2025-06-27
the mummer's dance
Dwarkesh interviews George Church. It’s interesting how similar his thoughts and ambitions are to how Rationalists generally view genetics and biology. Given how influential and successful he is, presumably that means he’s actually the originator of these views1.
Scott Alexander with an overview of the heritability debates, focusing on the question of how to properly interpret twin studies.
Ross Douthat interviews Peter Thiel (via Marginal Revolution). Speaking of Tyler Cowen, there’s something interesting about his project of “writing for AI”, because the more consistent your beliefs are, the easier it should be for AI to predict what you would say, which for different people might either be a great benefit or a major drawback. Anyway, to a large extent, it seems like Thiel’s thoughts all originate around the central idea that we have been, and are still stagnating far below our actual potential. There’s an interesting way to view his thoughts on Trump as a high volatility candidate: Personally, I’ve become convinced that we are probably on the Pareto frontier for most things, in which case if a country is doing relatively well, then random variance is more likely to result in negative effects than positive ones. But I suppose another way to view it from Thiel’s lens is that in our current frontier, we are too readily trading progress off for comfort, so we would be fine or even benefited from a little more suffering and discomfort. The interesting thing is that he still has this position, because empirically speaking, it seems to me like much of the recent disruption did not actually increase the acceleration in Thiel’s preferred directions. I’m having trouble understanding the mechanism by which he can assess the effects of his decisions, particularly since he tends to operate indirectly by focusing his efforts on influencing his local culture2. If circumstances continue to go against him, is that because the complacency he is fighting is too ingrained, or because his actions were ineffective or even counterproductive? Likewise, if things do start changing, to what extent would would he attribute it to his efforts?
Hard Fork had an interview with Sam Altman which is an interesting example of cultural differences between tech and journalism.
Dynomight with a simple formulation for AI alignment. I more or less agree with his positions, but with the important distinction is that if you buy that AI superintelligence will occur, then the decisions it will be faced with will increasingly be those that are outside of the “safe boundary”, particularly if generalization outside of training data remains a problem. This doesn’t trouble me though, because I think human values are to a large extent more malleable and emergent than most other people believe, to the extent that these decisions outside the safe boundary haven’t actually been set yet. They’re something that future humans and AI will probably have to work through together.
Naomi Kanakia interviews Irina Dumitrescu on writing book reviews. Some people complain about how book reviews are often barely even about the book, but I actually prefer it that way, because then even if you aren’t interested in whether the book is worth reading, you still get something out of it. And it’s also often more persuasive as an answer to that question than a straightforward summary and discussion of its contents.
Michelle Ma in Works in Progress on Journavx, a non-opioid painkiller.
Brian Potter explores possible reasons why homes in the western United States are relatively more expensive than those in the east.
Chris Arnade on the cultural importance of McDonald’s throughout the world. There was also a recent Conversation with Tyler with Chris where they discussed this topic heavily. His inability to tell the difference between Beijing and Shanghai didn’t leave me very impressed with his vibe checking skills, but then that really speaks for how important McDonald’s is to local culture, that it’s so clear even to him.
Kitstack on the South Korean nuclear industry.
It’s interesting that his success and prestige has insulated him from the usual attacks that are levied towards the rationalist views on genetics: for example, there’s no RationalWiki article for George Church.