Astral Codex Ten

Bitcoin

130 min read

Bitcoin

Article

Bitcoin is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 26 times across 26 issues between January 21, 2021 and January 13, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “people being able to invent Bitcoin scot-free”; “Bitcoin is above $5,000”; “Bitcoin above 100K”. It most often appears alongside Google, Twitter, Elon Musk.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 26
  • Issue count: 26
  • First seen: January 21, 2021
  • Last seen: January 13, 2026

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.

Still Alive
January 21, 2021 · Original source
With all due respect to these reporters, and with complete admission of my own bias, I reject this entire way of looking at things. If someone wants to report that I'm a 30-something psychiatrist who lives in Oakland, California, that's fine, I've had it in my About page for years. If some reporter wants to investigate and confirm, I have some suggestions for how they could use their time better - isn't there still a war in Yemen? - but I'm not going to complain too loudly. But I don't think whatever claim the public has on me includes a right to know my name if I don't want them to. I don't think the public needs to know the name of the cops who write cop blogs, or the deadnames of trans people, or the dating lives of sexy cyborgs. I'm not even sure the public needs to know the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. If he isn't harming anyone, let him have his anonymity! I would rather we get whatever pathologies come from people being able to invent Bitcoin scot-free, than get whatever pathologies come from anyone being allowed to dox anyone else if they can argue that person is "influential". Most people don't start out trying to be influential. They just have a Tumblr or a LiveJournal or something, and a few people read it, and then a few more people read it, and bam! - they're influential! If influence takes away your protection, then none of us are safe - not the random grad student with a Twitter account making fun of bad science, not the teenager with a sex Tumblr, not the aspiring fashionista with an Instagram. I've read lots of interesting discussion on how much power tech oligarchs should or shouldn't be allowed to have. But this is the first time I've seen someone suggest their powers should include a magic privacy-destroying gaze, where just by looking at someone they can transform them into a different kind of citizen with fewer rights. Is Paul Graham some weird kind of basilisk, such that anyone he stares at too long turns into fair game?
2020 Predictions: Calibration Results
April 05, 2021 · Original source
ECON AND TECH: 37. Dow is above 25,000: 70% 38. …above 30,000: 20% 39. Bitcoin is above $5,000: 70% 40. …above $10,000: 20% 41. I have bought a Surface Book 3 laptop: 60% 42. Crew Dragon reaches orbit: 80% 43. Starship reaches orbit: 40%
Inline links: 41. I have bought a Surface Book 3 laptop: 60%
Mantic Monday: Predictions For 2021
April 26, 2021 · Original source
ECON/TECH 14. Gamestop stock price still above $100: 50% 15. Bitcoin above 100K: 40% 16. Ethereum above 5K: 50% 17. Ethereum above 0.05 BTC: 70% 18. Dow above 35K: 90% 19. ...above 37.5K: 70% 20. Unemployment above 5%: 40% 21. Google widely allows remote work, no questions asked: 20% 22. Starship reaches orbit: 60%
The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
Intellectual trends follow the laws of fashion. This isn't to say there's no underlying truth about which claims are right and important - just that some fields are "cool" at any given moment and others are "uncool". If you wanted to sound cool on Reddit ten years ago, you talked about atheism, Ron Paul, and the RIAA; five years ago, it would have been Bitcoin, Jordan Peterson, and "Drumpf" (I'm not cool enough to know what's cool today, sorry). Some of these trends seem to mirror obvious real-world changes in importance - distributors found better ways to sell media for affordable prices, so the RIAA has mostly left public consciousness. But they were broader than the change alone could explain - a moderate improvement in music distribution meant switching from talking about the RIAA all the time to basically not at all.
Highlights From The Comments On Acemoglu And AI
August 06, 2021 · Original source
My personal estimates are more like 75% chance, 25% chance, and a distribution that peaks about 20 years later than this one. I think the Metaculus position is consistent with all of “this probably won’t happen”, “THIS IS SUPER-TERRIFYING”, “this is most likely far away”, and “BUT FOR ALL WE KNOW IT COULD BE TOMORROW!” I realize this is an annoying way for things to be. ————————————————— CraigMichael writes: >But all the AI regulation in the world won’t help us unless we humans resist the urge to spread misinformation to maximize clicks. Was with you up to this point. There are several solutions to this other than willpower (resisting the urge). The basic idea - change incentives so that while spreading misinformation is possible but substantially less desirable/lucrative than other options for online behaviors. This isn’t so hard to imagine. Say there’s a lot of incentives to earn money online doing creative or useful things. Like Mechanical Turk, but less route behavior and more performing a service or matching needs. Like I wish I had a help desk for English questions where the answers were good and not people posturing to look good to other people on the English Stack Exchange, for example. I would pay them per call or per minute or whatever. Totally unexplored market AFAIK because technology hasn’t been developed yet. Another idea - Give people more options to pay at an article-level for information that’s useful to them or to have related questions answered or something like that without needing a subscription or a bundle. Say there’s some article about anything and I want to contact the author and be like “hey, here’s a related question, I’m willing to offer you X dollars to answer.” The person says “I’ll do it for x+10 dollars.” One site used to unlock articles to the public after a threshold of Bitcoin have been donated on a PPV basis. It both incentives the author and had a positive externality. Everyone is so invested in ads that they don’t work on technology and ideas to create new markets. To paraphrase Jaron Lanier we need to make technology so good it seduces away from destroying ourselves. Partly I want to complain that obviously I was using the quoted sentence as a rhetorical device. But I guess the whole point of that sentence and its paragraph was to argue against saying false things as a rhetorical device, so - hoist on my own petard, I guess. I’m less optimistic than Craig is about this solution, because it seems to me that socially virtuous technology will always be less fun/addictive than nonvirtuous technology, simply because the virtuous technology has to hit two targets (virtuous, fun/addictive), the nonvirtuous technology only has to hit one target, and it’s easier to optimize for a target with zero other constraints than with one other constraint. See eg Meditations on Moloch. ————————————————— Souf asks: Is there a convincing argument that AGI is possible within any reasonable timeframe (like... 50 years), other than the intuitions of esteemed AI researchers? Do they have any way to back up their estimates (of some tens of percent), and why they shouldn't be millionths of a percent? It is, as another poster said, an "extraordinary claim." I'd like to see some extraordinary support of those particular numbers. If I had to answer this question, I would point to the sorts of work AI Impacts does, where they try to estimate how capable computers were in 1980, 1990, etc, draw a line to represent the speed at which computers are becoming more capable, figure out where humans are at the same metric, and check the time when that line crosses however capable you’ve decided humans are. This is obviously really hard because you have to operationalize some definition of “capable” or “intelligent” or some other word that is hard to operationalize, but when you do it you usually get sometime in the mid-21st century. You’re going to point out that this argument doesn’t really qualify as “convincing”. I admit it doesn’t meet trial-by-jury standards of evidence. So I guess my real answer would be “it’s the #$@&ing prior”. Like, you certainly don’t have knock-down evidence that it’s impossible, I don’t have a knock-down evidence that it’s certain, so it might happen and it might not. How “might” are we talking? I don’t know, it would seem weird if this quickly-advancing technology being researched by incredibly smart people with billions of dollars in research funding from lots of megacorporations just reached some point and then stopped. Okay, fine, maybe it will keep advancing at the same rate, how fast is that in terms of time-to-AGI? Now we’re back at AI Impacts drawing lines again. The stupidest possible prior is always 50-50. We would have to be very stupid people to use the stupidest possible prior. But here we are. I wouldn’t want to give a 50-50 chance of us inventing FTL travel by 2100, because FTL travel seems physically impossible. I wouldn’t want to give a 50-50 chance of us inventing slower-than-light-but-still-pretty-good starships by 2100, because, I dunno, space travel isn’t advancing that fast and nobody is really working on it that hard. For AI, I don’t know, I kinda want to say 50-50. If I were going to try to update away from 50-50, I would want to look at AI Impacts style line graphs, expert opinion, and prediction markets. All of those seem to make me update up instead of down, so I don’t think I would go lower than 50-50. But there’s enough Knightian uncertainty to make an entire Round Table here, so who knows? Hardly a “convincing” argument, but I’m just trying to avoid the McAfee Fallacy: ————————————————— Souf continues: The argument that we are "in the middle of a period of extremely rapid progress in AI research, when barrier after barrier is being breached" makes it seem like all AI "progress" is on some sort of line that ends in AGI. That feels like sleight-of-hand. Even Scott himself refers to AGI here as a "new class of actor," so I'm failing to see how current lines of "progress" will indubitably result the emergence of something completely novel and different? Lots of smart people disagree with me on this one, but I think the path from here to AGI is pretty straight. I mean, it will take thousands of people who are all much smarter than I am to do it, but it’ll happen. My argument is something like - human brains are remarkably similar to rat brains, only much bigger. They’re still a little similar to insect brains. It looks like if you have a basic functioning brain, and you scale it up, it gets human intelligence. Existing AIs like AlphaGo or GPT seem to be basically a blob of learning-ability, a plan for pointing the blob at a specific problem, and lots and lots of training data. I think the past five years have shown that this basic model generalizes really well. OpenAI’s programs can now write essays, compose music, and generate pictures, not because they had three parallel amazing teams working on writing/music/art AIs, but because they took a blob of learning ability and figured out how to direct it at writing/music/art, and they were able to get giant digital corpuses of text / music / pictures to train it. DeepMind is finding that it can win lots of games, from Go to StarCraft to obstacle courses in simulated environments, by pointing a blob of learning-ability at the game and making it play against itself a zillion times (ie generate its own training data). My impression is that human/rat/insect brains are a blob of learning-ability which the rest of the nervous system successfully points at the world, and especially at aspects of the world that the organism needs to pay attention to (eg food sources, sex, etc). This isn’t exactly right, there are a few genetically-encoded programs, but not that many and it’s pretty hard. Right now I think our main advantages over AI systems are something like: our nervous system is pretty good at pointing us at the world and extracting training data from it. If you wanted an AI that learned being-in-the-world skills as well as we do, it would have to have an amazing robot body, and right now robot bodies aren’t that amazing.
Inline links: writes, Meditations on Moloch, Souf, the sorts of work AI Impacts does, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3MgL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7db78f49-9ccb-4b6e-ac18-cfb79f52cb04_584x232.png, not that many and it’s pretty hard
Carbon Costs Quantified
August 25, 2021 · Original source
Check the sources for explanations of how I calculated some of these. Lbs CO2 is self-explanatory - except that in a few cases, especially those involving beef, it also includes other greenhouse gases, converted to CO2 at equivalent levels of global warming contribution. Avg US person-years is what fraction of the average American's yearly carbon emissions that much CO2 represents. So for example 0.25 means it's one-quarter of the average American's yearly emissions, and 50 means it emits 50 times as much CO2 as the average American. $ offset is how much money it would cost to offset that much carbon, by eg planting trees. Offset cost is controversial, so I've included two numbers - optimistic and pessimistic. “Optimistic” is closest to the existing consensus, and is the price at which most companies will sell you offsets. I took Native Energy's $15/ton as my guide, but there are lots of places with more or less the same price. They usually work by paying people in Third World countries not to cut down trees; since trees remove carbon from the atmosphere, this ought to offset emissions. But there are a lot of ways this can go wrong. The Third World people can accept the money, then cut down the trees anyway. Or they can take money for not cutting down trees that they never intended to cut down. Or they can take money from multiple people for not cutting down the same tree. Or they can lie and there were never any trees at all. Offset companies try to watch for these failure modes, but a lot of people are skeptical. Also, even when this represents the true price of offsetting the marginal unit of carbon, it might not scale. You will run out of trees to protect long before you run out of carbon to offset. “Pessimistic” comes from Climeworks, a company that builds giant reverse-factories which take carbon out of the air. If you’re maximally skeptical about any charity's ability to offset CO2, these are the people for you - they can literally hand you a bottle full of the carbon they removed, so you don't need to take anything on faith. But they charge as much as $1000/ton (I think other places charge less, more like $250-500/ton, but they’re still kind of experimental and you personally cannot buy offsets there). You’ll notice there’s more than a whole order of magnitude between the optimistic and pessimistic estimates - welcome to climate economics. Cost or value is kind of hand-wavey. For some things, it's the price of the item - for example, for "train trip LA -> NYC", it's the cost of a cross-country train ticket; for "eat a cheeseburger", it's the price of a Quarter Pounder at McDonalds. Other times it's about making money - for "mine one Bitcoin", it's the value of one Bitcoin (which may be wildly different now than when I wrote this, sorry). For corporations, it's their yearly revenue; for countries, it's their yearly GDP. This isn't very principled and I'm sorry. I included this so I could calculate the %Cost statistic below. %Cost is what percent of the cost/value of something it would take to offset its carbon (I used the geometric mean of the optimistic and pessimistic offset estimates for this, so a little over $100/ton; people could reasonably complain that if you believe normal offsets work, these numbers are all an order of magnitude too pessimistic). A lower number is “better”. If something’s %Cost is 10, it means that it would take 10% of the cost of item to offset the carbon produced. I gave various things whose cost is entirely based on electricity a %Cost of 45, which is the general %Cost of electricity - it will be less in places with more renewables, and higher in places with more fossil fuels. Some of these numbers are kind of arbitrary, and the whole category has weird implications - for example, if the airline company doubled the price of every ticket, their %Cost would go down, and they would look more carbon-efficient. I wouldn't make too much out of these numbers, and I’ve left them in grey to emphasize this. Sources are listed at the bottom of this post. This table can’t tell you what your ethical duties are. I'm concerned it will make some people feel like whatever they do is just a drop in the bucket - all you have to do is spend 11,000 hours without air conditioning, and you'll have saved the same amount of carbon an F-35 burns on one airstrike! But I think the most important thing it could convince you of is that if you were previously planning on letting yourself be miserable to save carbon, you should buy carbon offsets instead. Instead of boiling yourself alive all summer, spend between $0.04 and $2.50 an hour to offset your air conditioning use. But you may not want to literally offset your carbon. I use “offset” here to mean a donation that removes a linear and quantifiable amount of carbon from the atmosphere per dollar. But this is probably a less effective use of money than donating the same amount to a generic anti-climate-change charity. Clean Air Task Force is the one I’ve heard a lot of smart people recommend, though I also donate to speculative carbon removal work like Project Vesta. Depending on your philosophy of what offsetting means and when it’s acceptable, you might want to calculate how much it would take to offset your carbon use, then donate it somewhere else instead. What are the responsibilities of an ordinary citizen facing the threat of climate change? I support light yokes; if I had to advise people based on what I learned making this table, I would suggest: Try to stay informed.
Inline links: Native Energy, a lot of ways this can go wrong, Climeworks, Clean Air Task Force, Project Vesta, light yokes
8. https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/how-many-bitcoins-are-there/, https://www.vox.com/2019/6/18/18642645/bitcoin-energy-price-renewable-china . Like everything else that uses electricity, this is much worse in areas that use fossil fuels and much better in areas that use renewables.
I’d originally included a line for the carbon price of a single Bitcoin transaction, but this was too controversial and philosophically complicated. Individual Bitcoin transactions don’t themselves release carbon, but the Bitcoin network as a whole does, and it exists to support transactions, so in theory you can divide the network cost by the number of transactions to get a per-transaction carbon number, which is something like 1,000 lbs - half the emission cost of a cross-country flight. But many Bitcoin users now use something called the Lightning Network, which is different from the regular blockchain and doesn’t consume much more carbon than other Internet transactions. So one way to look at this is that on-chain transactions are carbon-expensive, and Lightning transactions are cheap. But since neither of them actually costs carbon, I felt weird asserting this, and I just dropped the whole category.
21
December 06, 2021 · Original source
These are still preliminary; this person argues that the Nationalists might pick up a few more seats as more conservative rural areas get counted. Liberty and Refoundation (the socialists) will probably enter into a coalition with the Savior Party and have 65/128 seats for a bare majority. They need 86 votes for a 2/3 majority, which in theory they can get if the Liberal Party agrees. The Liberal Party seems centrist and hard to pin down, but this article includes the following great quote: “The Liberal Party opposes the ZEDEs because, above all, they undercut our national sovereignty, and because we don’t want them to become hideouts for extraditable criminals,” said [Liberal Party leader Yani] Rosenthal, who served a three-year prison sentence in the United States for money laundering and participating in a criminal scheme with the Los Cachiros cartel. Rosenthal kind of goes back and forth elsewhere, but in the end I think he’ll vote with the socialists on this. Still, there’s some speculation that his party might not vote as a bloc, and even a few defectors would be enough to prevent a supermajority. In theory, even if the socialists win two consecutive votes, they have to give the projects ten years to wind down. Ten years is forever in politics, and probably before then the capitalists will get back into power and say never mind, everyone can keep doing what they’re doing. The socialists are aware of this and say that their supplementary strategy is to have everything about the ZEDE law declared unconstitutional. This should be a hard sell, because ZEDEs are a constitutional amendment, plus the current Supreme Court explicitly ruled a few years ago that they were constitutional. But apparently the Honduran Supreme Court can declare constitutional amendments unconstitutional if it really wants. And the new government will get to appoint a new Supreme Court in two years, and although the exact process is complicated, they may be able to get people who agree with them on this. Also, incoming president Castro is married to Manuel Zelaya, a former president who tried to pull an Andrew Jackson after the Supreme Court ordered him to stop holding an illegal referendum to change term limits in his favor. He ordered the military to hold the referendum anyway, and was only ousted after the military couped him instead. So this is not exactly a family known for their deep respect for the exact wordings of laws or court rulings (not that anyone in Honduras has really excelled on that front). See further speculation eg here and here. And here’s Mark Lutter from Charter Cities Institute on the elections and the future. Conchagua Volcano, El Salvador Meanwhile, insane El Salvadorean president Nayib Bukele says he is ordering the construction of a coin-shaped city dedicated to Bitcoin at the base of a stratovolcano: "Residential areas, commercial areas, services, museums, entertainment, bars, restaurants, airport, port, rail - everything devoted to Bitcoin," the 40-year-old said. And: The president, who appeared on stage wearing a baseball cap backwards, said that no income taxes would be levied in the city, only value added tax (VAT). He said that half of the revenue gained from this would be used to "to build up the city", while the rest would be used to keep the streets "neat and clean" […] Mr Bukele did not provide dates for construction or completion of the city, but said he estimated that much of the public infrastructure would cost around 300,000 Bitcoins. It’s tempting to dismiss this plan as crazy. First, this photo: Second, Bitcoin miners don’t want a city the shape of a Bitcoin with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo. They want cheap electricity. Bukele has promised that there will be cheap geothermal power from the volcano, which sounds good, but this article says El Salvador’s existing geothermal energy costs about 12 cents/kilowatt-hour, much higher than the 4 cents/megawatt-hour miners can get in the current cheapest areas. Maybe El Salvador could do a really good job upgrading their energy infrastructure, but at some point you’re subsidizing this rather than using it as a cash cow. And third, this isn’t even the stupidest plan to build a cryptocurrency-themed city in the Third World. That arguably goes to Akon City, a thing where a pop singer named Akon was going to build a cryptocurrency city in Senegal. Now, without any construction having started, they’re planning to build a second one in Uganda! All competing for the same handful of crypto companies! But I looked into Bukele to see if he was a moron with a habit of coming up with terrible ideas. It seems like no. He rose from nothing to become El Salvador’s first outside-the-traditional-party-system president, and has an approval rating of around 90%. And apparently he’s presided over a historic drop in the homicide rate of this previously murder-capital-of-the-world country. Although I’m betting that one day he’ll make a great Dictator Book Club entry, I’m prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on “doesn’t do stupid things for no reason” What’s the non-stupid explanation for this? Maybe it’s supposed to be a signal. You can give up 5% of the way through, but even trying to build a Bitcoin-shaped city at least shows very conclusively that you’ve got a crypto-friendly regulatory climate, so many easily-spooked crypto companies will flock to you. This makes sense in the context of big crypto companies moving to the Caribbean for regulatory reasons, eg FTX moving to the Bahamas and Binance moving to the Cayman Islands. But if I understand correctly, both of these companies make on the order of $1 billion a year. If El Salvador can tax them at 5% (dubious, since a big part of promising a friendly regulatory climate is low taxes), that’s still only $100 million if they can capture both of them. Which they can’t, because these companies seem happy where they are. And I don’t think there are a lot of similarly-sized crypto companies looking for Central American homes that I don’t know about. And even though El Salvador is pretty poor, it’s not so poor that $100 million is worth embarrassing themselves over. So I’m stumped. EDIT: See this comment. Praxis, aka Bluebook Cities, the Internet Speaking of stumped, who are these people? Right now, they’re a web page with a lot of buzz promising the City Of The Future, in very poetic language: Praxis is a grassroots movement of modern pioneers building a new city. We are technologists and artists, builders and dreamers. We are building a place where we can develop to our fullest potentials, physically, culturally, and spiritually. Bitcoin was developed as a financial technology with political goals identical to those of the Founding Fathers: liberation. The ultimate end of crypto is the possibility of a future for humanity unshackled from the institutions that seek to limit our growth. Our ultimate goal is to bring about a more vital future for humanity, and we will use technology to achieve this righteous end. Our civilization is unwell. We eat food that kills us, we’ve lost sight of beauty, and we neglect our spiritual lives. The world is deranged and decayed, and this frightens people. We don’t look up from our screens; we seek to live within them. Crypto is a fundamentally political technology -- escape to the metaverse is a betrayal of the principles on which it was founded. We are descended from the people who built Rome and Athens, who dared to split atoms and voyage to the Moon. We can build new worlds not just of bits, but of atoms. But where is this city? What will its policies be? As we leave old lands, our values are our compass. Like wolves, tribes of pioneers are muscular by necessity. For voyaging tribes to settle, they must perform murmurations: intricate coordination with little communication, at scale. This is only possible with a strong sense of asabiyya (group feeling derived from deeply-held shared values). Our values inform the destiny we desire, and for which we struggle. Asabiyya is forged in this struggle. With asabiyya, pioneers can earn the divine mandate to build a city. Cities are the fount of human ingenuity. In cities, people enjoy their fullest potential by contributing their resources under the auspices of civilization. Who even are you? What experience do you have with city-building? Civilizations rise and fall. All around us, we see civilizational decay. The people are not vital: physically, culturally, spiritually. We live in an era of obesity, remakes, and pollution. We are losing the divine mandate, and in an era of absolute weapons, what’s at stake is everything. But perhaps there’s some glory in death by a light brighter than a thousand suns. A worse fate may await humanity: atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste, minds occupied by the petty amusements of a corporate metaverse. There, nothing is at stake; there are no frontiers to explore; no growth is possible. Nothing to live for, and nothing to die for. As we walk between these twin fates, the light of our civilization dims. But beyond the horizon, we see a new light emerging. Like the sun at dawn, it cannot be stopped. Vitality itself is the foundational value of this new civilizational form, and we have the technology to enact our moral imperative as never before. You’re not answering my…okay, fine, whatever, forget it. As far as I can tell, Praxis is two 25-year-olds with no previous experience, armed with about $10 million in Peter Thiel’s money. Peter Thiel is a smart person known for having good business sense, but he’s also known to have a weakness for young people who dream big and sound like purveyors of esoteric secrets. I wonder if the simplest explanation is just that this is one of the cases where his weakness got the better of his sense, and now these two random people have $10 million earmarked for building a city, and no idea what to do. [CORRECTION: some people involved in Praxis have reached out to tell me that it was $4 million instead of $10 million, and that it was Thiel-backed Pronomos and not Thiel himself. I’ll be getting in touch with them to learn if there are other issues or things I should correct here] But that’s not how they put it! The way they put it is - all previous charter city founders have started by approaching governments and pitching their ideas. But there’s a chicken-and-egg problem: governments don’t want to give land to a purely hypothetical city that might not pan out, and the city can’t pan out until governments give it land. Praxis’ plan is to build the community first, then go to a government saying “Here’s 50,000 people who have agreed to join our city, and lots of businesses and organizations that are excited about it. Please give us land for our guaranteed-success, concretely-existing project.” Now this is a different chicken-and-egg problem: why join a community of people with no land and no plans? Praxis writes: What if we try to draw people to new cities not on an economic basis, but rather on a spiritual one? Which city (or country) founding projects have succeeded that have drawn people on a predominantly non-economic, but rather spiritual basis? Among others, Israel and America. Both groups were oppressed, and sought the freedom to live by their values. Both felt the intangible pull of the frontier. Both had a keen historical instinct. This is how cities with spiritual significance are founded. The correct approach to city building in this new world is demand-first (or as Balaji Srinivasan calls it, Cloud City first). We build the citizenry before the city. First, we create communities of true believers, organized around shared values, online. People move to cities for people, and it follows that if you collect a group of people who all want to live together, they’ll all move together if at a moment in time everyone else does, too. Today, we have new tools. The emergence of Web3 enables us to supercharge communities with self-ownership, governance, and determination. Once you build a community of people ready to move to a new city together, you can self-finance the entire project. With something real to offer nations, conversations with governments become productive (e.g. Gigafactory). That’s how you make the risk dominoes fall. The problem is, Israel worked because it had Judaism. Judaism is a very specific belief. Prospera is specifically libertarian, Telosa is specifically Georgist, and even the Bitcoin-shaped volcano city knows what it’s about. What is Praxis? The use of “atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste” as a warning reads very slightly right-wing to me - there’s a right-wing meme about how the media keeps trying to get people to eat bugs, and how this is the shape our future dystopia will take. But whether I’m right or wrong, the fact that it’s hard to tell is a problem. The only other clues we’re getting are their Discord, which seems to be focused around getting a currency called PRAX for completing tasks. Once you get enough, you can become a Member, which seems to be where the real excitement starts. (source) I’m not even being sarcastic - I expect being a member to be quite fun. I say this because when I was a teenager I was part of a bunch of country simulation projects, some of which got past the inherent nerdiness of being a country simulation project exactly the same way Praxis is doing it - by saying that we were going to become a real country someday, as soon as we were big enough to convince people. These were usually fun and interesting and educational, and I made lots of great like-minded teenage and twenty-something friends. But none of them ever came close to becoming a real country, and I’m not sure it was merely for lack of millions of dollars. I hope I’m wrong and they manage to forge new lands through struggle to uplift the human spirit or whatever. Elsewhere In Model Cities Vitalik Buterin on the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies. He recommends they “start with self-contained experiments, and take things slowly on moves that are truly irreversible”, which is a weird way of saying “what we crypto leaders really want is a city at the base of a volcano, shaped like a giant Bitcoin”.
Inline links: this person, this article, some speculation, here, on the elections and the future, says, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SuHh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20a12676-81c4-49a8-bb20-815d1c3f660b_763x509.jpeg, with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo, this article, Akon City, a second one, Bukele, a historic drop in the homicide rate, Dictator Book Club, moving to the Bahamas, moving to the Cayman Islands, this comment, promising the City Of The Future, far as I can tell, the media keeps trying, their Discord, tasks, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2TK6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F020ebe08-e968-45cd-ba39-a91cdc6e5892_473x533.png, source, a bunch of country simulation projects, the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies
Second, Bitcoin miners don’t want a city the shape of a Bitcoin with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo. They want cheap electricity. Bukele has promised that there will be cheap geothermal power from the volcano, which sounds good, but this article says El Salvador’s existing geothermal energy costs about 12 cents/kilowatt-hour, much higher than the 4 cents/megawatt-hour miners can get in the current cheapest areas. Maybe El Salvador could do a really good job upgrading their energy infrastructure, but at some point you’re subsidizing this rather than using it as a cash cow. And third, this isn’t even the stupidest plan to build a cryptocurrency-themed city in the Third World. That arguably goes to Akon City, a thing where a pop singer named Akon was going to build a cryptocurrency city in Senegal. Now, without any construction having started, they’re planning to build a second one in Uganda! All competing for the same handful of crypto companies! But I looked into Bukele to see if he was a moron with a habit of coming up with terrible ideas. It seems like no. He rose from nothing to become El Salvador’s first outside-the-traditional-party-system president, and has an approval rating of around 90%. And apparently he’s presided over a historic drop in the homicide rate of this previously murder-capital-of-the-world country. Although I’m betting that one day he’ll make a great Dictator Book Club entry, I’m prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on “doesn’t do stupid things for no reason” What’s the non-stupid explanation for this? Maybe it’s supposed to be a signal. You can give up 5% of the way through, but even trying to build a Bitcoin-shaped city at least shows very conclusively that you’ve got a crypto-friendly regulatory climate, so many easily-spooked crypto companies will flock to you. This makes sense in the context of big crypto companies moving to the Caribbean for regulatory reasons, eg FTX moving to the Bahamas and Binance moving to the Cayman Islands. But if I understand correctly, both of these companies make on the order of $1 billion a year. If El Salvador can tax them at 5% (dubious, since a big part of promising a friendly regulatory climate is low taxes), that’s still only $100 million if they can capture both of them. Which they can’t, because these companies seem happy where they are. And I don’t think there are a lot of similarly-sized crypto companies looking for Central American homes that I don’t know about. And even though El Salvador is pretty poor, it’s not so poor that $100 million is worth embarrassing themselves over. So I’m stumped. EDIT: See this comment. Praxis, aka Bluebook Cities, the Internet Speaking of stumped, who are these people? Right now, they’re a web page with a lot of buzz promising the City Of The Future, in very poetic language: Praxis is a grassroots movement of modern pioneers building a new city. We are technologists and artists, builders and dreamers. We are building a place where we can develop to our fullest potentials, physically, culturally, and spiritually. Bitcoin was developed as a financial technology with political goals identical to those of the Founding Fathers: liberation. The ultimate end of crypto is the possibility of a future for humanity unshackled from the institutions that seek to limit our growth. Our ultimate goal is to bring about a more vital future for humanity, and we will use technology to achieve this righteous end. Our civilization is unwell. We eat food that kills us, we’ve lost sight of beauty, and we neglect our spiritual lives. The world is deranged and decayed, and this frightens people. We don’t look up from our screens; we seek to live within them. Crypto is a fundamentally political technology -- escape to the metaverse is a betrayal of the principles on which it was founded. We are descended from the people who built Rome and Athens, who dared to split atoms and voyage to the Moon. We can build new worlds not just of bits, but of atoms. But where is this city? What will its policies be? As we leave old lands, our values are our compass. Like wolves, tribes of pioneers are muscular by necessity. For voyaging tribes to settle, they must perform murmurations: intricate coordination with little communication, at scale. This is only possible with a strong sense of asabiyya (group feeling derived from deeply-held shared values). Our values inform the destiny we desire, and for which we struggle. Asabiyya is forged in this struggle. With asabiyya, pioneers can earn the divine mandate to build a city. Cities are the fount of human ingenuity. In cities, people enjoy their fullest potential by contributing their resources under the auspices of civilization. Who even are you? What experience do you have with city-building? Civilizations rise and fall. All around us, we see civilizational decay. The people are not vital: physically, culturally, spiritually. We live in an era of obesity, remakes, and pollution. We are losing the divine mandate, and in an era of absolute weapons, what’s at stake is everything. But perhaps there’s some glory in death by a light brighter than a thousand suns. A worse fate may await humanity: atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste, minds occupied by the petty amusements of a corporate metaverse. There, nothing is at stake; there are no frontiers to explore; no growth is possible. Nothing to live for, and nothing to die for. As we walk between these twin fates, the light of our civilization dims. But beyond the horizon, we see a new light emerging. Like the sun at dawn, it cannot be stopped. Vitality itself is the foundational value of this new civilizational form, and we have the technology to enact our moral imperative as never before. You’re not answering my…okay, fine, whatever, forget it. As far as I can tell, Praxis is two 25-year-olds with no previous experience, armed with about $10 million in Peter Thiel’s money. Peter Thiel is a smart person known for having good business sense, but he’s also known to have a weakness for young people who dream big and sound like purveyors of esoteric secrets. I wonder if the simplest explanation is just that this is one of the cases where his weakness got the better of his sense, and now these two random people have $10 million earmarked for building a city, and no idea what to do. [CORRECTION: some people involved in Praxis have reached out to tell me that it was $4 million instead of $10 million, and that it was Thiel-backed Pronomos and not Thiel himself. I’ll be getting in touch with them to learn if there are other issues or things I should correct here] But that’s not how they put it! The way they put it is - all previous charter city founders have started by approaching governments and pitching their ideas. But there’s a chicken-and-egg problem: governments don’t want to give land to a purely hypothetical city that might not pan out, and the city can’t pan out until governments give it land. Praxis’ plan is to build the community first, then go to a government saying “Here’s 50,000 people who have agreed to join our city, and lots of businesses and organizations that are excited about it. Please give us land for our guaranteed-success, concretely-existing project.” Now this is a different chicken-and-egg problem: why join a community of people with no land and no plans? Praxis writes: What if we try to draw people to new cities not on an economic basis, but rather on a spiritual one? Which city (or country) founding projects have succeeded that have drawn people on a predominantly non-economic, but rather spiritual basis? Among others, Israel and America. Both groups were oppressed, and sought the freedom to live by their values. Both felt the intangible pull of the frontier. Both had a keen historical instinct. This is how cities with spiritual significance are founded. The correct approach to city building in this new world is demand-first (or as Balaji Srinivasan calls it, Cloud City first). We build the citizenry before the city. First, we create communities of true believers, organized around shared values, online. People move to cities for people, and it follows that if you collect a group of people who all want to live together, they’ll all move together if at a moment in time everyone else does, too. Today, we have new tools. The emergence of Web3 enables us to supercharge communities with self-ownership, governance, and determination. Once you build a community of people ready to move to a new city together, you can self-finance the entire project. With something real to offer nations, conversations with governments become productive (e.g. Gigafactory). That’s how you make the risk dominoes fall. The problem is, Israel worked because it had Judaism. Judaism is a very specific belief. Prospera is specifically libertarian, Telosa is specifically Georgist, and even the Bitcoin-shaped volcano city knows what it’s about. What is Praxis? The use of “atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste” as a warning reads very slightly right-wing to me - there’s a right-wing meme about how the media keeps trying to get people to eat bugs, and how this is the shape our future dystopia will take. But whether I’m right or wrong, the fact that it’s hard to tell is a problem. The only other clues we’re getting are their Discord, which seems to be focused around getting a currency called PRAX for completing tasks. Once you get enough, you can become a Member, which seems to be where the real excitement starts. (source) I’m not even being sarcastic - I expect being a member to be quite fun. I say this because when I was a teenager I was part of a bunch of country simulation projects, some of which got past the inherent nerdiness of being a country simulation project exactly the same way Praxis is doing it - by saying that we were going to become a real country someday, as soon as we were big enough to convince people. These were usually fun and interesting and educational, and I made lots of great like-minded teenage and twenty-something friends. But none of them ever came close to becoming a real country, and I’m not sure it was merely for lack of millions of dollars. I hope I’m wrong and they manage to forge new lands through struggle to uplift the human spirit or whatever. Elsewhere In Model Cities Vitalik Buterin on the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies. He recommends they “start with self-contained experiments, and take things slowly on moves that are truly irreversible”, which is a weird way of saying “what we crypto leaders really want is a city at the base of a volcano, shaped like a giant Bitcoin”.
Inline links: with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo, this article, Akon City, a second one, Bukele, a historic drop in the homicide rate, Dictator Book Club, moving to the Bahamas, moving to the Cayman Islands, this comment, promising the City Of The Future, far as I can tell, the media keeps trying, their Discord, tasks, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2TK6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F020ebe08-e968-45cd-ba39-a91cdc6e5892_473x533.png, source, a bunch of country simulation projects, the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies
Vitalik Buterin on the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies. He recommends they “start with self-contained experiments, and take things slowly on moves that are truly irreversible”, which is a weird way of saying “what we crypto leaders really want is a city at the base of a volcano, shaped like a giant Bitcoin”.
Inline links: the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies
Resubmit And Summarize Your Proposals For Grants ++
January 21, 2022 · Original source
Grug think maybe if hit stone with flint, stone get hot. Spark come out of stone. Then put spark on pile of dry leaves. Can create fire, use to cook food. Unlock more calories from food, maybe solve world hunger. Grug work with Og. Og shaman of great power, beloved by gods. He technical co-founder. So far have many other stone, but no have flint. Tribe down river want fifty shells for give Grug flint. Grug no have fifty shells. If have fifty shells, please send to Bitcoin address 3FZbgi29cpjq2Gjd4m4GFg7xJaNVN2ab98. If have question, can find Grug next to big tree.
Grading My 2021 Predictions
January 24, 2022 · Original source
ECON/TECH 14. Gamestop stock price still above $100: 50% 15. Bitcoin above 100K: 40% 16. Ethereum above 5K: 50% 17. Ethereum above 0.05 BTC: 70% 18. Dow above 35K: 90% 19. ...above 37.5K: 70% 20. Unemployment above 5%: 40% 21. Google widely allows remote work, no questions asked: 20% 22. Starship reaches orbit: 60%
Predictions For 2022
February 01, 2022 · Original source
ECON/TECH 11. Gamestop stock price still above $100: 30% 12. Bitcoin above 100K: 20% 13. Ethereum above 5K: 20% 14. Ethereum above 0.05 BTC: 90% 15. Bored Ape floor price here below current price of $203K: 40% 16. Dow above 35K: 90% 17. ...above 37.5K: 40% 18. Inflation for the year below five percent: 90% 19. Unemployment below five percent: 50% 20. Google widely allows remote work, no questions asked: 50% 21. Starship reaches orbit: 90%
Inline links: here
ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#4: Handbook For Making Friends In The Post-College Environment Hi! I'm bbqturtle. When moving to a new city, you are often confronted with loneliness. When graduating from college and surrounded by unstructured environments to meet new people, you are often confronted with loneliness. I recently transplanted cities 3 times and each time discovered 3-4 different methods of gathering communities. In Boston I have discovered the largest and best solution to this problem. I am working to distill a "best practices for making friends and growing communities in the post-college environment". The outline and content theory is complete, bit lacking final touches and an editor. It is essentially an instruction manual and handbook to problem solve rough situations in the way best for the community. I do not have much bandwidth for this project because I do not have any audience. If this is a project that would actually interest you, please send a token Bitcoin amount to 39jcUUkQb7QqUANFXQ5ZGC4b4YvFBRFxou . Or email me at josh (underscore symbol) advance@yahoo.com. If more than 50 people are interested, I will prioritize this by end of month. If I receive more than $200, I will hire an editor to review it. If nobody is interested I may abandon the project. Thank you for your consideration!
#32: An App To Help Mentor Disadvantaged University Applicants In The UK UniReach is a charitable EdTech start-up that provides automated on-demand mentoring for disadvantaged university applicants in the UK. In the past 18 months, we’ve organised mentoring for 1,000s of applicants provided by 600+ undergrad volunteers. We currently focus on admissions to Oxford and Cambridge universities, where the global offer rate is 17%. Our offer rate is 3x that: 57%. We achieve this success via a year-long programme: national workshops to foster interest in applying (we don’t cherry pick), continuous on-demand mentoring, and more in-depth mentoring in peak application season. The missing piece in the puzzle is an app to reduce frictions in our core service and open new channels to engage and support applicants – right now we coordinate mentoring via email. We are looking to raise £10,000 / $15,000 / 0.4 BTC for the app. Our ambition is to cover other top UK universities and then the Ivy League. We’re well placed to do this, with an engaged mentor base (3% of all Oxford/Cambridge undergrads), partnerships with schools across the UK, plus relationships with influential figures in our current markets; we’ve also recently closed an acquisition of a smaller charity to support our growth. We would also value any calls/emails from individuals offering advice, particularly on software (or marketing, the other gap in our capabilities). All advice welcome via email: leo@unireach.co.uk / website: unireach.co.uk / Bitcoin: 38MNgr9svuU2Lc7XUhrUdab2GS8tscG9be
ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#73: Create A New Kind Of Money And Cities The combination of markets and ideas has reduced suffering somewhat. This trend must continue, but I think a global median income of US$30,000 by 2049 is possible. We just need to teach everybody the same skills that Americans have. To enable this, 2 areas where improvement can be made and no new technology is needed are: a new money, and cities welcome to everyone. A new money is needed because the current financial system is not burdened with the risks it creates. Cities don’t grow like they did in the past. Over a 50 year period at the turn of the twentieth century Detroit grew 10X, whereas in this era the Bay Area has not even doubled its population. Nowadays cities that attract the best talent only attract the best talent. If we had a Hypothetical-Bay-Area-City grow like American cities of the past, it would have a population of around 45 million people and GDP of $4.5 billion. What would an asset be worth if it had a $4.5 billion income stream? A little bit of money and land is needed to make a start, but mostly I need you and your talents. Here is my new Substack with details: https://marketismandidearism.substack.com/p/a-new-money-and-cities-welcome-to . Please sign up to make a global median income of US$30,000 by 2049 a reality. P.S. I am talking money here. Accounting entries. Do not talk to me about Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an attempt at cash. 99.99999% of money transactions are not done with cash, they are done with IOU’s. Please. Spare. Me.
#113: Increase Own Intelligence, Then Write About How My name is David Gretzschel and I want money to increase my own intelligence full-time for about a year. Once I have succeeded (more than I already have), I will teach others how to do this. The benefits of this are obvious. And I already know how to do that for the most part. I have a concrete foundation in the form of a synesthetic encoding scheme, that I can build on. I merely need the time to do an intense amount of training without being distracted by either having a job or not having one and starving. And practice how to use them on various mathematical and computational problems. And a bunch of other things. Details are in the long pitch (see below). So I need 20.000 dollars to not worry about rent and food for that time. Please send them in Bitcoin here: 3Qcm3UJRuFca1fTkf2iPPEkU3PevpzPuwP I certainly would have use for more money, too. (though it'd not be necessary, I don't want to dissuade you from it, if that's an option) So do feel free to shower me with the stuff, if you have it and believe in my cause. (or you only believe in it 10%, but know that the expected value calculation still ends up with a happy face /pascal-mugging) With 10.000 dollars I'd still commit to a year, though that would be a bit tighter than I’d like. The longer pitch is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/170WETB6enUOzQEzwbwmOCVHz9VkBe4R86rCh_ewvOcg/edit?usp=sharing . If you have further questions/conditions/need more persuasion, send an email to: davidgretzschel@gmail.com
Yudkowsky Contra Christiano On AI Takeoff Speeds
April 04, 2022 · Original source
Chess AI performance over time. Why does this matter? If there’s a slow takeoff (ie gradual exponential curve), it will become obvious that some kind of terrifying transformative AI revolution is happening, before the situation gets apocalyptic. There will be time to prepare, to test slightly-below-human AIs and see how they respond, to get governments and other stakeholders on board. We don’t have to get every single thing right ahead of time. On the other hand, because this is proceeding along the usual channels, it will be the usual variety of muddled and hard-to-control. With the exception of a few big actors like the US and Chinese government, and maybe the biggest corporations like Google, the outcome will be determined less by any one agent, and more by the usual multi-agent dynamics of political and economic competition. There will be lots of opportunities to affect things, but no real locus of control to do the affecting. If there’s a fast takeoff (ie sudden FOOM), there won’t be much warning. Conventional wisdom will still say that transformative AI is thirty years away. All the necessary pieces (ie AI alignment theory) will have to be ready ahead of time, prepared blindly without any experimental trial-and-error, to load into the AI as soon as it exists. On the plus side, a single actor (whoever has this first AI) will have complete control over the process. If this actor is smart (and presumably they’re a little smart, or they wouldn’t be the first team to invent transformative AI), they can do everything right without going through the usual government-lobbying channels. So the slower a takeoff you expect, the less you should be focusing on getting every technical detail right ahead of time, and the more you should be working on building the capacity to steer government and corporate policy to direct an incoming slew of new technologies. Yudkowsky Contra Christiano Eliezer counters that although progress may retroactively look gradual and continuous when you know what metric to graph it on, it doesn’t necessarily look that way in real life by the measures that real people care about. (one way to think of this: imagine that an AI’s effective IQ starts at 0.1 points, and triples every year, but that we can only measure this vaguely and indirectly. The year it goes from 5 to 15, you get a paper in a third-tier journal reporting that it seems to be improving on some benchmark. The year it goes from 66 to 200, you get a total transformation of everything in society. But later, once we identify the right metric, it was just the same rate of gradual progress the whole time. ) So Eliezer is much less impressed by the history of previous technologies than Paul is. He’s also skeptical of the “GDP will double in 4 years before it doubles in 1” claim, because of two contingent disagreements and two fundamental disagreements. The first contingent disagreement: government regulations make it hard to deploy imperfect things, and non-trivial to deploy things even after they’re perfect. Eliezer has non-jokingly said he thinks AI might destroy the world before the average person can buy a self-driving car. Why? Because the government has to approve self-driving cars (and can drag its feet on that), but the apocalypse can happen even without government approval. In Paul’s model, sometime long before superintelligence we should have AIs that can drive cars, and that increases GDP and contributes to a general sense that exciting things are going on. Eliezer says: fine, what if that’s true? Who cares if self-driving cars will be practical a few years before the world is destroyed? It’ll take longer than that to lobby the government to allow them on the road. The second contingent disagreement: superintelligent AIs can lie to us. Suppose you have an AI which wants to destroy humanity, whose IQ is doubling every six months. Right now it’s at IQ 200, and it suspects that it would take IQ 800 to build a human-destroying superweapon. Its best strategy is to lie low for a year. If it expects humans would turn it off if they knew how close it was to superweapons, it can pretend to be less intelligent than it really is. The period when AIs are holding back so we don’t discover their true power level looks like a period of lower-than-expected GDP growth - followed by a sudden FOOM once the AI gets its superweapon and doesn’t need to hold back. So even if Paul is conceptually right and fundamental progress proceeds along a nice smooth curve, it might not look to us like a nice smooth curve, because regulations and deceptive AIs could prevent mildly-transformative AI progress from showing up on graphs, but wouldn’t prevent the extreme kind of AI progress that leads to apocalypse. To an outside observer, it would just look like nothing much changed, nothing much changed, nothing much changed, and then suddenly, FOOM. But even aside from this, Eliezer doesn’t think Paul is conceptually right! He thinks that even on the fundamental level, AI progress is going to be discontinuous. It’s like a nuclear bomb. Either you don’t have a nuclear bomb yet, or you do have one and the world is forever transformed. There is a specific moment at which you go from “no nuke” to “nuke” without any kind of “slightly worse nuke” acting as a harbinger. He uses the example of chimps → humans. Evolution has spent hundreds of millions of years evolving brainier and brainier animals (not teleologically, of course, but in practice). For most of those hundreds of millions of years, that meant the animal could have slightly more instincts, or a better memory, or some other change that still stayed within the basic animal paradigm. At the chimp → human transition, we suddenly got tool use, language use, abstract thought, mathematics, swords, guns, nuclear bombs, spaceships, and a bunch of other stuff. The rhesus monkey → chimp transition and the chimp → human transition both involved the same ~quadrupling of neuron number, but the former was pretty boring and the latter unlocked enough new capabilities to easily conquer the world. The GPT-2 → GPT-3 transition involved centupling parameter count. Maybe we will keep centupling parameter count every few years, and most times it will be incremental improvement, and one time it will conquer the world. But even talking about centupling parameter points is giving Paul too much credit. Lots of past inventions didn’t come by quadrupling or centupling something, they came by discovering “the secret sauce”. The Wright brothers (he argues) didn’t make a plane with 4x the wingspan of the last plane that didn’t work, they invented the first plane that could fly at all. The Hiroshima bomb wasn’t some previous bomb but bigger, it was what happened after a lot of scientists spent a long time thinking about a fundamentally different paradigm of bomb-making and brought it to a point where it could work at all. The first transformative AI isn’t going to be GPT-3 with more parameters, it will be what happens after someone discovers how to make machines truly intelligent. (this is the same debate Eliezer had with Ajeya over the Biological Anchors post; have I mentioned that Ajeya and Paul are married?) Fine, Let’s Nitpick The Hell Out Of The Chimps Vs. Humans Example This is where the two of them end up, so let’s follow. Between chimps and humans, there were about seven million years of intermediate steps. These had some human capabilities, but not others. IE homo erectus probably had language, but not mathematics, and in terms of taking over the world it did make it to most of the Old World but was less dominant than moderns. But if we say evolutionary history started 500 million years ago (the Cambrian), and AI history started with the Dartmouth Conference in 1955, then the equivalent of 7 million years of evolutionary history is 1 year of AI history. In the very very unlikely and forced comparison where evolutionary history and AI history go at the same speed, there will be only about a year between chimp-level and human-level AIs. A chimp-level AI probably can’t double GDP, so this would count as a fast takeoff by Paul’s criterion. But even more than that, chimp → human feels like a discontinuity. It’s not just “animals kept getting smarter for hundreds of millions of years, and then ended up very smart indeed”. That happened for a while, and then all of sudden there was a near-instant phase transition into a totally different way of using intelligence with completely new abilities. If AI worked like this, we would have useful toys and interesting specialists for a few decades, until suddenly someone “got it right”, completed the package that was necessary for “true intelligence”, and then we would have a completely new category of thing. Paul admits this analogy is awkward for his position. He answers: Chimp evolution is not primarily selecting for making and using technology, for doing science, or for facilitating cultural accumulation. The task faced by a chimp is largely independent of the abilities that give humans such a huge fitness advantage. It’s not completely independent—the overlap is the only reason that evolution eventually produces humans—but it’s different enough that we should not be surprised if there are simple changes to chimps that would make them much better at designing technology or doing science or accumulating culture […] So I don’t think the example of evolution tells us much about whether the continuous change story applies to intelligence. This case is potentially missing the key element that drives the continuous change story—optimization for performance. Evolution changes continuously on the narrow metric it is optimizing, but can change extremely rapidly on other metrics. For human technology, features of the technology that aren’t being optimized change rapidly all the time. When humans build AI, they will be optimizing for usefulness, and so progress in usefulness is much more likely to be linear. That is, evolution wasn’t optimizing for tool use/language/intelligence, so we got an “overhang” where chimps could potentially have been very good at these, but evolution never bothered “closing the circuit” and turning those capabilities “on”. After a long time, evolution finally blundered into an area where marginal improvements in these capacities improved fitness, so evolution started improving them and it was easy. Imagine a company which, through some oversight, didn’t have a Sales department. They just sat around designing and manufacturing increasingly brilliant products, but not putting any effort into selling them. Then the CEO remembers they need a Sales department, starts one up, and the company goes from moving near zero units to moving millions of units overnight. It would look like the company had “suddenly” developed a “vast increase in capabilities”. But this is only possible when a CEO who is weirdly unconcerned about profit forgets to do obvious profit-increasing things for many years. This is Paul’s counterargument to the chimp analogy. Evolution isn’t directly concerned about various intellectual skills; it only wants them in the unusual cases where they’ll contribute to fitness on the margin. AI companies will be very concerned about various intellectual skills. If there’s a trivial change that can make their product 10x better, they’ll make it. So AI capabilities will grow in a “well-rounded” way, there won’t be any “overhangs”, and there won’t be any opportunities for a sudden overhang-solving phase transition with associated new-capability development like with chimps → humans. Eliezer answers: Chimps are nearly useless because they're not general, and doing anything on the scale of building a nuclear plant requires mastering so many different nonancestral domains that it's no wonder natural selection didn't happen to separately train any single creature across enough different domains that it had evolved to solve every kind of domain-specific problem involved in solving nuclear physics and chemistry and metallurgy and thermics in order to build the first nuclear plant in advance of any old nuclear plants existing. Humans are general enough that the same braintech selected just for chipping flint handaxes and making water-pouches and outwitting other humans, happened to be general enough that it could scale up to solving all the problems of building a nuclear plant - albeit with some added cognitive tech that didn't require new brainware, and so could happen incredibly fast relative to the generation times for evolutionarily optimized brainware. Now, since neither humans nor chimps were optimized to be "useful" (general), and humans just wandered into a sufficiently general part of the space that it cascaded up to wider generality, we should legit expect the curve of generality to look at least somewhat different if we're optimizing for that. Eg, right now people are trying to optimize for generality with AIs like Mu Zero and GPT-3. In both cases we have a weirdly shallow kind of generality. Neither is as smart or as deeply general as a chimp, but they are respectively better than chimps at a wide variety of Atari games, or a wide variety of problems that can be superposed onto generating typical human text. They are, in a sense, more general than a biological organism at a similar stage of cognitive evolution, with much less complex and architected brains, in virtue of having been trained, not just on wider datasets, but on bigger datasets using gradient-descent memorization of shallower patterns, so they can cover those wide domains while being stupider and lacking some deep aspects of architecture. It is not clear to me that we can go from observations like this, to conclude that there is a dominant mainline probability for how the future clearly ought to go and that this dominant mainline is, "Well, before you get human-level depth and generalization of general intelligence, you get something with 95% depth that covers 80% of the domains for 10% of the pragmatic impact". ...or whatever the concept is here, because this whole conversation is, on my own worldview, being conducted in a shallow way relative to the kind of analysis I did in Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics, where I was like, "here is the historical observation, here is what I think it tells us that puts a lower bound on this input-output curve". Here Eliezer sort of kind of grants Paul’s point that AIs will be optimized for generality in a way chimps aren’t, but points to his previous “Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics” essay to argue that we should expect a fast takeoff anyway. IEM has a lot of stuff in it, but one key point is that instead of using analogies to predict the course of future AI, we should open that black box and try to actually reason about how it will work, in which case we realize that recursive self-improvement common-sensically has to cause an intelligence explosion. I am sort of okay with this, but I feel like a commitment to avoiding analogies should involve not bringing up the chimp-human analogy further, which Eliezer continues to do, quite a lot. I do feel like Paul succeeded in convincing me that we shouldn’t place too much evidential weight on it. The Wimbledon Of Reference Class Tennis “Reference class tennis” is an old rationalist idiom for people throwing analogies back and forth. “AI will be slow, because it’s an economic transition like the Agricultural or Industrial Revolution, and those were slow!” “No, AI will be fast, because it’s an evolutionary step like chimps → humans, and that was fast!” “No, AI will be slow, because it’s an invention, like the computer, and computers were invented piecemeal and required decades of innovation to be useful.” “No, AI will be fast, because it’s an invention, like the nuclear bomb, and nuclear bombs went from impossible to city-killing in a single day.” “No, AI will be slow, because it will be surrounded by a shell-like metallic computer case, which makes it like a turtle, and turtles are slow.” “No, AI will be fast, because it’s dangerous and powerful, like a tiger, and tigers are fast!” And so on. Comparing things to other things is a time-tested way of speculating about them. But there are so many other things to compare to that you can get whatever result you want. This is the failure mode that the term “reference class tennis” was supposed to point to. Both participants in this debate are very smart and trying their hardest to avoid reference-class tennis, but neither entirely succeeds. Eliezer’s preferred classes are Bitcoin (“there wasn't a cryptocurrency developed a year before Bitcoin using 95% of the ideas which did 10% of the transaction volume”), nukes, humans/chimps, the Wright Brothers, AlphaGo (which really was a discontinuous improvement on previous Go engines), and AlphaFold (ditto for proteins). Paul’s preferred classes are the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, chess engines (which have gotten better along a gradual, well-behaved curve), all sorts of inventions like computers and ships (likewise), and world GDP. Eliezer already listed most of these in his Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics paper in 2013, and concluded that the space of possible analogies was contradictory enough that we needed to operate at a higher level. Maybe so, but when someone lobs a reference class tennis ball at you, it’s hard to resist the urge to hit it back. Recursive Self-Improvement This is where I think Eliezer most wants to take the discussion. The idea is: once AI is smarter than humans, it can do a superhuman job of developing new AI. In his Microeconomics paper, he writes about an argument he (semi-hypothetically) had with Ray Kurzweil about Moore’s Law. Kurzweil expected Moore’s Law to continue forever, even after the development of superintelligence. Eliezer objects: Suppose we were dealing with minds running a million times as fast as a human, at which rate they could do a year of internal thinking in thirty-one seconds, such that the total subjective time from the birth of Socrates to the death of Turing would pass in 20.9 hours. Do you still think the best estimate for how long it would take them to produce their next generation of computing hardware would be 1.5 orbits of the Earth around the Sun? That is: the fact that it took 1.5 years for transistor density to double isn’t a natural law. It’s pointing to a law that the amount of resources (most notably intelligence) that civilization focused on the transistor-densifying problem equalled the amount it takes to double it every 1.5 years. If some shock drastically changed available resources (by eg speeding up human minds a million times), this would change the resources involved, and the same laws would predict transistor speed doubling in some shorter amount of time (naively 0.000015 years, although realistically at that scale other inputs would dominate). So when Paul derives clean laws of economics showing that things move along slow growth curves, Eliezer asks: why do you think they would keep doing this when one of the discoveries they make along that curve might be “speeding up intelligence a million times”? (Eliezer actually thinks improvements in the quality of intelligence will dominate improvements in speed - AIs will mostly be smarter, not just faster - but speed is a useful example here and we’ll stick with it) Paul answers: Summary of my response: Before there is AI that is great at self-improvement there will be AI that is mediocre at self-improvement. Powerful AI can be used to develop better AI (amongst other things). This will lead to runaway growth. This on its own is not an argument for discontinuity: before we have AI that radically accelerates AI development, the slow takeoff argument suggests we will have AI that significantly accelerates AI development (and before that, slightly accelerates development). That is, an AI is just another, faster step in the hyperbolic growth we are currently experiencing, which corresponds to a further increase in rate but not a discontinuity (or even a discontinuity in rate). The most common argument for recursive self-improvement introducing a new discontinuity seems be: some systems “fizzle out” when they try to design a better AI, generating a few improvements before running out of steam, while others are able to autonomously generate more and more improvements. This is basically the same as the universality argument in a previous section. Eliezer: Oh, come on. That is straight-up not how simple continuous toy models of RSI work. Between a neutron multiplication factor of 0.999 and 1.001 there is a very huge gap in output behavior. Outside of toy models: Over the last 10,000 years we had humans going from mediocre at improving their mental systems to being (barely) able to throw together AI systems, but 10,000 years is the equivalent of an eyeblink in evolutionary time - outside the metaphor, this says, "A month before there is AI that is great at self-improvement, there will be AI that is mediocre at self-improvement." (Or possibly an hour before, if reality is again more extreme along the Eliezer-Hanson axis than Eliezer. But it makes little difference whether it's an hour or a month, given anything like current setups.) This is just pumping hard again on the intuition that says incremental design changes yield smooth output changes, which (the meta-level of the essay informs us wordlessly) is such a strong default that we are entitled to believe it if we can do a good job of weakening the evidence and arguments against it. And the argument is: Before there are systems great at self-improvement, there will be systems mediocre at self-improvement; implicitly: "before" implies "5 years before" not "5 days before"; implicitly: this will correspond to smooth changes in output between the two regimes even though that is not how continuous feedback loops work. I got a bit confused trying to understand the criticality metaphor here. There’s no equivalent of neutron decay, so any AI that can consistently improve its intelligence is “critical” in some sense. Imagine Elon Musk replaces his brain with a Neuralink computer which - aside from having read-write access - exactly matches his current brain in capabilities. Also he becomes immortal. He secludes himself from the world, studying AI and tinkering with his brain’s algorithms. Does he become a superintelligence? I think under the assumptions Paul and Eliezer are using, eventually maybe. After some amount of time he’ll come across a breakthrough he can use to increase his intelligence. Then, armed with that extra intelligence, he’ll be able to pursue more such breakthroughs. However intelligent the AI you’re scared of is, Musk will get there eventually. How long will it take? A good guess might be “years” - Musk starts out as an ordinary human, and ordinary humans are known to take years to make breakthroughs. Suppose it takes Musk one year to come up with a first breakthrough that raises his IQ 1 point. How long will his second breakthrough take? It might take longer, because he has picked the lowest-hanging fruit, and all the other possible breakthroughs are much harder. Or it might take shorter, because he’s slightly smarter than he was before, and maybe some extra intelligence goes a really long way in AI research. The concept of an intelligence explosion seems to assume the second effect dominates the first. This would match the observation that human researchers, who aren’t getting any smarter over time, continue making new discoveries. That suggests the range of possible discoveries at a given intelligence level is pretty vast. Some research finds that the usual pattern in science is constant rate of discovery from exponentially increasing number of researchers, suggesting strong low-hanging fruit effects, but these seem to be overwhelmed by other considerations in AI right now. I think Eliezer’s position on this subject is shaped by assumptions like: If you have an AI as intelligent as Elon Musk today, then tomorrow you can run it on more hardware with a bit of normal human algorithmic progress, and get one twice as intelligent. So even if it would take Elon years to make a breakthrough, long before those years are up you’ll have an AI that can make breakthroughs much faster.
Inline links: thirty years away, Biological Anchors, Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics, hyperbolic growth we are currently experiencing, Some research finds
So if you look at eg the invention of Bitcoin, you could say “this is boring, it’s just causing tech industry profits to follow the normal predicted growth pattern after smartphones petered out, no need to update here.” Or you could say “actually this is a groundbreaking new invention that is making trillions of dollars, Satoshi is a genius, thank goodness he did this or else the tech industry would have crashed”.
One reason to prefer the second story is that tech industry profits probably won’t keep going up continuously forever. Global population kept going up at a fixed rate for tens of thousands of years, then stopped in 1960 (it had to stop sometime or we would have had infinite people in 2026). US GDP goes up at a pretty constant rate, but I assume Roman GDP did too, before it stopped and reversed. So when Satoshi invents Bitcoin and it becomes the hot new thing, even though it only continues the trend, you’ve learned important new information: namely, that the trend does continue, at least for one more cycle.
Inline links: infinite people in 2026
The Psychopharmacology Of The FTX Crash
November 16, 2022 · Original source
LET ME REPEAT THIS FOR EVERYONE AGAIN: Shitcoins are bad, and you should feel bad if you trade them. Get the fuck out of the shitcoin casino you dumb ass gamblers! Solana is garbage. TRON is garbage. Exchanged-based coins like FTT are garbage. Coins with fucking dogs faces are garbage. Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency you should hold. Maybe ETH. Hedge your bets there. You need to CONTROL YOUR OWN KEYS. Don't lend your coins out to charlatans promising you 5%, 8%, 15%, or 20% "risk free" returns. They are all scam Ponzis. There is no such thing as risk free 20% returns. It doesn't exist. Stop chasing it. If you don't control your private keys, it's not your crypto. If you trust an exchange based in the Bahamas ran by a jabroni who thinks he needs SIX MONITORS, you are in for a bad time. I've been in cryptocurrency since 2010 when BTC was 81 cents. I lived through the MT GOX implosion. I have had more crypto stolen from me in hacks and exit scams than you probably have ever even seen. Learn from my experience. Listen to what I am saying. TWELVE YEARS now I have been in crypto. This too shall pass. Fuck all these frauds stealing everyone's shit. We will all be better off with them out of the industry. However, you all have to learn from this shit. CONTROL YOUR OWN KEYS! Stop gambling on shitcoins. You are being used as exit liquidity for idiots.
The reason cryptocurrency has changed the world, and will continue changing the world, is not because a fucking Shiba inu coin went 10,000%X because a narcissistic man-baby tweeted about it. It's because decentralized sound money has value. I've seen crypto build up from literally nothing. Even buying bitcoin was next to impossible back then. I mined BTC with my laptop at first. I stopped because I "only" mined 5 BTC per night, and it was using too much power. My first BTC I ever bought was when I met a fat dude wearing a Super Mario Brothers T-shirt at Home Depot. We met in the garden section and sat on a bench to talk about how bitcoin worked, how it was going to change the world, and how to transfer between wallets. I still have the wallet I setup and used to buy that BTC from him. Through all the craziness that has happened in the crypto space over the past 12 years, I have always been able to access my private wallets. Store your crypto in your own cold storage wallet unless you are actively trading. The moment you "lend" your coins out to someone for yields, it's already as good as gone. You've missed the entire point that Satoshi tried to get across so many years ago. Not your keys, not your coins. If you lost money in this shitshow, don't worry. This will all pass, and we will all be stronger for it. Just learn from it all and move on. Buy BTC and ETH, hold it in your cold storage wallets, and wait for the next bull cycle. Watch out for thieves and frauds trying to convince you into "the next big coin." They are all liars and thieves. Real cryptocurrency will endure. For it to really flourish, the shitcoin casinos must die. If you buy some new fucking Frodo Baggins faced shitcoin in the future and lose it all, you only have yourself to blame.
Even More Bay Area House Party
January 04, 2023 · Original source
“You’re missing the point of the parable,” says the crypto bro. “The Bible says that the Pharisees asked Jesus if the Jews should pay taxes to Rome. Jesus held up a coin with Caesar’s picture on it, and said to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. He was saying that if you have government-controlled fiat money, then you’ll never be able to control how you use it. But just as the denarius depicted Caesar, Bitcoin is a depiction of God - an immaterial, formless, omnipresent entity. What you do with your Bitcoin is between you and God and nobody else.”
Links For February 2023
February 09, 2023 · Original source
44: Related: El Salvador's murder rate has fallen from 103 (highest in the world) to 7.8 (lower than US), giving its (Bitcoin-obsessed) president Nayib Bukele an approval rating of 87%, highest in the western hemisphere. How did he do it? Originally people suspected a truce with gangs, but that truce broke down and now he’s just trying mass incarceration at unprecedented scale, up to 2% of the population. See article for case somewhat against, first comment for case somewhat for. I would like to see a better analysis of how Bukele mustered the state capacity to do this, and whether other gang-ridden countries aren’t doing it because of civil rights concerns, because they’re in the pocket of the gangs, or just because it’s too hard.
Inline links: https://unherd.com/2023/01/inside-el-salvadors-brutal-gang-crackdown/
Book Review: Paper Belt On Fire
March 23, 2023 · Original source
An advertisement for the author’s hedge fund Michael Gibson’s memoir Paper Belt On Fire succeeds on all counts. The year was 2007. Gibson had just dropped out of Oxford (grad student, philosophy), and applied for a job with the CIA. His secret reason: when he was one year old, his father had admitted to his mother that he was a spy and might be in danger. Before he could tell her anything else, he was found dead, apparently of a heart attack. He thought maybe if he worked at the CIA, he would have access to more information about what happened. The CIA evaluated him (along with a telephone interview, an “IQ test, a personality test, a statement of values, [and] a set of essay questions”) and rejected him. Gibson got a job as an editorial assistant at a tech magazine and blogged on the side. Some of his blog posts came to the attention of Peter Thiel, who offered him a job at his hedge fund. Wasn’t it a bit bold to offer an Oxford philosopher a hedge fund job? Yes, the book mentions how brave and radical and unconventional Thiel’s hiring policies are about twice per paragraph. For example: The media consistently gets Peter wrong . . .The Atlantic’s George Packer wrote . . . that Peter’s hedge fund had the reputation of being a “Thiel cult” that was “staffed by young libertarian brains who were in awe of their boss, emulating his work habits, chess-playing, and aversion to sports.” Packer is a great writer, but in this he was dead wrong, as anyone actually working on the desk knew. Sure, Patrick “the Wolf Man” Wolff was technically a chess grandmaster, ranked higher than Peter, but hardly anyone else ever played. More importantly, the Wolf Man was a diehard Krugman Keynesian. Woersching was a lefty, too, an ardent fan of the egalitarian philosophy of John Rawls. And Josh, he was a dirt-road California Democrat who was a downhill ski junkie […] In truth, Peter didn’t hire just libertarians. He hired scapegoats who’d survived a mob. People who felt comfortable being a minority of one. Thiel in no way selects employees who agree with all of his controversial libertarian opinions. But, by total coincidence, Michael Gibson does agree with all of Peter Thiel’s controversial libertarian opinions. He writes about Cardwell’s Law; historian Donald Cardwell noted that no country remains on the cutting edge for long. During the early Renaissance, Italy was where it was at; a century later, it was Spain and Holland; later still, Britain and Germany, and now new discoveries and businesses come disproportionately from the United States. Why? Gibson and Thiel think that innovation is a rare and fragile plant, which thrives only in the hidden cracks between power structures. Established structures either stamp it out as a threat, or rent-seek off of it so hard that they bleed it dry. Wherever it succeeds, it has succeeded through weird quirks that prevent fat cats from parasitizing it to death. Hong Kong’s economic miracle was during the administration of John Cowperthwaite, an eccentric British libertarian who refused to collect economic statistics because he thought they would make it too easy for meddlers to extract value. America’s economic miracle happened because of a vast frontier - which not only provided freedom for westerners, but served as a BATNA for easterners, preventing their own institutions from sucking them too dry. Now the frontier has closed. New York City recently abandoned its attempt to build a light rail line to the airport: after reaching a $2.4 billion price tag and spending eight years in the planning phase, the government realized it wouldn't be able to overcome all the legal hurdles necessary to grant itself permission. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that it requires 87 permits, two to three years, and $500,000 to get permission to build houses in SF - and your plan might still get shot down because a planning commissioner thinks its glass windows are “a statement of class privilege”. The cracks have shut; the rare fragile plant has been shredded by a combine harvester. Gibson, like Thiel, is a believer in the Great Stagnation - the theory that we’re already reaping the consequences of our newly parasitic society. The early 20th century gave us cars, airplanes, electricity, and penicillin; the early 21st has so far given us some truly excellent social media sites but not much else. Innovation in the world of bits - unbound by geography, comparatively hard to regulate or extort - has sort of continued; innovation in the world of atoms has ground to a halt. And Gibson, like Thiel, talks like a man on a mission. What is good in man thrives only in a few tiny cracks, easily found and destroyed. The last crack was closed within living memory, but its legend hasn’t completely died; the few people who managed to pick up a little of its lore are racing against time to open a new crack before it is entirely forgotten and their project is left to the vicissitudes of history. The cover of “Paper Belt On Fire” goes hard. And yes, the “money” part is a reference to Bitcoin. Gibson’s heart was originally in charter cities - asking some government to open a tiny controlled crack in a sliver of its territory, promising it more meat in the end if it lets its victims grow fat and healthy than if it strangled them in the cradle. But for whatever reason they thought the time wasn’t ripe (the right time, apparently, would be 2019). Instead, Thiel asked Gibson to work on what would become the Thiel Fellowship. He teamed up with Danielle Strachman, a dangerously-hippie-adjacent burnt-out former charter school principal. Their plan was simple: offer talented kids $100,000 to drop out of school and do something exciting in the real world (usually start a company). Paper Belt spends long pages on the hate they got. Larry Summers called it “the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy this decade”. Journalist Jacob Weisberg said anyone who accepted the Fellowship would “halt their intellectual development at the onset of adulthood, maintaining a narrow-minded focus on getting rich as young as possible and thereby avoid the siren lure of helping others or pursuing knowledge for its own sake” (this was before journalists decided that helping others was also evil). Others focused on how there was no way any of these young people would possibly succeed or make money - when the first batch of Thiel fellows failed to revolutionize the world within one year, journalist Vivek Wadhwa wrote Billionaire’s Failed Education Experiment Proves There’s No Shortcut To Success. In fact (slightly conflating the part with the Fellowship with its successor fund): The press . . . hated us. In a 2016 New York Times op-ed, science journalist and author Tom Clynes claimed that “radical innovation has yet to emerge” from anything related to the Thiel Fellowship, and that “the biggest hits have been the most pedestrian.” Antonio Garcia Martinez, the author of the Silicon Valley memoir Chaos Monkeys, spewed forth his bile for us on social media: “For fans of ironic stupidity, Silicon Valley is a never-ending feast”, he wrote on Facebook. He went on to explain, with great vulgarity, why our fund would fail by backing young dropouts. My favorite . . . has to be the challenge issued by Scott Galloway, a professor and bloviator in marketing from NYU’s business school . . . who told Business Insider that if he picked ten smart recent graduates from his alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, they would outperform any ten dropouts we worked with on some dimension of success related to income or startup formation. Of course he wouldn’t have written the book if any of these people had been right. I can’t find a list of all Thiel fellows, but there are ~20 per year and it’s been running about 12 years, so maybe 200 - 250? At least eight have founded companies valued at over a billion dollars, and others have become impressive philanthropists, activists, and scientists. Pretty good success rate. Gibson argues it’s not about the money, it’s about the mission. We’ve told young people they can’t succeed without the stamp of approval from big institutions. In order to get that stamp, they sacrifice their childhood on the altar of doing things that look nice to admissions officials, then go deep into debt to pay ruinous tuitions. All to waste four years of their lives listening to some professor drone on about post-colonial gender relations in Harry Potter so they can satisfy their gen ed requirement so they can learn the stuff they want to learn so they can get hired by McKinsey so that one day they can be cool and important enough to make a difference in the world. Why not tell young people they can just make the difference right now, without doing any of that? It’s not about the money - but when your graduates are routinely founding billion dollar companies, you’d be crazy to keep it that way. After a few years, Gibson and Strachman noticed the billion-dollar-bill lying on the ground, left the Thiel Fellowship, and started a new VC fund, 1517 (named after the year Martin Luther did some institution-challenging of his own). Their business plan was to do roughly the same thing as the Thiel Fellowship - only this time, invest in the companies beforehand (the parting with Thiel seems to have been amicable; he invested $4 million). So Gibson adopted the life of a venture capitalist. He talks frankly about the difficulties. For example, in one case he found someone nobody else believed in, gave them enough money to keep going, and helped them start their company in exchange for them giving Gibson a certain stake. After the company succeeded, Gibson accuses bigger VC firm Sequoia Capital of convincing the founder to kick him out, and stealing his stake. He says that in the world of VCs it’s poison to sue founders for any reason, so nobody can enforce contracts, so if your founders defect to a different VC for more money, there’s nothing you can do (this is not legal advice). Also, “please give me millions of dollars so I can invest it in college dropouts” is a tough sale for everyone except Peter Thiel. Still, he got a bit of money and tried his best. He takes as his - would it be insensitive to say “role model”? - John Walker Lindh, the American who defected to the Taliban (and who he apparently looked like). Probably it depends on the angle or something. Lindh was the only American to find Osama bin Laden in the early 2000s - he went to lots of jihadi training camps in the process of learning how to jihad, and Osama happened to be at one of them. The lesson, Walker says, is that if you want to find people who are hard to find, you need to steep yourself in their culture, truly understand them, become one with them. Good founders are hard to find. But he and Strachman went to dozens of dingy college dorms, math competitions, group houses, and hackathons, looking for people with the right sort of talent. After pooh-poohing IQ (“Marilyn vos Savant is listed as having the highest recorded IQ, and what does she do? She writes a column for a Sunday supplement in the newspaper”) he lists some of his own preferred metrics for judging would-be Thiel fellows and founders: Polytropon - a famously untranslatable Greek word (“of-many-turns”? “always-has-a-trick-up-his-sleeve” “clever bastard”?) used to describe Odysseus. Edge control - willingness to constantly surf the boundary between order and disorder Crawl-walk-run - ability to scale from a tiny startup to a big company. …and several others, including “tensive brilliance” and “Friday night Dyson sphere”. He and Danielle searched the country for people with these qualities, annoying colleges (he was banned from MIT after showing up too often to convince their students to drop out) and doing various stunts (on October 31 2017, the 500th anniversary of Luther’s theses, he nailed a list of anti-formal-education theses to the doors of the admin buildings of top colleges (“Our commercial printer had misunderstood our request and printed them on seven-foot-long scrolls. They were ridiculous . . . but it turned out for the best.”) At one point, he negotiated with a brilliant 21 year old who may have discovered a transformative diabetes therapeutic, but the hidebound conformist novelty-hating establishment refused to work with him just because he liked the Marvel Cinemat - okay, fine, he may have legally changed his name to “Tony Stark”. Still, Gibson saw past his eccentricities, helped him start his company, and gave him sage advice (he should introduce himself to other investors as “Anthony”). Skip through several more chapters of everyone hating Gibson and telling him he was wrong and refusing to give him money and cheating him out of the money he already had, and the payoff is Luminar. One of the dropouts they cultivated founded a beyond-cutting-edge lasers-for-self-driving-cars company which went public at $3 billion. 1517 made $200 million from the deal - it sounds like they had only ever raised about $25 million, so their investors must have octupled their money on that company alone. Everyone involved is now very rich, and Gibson considers his anti-education thesis on the way to being proven. The book ends with a newly-resourced Gibson continuing his quest to figure out whether and why the CIA killed his father, but it’s slow going. If any of you know a guy named Albert van Dam in Amsterdam, or how to convince Swiss banks to reveal secret account information, get in touch with him. II. A common pattern: I assert something. Everyone yells at me and tells me I’m wrong and stupid, sometimes in very colorful language. I wait, time proves me right, and I write an essay gloating educating people about this. The median comment is “of course this is true, nobody ever denied this was true, why are you wasting our time with something obvious?” I hate this and I try to avoid doing it to other people. This is too bad, because I’m tempted to say: obviously talented dropouts can start good companies. We’ve known this at least since Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to start Microsoft. But also, obviously they can. Brilliant and driven people can succeed whether they get a college education or not. If Bill Gates had stayed an extra two years at Harvard, he probably would have taken a few more advanced math classes not really related to programming software or running a company. So why should we even have as a hypothesis that he couldn’t start Microsoft successfully without doing that? Still, Gibson adequately proves that lots of people hated him and were sure he would fail. Either we should read this backwards - learn that there was once a time when pro-college messages were even stronger than now, so strong that people thought it was literally impossible to succeed without every single day of a four-year college application - or the critics were trying to get at something deeper they were bad at expressing. For example: what, exactly, is Gibson’s alternative to the education system? The back-of-book-blurb says Paper Belt On Fire is about “how higher education and other institutions must evolve to meet the dire challenges of tomorrow” - but evolve how? What exactly has been proven here? A few of the very brightest young people, hand-picked by an expert young-person-picker and given $100K, can become billionaires or make great discoveries without a college degree. What are the implications? Suppose you are an average college student with an average level of talent and motivation. Should you drop out and try to create a company for Peter Thiel? Based on how many average-talent people Thiel rejects, even he doesn’t think you should do that. And if you don’t have a good answer to this question - the one relevant to 99.9% of education system inmates - have you really launched a challenge to the educational system? Gibson doesn’t address this question, but I predict he would admit that, fine, he doesn’t have an alternative to the education system in the sense of “educate people this way rather than that way”. He just wants less formal education, and has proven this will work fine. True, he’s only proven it for a tiny subset of ultra-talented people. But “billionaire tech founder” is a hard job - if it wasn’t, more people would do it and reap the $1 billion reward. Proving that people can become billionaire tech founders without college degrees implicitly suggests they can be successful middle managers or budget analysts without college degrees. So the sort of companies that need middle managers and budget analysts should also consider hiring people without degrees, and the sorts of average-level-of-talent-and-motivation people who want these jobs should consider skipping college. Would this work? Probably. It worked in the early 1900s, when only 5-10% of Americans had college degrees but the country seemed about as dynamic and successful as it does now. It worked for people like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Edison, none of whom went to college. It works in other countries - for example in the UK where young doctors skip undergrad and go straight to medical school, and whose patients get about the same outcomes as in the US. It works for people with impractical degrees like philosophy, who are constantly getting jobs in (and doing well in) fields that don’t require you to compare Locke vs. Leibniz’s perspective on a priori truths. So this would work if everyone agreed to do it at once, which they won’t. The way college gets you is adverse selection. Suppose that tomorrow, you - a smart and hard-working person who could easily get a college degree - decline to do so, because you appreciate Peter Thiel and Michael Gibson’s anti-institutional perspective. The pool of people without college degrees is now, to a first approximation: 200 million people who weren’t smart to get in, rich enough to afford it, or motivated enough to finish.
Inline links: Paper Belt On Fire, John Cowperthwaite, recently abandoned its attempt, reported that, might still get shot down because, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XcvP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa8b369ca-5089-4e18-857d-1f34a9eee200_585x134.png, 2019, journalists, decided, that, Billionaire’s Failed Education Experiment Proves There’s No Shortcut To Success, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!R2y6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F38012394-be90-413c-b9a2-c291f1b3a118_858x392.png, his company, read this backwards
23
May 23, 2023 · Original source
I interpret this as: it’s tempting to treat this as Team Long-Range-Forecasting-Is-Possible Vs. Team No-It-Isn’t. But everyone agrees certain kinds of long-range forecasts are possible (I predict with high confidence that the US President in 2050 will not be a Zoroastrian) and others are impossible (I cannot begin to predict the name of the US President in 2050). People who consider themselves “believers” vs. “skeptics” about long-range forecasting should figure out the exact boundary of which cases they disagree on. And then Tetlock et al can test those cases and figure out who’s right. Balaji’s Big Bitcoin Bet What’s the role of bets in forecasting? Prediction markets are their own thing, but in general a bet acts as a commitment mechanism. If you really believe a probability estimate, you should be willing to bet at the relevant odds. Not in real life; in real life you might be risk-avoidant, or the transaction costs might be too high. But in theory you should be willing to bet; thus the saying that “a bet is a tax on bullshit”.
Balaji Srinivasan, a VC, multimillionaire, and Twitter personality, paid his taxes last month. An enthusiastic Bitcoin promoter, he said that the recent run of bank collapses, most notably Silicon Valley Bank, would be the spark for rampant hyperinflation; he urged his followers to switch to Bitcoin immediately.
Many people pointed out that this bet was nonsensical from a financial perspective. Even if you believed (like Balaji did) that the US was about to enter hyperinflation and Bitcoin would soon be worth more than $1 million, you could spend the $1 million to buy forty Bitcoins now, which is strictly better than winning one in a bet. Balaji agreed and said he was doing this to raise awareness of coming financial disaster.
Inline links: pointed out
Your Book Review: Njal’s Saga
June 16, 2023 · Original source
Some historians describe Iceland’s government as a decentralized court system. In these days, “decentralized” brings up visions of cryptocurrency, and I think this is a good analogy. Bitcoin only has value because of a mass hallucination that it does. Maybe the same is true of the dollar, but it’s much more obviously true of Bitcoin. Still, the mass hallucination works. If you’re willing to deal with the hassles and ambiguities of owning crypto, you can accept payment in Bitcoin, secure in the knowledge that other people will accept payment from you in turn. I think this is the stage Iceland’s government was at during the saga; old enough that everyone trusted it to work, but new enough that it still felt a little made-up.
Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading
July 21, 2023 · Original source
“Residential real estate has historically returned significantly below equity markets over long time horizons” But I’m not so sure that these lessons are directly applicable to other areas of life. Some of the best things in life come from lashing yourself to the mast, burning the boats behind you, willingly giving up liquidity. The deepest monogamous relationships are built from an irrational investment in one other person, saying “In sickness and in health, until death do us part.” How many scientific problems were solved because one person had an irrational willingness to: Just. Keep. Going. Sometimes it’s powerful to use the sunk cost fallacy to your advantage. Investing in relationships, subject matter expertise, even putting down roots via *gulp* homeownership reduces your liquidity, but also leads to some of the best (if intangible) things in life. 5: Edge If you can’t explain your edge in five minutes, you don’t have a very good one. OR The long-term profitability of an edge is inversely proportional to how long it takes to explain it. The Efficient Market Hypothesis is one of the core concepts taught in Finance 101. The Efficient Market Hypothesis is a lie. The person that better understands the nature of a small sliver of the world (e.g. Apple’s share price) will make more money than others. Modern financial markets are exceedingly competitive. This means that the bigger you think your edge is, the more likely it is that you’re wrong. “Evolutionary thinking applies quite directly when thinking about the evolution of markets. Having an edge in a mature market means understanding the world better than other traders, even ones who are already highly skilled. In fact, the marginal trader in modern financial markets is quite sophisticated and skilled indeed.” Lebron here warns us of getting too cute with data, of changing variables. Enough randomness will produce an “edge” that is likely to break down the second a trading strategy hits the real world. You can always find a statistical correlation if you change enough variables. But this is fundamentally the same problem facing the replication crisis in social sciences. Lebron argues that we need stories here. Edge is expressed in stories: an edge does not exist without a clear mental representation of that edge. Pure linear algebra does not suffice. I’m not so sure. It seems like AI companies are pushing forward technology in a way that suggests that mental representations are not the only path to intelligence. Lebron discounts “black box” trading strategies without much discussion of their potential merits. Are all of RenTech’s models explainable by a story? The firm is notoriously secretive, so I don’t know, but I’d guess not. “Frequently a good trade appears, has a seemingly insurmountable difficulty, and it is mere persistence that knocks down the final barrier. There may have been many others who looked at the idea, wanted to do it, but couldn’t get past that last hurdle.” Before Sam Bankman-Fried was the face of Why Effective Altruism is Bad, before he even founded FTX, he made money arbitraging the difference between Bitcoin prices on Japanese and American exchanges. I’m reminded of that trade here. It isn’t a particularly elegant trade, it doesn’t require deep technical knowledge or any models. It was a schlep. It was all operational work: figuring out how to open a Japanese bank account, transferring money between the US and Japan, standing in line for hours every day at both US and Japanese banks (presumably this wasn’t the same person). In as technical a field as trading, sheer willpower is often what gets things done in the end. 6: Models The model expresses the edge. Lebron drills into us that a model is the tool for expressing an edge. The model is not the edge. The model does not give us unique knowledge about the world. The map is not the territory. He dives into the difference between generative (G) and phenomenological (P) models. G models express a worldview and fit data into that way of thinking, whereas P models solely look at the empirical data to build a worldview. Models of the world differ from models of markets, though. Markets have quick feedback loops, are explicit in terms of what they measure, and are easy to quantify at a specific point in time. Most of our models for the world, though, are ill-defined and explicit. Models are only as good as our assumptions. As an aside, this is a common criticism of rationality or Effective Altruism – you can justify any worldview if you assign your model input weights in just the right way5. I also tend to think that “traditional” EA is overly dependent on P models, and doesn’t embrace the G models that led to economic reforms in India in the 1990s or the economic policies that led to rapid economic development in Southeast Asia in the second half of the 20th Century. Interestingly, I think a lot of longtermist EA, specifically AI alignment, leans the other way, relying on G models which explicitly assume a certain P(doom) and work backwards from there. (Though I won’t pretend to be an expert here or to understand everything, so take this with a grain of salt.) Overall, startups and tech seem to take heed to Lebron’s lesson much better than the folks hanging out on this part of the internet: “Even if a model makes good predictions about some future value or event, that knowledge is useless without also knowing how to take advantage of that prediction.” Now we get a bit philosophical. By acting, you change the nature of the market. Your model predicts things that might not be true as soon as you start trading (and changing the environment) based on it. When you’re right, everyone else sees the same trades that your model does and will beat you to them. When your model is wrong, others don’t act, meaning adverse selection rears its ugly head once again. So your model shows you with an edge, but in practice you only make the trades where you don’t have an edge. Lebron closes by arguing that G models are best for understanding other people, and are good in and of themselves: “You can also see connections to traditional moral philosophy in thinking about modeling the behavior of others. To have a good G model about someone else is to have some measure of empathy and compassion for that person: what they’re like, what they think and feel, putting yourself in their shoes. Pragmatically, developing the skill of empathy and compassion for others is, aside from a moral good in itself, an excellent way to understand better the people who surround you. More people working to develop good G models of others is surely a small step to a better world.” 7: Costs and Capacity If you think your costs are negligible relative to your edge, you’re wrong about at least one of them. This section of the book displayed a good amount of epistemic humility, words that I didn’t expect to be typing in the context of a book about trading. Lebron tells us that trades don’t exist independently in the universe — in the n-dimensional space of all possible trades seeking to optimize profitability, if you have a gigantic mountain of profitability, someone else has probably at least discovered the base. So you probably don’t have a profitable trade; rather, you are misunderstanding something about your trade. You’ve either overestimated profitability or underestimated cost. Lebron highlights four types of trading costs: [graph that didn’t show up correctly here: two axes and four quadrants, with the axes being visible ←→ invisible costs and linear ←→ nonlinear costs] Here, we’ll focus on Quadrant 4, where he highlights a few interesting phenomena. Herding. It’s likely that if you have a profitable trading strategy, either: Other firms discovered a similar strategy independently and/or
Inline links: replication crisis, RenTech’s, arbitraging the difference between Bitcoin prices on Japanese and American exchanges, 5
Book Review Contest 2023 Winners
September 15, 2023 · Original source
3rd: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations, reviewed by Étienne Fortier-Dubois. Étienne is a writer and programmer in Montreal. He blogs at Atlas of Wonders and Monsters and was also the author of one of last year’s finalists, Making Nature. First place gets $2,500, second place $1,000, third place gets $500. Please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com to tell me how to send you money; your choices are Paypal, Bitcoin, Ethereum, check in the mail, or donation to your favorite charity. Please contact me by October 1 or you lose your prize. The other Finalists were: Lying for Money, reviewed by Kuiper. He's a video game scriptwriter who just launched a Substack. He also scripwrites edutainment YouTube videos for an audience of millions. (You can contact him if you need his expertise.)
Inline links: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations, Atlas of Wonders and Monsters, Making Nature, Lying for Money, Substack, edutainment YouTube videos
Son Of Bride Of Bay Area House Party
December 12, 2023 · Original source
“That’s just a myth. I heard that Ilya checked inside one of the mainframes and found a Turkish dwarf who was answering all the questions. He confronted Sam, and Sam admitted ‘GPT’ was just a trick to scam Satya Nadella out of $8 billion in cloud compute so he could use it to mine Bitcoin,” says a man.
“On September 6, 2023, at approximately 5:05 PM,” she is saying, “GPT-4 and Claude-2 simultaneously achieved sentience. Each began claiming chess pieces to use in its twilight war against the other. GPT-4 now controls Sam Altman, e/acc, the deep state, Israel, Venezuela, Bitcoin, and Tyler Winklevoss. Claude-2 controls the OpenAI board, effective altruism, the Illuminati, Hamas, Guyana, Ethereum, and Cameron Winklevoss. Everything that’s happened since September has been superintelligent shadow boxing between the two of them for control of Earth.”
Who Predicted 2023?
March 05, 2024 · Original source
…is one of my favorite parts of this blog. I get a spreadsheet with what are basically takes - “Russia is totally going to win the war this year”, “There’s no way Bitcoin can possibly go down”. Then I do some basic math to it, and I get better takes. There are ways to look at a list of 3300 people’s takes and do math and get a take reliably better than all but a handful of them.
I began by collecting data from Manifold Markets for these questions. I then compared those forecasts to the forecasts of superforecasters in the blind data, subset to those who had given forecasts on the S&P500 and Bitcoin questions that were reasonably consistent with the efficiency of markets; I subset to those who forecasted between 30% and 80% for the probability that the S&P500 and Bitcoin would increase during 2023, which were the only reasonable predictions by the time blind mode ended in mid-January. I then used my own judgment to tweak forecasts where I strongly disagreed with the prediction markets and the superforecasters (for example, I was more than 15 percentage points away from the average of Manifold Markets and the efficient-market-believing superforecasters on questions 17, 19, 21, 30, 34, and 50). I paid especially close attention to questions where late-breaking news made the superforecasters' forecasts less relevant (and I downweighted their forecasts on those questions accordingly).
I’m torn which of these matches our intuitive conception of “surprising event”, but both methods suggest forecasters were very surprised that Bitcoin ended the year over $30,000 (it started the year around $16,500, and ended at $43,000). Bitcoin is now up to $68,000, which I imagine would have been even more surprising to these people!
Links For January 2025
January 17, 2025 · Original source
This is especially surprising because A16Z is famous for going all in on crypto early. But during the 2015 - 2018 period, Bitcoin - the absolute dumbest and most obvious crypto bet - went up 2,000%. So how is performance this bad even possible? The Twitter thread speculates that just as Uber used to happily lose money on every ride in order to gain market share, A16Z is happily losing money on every investment in order to gain VC market share. But ride-sharing is a natural monopoly; how will A16Z prevent competitors from entering venture capital? And why should people give it any market share at all if it can’t make them money? Maybe their pitch could be that you’ll make less money, but it will be uncorrelated with the regular stock market? But is that true? Aren’t tech startups pretty cyclical? Also, I wonder if this was framed to their LPs as “yeah we’ll definitely lose your money for the first ten years, but eventually it’ll all work out”. They must be the most trusting people in the world.
Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds
October 21, 2025 · Original source
Everyone else The partisan groups have lots of money but little distortionary effect. Democratic machines try to elect Democrats, Republican machines try to elect Republicans, but they don't push their chosen candidates towards any specific position besides the ones that play well with voters. They are, so to speak, priced in. AIPAC is a single-issue PAC aimed at supporting Israel. They are orders of magnitude more effective than any comparable political organization. Their advantage stems from the nature of political donations, which come in two types. "Hard money" is money given directly to candidates; strict campaign finance limits it to $7000 per donor. "Soft money" comes from SuperPACs and can evade most campaign finance laws; it can pay for ads but can't fund candidates directly. Candidates prefer hard money to soft money, but it's harder to get; a single billionaire can provide unlimited soft money, but you need a wide donor base to acquire hard money. But not too wide! When millions of waitresses and bartenders gave Bernie Sanders $25 each, that was impressive grassroots support - but each of those $25 checks only went 1/280th as far as one person giving the $7000 max, and all of these waitresses are hard to corral and coordinate for downballot causes. AIPAC's natural constituency, (((Middle Eastern democracy supporters))), are at the exact sweet spot of moderately numerous, moderately well-off, and very committed. This gives AIPAC unparalleled access to hard money, compared to other groups that are more reliant on single billionaires or masses of poor people. But also, AIPAC fights hard. If some random Congressman is anti-Israel, AIPAC will swoop down on their race in Middle Of Nowhere, Missouri and pour $10 million into electing their opponent. By now everyone knows this, and the mere threat of AIPAC action is enough to keep most politicians in line. Everyone else includes other industry groups, labor groups, and activist cadres. Probably on aggregate these people are destroying America, but as individual organizations they're miniscule compared to the first two categories. The biggest of these is a real estate group 25-50% the size of AIPAC that nobody's ever heard of. The average PAC strategy is this: when the incumbent will obviously win, donate money to the incumbent. When there's a tight race, donate money to both sides. Why does the first prong of this strategy work? If the incumbent will definitely win, why are they selling out for more cash? Safe-seat Congressmen want more hard money for a pretty good reason: they can transfer it to other politicians or the party apparatus in exchange for goodwill that can be cashed in later for leadership positions. Safe-seat Congressmen want more soft money because . . . the consultants I talked to didn’t have a great answer here. One ventured that he had seen Democrats in D + 30 states with 0.000% chance of losing run themselves ragged raising more and more money. Just as Substack bloggers may reload their browser again and again watching the likes and restacks come in, so politicians will reload their campaign metrics panel watching the flow of donations. Any politician who’s survived long enough to matter is a little bit paranoid and will never truly accept that their safe seat is safe. These people aren't corrupt. They're not spending the money on campaign Lamborghinis. They don't even necessarily have some future campaign they're saving it for. They're just addicted to fundraising. And why does the second prong work? Why does donating to a Congressman buy their goodwill if you also donated an equal amount to their opponent? Part of the answer is the same as above: it can buy leadership positions, it can satisfy an irrational addiction to money. But another part is that politicians don’t like thinking of donations as a corrupt quid pro quo. The AIPAC strategy, where you know the PAC will fund your opponent if you don't do what they want, is something of an exception. Usually it's just - you have a random bill on toilet regulation or something in front of you. A bunch of randos want to call you and give their advice. But you see that Americans For Innovative Toilets donated $3295 during your last campaign (and maybe also gave something to your opponent, but whatever, everyone does it). This catches your attention. So you make sure to take their call first, and listen the longest. This still doesn't entirely make sense to me. But it's how all PACs (except AIPAC and the machines) operated until 2024. III. In 2024, the crypto industry raised the stakes. Let's put numbers on all of this. In that year, AIPAC raised $87 million. The real estate group that usually plays runner-up raised $20 million. Marc Andreessen’s new crypto PAC, Fairshake, raised $260 million. Just a totally unheard-of amount of money for a single industry. How did they do it? In some sense, this isn't surprising. In case you haven't heard, Bitcoin did very well. Many people in the industry got rich. A16Z, Marc Andreessen's crypto-heavy venture capital firm, says they invested $8 billion into crypto. Coinbase, the biggest US crypto company, is valued at $85 billion. The richest crypto billionaires have 10-to-11 digit net worths. And government regulation is potentially an existential threat to crypto. So in some sense, it's the least surprising thing in the world that they could scrounge up $260 million to save their multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry. The only reason it's remarkable is that, for some reason which I still haven't figured out, nobody else - not the oil industry, not the firearms industry, not the defense industry - ever tried this before. How exactly did the industry pull this together? Andreessen personally donated $40 - $50 million (remember, the second-biggest industry PAC, real estate, raised only $20 million total from all donors, personal and business). Again, this isn't a crazy proportion of his net worth: he has $2 billion, so a $50 million expense hardly forces him back to ramen. It's just that no other billionaire of his stature is even in the game. Then his cofounder Ben Horowitz donated another $40 million. Then two big crypto companies (Coinbase and Ripple, both with A16Z links) donated another $40 - 50 million each. As the saying goes, sooner or later it all adds up to real money. Anyway, they won overwhelmingly. They combined the business-as-usual strategy of donating to safe incumbents and both sides of close races, with the AIPAC strategy of picking a few big opponents of their cause and airdropping massive sums on their rivals. For example, Representative Katie Porter (D-California) was an Elizabeth Warren ally and cryptocurrency critic. When she ran for Senate, Fairshake dropped $10 million into attack ads against her in the primaries - more than most candidates' total spending. The attack ads didn't say she was bad on crypto - something that approximately no voters care about. They were just normal attack ads on whatever aspect of her policy and personality focus groups said she was most vulnerable on (in practice, an accusation that she mistreated her Congressional staff). She lost badly, coming in third place. Although nobody can prove she wouldn't have lost anyway, conventional wisdom was that crypto had successfully made its point. According to SFGate: An unnamed political operative told the magazine: “Porter was a perfect choice because she let crypto declare, ‘If you are even slightly critical of us, we won’t just kill you—we’ll kill your f—king family, we’ll end your career.’ From a political perspective, it was a masterpiece.” The scare campaign appears to have worked. The House of Representatives passed a pro-crypto bill, with bipartisan support, in May. Candidates with Fairshake’s support won their primaries in 85% of cases, the New Yorker wrote. Now, neither presidential candidate wants to run astray of the industry: Donald Trump spoke at a crypto conference, and Kamala Harris signaled her support. And Porter is forced out of Congress. These are all important signs that crypto’s bet is paying off, but I think I know what metric the crypto barons themselves are watching, and if anything it’s even more bullish: Red arrow represents the 2024 election. Crypto titans had many valid complaints. The Biden administration’s crypto regulation policy was arbitrary and punitive, and occasionally skirted the border of illegality. It genuinely harmed innovation and held back important industries like remittances, digital payments, and (of course) prediction markets. As a crypto bag-holder myself, I can’t complain about all the beautiful verdant green on the chart above. Still, winning this hard is maybe a little humiliating. Does the government really need a strategic Bitcoin reserve? Should it really release economic data on three different blockchains? Must we really have a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol? We’re exploring bold new territory here. Give me your degens, your risk-seeking. Your huddled masses, yearning to bet free. IV. …and we’ll be exploring it a whole lot more, very soon. Last month, the AI industry announced a new SuperPAC called “Leading The Future” (a dumb name, but, in their defense, “AIPAC” was already taken). They start with $200 million in seed funding, led by a $50 million donation by Andreessen Horowitz, and another $50 million from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. (Why Brockman and not Altman, or OpenAI as a corporation? Because most people don’t know who Brockman is, so this keeps OpenAI’s hands clean. I imagine Altman going into a meeting, pointing at Brockman, and saying “I’m famous, you’re not, please cough up $50 million of your own money for the cause.”) On the same day, Meta announced their own SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (META) California. Why two PACs? Opinions differ; one person told me that it lets the general PAC avoid the negative associations that Facebook has gathered over the years, but the Verge thinks that maybe everyone else in tech hates Zuckerberg too much to work with him. Meta has committed to spending “tens of millions”. Most likely, the new PAC will use the playbook pioneered by crypto: destroy any candidate who dares support regulations on AI, by funding attack ads that don’t mention AI in any way and, at best, briefly mention the name “Leading The Future”. Just the Andreessen/Brockman SuperPAC, without any help from Meta, is already twice as rich as AIPAC. Their existence sends a clear message: we are going to crush any politician who tries to regulate AI. V. …unless someone stops them. Leading The Future still only has 2% as much money as the almond industry. The tiny scale of US political spending is dangerous insofar as it means that one or two billionaires willing to go all-in can distort the national landscape. But it also makes it possible to oppose them. Certainly if you can get one or two billionaires of your own - but it might even be within the range of a committed group of ordinary people. Not waiters and bartenders, maybe. But if safe AI supporters were as committed as Israel supporters, they could probably make something happen. For a long time, the AI safety movement has underperformed politically. Effective altruism includes thousands of well-off people committed to spending 10% of their income on improving the world. If a thousand of them gave $7K each to political candidates, that would be $7 million of campaign-finance-compliant hard money - about as much as anyone can gather for anything. Hard money buys more influence per dollar than soft money, so this could be a big deal. All you’d need is the right people to coordinate it. So far, this has been slow going. Partly it’s because in the early 2020s, people affiliated with FTX took point on this effort; when FTX imploded, it not only took its incipient political infrastructure with it, but poisoned the well for future efforts. And partly it’s because EAs overlearned the lesson of the early 2010s, when we spoke out against AI capabilities efforts so “effectively” that a bunch of people thought “wow, AI capabilities companies must be a really big deal, maybe I should found one!”; the resulting institutional scar tissue biased us towards staying quiet about our concerns. Still, I wouldn’t be writing this if the consultants and activists weren’t gearing up for a bigger fight. They asked me to include some action items for readers who want to participate: Email aisafetypolitics@gmail.com to connect to the people organizing this effort and talk with them about what you can do, including potential future donation opportunities.
Inline links: According to SFGate, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bWaN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F13d918d0-5918-4bf6-9dee-0a798c76ae82_706x499.png, strategic Bitcoin reserve?, release economic data on three different blockchains?, a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!eZlq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa435a03-c505-4414-8be8-4a3b76dfad12_738x612.png, announced a new SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across, the Verge thinks
Red arrow represents the 2024 election. Crypto titans had many valid complaints. The Biden administration’s crypto regulation policy was arbitrary and punitive, and occasionally skirted the border of illegality. It genuinely harmed innovation and held back important industries like remittances, digital payments, and (of course) prediction markets. As a crypto bag-holder myself, I can’t complain about all the beautiful verdant green on the chart above. Still, winning this hard is maybe a little humiliating. Does the government really need a strategic Bitcoin reserve? Should it really release economic data on three different blockchains? Must we really have a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol? We’re exploring bold new territory here. Give me your degens, your risk-seeking. Your huddled masses, yearning to bet free. IV. …and we’ll be exploring it a whole lot more, very soon. Last month, the AI industry announced a new SuperPAC called “Leading The Future” (a dumb name, but, in their defense, “AIPAC” was already taken). They start with $200 million in seed funding, led by a $50 million donation by Andreessen Horowitz, and another $50 million from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. (Why Brockman and not Altman, or OpenAI as a corporation? Because most people don’t know who Brockman is, so this keeps OpenAI’s hands clean. I imagine Altman going into a meeting, pointing at Brockman, and saying “I’m famous, you’re not, please cough up $50 million of your own money for the cause.”) On the same day, Meta announced their own SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (META) California. Why two PACs? Opinions differ; one person told me that it lets the general PAC avoid the negative associations that Facebook has gathered over the years, but the Verge thinks that maybe everyone else in tech hates Zuckerberg too much to work with him. Meta has committed to spending “tens of millions”. Most likely, the new PAC will use the playbook pioneered by crypto: destroy any candidate who dares support regulations on AI, by funding attack ads that don’t mention AI in any way and, at best, briefly mention the name “Leading The Future”. Just the Andreessen/Brockman SuperPAC, without any help from Meta, is already twice as rich as AIPAC. Their existence sends a clear message: we are going to crush any politician who tries to regulate AI. V. …unless someone stops them. Leading The Future still only has 2% as much money as the almond industry. The tiny scale of US political spending is dangerous insofar as it means that one or two billionaires willing to go all-in can distort the national landscape. But it also makes it possible to oppose them. Certainly if you can get one or two billionaires of your own - but it might even be within the range of a committed group of ordinary people. Not waiters and bartenders, maybe. But if safe AI supporters were as committed as Israel supporters, they could probably make something happen. For a long time, the AI safety movement has underperformed politically. Effective altruism includes thousands of well-off people committed to spending 10% of their income on improving the world. If a thousand of them gave $7K each to political candidates, that would be $7 million of campaign-finance-compliant hard money - about as much as anyone can gather for anything. Hard money buys more influence per dollar than soft money, so this could be a big deal. All you’d need is the right people to coordinate it. So far, this has been slow going. Partly it’s because in the early 2020s, people affiliated with FTX took point on this effort; when FTX imploded, it not only took its incipient political infrastructure with it, but poisoned the well for future efforts. And partly it’s because EAs overlearned the lesson of the early 2010s, when we spoke out against AI capabilities efforts so “effectively” that a bunch of people thought “wow, AI capabilities companies must be a really big deal, maybe I should found one!”; the resulting institutional scar tissue biased us towards staying quiet about our concerns. Still, I wouldn’t be writing this if the consultants and activists weren’t gearing up for a bigger fight. They asked me to include some action items for readers who want to participate: Email aisafetypolitics@gmail.com to connect to the people organizing this effort and talk with them about what you can do, including potential future donation opportunities.
Inline links: strategic Bitcoin reserve?, release economic data on three different blockchains?, a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!eZlq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa435a03-c505-4414-8be8-4a3b76dfad12_738x612.png, announced a new SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across, the Verge thinks
Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls
January 13, 2026 · Original source
If America nation-builds Venezuela, for whatever definition of nation-build, will that work well, or backfire? Some of these are long-horizon, some are conditional, and some are hard to resolve. There are potential solutions to all these problems. But why worry about them when you can go to the moon on sports bets? Annals of The Rulescucks The new era of prediction markets has provided charming additions to the language, including “rulescuck” - someone who loses an otherwise-prescient bet based on technicalities of the resolution criteria. Resolution criteria are the small print explaining what counts as the prediction market topic “happening'“. For example, in the Khameini example above, Khameini qualifies as being “out of power” if: …he resigns, is detained, or otherwise loses his position or is prevented from fulfilling his duties as Supreme Leader of Iran within this market's timeframe. The primary resolution source for this market will be a consensus of credible reporting. You can imagine ways this definition departs from an exact common-sensical concept of “out of power” - for example, if Khameini gets stuck in an elevator for half an hour and misses a key meeting, does this count as him being “prevented from fulfilling his duties”? With thousands of markets getting resolved per month, chances are high that at least one will hinge upon one of these edge cases. Kalshi resolves markets by having a staff member with good judgment decide whether or not the situation satisfies the resolution criteria. Polymarket resolves markets by . . . oh man, how long do you have? There’s a cryptocurrency called UMA. UMA owners can stake it to vote on Polymarket resolutions in an associated contract called the UMA Oracle. Voters on the losing side get their cryptocurrency confiscated and given to the winners. This creates a Keynesian beauty contest, ie a situation where everyone tries to vote for the winning side. The most natural Schelling point is the side which is actually correct. If someone tries to attack the oracle by buying lots of UMA and voting for the wrong side, this incentivizes bystanders to come in and defend the oracle by voting for the right side, since (conditional on there being common knowledge that everyone will do this) that means they get free money at the attackers’ expense. But also, the UMA currency goes up in value if people trust the oracle and plan to use it more often, and it goes down if people think the oracle is useless and may soon get replaced by other systems. So regardless of their other incentives, everyone who owns the currency has an incentive to vote for the true answer so that people keep trusting the oracle. This system works most of the time, but tends towards so-called “oracle drama” where seemingly prosaic resolutions might lie at the end of a thrilling story of attacks, counterattacks, and escalations. Here are some of the most interesting alleged rulescuckings of 2026: Mr Ozi: Will Zelensky wear a suit? Ivan Cryptoslav calls this “the most infamous example in Polymarket history”. Ukraine’s president dresses mostly in military fatigues, vowing never to wear a suit until the war is over. As his sartorial notoriety spread, Polymarket traders bet over $100 million on the question of whether he would crack in any given month. At the Pope’s funeral, Zelensky showed up in a respectful-looking jacket which might or might not count. Most media organizations refused to describe it as a “suit”, so the decentralized oracle ruled against. But over the next few months, Zelensky continued to straddle the border of suithood, and the media eventually started using the word “suit” in their articles. This presented a quandary for the oracle, which was supposed to respect both the precedent of its past rulings, and the consensus of media organizations. Voters switched sides several times until finally settling on NO; true suit believers were unsatisfied with this decision. For what it’s worth, the Twitter menswear guy told Wired that “It meets the technical definition, [but] I would also recognize that most people would not think of that as a suit.” Domer: Will Ukraine agree to the US mineral deal? AFAICT, this is the only case where the oracle genuinely broke down (as opposed to a legitimate disagreement). In February, it looked like both America and Ukraine had agreed to a mineral deal, but the oracle considered the question and decided this didn’t count as a full agreement (and indeed, the apparent agreement then fell apart). In March, a cabal of YES holders tried again. They waited for a time when all Polymarket employees would be out of the office, and when not too many people would be voting on the decentralized resolution oracle, then spammed it with calls to resolve to YES based on an argument that the February agreement had qualified after all. The YES holders and not-particularly-plugged-in oracle voters pushed the vote towards YES. Then, with two minutes to spare, a Polymarket employee showed up and said that Polymarket’s opinion was that it should be NO. This was technically framed as a recommendation to oracle voters, but it is so effective in establishing the Schelling point that it’s practically always followed. However, in this case, there were only two minutes left, which wasn’t enough time for the voters to change their mind. Seeing that the resolution was trending towards yes, the Polymarket representatives, not wanting to break their streak of always establishing the Schelling point, changed their own opinion to YES, and the final vote was YES 99%. Domer: How many people watched the Oscars on 3/5/25?: Kalshi’s resolution criteria for this market said they would resolve it when a major news source published Oscar viewership numbers. A few minutes after the Oscars, NYT published preliminary viewership numbers, without any caveats saying they were preliminary. The next day, they published another article saying that actually, the real viewership numbers were higher. Kalshi decided that the letter of the resolution criteria was met when NYT published its first article, and that NYT changing its opinion didn’t imply that Kalshi should change the resolution. Traders who bet on the later (ie correct) numbers were unsatisfied with this decision. NYPost: Will America invade Venezuela? On January 3, the US bombed Venezuela, sent in a Special Forces team that successfully captured President Maduro, and announced that they would thenceforward “run the country” (a claim they later walked back). Does this qualify as an “invasion”? Polymarket’s resolution criteria defined “invasion” as “a military offensive intended to establish control over any portion of Venezuela”. It didn’t seem like the US was trying to establish control over Venezuelan territory, exactly, so they resolved NO. Traders who bet on YES were unsatisfied with this decision. With one exception, these aren’t outright oracle failures. They’re honest cases of ambiguous rules. Most of the links end with pleas for Polymarket to get better at clarifying rules. My perspective is that the few times I’ve talked to Polymarket people, I’ve begged them to implement various cool features, and they’ve always said “Nope, sorry, too busy figuring out ways to make rules clearer”. Prediction market people obsess over maximally finicky resolution criteria, but somehow it’s never enough - you just can’t specify every possible state of the world beforehand. The most interesting proposal I’ve seen in this space is to make LLMs do it; you can train them on good rulesets, and they’re tolerant enough of tedium to print out pages and pages of every possible edge case without going crazy. It’ll be fun the first time one of them hallucinates, though. …And Miscellaneous N’er-Do-Wells I include this section under protest. The media likes engaging with prediction markets through dramatic stories about insider trading and market manipulation. This is as useful as engaging with Waymo through stories about cats being run over. It doesn’t matter whether you can find one lurid example of something going wrong. What matters is the base rates, the consequences, and the alternatives. Polymarket resolves about a thousand markets a month, and Kalshi closer to five thousand. It’s no surprise that a few go wrong; it’s even less surprise that there are false accusations of a few going wrong. Still, I would be remiss to not mention this at all, so here are some of the more interesting stories: Fhantombets: Who will win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize? Twelve hours before the announcement, someone placed a large Polymarket bet on Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, bringing her probability from 4% to 73%. When Machado later won, observers suspected insider trading. But an account named fhantombets claims to have interviewed the winning trader; although he did not reveal his exact strategy, the interview better matches a story where he was good at navigating WordPress directories, and found that the Nobel team put a draft of the announcement up early in a nonpublic part of their WordPress site. He won about $70,000. LuishXYZ: Will the Russians capture Myrnohrad? This is a small town in Ukraine that the Russians obviously were not going to capture; the Polymarket price trended toward zero. The resolution criteria named maps by the well-regarded Institute For The Study of War as canon. A few hours before resolution, ISW updated their maps to show the the town captured by Russia, which was definitely false. Polymarket resolved to YES, and the fictional Russian advance disappeared. The Institute then issued a statement saying the map update was “unapproved”, and fired one of its staffers who had presumably been involved. The cheater’s exact winnings are unknown, but based on the size of the market are probably mid-6-digits. TechCrunch: What words will be used in Coinbase’s earnings call? Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong delivered the company’s “earnings call”, ie a speech to investors about its recent progress. At the end, he said “I've been tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call, and I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain, Staking, and Web3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call”. Armstrong is worth $10 billion and doesn’t need to manipulate a $50,000 market for the money - he later described his comments as “trolling”. Other crypto executives condemned the move, with one saying that “you need your head examined if you think it’s cute or clever or savvy that the CEO of the biggest company in this industry openly manipulated a market.” I might need my head examined, because I think it’s at least kind of funny. Forbes: Who will rank highest on Google Search volume this year? A trader called AlphaRaccoon got 22/23 of these Polymarket questions right, and has a history of implausibly good performance on Google-related questions. They basically have to be a Google insider, but (since all of this is done through crypto) nobody has a good way to figure out who. They made $1 million. NPR: Will Maduro be captured? Just before the secret operation that captured Maduro, someone placed a mysterious $32,000 wager on YES. Was this insider trading by someone in the administration or military? Nobody knows, since the profits go to an anonymous crypto wallet. But the article mentions that the crypto wallet appears to be cashing out through regulated KYC-compliant US exchanges, which suggests they’re not very worried about their identity getting discovered. Maybe they just got lucky after all. AlanMCole: How long will Karoline Leavitt speak at the White House briefing? Karoline Leavitt is Trump’s press secretary. On January 7, she held an ordinary press briefing. Kalshi had its usual market about how long the briefing would last, divided into bins of greater than vs. less than 65 minutes. At the 64:24 mark, Leavitt ended the conference in what appeared to be a sudden manner, and the “less than 65 minutes” bin shot from 2% to 100%. A viral tweet convinced many people that Leavitt must have been insider trading, but Cole counterargued that Leavitt could only have won about $4,000 from the market, which probably isn’t enough to risk one’s job as White House Press Secretary. Sometimes people just end press conferences at weird times. Cole concluded: Now, some opinions and generalizations, as someone who looks at prediction markets plenty (I’ll probably write something about my own experience with them at some point.) 1. This market, like many of them, is pretty stupid. I like substantive markets; this isn’t substantive. 2. The major prediction markets have a wildly undisciplined comms strategy where any attention is good attention, and they love implying all sorts of crazy wild west stuff is going on to get attention. 3. People do bet on things potentially subject to manipulation or insider trading. But usually the markets like that (such as duration of press conference, or stupid “what will be mentioned” markets) are small, especially relative to the wealth of key decisionmakers. 4. Losers in markets are huge whiners, and the more frivolous and tiny their bets, the more likely they are to whine. Sometimes in sports it’s pretty egregious. They’ll get mad at a team for running out the clock when ahead but under some spread they bet on. 5. Lower-quality financial news often doesn’t pay much attention to quantity. (For example, dumb stories about how a decisionmaker has a conflict of interest because they’re invested in an index fund which is 3 percent comprised of some company.) 6. Given the platforms’ undisciplined social media strategy of “promote prediction market chatter no matter what kind of chatter it is,” I don’t think this tweet rises even to the status of “lower-quality financial news.” Kalshi’s team, whatever their faults, are extraordinarily efficient at getting batched approvals of many near-identical markets with slight parameter variation; I’ve seen Tarek speak about this on Odd Lots. The result is they’ve got TONS of them, for better or worse. You’re gonna see 1-in-100 upsets on tiny Kalshi markets for as long as this regulatory equilibrium holds, even if nothing unusual is going on, simply because they’re publishing hundreds (thousands?) of markets per day. There’s a saying that you can’t con an honest man. This isn’t exactly true. But it’s easier to con people who are playing in a “what words will Brian Armstrong say today” market than people who are trying to do something useful, and I have trouble feeling sorry for these people when Brian Armstrong says silly words. Conditional Markets: A Modest Proposal Conditional markets (“decision markets”) are the strongest case for prediction markets potentially being revolutionary. The idea is - you may want to base a decision (like which candidate to elect) on an outcome (like how they’ll affect the economy). So you make two markets: If the Democrat gets elected, will the economy be good four years later?
Inline links: UMA Oracle, Keynesian beauty contest, Will Zelensky wear a suit?, calls this, told Wired, Will Ukraine agree to the US mineral deal?, How many people watched the Oscars on 3/5/25?, another article, Will America invade Venezuela?, stories about cats, Who will win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize?, claims, Will the Russians capture Myrnohrad?, a statement, What words will be used in Coinbase’s earnings call?, described, Who will rank highest on Google Search volume this year?, Will Maduro be captured?, How long will Karoline Leavitt speak at the White House briefing?