Dawkins & Weinstein [Oct 2018]

Brett Weinstein & Richard Dawkins

https://youtu.be/hYzU-DoEV6k

BW: Both of them are evolutionary biologists, dyed in the wool

• There are areas of notable difference, though

• Disagree on specific areas of evolutionary theory

RD wrote The Selfish Gene at 35 years old

• Still feels cutting edge, to BW

• The current era has been much quieter, theoretically 

At first, BW thought RD + Fisher + co had run the table, closing most questions

• Then realized there’s a lot of open questions still

• e.g., why do males engage in elaborate displays before mating?

• Why has progress slowed, given all the open questions that remain? 

• And where are the biologists that can wield tools in the same bold way?

Darwin noticed the advertising capability of males e.g., peacocks

• Darwin left it at aesthetic consideration 

• Wallace, co-discoverer of natural selection, hated the simple explanation

• The advertisement has to have some utility 

  1. Invoking taste, in Wallace's opinion, was bordering on mysticism 

• One theory: the male is so fit, it can survive in spite of the ostentatious display

• Less aggressive theory: it showcases parasite / malady resistance 

BW: if females are picking, based on good genes..

• Then in a few generations, the need for display should disappear 

• Female vigilance should drop, once genes leave the pool

• Or, it should be oscillating; bad genes appear periodically, need to be sorted out

RD: This seems to be a matter of mathematical modeling

• It’s an active field of research, nowadays

• BW: Well, count me skeptical 

• Math can spit out answers that aren’t feasible 

• RD: Certainly the remedy is better models..

• BW: Not so sure; math seems like a fallback option here 

BW: The current field seems to defer to these very powerful models/tools

• And these have yet to predict or prove anything substantial

George Williams paper on senescence (feebleness of age)

• Put forth a theory, and stated what we should see in nature 

• BW is a fan of this sort of reasoning and inquiry 

• It wasn’t simply that aging/deterioration is “good for the species"

• Genes are modified by other genes

• Things that kill you when you’re past reproductive age are favored

  1. Overwhelming genetic “pressure” is on genes that favor younger pursuit 

RD: Nationalism might be an even greater evil than religion

• Might not be helpful to discuss in Darwinian terms 

• There’s lots of complexity layered atop the base biological terms

• BW: Disagree; think it’s vital to discuss in biological terms 

• The complexity could be uniquely human, with social + genetic interplay 

  1. To confront the problem, we do need to confront who we are

• BW: We need to look at “selfish replicators” 

• To resist the will of the replicators, we need to stare straight into the motivations

We know there’s a genetic component to homosexuality 

• BW: The older brother / right-hand rule

• The more older brothers you have, the more likely you are to be gay - but only if you are right-handed

  1. Very odd; but suggests there’s some structure

Suicide: RD can think of psychological and mimetic reasons

• BW thinks biology has instantiated a bad assumption

• We’ve over-indexed on individual fitness, versus group fitness 

  1. The motivation might be for the familial continuity

• RD: doesn’t seem helpful to couch this in Darwinian terms 

• Suicide, nationalism et al are not instances of Darwinism

  1. They’re complex intertwining of sociology, psychology..

BW: So let’s dig deeper 

• If Darwinian, then digging into their nature is essential to rectifying the problems 

• e.g., understanding when the genocide program is “triggered”, genetically

• RD: Still, the framing seems like a simplistic rationalization

• You can acknowledge the relics of our genetic past 

• BW: Agree we can get carried away with these logical traversals 

RD: Let’s think about the Nazi invasions to the east

• You have layers of motivations; state-level, down to personal 

• How can we make Darwinian claims across strata?

• Even so, we can recognize phenomena like tribalism

• Common motifs, played upon in common ways 

BW: Catholics contain a non-reproductive caste 

• RD: Worker bees don’t reproduce

• Alleges in Selfish Gene that celibacy in clergy is a failure of evolution

  1. Priests forego reproductive viability due to certain memes

• BW: Person involved in failure or Darwinism is goading others to reproduce 

• RD: His memes are spreading, if not his genes 

RD: Catholicism is a complex of mind viruses, yes

• BW: We disagree on that

• There’s lineage level adaptations, responsible for the spread of beliefs 

RD: Taking a step back: Darwinian natural selection is all about the survival of replicators

• Memes are some; genes are others

• Vehicles are bodies, brains

• We unite the genome; but individual genes are like viruses

• A set of independently tussling replicators 

  1. Some replicate by going in “gangs” ; others occupy lone vectors 

BW: Agree with most of what you’ve said

• Genes are entrapped in shared fate at conception; this causes an organism

• RD: The notion of an extended phenotype

• e.g., beaver dams; bird nests - not part of the body, but genetically instigated 

  1. You can have genes that ultimately lead to consumption by a “terminal” host 

  2. The ecology is not functionally divisible from the organism, in this lens 

Supercomputers [The Computer Chronicles - 1984]

• Computers that can do 100s of millions of operations per second 

• Fastest computers in US and Japan 

• Historically massive parallel architectures 

• Magnetic fusion experiments at Livermore lab using lots of SCs 

  • Octopus network 

  • Lots of partial differential equations 

• CRAY is one of the fastest commercially available 

• Nuclear weapon design and analysis at Livermore 

• Japan’s supercomputers heralded a new generation of speed and sophistication 

• Vectorized compilers had to be built

  • Different than scalar computation 

  • Algorithms needed to be redesigned 

• Commercial applications? 

  • Petroleum ; not clear what the goal is yet, but lots of simulations + exploration

  • Automobile industry; high-dimension simulations ; profitability analysis 

• Grace Hopper nanosecond 

• Speed of light is the fundamental limitation on computing

🇯🇵 JAPAN

• Hitachi was building SCs 

  • Part of public/private partnership to produce 10X faster super computer

• “Science City” 60 miles north of Tokyo 

• Very cold chip environments required 

• Bit of an arms race mentality 

  • Fujitsu compiler looked really good, to Livermore 

• Defense / dominance perspective

• There’s material risk to losing that dominance in America 

  • Not as many visible super computer companies in America as you’d think 

Niall Ferguson - Rubin Report [May 2018]

Niall Ferguson + Dave Rubin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKkNIOkGtnQ

• History departments have moved to the “monochrome left" , in his estimation

• Definition of defeat in the culture war is that it’s imperceptible 

  • Often it’s a replacement problem

  • Conservative historians weren’t ever replaced

  • The left was good at succession; that was the important game

• Stanford history department wanted no part of him; only Hoover affiliation

  • Unlike at Harvard; was a pariah at Stanford

  • Implicit rule that you don’t hire right-leaning historians or grad students

• Students in a class he lectured in hadn’t considered the religious angle of 9/11

  • Howard Zinn’s books are most prominent; but just one perspective

• IDW…such mystique and interest

  • How could he be part of it, when he’s been in establishments for so long 

  • Seemed disingenuous to put himself in same category as Brett Weinstein and others

  • But it’s not about denial of platform: about whether you’re seen to speak for those who feel that they’ve been silenced

• Cowardice is the most powerful force in human history

  • Seen it with his wife, and those who hesitate to support her

  • Fear of getting targeted by jihad, or something

• Biggest newspapers have cultures like colleges

  • NYT, FT..

• The guilty until proven innocent model of current outrage..

  • It’s like a wheel of fate, medieval style 

• Scots have a self-image of courage and boldness

  • Marching towards gunfire, bagpipes playing

• When to NYU imminently after 9/11

  • Feels like it comes from his Scottish feeling of defiance 

• Soviets recruited British sympathizers in academia 

  • Single most successful act of Russian espionage 

  • Very exclusive network infiltration 

• Took the Remain position, due to friendship with Cameron, Osborne and others

• Found arguments of Brexit advocates as unconvincing 

  • That you’ll recoup money and give it to domestic services

  • Immigration was the issue

  • Britain was subject to open borders, and inheriting Germany’s (or others) immigration policies 

  • Feels he was wrong initially; can admit that

  • Should’ve advised Cameron that he advocated for Brexit after there was pitiful progress on immigration across EU 

• Not a fan of Theresa May 

• In this weird scenario where Brexit is being implemented by those who really don’t want it

  • Disaster to be subject to rules of EU, through trade or whatever, without getting the top-tier upside

• Thinks this whole fiasco can lead the way to Corbyn and totally leftist government 

Company Building in Crypto [Dec 2018]

Chris Dixon + Brian Armstrong

https://youtu.be/Bx78aNxwA1E

How did Coinbase start?

• Armstrong Studied CS and Economics

• Saw hyperinflation in Argentina 

• Worked at AirBnB

  • Front row seat to international commerce at scale

  • Saw a lot of broken things 

• 2010: read Satoshi’s white paper 

• Decentralized protocol for moving value, along with information 

Even in 2011, felt like he might be too late 

• Worked on Coinbase prototype on nights/weekends 

• Got into YC

• Andreessen felt he might’ve missed the internet revolution in ’93 🙃

Dixon considers himself an innovation maximalist

• Thinks VR is about to come back 

• Crypto feels like one of the big paradigms; few come along in a career

• Time is tough, though

• Nerd energy (nights/weekends) still funneling towards ML and Crypto 

A16Z invested in Coinbase in 2013 

• Series of run-ups, and declines

• Challenge for Armstrong in managing his psychology, his team’s psychology

• Friends and family could be tough; “you’re working on the scam thing?” 

• People who make companies successful need passion that transcends 2-3 years

• Those initial years are full of setbacks; maybe you see success after 8-10 years

Most initial activity was in one protocol: Bitcoin

• Scaling concerns started to bubble 

• Realized that Coinbase couldn’t just be a Bitcoin company; might just be digital gold 

• ETH, then expanded to 5.  More coming

• Not going to be like TCP/IP, where it’s one protocol to rule them all

• Handful will likely succeed; e.g. JPEG, PNG for images

  1. Traded risk for complexity in the landscape 

• Aiming to be the most trusted, and easiest to use, in the crypto world 

Ethereum’s appeal

• JS-like, Turing-complete language that’s relatively easy to use 

• Enabled a new set of tokens; comprehensive smart contracts; etc

• Half a developer maintained SSL; there was no money for funding it 

• ETH has inspired a renaissance in protocol development

  • ..and maybe there’s a business model for maintaining them 

• New design space unlocked, where you can't assume that you have total control over the distributed computer

Coinbase is a little over 500 people, now

• Things like mission statements, OKRs start to feel necessary when you cross Dunbar’s number

• Executive coaching has been really helpful 

• Armstrong wants to run a big, public company someday

  • Keen to learn / professionally develop 

  • Does NPS feedback after every big meeting 

What is crypto useful for, beyond speculation?

• Access to financial services in emerging markets

• Recipients can verify payment with just math; not third party

• Prediction markets

• Wisdom of the crowds 

• Social apps, decentralized 

• Endorsements and up-voting resulting in payment

  • Can you reduce the friction with moving little amounts of money around?

  • Putting in a credit card is still very high friction

  • (Armstrong doesn’t know who PewDiePie is)

• Dixon: the idea that we’re only 20 years into the internet and compensation modalities are done?

• Feels short-sighted; ads not likely to be the end-all-be-all

• Quality of crypto teams is a high quality as any other types that A16Z sees

A16Z’s initial foray into Crypto

• 2013; was a contrarian move to dive in

• Dixon was in the security space; has always found it interesting 

• HashCash was interesting, in the context of surmounting spam 

• You can always find reasons to be a detractor, but on net, there’s much to be excited about

Akira the Don / Jordan Greenhall [Rebel Wisdom 2018]

Link: https://youtu.be/s6KSJqMI0NU

IDW - what’s the nexus?

• We’re at some sort of juncture; they’re adding to the conversation 

• Akira sees them as characters in a Marvel-esque universe 

• JBP is sort of like Iron Man 

JG: We’re in “mythopoetic” times; archetypal times 

• Always, but especially now, it seems 

Qualities showing up in the IDW

• Courage; bravery 

• We seem deeply attuned to this 

• An unreasonable attraction to the truth

• Even suffering through pain 

• Calling out to the hero in the everyman 

To venture into the unknown is eternally scary

• And preternaturally admired, at the same time 

The times seem to summon the speaker 

"A beautiful corpse"

• e.g., Beatles on Ed Sullivan 

  • It’s received, en masse 

• Now, responders / FLUPs are at parity

• The end of the author

  • Parallel to Foucault’s birth of the author

High and low culture

• They’re both evolutionary niches 

• You can tailor content to an audience

There’s a flat surface, in media now; how do you play the game?

• We’re figuring that out