YouSaid · the spoken record

Steve Hsu

lines on the record: 164
first: 2022-08-23
most recent: 2022-08-23
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

“Yeah, so my well, my last name is HSU. That's like the hardest thing for people because it's kind of anti-phonetic. H then S, then U. And just search for me. I'm on Twitter. I have a blog, and I have a podcast called Manifold, which doesn't have a huge listenership, but I try to keep the quality level really high where I try to get really best in class kind of guests, and then we're willing to go into some depth. So it's got a very kind of niche audience. But if you like the conversation that we just had here, you'll probably like manifold. So you can look for that in all the usual places. You get your podcast and also on YouTube.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow, we've covered so much, and I just really think you're a great interviewer because your questions are like always getting at a key thing that I think a lot of people are confused about. And there's a lot of depth there. So I thought it was great. There's plenty more that we could talk about. We should just get together and do this some other time. But I don't think you left anything out.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because you're maybe a little more focused on things like software development in ML and stuff. But if you look at more kind of traditional engineering fields, which aren't as hot, probably those guys like an engineer at Boeing or those guys would probably say like, no, my fucking salary is heavily suppressed by the existence of hungry engineers from India and China and stuff like that. Software, because it's been so hot for so long doesn't feel this effect so much. It's got plenty of elasticity.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just never win these competitions anymore. So ultimately you might be kind of discouraging the native talent pool by just letting the door opening the door and bringing in like all these super talented people from outside. So there could be some second order effects that aren't so good.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good for the US overall, on average, bad for developing countries because you're stealing their talent. Bad for native born Americans who have to compete against the best brands from all over the world. So much harder for an American kid to get the job he deserves at these elite levels where he's strongly impacted by immigration. So you got winners and losers. Whether there's a long-term problem for America. So now guys who are super obsessed to like comment on my blog every now and then who study like where are all the IMO international math Olympiad winners going where are they what you know and they claim they're seeing this huge drop off in like Kids who grew up in America who are not first children of immigrants, but they've been here a while.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Entrance exam, but they but they ended up going to Caltech or they ended up going to MIT or so there's this huge brain drain drain. I mean, it's super powerful elite brain drain. And MIT recently has just been recruiting. If you win one of these Olympiads, you get a gold medal in the informatics Olympiad or the math Olympiad. MIT will try to get you to come to MIT. So there's this huge sucking of talent into the United States, which is great, I think. That's why when you go to IIT, Even though the undergraduates are super smart, the professors are actually no offense to my colleagues who teach there. But the professors there would generally, if they get a bid from UCLA, they'll move to UCLA on average.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They had plenty of talented undergraduates, but the best of those undergraduates always want to come to the US for their PhD. They went from that to now some of the best undergraduates stay there, and the researchers who are professors there are becoming world class. But that happened only in my adult lifetime. So you can see it's a heavily lagging indicator. Interestingly, like in my physics career, I knew several, I think the Indian term is called toppers. I don't know if you know this term toppers. So the people who take the IIT exams, they literally rank every kid in the country who takes the exam, right? So I knew guys who were number one or number two or number five on the IIT.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the easy answer to that question is many of the things are almost all the things you mentioned are lagging indicators. So they reflect the fact that the West was developed and had a strong scientific and engineering tradition when China and India were desperately poor and just didn't have any of that. And in my own life, I went in the last 20 years from when I would visit a university in China or even like South Korea and Taiwan, I could see them go from”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understand how the world works. I kind of understand why this other dude can raise so much more money than I can raise or get meetings that I can't get, right? So that's how I was initially interested in this question.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kids are children of super wealthy people. Some of them are children of super influential people. And all of them are trying to get ahead. They're super ambitious. They know what it means to like make managing director at Goldman or become a partner in McKinsey. They know what those things are. If you didn't know them, because you grew up in Ohio, you learn them right away because you see what Joe, who was two years ahead of me but had the room across the hall. He interviewed. Now he's at McKinsey. Now he's doing this. You just get a better view of what's possible in the elite sector of society from that exposure. So there are multiple factors. Networking some of these Harvard kids come from super wealthy families. Some of them their dad used to play golf with the head of the fund that he's trying to get a meeting with. So it's all those things together. I'm not saying it's good, but I kind of want.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I got intensely interested in okay, these super outlier guys, like, how did this guy get a job writing for the Simpsons? I would like to write this other guy would like to write for the Simpsons, but he went to Ohio State. So he's like 10 layers of social networking away from the Simpsons. But the Harvard guy's not, actually. His buddy's at the Crimson all right for the Simpsons, right? So there are multiple factors why take two kids, they both scored 1580 on the SAT. One goes to Ohio State on the Ohio Regents Scholarship for Engineering. And the other one says, no, fuck no, I'm going to go to Harvard, even though the engineering school there sucks, but I'm going to go to Harvard instead. So what's the difference in their lives? One, somehow, maybe the guy went to Harvard because he kind of understands how the world works a little better than the other dude. Two, when he gets to Harvard, he's going to meet a lot of super ambitious, aggressive, smart kids.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, I researched this question pretty aggressively when I was became an entrepreneur because I was like, well, we can raise this much money. We can get these meetings with these funds. But how the hell did this guy get raise $100 million for this stupid idea? Like, what the hell? And then so I would start looking into this guy's background. I'd be like, well, he went to Harvard and, oh, he was in skull and bone, you know, whatever.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your question, and that's very G loaded, but you could use technologies to improve yourself training is not the right word, but if you kind of get good at using certain technologies or certain information channels, you can amplify your ability beyond just what the raw capability. So I think my answer is that there are tools, but there's nobody who's no dojo where you can go and Henzo Gracie just starts teaching you immediately like this, do this, this, this, and this, and then the guy who's bigger than you, but you're going to take him down and choke him out. There isn't something like that for cognition. But I can see people can amplify their. Capabilities in different either more or less effectively.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. So, in a way, Jiu-Jitsu is like applied physics because you're thinking about like, I have two arms, you have two arms, is it easier for you to punch me and knock me out before I can close a distance and force you to grapple with me? It really is, the reason I liked jujitsu so much is because it's very rational. It's basically scientific analysis of what two humans can do to each other. And so it's a technology. In terms of what technologies people can use to amplify their brain power, obviously we're surrounded by it. So here's an interesting thing. Suppose you and your girlfriend are trying to get the answer to some question and you're both using Google. There's an enormous variance in who immediately puts the search term in that gets the right, like the top hit is the direct answer.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being a super successful founder selects for the ability to figure out, okay, this investor is from private equity. This is how he's going to think about the problem. And this is how I should explain it to him. This guy's from a very tech-heavy venture fund. This is how I got to talk to him about the problem. This is the due diligence guy that they sent me, and he's a computer science professor at Stanford. I got to talk to him in this language. So founders are very selected population for being very good multi-band communicators across different cultures and stuff like this. This is a dumb investment banker from Goldman, and I mean, they're not dumb, but he's not technical at all. And so I got to explain to him this way. But this guy's a lawyer. I got to talk to him that way. So it's not surprising to me that this guy would have those capabilities. It's selected for in that population.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said, or at least he finds the problems with what we said, or if we did a good job on it, he gets it right away, which is some executives might not get it right away. So my point is that people who have these super high Just raw gy abilities, they generally can be useful in these technological environments, even if they don't have a lot of background. Like they can still come in and be helpful and sometimes they can solve problems that the people who are well trained in that area are having trouble with. I think that is fair. But it's not fair to say there's just some unidimensional measure of intelligence. And this guy always beats this guy always, it doesn't work like that. But just that some of these off-scale guys are just generally more useful than the critics would like to give them credit for.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of physicists who leave physics and do other stuff is that very often in an engineering setting or a startup setting, people be like, you don't know shit about that. What are you talking about? But the reality is people who do perform on a technical problem, okay, not about what's the right way to get a good, a warm intro to this VC, not something like that, but some technical problem that the startup has to solve. Like in Bezos' case, it was often like optimization of some supply chain thing or optimization of some sorting process or reducing the error rate and some address labeling. It was a very well-defined thing once you operations problem. And the people in the company uniformly say like when Bezos comes in the room, he will give us, he will give us very good feedback on the solution to this ops problem that it could be out of the blue better than what we.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lead a company, they could not put together a presentation that would convince a venture capitalist to invest. So it sort of, you know, different skill sets that we're talking about. I think the idea that there's a unidimensional measure of cognitivity is just not that useful. You know, I'm probably guilty. People say, wait, Steve Shu just said that, but he's the guy most responsible for promulgating this perspective. But it's only because it's the simplest thing to talk about is if you compress it to one general factor, it's just easier to talk about. It doesn't mean that the other components are not meaningful. We just got done talking about verbal versus spatial versus some more generalized mathematical talent. So obviously it's a high dimensional, not that high dimensional, but it's at least a multidimensional space of abilities that we're talking about. Now, the point about Bezos, I think, which is non-trivial, though, which I think is directly relevant to the life experience.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a great topic that, you know, I think a lot of people are just in this topic and even among my close friends, including these friends who know Biza or knew Bezos in school, we all talk about this kind of stuff. So first of all, you got to make a distinction between the very abstract kind of intelligence, which is useful in physics and math or maybe computer science versus a more kind of generalist intelligence. And those are correlated, but they're not the same thing. And so I would say Bezos is probably very off scale for the ability to work hard, take risk, function under pressure, be focused, and generalist intelligence. So he's just probably off scale on, you know, if you're just, since these traits are at least somewhat uncorrelated, if your top 10% in each of these five simultaneously are already pretty rare individual, right? Because plenty of the physics guys who did better than Bezos in the physics classes, they could not.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He went to grad school at Caltech. And so actually, he and I, I don't remember how I looked him up at one point. I think we met up at Caltech when I was visiting at one point and he was in grad school.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just say one I got to add one anecdote. That guy. So I know a lot of the guys that were in Bezos' eating club and were also, because we're very similar in vintage, and who took all these classes with him. And a lot of them were late. One was a friend of mine from high school, but another were guys, a whole other set were guys that I went to grad school at Berkeley because there's a whole Princeton contingent that would go to Berkeley for grad school that I knew that were Bezos' classmates. So I know all these guys. I know all these Bezos stories. The funny thing is the guy you're talking about whose name I believe is Yasanto is an Indian guy, Sri Lankan guy.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do fundamental research, including experimentalists around the world. There are tens of thousands, and maybe some of those guys should also be doing some more cancer research or doing financial modeling. Yeah, maybe so. Maybe so. I mean, maybe even some of those guys should, you know, we should tear off, you should remove even more of those guys and have them do more stuff. There's still some argument in favor of that. But we do need a core of people that are trying to do these really hard fundamental, answer these hard fundamental questions about nature.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so number one, the attrition rate is super high. So even if you cut, you say like take this set of kids that are plus three or four standard deviations in ability and they enter a physics major at Princeton or MIT or something, what fraction of them actually end up as practicing physicists. It's pretty small. So they're bleeding off at all points. Like, you know, Bezos started in physics and toward the end of his Princeton career, switched to computer science. And Elon was in graduate school in physics at applied physics or physics at Stanford, and he bled out. So it's already the case that for me, one way to say it is that education is phenomenal. You should try to get that education. It'll pay off for you later, and probably you're going to bleed out. You're going to trit away and do something else. Now, if you say like, okay, of the thousands of theoretical physicists or physicists who”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This admission scheme will work perfectly. We can't lie to ourselves about it. And I guess that's true for coders too. But anyway, it's very different from social scientists and stuff where they can just decide, I don't like that reality. I'll just make up this model for how society behaves and then I'm done. We can't do that.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's fair because, yeah, debug when you debug your code, there are many different ways it could have failed, and you have to actually, in a sense, step back and model, like, oh, maybe this module is feeding me something back wrong, and that's what's causing the problem, or it's this other layer. So that is very analogous to like when we have to deal with a physical experiment in the lab. The thing with physics, though, is that we're really, really geared toward getting toward the underlying reality. If it's really late at night and my buddy, my lab partner and I, we just want to get out and go to sleep. We can't tell ourselves that things are okay. We didn't actually screw up the shielding on that. It's okay. We'll just bring the data home and look at it. No, we got to actually decide. Do we have to spend three more hours ripping this thing apart and reshielding it or we have to get to the real underlying reality? We can't fake it. We can't just pretend like, oh.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be happening, like maybe you're visualizing it, like the muon comes in and it does this, and interpolating between the theoretical view of what should be happening with the particles and the systems and what the actual data looks like and saying like, oh shit, we didn't do this or we didn't shield this part. So that's why we're getting that. That's something physicists are very, very used to doing. And mathematicians are often shitty at it. They just accept, oh, I just accept this is the data and now I will now reason with this data. And the same could be true for computer science people. But you need someone who's actually had to deal with shitty data and tried to connect it to a very elegant mathematical model. That's something physicists kind of uniquely or use.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do want to say one thing about physicists, which is a little different from mathematicians and computer science guys. Maybe not so different from data science guys, but definitely different from most computer science guys and most math guys, is that we spend a lot of time looking at bad, noisy data. So even if you're a theorist, you had to go through these lab courses where, I mean, for me, those lab courses were among the hardest, like the worst, because you had to go in and build some electronic equipment to take some data. you know, it could be extremely noisy, like you're measuring muon cosmic arrays coming through the roof and hitting your detector. And then you have to analyze the data. And when you're building this thing, you screw it up. And so you get data that makes no sense or you something about the amplifier wasn't right. Or you're used to seeing data that sucks. And you have this theoretical view of what should be done.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, there are two books. There's one called When Genius Fail, and then there's actually three books, at least three books, but they're all good.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The answer is a little bit complicated. I think all the factors you mentioned are true, but one of the things was that in the early phase, Like in the 80s and 90s, when a lot of people in my generation went into finance, a lot of them went to do to trade derivatives. And if you look at options pricing theory, it looks a lot like physics. It's kind of like the mathematics of random walks, basically. And so there was a very not tight connection, but the concepts were strongly related that were necessary. Now, if you brought it out a little bit more to say like, okay, but nowadays if you go to really big quant funds and they're looking for signal and analyzing tons of data and they're not trading derivatives, they're trading just actual names like stocks or whatever. I think there's more loading on machine learning in CS background now. And the physicists who go in, they're having to, they're using that subset of their skills. But the funds would just as soon hire a CS or ML type guy to do it.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gonna say, this is a very weird thing for me to reveal, but sometimes when I'm having trouble falling asleep, I'll be visualizing, like recently I was thinking about. How I would use a ballistic missile to target like an aircraft carrier, right? Have the Chinese actually solved this problem? And sometimes if I'm trying to go to sleep, I'll just be visualizing like, okay, when you're at about an altitude of five kilometers, what can your radar see and how much resolution do you need? And then how much time do you have for course correction to hit the ship? I'll be thinking about stuff like that for relaxation. But and at this highly visual and also quantitative because you have to make some estimates. But I think that would be typical of a lot of physicists. Because if we start talking about it, we'd be like, oh, yeah, right. And you've only got about of order a tenth of a second to do this. But your thing can do it in milliseconds. So we're okay. And then anyway, that kind of thinking is very prevalent among certain types of people.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was going to say people are going to do it different ways. I do think that if you compare the category of engineers to the category of software developers, Engineers generally, I think, have higher on average higher spatial ability and they're using it. Whereas you can be an awesome programmer with like zero, I think zero spatial ability. That's my guess.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's very spatially loaded stuff which used to be part of the American economy and education system and now I think it's all gone, but it's real. It's not fake. People are not making this up. And psychometricians of the 1950s and 60s would have been like, yeah, here's my 10 volume treatise on spatial measuring spatial visualization ability or something.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're all like my generation is like, you don't have to lie to me about all these things. We saw how it works. We saw people take the standardized test for spatial visualization. And then we saw people try to fucking work the machine, the metal bending machine. And some people just couldn't do it. Like they couldn't actually make the thing look the way the product looked the way it was supposed to look. In the real economy of atoms and grams of steel, kilograms of steel, which has all moved to China now or something, all this stuff is super important. Like you can't just theorize about like, okay, then I have this module that does this and this function's going to have these types. And, well, that's nice. That's super valuable in this part of the economy. But somebody's got to get this plant working and it's got to be efficient and we got to put the machines here and here so we don't have to carry the shit too far from here. You know, there's a lot of like.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spatially rotate at all. He was totally lost in figuring out how to do the bends to make the ashtray or whatever, right? So you see that very clearly. And in those old days when things were more based, when you went to shop class, sometimes you just give you a standardized test, which was a standardized test of spatial ability.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think those things are super fascinating. Something that's kind of gone out of fashion now but was very in very standard when I was growing up is like when I took shop class I don't know if you had to take shop class in junior high or high school but we had to take like shop class which were you going bend metal and literally they have machines that would we made like an ashtray or something out of steel or something so yeah in that class which is very spatially loaded like you could have guys like I had a friend who was you know had a very high SAT score and went to Princeton to study English That guy could not”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think your description captured the whole story that people are very different in the way they attack, even though they're attacking the same problem, the way that their brain does it. I think that's one of the most fascinating things about this field of psychometrics and psychology that we're really trying to get into that. One of the things that fascinated me when I was being educated and going through training as like in theoretical physics and math is like looking at how my whatever classmates at Caltech or Richard Feynman or somebody approached a problem which might be totally different than the way I would do it or the way that we would communicate about the solution once we got it and there clearly are people who are visual like Feynman was a very visual thinker Other people are more kind of logic goverbal where they're like stepping through things and it might even be like they hear the arguments as they're stepping through it or something so everybody's different”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think again, if you're more of a left guy and you like government intervention, and so this becomes part of the government healthcare system and it's free. And you say, we will allow more aggressive edits or more embryos to be produced for below average families. There's a very natural way you can redistribute. Just like you're going to forcibly take a bunch of money from me when I die that I would rather pass on to my kids. You're going to forcibly take it from me. Well, you can forcibly give more genomic prediction resources to people who need them. It's easy.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Morlocks and the Eloy. Yeah, I mean, I think that is a fair concern that this could lead to grotesque huge inequality. And that is a risk of the technology in it. A lot of that depends on society too. I mean, like when someone confronts me with that, I will acknowledge it as a legitimate concern. But then I'll say like, you know, we live in a country which is the rich, in some sense the richest country in the world, and there are plenty of people who don't even have healthcare. Are you worried about that inequality? We have a lot of inequality. There's a lot of things for you to worry about when it comes to inequality. And this is some technology which could contribute to it, but doesn't have to.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about it. Think about why you're angry at me. Like I'm actually exploring how the world actually is. And don't you want to know how the world actually is? If we have an inequality problem, because some people don't do well in school, don't you want to give those families these resources so they can fix it for the next generation? Isn't that the ultimate goal of what you want? I mean, just think about it.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technologies have a chance of working. I don't know anybody who's working on that actually really like spending all their time working on that. But yeah, that could work as well. Well, I do still want to say that I made these jokes about the wokes and progressives and people like that who hate us. And I actually just feel it's kind of wrong-headed of them. I think actually the goals, I actually consider myself a progressive. I don't consider myself woke. But the goals of having healthy people, maybe healthy, beautiful people who live to be 200 years old, who was against that, you know, like I'm also against inequality in society. I think, you know, consistent with growth and advancement in science and technology, we should try to have a fairly egalitarian society for all those things. So I think if you're a wokester who's watching this interview to just like hate Steve Shu or something.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there it's like you make the embryo, you make a bunch of embryos, and then you decide which ones you like, and then before you actually make it into a person, so then that person grows up and reproduces, you actually reproduce just using iteration of embryos. That's also plausible too. So I think... Of these very molecular.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, all of this is stuff that you're younger than me. So, I'm fully confident you're going to see it all. I may not see all of it, but I'll see it, the technology perfected. I won't necessarily see this impact on society. But you'll probably see it.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are confident in it. I think on that same time scale, multiplex, very accurate sort of CRISPR-based editing will also arrive. And so at that point, it's like, why are you fooling around with this? I'll just go in and make the changes I need to make. And over that same time scale, I think it's roughly the time scale over which we're going to figure out where the real causal.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are reasons why you do it, but for a lot of people, I think they would say that egg was made through a new and untested process. I'd rather have an egg where I don't have that additional risk in this whole thing. So I don't know adoption-wise what's going to happen there. But I do think that it's just a technological prediction it will be possible. We're not that far from being able to do it. I mean, the fact we can do it in rat means I think we're not too far. And yeah, it could have huge implications for natural selection if you really wanted to be able to select from best of 1,000 embryos. There's no technical, I mean, eventually there's no technical barrier. Now, I would say that on roughly the same time scale for the pluripotent production of eggs to get mature, to be tested.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Model system. So there's a few labs like in Japan where they seem to have fully mastered this and they've done multiple generations of rat using induced fluripotency to make the eggs. And so my guess would be to get it working in humans is not that hard. It's a matter of some years of just slaving away in the lab to get it working. And I know of startups that are actually working on this. And now there's going to be some trepidation initially. Like why would you do that if you can just pay some 19 year old to be your egg donor or something? For example, some gay couples really want to do it because maybe they think they can also. Maybe You know, their partners can make it into an egg. Okay. So”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so eggs are the limiting factor. Sperm is cheap And the technology, the stem cell technology to take a skin cell and revert it to the pluripotent state so that it can become some other kind of cell, not a skin cell, but maybe an egg cell. That technology has been more or less mastered for mice and rats, I believe. At least maybe rat is the most common.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's totally shocking because usually it's an older woman who's like in her 30s or 40s who's going through it and they're struggling just to get some viable embryos. And then so then when you run that same process with a 19 year old, what do you get? And I was kind of shocked at how high these numbers were. So in principle, let's just imagine you're a billionaire oligarch, but very tech savvy and you want to have some you want to have a large family and you want to have really high quality kids, maybe very long-lived, healthy kids, you might be selecting the best out of hundreds. There are 100 parallel universes I could live in, I get to peek into each one and then choose I'm gonna step through door number 742 because that's the outcome I like Not that expensive, actually but amazing that people can now do this.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that the base level of mom and dad is a very big factor, actually, the big factor is how good are your predictors and how many embryos are you looking at or how good are your editing tools? By the way, I just want to reinforce something I recently learned. It was so amazing that it freaked me out because I thought, oh, I'm kind of in this field, in this industry. So I kind of know about it. Our company was having some conversations with a company that handles egg donation. So it's in IBF space. And the egg donors are typically young women like 22, 23. They could even be college-age women who are paid a fair sum of money to go through an IVF cycle and just donate the eggs to some billionaire family or whoever wants the eggs. And I was told that sixty to one hundred eggs per cycle is not unknown.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, Feynman played around with some molecular biology when molecular biology became a big thing. He was friends with Francis Crick, who was down in San Diego. And so he would do stuff like that. And now it's almost impossible. And people would tell me, Steve, like serious theoretical physicists would be like, Steve, why are you fucking around with this stuff? You're wasting your talent. They literally say stuff like that to me. So I don't think the trends are good for that. But for general intellectual exchange, I think the trend is good”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it takes so much money and resources and institutional support within a university or lab or something to get stuff done. I think it's getting less and less common to find polymathic people who are actually able to do things at the frontier where they really make a significant contribution and it's recognized by the natives in that subspecialty. That's becoming rarer and rarer. It was much less rare in the time of like Feynman and Van Neumann and people like that just because science was smaller.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source