Alex K. Chen
Important to mention the HHMI funding model, which puts “trust” in PIs/evaluates them as PIs rather than as research proposals.
Also
“The MacArthur grant is a template for what this looks like on a personal level, with a shift in focus from creativity to integrity, and a bump in compensation – $625,000 is a lot of money, but that money is designed to be seed money for an activity rather than financial security. Those getting a MacArthur grant still face the specter of future financial needs. One needs an order of magnitude more than that over a lifetime to be secure while not compromising one’s interactions with society. ”
important links (this is really the best place for me to post/update them rn)
https://perlara.substack.com/p/low-dose-statin-as-a-potential-treatment
https://taylorpearson.me/ergodicity/
https://www.wired.com/story/fast-forward-chatgpt-hunger-energy-gpu-revolution/
sid mani
Tunadorable
Adam Green of markov.bio
LLM content
https://api.together.xyz/playground/chat/meta-llama/Llama-2-70b-chat-hf
310.ai
https://cen.acs.org/materials/2-d-materials/Mighty-MXenes-ready-launch/102/i9
Novelties
websim.ai
I’m only comfortable with more humans if we make serious efforts to increase the percent of vegans/vegetarians, or reduce the amount of meat needed by human, given how wasteful meat is to land use.
[limited hunting of deer/pigeons/waterfowl could be ok, but people would still need to eat way less meat than they do now]
maybe, just maybe, cultured meat will come just enough time to save us. But the probability range of this is still too high for comfort.
I very strongly believe any pro-fertility incentives must be coupled with incentives to decrease meat consumption/increase vegetarianism (or increase % of power from nuclear, given that excess solar energy will also destroy habitat).
EO Wilson once advocated that 50% of the world is set aside for wilderness. Maybe that’s a bit too ambitious, but I think 35% would be good enough to preserve enough biodiversity. Taiwan/Hong Kong/Japan are all densely populated and have roughly that % of wilderness/forest (they also rely a lot on seafood, which does not destroy wilderness , but is still inherently a limited resource given overfishing). People get huge health/happiness benefits from nature exposure too, esp when the nature is close to where they live
“If everyone agreed to become vegetarian, leaving little or nothing for livestock, the present 1.4 billion hectares of arable land (3.5 billion acres) would support about 10 billion people”—EO Wilson
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2204892120 is one of the most depressing findings ever.
How do you optimize your life for serendipity?
Ken Stanley has a new social network and I asked the question here: https://app.heymaven.com/discover/25623
But progress studies forum should have more people who can answer this (esp b/c serendipity and progress are both close allies)
Tribal-based SEZs could be the perfect place for people to sell normally Rx-based drugs OTC.
On reservation land, there is already massive distrust of the “process of modern medicine” (including doctors), which prevents many people from getting the care they need. Diabetes rates (and “addiction rates”) on reservations are ultra-high (one Oglala reservation featured by Peter Santenello [he showcases the differences between Indian reservations on his YouTube videos] had dialysis centers). If diabetes medication [eg empagliflozin, sotagliflozin, metformin, rapamycin, semaglutide]+statins+[potentially revolutionary treatments to addiction, which could include some native-based psychedelic plants] could be made OTC (OTC means trusting the customer, it means being pro-choice), it could do a lot to prevent health problems from turning into health disasters, especially on tribal lands. And since there is also substantial demand for these medications OTC among the ordinary population, it could serve as a huge source of taxable income, kind of like the casinos.
It’s already possible to get many of these Rx-based drugs OTC in Latin America (and perhaps from India/Turkey through the grey market) [Latin America has its own unique issues with high diabetes rates], but then one has to deal with inconvenient flights [or travel costs]/customs/etc, which massively reduces their convenience.
Similarly, they can be places where people base experimental medical treatments like exosomes or stem cell treatments (where it’s a massive hassle to offer them in the US due to regulation, and where it’s possible to get them in Latin America). Eg https://garmclinic.com/ (which is in Honduras, and thus tough to get to for most Americans). Any form of non-mainstream medication innovation (that the FDA holds back!) would have a strong argument for being more-than-welcome on tribal land
I’ve visited Roatan before, and the amount of land needed to set up these jurisdictions is quite small. If Minicircle could be offered on tribal land rather than Latin America. Of course, one would have to do due justice to issues that Native Americans face, but bypassing the untrustworthy “white man/FDA” medical system is, I think, enough of a good reason.
[OTC removes many barriers that indigeneous/poor populations face when getting the medication they need, especially preventatively.]
Upon looking further: https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/cpg-sec-100350-fda-jurisdiction-indian-reservations might be an obstacle.. (it might not be impossible to change this in the name of generally increasing tribal soverignty...)
LINKDUMP
https://latecomermag.com/article/what-happened-to-molecular-manufacturing/
https://www.leversforprogress.com/
SOME RANDOM LINKS:
https://curius.app/alex-k-chen
https://nanoscale.blogspot.com/
https://blog.spec.tech/p/speculative-technologies-2023-year
SOME interesting people:
orthogonal to the popular ML/DL/AI people [or orthogonal to “scaling is all you need” people]
https://hillelwayne.com/post/ [he’s also in the jkoppel/predrag circuit]
[also I listed some on LW]
https://github.com/VictorTaelin
https://gist.github.com/VictorTaelin/9061306220929f04e7e6980f23ade615
https://higherorderco.com/
more in the PC of popular ML/DL/AI/”scaling is all you need” people
Is Speculative Technologies part of the upstream process of creating alternatives to plastics? (alternatives that don’t have the “persistent pollutant” or microplastic/nanoplastic decomposition problems)
How common is it for top German students to want to attend ETH-Zurich instead?
PS: you should talk to Tim Farkas about all of this!
Hello! I’m Alex K. Chen (http://twitter.com/InquilineKea, https://linktr.ee/simfish , http://quora.com/Alex-K-Chen). I’m everywhere. I’m a singular individual and “interesting things happen around me” (esp b/c I always have an eye directed towards progress, even though I am super fine-grained and keep track of SO many things that it gives me ADHD [this is not a bad thing however!}) I am the living embodiment of “Why Greatness Cannot be Planned”/open-ended reinforcement learning/maximum-entropy reinforcement learning.
I have lots of access to new/early-stage people (including TKS’ers, Atlas Fellows, Interact Fellows, old Quora crowd) and might be the ideal inter-generational connector.
http://forum.longevitybase.org. I also know more than almost anyone in how to slow down rate of aging (which I also think is integral to progress studies, as people take WAY longer to “grow up” than ever before) [I know https://twitter.com/bkavoussi also got into longevity as of late]
“If everyone agreed to become vegetarian, leaving little or nothing for livestock, the present 1.4 billion hectares of arable land (3.5 billion acres) would support about 10 billion people”—EO Wilson
[though limited hunting of deer/pigeons/waterfowl could be ok]