YouSaid · the spoken record

Balaji Srinivasan

lines on the record: 605
first: 2022-10-20
most recent: 2022-10-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Be cruel. I don't know what that is. It's weird because I think, you know, one of my sayings is, just like the internet increases microeconomic leverage, the internet increases variance. For anything that exists before, you have the 0 and 100 versions of it. I'll give some examples and I'll come to this. For example, you go from the 30 minute sitcom to the 30 second clip or the 30 episode Netflix binge, right? You go from guy working 95 to the guy who's the 40 years old and has failed to launch, hasn't a job or anything. And the 20-year-old tech billionaire. You go from all kinds of things that were sort of Gaussian or kind of constrained in one location to kind of extreme outcomes on both sides. And applying that here, you are talking about the bad outcome, which I agree does happen, where the internet in some sense makes people have very low empathy between others.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But still, even your physical mobility is less than your digital mobility, right? You can just essentially, I mean, the entire concept are like nations and borders and whatnot didn't exist in the Hunter-Gatherer Eller, right? Because you couldn't build permanent fortifications and whatnot. Even nations as we currently think of them would demarcated borders, you need cartography, you needed maps, right? That stuff didn't exist for a long time. You just had sort of a fuzzy area of we kind of controlled this territory and these guys are on the other side of the river.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The digital world. Exactly. Okay, because you can now think about every site for very low cost that you can visit the digital world. I mean, how many websites have you visited? I don't know, hundreds of thousands probably at this point over your life, right? How many places on the surface you've visited? You're actually unusual. You might be like a world traveler or what have you, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“School to home, home to school. You know, it wasn't like you went and explored the map. Most people didn't, right? They were highly canalized, meaning it was just back and forth, back and forth, very routine, just like the push the button, push the button, trapped within this very small piece and also trapped within this large country because it was hard to travel between countries and so on. Again, of course, there were vacations. Of course, there was some degree of news and so on. Your mobility wasn't completely crushed. But it was actually quite low. relatively speaking just the you were you were trapped in a way that you weren't even really thinking about it okay and now that map has opened up now you can see the whole map you can go all over the place um you know i don't have the data to show it but i would i would be shocked if people the average person didn't go to more places wasn't you know doing more you know going to more restaurants and things like that today than they were in the 80s simply because the map is open okay”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is coming back to the hunter gatherer, farmer soldier digital nomad kind of thing, right? The digital nomad combines aspects of the V1 and the V2 for a V3, right? Because the Digital Nomad has the mobility and freedom of the hunter-gatherer, but some of the consistency of the civilization of the farmer and soldier, right? But coming back to this, one other thing about it is in the 1950s, If a guy in assembly line might literally push the same button for 30 years. Whereas today, you're pushing a different key every second, right? That's like one version of like microeconomic leverage. Another version is in the 1980s, I mean, they didn't have Google Maps, right? So you couldn't just discover things off the path. People would just essentially do, you know, home to work and work to home and home to work. And a trip had to be planned, right? They were contained within a region of space, or you do home to school.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I mean, just your profile. Is there like a national profile? I mean, there's like driver's license. Point is that it's assumed that it's not like individually customizable quite in that way, right? Of course, you can move around your house and stuff like that, but it's not like your experience of the US is like configurable, you know?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's individual empowerment, right? And so our sort of industrial age systems were not set up for that level of individual empowerment. Just to give you like one example I think about, we take for granted every single website you go and log into. You can configure your Twitter profile and you can make it dark mode or light mode and your name, all this stuff is editable, right? How do you configure your USA experience? Is there a USA.gov that you edit? Can you even edit your name there?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lyft and Uber, right? When you're at the store, you see a price on the shelf and you can comparison shop. If it's Tinder, you can swipe. If it's Twitter, you can click over to the next account. The back button is exit. The microeconomic leverage, leverage in the sense of alternatives. This is like one of the fundamental things that the internet does. It puts this tool on your desktop and now you can go and talk to an illustrator or you can kind of build it yourself, right, by typing in some characters into Dali.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And people push those buttons to get people to stick. That's like, you know, I shouldn't say the bad version, let's say a common version. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. But then there's the good version, which is, oh, you know, maybe the price is down right now, but you believe in the cause. So even if they're, you know, on paper, you would rationally exit, you believe in this thing, and you're going to stick with it. So loyalty can be, again, good and bad, but it kind of modulates the trade-off between voice and exit. So given that framework, we can think of a lot of problems in terms of, am I going to use voice or exit or some combination thereof? Because they're not mutually exclusive. It's kind of like, you know, left and right sometimes use both together. I think that one of the biggest things the internet does is it increases microeconomic leverage and therefore increases exit in every respect of life. For example, on every phone, you can pick between”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In capitalism are useful forces. But there's a third, which is migration, right? So you can vote with your ballot, you can vote with your wallet, you can vote with your feet. Wallet has some aspects of exit built into it. But voting with your feet actually has some aspects of voice built into it, because when you leave, it's like an amplifier on your vote. You might say 10 things, but you actually leave, then people take what you said seriously. You're not just like complaining or whatever. You actually left San Francisco because it was so bad on this and this issue and you've actually voted with your feet. It is manifest preference as opposed to state of preference. So voice versus exit is this interesting dichotomy. Do you try to reform the system or do you exit it and build a new one or seek an alternative? And then loyalty modulates this, where if you are a patriot as part of the initial part of your conversation, right? Like, you know, are you a traitor? You know, you're giving up on our great thing or whatever, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is exit? So there's this book which I reference a lot. I like it called Exit Voice and Loyalty by Albert Hirschman. And he essentially says, and I gave this talk in 2013 that goes through this at YC Stub School. But just to describe these, voices reform exit as alternatives. For example, in the context of an open source project, voices submitting a bug and exit is forking. In a company, voices, you're saying, hey, here's a ticket that I'd like to get solved and Exit is taking your business elsewhere. At level of corporate governance, voices, you know, board directors vote and exit is selling your shares, right? In a country, voices of vote and exit is migration. And I do think that the two forces we talk about a lot, democracy,”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A healthy way Okay, so in many ways, you know, and this is a very superficial way of talking about it, but this is exit is the anti-genocide technology, right? Because exit is the route of the politically powerless. Exit is not, people always say, oh, exit is for the rich. That's actually not true. Most immigrants equals most immigrants are not rich. They're politically powerless.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the thing is that simply describing something, some abuse, unfortunately, after the initial shock wears off, people will unconsciously think of it as sort of an attractor in the space, right? It's like, I'll give you some examples. Like, you know, minority report had the gesture thing, right? And the Connect was based on that. So the dystopian movie, but had this cool kind of thing and people kind of keyed off it, right? Or people have said that movies like Fullmetal Jacket, that was meant to be in my understanding was meant to be like an anti-war movie, but lots of, you know, soldiers just love it despite the fact that the drill sergeant is actually depicted as a bad guy, right? For the sort of portrayal.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rule 34, but for abusive technology, you can always come up with a black mirror version of something. And in fact, there is this kind of funny tweet, which is like a sci-fi author. My book don't invent the torment nexus was meant to be a cautionary tale on what would happen if society invented the torment nexus. And then it's like tech guys, at long last, we have created the torment neck, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Basically, any technology, I mean, you can use a hammer to go and hit somebody with it, right? I'm not saying every technology is equally destructive or what have you, but you can conceive of, it's kind of like rule 34, but for technology, right? Okay, right, you can probably figure out something.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have you heard the term argumentum ad hitum or like Godwin's law or something? It's something where if the reference point is Hitler, it's this thing where a lot of things break down. But I do think, I mean, look, is there any, did Bitcoin manage to get where it was without a single shot being fired to my knowledge? Yes, right. Did Google manage to get to where it is without shots being fired? Absolutely.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's the thing basically there's also a scilla and ashurribdus. I'm not, when you see what centralization can do, and you correct in the direction of decentralization, you can overcorrect with decentralization and you get anarchy. And this is basically, then you want to centralize, right? And this is the, I think it's the Romancer of the Three Kingdoms, the Empire Long United Must Divide. The Empire Long Divided Must Unite. That's always the way of it, right? So it's going to happen is We will state certain verbal principles, right? And then the question is where in state space you are? Are you too centralized? Well, then, okay, you want to decentralize. And are you too decentralized? And we want to centralize and it may track more, right? And people opt into more tracking because they will get something from that tracking, which is a greater societal stability. So it's kind of like saying, are we going north or south? And the answer is like, what's our destination? Where's our current position in the civilizational state space?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the issue is basically once one realizes that the moral tradeoff has two poles to it. And that basically centralized organized murder has, I mean, if we add up all the disorganized murder of the twin century, it's probably significantly less than the organized murder that these states facilitated, right? And probably by RJ Rummel has this thing called democide, right? And the thing is, it's so grim, right? Because it's saying one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic, right? These are just like just incalculable tragedies that we can't even understand. But nevertheless, engaging with it, like, you know, I don't know, is a ratio 10x? Is it 100x? I wouldn't be surprised if it's 100x.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, history isn't overt. If you think about what the Chinese are building on this, that surveillance state, it's not just tracking your name, it's tracking everything on you. Like WeChat is essentially like it. It is all the convenience and none of the freedom.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it is like nuclear energy. It is something which you're going to keep having it reform because there's good reasons where you have centralization, decentralization, decentralization. But power corrupts, absolute power corrupts, absolutely. And you just have to be very suspicious of this kind of centralized power. The more trust you give it, often the less trust it deserves. It's like a weird feedback loop, right? The more trust, the more it can do, the more it can do, the more bad things it will do.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't prevent the murderers there, right? So, my point is just in the ethical weighting of it, it's a two-sided thing. You're right that the tracking can prevent disorganized murders, but the tracking facilitates, unfortunately, organized murders. Lists of undesirables were the primary tool of all of these oppressive states in the twin century. You see my”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that who is committing all those murders? It was the state. It was the organization that one is implicitly trusting them to track you. And how did they commit those murders? Well, how did Lenin, the hanging order, I'm talking about the hanging order for the Kulocks? Okay, the famous hang order, which actually showed they were actually bloodthirsty. The key thing was he said here's a list of all the quote rich men, the Kulocks, go and kill them. The real names, the state names were what facilitated the murder.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Murder is something that SADE 1 probably has effectively a social smart contract or a social contract that says that's illegal. Therefore, you're in jail. Therefore, you're deprived of the right to exit. But upon entry into that society, in theory, you would have said, okay, I accept this quote, social contract, right? Obviously, if I kill somebody, I can't leave. Okay, so you've accepted upon crossing the border into there, right? Now, as I mentioned, what is murder? Like people will, I mean, there's an obvious answer, but as I said, there's been human sacrifice in some societies, communism. They kill lots of people, Nazism, they kill lots of people. Unfortunately, there's quite a lot of societies. I wanted to say it's an edge case, but maybe many of the 20th century...”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm thinking of the Aztecs or the Mayas or something like that. There's weird edge case, of course. Yeah, their societies, unfortunately, that have actually, that's why I asterisk it. But let's say”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From doing that. Sure, sure. Murder is going to be against the rules in almost every society. And people will argue. Yeah, most likely, right? And”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think your surname right now for many people, it's.eth, and that reflects the Ethereum community. Your surname online will carry information about you, like. says something different about you,.btc says yet something different. I think we're going to have a massive fractionation of this over time. We're still in the very earliest days of our internet civilization, right? 100, 200 years from now, those surnames may be as informative as, say, Chen or Friedman or Sriniv Austin in terms of what information they carry because the protocol is the civilization fundamentally that you're associated with, right? Right.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Able to do. You can pay Lextream.eth. You can message Lexstream. You can look it up like a social profile. You can send files to it. You can upload and download. Basically, it combines aspects of an email address, a website, a username, et cetera, et cetera. Eventually, I think you'll go from email to phone number to ENS address or something like that as the primary online identifier because this is actually a programmable name, right? Whereas a state name is not. You know, think about it, like a state name will have apostrophes perhaps in it. Or is that your middle name or this and that? That was a format that was developed for the paper world, right? Whereas the ENS name is developed for the online world. Now, reason say ENS are something like it. You know, somebody at a village, their name might be Smith because they were a blacksmith or potter because they were Potter, right? And same might.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's completely unable to secure it. It's hacked over and over again. China probably has the entire OPM file. And it's not just that, like Texas is hacked. And some of these hacks are not even detected yet, right? And these are just the ones that have been admitted. And so what happens is criminals can just run this stuff and find, you know, okay, so that guy who's got that net worth online, he merges various databases, they've got a bunch of addresses to go and hit. In that sense, real names were not state names were not built for the internet. They just give up too much information in our actually existing internet environment, they give up too much information. On the other hand, they also give too little. Why? If instead you give out lexfriedman.eth, okay, or a similar crypto domain name or Urbit name or something like that, now that's actually more like a DNS, okay? First, if you've got a Lexstream.eth, what can you do that? Some you can do today, some you'll soon be.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The real names out there, their stalker knows it, they can find address information, all this other kind of stuff, right? And with all these hacks that are happening, just every day we see another hack, massive hack, et cetera, that real name can be indexed into data that was supposed to be private, right? Like, for example, the Office of Personnel Management, like the government, the US government, many governments actually, are like a combination of the surveillance data and the Keystone Cops, right? Why? They slurp up all the information and then they can't secure it. So it leaks out the back door. Okay, they basically have a hundred million records of all this very hundred million records of all this very sense of data. They just get owned, hacked over and over again, right? And so really there should be something which just totally inverts the entire concept of KYC and what have you. And of course, comply with the regulations as they are currently written. But also you should argue privacy over KYC. The government should not be able to collect what it can't secure. It's slurping up all this information.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is a complicated topic, but let me make a few remarks. First is real names, quote unquote, state names. We're not built for the internet. State names, right? It's actually a great way to think about social security name, right? So your state name, your official name was not built for the internet. Why? They give both too much information and too little. So too much information because someone with your name can find out all kinds of stuff about you. Like, for example, if someone doesn't want to be stalked, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Terms of who this person is. So this way they don't discriminate versus male or female for who's getting a violin position. So you combine those concepts like ban the box, not asking these various questions, blind auditions, and then also the concept of implicit bias. If you believe this research, people are unconsciously biased towards other folks, right? Moreover, with AI, very soon the AI version of Zoom, you'll be able to be whoever you want to be and speak in whatever voice you want to speak in. And that'll happen in real time.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Concerns of various factions are actually obviated or at least partially addressed by going pseudonymous as default, right? It is the opposite of bringing your whole self to work. It's bring only your necessary self-to-work, right? Only show those credentials that you need, right? Now, of course, anybody who's in cryptocurrency understands Sushi Nakamoto and so on is for this, but actually many progressives are for this as well. Why? You don't ban the boxes. It's like you're not supposed to ask about felony convictions when somebody is being hired because they've served their time, right? Or you're not supposed to ask about immigration status or marital status in an interview. And people have this concept of blind auditions where if a woman is auditioning for a violin seat, they put it behind a curtain so they can't downgrade her for playing performance is judged on the merits of its audible quality, not in terms of”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now you can be your real self. And so we've had this kind of thing for a while with communication. The new thing is that cryptocurrency has allowed us to do it for transaction, hence the pseudonymous economy, right? And you go from anonymous pseudonymous real name. These each have their different purposes. But the new concept is that pseudonym, you can have multiple of them, by the way, your ENS name, you could have it under your quote, real name or state name like Lex Friedman.edh, but you could also be punk 6529.eth. And now you can earn, you can sign documents, you can boot up stuff, you can have a persistent identity here, which has a level of indirection to your real name. Why is that very helpful? Because now it's harder to both discriminate against you and cancel you.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what's interesting is on their RINSTA, they're their fake self because they're in their Sunday best and smiling. And this is the one that's meant to be search indexed. On the Finsta. Their fake name, this is just shared with their closest friends. They're their real self, and they're hanging out at parties or whatever. And so this way they've got something which is the public persona and the private persona, right? The public persona that's search indexed and the private persona that is private for friends, right? And so organically people are, you know, like Gene Jacobs talks about like cities and how they're organic and whatnot. some of the mid-20th century guys, the architecture they had removed shade from, you know, like awnings and stuff like that got removed. So this is like the restoration of like awnings and shade and structure so that you're not always exposed to the all-seeing web crawler that I have Sauron, which is like Googlebot just indexing everything. These are search resistant identities and that like I just sort of passes over you like, you know, in the terminator, like in the terminator, I just kind of passes over you, right? So searchers and identity is not pulled up. It's not indexed.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't have to. One thing that we're seeing now actually is at the level of kids, you know, the younger generation, Eric Schmidt several years ago mentioned that people would change their names when they became adults so that they could do that. This is kind of already happening. People are using this many years ago, search resistant identities. Why? They have their Finsta, which is their quote fake name in Scram, and Rinsta, which is their real name Instagram.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so think of it as being the center of a giant network of all of these things. When you go and create a pseudonym, you're butting off a totally new node that's far away from all the rest. And now he's choosing to attach Bitcoin talk and Bitcoin.org and the GPT signatures of the code if he choose to do that. All those things, the digital signatures are all attached to this new decentralized name because he's instantiating it, not the government. One way of thinking about it is the root administrator of the quote real name system is the state because you cannot simply edit your name there, right? You can't just go, you can't log into USA.gov and backspace your name and change it. Moreover, your birth certificate, all these stuff. That's fixed and immutable, right? Whereas we take for granted that on every site you go to, you can backspace, you can be like, call me Ishmael, you know, walk into a site, use whatever name you want, you decide to use the same name across multiple sites. You can do that. And if not,”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Attached to that is every database, his Gmail, his Facebook, if he had one, every government record on him. All of these databases have that state name as the foreign key, right? And so it can go and look things up in all of those databases.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's right. In fact, there's a book called Seeing Like a State, which actually talks about the origins of surnames and whatnot. Like if you have a guy who is, that guy with brown hair, that's like an analog identifier. It could be in 10 different people in a village. But if you have a first name, last name, okay, that guy can now be conscripted. You can go down with a list, a list of digital identifiers, pull that guy out, pull him into the military for conscription, right? So that was like one of the purposes of names was to make masses of humans legible to a state, right? Hence seeing like a state. You can see them now, right? So these digital identifiers, one thing that people don't usually think about is pseudonymity is itself a form of decentralization. So people know Satoshi Nakamoto was pseudonymous. They also know he's decentralization. But one way of thinking about it is, let's say his real name or his state name is a node, okay?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very new thing. And I actually think this will be a transitional era in like human history. We're actually going to go back into a much more encrypted world. Okay.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Difference. Anonymous is like 4chan, where there's no tracking of a name. There's zero reputation associated with an identity. Pseudonymous is like much of Reddit, where there's a persistent username and it has karma over time, but it's not linked to the global identifier that is your state name. So your quote real name, even the term real name, by the way, is a misnomer because it's like your social security name, like social security number. It's your official government name. It's your state name. It is the tracking device. It's an air tag that's put on you, right? Why do I say that? Another word for a name is a handle. And so just visualize like a giant file cabinet. There's a handle with Lex Freeman on it that anybody, the billions of people around the world can go up to and they can pull this file on you out. Images of you, things you said, like billions of people can stalk billions of other people now.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so I actually gave a talk on this a few years ago called The Pseudonymous Economy. And it's come about faster than I expected, but I did think it was going to come about fairly fast. And essentially the concept is obviously we've had, so first anonym, pseudonym, real name, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you have Slack. And yes, you can use Slack to go between different company Slacks, but Slack historically, at least I'm not sure what their current policy is. Historically, they discourage public slacks. So it's mostly like you have your main slack for your company, and then you sometimes may jump into like a, let's say you've got a design consultant or somebody like that. You'll jump into their Slack. But Discord is, you've got way more Discords usually that you jump into than Slacks, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is like a Warren's, you know, like, you know, it's like rabbit warrens or like an ant colony where you don't know where information is traveling. Then you've got Reddit, which has sort of your global Reddit and then all the subreddits. That's a different model of Cavendmins. I think one of the reasons it works is that you have individual moderators where something is totally off topic and accept and unacceptable in this subreddit and totally on topic and acceptable in another. That's like kind of a precursor of the digital societies I think that we're going to see that actually have become physical societies like lots and lots of subreddit like things become physical societies. Then you start going further into like discord where it's more full feature than as you go Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, now you jump into Discord and Discord is a bunch of individual communities that are connected and you can easily sort of jump between them, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Twitter is a commons, then Facebook is like it's got all these Warrens and stuff. Facebook is very difficult to reason about privacy on that. And the reason is I think it's easy to understand when something is completely public like Twitter or completely private like Signal. And those are the only two modes, I think, in which one can really operate when something is quasi-private like Facebook, you have to just kind of assume it's public because if it's interesting enough, it'll go outside your friend network and it'll get screenshotted or whatever and posted. And so, you know, Facebook is sort of forced into default public despite its privacy settings. For anybody who says something interesting, if it's like, you can figure out all their dials and stuff like that, but just hard to understand unless it's totally private or totally public, right? You have to basically treat it if it's totally public, if it's not totally private. Okay, at least under a real name, I'll come back to pseudonym. So you've got Twitter. That's Total Commons.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, meaning no offense to Liberians. It's like a library and Liberia. Liberia was wracked by civil war for many years, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, the way I think, I mean, Twitter is like a cross between a library and a Civil War. It's something where you can learn, but you can also fight if you choose to fight, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And so you can think of many kinds of social networks as being on the Cave and Commons continuum. For example, Twitter is just all commons. Caves are just like individual DMs or DM threads or whatever, but it's really basically just one gigantic global public fight club for the most part, right? Then you have...”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it is. It is. So, for example, an office, a good design for an office is frequently you have the commons, which is the lunchroom or the gathering area. Then everybody else has a cave on the border they can kind of retreat to.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What does the platform for a highly aligned online community look like? I think Discord is the transitional state, but it's not the end state. Discord is sort of chatty. The work isn't done in Discord itself, right? The cryptocurrency for tracking or the cryptocarma for tracking people's contributions is not really done in Discord itself. Discord was not built for that. And I don't know what that UX looks like. Maybe it looks like tasks, you know, like maybe it looks something different.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something looked delicious. Entropy going in a ton of different directions due to novelty versus focus. It's like heat versus work. Heat is entropic and work force along a distance. You're going in a direction, right? And so if those 30 links on the next version of Hacker News or Red or something like so brilliant, that's leveling you up. The 30 things you click, you've just gained a skill as a function of that, right? So these kinds of online communities, I don't know what they look like, they probably don't look like the current social media. Just like, for example, I know this is a meta-analogy, but in the 2000s people thought Facebook for work would look like Facebook. And David Sachs, you know, found in sold a company Yammer that was partially on the basis. It was fine. It was a billion dollar company. But Facebook for work was actually Slack, right? It looked different. It was more chat focused. It was less image focused and whatnot.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source