manifold.markets/Sinclair
Sinclair Chen
Karma: 629
Today we have a lot of improved reactor designs that are much further from dual use, much more resistant to catastrophic failure, much easier to scale to smaller size, and that produce much less waste, but never allowed ourselves to build them.
I agree on the resistance to failure and less waste production, but disagree on dual use.
Thorium produces uranium-233 which can be used for nuclear reactions. Unlike uranium 235 based energy reactors, thorium produces more uranium-233 than it consumes in the course of producing energy. With thorium reactors, all energy reactors will be producing weapons grade nuclear material. This may be less efficient than traditional reactors dedicated to making nuclear weapons material, but converting a thorium energy plant from energy to weapons making is more trivial.
And if as you say these new reactors design are more simple and small, the capital costs will be much lower, and since thorium is abundant the operational costs are much lower, so the plants will be more spread out geographically and new nations will get it. Overall the headache to global intelligence agencies is much higher.
I also think beyond these specific objections, the dual-use nature nuclear is “overdetermined”. There’s an amusing part of the interview where Thiel points out that the history of industrial advancement was moving from energy sources that take up more space to ones that take up less, from wood to coal to oil to nuclear. and now we’re moving back to natural gas which takes up more space and solar panels that take up a lot of land. Anyways, the atom fundamentally has a lot of energy in it, . but massive amounts of energy in a small space is easy to turn into large explosions. The thing that makes nuclear attractive is the same thing that makes it dangerous. There’s been incredible technical progress in preventing nuclear accidents but preventing nuclear weapons requires geopolitical solutions.
Language is a border on culture, like a big wall.
Within a big language like English, people naturally invent new words when trying to reach for concepts they can not yet say, and this creates a tiny fence around a subculture. you can step over it, but the taller the fence the more the subculture diffs the broader culture.
I say this to say there is any value at all in having different communication protocols in the world at all. From an optimalist perspective you’d want everyone to have the same, because communication leads to truth right? but humans aren’t immune to propaganda; listening is not a free action. If the world spoke the same words tomorrow, people would immediately fight and get polarized, and diverge as they all tried to carve away a tiny little society that’s safe and better by their values.
But I think such a society is much better than the one we currently have. Large borders seem worse than a polycentric world where people can move between subcultures and pick up the best parts. Freedom of movement allows people to leave cultures worse for them and enter cultures that are better.
Anyways, besides that small caveat, at this point in society we should if anything be actively trying to replace and assimilate the small languages rather than preserve them.
this is an incredible insight! from this I think we can design better nightclublike social spaces for people who don’t like loud sounds (such as people in this community with signal processing issues due to autism).
One idea I have is to do it in the digital. like, VR chat silent nightclub where the sound falloff is super high. (perhaps this exists?) Or a 2D top down equivalent. I will note that Gather Town is backwards—the sound radius is so large that there is still lots of lemurs, but at the same time you can’t read people’s body language from across the room—and instead there needs to be an emotive radius from webcam / face-tracking needs to be larger than the sound radius. Or you can have a trad UI with “rooms” of very small size that you have to join to talk. tricky to get that kind of app right though since irl there’s a fluid boundary between in and out of a convo and a binary demarcation would be subtly unpleasant.
Another idea is to find alternative ways to sound isolate in meatspace. Other people have talked about architectural approaches like in Lighthaven. Or imagine a party where everyone had to wear earplugs. sound falls off with the square of distance and you can calculate out how many decibles you need to deafen everyone by to get the group sizes you want. Or a party with a rule that you have to plug your ears when you aren’t actively in a conversation.
Or you could lay out some hula hoops with space between them and the rule is you can only talk within the hula hoop with other people in it, and you can’t listen in on someone else’s hula hoop convo. have to plug your ears as you walk around. Better get real comfortable with your friends! Maybe secretly you can move the hoops around to combine into bigger groups if you are really motivated. Or with way more effort, you could similarly do a bed fort building competition.
These are very cheap experiments!
I think a restaurant where you paid for time, if the food was nothing special, would quickly turn into a coworking space. Maybe it would be more open-office and more amenable to creative, conversational, interpersonal work rather than laptop work. You probably want it to be a cafe—or at least look like a cafe from the outside in signage / branding; you may want architectural sound dampening like a denny’s booth. You could sell pre-packaged food and sodas—it isn’t what they’re here for. Or you could even sell or rent activities like coloring books, simple social tabletop games, small toys, lockpicking practice locks, tiny marshmallow candle smore sets, and so on.
I think the concept of true love is too confused to be worth rescuing. There’s a fairytale conception of it being idyllic and perfect. There’s the romcom conception of it happening with strangers in unexpected circumstances. And there’s many many people’s personal experience of romance, which they are motivated to describe as true or not true depending on whether they want to keep the relationship or move past it.
Perhaps the definition which you give the phrase is what the meaning ought to be from the plain meaning of the words individually, but it won’t be how most people use the term or what they think you mean when they hear it. Your sense of true love does seem like a fine thing to aim for. I would have liked this post if it were a tweet.
Other lies people believe about romantic/relationship love: that it can’t be induced or designed. that it can’t be stopped. that it is fundamentally irrational. that it is not made of atoms. that all is fair for it. that it is always good.
(I’m too lazy to type up my whole model of love right now, but as a pointer, search academic papers for the connection between limerence and OCD)
That those with a lot of money live better than those with less money is what gives money value in the first place. And in this particular scenario the worst off aren’t counterfactually harmed and in fact have quite a lot to gain in the medium term.
On the object level, I know someone who was able to get GLP-1 agonists for much cheaper by buying something meant for animal use off a sketchy website. Compounding pharmacies are also producing semaglutide for cheaper.
is anyone in this community working on nanotech? with renewed interest in chip fabrication in geopolitics and investment in “deep tech” in the vc world i think now is a good time to revisit the possibility of creating micro and nano scale tools that are capable of manufacturing.
like ASML’s most recent machine is very big, so will the next one have to be even bigger? how would they transport it if it doesn’t fit on roads? seems like the approach of just stacking more mirrors and more parts will hit limits eventually. “Moore’s Second Law” says the cost of semiconductor production increases exponentially. perhaps making machines radically smaller, manufacturing nano things using many micro scales machines working in parallel, could be a way to reign in costs and shorten iteration cycles.
there’s a two papers I found about the concept of a “fab on a chip”—they seem promising, but mostly exploratory. they did succeed in using microelectromechanics (MEMS) and tweezers to create a tiny vapor deposition tool i believe.obviously the holy grail would be a tiny fab that could create another version of itself as well as other useful things (chips, solar panels). then you can do the whole industrial revolution recursion thing where you forge better tongs to forge better. I think this vision is lost on people that do nanoscale R&D now—academics and people working long hours in cleanrooms running expensive tests on big expensive machines.
anyways, I’ve only been looking into this for a short while
2D is a limit. but there’s also more design language built around 2D UIs. I still think there’s a ton of unexplored design space around “tabletop games” that make use of modern web flows.
I agree shared presence is important. I also think it’s unsolved. VR isn’t fidelous enough to transmit sufficient social information and it’s still very inaccessible due to price & physical discomfort
New startup idea: cell-based / cultured saffron. Saffron is one of the most expensive substances by mass. Most pricey substances are precious metals that are valuable for signalling value or rare elements used in industry. On the other hand saffron is bought and directly consumed by millions(?) of poor people—they just use small amounts because the spice is very strong. Unlike lab-grown diamonds, lab-grown saffron will not face less demand due to lower signalling value.
The current way saffron is cultivated is they grow these whole fields of flowers, harvest them, then just pick out the stigmata—that tiny strand is the saffron. You can’t even use the whole strand if you want good quality saffron—you only keep the red part of the strand.
Vanilla, also an expensive space, gets the vast majority of its flavor from the chemical vanillin. But saffron gets it’s flavor from lots of different chemicals. Artificial vanilla flavoring is very prevalent but artificial saffron flavoring is not because it’s harder to get it right.
I expect that lab grown saffron would make a lot of money if you can get the cost lower than field-grown saffron. It would not be easy for existing providers to lower their prices because growing saffron is intrinsically expensive and it’s already fairly priced. The demand for it is very robust, and its existing consumers are price-sensitive.
lactose intolerence is treatable with probiotics, and has been since 1950. they cost $40 on amazon.
works for me at least.
Conglomerates like Unilever use shadow prices to allocate resources internally between their separate businesses. And sales teams are often compensated via commission, which is kind of market-ish.
I’m a secular person who also is less certain near-term AI doom. While I do think the eschaton of becoming grabby aliens is both true and spiritually meaningful, I don’t predict it to happen soon, so I’d also appreciate the inclusion of more parochial near-term future ideas and technology.
Sheet music is good.
Charging money is good actually.
let people into your heart, let words hurt you. own the hurt, cry if you must. own the unsavory thoughts. own the ugly feelings. fix the actually bad. uplift the actually good.
emerge a bit stronger, able to handle one thing more.
My literal interpretation of Zack:
The secret lore of the Rationalist movement is that some specific kinds of criticism make Rationalists hate you, such as criticizing someone for being too friendly to racists.
The secret truth of rationality is that all “criticism” is at least neutral and possibly good for a perfectly rational agent, including criticizing the agent for being too friendly to racists.
My thoughts
- Reputation is real, but less real than you think or hope. And reputation is asymmetrically fact-favored—just speak the truth and keep being you, and your reputation will follow.
- Slander may cause dumb or mean people to turn against you, but wise people will get it and kind people will forgive you, and those people are who really matters.
- Bad press is good press. It helps you win at the attention economy.
- The Rationalists are better at accepting criticism, broadly construed, than average.
- The Rationalists are better at handling culture-war stuff than average, but mostly because they are more autistic and more based than average.
- The average sucks. Seek perfection.
- I understand on an emotional level being afraid of cancel culture. I used to be. For me it’s tied up with fear of social isolation, loneliness, rejection. I overreacted to this and decided to “not care what other people think” (while still actually caring that people saw me as clever, contrarian, feminine, etc; I just mean I decided to be egotistical.) This led to the opposite failure of not listening enough to others. but it was a lot of fun. I think the right identity-stance is in between.
On a personal level, crockers rule made me happier and believe more true things. Even activating, unfair, or false criticism as a gift of feedback. The last time someone said something super triggering to me, it caused me to open up my feelings and love people more. The time before that, I became more accepting of embarrassing kinks I had—and this time was from some quite off-base trolly criticism.
It’s related to “staring into the void” or considering the worst possible scenarios—literally as in “what if I lose my job” but also spiritually like “what if people stop loving me.” Kinda like how you’re supposed to think of death five times a day to be happy. Or like being a dnd monk I imagine. Either they’re right and you deserve it or they’re wrong and it doesn’t matter.
Good stories rank well on google, social media, & word of mouth; drawing in more customers and prospective employees. The market of ideas is reflexive. If more people pay attention to a field / framework / method / company, more progress is made.
(There’s also sampling bias. You are more likely to hear the fun stories than the numbers from your friends, twitter feed, etc)
Diet
Ok. Well I don’t think there’s a robust nutrition engineering either. Except maybe whatever the gym bros are cooking up (iirc mostly macronutrients, some supplements, and don’t take certain research chemicals that will kill you). There is a lot of incredible engineering in making food tasty and cheap though.
Skipping showering is easy actually.
Caveat: people differ in body odor based on genetics, hormones, and armpit microbiome. I personally am privileged to not smell bad, therefore I don’t shower until my skin or hair starts to feel icky (a few days).
I used to get dandruff a lot even back when I was showering daily. I saw r/HaircareScience saying sulfates and other chemicals in typical shampoos dry out the scalp and make it overcorrect by producing more oil. this matches my experience. Shampoo is like coffee; it creates dependency. Later, when I stopped showering daily, I did some experimentation and found that if I used shampoo, my scalp would actually feel worse the day after. So I just went cold turkey.
Now, my hair routine is: brush it every morning, use normal conditioner every time I shower, and use clarifying conditioner if my hair feels icky.Shoes
I saw people on r/parkour talk about running barefoot, so I gave it a try. The impact hurt at first, but I focused on landing on my forefoot, I immediately learned the technique and honed it over a few runs. Then I was able to use this technique even while having my shoes on.
At the time, I reasoned that this skill would allow me to be prepared in scenarios where I was wearing high heels or something, because I had the option to take them off and run. Which is true but moot: now I prefer to wear shoes with a “zero drop” because they pack light, are cheap, and comfortable to me.Walking
Walking strictly slower than running. Most things if done faster will give you more stress, but pure movement done fast both saves time and is healthy.
I tried to give up walking for Lent—except when inside or walking with a group of people, and I can walk when out of breath. Honestly I’ve forgotten to do this sometimes. But it’s fun and I’m getting better.
I also don’t have a sports bra, or any bras really because I’ve grown out of my old ones. This is definitely me being an idiot, but to cope I’ve discovered how to run with long gentle strides such that when the foot lands it loads the energy into the arc of my foot like a spring, using my leg and foot almost like a suspension, and this eliminates the jerky shockwave that would make my tits hurt. It’s easier on the knees and saves energy I think, but harder on the achilles tendon probably? (I don’t trust my biomechanical description here.)warning that these things can have surprising tradeoffs. my energy-saving technique for descending stairs / slopes quickly also makes me more likely to slip, for instance, though I think I am better at catching myself than most people...
(Splitting into multiple comments)
401k
Yes, the employee matching is “free money.” But transferring my money out of this to do a Roth IRA rollover was really annoying and I may have accidentally done it wrong and now I need to talk to a CPA. All this work for just for a matched $6000. Bureaucracy, friction, and poor UI are bad because it makes my adhd brain procrastinating on actually investing. (Incidentally this is also a reason to be wary of crypto as an investment—annoying to get on/off chain)
Retirement accounts are also often not able to invest in non-traditional assets like crypto or startup equity. They are less liquid.
I’ve reduced my “necessary” possessions to only what fits in a single tiny backpack. I’ve also cut my expenses substantially. I’ve saved so much money, I could retire very soon and travel the world in low cost-of-living countries, just living off the 4% of the principal. So by keeping my money in “retirement” accounts I am delaying the age at which I can retire because of the tax penalty!
(I love working at manifold tho, and even if I left I’d probably just start my own startup, or something else ambitious, while being a nomad.)maybe you don’t earn very much, but the future is coming fast so who knows when financial escape velocity will come for you
index funds
diversification has diminishing marginal returns.
if instead you just hand-pick a dozen of stocks of companies you think are underrated, spread out across industries, you’ve got most of the benefit of diversification already, but at higher EV
if you’re young, you should be taking on more risk for higher EV
the lesswrong zeitgeist in particular was ahead on crypto, covid, and AI. I have made money listening to it. what else will this community be ahead on?
if everyone buys the top 500 companies in the S&P, because “they’re supposed to,” then the top 500 are overvalued and you should buy the 501st company. (some mutual funds do this trade, and my rationalist friend who I think is smart, but who also lives in his mom’s basement, swears there’s still alpha in this. I don’t bother.)
The future will be weird
Markets are anti-inductive
Of course, you probably should not be thinking too much about optimal investments if you have very little to invest, or if you are in debt. Weigh the value of your time. If you are young the most important thing to invest in is in yourself—your skills, equipment, knowledge, etc.
Whatever you use, remember to backup your vault regularly. A cautionary tale:
I lost access to my bitwarden vault containing a private key to a few thousand $ worth of crypto, after changing my master password to something that I was then not able to recall perfectly. And bitwarden’s website / extension start to rate limit you client-side after failed attempts. So instead, after a lot of research I was able to find the bitwarden hashfile on my computer where chrome stores data for its extensions. I then downloaded hashcat and tried to do a dictionary attack and some other clever attacks that made use of what I thought my password was supposed to be, but to no success.
Don’t be me. Bitwarden lets you download your encrypted vault from the website or CLI. do that.
After the Norman conquest of England, “beef”, derived from the French word for cow, started to refer to the meat of the cow in the context of a meal. This is because the nobles spoke French. You see the same etymological distinction in pork/pig, venison/deer, and mutton/sheep.
The addition of new words from foreign languages into English continues to happen all the time still. This happens by default. (I should note that sometimes when populations which speak different languages live side by side they form a more simplified combination language called a pidgin/creole rather than any one of them winning out.)
I think violence is bad. If you just teach kids in a language gives them job access to the world economy, their more obscure language will get replaced in a few generations.
My advice to multinational corporations is to run their offices in English or Chinese (pick one). My advice to developing nations is to pick as their official language (like in legal texts and taught in schools) one of the six UN languages. My advice to new parents anywhere is to expose your toddlers to a ton of media in either English or Chinese and to get them into a peer group that speaks that language (like by picking their school). maybe even Spanish if you want to make a high variance bet on Mexico/South-America—Except-Brazil.
I’m sorry but Hindi, Bengali, Urdu speakers should learn English. Portuguese speakers should learn Spanish. Japanese punches above its weight in fraction of global GDP and number of webpages, but I nonetheless think its speakers should continue the slow Englishification of Japanese that is already happening. Much of Africa already can speak French or English but especially for the people who don’t it’s probably worth making the leap to Chinese.
Also, it would be nice if the non-east-asian languages could coalesce on the latin alphabet as much as possible. Also also it would be nice if when the CCP gets around to Simplified Chinese 2.0 they reform the pronunciation component of the characters to follow a consistent schema, perhaps taken by Hangul. the semantic components should probably be kept the same, except to make the symbols more pictographic.
Oh, and as English speakers, we should deliberately try to nudge it in an easier-to-learn direction.
Avoid using words that are too long, be consistent in meaning, and perhaps deliberately misspell words the way they are said and misspeak words the way they are written. And use emojis and emoticons—they are not literally universally understood tokens but they are far more widely understood than any other token.
I cannot actually do grand sweeping global language changes but I can do this at least.