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self_made_human

amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi

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joined 2022 September 05 05:31:00 UTC

I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.

At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!

Friends:

A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.


				
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self_made_human


								

								

								
								
									
								
								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi

				
				
				

				

					14 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 05:31:00 UTC
				


				
					

					
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.


At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!



				

				
					
Friends:

					
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.


				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 454


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Transnational Thursday for March 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Same here.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My understanding is that even a few years of experience at SpaceX is an easy ticket to a much more cushy/comfortable position elsewhere in aerospace, especially for a newly minted engineer. These guys aren't idiots, they weren't coerced into anything. They made the conscious choice of opting-in to work in the most exciting and fast paced company in their field, and most of them saw that as a golden opportunity. If they don't like it, they can quit, and many have. Elon isn't a slave-driver, he's just a hardass boss.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If that's the "best" solution you've heard, I really don't want to know what the others were.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


So who is better, Bezos or me? It is going to depend on whom you ask




You're welcome to use whatever criteria for "goodness", I've just used mine. I value intelligence, conscientiousness, ambition, drive etc etc, and at least by those metrics, I think the type of billionaire I've singled out is ahead of the both of us. There are obviously other factors I care about, these are just the ones where they're clearly above average.




Nor would it be reasonable to say that he has more moral worth than me (which is what the "all men are created equal" line means).




I happen to disagree with that. I think different people can and do have different moral worth. I think a billionaire contributes more than a peasant in Africa, or a hardworking middle class person deserves more moral consideration than a serial killer, and thus I value their existence more, and would make ethical decisions accordingly. So does the rest of the world, going by revealed preference.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Easy to claim, harder to prove. If you have studies saying so, I'll take a look.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've updated my opinion of Elon considerably downward over the past few years. This isn't motivated reasoning or tribal updating, I think his early work genuinely represented some of the most impressive entrepreneurial achievement of the century, and I weighted that heavily for a long time. It's just that the account has been drawn down pretty substantially at this point.




my space autism getting triggered unimaginably by space-x getting fucking shackled to a corpse right before IPO




SpaceX exists because Elon Musk willed it into existence through what can only be described as an unreasonable application of personal capital, obsession, and tolerance for failure. The prior probability of a private company successfully developing orbital rockets from scratch was, charitably, very low. He is not a steward of someone else's vision. He is the vision, or at least was its necessary precondition. You can believe the xAI merger is strategically stupid (I have no strong view either way) while still acknowledging that "guy makes questionable decisions about his own company" is a fairly weak indictment. The stronger criticism would need to be about the employees or shareholders who signed on under different assumptions, which is at least a real argument.


On billionaires more broadly, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of being genuinely more sympathetic to them than the median person in my reference class seems to be, to the point I'd have gone on that Pro-Billionaire March in SF if I was eligible and there, and I've spent some time trying to figure out whether this is motivated reasoning or just correct.


Here's the thing about capitalism that I think gets systematically underappreciated: it's one of the only wealth-generation mechanisms in human history that is even structurally capable of being positive-sum. The historical alternatives  (conquest, extraction, inheritance, political rent-seeking) are zero or negative sum almost by definition. Someone taking your grain is not creating value; they are relocating it, while destroying some in the process.


Whereas Bezos building a logistics network that genuinely makes it cheaper and faster to get goods to people is, at minimum, attempting to create value, and by revealed preference it mostly succeeds. I'm simplifying, obviously. There are real extraction dynamics in modern capitalism. But the baseline isn't "billionaires take from the poor"; the baseline is "billionaires accumulate disproportionately while also expanding the total pie," which is a meaningfully different situation that calls for different policy responses.


The talent point is one people find uncomfortable to make explicitly, but I think it's basically right and the discomfort is doing a lot of work to obscure valid reasoning. The self-made billionaires specifically, the ones who started from, say, merely-upper-middle-class and compounded from there, represent a genuinely unusual combination of intelligence, risk tolerance, executive function, and social skill. You can find individual counterexamples, and luck is real and important, but as a population they seem to have a lot of the thing that makes economies grow. Artificially capping that seems like exactly the kind of policy that makes a satisfying fairness intuition and a mediocre growth outcome.


These people genuinely are *better" than you and me. Smarter, more driven, more ambitious, and more willing to take risks. All men are categorically not made equal.


("If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is not an entirely invalid argument)


I'll steelman the opposition: you could argue that beyond some threshold, wealth primarily compounds through rent-seeking rather than value creation, and that extreme concentration creates political capture that undermines the positive-sum game entirely. I think this is the correct version of the billionaire critique, and it's pretty different from "they are morally bad people who should be humbled."


The relationship between wealth and virtue is much weaker and in an opposite direction from what progressive discourse implies, and if you're selecting for "demonstrates poor impulse control, short time horizons, willingness to harm others for small personal gain," you will find that distribution pretty spread across income levels, possibly with some concerning concentrations nowhere near the top of the wealth distribution.


(If it's not obvious, this is not my stance on all billionaires. It doesn't extend to Russian oligarchs, tinpot dictators etc.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				For less capable people He wrote the Mahābhārata
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
For context, the cousins in question were murderous, rapey assholes who had cheated Arjuna and his siblings out of their birthright and then tried to assassinate them multiple times.


Poor bastard still feels bad about killing them because of familial ties, hence the little pep talk from his Uber driver Krishna.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Presumably some of that city-sized volume and mass will be dedicated to redundancy.


It's unlikely to operate (for most of its life outside of transit) as a singular behemoth. There will probably be hundreds or thousands of dedicated cargo or mining vehicles/drones. The main vessel might be heavily modular and potentially capable of jettisoning or reconfiguring bits of itself.


You also have multiple ways to make tradeoffs between mass/redundancy/bare-minimum required for bootstrapping vs a maximal tech stack from day 1.




"A factory that works perfectly for 10 years without external human intervention" seems very far from our current technology, despite pretty good incentives to make one.




Well, it looks like a pretty AGI-complete problem to me. I don't see that as a major impediment, because of my own impression that AGI is imminent in the near-term. It doesn't have to work perfectly either, as long as it can patch itself up. Ideally it'll be cheap enough that a few VNRs breaking down won't be the end of the world, and even if it's not cheap, they just have to reproduce faster than they break.


If we relax the constraints and allow humans on board, then we're looking at some kind of self-sufficient colony ship that relies on ISRU to replicate itself, with or without planetary activity and settlement as an intermediate step.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't see how a slowdown in "growth" can make things worse than they are today. You'd need a widespread recession and general contraction of the economy, and we were launching people into space when the absolute size of the economy was much smaller.


I don't see anything short of nuclear war bringing about an absolute retreat from space. The military and economic value of spaceflight is far too great. If we can launch satellites, then we have the tools to launch astronauts, and we have rather widespread knowledge that is rather hard to completely lose.


I exclude AGI, because if we're wiped out by it, it's going to find its own way to space. Humans not invited.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Not sure I'd agree with this. I feel the politics of the 60s/70s/80s gets glossed over in a weird way in regards to history, but atleast part of the Civil Rights Movement were actively protesting against the Apollo program.




I did say:




The popularity of the original Space Race is grossly overstated. Most people back then didn't particularly care that much. It still happened because politicians and technocrats wanted to beat the Soviets, and the Soviet central planners wanted to beat the Americans (even if the average peasant would have traded the Soyuz for more vodka).






It also shows near world-wide celebration when America managed to land safely on the moon.




My grandpa remembers hearing it announced live on the radio, and people really were happy.


But I don't see a contradiction between people celebrating the successful outcome and the majority not particularly seeking investment into the programs that brought about the outcome. Most Americans drastically overestimate NASA's share of the budget, which at least weakly implies that they wouldn't mind a higher share than in reality. They're not going to change their voting patterns over it, nobody lost an election for supporting the SLS despite it being an absolute boondoggle.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The conditions you describe are most applicable to the very early colonies. There are enough people with a risk-appetite large enough to consider the journey, especially if they're getting paid.


Funny store. My first interaction with Scott involved him responding to an essay of mine, our exchange evolving with him then encouraging me to consider rather longterm dreams I had like becoming a psychiatrist on a Mars mission. I'd take that up for a few years, especially if I was getting paid big bucks. A mere million USD would convince me to take the risk and tolerate the inconvenience.


The first colonies will probably live In grounded Starships converted into habitats, or in relatively small colonies covered by regolith. But once ISRU is running (and there are many ways to get easy concrete substitutes on Mars), there are few limits on how big and luxurious habs can be. You could have pretty large houses or apartments in hab blocks, as long as you keep the whole thing sealed, which was the plan anyway.


Even the journey wouldn't be so bad with a Starship. The modeled crew quarters would put earlier missions to shame.


Do I particularly want to go to Mars? Not really, though I think it's kinda cool. I'd be much quicker to sign up for NEO stuff, because of all the convenience that entails. But there are enough people who can be swayed when there's 8 billion people to draw from. People sign up for 6 month stays in Antarctica after all.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't see an issue with this, unless the government is giving away insurance at ludicrously low prices at very high risk. Many of the countries affected by a potential blockade are (at least nominally) US allies. Then you have the issues of other US allies in Europe rather reasonably feeling lukewarm about things, so preventing oil prices from spiking is at least a bone thrown in their direction.


Also, the US Navy is in a position to assess risk better, and also do something about said risk. It's like paying the police for insurance, they're going to patrol the streets better and deter criminals more than a mall cop.


On top of that, if ships under the new insurance scheme successfully continue making the crossing, then that might restore general confidence and bring private insurers back on board, while preventing other knock on effects on the global economy, of which the US is a part of. It might be a relatively cheap (and potentially profitable) intervention, since you don't have to pay out insurance unless the ships are actually sunk.