All of Alex K. Chen's Comments + Replies
Relevant - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/13/climate/electric-power-climate-change.html
Important to mention the HHMI funding model, which puts "trust" in PIs/evaluates them as PIs rather than as research proposals.
Also
"The MacArthur grant is a template for what this looks like on a personal level, with a shift in focus from creativity to integrity, and a bump in compensation – $625,000 is a lot of money, but that money is designed to be seed money for an activity rather than financial security. Those getting a MacArthur grant still face the specter of future financial needs. One needs an order of magnitude more than that over a lifetime to be secure while not compromising one’s interactions with society. "
important links (this is really the best place for me to post/update them rn)
https://perlara.substack.com/p/low-dose-statin-as-a-potential-treatment
https://titotal.substack.com/p/bandgaps-brains-and-bioweapons-the
I'm only comfortable with more humans if we make serious efforts to increase the percent of vegans/vegetarians, or reduce the amount of meat needed by human, given how wasteful meat is to land use.
[limited hunting of deer/pigeons/waterfowl could be ok, but people would still need to eat way less meat than they do now]
maybe, just maybe, cultured meat will come just enough time to save us. But the probability range of this is still too high for comfort.
I very strongly believe any pro-fertility incentives must be coupled with incentives to decrease meat consu... (read more)
How do you optimize your life for serendipity?
Ken Stanley has a new social network and I asked the question here: https://app.heymaven.com/discover/25623
But progress studies forum should have more people who can answer this (esp b/c serendipity and progress are both close allies)
Tribal-based SEZs could be the perfect place for people to sell normally Rx-based drugs OTC.
(Canada is way more liberal wrt respecting tribal sovereignty than America - the courts in Canada consistently rule in favor of tribal reservations and the RMCP in British Columbia has encountered public outrage when it tried to do enforcement before, which has nudged it towards non-enforcement of some actions where tribal actions had a conflict with the province). Canada also allows tribes to "buy up more land", which is way easier in Canada than the states. Canadi... (read more)
LINKDUMP
https://latecomermag.com/article/what-happened-to-molecular-manufacturing/
https://www.leversforprogress.com/
forum.quantifiedself.com
SOME RANDOM LINKS:
https://logancollinsblog.com/2023/08/31/logans-catalog-of-useful-resources-for-creating-the-future/
https://curius.app/alex-k-chen
https://nanoscale.blogspot.com/
https://blog.spec.tech/p/speculative-technologies-2023-year
SOME interesting people:
orthogonal to the popular ML/DL/AI people [or orthogonal to "scaling is all you need" people]
https://hillelwayne.com/post/ [he's also in the jk... (read more)
Is Speculative Technologies part of the upstream process of creating alternatives to plastics? (alternatives that don't have the "persistent pollutant" or microplastic/nanoplastic decomposition problems)
How common is it for top German students to want to attend ETH-Zurich instead?
PS: you should talk to Tim Farkas about all of this!
Hello! I'm Alex K. Chen (http://twitter.com/InquilineKea, https://linktr.ee/simfish , http://quora.com/Alex-K-Chen). I'm everywhere. I'm a singular individual and "interesting things happen around me" (esp b/c I always have an eye directed towards progress, even though I am super fine-grained and keep track of SO many things that it gives me ADHD [this is not a bad thing however!}) I am the living embodiment of "Why Greatness Cannot be Planned"/open-ended reinforcement learning/maximum-entropy reinforcement learning.
I have lots of access to new/early-stage... (read more)
"If everyone agreed to become vegetarian, leaving little or nothing for livestock, the present 1.4 billion hectares of arable land (3.5 billion acres) would support about 10 billion people" - EO Wilson
[though limited hunting of deer/pigeons/waterfowl could be ok]