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

“You've got a laser, right? You've got something which you focus on something because most of the Web2 internet is entropic. You go to Hacker News, you go to Reddit, you go to Twitter, and you're immediately struck by the fact that it's like 30 random things, random. It's just a box of chocolates. It's meant to be, you know, we're...”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At a minimum, you don't have a highly aligned online community unless you have a thousand people and you paste in a tweet and a thousand of them RT it or like it. If you can't even get that, you don't have something. If you do have that, you have the basis for at least collective digital action on something. And you can think of this as a group of activists. You can think of it as, for example, let's say I mentioned a guild, but let's say they're a group that wants to raise awareness of the fact that life extension is possible, right? Every day there's a new tweet on, I don't know whether it's metformin research or Sinclair's work or David Sinclair, right? Andrew Hubman has good stuff here, you know, or there's longevity VC. There's a bunch of folks working in this area. Every day there's something there. And literally the purpose of this online community is raise the rationale of longevity. And of the thousand people, 970 go and like that. That's pretty good, right? That's solid. You've got something.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company with the scale of a community. That's like what a highly aligned online community is, right? Start to get 1,000 or 10,000 people who can collectively do something as simple as just all liking something on Twitter. For example, why would they do that? They're a guild of electoral engineers. They're a guild of graphic designers. And you've got a thousand people in this guild. And every day somebody is asking a favor from the guild and the other 999 people are helping them out. For example, I've just launched a new project or I'd like to get a new job. Can somebody help me and so on? And so you kind of give to get your, you know, you're helping other people in the community and you're kind of building up karma this way. And then sometimes you spend it down like stack overflow has this karma economy. It's not meant to be an internal economy that is like making tons and tons of money off of it's sort of a keep score, right? That's a highly aligned online community part. Then capacity for collective action. I just kind of described that, which is”
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 the network state? So I'll give it a sentence and I'll also give it an image, right? So the informal sentence. A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states. So just taking those pieces, highly aligned online community. That is not Facebook. That is not Twitter. People don't think of themselves as Facebookers or Twitterians, right? That's just a collection of hundreds of millions of people who just fight each other all day, right? It's a fight club. A company is highly aligned where you'll put a task into the company Slack and if you do an all hands about 100% of the people in a company Slack will do it. So they're highly aligned in that way. But online communities don't tend to be highly aligned. Online communities tend to be like a Game of Thrones fan club or something like that. Or a Twitter account, you might get 0.1% of people engaging with something. It's not the 100%. If you combine the degree of alignment of a company,”
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 just interactive enough that your brain is working and you're problem solving. And sometimes you'll need a little pen and paper. But that format of sort of very mobile-friendly, just continuous learning. I'd like to do a lot more with that. And so that's kind of where we're going to go the book”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But one thing I was really pleasantly surprised by is how many people got in touch with us afterwards and asked us if we could open source the software to create this website, right? Because actually you can try it on mobile. I think it's actually in some ways a better experience than Kindle. And so that was interesting because I do think of the website as like a V1 version of this concept of a book app, right? For example, imagine if you have the Bible and the Ten Commandments aren't just text, but there's like a checklist and there's a gateway to a Christian community there. And, you know, the practice is embedded into the thing. Do you know brilliant.org? Amazing site. I love this site. Brilliant is basically mobile-friendly tutorials. And you can kind of just swipe through your in line at Starbucks or getting on a plane or something. You just swipe through and just get really nice micro lessons on things.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A concept from the middle of chapter three. How do I get the thing from front to back? I can just point them at the networkstate.com that is import this one entry point. And you mentioned subscription and money and so on and so forth. And I think people are paying for content online now with newsletters and so on. But I've chosen to, and I will always have the thing free. And I want it on. You can get the Kindle version on Amazon simply because you have to kind of set a price for that. But NetworkState.com, what I want to do is have that optimized for every Android phone. So people in India or Latin America or Nigeria can just tap and open it. Going to do translations and stuff like that. Greg Foder of All Space VR, you know, founder of AllSpace VR, you know, he sold that and he coded the website. And I worked with him on it. And there's another designer who Elijah. And it was basically just a three-person group. And we thought we had something pretty nice.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think there's a lot that can be done there because actually, in going through this process, in many ways, the most traditional thing I did was a self-publish ebook on Kindle, right? Why? Because basically like, you know, if you actually ink a deal with a book publisher, first day, you know, they'll give you some advance. I didn't need the advance or anything. But second is all these constraints. Oh, you want to translate into this? Oh, you want to do this other format? Or you want to update it? You have to go and now talk to this other party, right? Also, the narrowing window of what they'll actually publish, it gets narrower and narrower. You see all these meltdowns of young adult novels and stuff on Twitter, but it's more than that. So, you know, actually having an Amazon page, it's just like a marker that a book exists. Okay. And now I've got an entry point where if someone says, okay, I like this tweet, but how do I kind of get the, that might be...”
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 wanted to get something out there and get feedback and whatnot. Just like an app, right? Again, you have these two polls of an app is highly dynamic and you're accustomed to having updates all the time and a book is supposed to be static. And there's a value in something static, something unchanged and so on. But in this case, I'm glad I kind of shipped a version 1.0 and the next version, I'm going to split it into tentatively motivation theory and practice, like motivation like What is the sort of political philosophy and so on that motivates me at least to do this, which you can take or leave, right? And then theory as to why network state is now possible. And I can define it in a second. And then the practice is zillion's a practical details and everything from roads to diplomatic recognition and so on, funding, founding, all that stuff. A lot of the stuff actually I left out of V1 simply because I wanted to kind of get the desirability of it on the table.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stick to V2. I'll give a few, right? And so a lot of this stuff will go into the version. So I've got this book, The Network State, which covers some of these topics”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gives you signal for today on this currency is down or up relative to this other currency. In the same way each of those migration pairs, someone goes from New York to Ohio to California, gives you information on the desirability of different states. You can literally form a pairs matrix like this over time, very much like link matrix. That's shaped America in a huge way. And so you ask A, if this nation of immigrants that was founded by men younger than us, by the way, the founding fathers were often in their 20s, right? you know, endorse the concept of a proposition nation who have given rise to a country of founders and pioneers who've literally gone to the moon, right? Those folks would think that this is the end of history, that that's it, we're done. Like we've done everything else. I mean, there's people in technology who believe, and I agree with them, that we can go to Mars, that we might even be able to end death, but we can't innovate on something that was 230.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Century, like during the Great Depression, and now we're entering the modern era where Florida and Texas have risen, and New York and California have dropped. And so interstate competition, it's actually just like intercurrency competition. You've got trading pairs, right? You sell BTC by ETH, you sell Monero by Zcash, right? Each of those trading pairs.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those folks, I mean, 0.01% of the energy is going towards building a new system, that seems like a pretty good portfolio strategy, or 100% are supposed to go and edit this code base from 200 something years ago. I mean, the most American thing in the world is going and leaving your country in search of a better life. America was founded 200 years ago by the founding fathers. It's not just a nation of immigrants. It's a nation of immigrants, right? Emigration from other countries to the US. And actually also immigration within the US. There's this amazing YouTube video called, it's like 50 states, US population, I think 1790 to, it says 2050, so they've got a simulation. So you just stop it at 2019 or 2020. But it shows that like Virginia was like number one early on, and then it lost ground in New York gained. And then Ohio was a big deal in the early 1800s. And it was like father of presidents in general, all these presidents and later Illinois and Indiana. And then California only really came up in the 20s.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And let me say one other thing about this, which is there are, I mean, everybody in the world, okay, let's say, I don't know what percentage, let's say 99.99% rounds to that number of Political discourse in the US focuses on trying to fix the system.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some people theorize that the entire Garden of Eden is like a sort of built-in neural network recollection of this pre-cile era where we're able to roam around just pick off fruits and so on, low population density. So point is that I think what we're seeing is a V3. You go from the hunter-gatherer to the farmer and soldier, the cessile nations are here and they've got borders and so on to kind of the v3, which is the digital nomad, the new hunter-gatherer. We're going back to the future because, you know, it's even older than nations is no nations, right? Even more traditional than tradition is, you know, being international, right? And so we're actually tapping into that other huge thread in humanity, which is the desire to explore pioneer, wander, innovate. And I think that's important.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there weren't borders and so on, they kind of went where they want, right? Skeletons and stuff like that. Many folks report that the transition to agriculture and being sciile resulted in diminution of height. People had like tooth decay and stuff like that. The skeletons, people had traded off upside for stability. That's what the state was. That was what these sales.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's several different kinds of lines of attack or debate or whatever on this, right? First is, yes, there's obviously value to tradition. And people say this is Lindy and that's Lindy. It's been proven for a long time and so on. But of course there's a tension between tradition and innovation. Going to the moon wasn't Lindy. Just it was awesome. And artificial intelligence is something that's very new. New is good, right? And this is attention within humanity actually itself because you know it's way older than all of these nations. I mean, humans are tens of thousands of years old. Ancestors are humans are millions of years old, right? And you go back far enough and the time that we know today of the sessile farmer and soldier is, if you go back far enough, you want to be truly traditional, well, we're actually descended from hunter-gatherers who are mobile and wandered the world.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Microsoft or name some company that's GameStop, and you can try to reform it, or you can start your own. And the fact that both options exist mean that you can actually just start from scratch. And that's just, I mean, the same reason we have a clean piece of paper, right? I mentioned this actually in the network state book. I'll just quote this bit, but we want to be able to start a new state peacefully. For the same reason we want to bear plot of Earth, a blank sheet of paper, an empty text buffer, a fresh tarp, or a clean slate, because we want to build something new without historical constraint, right? For the same reason you hit plus and docs.new, you know, like create a new doc. For the same reason, right? Because you don't have backspace, you don't have just like 128 bytes of space, 128 kilobytes, and just have to backspace the old document for creating the new one. So that's a fundamental thing that's wrong with today's governments. And it's a meta point, right? Because it's not any one specific reform. It's a meta reform of being able to start new countries.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and what do I mean by that is basically. Can start a new company, you can start a new community, you can start a new currency even these days. You don't have to beat the former CEO in a duel to start a new company. You don't have to become head of the World Bank to start a new currency. Because of this, yes, if you want to, you can join, I don't know.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or the diameter of a virus, those are just exist independent of the human mind. Change in a human minds doesn't matter. Those remain constant. And then you have things that are interestingly in the middle where cryptocurrency has tried to pull more and more things from the domain of political truths into technical truths, where they say, okay, the one social convention we have is that if you hold this amount of Bitcoin or that if you hold this private key, you hold this Bitcoin. And then we make that very hard to change because you have to change a lot of technical truths. So you can push things to this interesting intermediate zone.”
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 I mean, I guess I'm talking about technical insight where this is the thing we were talking about actually before the podcast, like technical truths versus political truths, right? Some truths, they're on the spectrum. And there's some truths that are actually entirely political in the sense that if you can change the software in enough people's heads, you change the value of the truth. For example, the location of a border is effectively consensus between large enough groups of people. Who is the CEO that's consensus among a certain group of people? What is the value of a currency or any stock, right? That market price is just the psychology of a bunch of people. Like literally, if you can change enough people's minds, you can change the value of the border or the position of the hierarchy or the value of the currency. Those are purely political truths. Then all the way on the other end are technical truths that exist independent of whatever any one human or all humans think. Like the gravitational constant, 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, because at will, actual insight is, again, Maxwell's equations. You're able to shift the world with that. There's a lot of practical devices that work. The illusion of insight is, I'm Jesus Christ, and nothing happens, right? So I don't know. I think those are quite different.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the computer needs to do. I do wonder whether they actually give people insight or whether they give people the illusion of insight.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. I think it's something, I mean, again, my recollection on that is it's like a pile of highly And yeah, exactly like a robot is just a little too deterministic. Or if it's got noise, it's like Gaussian noise. And the way humans do it is just not something that you'd easily be able to do without collecting thousands and thousands and thousands of human traces doing it. But it is a predator prey on that.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right. And it'll schedule Zooms, it'll send emails, it'll essentially, because if you think about it, a human is hitting the keys and clicking the mouse. But just like a self-driving car, the wheel rotates by itself, right? Those keys are effectively just, it's like the automator app in Apple, right? Everything is just moving on the screen. You're seeing it there and it's just an AI.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you can do that, that's a big deal. People obviously have trading bots and stuff, but that would be the next level: it's typing out emails, it's creating documents.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a challenge problem, if you were a Microsoft or Apple and you had legitimate access to the operating system, just like Apple says, can you send me details of this event? A decentralized thing could, in theory, log the actions of 10,000 or 100,000 or a million people. And with cryptocurrency, you can even monitor a wallet that was on that computer. And you could see what long run series of actions were increasing or decreasing this digital balance. You see what I'm saying? So you start to get at least conceptually, it would be invasive and there'd be a privacy issue and so on conceptually you could imagine an agent that could learn what actions humans were doing that result in the increase of their local cryptocurrency balance. There may be better ways to formulate it, but data considered a challenge problem is to go from the Turing test to a genuine intelligent agent that can actually go and make money for you.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That this is a human for n sessions. Remote work actually makes this possible. That's another definition of a multiplayer Turing test where basically you have a chatbot that's fully automated, that is earning money for you as an intelligent agent on a computer that's able to go and get remote work jobs and so on. I would consider that next level, right? If you could have something that was like that that was competent enough to, I mean, because everything on a computer can be automated, right? Literally, you could be totally hands-free just like autonomous driving, you could have autonomous earning.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that is the Turing test, but it's like the multiplayer Turing test. Now that actually a fair number of chatbots have passed the Turing test, I'd say there's at least two steps up, right? One is a multiplayer Turing test where you have chatbots talking to each other. And then you ask, can you determine the difference between end chatbots talking to each other and clicking buttons and stuff in apps and humans doing that? And I think we're very far off, or I shouldn't say very far off, at least. I don't know how far off we are in terms of time, but we're still far off in terms of a group of N chatbots looking like their digital output is like the group of N humans. Like go from the Turing test to the multiplayer Turing test. That's one definition. Another definition is, you know, to be able to kind of swap in and you're not just convincing one human that this is a human for a small session. You're convincing all humans.”
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's about people's empathy for that corporation, their brand identity. But it's interesting to see that, first of all, people sort of do think of corporations as being more or less like the branding is really what they're responding to.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a spectrum. So, for example, Disney is considered about as human as a dog, but like Exxon, I may be remembering this wrong, but they had a level with human at one end and like rock at the other end.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, the reason being because. You know, it's possible. It's possible that you have a partition of society on literally this basis. That's one model where there's some people, just like there's vegetarians and non vegetarians, right? There may be Machians have life and machines are machines, you know, like, or something like that, right? You could definitely imagine some kind of partition like that in the future where your fundamental political social system, that's a foundational assumption. And is AI does it deserve the same rights as a human? Or for example, a corporation is an intermediate. Do you see that thing which is how human are different corporations? Have you seen that infographic? Actually, funny.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I saw that Google engineer was basically saying this had already happened. And I was surprised by it because when I looked at the chat logs of it, it didn't seem particularly interesting. On the other hand, I can definitely see, I mean, GPT-3 for people who haven't paid attention shows that serious step-ups are possible. And obviously you've talked about AI in your podcast a ton. Is it possible that GPT-9 or something is kind of like that? Or GPT-15 or GPT-4, maybe?”
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 one is something I'd have to Google around, but there was a guy, I think, at Santa Fe Institute or something who had some definition of life and like some thermodynamic definition. But you're right that it's going to be a multi-feature definition. We might have a Turing test-like definition, frankly, which is just if enough humans agree it's alive, it's alive, right? And that might frankly be the operational definition because, you know, viruses are like this boundary case. Are they alive or not? Most people don't think they're alive, but they're more alive than a rock in a sense.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Replicate an error correct it because helix unwinds and you copy paste, right? So he was a big struction person, and that applies not just at the protein level, not just at the level of DNA, but potentially also at the level of organs, like the Clostrum is kind of this system integrated level, right? It's like the last layer in the neural network or something. And so that's the kind of thing that I think is worth studying. So consciousness is another kind of big abiogenesis, a big question. The prime number remains consciousness is a big question.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a couple of remarks on that. One is Francis Crick of Watson and Crick, before he died, I think his last paper was published on something called the Klaustrum. And the thing is that sometimes in biology or in any domain, people are sort of discouraged from going after the big questions, right? But he proposed that Klaustrum is actually the organ that is the seat of consciousness. It's like this sheath that covers the brain. And for mice, and again, I may be recollecting this wrong, but you can look at it. My recollection is in mice, if you disrupt this, the mouse is like very disoriented, right? It's like it's the kind of thing which, you know, Watson Crick were all about structure implies function, right? They found the structure of DNA, this amazing thing. And, you know, they remarked in this very under understated way at the end of the paper that, well, obviously this gives a basis for how the genetic material might be.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To give rise to a different branch of life form, the silicon based as opposed to carbon based to stretch a point. You give rise to something that actually does meet the definition of life for some definition of life.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In post. One thing that I do think was interesting is Craig Venter a while back tried to make a minimum viable sell where he just tried to delete all of the GNs that were not considered essential. And so it's like a new life form. And this was like almost 20 years ago and so on. And that thing was viable in the lab, right? And so it's possible that you could reverse engineer. So you're coming out the problem from different directions like RNA molecules can do quite a lot. You've got some reasonable assumptions as to how that could come together. You've got like sort of stripped down minimum viable life forms and so on. It's not there isn't stuff here. You can see microevolution. You can see at the sequence level. You know, if you do molecular phylogenetics, you can actually track back the bases. There's actually, so it's not like there's no evidence here. There's a lot of tools to work with. But this, in my view, is a fascinating area. And actually also relevant to AI because another form of abiogenesis would be if we are able to.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most important And again, there may be some biochemist who's like, oh, Baji, you didn't know about X, Y, and Z that happened in the abiogenesis field. I freely confess I'm not at au Corant on it. The last thing I remember looking at it is the Quran.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One possibility is if we could do atomic level simulations of molecules bouncing against each other, it's possible that in some simulation we could find a path, a reproducible path to abiogenesis, and then just replicate that in the lab, right? I don't know, but that seems to me to be like a mystery that we still don't fully understand, like an example of the prime number maze, 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, that's possible. I mean, one of the things is so here's, for example, a mystery that we haven't yet done, right? Or we haven't really figured out yet, which is abiogenesis in the lab, right? We've done lots of things where you've got, you can show macromolecules binding to each other, you can show evidence for the so-called RNA world, abiogenesis to go from non-life to life, right, in the lab. You can show microevolution, obviously with bacteria, you can do artificial selection on them, lots of other aspects of fundamental biochemistry origins of life stuff have been established. There's a lot of plausibility arguments about the primitive environment and nitrogens and carbon snapping together to get the RNA world is the initial hypothesis. But to my knowledge at least, we haven't actually seen abiogenesis demonstrated. Now, one argument is you need just like this math.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number of light years out that people that alien civilization wouldn't be able to detect it, right? That's another argument.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, there's a lot of folks who have kind of ridden and talked about this, just the Drake equation, which is like multiplying all the probabilities together. There's perhaps more sophisticated takes like the dark forest, which says that if the universe is like a dark forest where the dumb ones that aren't hiding our presence, there's one calculation I saw, and I haven't reproduced it myself, but basically says that the assumption that other civilizations have seen ours is wrong because when you have like a spherical radius for the electromagnetic radiation that's leaving our planet, as that sphere gets larger and larger, it gets smaller and smaller amounts of energy. So, you know, you get farther out, you're not getting enough photons or what have you to actually detect it. I don't know. I actually haven't looked into the math behind it, but I remember seeing that argument. So actually, it is possible that it's so diffuse when you go past a certain”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a surprising amount of stuff out there on this. The UK has declassified a bunch of material. Harry Reid was a sender, has talked about this. It's non-obviously. Is there something happening there, right? And people had thought for a long time that the UAP thing was like American kind of counterpropaganda to cover up their new spy planes that were spying over the Soviet Union to make anybody who talked about them seem crazy and hysterical or whatever. But if the UAP thing is real, it could be atmospheric phenomena like the Aurora Borealis or the Northern Lights, but things we don't understand. It could be something like the bomber and passion series, you know, which were the observations of emission spectra before quantum mechanics. So that's like another option as opposed to doesn't exist or Little Green men. It could be physics we don't understand yet as one possibility.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know that gets like very abstract, but there are unsolved problems in physics, like the condensed matter space. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening. My recollection, I may be out of date on this, like things like sona luminescence, we don't know exactly how they work. And sometimes those things that are like at the edges of physics, you know, in the late 1800s, I think Rutherford, somebody, I think it was Rutherford said, you know, basically all physics is being discovered, et cetera. And that was obviously before quantum mechanics, you know, that sort of edge case people are looking at the bomber and the passion series and seeing this weird thing with the hydrogen spectrum. And it was quantized and that led to this sort of phenomenological set of observations that led to quantum mechanics and everything. And sometimes I think the UAP stuff might be like that, right? People immediately go to aliens for UAP like the unidentified aerial phenomena, right? People have been”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. So maybe the math we have gets us through the equivalent of the even turns and the odd turns, but there's math we don't yet have that is more complex or more complex rules for other parts.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but on the other hand, it's like, you know, it is yet we're still also in a prime number maze. There's things we just don't understand. And, you know, so.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Math is surprisingly useful to describe the world, like very simple equations give rise to these complex phenomena. Wolfram is also on this from a different angle with the cellular automata stuff”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting. So I tend to be more of a hard science person, right? And so just on that, people talk about qualia, you know, like, is your perception of green different from my perception of green? And my counter argument on that is, well, we know something about spectrum of light, and we can build artificial eyes. And if we can build artificial eyes, which we can, you know, like they're not amazing, but you can actually, you can do that. You can build artificial ears and so on. Obviously, we can build recording devices for cameras and things like that. Well, operationally, the whole concept of your perception of green, you see green as purple, icy, green as green, or what I call green doesn't seem to add up because it does seem like we can do engineering around it, right? So the Hoffman thing, I get why people more broadly will talk about a simulation hypothesis because, you know, it's like Feynman, many others have talked about how”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't. I know Roger Penrose has his road to reality series for basic physics getting up to everything we know, but go ahead.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source