Venkatesh Rao @vgr
I’ve been noodling on an idea for a while that I’ve been reluctant to do a thread on for… reasons that will become obvious, but let’s yolo it. I call the idea “charismatic epistemologies.” Aka… how successful people explain the world, and how those explanations fail.
July 31st 2021
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“as open as possible” (and as generous with data as possible,
including the evolutionary input stream) given constraints (openness
REALLY makes it possible for early-stage people to absorb more and
know what’s possible - video learning allows some people to KNOW
what’s possible where book learning doesn’t do) => not ALL important ppl in longevity are as “open as possible” [biotech can be a nasty world] - in fact people with “strategic genius” are often not the most open, but we need both kinds, and those mentally flexible enough to partition off what can be open and what is not worth the risk of disclosing (at least when not immediately) -
gives effusive thanks/appreciation/love to people who do things JUST to improve their healthspan/youthspan (esp when they opt for low-calorie substitutes to standard foods and replace "unhealthy fried food” with fruits/veggies/hummus/MUFAs, and ESP in scenarios where they incur social risk for doing so - esp when going so far as to demand non-plastic packaging or getting special orders to replace grains/soybean oil with steamed veggies). So few people do this to themselves, and healthspan is a social good
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knows all the pareto-efficient improvements to kindness (total
kindness may not be possible - elon musk is not totally kind to
employees). -
as high-integrity as possible. Or gives way for allowance to be
corrected when needed. -
knows how to access information that they don’t know (also knows
when to “know enough” and move on). “know enough” often means find
task where they can ideally allocate/distribute a new research
assistant (or anyone with money) to do.
Generalist is important. Being able to have a mental module for things
one knows is important but doesn’t have enough time to learn (but with
an eye towards filling it in in the future or getting someone to
explain it to them). Ideally they should have the social capital to
get the entire methods development + aging field to answer their
questions (or they should have the social capital to get a maximally
gutsy person with social access to WANT to fill in all their questions
for them) -
your ideas/opinions on issues have higher salience than most people’s ideas (at least to the critical set of people who believe in you)
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very first principles in thinking (and b/c longevity means you have to try anything radical, you have to be radically open to changing your mind on the things that aren’t strongly held-beliefs [you recognize that longevity is the ONLY strongly-held belief worth holding - everything else is reconfigurable])
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Gives people second chances (this is high kindness). Longevity is
the longest of long games and some people take ridiculously long to
mature (especially since almost everyone grew up in “shitty
environments”) - give them the time. High kindness also means that spending some time on discouraged learners may be especially high-leverage. They may do everything for you if they recognize that you are the one person who can save them from feeling discouraged in all areas of life.
That said, long timeouts for some offenses may be important.
- practices techniques from superforecasters and ought.ai people
- practices all pareto-efficient improvements to diet (b/c you can
only be fully rational when your brain works as well as it can, and
given decline in brain volume over time, this does NOT happen with
most western populations). Take rapamycin+metformin, eat mostly vegetables+mushrooms+organic berries/wild fruits+MUFAs+omega-3’s, reduce calories/fast whenever possible (modafinil+donepezil make this super-easy)
being kind to your brain (making sure it always operates) also means
wearing masks whenever air pollution levels are above 10 ug/m^3 (yes
this means ALWAYS wearing masks when on subways and freeways - thank
god for covid for making it perma-acceptable to do this)
- is able to twitch their learning process as much as they can. The
more new people can understand them, the better they are able to
supercooperate with new people - has a clean input stream, does not distract themselves with stupid
things like trading and short-term price movements and logistics and
virtue-signalling - values their time to the max. Those who prolong other people’s lives
should have more value placed on their time than others (b/c they
increase the amount of time OTHER people have). This places hard
limits on extreme right-tail kindness, but even expressing gratitude
well can go A LONG way
he more of these characteristics you have, the more people will take
on pascal’s wager and fund the **** out of you, because you are one of
their only chances of achieving increased longevity. The net worth of
10 extra years of Jeff Bezos’s time is immense. Even that of
standard software engineers => can be easily worth millions
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Be someone who a sufficiently critical mass of people want to
believe in simply because of your unique values (and have them
incentivize you to always be at your best (this means never straying
from high-integrity if possible - integrity is all about playing the
long game and sometimes takes patience). Being high-kindness is also NECESSARY for getting people to believe in you -
Highly open- does not immediately look down on new ideas (and knows
that many younger people have higher expressivity than they do - just
look at platforms like replit and -
giving everyone a chance even if they do not have the expected
skillset or background. I’ve talked to many kind aging professors and
they are clueless as to how to advise people with outlier
skillsets/backgrounds. This does not have to happen (very few in aging
have breadth, and while breadth means you can’t do experiments, many
PIs are high-breadth and don’t directly do experiments anymore, though
some is still helpful) -
is not afraid of asking for more rather than less. has enough self-love to value themselves to the max
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be able to train some people to understand them well enough to
delegate everything to (eg ray dalio). If we had a bridgewater
organization for aging, imagine what it would do. The money will be
there sometime - it is in the self-interest of many of the rich to
invest 30-50% of their capital into longevity. -
can afford to hire as many personal assistants as they can (and
crowdfund as many personal assistants as they can afford to hire) -
knows how to access both online and IRL environments. It’s important
to know SOME about each of the high-capacity labs and universities (eg
knowing Stanford well). -
knows the periphery areas to aging (most progress in aging will
ultimately be driven by biotechnology. This means being the “bridge”
or “interface” between different areas. They may not have the time to
do the interfacing - this is one area to hire apprentices to do it. -
the extreme approximation of the ideal
protagonist may be like Jesus Christ (Christ “rescued” people from the dead, and was infinitely willing to give people second chances (redemption) and was infinitely
kind in the theoretical approximation. Thiel’s recognition of the
importance of Christianity may not have been an accident. Christ loved everyone and remains one of the most loved people in the planet - and made all of those who accepted His grace live forever in the Kingdom of God. AGI may make ChristianTranshumanism finally possible (only after 2000 years of abuse by Western Empires that abused people under the Christian name). If you truly love someone, you don’t want them to ever die (people are already like this to their elderly parents, except they are rhetorically myopic rather than globalist on this). Subscribe to read | Financial Times -
valuing their time to the max also means not wasting their time in
inefficient lectures and meetings (see SOME aspects of george church).
The training process is incredibly wasteful to most people’s time. -
in cases where they have burned bridges or don’t get along well with
everyone, some of their closest associates will have a way of getting
along well with anyone -
their principles will be read as deeply and as carefully as ray
dalio’s principles (this means intermittent quizzing - I once asked
someone if he remembered a single passage from ray dalio’s principles
and he remembered nothing, even though it was his favorite book). -
Knows that compassion and kindness is the root of longevity (because
longevity means giving everyone the gift of extra time, of extra
chances at life, extra time to self-actualize at the fullest,
especially because almost everyone socialized prior to GenZ was
subject to incredibly repressive social forces that inhibited them
from being at their best or having the fullest expression of
themselves) -
Does not self-limit themselves, but is also kind enough to
themselves to not wreck their health (like Elon Musk) in the pursuit
of longevity [though maybe timelines are urgent enough that we do need
someone who wrecks their health as much as Elon does] -
knows that longevity is the ultimate “infinite game” (from “finite
and infinite games”) -
has extreme self-confidence in themselves (but also the confidence
not to delude themselves). Having personal assistants or
accountability buddies helps. Ultimately there will be a way to twitch
stream one’s non-private information + wearables [of alertness/brain
waves/etc] and then have AI algorithms auto-analyze them so they can
constantly be at their best (and so future people can learn from them) -
has enough social capital/power to get people to want to do things
for them (you can have that and still be kinder and more appreciative
than the vast majority of PIs) -
be the ideal allocator and judge of character + enabler of people (esp the early stage) and people will want to fund the hell out of you to fund others to do what they are best at doing.
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the internet has to care enough about their well-being to ensure that they value their time to the highest degree, fill or tutor in their knowledge gaps where their technical might be lacking, recognize that helping them is helping the collective conscious reduce its brain decay
person will have social power to define the tokenizations for future ppl, and there will be a hermeneutics to translate their thoughts.
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they are very clear at clarifying their intentions (and there should be very few incentives for them to do otherwise, especially b/c they should be able to act outside of the gatekeeper system [especially with those Pascal’s wager funds]). Clarifying intent is important for getting people to want to cooperate with you and even recognize that cooperating with you is so much better for them to put their work into than is slaving away in grades/courses.
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they will be able to magically reconfigure people’s incentives towards not slaving away in the system
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there will not be very many people who believe in this person at first, but when the inflection point comes, it may come very quickly
-they must be “open af” and pretty much willing to try anything (that isn’t dumb/immature) - b/c we NEED unconventional - going by conventional approaches alone guarantees death. In the ideal approximation, they may configure their own long-term valued longevity-value system that frees people from all emotional association from current degenerate value systems (unschooling is one way to do it, but it does not do it fully)
- agency >> intelligence.