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

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“So once you kind of realize that these words have just been chosen in such a way as to delegitimize their target, and they all went vertical in 2013 and they were suddenly targeted against their erstwhile alleys in tech, but also just across the country. You can see that this great awakening, that's what Iglesias called it by play on words the great awakening, right? This kind of spasm of quasi-religious extremism, I wouldn't call it religious because it's not god-centered, it's really state and network-centered. So I call it a doctrine, which is a superset of religion and political doctrine. These words went vertical, and all the terrorism stuff you just notice kind of fell off a cliff. That was the obsession of everything in the 2000s and just channel change, right? It's amazing how that happened.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is the underpinning ideology. All these words have embedded in them an ideology. Another way of thinking about it is this is not my reference, but I'll cite it anyway. The glossary of the Greek military junta, the creation and or use of special terms are employed by the junta as propaganda tools because essentially the word itself embeds a concept. You can russell conjugate something one way or the other, right? Russell conjugation is a concept that I sweat, you perspire, but she glows. You can always take something. You are uncontrollably angry, but he is righteously indignant. You have a thin skin. They clap back”
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 they just deployed them, right? And essentially, somebody observed that wokeness is the combination of Fucaldian deconstruction and civil rights, where deconstruction takes away the legitimacy of the old order. And then civil rights says, okay, the only thing that's good is this, right? Which is says the old order was also bad in a different way, but this is what's good.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tech helped Obama get re elected and media was positive on tech until December 2012. They wrote like the nerds go marching in in the Atlantic. Then after January 2013, once Obama was ensconced, then the knives came out because basically these tech guys were bankrupting them. They were through supporting them. And so the journals got extremely nasty and just basically they couldn't build search engines or create social networks, but they could write stories and shape narratives. So clear editorial direction went down that, you know, essentially took all of these weapons that had been developed in academia to win status competitions in humanities departments.”
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 talk about this in the book, but I think fundamentally what happened was tech hurt media and their revenue dropped by about $50 billion over the four years from OH 2012”
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 really 2013 is the exact moment you see these things, they're flat and then just go vertical, mansplining, toxic masculinity”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, yeah. And so here is this graph. Okay, David Rosato is a data analysis, I think, that put this together. So basically, this is a graph of the word usage frequency in the New York Times, 1970 to 2018. And he's got some controls there.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Survivalist type of stuff, right? And you just kind of go kind of too crazy into that corner. And then, of course, though, the other extreme of having no sovereignty is you will own nothing and be happy. Everything's in the cloud and can be deleted at any point, right? So each of these kind of has badness when it's there, but also its total extreme opposite is bad. And so you want to kind of carve out like an intelligent intermediate of these three poles. And that's the decentralized center or the recentralized center I call. Now with that said, I think there is a repositioning in particular of vote capital that is happening. And I think if the 2000s was the global war on terror and then the channel just changed to wokeness in the 2010s. And when I mean channel change, have you seen Paul Graham's graph or actually David Rosato's graph that Paul Graham posted?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also negative in its opposite. For example, obviously just totally submitting to total surveillance is bad, but a society where nobody submits is San Francisco, where people just rob stores and walk out in the middle shoplifting all these goods and nothing happens, right? A society where you have the bulk level of sympathy where you get to the kind of insanity of math is white supremacist and whatever nonsense is happening today is terrible, but a society that's totally stripped of sympathy is also not one that one would want to be part of, right? That's just like the, you know, whether it's 4chan's actual culture or it's fan culture or something like that or some weird combination, that's also not good. It's like Russia in the 90s. Like nobody trusts anybody. That's also bad. And, you know, being totally sovereign, that sounds good. And there's a lot that is good about it. I'm sympathetic to this corner. But being totally sovereign, you go so capitalist, so sovereign that you're against the division of labor. You don't trust anyone.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it ends in your head bowed. It's an ideology of submission. It's not that subtle, but it's like somewhat subtle. And then finally, crypto capital is head held high. You must be sovereign. Okay, which, and one of the things I point out in the book is each of these polls is negative in some ways when taken to extreme.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, what is NYT? So its formula is a little interesting. If CCP is just you must submit because they're powerful and then you bow your head because the Chinese Communist Party is strong. Woe capital is you must sympathize. Why do you bow your head, Lex? Oh, because you're a white male. Therefore, you're guilty. You must bow your head because you are powerful. Yet, notice it ends in the same place in your head looking to the ground, right? In China, it's because they are powerful, so therefore you must bend your head. For the wokes, it's the left-handed version where you are powerful, and that's shameful, so you should bow your head”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The defenders of capital, you have the Americans who are with capital. You have the Communist Chinese who are with capital, and you have the internationalists who are with capital. And it's the Conservative American nationalists who are in some ways against that, which is kind of funny, right? So it's like this weird ideological flippining that if you take the long lens, you have these poles that kind of repel each other. So just on the CCP NYTBC thing.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A casual, but I think it's also important because it seems it's paradoxical, right? So I had a thread on this. The future is communist capital versus vote capital versus crypt capital. Each represents a left-right fusion that's bizarre by the standards of the 1980s consensus. It's PRC versus MMT versus BTC. And why is it bizarre by the standards of the 1980s consensus? Well, in the 1980s, you wouldn't think the communists would become capitalists, but they did. You wouldn't think that the wokes, the progressives would become so enamored with giant corporations and their power, right? They've seen something to liken that, right? And you also wouldn't think that the non-Americans or the post-Americans or the internationalists would be the champions of capital because you think it's the American nation, right? So rather than the conservative American nationalists being”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, so basically, and by the way, in China, they call it CPC. They don't like it usually if you say CCP, right? So the Communist Party of China, as opposed to Chinese community. Basically, that is capitalism, that it's a Chinese pool of capital, that billion person pool that we chat and it's Alibaba and its entire kind of thing. That is one just social network with currency. The whole thing is vertically integrated.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beautiful triangle. And then I will also come back up and I'll talk about how the CCP story relates to social media and decentralized social media. All right, so NYT CCP BTC is What capital, communist capital, crypto capital? And communist capital is the simplest, is you must submit. The Communist Party is powerful. CCP is powerful, and you are not. If you're in China, you just submit.”
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 that's counterpositioning that will basically attack the wokes by how much money they're making. Not contesting the ideology. So when one guy signals economics, you signal culture, when the other guy signals culture, you signal economics, that's a whole thing I can talk about. Should I talk about that for a second?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get it, right? Like, you know, if you're so smart, why aren't you rich is the normal kind of thing, right? If you're so woke, if you're so holy, why is, for example, the BLM founder, why do they have this million dollar mansion? If you're so woke and it's all about being good and you're anti-capitalist, how come you seem to be raking in the money, et cetera, right? This is an argument which I'm not sure how long it will go. It might take years to play out. It might take decades to play out. I think probably on the order of a decade, you're going to see, in my view, the repositioning if the Democrats are the Woke Capitalists, the Republicans will eventually become are becoming the Bitcoin maximalists. Why? Because, you know, if one guy picks left, the other guy picks right. It's literally like magnets.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was another 10 points moving over of black voters to Democrats. Ruffleman said, completely lost moral authority 100 years after the Civil War. Then the next 50 years, that loss of moral authority meant that they lost economic authority. Because now you wouldn't want a Republican bigot as a C of your tech company anymore, would you? So by 2015, now you have, it's like two sine waves that are staggered, right? Moral authority leads to economic authority, leads to loss of moral authority, leads to loss of economic authority. And so now you have the Democrats have completed 155-year arc from the defeated party in the Civil War to the dominant party in the U.S. establishment. All the woke capitalists are now at the very top. And now the same repositioning is happening, where if you're so woke, why are you rich?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not as a party of the Southern racist, but the poor, right? And the cross of gold speech by William Jennings Bryan was part of that. There's a gradual process that reaches, but let's say a crucial mark with the election of FDR, where it was actually not the 1932, but the 1936 election that black voters switched over to FDR. That was actually the major flip to 70% to the Democrats. Now they had repositioned as the party of the poor, not the party of the South. And Republicans had lost some economic authority, or rather they had moral authority. They turned into economic authority. They started to lose some moral authority. The loss of moral authority was complete by 1965. That was actually mop-up. People dated, you know, the civil rights movements movement as the big way where the Republicans lost moral authority. That was a mop-up because 1936, 30 years earlier, was when black voters switched the Democrats.”
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 look through history, the Christian king, the Republican conservative, the CCP entrepreneur, the WASP establishment, these are all examples of a revolutionary left movement becoming the ruling class right. Like the Republican conservative, just as that one example, I go through an extended description of this in the book, but the Republicans were the radical Republicans, the left of 1865. They won the revolution and their moral authority led them to have economic authority in the late 1800s. You wouldn't want a Democrat Confederate traitor as the head of your railroad company, would you? So all the Confederate traders, et cetera, were boxed out from the plum positions in the late 1800s. And so what happened was the Republicans turned their moral authority into economic authority, made tons of money. The Democrats then started repositioning.”
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. Once you realize that, you're like, okay, I can, just like as an engineer, you can kind of, okay, sometimes I want to do this on the front end, sometimes I want to do the back end, sometimes it's explicit. And sometimes the user doesn't need to see it, and it's on the back end. Lots of political stuff, you know, is arguably not just best done on the back end, but always done on the back end. One of the points I make in the book is left is a new right is the new left, is um.”
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 did trade with Hong Kong, and he spent his political capital on this one exception. It grew so fast that gave him more political capital. You know, some people think actually that the Sino-Vietnamese war was Deng's way of just distracting the generals while he was turning China around to get it back on the capitalist road. And what he did was the opposite of a rebranding. He did a reinterpretation. Like a rebranding is where the substance is the same, but the logo is changed. You were Facebook, you're now Meta. That's a rebranding, right? Reinterpretation is where the logo and the branding is the same. They're still the CCP. There's still the Chinese Communist Party, but they're capitalist now, the engine under the hood. It's deniable. And this is a very common, once you've realized those are different things, it's like swap the front end, swap the back end.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Otherwise, if I say something, it sounds too surprising. So that's why I want to make sure I have. Yeah. So, like, yeah, I mean, people would be shot for holding some grain. So what happened though was Ding Xiaoping. Said, okay, we're not going to kill you. In fact, we're going to actually set up the first special economic zone in Shenzhen. He didn't try to flip the whole country from communist to capitalist in one go. Instead, he's like, we can reform in one place. And in fact, he fenced it off from the rest of China.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, here I'll paste this link so you can put it in the show notes. All right, this is worth reading. It's still applicable today, but now that we have stable diffusion, now we have all these people online now that Russia and China are America's national bad guys as they were before. They are again, perhaps we'll get some movies on what communism actually was during the twin century and how bad it was, right? And vaccinating people against that as well as against Nazism, which they should be. The point of this, 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
“And in a few years earlier, they might have just been executed. And in fact, many were. That's what it means when you see millions dead. Millions dead means guys were shot for keeping some grain for themselves. Okay. It means like guys came and kicked in the door of your collective farm and raped your wife and took you off to a prison camp and so on and so forth. That's what communism actually was. It hasn't been depicted in movies. There's a great post by Ken Billingsley in the year 2000 called If I get this right Hollywood's Missing Movies”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what happened? Right. So now that they could keep some of what they earned They had a bumper harvest. And you know what happened with that bumper harvest? That made the local officials really suspicious and mad. They weren't happy that there was a bumper harvest. They're like, what are you doing? You're doing capitalism?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And said, We all agree that we will be able to keep some of our own grain. And if any of us are killed for doing this, then the contract said that the others would take care of their children. Okay. To keep some of what you earned, I mean, just think 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
“It's crazy. Okay. Yeah. Here's the thing. Capitalism was punishable by death. Living memory in China. Just to explain what that meant, okay? I mean, that's what communism was, right? It was literally the same China that has the entrepreneurs and jackmon and so on and so forth. 40-something years ago, capitalism was punishable by death. To give you a concrete example, this is a famous story in China. Maybe apocryphal, but it's what the folks have talked about. There's a village in Zhaogang. basically all the grain that you produced was supposed to go to the collective. And even one straw belonged to the group. At one meeting with Communist Party officials, a farmer asked, what about the teeth in my head? Do I own those? Answer no, your teeth belong to the collective. Okay. Now, the thing is that when you're taking 100% of everything, work hard, don't work hard, everyone gets the same, so people don't want to work, right? So what happened? These farmers gathered in secret and they did something that was like, would have gotten them executed. They were a contract amongst themselves.”
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 one concept of what next social media looks like. There's actually so much more. Another huge thing is decentralized social media. Social media today is like China under communism in a really key sense. There's a great article called The Secret Document That Transformed China. Do you know what China was like before 1978?”
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 this way, at least, what you can do is you can say, okay, here's the things that are consensus reality, like the value of the gravitational constant will be the same in the MAGA knowledge graph and the US establishment knowledge graph and the CCP knowledge graph and the, I don't know, the resilient knowledge graph and so on and so forth. But there's other things that will be quite different. And at least now you can isolate where the point of disagreement is. And so you can have a form of decentralized fact checking that is like according to who, well, here is the authority and it is this knowledge graph, right? So that's like a kind of thing, right? Yeah.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so like GPT 3, but the stable diffusion version where it's open. Okay. And so now stable diffusion shows that it is possible to take an expensive AI model and put it out there. So you have, you know, you know what a knowledge graph is? Like basically you wouldn't actually whether you have it as RDF or like a triple store kind of thing or some of the representation. It's like an ontology of A is a B and B has a C and it's got probabilities on the edges sometimes and other kinds of metadata. And this allows Google to show certain kinds of one box information where it's like what does Steve Jobs' age or birthday? They can pull that up out of the knowledge graph, right? So you can imagine that Trugel would have both deterministic and statistical components. And crucially, it would say whether something is true according to a given knowledge.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so when people were saying they want to ban lying on social media, fact check social media, the assumption is that they know what is true. And what do they mean by that? They really mean the assertion of political power, right? With that said, do I think it could be useful to have some kind of quote fact-checking thing? Yes, but it has to be decentralized and open source. You could imagine an interesting concept of coding true, like a Google That return was true. It's like a modified version”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Million things I can say here. So, a few things. First is fact checking. I had this kind of fun, I thought it was a funny tweet to anyone who wants to quote ban lying on social media, please write down a function that takes in a statement and returns whether it is true. If you can start with a Reman hypothesis, that would be amazing. That's kind of funny, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Operational transformations how like Google Docs coordinates edits, conflict-free replicated data types is another alternative easier to code in some ways an operational transformation. Microtasks like mechanical cherk, scale AI, and earn.com before we sold it. Blockchains and crypto, obviously, the polymath project, where a bunch of people parallel processed and were able to solve an open math problem by collaborating. Wikipedia with its flaws that we talked about, social networks and group messaging, all these are ways for collaborating. They're not just simply attacking or doing something on the internet. This is something that Alon could use, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tools for directed collaborative work by really large groups on the internet are still in their infancy. You can see pieces of what I was talking about, the scratch pad thing, the network state being a group which can do collective actions. This is kind of the thing, right? So technologies for internet collaboration that can be very useful to the software for future network states.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here is a remark I had just before the pandemic related to this, okay, about Twitter helping a lot just beyond that for a second. Maybe centralization is actually also underexplored in the design space. For example, today's social networks are essentially governed by a single CO, but that CO is a background figure. They aren't leading the users to do anything. What if they did? One example, could Elon Musk's then 30 million followers somehow get us to Mars faster?”
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 don't think it's as successful I mean, obviously they existed before Twitter, and a lot of the engineering problems are obviously non-Twitter things, right? But Twitter itself has certainly probably helped Musk with Tesla 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 a region called New Caledonia, and that's in the southeast Pacific. So maybe New Catalonia is somewhere else, right? So if you're flexible in that, now, of course, a bunch of people will immediately say, 50 different objections to this. They'll say, oh, you don't get it. The whole point is the land, and so on. They've been there for generations. Say, I do get it. But this Catalan nationalist who's like literally ridden in Catalonian Don't know how many years, right? Is basically saying this is worth thinking about. And so it's a peaceful third way.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not something where you're going to be able to get a state. But just like there's more Irish people who live outside of Ireland, just like the Jewish people didn't actually get a state in Poland or what have you, they had one in Palestine. Perhaps the Catalonians could crowdfund territory in other places and have essentially a state of their own that's distributed. Again, what people are immediately going to say is, well, that's going to lead to conflict with the locals necessarily and so on and so forth. But if your parallel processing, you don't have the all-in-one bucket aspect of, I must win here, and the guy on the other side is like, I must win. You have optionality. You can have multiple different nodes around the world. It's like there's multiple Chinatowns. You could have multiple Catalonian towns. And some places you might be able to just buy an island and that becomes, you know, the new Catalonia, right? It's like in, I think.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This Catalonia nationalist said, he's like, Look, well, we can't give up on our existing path. The network state is a really interesting third option. I mean, by the way, I hadn't talked to this guy v Partal, and he's got this cycle via web, sorry. It can be, meaning the network state can be especially appealing to us. Catalans are now embarking on the task of having a normal and current state in the old way, and this is a project that we cannot give up. But this does not mean that at the same time we are not also attentive to ideas like this and we do not try to learn and move forward, right? Meaning, you know, the network state, right? Because that's the third way, which says, okay, maybe this particular region.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't if you're a nation, you know, meaning that they've got a legitimate claim from history, language, culture, all that stuff, right? The Basque Do as well. The Kurds do as well. Lots of ethnic groups around the world do. So in the game of musical chairs, that was the formation of current national borders, they lost out, right? So what did they do? Well, one answer is they just submit to the Spanish state and they just speak Spanish and their culture is erased and their history is erased and so on. The second is they do some sort of Ireland-like insurgency, the troubles to try to get a thing of their own, which is obviously bad for other kinds of reasons, right? You know, violent, et cetera.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, V1, V2, V3, the nation state is V2, and it beat the city-state, which is like V1. And the network state I think of as a potential V3, which combines aspects of V1 and V2. So Catalonia or the Basque region, these are underneath the nation state of Spain, but many Catalonians think of themselves as part of a separate nation. Not all, many. And so they want a state of their own.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The movement In the sense that Zionism shows that it is possible to have a book and then a conference and then a fund and eventually in the fullness of time with a lot of time and effort. To actually get a state, right? And as I mentioned earlier, a lot of countries are smaller countries. What I didn't mention, there's a guy who's the head of Kazakhstan, and he made a remark. He's like, you know, if we allow every nation that wants to have self-determination to have a state, we'd have 600 countries rather than 190. Because there's many opposites of a nation state, but one of the opposites is the stateless nation Do you remember the network seat is popular? In places like Catalonia, Catalonian nationalists in Catalonia, guys who are committed Catalonian nationalists. So Catalonia, you know, this region of Spain, right? The thing is that”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it possible? Well, my tweet. Good question. I think the network state will be, I think, important, or I hope it. Well, 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
“Think it's good, but basically if I'd say that's what's my primary thing on Twitter, it's that. It's a scratch pad for me to kind of put some concepts out there, you know, iterate on them, get feedback on them, and so on and so forth.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I use Twitter, I wouldn't really think of it as quick communicating my wisdom per se or anything like that. I use Twitter like I might use GitHub as a scratch pad for just kind of floating concepts. And I've got, okay, here's a frame on things. Let me kind of put it out there and see what people think, get some feedback and so on.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you need to do that as well as understand what is good about the conventional wisdom. And for example, if you notice a lot of what I talk about is like the V1, V2, V3, whereas critical as I am of, let's say the FDA, I recognize that people want a regulated marketplace. And how do we do better? As critical as I can be of the Fed, I recognize that some kind of monetary policy is necessary. And Satoshi came up with a better one, right? As harsh as one can be a critic of the current system, It is really incumbent as difficult as that is upon one to come up with a better version, just like academia. As much as I think current science is corrupted, what I propose is a way to actually improve on that and actually any true scientists say, yes, I want my work to be reproducible. Yes, I want citations to be important statements and so on and so forth. And we don't have to get everybody to agree that, but it's just enough to build that better version and not regress.”
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 kind of what I try to do, what is the dark matter? What is the question that is not being asked or what have you, right? And so, you know, that's not to say that you need to be so anti memetic that you only do that.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing that is the most popular is the thing that's on the shelf because it's been sold out So, in some ways, like this is similar to that famous photo that people have image that people have on Twitter of the plane and the parts that are shot versus not, right? The survivorship bias, right? And one way of kind of thinking about it is the guys who you think of as bad guys or possible bad guys or controversial guys or whatever are those you've already got some vaccination to. That's why you think of them at all. Whereas the folks that I mentioned, the regulators invisible. Salzburger, you know Zuckerberg, you know his pros and cons. You know who he is as a person. You don't even know Salzberger exists most people, right? Despite the fact that he's like certainly as powerful, he owns the New York Times. He inherits it. He also got dual class stock, just like Zuck. But he's invisible, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the time, not as much, right? That's why I brought those guys, right? Because often it's kind of like. Have you ever stock shelves at a supermarket? So seem totally out of left field.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source