, that establishes and maintains this database. People would be paid to provide their data to the fund, and a market can open for institutions to perform the sequencing as well as for companies manufacturing the equipment. This will bring the costs down. The fund also gives contracts to data engineers, bioinformaticians and biostatisticians to issue reports and assist researchers.
A strong incentive needs to be there for establishing a solid genetic database to realize your objectives, yes, but it can take many forms.
I'm not opposed to corporations and private donors helping the effort or setting up parallel institutions. I'm just opposed to those who want to sink government funding. Government funding isn't impeding anything you're talking about. The opportunity cost of requiring efficient investment is high. Better to have low efficiency than low investment.
I vote anthropic
Just heard George Church on the Dworkesh pod. He seems to be of the opinion that SAI + bio engineering = pDoom.
Oh, that's a standard component of the memetic cycle of AI Alignment
https://philomaticalgorhythms.substack.com/p/ai-alignment-from-first-principles
You can expect soon that a big or hot AI company player will announce they have an idea for a workaround to the SAI + bio engineering => annihilation of humanity problem and they'll need ten billion of additional VC funding to save humanity.
This philosophy is only fit for small high agency city states or companies, not large nations. The problem with a high risk society is that it is highly risky by definition, mess up and you destroy what the risk takers before you built. The soviet union (at least initially) and 3rd Reich were both high risk societies on a scale that makes modern risk enthusiasts look like larpers and it devastated them both. What's the point of making wins today if some cowboy will lose them tomorrow at the altar of "moar risk📈"
Wasn’t Steve Hsu doing real genetical research and got forced to resign by the wokies? Though I think he bounced back in caltech and works in private companies doing genetical stuff too
There is no sector of our society where open political racism is more tolerated than in the field of genetics. I don't know the details of Steve's case but I would assume he got political. I would expect the military to also fire people who get political when their job is to shut up and work. But apparently it hasn't hurt him very much. Lots of performative stuff with very little impact on science.
He also gripes about how we've abstained for decades from collecting or declassifying what amounts to reams of useful genetic data on IQ which could make his embryo selection scheme a lot more powerful, explicitly over fears of the racial dimension of this data.
My point is that Republicans wouldn't do a damn about this with some kind of super-super-duper majority. You're identifying a problem, but not one that Republicans are willing or able to solve. The genetic data that we have thus far is a result of funding, which Republicans are more likely to pull than Democrats.
Here you have a list of accusations of faults of Steve by the wokes themselves here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1270829003130261504.html#google_vignette
His main accusation was basically IQ posting on some blog, discussions on podcasts and not wishing to see SAT test deleted.
His second greatest sin according to the list is eugenism: « Hsu has been an outspoken advocate for eugenics, including his eugenic own startup business
Hsu advocates for embryo selection specifically to remove embryos with the possibility of developing an illness/disease/disability » and improving intelligence. That should be extremely bad from the wokes according to your principles.
To be fair, it happened in 2020 which was a peak woke moment. He wouldn’t get canceled again until the next peak woke moment.
I care more about expanding research than implementing the technologies that we presently have.
We should euthanize all Social Security recipients at the age of 75 if they continue to withdraw from their accounts. As long as you don’t use SS you can live. Also we should probably allow upper-middle class people to use low human-capital working class people as indentured laborers for a set time period, the end of which they can move to Puerto Rico with a pension of 2000 Mexican pesos per month, but once they hit 75 and refuse to stop taking social security and their pension, they get euthanized like everyone else.
Someone else finally took the Rob Ford pill. Kudos.
“You’ll* cowards don’t even smoke crack”
Do you consider Thiel and Silicon Valley Bros as part of the Technocracy that Yarvin advocates for, or are they a little bit more closer to your ideological ideal? Are there any high profile figure that fits your liking?
So I agree rule by scientists isn't really all that good an idea. And the old tradition of wanting military service for leaders may have something to recommend it. I get that the whole system of selecting 'excellent sheep' (to take the title of a new book) has real problems in terms of leadership. And I agree the current administration's populism is more show than reality.
However:
"The worst form of government is hysterical and neurotic. A government which bows down before pensioners and corporate parasites, too afraid to stand up against special interests. Specialists are ill-equipped for this task, because it is not one of knowledge, but of character."
I disagree.
The worst forms of government, given recent history, are communist or fascist dictatorships that aren't afraid to boldly innovate and pursue their vision, whether it be Real Socialism or an empire that they don't have the troops to hold, and result in tens of millions of deaths of their own citizens. Mao did a lot more damage to China than our last pack of wimpy neoliberals did to the USA. The current NIH cuts are doing more damage to science than DEI did (not that I am a fan of DEI).
What you really want is more masculinity. But guys like Eisenhower weren't cowboys, really; they were disciplined military officers who worked their way up through the ranks. The peacetime military has many of the problems you claim as well, since politics become a huge part of the promotion process. Of course, that then means we have to start wars to get effective leaders, which seems like more trouble than it's worth nowadays, as it's expensive and sooner or later one could go nuclear.
an important political axis is how much you like or dislike violent mobs. sensible people are moderately against them, whereas Yarvin's worldview represents the maximal extreme of opposition to them.
I love the EOCU idea. Also tack on free speech as a mandate for it. Perhaps make it a branch of the military which would require physical fitness, but make it open to disabled members who have exemptions from the physical tests they can't do. Then dump money into it for superhuman purposes!
The idea that MAGA is preventing anything of the sort is hilarious. You chugged too much Cofnas crack. Science will move faster not slower minus the DEI and woke junk it was being spent on and the tech bros becoming the donor class
I find it ironic you speak against technocracy when your ultimate end goal of genetically engineered supermen taking over would require technocracy, quite an oppressive one to make it work. I know you've talked about "voluntary eugenics" but the only way to reign in the envy of the populous would either be oppression or class genocide.
Wow, a neoliberal with testosterone. What up? Awesome stuff. Just no need to drag the UKR war out longer, allowing still more efficient drone killing machines to be developed (which AI will no doubt later turn on us), simply to control the EU. Better tariff TF out of them, switch off their energy and offer minimal life support when they start to turn blue.
I'm not anti-EU, I'm pro-EU enlargement to balance the anti-EU forces within France and Germany.
Couple of years, countries be queuing up to get out the EU. Only someone with the brain capacity of a lobotomised slug would have got into a war with Putin in the manner they did. Stone cold guaranteed loser from day one. You can't replace strategic intelligence with ideology and if you try, you lose everything and have to expect that.
It's symbolically important that the world sees Machiavelli reduced to the status of a street whore. And that the EUs only remaining role now.
Do you think you will be as keen on risk-taking in 40 years?
Risk has a way of either diminishing or meeting an early grave!
True, that!