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Honored to have been included in all 4 @ns conferences; this year I spoke about the need to focus on the user (not the vision) and build things that people want.
Patri Friedman 🌆
8,825 posts
Patri Friedman 🌆
@patrissimo
Alleviating global poverty with startup cities @PronomosVC; previously founded @Seasteading @Ephemerisle
- If you can't rest because you have: (full todo list, backlog of projects, desire to accomplish more, self/life/world aspects you want to change), you will never rest. These lists are infinite. So you must learn to rest peacefully beside an infinite mountain of potential work.
- There should be an extreme sport of trying to advance up the tech ladder with minimal tools as fast as possible. Ie, start with stone age tools and try, in a week, to build a forge and basic set of iron tools. Start with iron and make a steam engine.“We've identified the 50 most important machines that we think it takes for modern life to exist...then we set out to create an open source, DIY, do it yourself version that anyone can build and maintain at a fraction of the cost.” ted.com/talks/marcin_j…
- I got curious about @chamath's stat on excess mortality for the young, so I dug into the data, focused on the tables that excluded covid. The graphs below confirm that US mortality for those 45 and over is at or below the pre-covid rate, while under 45 remains substantially
01:22:49THE 2023 BESTIE AWARDS! join the besties as the recap the best, worst, and craziest from this past year! (live on @X) timestamps: (0:00) welcome to the fourth annual bestie awards! (4:14) biggest political winner (10:26) biggest political loser (15:14) biggest political - Here's a longer take of why I'm against e/acc, since I was not that clear & many commenters got it wrong: I'm an OG transhumanist singularitarian, broadly in favor of rapid tech progress as the best way to relieve suffering, upgrade civilization & protect our speciesOk let's see if e/accers believe what I think they believe. Please answer as to whether you think xrisk is negligible (< 1%) or significant. By xrisk I mean an awful future for humanity like extinction or a life barely worth living (slavery etc).
- Umm, your company lost $800B last year. Traditionally, you need profit before issuing dividends. Also, a company with 320 million employees, that starts paying them even if they don't work, is going to go broke pretty fast (even with $20T in revenue).If I were one of 320 million shareholders of a company producing $20 trillion+ in annual revenue I would probably want a dividend.
- If you favor taxing billionaires more, that means you want to transfer resources from @BillGates, who is revolutionizing philanthropy and saw #COVID19 threat years ago, to the US govt, who have disastrously bungled our response to the virus. Here's why that's wrong.In 2015, Bill Gates told me a deadly flu-like pandemic spreading under globalized conditions was the most predictable disaster in the history of the human race, and so there was no excuse to not be prepared for it. I'm thinking about that a lot lately. vox.com/2015/5/27/8660…
- The argument against the One Ring is not "it can't do good things". It's that no one being should have all that power. The argument against censorship isn't "all ideas add to the marketplace". It's that no institution can be trusted to gatekeep the noosphere.Replying to @micsolanaOne argument is that some people are too easily persuaded by bad faith actors in the marketplace of ideas, and those actors have an easier time than ever of being believed. And because that persuasion leads to all sorts of social maladies, censoring those actors is appropriate.
- 1/ Watching #btc volatility & thinking about current use cases, I finally appreciate why @VitalikButerin says it's important to make a StableCoin. Ppl should be able to store value w/o taking on all this currency risk.
- Let's talk Zuzalu (zuzalu.city), a pop-up village in #Montenegro of ~200 ppl (1-2 months) & ~300 visitors, centered on longevity, @ethereum & ZKs. Plus mini-conferences like "New Cities & Network States" (which drew me). Longer post: facebook.com/patri.friedman…
- The political ramifications of Covid19 ignore our arbitrary left/right policy bundles. It boosts: * Border controls * Socialized medicine * Xenophobia * UBI (for ppl missing work due to quarantine) * Fast-track test & vaccine approval * Surveillance & tracing What else?
- I believe that a person’s ability to speak accurately about how aliens might plausibly differ from humanity is a profound reflection of their understanding of reality. If we ever hang out at a party I’m always game to discuss this.
- Dear colleagues, I apologize for my low responsiveness these past few days. I live in a poor, remote province called California, which suffers from mismanagement & crumbling infrastructure. I have a generator, but my internet & cell providers don't, and so are down.
- This is like if a company said "We won't fund or endorse specific sports teams, or allow sports-based rivalries to divide our company. We're here to ship product", and someone responded "So like do we just pretend the NBA finals didn't happen?"So like do Coinbase employees just pretend that debate didn’t happen tomorrow?
