# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/use_ai_with_my_website.md

2025-01-22

# Use AI with my website

Here's some ways to use AI to improve your experience browsing this website.

/raw/ contains all the static files of my website, including markdown, images and audio.

The broader thesis I'm betting on is that as long as the raw content is present in a folder, AI can do everything else with the content - simplify it, summarise it, style it, translate it etc.

I'm aware the implementation of some of these features sucks right now and requires technical skills. I'll try improving all this when it's a priority for me and I have free time.

#### Audio voiceover

I have already used elevenlabs to convert all the text into audio files. They are available at /raw/english_audio_ai_generated_{date}/.

This may have inaccuracies or be outdated. You can also use AI to generate the voiceover yourself.

#### Search

To search my website using AI, copy-paste the contents of /raw/english_singlepage_{date}/singlepage_{date}.md into the prompt window, and follow it with whatever question you want to ask about my writings.

I have dumped my entire website contents into a single page, so it is easier to copy-paste.

#### Simplified english

I have already use OpenAI o1 to generate simplified english version of my website content. Available at /raw/english_simplified_ai_generated_{date}/

This may have inaccuracies or be outdated. You can also use AI to generate the simplified version yourself.

#### Translation

I have already used OpenAI gpt4 to get hindi translations. They are available at /raw/हिंदी_अनुवाद_ai_generated_{date}.

This may have inaccuracies or be outdated. You can also use AI to generate the translations yourself.

#### Styling

If you don't like the styling (font family, font size, line spacing, etc) on my website, you can do the following.

1. Give an AI the [current CSS](https://samuelshadrach.com/viewer.css) and [current HTML](https://samuelshadrach.com/viewer.html) file as input, and ask it to generate a modified CSS file based on your preferences.
2. Upload the modified CSS file to any online file storage such as google drive or aws s3.
3. Paste the (publicly accessible) link to the modified CSS in the form input at the bottom of the page. It will persist for the duration of your browsing session.

P.S. The default css and js are also mostly written by AI, so it's unlikely anything you generate is much worse.


#### Full stack

If you want to do something more complicated (such as doing many of the above steps together), you can download /raw/english_tarball_{date}/english_tarball_{date}.tar and then ask AI to write a bash pipeline for you that does all the necessary steps.

## Future features

In short, I really don't want to host a (not static) backend or manage user payments. And I don't see why the use cases below should should require me to host one.

The features I'm personally most interested in:
 - WebRTC client connecting to OpenAI Realtime API (audio), with this website's content injected as context
   - This is a common enough use case that I wish someone else would offer hosted backend for this.
 - Better payment system
   - An important reason AI app devs need to host a backend is because OpenAI wants to be paid by app devs, who will then optionally collect payments from end users.
   - For my use case though, ideally OpenAI collects payments from users and issues (ephemeral) API keys to the client directly. Then no backend would be required.
   - Legal liability might be a reason they're avoiding doing this. I'm unsure. Maybe OpenAI wants an app dev who they can hold responsible for API inputs with malicious intent.

Other features that would be cool:
 - Ability to ask OpenAI to crawl my website directly. No "singlepage" needed. I have updated my robots.txt but OpenAI still refuses to crawl my website.
   - Legal liability might be a reason they're avoiding doing this. I'm unsure.
   - Maybe they don't want to be held responsible for sending GET requests on IPs with bad reputations. Or they don't want to handle responses containing data of malicious intent.
   - If legal liability is the only reason, then ideally the crawler runs client-side.
 - Browser allows changing UX using AI. Some of the features above like translation and changing CSS are UX features that could ideally be supported by the browser itself. Until then someone could write a browser extension for it.
   - So far I don't see a reason this can't happen. Maybe it will happen eventually.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/my_projects/my_projects.md

2025-01-13

# My projects

[Tokens for tokens](http://tokensfortokens.samuelshadrach.com/sender.html)
 - Pay for OpenAI API using cryptocurrency, at discounted rate, anonymously


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/my_ideas/my_ai_timelines.md

2024-12-31

# My AI timelines

DISCLAIMER
 - I'm not a deep learning expert. I understand theory of LLMs, RNNs, CNNs, etc. but I don't have experience training large models or curating large datasets or doing original DL research.
 - Please consider getting the opinion of many people other than me. Many of the signatories on [this list](https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk) have made individual statements, search for their podcast interviews, blogposts, research publications and so on. Lesswrong is also a good forum.
 - I strongly recommend you form your own independent opinion on this subject, and not blindly copy the views of others, no matter how smart or trustworthy they seem. This field would make a lot more sense if more people formed independent opinions. (And yes forming a good opinion takes a lot of time and effort, and you have to decide whether the time investment is worth it for you personally.)

This document is mainly aimed at lesswrong (LW) rationalists / effective altruists / adjacent people, since a lot of my work is culturally downstream of theirs, and a lot of my potential research collaborators exist in their communities. This doc will make less sense if you haven't encountered their writings before.

Most of this doc is guesswork rather than models I have a lot of confidence in. Small amounts of evidence could upend my entire view of these topics.

**If you have evidence that my view is wrong, please tell me**. Not having to spend any more time thinking about AI will improve my quality of life. I am being completely serious when I say I might thank you till the day I die, if you persuade me either way. I can also pay you atleast $1000 for convincing me, although we'll have to discuss the details if you really wanna be paid.

The last time I read papers on this topic was early-2023, it's possible I'm not up-to-speed on any of the latest research. Feel free to send me anything that's relevant.

I have ~15% probability humanity will invent artificial superintelligence (ASI) by 2030.
 - If it happens, this will be the most significant event in ~10,000 years of human history on many metrics of what counts as significant. (If the intelligence gap is sufficiently large it might even be the most important event in the ~14 billion year history of the universe. My probability for this is smaller.)
 - This will more-likely-than-not use transformers + data and compute scaling.
 - I define artificial superintelligence to be AI superior to the best humans (not median human) at basically every task humans can do on laptop with internet access.
 - See my usual disclaimer on predictions shaping reality. If you are involved in building ASI, please consider *not* doing that or atleast talking to me once about it. I don't want ASI to be built by 2030 unless many aspects of society change first.

Conditional on ASI being invented by 2030, I expect ~30% probability it will kill everyone on Earth soon after. In total that's ~5% probability of humanity killed by ASI by 2030.

I have chosen not to work on this problem myself. This is downstream of ~15% not being large enough and the problem not capturing my curiosity enough. I am not a utilitarian who blindly picks the biggest problem to solve, although I do like picking bigger problems over smaller ones. If you are working on safety of AGI/ASI, I think you are doing important work and I applaud you for the same.


## Reasons for my beliefs

*Mildly relevant rant on consensus-building:* Both these probabilities seem to involve dealing with what I'd call deep priors. "Assume I take a random photo of Mars and a random pixel from that photo, what is the probability its RGB value has higher Green than Blue?" Humans tend to agree better on prior probabilities when there's enough useful data around the problem to form a model of it. Humans tend to agree less on prior probabilities when they're given a problem with very little obviously useful data, and need to rely on a lifetime of almost-useless-but-not-completely-useless data instead. The "deepest" prior in this ontology is the [universal prior](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_inductive_inference).

~15% is lower than what many people in EA/LW communities assign, because I reject a lot of the specific models they use to forecast higher likelihood of ASI.
 - Total amount of neurons in human brain has nothing to do with compute required to build ASI, as evolution produced human brains and evolution used a lot more compute than an individual brain.
 - Nobody has a proposal that's IMO likely to work at replicating biological evolution in-silico. How to capture initial conditions? How much compute do you require to simulate the environment? I haven't seen convincing arguments for why these details aren't important.
 - I have a prior that most STEM research that promises bold outcomes fails. This is the default not the exception. To study this prior you have to go back in time to each of the failed research agendas of the past 100 years, and notice what it would have **felt like** if you were born then and were hyped up by a research agenda you didn't know would succeed or fail.
 - Update (credits: someone on LW): I have seen some basic arguments from neuroscience saying neurons (or the genetic information that produced the neurons) don't by themselves encode much of whatever it is that produces human intelligence, most of it is learned after birth. I'm open to arguments of this type but I'll probably have to study neuroscience to evaluate them.

[Discontinuous progress in human history by Katja Grace](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CeZXDmp8Z363XaM6b/discontinuous-progress-in-history-an-update) is the closest thing I could find to work that tries evaluating the prior probability of any reserach agenda succeeding with radical outcomes. I have not spent a lot of time searching for such research though. Convincing me either way may require publishing or pointing me to a lot more work of this type.

Alternatively you have to provide me a gears-level model that explains why the LLM scaling laws empirically hold.

~15% is higher than what many AI researchers assign, because I reject a lot of the specific reasons they give for why LLM scaling cannot possibly achieve ASI
 - I have read some arguments for why specific unsolved problems are *hard* when compared with already solved problems, and why there's no specific reason LLM will crack them.
 - However most of the problems LLMs have already cracked also got cracked without anyone having an actual model for why LLMs will or won't crack them. LLM scaling has consistently proven itself (to me) to be black magic; both its supporters and its detractors fail to accurately predict which problems it will or won't crack. Predicting loss curve doesn't tell which problems will or won't be cracked.
 - Some people cite architectural limitations of LLM as a bottleneck. For instance LLM has a theoretical upperbound on number of calculations per forward pass, and a certain ratio of "memory access" to "computation" steps. But solving a real world problem can use multiple forward passes + non-LLM scaffolding + non-self-attention layers. For example, you can often use layers from two different architectures (let's say self-attention layers and CNN layers) in a single model, train this model and get good performance.
 - Some people say we will run out of data required as per empirical scaling law but my guess is this is more likely than not solveable. I'm very unsure on this. (And I lack sufficient expertise to evaluate this argument tbh.) I'm guessing you can teach a model simple reasoning using a smaller dataset, use this model to fill holes in a bigger dataset, and then teach the model more difficult reasoning using this data.

~30% probability for extinction conditional on ASI invention by 2030 is because I am more optimistic about boxing an ASI than some LW rationalists. I do believe misalignment happens by default with high probability.
 - The intelligence difference between Einstein or Churchill or Hitler, and a hyperpersuasive AI is large, relative to the intelligence jumps shown by scaling so far. I understand there's no natural scale for intelligence. I am open to the idea a hyperpersuasive AI can exist in theory. (In this context, a hyperpersuasive AI is an AI that can gain complete control over your mind with near 100% probability simply by talking to you.)
 - I am assuming a high level of competence among the people boxing the ASI. I have low probability of ASI coming completely by surprise. A lab building ASI in this decade will almost certainly employ many people who take the prospect of ASI seriously.
 - I am assuming that pausing ASI research will be politically possible, even obvious, once we have built a boxed ASI with empirical evidence of a lack of safety. I think I have better intuitions on politics than the median LW poster.
 - I have some confusion on how the AI will reason about the hardware-software abstraction. At what point does an AI translate "maximise XYZ assembly variable" into "maximise the number of electrons in positions in semiconductor underlying XYZ"? My guess is whether an AI wants to "break out" of its machine depends on how it reasons about this. I accept that an ASI could understand that its variables are made up of positions of electrons in a semicondutor, I'm just unsure what it'll do once it knows this.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/my_ideas/world_models_im_currently_building.md

2025-01-24

# World models I'm currently building

This doc is a mix of existing world models I have and holes in said models. I'm trying to fill some of these holes. The doc is not very well organised relative to how organised a doc I could produce if needed. Often the more time I spend on a doc, the shorter it gets. I'm hoping that happens here too.

I'm mostly going to study this stuff by myself. However if you would like to help me by speeding up the process, please [contact me](../contact_me.md). If your attempt to help me answer these questions is in good-faith, I will be grateful to you no matter how successful or failed your attempt is.

*tldr* How do we safely navigate technological progress or personal growth in a world without privacy? How does tech progress shape incentives and culture, and how do incentives and culture shape tech progress?

#### DISCLAIMER

It is difficult to predict the future without altering it. My writings may have unintended effects on the future. (I'd like more accurate likelihood estimates of these effects, both mean outcome and tail outcomes.)
 - I am aware that simply by thinking of a question like "will some dictator implant microphones in everyone", I am personally increasing the probability that this ends up happening. Once I have thought something I'm unlikely to forget it, and will eventually say it to others. Eventually one of them may leak it to the internet and eventually the idea may reach the relevant politically powerful people who can implement it in real life. (LLM embedding search >> Google, don't underestimate it.)
 - This is unfortunate, as my platonic ideal is to be able to think through various possible futures (alone, or with a group of research collaborators) without actually influencing the world, pick the best future, and then only start taking steps that push the world towards that future.
 - However I'm still going to write publicly about certain topics as that's one of the best ways for someone in my situation to get feedback.

## Topic: Which organisations are capable of keeping secrets in present and near future (10-20 years from now)?

Specific questions
 - How easy is it for TSMC to backdoor all their chips so they can secretely capture private keys, for example?
 - How many S&P500 companies have publicly available evidence of their key business knowledge being leaked to China? (Be it via hacking or espionage or voluntary disclosure by ex-employees etc)
 - Is it possible to read WiFi IP packets using handmade radio?
 - Is it technically possible to implant microphones in the human body? What about cameras?
 - Is gigapixel photography from 10 km altitude possible as of today? What about in next 10 years?
 - Am I missing any technical challenges in paying ~10,000 drone pilots to surveill a city 24x7x365?

Broader questions
 - How much time does it take to write code that understands metadata?
   - Suppose all the world's computers were hacked and their data ended up in NSA datacentres (or their Chinese equivalent, which keeps getting renamed). Suppose all text-based formats are converted to plaintext, existing metadata the users may have left is preserved as is, and NSA appends metadata of the MAC, IP, timestamp, etc of capture.
   - How much software developer time would be require to make sense of most of this metadata. This could be to answer individual queries on "suspicious" inviduals or analyse aggregate trends (such as societal respones to certain govt policies).
 - Will there be more espionage orgs operating independent of nation states or elites (major politicians, billionaires) in the future?
    - Internet and information tech has reduced the financial cost of both journalism and espionage. Cameras, hard disks, internet bandwidth, smartphone processors are all much cheaper than 10 or 20 years ago.
    - Independent journalism has clearly increased in many countries, most notably the US.
    - Independent cyberhacking has clearly increased. (Although it's less clear to me if independent hackers are able to keep up with state-spnsored cyberhackers. I may have to read more.)
    - Independent espionage has also increased, see The Mole (anti-North Korea) or Edward Snowden (anti-US), but it is less clear to me if these are isolated examples or the beginning of a trend.
    - Theory (based on incentives and culture) says independent espionage should go up, I'm waiting on the empirical evidence though.
 - Speed advantages
   - Individuals tolerated by society benefit a lot from being public. Hiring, fundraising, research feedback, making friends and dating, nearly everything goes better if you can do it on the internet. For instance, people can prove trustworthiness and competence faster, and obtain benefits from other people faster (advice, first-hand personal info, allies, etc).
   - Same goes for orgs such as companies. Orgs that are tolerated by the (people with power in) society can move faster if they opensource a lot of their processes and outputs (except their key competitive advantages). For example, hiring, research, etc. Also they can move faster, and win race conditions against orgs that try to maximise secrecy.
 - What are the psychological effects of keeping secrets? What are the failure modes of various groups that try to keep secrets? This could be small groups like families or C-suite executives of a company, or big groups like military research projects or intelligence orgs.
   - **I vaguely suspect that the best way to keep important secrets in the modern world is to found a ~~cult~~ community of a few hundred people that blackholes information as follows:** people disallowed from leaving the geographic area for >30 years, internet download allowed but upload disallowed, everyone is forced to find both work relationships and personal relationships inside the area, raise families within the area, etc.
   - I want more data on previous attempts at founding secret-keeping orgs in order to prove my hypothesis right or wrong.
   - Some major concerns of founding such a group are ensuring people in it lead emotionally healthy lives, ensuring ideological diversity (in both thought and action), and allowing people to leave relationships that don't suit them to find new ones. Hence I'm biased towards inviting a few hundred people rather than just two (such as a marriage) or ten (such as the C-suite executives of a company).
 - How do you actually secure a computer against adversaries with billions in funding?
   - Physical methods in cybersecurity seem to trump both hardware-based and software-based methods. Hardware-based methods can be beaten by hardware backdoors installed by manufacturers. It seems better to assume there's an evil demon possessing your computer, and develop security with that in mind.
     - Most secure way of erasing a private key from RAM is to cut the electricity. Otherwise cold boot attack is possible.
     - Most secure way of erasing a private key from disk is to smash it with a hammer. Otherwise a microscope may be able to recover the data from disk.
     - Most secure way of verifying someone's public key is to meet them in person. Video footage with your face and the key is the second-best option, atleast while AI cannot produce convincing deepfakes. 
     - Most secure of ensuring no information leaves the machine is to weld the machine into a Faraday cage.
     - Most secure way of sending a message to another user without third-parties recording metadata is probably printing it on paper and sending a post. Copying to disk and sending that by post is second-best. Sending the message over the internet is worst in terms of preventing third-parties from capturing the message and associated metadata (timestamp, message size, sender and receiver identities). The server host and any other intermediary servers that are hit (think google analytics or cloudflare) can sell this data to data brokersa, fiber optic capables can be tapped, wireless signals can be triangulated and routers can be hacked.
   - I wonder if there's way to build a physical firewall that requires near-zero trust in other people to work. Like, build radio or networking equipment that isn't manufactured in some centralised backdoorable factory, so you can verify what's inside every IP packet exiting and entering your machine. It seems okay for the typical use case if this slows down internet speed by many orders of magnitude.
 - As a dictator, how to build 100% surveillance instead of 99%, to increase the stability of your dictatorship?
   - This is basically a redteaming exercise. Put yourself in the dictator's shoes and then put yourself in the shoes of someone trying to evade him.
     - The "predictions shape reality" disclaimer especially applies here. For instance I might end up finding solutions more creative than the average engineer hired by a dictator is capable of, which could implicate me personally. I wish someone had clearer solutions to how redteaming is to be done safely.
   - Political considerations
     - I currently model various levels of democracy as states in a markov chain, each state has some probability of being stable or decaying to a different state.
     - The difference in half-life of a dictatorship with 99% surveillance and 100% surveillance is large. People organising revolts are the 1% who will endure the maximum inconvenience to bypass surveillance.
     - Very little technology is needed to organise a revolt. Just a few people (then a few hundred, then a few thoushand etc) meeting at a common location is enough. There are ways to organise a revolt even if surveillance can successfully enforce curfew. Mics alone are not enough because this 1% of people can communicate using pen and paper when organising. Cameras are needed for surveillance.
   - OODA loop: Information capture, analysis, decision-making, enforcing penalty or reward
     - O: Information capture
       - This seems like the hardest part, both at technical level (doing the engineering work and building infrastructure) and cultural level (building a culture where everyone is okay with it)
       - Hence I've spent a lot of time analysing information capture in particular.
     - O: Information analysis
       - Becoming easier with LLM-based search, language translation, etc. As of 2025-01, LLMs are not smart enough to fully automate surveillance. At the extreme end, this 1% of protestors could invent an alternate language to communicate. An army of human censors must assist the system.
     - D: Decision-making
       - Some edge cases may be worth analysing, but in general decision-making does not feel too complicated to me, from the pov of a dictator. A dictator can often be overly harsh on ambigious edge cases, punish a number of false positives, and not face any repercussions themselves.
     - A: Enforcing reward or penalty
       - This doesn't feel hard to me either, from the pov of a dictator. As long as the population of protestors is not large, if everyone has been ID-ed, one can cut off their access to all digital services (SIM cards, ID checkpoints, bank accounts) and send policemen to arrest them. As of 2025 they may be able to escape arrest, but they will have restricted access to the rest of society they wish to influence.
   - How to capture 100% of human-generated information? People move a lot.
     - Technical Option 1: Move the cameras and mics on ground along with the person
       - Mics and cameras in static locations can be escaped. Unless you literally imprison people, total land area to cover with mics and cameras is too large to do perfect surveillance this way.
       - If the mic/camera travels on ground there can be charging stations, but robotics knowledge in 2024 is not good enough to traverse uneven terrain.
         - This could change in future, especially if AI for robotics improves due to scaling laws or related advances.
     - Technical Option 2: The person carries the camera and mic
       - The person carrying the mic/ camera themselves is possible (such as a smartphone or an implant)
       - Biologically implanted microphones and cameras seem like one obvious way to do perfect surveillance, assuming you could engineer culture to the point everyone was okay with it.
     - Technical Option 3: Acquire more data per camera or mic
       - Update: I will look more into satellite/aircraft/drone imagery when I find time.
       - One can increase land area covered per mic or camera, by increasing resolution of each individual mic or camera. However it is difficult to get 100% rather than 99% surveillance this way. Maybe you can make it illegal to make noise or build opaque buildings, and ensure 100% data acquisition. This seems difficult. Unless you do this, the 1% of protestors can deliberately make noise to drown out their audio or hide inside an opaque building to drown out leaked light / EM radition.
       - If increasing area covered per camera or mic, it seems best to place it in the air as opposed to at ground level.
       - Image and video data are acquirable at three altitudes: Space satellties (>200 km), aircraft/helicopters (1-10 km) and small quadcopter drones (<1 km)
         - (People often also call AI-driven helicopters and aircraft as drones, I find that terminology confusing. UAV is a better terminology IMO. A lot of military "drones" are aircraft driven by AI.)
         - [Example of satellite data as of 2025: Sentinel 2 by ESA, open source data](https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu/). You can browse your favourite city here. Open source satellite data is currently at 10 metre resolution and private satellite data is currently at 0.5 metre resolution
           - I have to look into whether telescopes of future satellites can improve resolution beyond this.
           - I'll have to look into satellites at lower orbits and whether orbital decay is solveable in practice.
         - Gigapixel photography is becoming possible in the last 10 years, by digitally stitching together images from many megapixel lenses. This could allow obtaining sufficient resolution from individual images of an entire city (let's say 30 km x 30 km) at 10 km altitude, from a helicopter or aircraft.
           - I need to read more on this. Out of all the approaches, my guess is this is the one that has highest odds of working first.
           - US army has already [commissioned gigapixel photography from helicopter](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16358851).
         - Obtaining data from drones at 100 m altitudes is possible, but requires multiple drones (drone swarm) to coordinate and divide the region into smaller regions per drone.
           - As of 2025, AI knowledge is not good enough to autonomously pilot a drone swarm for this purpose. Travel paths can be fixed, but one needs to be able to handle errors autonomously, like winds, collisions, internet connection loss, etc.
           - This could change in the next few years, if AI improves ability to autonomously pilot drones.
           - Paying a large number of drone pilots is possible but expensive, depending on how many drone pilots need to be paid. This depends on frequency of snapshots required. See below.
           - Flight time
             - Electric drone flight time < Energy stored per unit mass battery / Energy required per unit mass payload per unit of flying time = (100-300 kWh/kg) / (100-300 kWh / kg / h)
             - Flight time is typically below an hour for electric-powered drones, after which one typically swaps the battery with a charged one. Gas-powered drones can run as long as a day due to higher calorific value, but have been mostly abandoned by industry for other reasons (what reasons??). P.S. Has anyone tried hydrogen?
             - Flight time might (or might not??) be improvable by custom designing a drone that can also cruise along the wind. I'm not sure if this is feasible at low altitude though, I'll have to read more.
             - Maximum flying speed of (small quadcopter) drones developed so far is ~400 km/h, which could improve the numbers somewhat.
           - Area sweeped per drone
             - Total area sweeped per flight = Flight time * Max drone speed * (Altitude / 2tan(FOV/2)) < (1 hour * 100 km/h * 0.1 km) / (2 * tan(90 degrees / 2)) = 20 km^2
             - Assuming city area of 30 km * 30 km, this means 45 flights of 1-hour each to cover the entire city.
             - You get one snapshot per region every 2 days, per drone pilot hired. Hiring 1000 drone pilots could get a snapshot every ~3 minutes. Hiring 20,000 drone pilots means the drones could all be positioned at static locations and ensure full coverage ((30 km * 30 km) / (200 m * 200 m)).
             - Flight altitude
               - If higher camera resolutions are used, one can increase flight altitude and area covered per flight. Hence the number of people who must be hired can be reduced.
           - Drone could do information analysis on-board, if it has a GPU and disk with embedding search data (such as embeddings of a facial recognition database). If done this way, significant internet bandwidth would not be required to get useful information about "suspicious" activities or people from the drone. However this also means the data on-board has higher chances of being stolen.
           - Am I missing any technical difficulties in this entire plan? The fastest way to investigate would probably be to test it out using: off-the-shelf drone, SIM-card internet, SOTA open source facial recognition model and embedding model, construct your own embedding database from scratch by flying the drone.
         - I also want to look into hot air-balloon suspended cameras. This is a very old technique but can now be done with modern camera resolutions, possibly even gigapixel cameras.
      - Technical Option 4: Track data footprints besides image/audio/video
        - For example one could setup 1 million DNA collection sites across the city, and try to (partially or fully) automate transporting samples to the sequencer. As of 2025, I don't know of any such tech that can be developed within 10 years, but ofcourse this could change in the future beyond 10 years.
      - Non-technical Option 1:
        - You can engineer incentives such that everyone reports on themselves or report on each other (example: stalinist russia), but I'm unsure how you get beyond 99% surveillance with this sort of system either. A group of close friends and family can collectively choose to not report each other, and distance themselves from the rest of society so no one else can report them. Can you prevent people from distancing themselves from others? Maybe I should read more about the historical examples where this stuff has been tried.
      - Non-tehnical Option 2:
        - North Korea's technique of keeping the population illiterate and starving is effective, but still only reaches <99%. There will need to be a 1% of cvilians who are well-fed and educated from diverse intellectual sources.

## Topic: What are the consequences of this reduced secrecy?

Broader questions
 - **Assuming no organisation can maintain significant lead time on any technology (and it will immediately get copied by orgs united by a different morality and culture), what are the implications for technological progress in the future?**
   - There is an assumption embedded here, that no org can keep secrets. I'm unsure if it is true. Supposing it is true though, what are its implications?
   - The most obvious real world example of this is US versus China, neither seems able to keep significant secrets from the other.
   - However I want to figure out general principles here, and not spend too much time studying individual examples like Obama or Michael Hayden or whoever. Metaphorically speaking, I want to study the dynamics of a particular initial position of Chess960, not how Magnus Carlson plays that particular initial position. This also connects to ideas on theories of history. Whether one should study game theory, sociology etc, versus the psychology of individual leaders, depends on which theory of history one subscribes to.
 - Will inability of organisations to keep secrets force homogeneity in the behaviour of civilians, and punish people who behave in outlier ways? Will this reduce the rate of invention of technology in future?
   - Many important technologies in history seem to be invented by individuals who the median member of that country or society would not be able to relate to, and not easily tolerate as a friend / neighbour / family member.
   - This relates to another confusion of mine - how do you merge the high-trust benefits of living in (some) small towns with the individual freedoms of living in (some) cities? It seems to me like high trust and reduced individual freedom are both causally downstream from the same thing, namely densely connected social graph that can gossip information about you.
   - Also seems related to ideas on class. My guess is that people of both low (labour) socioeconomic class and high (elite) socioeconomic class are on average more dependent on maintaing unchanging social ties if they want to climb up within their class. (I'm not talking about climbing up a class, that is much harder.) People of middle (knowledge) class are less dependent on social ties if they wish to climb positions within their class. Being dependent on static social ties constraints people's behaviour (and actions and thoughts) along certain dimensions. How will the class structure interact with increased surveillance? (Tbh I really want to get more raw data here, what is it like in the classes outside my own? I have some data already but want more.)
   - Also relates to ideas around morality. Living close to a set of people often increases social pressure to have shared values, but it especially increases social pressure to have shared ideas on morality.
   - Also relates to ideas around physical safety being 2nd level on Maslow's hierarchy, and how militaries couple physical safety with cultural preservation.
   - There's also psychological literature worth reviewing on all these topics, be it secrecy or physical safety.

I haven't written a lot of points here because I'm still making up my mind on a lot of the implications.

## Topic: How much power do science fiction writers and early enthusiasts have in deciding which technologies humanity chooses to pursue?

Specific questions
 - Would Shane Legg and Demis Hassabis have cofounded Deepmind if Eliezer Yudkowsky hadn't talked about AI at all in time interval 2000-2008?
   - Shane Legg claims he was inspired by Ray Kurzweil. Yudkowsky helped broadcast views of people like Ray Kurzweil by organising MIRI and Singularity Summit.
   - Yudkowsky got funding and attention from Peter Thiel, and may have also helped Deepmind get their seed round from Thiel. (As of 2014 Founder's Fund owned over 25% of Deepmind)

Broader questions
 - I generally want to read 1990-2015 history of biotech. Who or what inspired Illumina's parent companies that worked on next generation sequencing? Who or what inspired Kary Mullis to work on PCR? Who inspired the inventors of CRISPR? Who inspired Kevin Esvelt to work on gene drives?
 - The standard pipeline for how technologies come into society: scifi -> theory -> practical (lab demonstration) -> engineering (scale up). If an individual of my socioeconomic class wanted to maximise their influence on this pipeline, my hypothesis is they should study scifi and scifi -> theory stages. I would like evidence that proves my hypothesis is wrong.
   - Example of evidence that would prove me wrong: a list of technologies that had scifi writers and early enthusiasts, got proven in lab demos, failed to obtain funding for scale up at first, got scaled up many decades later and significantly changed society when they did. This would prove that studying the engineering/scaleup and funding landscape is more important.
   - For example, world war 1 and 2 lead to the creation of a lot of tech in 20th century. I would want to understand whether this was primarily due to ideas and culture inspiring researchers, or whether the increased funding was more important.
   - Another example of evidence that would prove me wrong: a list of technologies that had scifi writers and early enthusiasts, got many researchers interested who ran experiments, did not achieve successful lab demos, but got proven in lab many years decades later once some other necessary precursor technology was invented. This would prove that studying the practical research is more important as many plausibly good ideas turn out to just not work despite inspiring people.
   - **If my hypothesis is right, could a handful of people consistently meme-ing in favour of BCIs or gene drives or whatever for five years, basically bring these technologies into existence?** Assume the memes are technical enough and interesting enough to attract the curiosity of researchers in the relevant research fields. And assume most outlier-brilliant researchers are driven primarily by curiosity not altruism or money or fame, which I think has been true throughout history.

## Topic: Which technologies can possibly influence the future of humanity?

Specific STEM questions:
 - What is the consensus among neuroscientists for Neuralink's timelines?
 - Did MKULTRA actually discover anything useful? Could it have discovered anything useful, if ran for more time with more funding?
   - Many documents are FOIA-ed but I haven't spend enough time reading them. My guess is they didn't achieve much.
 - How much useful work did Biopreparat actually do?
   - My guess is they didn't achieve much, but I wanna know the facts.

Broader technical questions
 - I'd like to study pharmacology and neuroscience till I'm no longer at a beginner level, as those are the two of the following six categories I have least knowledge about.
    - Human (or human-like) brains are likely to shape the future. Technology that will directly alter what human brains do seems worth paying special attention to. 
      1. Information tech - search engines, interest-based communities etc
      2. Digital minds - superintelligent AI, mind uploads, etc
      3. Neuroscience - brain computer interfaces, etc
      4. Pharmacology - barbiturates ("truth serum"), psychedelics, opiates etc
      5. Genetics - CRISPR, etc especially if done to alter human brains
      6. Nanotechnology - especially bionanomachines

 - I'm particularly interested in studying MKULTRA, history of barbiturates and history of psychedelics. MKULTRA is AFAIK rare example of pharmacology research with the explicit goal of altering human brains and human society as a result. Also it's aimed at changing human brains, not fixing "disabilities".
   - Are there ethical pharma research agendas not aimed at fixing disabilities?
   - As of today, pharmacology seems to operate more on the reactive/emotional/primitive part of the brain, sometimes with the hope this also percolates to higher order cognition. For example injecting oxytocin can increase feelings of safety, injecting adrenaline can reduce feelings promoting self-preservation, SSRIs can affect serotonin levels and hence mood regulation, and so on. But what exact thoughts they cause in the mind is less predictable or controllable. Similarly, lasting changes in worldview as a result of the drug are less predictable. 

 - I want to study more about bioweapons research. I suspect its mostly borrowing techniques from biotech that I'm already vaguely aware of, but I wanna study more and confirm.

 - I want to study more about possibilities for biotech automation
   - DNA sequencing is automated and cheap but the process to figure out whether any given sequence is actually useful (often gene cloning and protein expression) is not fully automated or cheap. Current cost is ~$100 for reagents and 10-100 researcher hours.
   - This seems like the hamming question for biotech (as per my limited knowledge) so I'd like to look more into it.
   - Update: Nuclera seems relevant. [Demo video](https://www.nuclera.com/resource-library/how-to-set-up-a-run/) Credits: a friend

 - I want to study more materials science. I know very little about it today.
   - Most STEM research fields go through three phases:
     1. Invent new tool to (cheaply) acquire lots of data from some physical system
     2. Acquire lots of data - from nature or from experiments
     3. Understand the physical system using all this data
     - Step 2 and step 3 often inform each other and run in an iterative loop
     - Step 1 could be the invention of microscope or cyclotron or radio telescope or anything else really.
   - Step 1 usually depends heavily on getting the right materials
   - A lot of practical inventions also seem to depend on material science. For instance fusion energy research is AFAIK basically containining 10M Kelvin plasma using fields, an alternative pathway might (???) be discovering materials that can contain it. Quantum computing research will benefit from having better nanomaterials and better superconducting materials I guess?
   - I understand an intro to materials science textbook won't teach me about better superconductors or whatever, but it still seems worthwhile to study.

Broader non-STEM questions
 - I'd like to build a "gears-level" high-level framework of the more indirect ways technology shapes society. (Not the stuff listed in the six categories above)
   - Often technology shifts offense-defence balances between various actors in society - individuals, small groups and large groups. An oversimplified way of categorising some historical examples would be as follows:
      - Tech that increases power of individuals relative to small groups: cities (drainage systems, etc), printing press, guns, cheap airplane fuel
      - Tech that increases power of large groups relative to individuals: radio, social media ?
      - Tech that increases power of large groups relative to both small groups and individuals: nuclear bombs, nuclear energy, cheap steel
   - Also some technology gives power to certain individuals over others:
      - Tech that increases power of old people relative to young people: elderly healthcare (treatments for cancer, poor eyesight, neuro disorders etc), anti-aging if ever discovered
      - Tech that increases power of women relative to men: condoms?
   - Tech that gives power to large groups of people (relative to small groups and individuals) fuels most of geopolitics as far as I understand
     - Countries and large corporations want to be the first to discover and deploy some tech and then use their military, spies, immigration policy, export controls, R&D budget etc etc to monopolise or maintain lead time on tech. US tech policymaking is the most obvious example.
     - Large groups that have achieved monopoly or lead time in some tech often use this as a bargaining chip to export their culture or religion or whatever morality unites that group in the first place.
     - Very often a large group of people controls production of some tech (individuals or small groups can't produce it), but once produced, individual units are sold as a commodity which gives power to individuals. Tech wih centralised production, decentralised ownership is very common, and has geopolitical dynamics more predictable than tech that is not like this. For example, geopolitics of solar PV modules is easier to model than geopolitics of railway networks IMO.
   - I'm choosing to use a game theory lens here, by modelling cost of attack, defence, coordination of various actors in society.
     - Incentives predictably shape behaviour of most people, even if some ambitious individuals are able to break out of them.
     - Over past 300 years technological progress has been very fast relative to human lifespans, so every generation faces incentives different from the previous generation. One can imagine a hypothetical civilisation with slow technological progress, where the existing technologies create incentives that make people's behaviour more predictable in certain ways across many generations, even if we know nothing about the psychology of the individual people or the details of the culture their future society creates.
     - I am somewhat optimistic that studying incentive structures created by tech will help figure out which tech is worth pursuing versus not, and ensure better trajectories in the future when people like me may no longer be around to think about it. **(This is a plan I think a lot about.)**
     - When deciding which tech is worth pursuing, many people today use a lens of "will the good guys get the tech before the bad guys" for some pre-defined idea of "good guys" that matches their moral and other values. I am not so optimistic on this plan. This is because as of 2025, a) we seem to lack the ability to lock-in who the elites of post-2100 society will be or what their values will be, and b) we seem to lack the ability to lock-in our society to a particular paradigm of technological progress sufficiently, such that elites post-2100 are left with no meaningful choices and everything is already pre-determined. 
     - I am also not optimistic about the plan of just trusting people post-2100 to figure it out, and not thinking too hard about it today. If there are ways for us to exert influence far into the future, I think it is good for us to try to do so. Future people are not to trusted blindly IMO, by default I assume they're capable of making the same mistakes in governance that our society in 2025 already makes.
   - I want a framework that I can fit all the historical examples into, right now my framework is messy (not "gears-level").


## Topic: Information people don't feel safe enough to share

Specific questions
 - Is there any way to increase public access to therapy-client records from over 30-60 years ago? Is it a good idea to do this? What about personal diaries and letters?
 - Is there any way to increase the number of therapy-client records collected from today onwards that will be released publicly 30-60 years from now? Is it a good idea to do this?

Broader questions
 - How do you design societies where more people feel safe enough to share more information about their personal lies publicly?
   - A lot of information about individual human experiences does not reach the public domain because people don't feel safe enough to share it publicly. (They're many reasons for this and they're often valid, from the perspective of that individual).
   - This information is however extremely useful, be to empathise with other individuals at a personal level or provide them useful advice with their life problems or make policy recommendations to govts that benefit individuals or even design new forms of govt more conducive to individuals.
   - Iteration speed of psychology as a field is slower than it would be if there were public transcripts of conversations. Each therapist must form hypotheses based on the limited private data they have, and their guesses of whether to trust hypotheses from other therapists who also work with private data. (This is related to my posts on knowledge versus common knowledge, common knowledge can bring down govts or dominant research paradigms for example, widespread knowledge alone cannot).
   - This also applies broadly to individuals trying to help other individuals with personal advice (which is often atleast partly based on psychology). It doesn't have to be restricted to people trained as psychologists/therapists/whatever.
 - How to best nudge people to leave behind their private information (such as that shared only with friends and family), so that some years after they die we get this information in public domain?
   - I want to study more about the culture around this, in different countries. What are the different cultural attitudes to personal and sensitive information?
   - I should also probably looking into succession planning for big tech companies. What happens once (say) Mark Zuckerberg dies and his (Facebook's) entire plaintext database fits inside a football. Who gets the football next?
 - How to better organise all the historical information we do have on personal and emotionally sensitive matters? I would like to spend some time looking at existing datasets, to see if I can convert everything to plaintext and embedding search it.

## Topic: Interplay between incentives and culture

Definition: In general when I talk about incentives I usually mean these three: social (people giving you respect/compassion/admiration/sex/etc), financial (people giving you money/food/goods/place to live/etc) and safety (people imprisoning/injuring/raping/murdering you, or protecting you from others who might). Doing "X" gets you more respect or money or safety, or not doing "X" gets you less of it. Maslow's hierarchy is a decent model, if you ignore the ordering of the hierarchy.

Broader questions
 - How much power do elites have to take decisions that go against their local incentives and local culture?
   - (For example if the prime minister of a country is in favour of declaring war but other people in his party and other parties are not, how much power does this person have to single-handedly shift the situation?)
   - What are the psychological traits required to do this? How do you train more of our elites with these traits?
   - What is the political knowledge required to do this sort of manoeuvre? Can we teach our elites to do more of this?
   - (Yes I am biased lol, I think most elites don't do anything interesting with their lives. This is causally downstream of incentives and culture of the people around them. "Interesting" is defined as per my tastes, ofcourse each elite may have their own unique tastes.)

 - How do you ethically run experiments to see the outcomes of unusual incentives (social, financial, safety) and culture on people?
   - There is a lot of existing data available to be collected, on how existing incentives and culture influence people. The three socioeconomic classes have different cultures and incentives, people in different countries have different cultures and incentives, people in different professions have different cultures and incentives.
   - But this data is finite, and it would help to be able to run experiments of different circumstances not occurring naturally.
   - Ethical problems abound, for instance threatening someone's life or disrespecting them or depriving them of important information about the world is usually considered unethical in the context of a research experiment. What are some techniques to bypass this?
   - Theory goes only so far when predicting human behaviour, experimentation is needed. (I mean, I basically see STEM versus non-STEM as prediction and control of systems not including and including human beings respectively. Human brains are the most complex known object in the observable universe and predicting them with >90% probability is hard in many situations.)
   - Hmm I should prolly first make a list of experiments I'd love to run, assuming ethics is not an issue. Then filter the list on ethics. Will update this section when I do.

 - How to think about morality and how to teach morality in a world where morality is dependent on circumstances?
   - Different people face different incentives and culture. A moral principle that is easy to follow in one person's situation is difficult to follow in another person's situation. For example honesty is generally easier when you have some money saved than if you don't, because if someone dislikes your honesty and is abusive in response, you have more options to escape them or fight back.
   - A significant threshold for whether an ideology or institution has power over you is whether it has shaped your sense of right and wrong. For example (some) communists believing private property is bad and theft is okay, or (some) anarchists believing big govts are bad and tax evasion is okay, or (some) religious people believing sex before marriage is not okay and denying couples houses for rent, etc.
   - Morality is a political question, as whichever ideology or group can recruit more soldiers to be morally okay killing enemy soldiers in its name is one that will be more powerful. Political circumstances of a society change with time, and this correlates with changes in moral thinking of a society.
   - People generally suck at understanding is-ought distinction.
   - People (including me) also suck at imagining what they would be like if they were born in hypothetical cultures they are not actually a part of.
   - The practical result is people find it very hard to understand what morality is like from the perspective of someone in a sufficiently different circumstance than them.
   - Will the internet force homogenisation of our ideas of morality worldwide? Or does an eternal culture war just become the new normal? I'm guessing it'll be a mix of both. I want to build a more gears-level model for memetics with a focus on morality.


## Topic: Miscellaneous

 - What do "replicators" in politics look like?
   - Businesses that hire very few people and sell self-contained products are easier to replicate than other businesses, because people are harder to predict or control than physical systems. For example: a large farm with automated equipment is easier to manage than a farming village with thousands of labourers.
   - What are some easy-to-replicate involve-less-people playbooks in politics or non-STEM more broadly? A lot of political events seem to me to be one-off events without an underlying theory that will enable replicating them in other contexts.
   - I would love to discover/invent playbooks for regime change or good tech policy or maintaining law and order etc. that are replicable across multiple cultural contexts.
   - A major bottleneck here is that law and order in many groups (including nation states) plays two roles at the same time - protecting physical safety of its members (which is low on maslow's hierarchy), and preserving culture of its members (which can be higher level on maslow's hierarchy). Forming a military that is loyal to certain values is often seen as instrumentally valuable to preserving those values in the world. **I'd be particularly excited about ways to decouple physical safety from cultural preservation.**

 - Why didn't the US nuke USSR cities immediately after nuking Japan to establish a nuclear monoppoly, before USSR got nukes? Are the transcripts of these conversations available? (Between the people who were pro-nuke and the people who were anti-)

 - Should I just stop caring as much about grammar and spelling in my writing, and invent more shorthands?
   - English in 2024 is more concise than English from the middle ages, this is good as it reduces cognitive load, and saves time.
   - I sometimes want to invent jargon for concepts. I want to skip articles (a, an, the), ignore verb conjugation, skip pronouns sometimes, etc. I suspect future humans will be doing this anyway.
   - I don't want to raise the entry barrier for people viewing my work though, atleast while my work is not that popular. My current guess is that this is a change I should try to nudge people towards once I'm a lot more popular.

 - How good are Israeli research univerities exactly?
   - After US, UK, China, Israel seems like it might occupy 4th place in any tech race. Israel is nuclear-armed (hence won't listen to US or China) + great cyberhacking/espionage (so they can steal everyone's research without much lag time) + decent research talent (so they can implement stolen research)





# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/my_ideas/controversial.md

2025-01-20

# Controversial topics thread

Please consider first reading the page on [Disclaimer on value differences](../value_differences_disclaimer.md).

## Freedom of speech

I live in India, upper-middle socioeconomic class (college-educated, net worth $20k-$100k). This might place certain restrictions on what I can say and how I say it.

Some topics that are considered sensitive:
 - criticism of people in my immediate social circle
 - criticism of any religion or religious leaders, including related issues like dating, caste, etc.
 - criticism of any political party or politicians in India
 - criticism of India
 - ???

All my opinions on these topics are within this one post, and I will avoid mentioning them in other posts. 

(I might use pseudonyms to talk about these topics anonymously. I understand that someone putting enough effort can probaly doxx them anyway.)

## No movement pls

Social change happens not when 10% of people want change, but when 10% of people know that everyone in that 10% wants change. Establishing "common knowledge" is a major part of it. See also: [Blue Eyes Puzzle](https://xkcd.com/blue_eyes.html), [Scott Alexander's political posts](https://slatestarcodex.com/about/), [Srdja Popovick's book](https://www.amazon.com/Blueprint-Revolution-Nonviolent-Techniques-Communities/dp/0812995309#customerReviews)

**I am NOT interested in acting as a leader for social change around any topic mentioned on this page.**

Goals of this website:
 - Find high quality research collaborators, receive high quality feedback
 - Spread knowledge

NOT Goals of this website:
 - Establish "common knowledge", start a political movement


## Rule of law

Protecting your safety, belongings and relationships requires living in a culture that allows you to protect these things. Law enforcers are usually members of your culture and ultimately accountable to members of your culture. It is not practical for law enforcement to protect you if most members of your culture don't feel you deserve to be protected.

Physical safety is the second level of Maslow's hierarchy, after having enough food and water. In today's world (and particularly in India), it is rare to find someone dying of thirst or starvation. But it is not rare to find someone who feels unsafe.

Fear begets fear. If you are afraid of people of a different value system from yours, you're less likely to advocate for rule of law to protect them. They will then use extra-legal means to protect themselves. Now both you and them are less safe.

People who feel less safe can be less empathetic, less honest, less trusting and more isolationist. If many people collectively feel unsafe, this has impacts on nearly every aspect of culture. These damaging effects can persist multiple generations, as it is transmitted from parents to children.

In particular, if you are benefitting in any way from making others feel less safe, please consider whether your benefits are worth inflicting this sort of damage on another person. The damage can persist long after you die, the benefits may not.

Please consider protecting people in your daily life from harm irrespective of their value system. Please consider advocating for a rule of law that protects everyone. This way everyone can peacefully coexist despite their differences.


## Individualism

I am quite individualist. I take my life decisions myself, and I want to ensure I'm the primary person responsible for the outcomes of my life. IMO some people, but not necessarily all people, could benefit from being more individualist. How you want to live your life is a personal decision. I am not recommending everyone copy me.

Why?

Some important ideas that I believe in are as follows.

1. Almost nobody likes being controlled by another person.
 - This could be a parent or sibling or spouse or employer or political leader or anyone else. Voluntarily following someone almost always feels better than following them under threat of violence or starvation.
 - Ideally you can negotiate boundaries and agreements with people in your current social circle in a mutually beneficial way, be it when deciding your actions or when expanding or narrowing your circle.
 - I'm strongly in favour of consensual social connections over non-consensual ones.
 - I'm also generally in favour of making long-term commitments not only short-term ones. Consensual agreements doesn't necessarily mean no commitments or responabilities.
 - However, sometimes people in your existing social circle might restrict you and seek control over you. If you are currently under someone else's control, and you would prefer to break out for any reason, this might be possible. See below for how.

2. There are 8 billion people on this planet. The probability that your family and friends are among the wisest / most knowledgible / happiest / kindest / etc people out of these 8 billion is approximately zero.

 - You can still selectively learn good things from your family and friends, but it'll help to also consider learning from others.
 - You can increase the odds you have an awesome life by deliberately choosing what you learn and from whom. Your source of inspiration and learning could be a podcaster or religious leader or politician or filmstar or anyone really.
   - Copying other people's decisions tends to get you life outcomes similar to those you're copying. Make sure to track what outcomes your role models got in their own life.
 - If you are not satisfied with your role models' life outcomes and want something better (or even just different) for your life, you must learn to think independently and act independently.
   - Becoming an independent thinker starts with exposing yourself to books, people and situations that others in your social circle are not being exposed to. Your brain is a computer, its output depends on its input.
   - I have gained a tremendous amount of value in my life doing this, arguably more than my entire formal education (although it's kinda hard to compare, they both support each other).

3. Approval / disapproval of you by your social circle is one of the largest predictors of your behaviour.

 - Social incentives (what your friends and family approve of and disapprove of) are often a stronger predictor of your behaviour than financial incentives (what makes you more money) or culture (what other people around you usually do).
 - If you choose your social circle deliberately, you can alter your own thinking and behaviour.
 - Pain of social disapproval is often greater than reward of social approval, atleast in terms of how it feels inside your head. You should be especially careful about what your peers disapprove of, as this will affect you more strongly.
 - See also: Asch's conformity tests and other research that confirms these hypotheses in a specific lab setting


#### See also: Dealing with abusive situations

DISCLAIMER: I am not an expert on dealing with abusive situations. If you are in such a situation, try to get advice and support from people who have more experience with it than me.

How to break out of another person's control?
 - Two things you need:
   - a source of income or sufficient savings not under this person's control. If you do not have this, obtaining this should be your life priority.
   - moral convinction that you are not anyone's slave or property.
 - Conflicts of this type that I've seen are often more psychological warfare than actual war.
   - If you believe you are not under their control, this reduces their control over you.
   - Non-violent resistance is powerful and ensures you retain the moral high ground. Keeping this internal sense of morality and self-respect is important in order to break out.
   - If they threaten violence, it is often a bluff, they lose their power if you call their bluff.
   - Even if they are violent, spending one month in a hospital may be better than spending decades as their slave.
   - Some situations are extreme enough that your abuser would literally rather murder you than let you go free. In this case, you may have to be more strategic, move slowly, find allies before making any move. Your opponent is not willing to play fair and neither do you have to. You may end up scarred whether you stay in this situation or attempt to break free. Remember that one day you are going to die, and your choices will affect your life many years to come.



## Cosmopolitanism

I am extremely cosmopolitan.

If this at all interests you, I recommend making friends (or atleast acquaintances) of people from countries other than your native one. I would also recommend making friends with people of different cultures in your country, of different socioeconomic classes, and of different value systems.

How?
 - This could be online or by travelling to other places or by finding people from those places visiting or living in your city.

Why?
 - Friends can tell you things you won't learn as easily from social media or elite-funded news channels (i.e. almost all news channels).
 - Also you'll be able to empathise with actual people rather than figments of your imagination. I've personally had good experiences doing this.
 - The really optimistic version of this is, maybe wars will become less likely if everyone had friends from other countries, maybe class boundaries would reduce and so on. But I think the benefits to you as an individual alone are worth it, ignoring the societal benefits.


## Religion

I am atheist. I strive to be tolerant of people of other faiths, although there are some topics we may have to avoid in casual conversations in order to have a pleasant interaction.

Which religion you choose to belong to is one of the most important decisions of your life. You don't want to blindly pick whichever religion you happened to be born into. It is better to think deliberately about it.

How?
 - If you are interested in exploring further on this topic, there are lots of freely available websites, books and videos online. Consider reading the writings of all the major world religions, and reading materials from multiple conflicting points of view.
 - I'm not sure what the best intro resource on atheism is, maybe [this one?](https://www.suchanek.name/texts/atheism/ChapterUniverse.html).

**The rest of this section elaborates my personal views on religion. If you're not interested, you are free to ignore it.**

There's a bunch of separate threads of evidence in favour of atheism that I consider worth studying. Which ones you study more deeply may depend on your interests. The most important thing is you actually study these topics yourself from the ground up, so you aren't blindly trusting a bunch of scientists or scientific institutions.

Stuff I've studied reasonably well:
 - biochemistry, genomics, computational genomics ([example](https://asia.ensembl.org/info/genome/compara/mlss.html?mlss=1098))
 - newton's laws, quantum mechanics, newton's laws implying deterministic universe, philosophical implications of human brains also being deterministic
 - occam's razor, solomonoff induction
 - chalmer's hard problem of consciousness

Stuff I've studied at surface level:
 - radioactive carbon dating of fossils
 - particle physics, esp. particle physics around big bang, star formation
 - evolutionary explanations for mammalian morality
 - redshift of stars due to universe expansion
 - psychology, evopsych, sociology of groupthink

Stuff I wish I'd study sometime:
 - reading holy texts of all major religions (I'm still halfway on this)
 - CMB radiation
 - neuroscience and psychology research on meditation, prayer, community rituals

Some potential advantages of being atheist:
 - In the very long run, you might help humanity find the truth. Truth tends to survive the rise and fall of civilisations, as information is easy to preserve and hard to destroy. A record of your beliefs and actions may be preserved and later read by others even if your nation gets nuked to dust, for example.
 - People around you might benefit in terms of material wellbeing. Post-Englightenment, there's a direct correlation between countries' GDP growth and their cultural tolerance of atheist scientists and engineers. (I also suspect there's a direct correlation between this tolerance and rate of new inventions by country, but this is harder to prove.)
 - You might avoid some traps like using medicines that haven't undergone double-blinded randomised control trials and may hence be toxic.
 - It might improve your critical thinking skills. Many cognitive biases are due to social pressure, learning to resist social pressure will make you a better thinker. Your beliefs may be less compartmentalised, as knowing the truth in one subject also aids with knowing the truth in other subjects (and vice versa knowing falsehoods deteriorates it).

Some potential disadvantages of being atheist:
 - You may end up distanced from people who no longer share your values. Coordination is easier between people with shared values and beliefs. You may find it harder to coordinate with others.
 - You may end up distrusting of other people's beliefs. You'll realise truth-seeking is really hard and a lifetime of effort is not enough to discover all the important truths about the world.
 - You may have more anxiety about the future. You'll realise many events in life are random and beyond your control. (For example, this could be who you date or how good your health is or how a particular exam result went.) You'll realise people often imagine fictitious narratives to make sense of random events, because they don't like random events.
 - You'll realise most problems in life don't solve themselves, someone needs to actually put in the work to solve them.
  - You'll have to take life decisions while facing more uncertainty about potential outcomes. You'll realise many facts about our past, present and future are currently unknown. Many of these facts will remain unknown even after you die.
 - You may become more confused about your morality. You'll realise that different cultures produced people with different moral values.
 - You'll realise the world is not a fair place, karma doesn't always work. History is full of mass murderers who received more love and popular support than you ever will.
 - You may end up less satisfied with your present circumstances. Most religions teach some degree of contentment with one's present circumstances.

If you have recently become atheist, I encourage being kind to yourself while you figure out its implications for your life. This took me many years to figure out, and could take you as well.



# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/polyamory.md

2025-01-14

# Polyamory

I'd probably be polyamorous if I were living in the US. As of today though, I am not practising polyamory.

Why?
 - I'm sympathetic to the idea of compound benefits. Investing 10 years into the same person has compound benefits you don't get if you choose a new person to date every year. I don't have a deep understanding of what the compound benefits are, but I'm convinced they're real and significant. I'm also sympathetic to the idea of planning your life many years into the future instead of just doing what feels good for the next day or month or year.
 - I'm sympathetic to the idea that different people provide different forms of values that are hard to compare, say on a scale of 1 to 10. If I'm forced to pick only one partner for my whole life, I will naturally have a high bar for who I wish to pick. I will have to eventually breakup with anyone who fails to meet this bar, no matter how good they are for me or I am for tham.
   - I do think nobody can be perfect at everything, and there will ways in which this ideal person falls short no matter who they are. There will be meaningful value (trustworthy advice, knowledge, emotional support etc) I can get from people other than this one person.
 - I like gradients over sharp cut-offs. If you're monogamous you're forced to either consider someone as having potential to become one of the most important people in your life, or remove them from your life completely. There is no in-between. In the past I have not done well with staying friends with people I'm romantically interested in, so I end up removing them from my life completely. If you're polyamorous you can increase or decrease time commitment more gradually.

Poly combines the benefits of both.

How?

Scarce resources include time and location.
 - I used to think time is a constraint for practising polyamory but I'm less convinved by this now. Even if you have only 4 days a month to spend with other people, you can split that as 2 days a month per person. Doing this over 10 years still likely gets some of the compound benefits I mentioned before.
 - Place is a significant constraint. Since I plan to eventually shift to the US, one way or another, any social bonds I form while in India will eventually need to adjust to that. (This is the kind of annoying tradeoff that makes me wish billion-person cities existed.)

The biggest constrait by far though is that I, and more importantly the women I date, will face significant societal judgement from religious people while I'm in India, and I'm not sure dealing with that is worth the benefits. Therefore I plan to be monogamous as long as I'm in India.

I also hope to remain friends with religious people and be included in their social circles, to whatever extent that is possible. Some of the kindest people I have met in my life are religious, for example, and I expect I can grow as a person by spending more time with them. This is easier to do if I weren't actively practising polyamory. (I'm sure there's people who think I'm committing evil simply by thinking about the idea and not practising it, but I can't do anything about that. I can censor my actions and words to some extent, but I can't censor my thoughts. That is sacred to me.)

Navigating this is confusing and I don't have all the answers. In my mind there's a clear pareto frontier where both increased and decreased self-expression come with significant upsides and downsides.






# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/my_role_models.md

2024-12-05

# My role models

I'm generally against the idea of having a single role model in my own life. (You can have a role model in your life, I have no problem with that. I'm talking strictly about myself here.)

That being said, here's an incomplete list of people I rely on for motivation. (Motivation is not the same as Advice)

 - Eliezer Yudkowsky
 - Tim Urban
 - Moxie Marlinspike
 - Vitalik Buterin
 - Yeonmi Park


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/elite_class_social_norms.md

2025-01-14

# Elite social norms

I have been raised in upper-middle class India which means I have internalised many of the social norms of the middle (knowledge) class and am blind to many of the social norms of the upper (elite) and lower (labour) classes. I am very sympathetic to perspectives such as [this analysis by siderea](https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1237182.html) on why social class is more important than economic class, and this helps explain why I am blind.

This entire post is therefore a bunch of guesswork from someone who does not have enough first-hand data. Everything here is to be read with the understanding that it could be completely incorrect with significant probability.

If you are an elite, please correct the incorrect parts. It'll mean a lot to me if you do.

#### Disclaimer

Publishing this article in public makes me nervous for a couple of reasons.
 - I am still in a knowledge-gathering phase of my life. I want to spend more time interacting with people outside my class and learn more about what life is like for them. I'm worried I will get reduced opportunities to do that if people know I'm going to publish some of my learnings on my blog.
   - This is especially true if what I publish includes criticism, and isn't just descriptive of the facts.
   - This is especially true if I publish includes incorrect guesses of what it's like in other classes. People could think I'm naive and overconfident, and not be willing to correct me. (If you think I'm naive and overconfident, please correct me, I will appreciate more for this than if you keep quiet. If I don't accept your criticism that's okay, I'll still appreciate the attempt.)
   - In general, if I have published anything that you don't like, please let me know. I'll usually be willing to take it down or atleast rewrite it in a way it no longer feels like it is criticising you specifically.
   - (There may be exceptions. Maybe you've done something especially immoral from my perspective, and I want to call you out publicly and pick a fight with you. But this is rare, I don't usually start conflicts with other just because their values are different from mine. If you are afraid that something you say to me will end up on this blog against your wishes, please ask me first.)
 - If I had a magic wish, I would love to be part of the elite class instead of my current socioeconomic class. I think there's a lot of good that can be done in the world only by elites (or by people of my class who join the elite class).
   - However some of my current behaviours and actions in the world are already indicating my membership of the knowledge class, and my potential lack of eligibility to other classes.
   - For instance my ideal attitude to criticism is a lot closer to people of my class than the elite, whenever I hold back on offering criticism I feel like I am betraying my inner ideals for instrumental gain. In practice yes I often hold back on offering criticism for various reasons, but I hate the fact that I have to do this. (Yes, all 3 classes withold criticism, but elite class does this the most IMO, atleast for public criticism not private.)
   - If I choose to give up on my ambition of becoming an elite, I could still have significant influence, for example by influencing and advising existing elites. But this influence will still be reduced (by how much??) if I refuse to adopt any of the social norms of the elite class myself.

**I still remain unsure whether this article should stay published. If you think I would have a better life if I took this article down, please let me know.**

## Elite social norms that differ from knowledge class' social norms

A bunch of the social norms seem explainable just through incentives. I probably don't actually have to spend 10 years living as an elite myself to figure it out.

If I have to summarise this entire post in two lines it's probably the following:
 - Elite social circles are a small world, there's a small number of people like you. Your entire life - personal and professional - depends on allying with some subset of this set of people.
 - In labour class, others can destroy you so you must be careful how you behave. In elite class, you can destroy others so you must be careful how you behave. It's only the knowledge class that lives in this fictitious zone of "equality".

Now that the summary is over, I'll talk about details.

 - My guess is elites can get away with a lot more weird or even immoral behaviour in private, compared to people of other classes.
   - My guess is elites on average have a stronger demarcation between their private and public life than people of other classes. (Although yes ofcourse all 3 classes maintain this demarcation.)
   - Elites can get away with a lot more things in private simply because of the power they wield. If an elite ever got into a conflict with someone of the knowledge class, they are likely to "win" in many ways.
   - This includes self-expression that would be punished in other classes. If an elite wants to architect their house in a 16th century style, or consume a range of non-FDA-approved supplements, or go live in a monastery for a year, or have multiple partners, it's easier for them to do that. Many people of other classes would love this level of freedom and self-expression, but get restricted by their immediate social circle.
   - [Trigger Warning: Rape] This also extends to immoral actions. For example, it's a lot easier for an elite to get away with rape than someone of other classes. I also think the number of men of other classes who would rape others if they could get away with it is surprisingly high (atleast 5%, global average), but elites get to act on it instead of just thinking it in the privacy of their minds. There are 3000 billionaires today, I'm pretty sure atleast 150 of them are rapists (I'm not including paid sex work here, and I'm not including edge cases like a 50-year old sleeping with an 18-year old here).
     - Disclaimer: Predictions shape reality. Please don't turn my prediction into reality. It would be nice if I was wrong, and this number was a lot less than 5%.
 - My guess is elites are on average more lonely.
   - It is a small world at the top, there's less than 10000 elites globally. For the knowledge class it's easier to do something weird and trust that you eventually find a find people who are not just tolerant but actively supportive of anything weird you want to do. For example, if you want to suddenly convert from hinduism to christianity, you can probably find an existing community of hindus-converted-to-christianity of your class. If you are a Nepali immigrant to the US, you can probably find other nepali immigrants to the US, of your class. As an elite it's a lot harder to find another elite who shares your unique set of life experiences. (Also it takes a lot of time and effort to forge social bonds outside your class that are based on honest foundations, see my next point.)
   - As an elite you're basically 24x7 exposed to non-elites who are engaging in varying amounts of deception to get access to some of the capital and attention you wield. This is true both in professional life (other companies and non-profits who want to ally with you) and in personal life (people who want to befriend or date you). This also seems obvious based on incentives. If someone has $1M it might be worth spending 1 year trying to entrap them, if someone has $1B it might be worth spending your entire life trying to entrap them. Forging trustworthy bonds outside your social class takes a significant amount of time and effort, in fact a significant part of designing your company or government or whatever is basically figuring out how to get people of other classes to do your work without you ever having to trust them.
   - As an elite, if you're ambitious and trying to get something done, you need to interact with a lot of people where you cannot let your guard down emotionally. You cannot choose to avoid interacting with people if you are ambitious and wish to climb further upward. (This is true for basically all 3 classes, but it is an added factor here. I'm not claiming it's worse or better in this class.)
   - There is also cultural spiralling here. If the other people you know are also more lonely and less willing to take bold risks, this will also rub off on you.
 - My guess is elites can get away with less weirdness on things that actually matter, in business and politics, than people of the knowledge class.
   - There's a lot of nuance here that's hard to summarise.
   - This is especially true if they wish to keep their elite social circles (including friends and family) or climb up within their class.
   - This is especially true if the elite wields or aspires to wield attention rather than capital. Elites often wield a lot of attention by crafting a public image that is entirely separate from their private image.
     - Getting a large number of people behind cause may require you to support the average of their views, and the average of a large number of people's views is by definition conformist.
     - [Side note: I wish there was an honest way to do this. For example, I have massive respect for a politician who says "my private beliefs are X, however the voters have voted for Y, therefore if I were elected I'm going to do Y" and I have a lot less respect for someone who just pretends their private beliefs are Y. I understand that the former has disadvantages. For instance, your voters may be too unintelligent to understand the nuance. Also, your message will get mutated as it spreads across place and time, and competes with other ideas, so you may prefer communicating a simpler message over a more complicated one. If someone figures this stuff out, I'd be grateful.]
 - Elites can get away with less criticism of other elites. People of the knowledge class can tolerate more criticism on average, both on the giving and receiving end.
     - Criticising another elite in public is essentially rallying a mob against them. An elite's words in public carry a lot more weight than someone of the knowledge class. (Arguably, being able to rally people using words is basically the most important role an elite plays, in a sense.)
     - An elite's words also end up setting up status heirarchies across all the organisations they control. If you as an elite criticise only one particular type of behaviour by someone, people across all your organisations will go out of their way to avoid that particular type of behaviour.
     - The elite who receives the criticism can also do a lot more damage in response. See again, "it's a small world". The elite on the receiving end can influence their network of other elites to demand conformism or else cut off their ties with you. The extreme end of this phenomena is countries going to war over personal rivalries involving trivial matters.
     - Even when elites do use their media houses to push criticism against other elites, it's done via abstractions. It's "The New Yorker published X" not "the Newhouse family who owns Conde Nast allowed X to be published", it's "the NSA helped kill X" not "Michael Hayden the NSA director helped kill X", it's "climate non-profit got shutted because X" not "Mohammed bin Salman the prince of Saudi Arabia shuttered climate non-profit". Most of us don't even know the names of the people who own the media houses and companies and nonprofits that we interact with on a day-to-day basis, this alone is proof that abstractions work. (I'm not claiming anything about these specific examples, they're just examples.)
     - [Side note: My guess is a lot of criticism being extinguished top-down on the internet, is downstream of this phenomenon. Elites own the social media and knowledge workers publish on them.]
   - Knowing when to do things "how things are usually done" and when to invest on your personal beliefs around better ways of doing things - seems like one of the strongest markers of an elite's good judgment.
 - My guess is elites look at morality differently than people of the knowledge class.
   - Elites are less likely to register the harm done by the organisations they wield as harm that they personally have done. See also: [Power buys you distance from the crime](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fB4gvoooNYa4t56S/power-buys-you-distance-from-the-crime)
     - (Arguably knowledge workers do the same blame deflection, just in a different context. If a smartphone manufacturer uses slave labour to mine their rare earth metals for their smartphone, then the people purchasing the smartphone typically think they're blameless with "if not us then someone else would do it" as a potential justification, and the CEO and investors of the company also typically think they're blameless with "if not us then someone else would do it" as a potential justification.)
   - Elites are basically above the law, the only law that matters is the rules set by other elites. The only way people of the knowledge class get to enforce rules on the elites is to find another elite who is willing to do the enforcing.
   - Most large organisations end up doing some harm to someone. Some of this is an accidental byproduct of governing a large organisation.
     - Often organisations was designed by people other than you. Even if you as an elite have the ability to re-design them better, it's often not worth the time and effort invested to do this, if your goals in life are something else.
   - Some of this is deliberate. Governments often deliberately suppress their citizens using the military for example. Companies often have armies of salesmen, lawyers and scientists aimed at addicting people to various products. These armies don't spontaneously spring into existence, there are elites who devote their entire life to trying to build them. A full analysis of deliberate harm done by elites and why this happens is out of the scope of this post.
   - Again, "small world" phenomena means as an elite, you have less ability to cut people out of your network if they have done evil things. If you want to raise as much capital or attention as possible towards a cause, you have to be more willing to tolerate receiving it from people who have done evil things. How much you tolerate depends on your negotiating position, which could depend on how rich you are, for eexample. A knowledge worker's moral line might be "I will not accept money from anyone who is rude to all their friends."; an elite's moral line might be "I will not accept money from anyone who has committed genocide.". An aspiring elite with $10M may be more tolerant of a billionaire rapist, another billionaire may be less tolerant of the first billionaire, because the former is more dependent on the billionaire's support. (I don't know where these lines actually get drawn in practice, I'm just guessing they get drawn differently.)
   - Elites are definitely more sympathetic to utilitarian ethics - ensure good done is greater than harm done. Elites accept as a matter of course that they will end up doing a bunch of both good and harm in their life. Knowledge workers are more sympathetic to deontological ethics - do not harm, how much good you do less important.
   - The net result of all these dynamics makes elite morality noticeably different from that of knowledge workers.
   - [Side note: I wish some elites could help explain their morality to the rest of us. I'm afraid many elites have given up on trying to explain anything to anyone, and this makes me sad. Many knowledge workers think that if an elite must have high moral standards, they must copy the values of the knowledge workers themselves. This is not possible due to all the incentives mentioned above. The net result of making such a demand is that you get politicians who pretend to "live like a common man" while thinking in ways very different from one. I wish some elites could explain to us what high ethical standards look like *from their own perspective*, and then actually try to uphold those standards. Forging genuine empathy and understanding between members of both classes is going to require work of this sort.]
 - My guess is elites trade a lot of favours, especially the ambitious ones.
   - Keep tracking of debts owed and incurred to other elites, not just financial but favour-based, seems like a non-trivial part of the job of an ambitious elite. Not keeping good records puts you at a disadvantage.
 - My guess is elites, especially the most successful ones, make plans with time horizons longer than the other two classes.
   - This is definitely not true of all elites, I'm sure many are just trying to improve status among their peers or find a better partner or whatever.
   - Having more wealth does allow you to make plans on the timescale of multiple generations though, so a handful of elites make use of this opportunity.
   - Sucessful elites put a lot of time into thinking what happens to their wealth, position and organisations after they die. They try finding successors (for example grooming their children for the role) and try modifying their organisations such that they can survive their death. They especially do this when they are old themselves. They care about what story they are remembered for.

[Side note: I basically think the internet is going to disrupt the social norms of all three classes. I would first like to understand what the current norms are, before trying to predict how they will be disrupted.]


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/readme_for_unimportant_folder.md

2025-01-06

# README for "unimportant" folder

Attention is a scarce resource. Whenever I make a bid for your attention (be it in person or online), I only want to push a small amount of content. Anything I do not think is important enough to push on someone with limited attention goes into the "unimportant" folder.

My standards for how crisp a world model is or how clearly it is communicated are lower in this folder.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/taboo_words.md

# Taboo words on this website

2025-01-12

I am sympathetic to the lesswrong social norm of taboo words. Basically you avoid the usage of words that are not defined in a clear way where everyone agrees on the definition. If you think somsone is using a word without clear definition agreed by everyone, you can ask them to repeat their point without using this word.


Taboo words on this websites:
 - can, possible, because
   - On this website I almost will never say "X happened because Y". I will almost never say "X is possible" or "X is impossible".
   - Saying "X happened because Y" means in an alternate universe where X did not happen, Y would not have happened.
   - Especially when studying history it is difficult to construct this alternate universe thought experiment in a way everyone agrees what the thought experiment should be, and what its outcome would be. (I accept that in theory this thought experiment works fine. Human brains don't violate deterministic universe. It's just in practice we don't know how to get the outcomes of these experiments.)
   - In practice often multiple pre-conditions existed when an event happened. The combination of those pre-existing conditions is not simple linear algebra, "A and B and C => Y", it's "f(A,B,C) => Y" for some poorly understood f.
   - I prefer the phrases "causally upstream" and "caually downstream" over the word "because".
   - There are different levels of "impossible". There are events that would have required people to have different ideas or imaginations in order to happen, there are events that merely required the right amount of funding or the right set of social bonds to form, there are events that required increased amounts of engineering resources, there are events that would straight up violate the laws of physics if they happened. Unless an event would violate the laws of physics, I'm hesitant to say it is impossible. And if it violates the laws of physics, I may be open to its possibility, human understanding of our current physical laws is less than a century old, it could have exceptions.
   - If nothing is impossible, then saying "X is possible" also conveys zero useful information so I avoid saying it.
 - less, more
   - I will almost never say "X is less" or "X is more". Scales are relative, and where exactly the middle of the scale gets defined to be is often a political question. I will almost always say "X is less than Y" or "X is more than Y". This could be when referring to any adjective. X could be more beautiful, powerful, wealthy, empathetic, knowledgible etc. than Y, but X will never just be more beautiful, powerful, wealthy, empathetic, knowledgible etc. period.



# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/embedding_search.md

2025-01-10

# Embedding search

I'm writing a post on why I'm so excited by embedding search.

It may have massive upsides and downsides. Also the ingredients for it seem mostly ready. So it'll be difficult to un-invent even if the downsides are greater. It seems better to adapt to a world where better embedding search is present.

A lot of distinct problems in life seem like they could benefit from better embedding search.
 - Finding a life partner
 - Finding funding or a job
 - Finding books, articles, etc relevant to your research
 - Establishing trust. Getting diverse information sources about a person helps build trust faster.

Some dual use implications:
 - Finding people who are trying to stay hidden because they are afraid of or competing with you or someone else. (This is dual use.)
 - Finding secrets leaked to the internet (or any private database) by powerful organisations. (This is dual use.)
  - In general, even things like finding funding or becoming better at research, etc accelerates everyone irrespective of what their goals are. 

Attention markets on the internet right now are quite power-law distributed.
 - If you want to find people of a specific niche, often you have to first get attention of the mass public, and then filter out the subset of this that is interested in your niche. This is especially true if there doesn't exist an already well-established community with organisers and funders.
 - Attention markets are power law-distributed because there's atleast 1 million people competing for attention, but any random user has not more than 10 or 20 internet sources they regularly follow. (Sure, you might follow 1000 instagram pages, but you're not paying attention to all of them.) If you can't get into someone's top 20 follows, you're at a massive disadvantage when trying to get mass attention.
 - There aren't clear rules for how to give or receive attention. In practice this leads to an arms race, one side invents ever new techniques to spam all the platforms, and the other side raises the entry barrier to allow anything in.

Embedding search might (??) also help fix the attention market. For example, I could list 5000 people I'm interested in, and the other person could also list 5000 people they're interested in, and if there's overlap then we connect. At no point do either of us need to send a DM without knowing a good probability estimate of whether this is useful or spam for the other person.

Elites use filters
 - The more you wield a scarce resource such as attention or money, the more people are competing to get in your network or influence your thinking. And the more you need to be deliberate about what filters you use to let people in or out.
 - A lot of problems in society are causally downstream of principal-agent problems. Elites don't know who to trust and get fooled into doing massively suboptimal things, basically all the time.
 - Building better filtering mechanisms for elites seems useful.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/ai_enabled_cloud_gaming.md

2025-01-18

# AI-enabled Cloud gaming

AI-enabled cloud gaming seems like one of the hardest applications to do on cloud rather than locally. However I expect it'll get done in 10 years.

If you're a game developer you might want to work on this.

Why?
 - Latency limits of human body
   - Video output - Most people can't distinguish individual frames in video above 90 frames per second (~10 ms / frame)
   - Audio ouput - Some audio engineers on reddit find 10 ms latency when playing music digitally to be noticeable but acceptable.
   - Keyboard + mouse input - Human motor reaction times are generally estimated above 100 ms. Upper bound on nerve conduction velocity is around 120 m/s, covering 1 metre of neurons from hand to brain requires >10 ms. Anticipating inputs and reacting to them can lower response time (often happens in games).
   - End to end - Many cloud gamers have reported on reddit that <10 ms latency is where FPS and other action-heavy games feel as fast as playing them offline.

 - Internet bandwidth limits
   - streaming 24x7 video requires lot more bandwidth than text/image/audio
   - 1 gbps fiber connection (with no upload/download cap) is becoming increasingly popular in US, which is more than sufficient to stream UHD 90 fps video.
   - Streaming 3D content directly is not possible though. VR headsets-based use cases might (?) still prefer streaming 3D content over the rendered 2D output, I haven't studied VR well enough.

 - Latency limits of computers
   - Input/output device latency - 1 ms latency (1000 Hz) has been achieved on keyboards and mice, and gamers generally feel increased latency won't be detectable.
   - Game engine, 3D rendering latency - I don't know much about this, but seems doable for most games today in under 1 ms? It depends a lot on the exact application though, there's definitely lots of 3D apps that can't be built with 10 ms latency constraint.
   - Network roundtrip latency - <10 ms has already been achieved on consumer fiber connections in many US cities, there's no fundamental reason paying customers can't get this in cities across the world. Light travelling from Netherlands to California (9000 km) one-way takes 33 ms, in practice roundtrip latency is reported around 100 ms (50 ms one-way). As long as the closest datacentre is within 1000 km, there's no physical limitation on achieving <10 ms via fibre connection.
   - AI inference time - As per Jacob Steinhardt, [forward passes can be significantly parallelised](https://bounded-regret.ghost.io/how-fast-can-we-perform-a-forward-pass/). 1 frame of video can be generated in under <1 ms, assuming you build an ASIC just for that specific model.
   - AI inference cost - This is the biggest bottleneck. Diffusion models use maybe 0.1-1.0 PFLOP for 100 sampling steps, for one frame. At 90 fps that's 10-100 PFLOP per second of video generation. For 1 second per second output, you need a GPU cluster with 10-100 PFLOP/s. H200 is 4 PFLOP/s fp8 rentable at $2/hour. Assuming Epoch AI scaling laws of FLOP/s/dollar doubling every 2.5 years, we should get 16x more FLOP/s/dollar in 10 years, so 100 PFLOP/s rentable at $2/hour.

Effects on IT ecosystem
 - If this application can be done on cloud, then almost any application can be done on cloud
 - Cybersecurity and user control will be the only reasons to do things locally, performance will no longer be a reason. Financial incentives to build anything in favour of security or user control are a lot weaker than the incentives in favour of higher performance. Big Tech will no longer need to fund open source software for performance-based reasons, hence open-source software could lag behind. 
 - Client device could also change. End state of this vision is 99.9% of people own machines with touchscreen (keyboard+monitor) and network card (but no CPU, no disk, no RAM) and it is not practical to do anything unless you submit the job to a server. (This will probably a Big Tech server, unless small cloud is able to compete on getting low latency connections with ISPs who have inherent network effects.). See example of mobile being more locked down than desktop, but having more users. It is possible to live without a phone, but you lose access to jobs, friendships, etc. and are at a disadvantage relative to everyone else.
 - This incentive structure makes it technically less challenging for the NSA (or its equivalent in your country) to get 99% surveillance over people's thoughts. As of today they need to backdoor lots of devices, routers and cables, and send whatever is useful back to their servers. This might be possible technically but requires more developer time and coordination/coercion of intermediaries to pull off.
 - Incentives push in the direction of them using this data for political purposes and also leaking the data itself.



# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/project_ideas_for_you.md

2025-01-20

# Project ideas for you

Here's a (incomplete) list of projects that I wish existed. Feel free to complete any of them if you find them interesting enough. You'll probably also get other ideas if you browse through my website. I hoping to minimise duplication of info on my website.

I might work on some of these myself in future.

It's possible some of these ideas are completely off-base. If so, please let me know.

# Most important projects as per me

What is "important" depends on one's worldview. This list is biased towards my subjective worldview that considers future of surveillance, future of tech and geopolitics as very important. I would encourage to form your own independent view of what is important or meaningful to you and select projects based on that, instead of blindly copying my view.

#### Meta work

For each of the projects listed below, you can directly work on the project. Or you can do "meta" work that enables other people to complete the projects.

Examples of meta work:
 - find people who can fund the work
 - find people interested in doing the work and connect them to each other
 - raise media attention for the work to find more interested people
 - figure out business models if possible (Usually the most impactful+tractable+neglected opportunities to improve the world are hard-to-commercialise. Once you can find a way to commercialise them they become less neglected)
 - set up research labs or offices with infrastructure conducive to the work, and reduce entry barrier for interested people to get access to the infra
 - publish reviews of existing work. write about failed agendas so researchers won't waste time on the failed ones.
 - train people who are interested in doing the work but lack skills

Depending on the project, you can identify which of these meta work will be more useful and which will be less useful.

#### Anyone

Writing
 - Write a book about your life that will be released after you die. Prefer including information that you don't feel safe sharing while you are still alive.
   - Objective: People of later generations will get unfiltered view of the good and bad in your life, and can use this information to make their lives and their society better.
   - If the information will negatively affect other people who'll outlive you (such as family members), consider leaving the book with a young lawyer / trusted person and a date when they should release the book.
   - Publishing it (getting an ISBN or whatever) is optional. Put the book online and pay a trusted person to ensure the server hosting it doesn't ever go down.
   - You can also start a non-profit that popularises this "autobiography after death" idea and handles legal, payment, webhosting aspects for everyone else who wants to launch such a book.

 - If you hold any well-paying job, record videos of your day-to-day life at work. This will help others more quickly acquire the necessary tacit knowledge for them to get your job.

#### Politics

 - Consider starting a youtube channel and getting enough attention to influence politics.
   - Which niche you want your initial userbase to come from is upto you, the important thing is to not stop there and go for mass appeal eventually.
   - Which country's politics you'd like to influence is upto you. Probably you'll pick the country you live in.
   - This is the kind of insanely ambitious plan I wish I was the right person for, but might not be.
 - Look into industrialisation of agriculture in India, in particular the politics involved in consolidating small land holdings into big ones so that large-scale automation becomes possible.
   - 500 million plus people's lives depend on it.

#### Media/journalism

 - Consider starting an independent espionage org to infiltrate and HD video record an org doing something of questionable morality. For example, the Mole (anti-NK) or Edward Snowden (anti-US).
   - Consider NOT mentioning my name anywhere; I make no public claims on which orgs do or don't deserve to be spied on.

#### Psychology

 - Consider starting a youtube channel on psychology or or cultural issues.
   - IMO a lot of problems in modern world can be solved through changes in culture, even if there are no significant changes in material circumstances. So a few people like you could many countries' populations on a better path.

#### AI research - artificial superintelligence

 - Please read my post on [AI timelines](../my_ideas/my_ai_timelines.md) or related posts made by others.
   - They explain my guesses on why the AI labs in San Francisco might invent artifical superintelligence in the next 10 years, and what its outcomes could be.
   - If such arguments persuade you, consider working in the field of AGI/ASI safety.
   - I won't make specific recommendations on which exact project or job role is good, you have to figure that out for yourself. Please don't blindly defer to others when making this decision.

#### Any STEM researcher

Writing
 - Make a blogpost with photos of the latest equipment in your lab, short descriptions of what each equipment does, and short videos showing how to operate it.
   - Target audience: STEM-degree holder who know nothing about your research field
   - Objective: someone can quickly get an idea of what your field of research does on a day-to-day basis, without having to complete a bunch of courses.
   - Ideally you could even publish video recordings of all your experiments which are published in journals. It will be easier to understand, replicate and notice errors in experiments if there is publicly available video recording of them.
 - Identify Hamming questions in your research field and write about them. Hamming questions are basically the set of questions that would accelerate the research field *the most* if solved, and have a non-negligible chance of being solved if people tried solving them. For many fields, the Hamming question is IMO inventing a data collection tool (like microscope, brain probe, cyclotron, etc.) that provides data at a resolution/cost/speed not available with existing tools.
 - In general if you have any sort of expertise that is rare on Earth, consider writing about it. If you're patient you may be positively surprised how many people read it.

#### Fusion energy

Research, writing
 - Consider working on fusion energy, or writing about it.
   - IMO a lot of cultural problems would be improved if everyone involved was more wealthy. (Assuming wealth is measured in terms of real resources like food, water and energy consumption per capita, and not measured in terms of dollars.)
   - IMO this is one of those rare ideas that is radical and yet agreed on most people as good, if they think enough about it. Unlike many of the other projects listed on this page, that have obvious downsides if executed well and even more downsides if executed poorly.
   - The main argument against fusion I've read is that all people should abandon all attempts at tech progress and put all their attention and energy into some social science projects instead. I am sympathetic to this perspective but don't fully agree. If this argument were true then most of the projects on this page would not be worth doing.

#### Biotech

Writing
 - Write about automation of biotech R&D. Optimistic/pessimistic/neutral take, anything is fine.
 - Write about history of 1990-present biotech.

Research
 - Look into feasibility of mics and cameras implanted into human body. (If this turns out feasible, carefully pick who to disclose this information to.)
 - Work in the bioweapons space, to reduce risk of anyone using a bioweapon or mitigating damage
   - I'm not sure what the best projects are in this space, go ask someone who knows about it.
 - Work on genetic engineering of humans
   - Again, I'm the wrong person to ask what the best projects here are, see [this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JEhW3HDMKzekDShva/significantly-enhancing-adult-intelligence-with-gene-editing) for example.

#### Cybersecurity

Hardware
 - Improve airgapped tech
   - Test all the Faraday cages available online for security. Suggest recommendations based on security, price, blending in with society, etc
   - Handmade radios that can read wifi IP packets. (I'm not sure this is even possible.)

Software
 - Improve internet anonymity
   - Payment-based (or proof-of-work-based?) firewalls so server owners don't need to deanonymise and demand "reputation-building" of IP addresses to defend against DDOS. Proton and Brave already have working implementations of proof-of-work captcha, I'm unsure why they haven't replaced Cloudflare yet. So you could figure that out.
   - Pay-for-bandwidth on Tor (or something Tor-like), so nobody has to altruistically donate bandwidth on Tor
   - Invent something Tor-like that resists analysis of metadata and traffic stats better than Tor
 - Improve airgapped tech
   - Increase ease-of-use of LUKS disk encryption.
   - Help with mature implementation of Shamir secret-sharing that can ship with linux.
     - `ssss` already exists, I'm not sure what's the process to make it as trustworthy as pgp for example. Probably just more cybersecurity researchers using it and reporting issues?
   - Linux phone that doesn't suck.
     - Will need to get popular enough that all popular apps (food delivery, ride sharing etc) also ship a linux version of their app. 
     - ios and android (and the mobile browsers) would be a lot less locked down if linux phones existed as a competitor.
 - Misc
   - Good SFTP GUI clients for android and ios (iphone)
     - Support image/audio/video thumbnails and previews, GUI file browser, support internet connections that are really good (low latency) and really bad (high latency, high packet loss)
     - ios filesystem probably sucks on purpose so people are forced to purchase icloud subscription (or purchase macbook+airdrop) instead of renting a linux server. The bigger move to play here is to launch a linux phone (see above).

Writing
 - Write about hardware backdoors.
 - Write about cyberwarfare from a game theory lens.

#### AI and information tech

Software
 - LLM embedding search projects
   - Obtain upperbound on effectiveness of LLM embedding search-based stylometric doxxing.
   - LLM embedding search over Libgen books' text.
   - LLM embedding search over CommonCrawl plaintext.
   - LLM embedding search over ethereum blobdata or another hard-to-censor data store.
 - LLM language translation projects
   - Integrate LLM language translation better with browser and OS.
   - Realtime voice language translation for in-person conversation. Connect to two pairs of headphones and two screens. Play the translation while the person is still speaking, and subtract the original from the headphone mix.
 - One-click LLM-generated summaries of every ~10 pages of any libgen epub.

 - [TIMEBOUND] Solve [VNC challenge](https://codex.flywire.ai/app/vnc_matching_challenge) in drosophilia connectome. No neuroscience knowledge needed. Fully map vertices between two graphs (~19k vertices each, ~2-4M edges each) to maximise number of common edges.
   - This investigates the connectome hypothesis. Is a weighted graph of neurons (connectome) alone sufficient to learn useful things about C elegans or Drosophilia melanogaster brains, or is lower-level information such as electric signal data needed?

Infra
 - Hard disk "dead drop" marketplace - as a replacement to torrent for large datasets

#### Pharmacology

 - Figure out substances that do any of the following, but without the downsides and side effects that existing substances have:
   - improve socialising similar to alcohol and cannabis, or similar to oxytocin. Especially focus on changes in ability to experience trust or love that are long-term.
   - render someone incapable of lying, similar to barbiturates but more effective. (If you find this, disclose this very carefully, it has huge political implications.)
   - improve fluid intelligence (IQ), focus, executive function, working memory, long-term memory, etc.
   - increase human lifespan
 - In general any sort of work in pharmacology that is aimed at improving the baseline human condition, rather than fixing disabilities, is someting I'd be a fan of.


# Some more projects

Here's some more cool projects. I'm less confident they're important or worth doing, but consider looking into them anyway.

#### AI and information tech

Software
 - Language learning content
   - Possibly produced by video generation AI
   - Produce video content aimed at language learning based on "comprehensible input". (Video content of real-life scenarios where visuals help explain to the viewer what the audio means.). Prefer near-zero large gaps in the audio, entertaining not just educational, and progressively increase vocab size and grammar complexity based on the learner's language level. Repeat this for all pairs of popular source and destination languages.
 - Look into Denuvo game crack and study state-of-the-art in beating code obfuscation.
   - Using deliberately complicated data structures is one of the last defences against perfect surveillance, see how well it actually holds up versus not.
 - Find zerodays, leaked identity databases, hacking software etc and publish about them publicly.
   - It would be nice to get more public information on what state of the art looks like here.
   - There's a responsible way to do this, figure that out for yourself and follow it.
 - Write better RAM-only software
   - We're reaching a point where the whole world's plaintext data and most of its programs can run entirely in RAM, rarely ever touching the disk. Even backup can be done to another machine's RAM instead of to disk. Performant RAM-only databases and software are still hard to write however.
 - Improve DevOps to setup cloud machine in < 1 second
   - Within one second it should be possible to get the following ready: launch new machine, install requested software (apt install xyz, snap install xyz), libraries (npm install xyz, pip install xyz, etc), load user API keys to respective tools, load user dataset on disk
   - There are two software dev paradigms: where developer time costs more and where hardware+electricity costs more, this is to speedup the former
   - (Maybe) Increase ease-of-use of attaching/detaching block storage from processor, and resizing block storage without corrupting data. A user can quickly attach external block storage (with existing dataset). Instead of downloading over internet, or from same cloud's s3.
   - (Maybe) Provide block storage with various popular libraries installed. A user can quickly: rent + attach external block storage
   - (Maybe) Provide external RAM with RAM filesystem with various popular libraries installed. A user can quickly: rent external RAM + attach external RAM + copy to internal RAM + detach external RAM.
   - (Maybe) Don't install anything at installation time, but fetch from the external RAM fs at runtime
   - (Maybe) Distribute .pyc bytecode instead of python wheels (for all combinations of OS, python and library versions)
   - (Maybe) Figure out why npm installs are slow and speed them up
   - (Maybe) Standardise a keystore where someone can dump all their API keys, and import them on any internet-connected machine with one-liner command + password + 2FA (optional).
   - (It's possible some of this can already be done a different way, and I'm just ignorant)
 - Global notification app
   - Allow any website to register with your app and push mobile notifications through your app
   - Why?
     - Ease of ensuring user security from everyone except the server themselves: Websites (Google, Apple do security via chromium, safari security features) > Mobile apps (Google, Apple do security via android and ios security features, and app store approval system) > Desktop apps (User must figure out which apps to trust)
     - Open source mobile browser is easier to maintain than open source mobile OS. In general, software complexity is a moat. Easier to maintain reduces cost-of-exit from Google and Apple ecosystems, which reduces decision-making over future direction of ecosystem exerted by Apple and Google. (ios+android market share is 99.5%, adding Samsung android-skin its 99.8%, whereas chromium+safari mobile browsers are ~97% with firefox and UC browser as minor competitors)
     - Most mobile apps could be mobile websites instead, if they had a way to send notifications while closed.
     - (Launching a linux phone is still a bigger move though.)

Infra
 - Setup low latency ("edge") GPU datacentres in hundreds of cities across the world
   - i.e. as many geographic locations as cloudflare, not aws
   - its possible cloudflare themselves do this over next 1-2 years
   - This is a "cool" project that benefits a few use cases (such as AI-enabled cloud gaming) but doesn't necessarily improve the world in terms of amount of surveillance.

#### Games

 - Write a game that does not blindly copy ideas from existing game genres.
   - Games allow you to express a strictly larger set of ideas than films or books. However as of 2024 it's still more common for a person to say that they changed their life over a book or film, than a game. If you're imaginative enough, you can change this.

#### Robotics

 - Run an automated kitchen operating at medium scale (1k-1M meals/day), or advance robotics and AI for the same.
   - If you compare society before Newton and today, cooking is one activity that still consumes a huge number of man hours as it did then.
   - "Scaling laws" + robotics has lots of low hanging fruit, see DeepMind's end-2024 papers for example. Even if you don't work on the AI yourself, there may be other work (such as hardware) which helps bring the AI into the world faster.

#### Biotech

 - Look into making meal replacements (Huel, Soylent etc) more tasty, run longer scale trials etc
   - I don't know much about freeze-drying proteins/vitamins/minerals or about chemistry of taste, so I'm the wrong person to guide you here.
 - Work in the artifical meat protein space
   - Again, don't know much about this space personally.

#### Urban planning

 - Figure out why don't we build one city with one billion population
   - Assuming end-to-end travel time of 2 hours via bullet-train, max population = (200 km/h * 2h)^2 * (10000 people/km^2) = 1.6 billion people
   - Is there any engineering challenge such as water supply that prevents this from happening? Or is it just lack of any political elites with willingness + engg knowledge + governing sufficient funds? If latter, will a billion-person city become feasible after 20-50 years once the world is richer and more elites govern enough capital to make it happen?
   - Bigger cities will probably accelerate tech progress, and other types of progress, as people are not forced to choose between their existing relationships and the place best for their career 






# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/connect_with_me/contact_me.md

2025-01-16

# Contact me

## Online

**My email:**

samuel.da.shadrach@gmail.com

Please consider emailing me if you at all believe either you might benefit from it, or I might benefit from it. Please don't waste words writing formal salutations and filler words, just get to the point.

I find call faster than text for extended conversation. To maximise value you get from me, consider writing a short document about what you'd like to talk about and attach it to the email. Then we can schedule a quick call where I go through your document and provide input to you.

Just in case I ignore your email, you can get my attention by [donating me](./donate_to_me.md) a tiny amount and attaching proof in the email.

I'm okay being spammed. Worst case I'll ignore your email. It doesn't consume a lot of your time to write me a one para email, so you shouldn't overthink it. I don't mind spending one-hour calls with lots of strangers to help them. I expect some fraction of these callers will repay the favour back to me when I need it.

It does not matter if we've spoken before or not, or if you're approaching in a personal or professional context, or what your message is about, as long it'll add value to me. Even if you're criticising or accusing me for example, it's possible this adds value to my life, and I might appreciate you for the same.

## In person

Probably first meet me on audio/video call, and if it goes well, we could meet in person.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/connect_with_me/hire_me.md

# Hire me

You can hire me for $200k / annum or $150 / hour for almost any task in any location.

Use common sense though, I might make exceptions for moral reasons, threat to my safety, etc.

[Contact me](./contact_me.md) for the same.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/connect_with_me/date_me.md

2025-01-20

# Date me

Writing this doc is hard because:
 - I have an incomplete model of what I could one day appreciate in other people, and an incomplete model of what other people could appreciate in me.
- See [culture war thread](../my_ideas/culture_war_thread.md), what is appropriate to discuss depends on where I live.

I value novelty highly so if you're interested in me romantically, you should probably reach out even if the criteria below don't match. Cost of failure is very low from your point of view, I would appreciate the attempt even if it fails.

[Contact me](../contact_me.md) if you'd like to talk.

Relationship style
 - **This doc is mostly about criteria for long-term relationship - which I'm willing to share publicly.**
 - I probably want to get married. I'm straight. I can likely tolerate mono. I have no clue if I want children, and haven't put enough thought into it. I'm not particular about what age I get married or what age you are. (I could change my mind on these points later.)

Money
 - I'm quite particular about keeping our finances separate. I could make exceptions if you're earning less than 10k INR / month but even so, I'm probably not the best match for you.
 - I'm okay dating someone with significantly less or more money than me. It comes with additional challenges, but my current guess is it can sometimes be worth putting the effort to solve them.

Place
 - If I get financial backing, I probably want to live in San Francisco.
 - Otherwise I could probably live in any tier-1 city in India.
 - I might be open to living outside India or living in India but not in a tier-1 city. For this, I should end up liking the people and environment of your city, it's not enough if I like you. Another restriction with living outside India for the long-term is that I don't want to take a job so I may not be eligible for visa.
 - (All of this could change depending on which phase in life I'm in.)

Time
 - I probably can't spend more than 1-2 days per week with you. I try to spend a good amount of time working. I also value a minimum amount of alone time. (This could change depend on which phase in life I'm in.)

Values
 - I value authenticity and emotional vulnerability highly, among close relationships.
 - I'm atheist and can be annoying about this in private. We'd be a better fit if you're atheist too.
 - I'm somewhat altruistic and ambitious. We'd be a better fit if you are similar yourself, or atleast understanding of this aspect of me.
 - I don't let anyone else take my life decisions for me. We'd be a better fit if you take your own life decisions yourself too. I'd rather not start a long-term relationship with you if I know other people (such as your family members) are going to interfere in a negative way some months or years later.

I'm sympathetic to [Paul Graham's advice](https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html) on this.

> Don't marry someone who doesn't understand that you need to work, or sees your work as competition for your attention. If you're ambitious, you need to work; it's almost like a medical condition; so someone who won't let you work either doesn't understand you, or does and doesn't care.

Personality traits
 - Introvert. Nerd. Very curiousity-driven. I look at the world through a very intellectual lens. This could be a plus or minus depending on your own outlook of the world.
 - High openness-to-experience. Not that interested in stability or minimising risk. If you're too low on openness-to-experience or risk tolerance, we're probably a bad fit.
 - Direct communication style, can give and receive feedback and criticism. I can dial this down on request but only so much, if you're very sensitive we're probably a bad fit.
 - I can put significant efforts (including one-sided) for others, can share past examples of the same.
 - I'm not the most happy or emotionally stable person as of today. You will inevitably have to shoulder some of the burden despite my best efforts to find other solutions. (This could change in future.)

Intimacy
 - I find "actually wanting the other person to have a good time" to be more important than just "not technically violating consent". My previous partners seemed mostly happy with me in this domain lol.

Social circle
 - See my doc on [my people](../my_people.md) for more on this. My social circle is still evolving. Not everyone I know gets along with or even knows each other, so it's okay if you don't get along with some of the people in my circle either. Likewise I'm probably not going to put a lot of effort trying to impress your social circle, although I might put in a little effort if requested.

Hobbies
 - Hobbies don't matter to me for relationship compatibility but I'm listing them anyways.
 - Travelling, board games (chess, catan), music (rap, rock, nightcore, etc), books (nonfiction, you can read my posts on my research for more)
 - I tend to shift places often so I prefer hobbies that are easier to carry arround. Extreme end of this is obviously hobbies you can access on a laptop. (This is not a hard constraint, and could change in future.)
 - I might be open to trying your hobbies too.



# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/connect_with_me/donate_to_me.md

2024-12-31

# Donate

If you like the work I do, consider donating money to me.

Do not donate:
 - if your expected networth in next 5 years is below $500k. There's a possibility you need this money more than me.
 - if you feel you have obtained most of your money by morally grey or immoral means. This is true whether or not I ever get to know how you obtained your money.

#### Donating less than $1000

For amounts below $1000, I only accept Monero (XMR) from anonymous donors.

**My XMR address:**

446uMYQvFeN5kmwC4TKs4h9BLTbDmXD9ECTTpe5NfnXKby7XSeY876LMpSryKMLFBAYLYWumrxdftLcqnp2F1CSQMHrHpPb

I prefer anonymous donations because I don't have time or interest in doing a background check on small donors. And I would not want to entangle my reputation with yours without a background check.

How?
 - If you've donated to me, do not message me saying you've donated to me, as that can break the anonymity.
 - The best way to buy XMR is usually buying BTC first using a bank transfer, then swapping that for XMR. Reddit has recommendations for both KYC and no-KYC options. If you find this hard or time-consuming, consider finding a friend who can buy it for you and paying them a commission. Learning these skills can be fun and can come in handy in the future.

#### Donating $1000 to $500k

The above XMR address still works. However I can likely support other payment modes such as wire transfer (SWIFT), Paypal/Stripe or US equity.

I can also list you on my website after a background check, if you prefer this.

[Email me](./contact_me.md) and I'll quickly figure out the best way to accept your donation. If you're undecided on whether to donate and want a 1-hour call with me first, please email me.

#### Donating above $500k

I'd recommend donating $500k first, and giving me a couple weeks to figure out the legal aspects. Once I'm ready, you can send the remaining amount. [Email me](./contact_me.md) and I'll figure it out.

Allying with a politician or billionaire would be my lifetime goal. If you are one, I'm willing to put in a lot of effort to build such a relationship. It could be a standard donor-recipient relationship, in which case I will insist on maintaining autonomy over my decision-making. Or it could be a relationship that involves shared decision-making, in which case we may both have to make compromises.

## Consequences of donating to me

Money donated to me is not earmarked for a specific project, it is given so that I have more agency in the world. **If I spend all of the money on having fun or on some fruitless endeavour, I have not done anything unethical.** I'll try not to do that, but I make no legally binding promises.

Receiving $500k cumulative donation would significantly change my life, as that would let me get an EU citizenship and fast-tracked US green card. If I were to live in the US (most probably in SF), I could meet potential collaborators and mentors, and abide by the free-speech norms of the US. I am not keen on shifting to the US on a visa that lets someone else arbitrarily restrict what I do or say.

Receiving small donations will not significantly change my life but would provide me encouragement, and allow me to tell others that I get paid for my work, instead of telling them I'm unemployed.

I am not dependent on donations. I currently live in India on approx $200 per month (approx $2500 per year). The exact amount I spend can go up or down, for example depending on the projects I'm working on. I can sustain myself on my savings for atleast a few years.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/value_differences_disclaimer.md

2024-12-24

# Value differences (Disclaimer)

Your first impression after meeting me in person or via audio/video call may be noticeably different from what you'd expect if your only impression of me is from this website. Different contexts elicit diifferent slices of one's personality.

My website attempts to have high information density of things not already obvious to you, and things you may disagree with. Whereas if we meet in person or on call, and don't know each other well, it may be better to find things we agree on first.

Also, if I'm meeting you in person, I'm likely to put more effort trying to understand your values and beliefs, as compared to preaching my own values and beliefs. I want to understand you and be able to empathise with you even if I don't agree with you.

I am still trying to figure out the optimal balance between sharing my own views and trying to understand other people's views. This is my current best attempt.

My core values include truth and empathy. If you practice these in your daily life, we are more likely to get along, no matter what our specific values and beliefs may be.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/advice_for_you/advice_disclaimer.md

2024-12-13

# Advice (Disclaimer)

I am quite confused which audience I should tailor this advice page and generally my entire internet presence to. I'm currently experimenting with trying to tailor to everyone simultaneously. I think maintaining multiple separate identities on the internet does not work well over long time horizon. I probably won't update these pages regularly, as giving advice is not my primary life goal.

I generally hesitate on giving advice. There is a lot of advice on the internet and a lot of it is noise to me. 

#### 1. Evidence behind the advice

Assuming I was the recipient of advice, here's the hierarchy of how seriously I'd take that advice:
 - advice empirically proven to work
   - the more meaningfully distinct circumstances it has worked in, the better
   - a theoretical model for why the advice works is a bonus, but sufficient empirical evidence always trumps theory
   - IMO there are entire fields where the replication crisis can be solved by making larger sample sizes the norm and small sample sizes as abnormal (by getting the funding, culture etc so this is possible)
 - theoretical model of why some advice would work 
   - the more distinct types of people are confident in the model, the better
   - empirical evidence about similar-but-not-same situations is a bonus

Whenever you are taking advice from me, try to figure out where exactly on the hierarchy the advice sits. Even if something worked for me, please remember I am just one person. And if I don't have personal experience with it, please remember this is just one person's guess with no empirical evidence.

#### 2. Context-dependence of advice

I rarely ever tell people that they "must" or "should" do xyz. If I make this mistake please correct me.

You have information about:
 - how your brain works - your likes, dislikes, what motivates you, etc. Conveying information about your feelings to me is difficult, even if you genuinely want to convey it. So I assume I lack this information about you. In particular there is an is-ought distinction where transmitting information is easy ("if you do X, Y will probably happen") and transmitting values is hard ("you should do X"). So I mostly do the former.
 - your context, your unique life circumstances. Conveying this information to me is possible but takes a lot of time. So I may also be lacking this information about you.

This doc is full of me saying "consider" doing xyz. If I use the word "consider", that means there may exist exceptions to the advice. Sometimes I may be aware of the exceptions but I'm not listing them out, and sometime I may not be aware of the exceptions. The point is to use your own judgement. You are the master of your own life and I'm not interested in being your guru.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/advice_for_you/advice_for_you_knowledge.md

2025-01-15

To do for myself:
 - Rewrite page so it's simpler and more people can understand
 - Make it easier to directly navigate to relevant section

# Advice for you (Knowledge class)

If you don't understand anything on this page, please ask me about it.

Please read [Advice Disclaimer](./advice_disclaimer.md) first.

## Advice for everyone - Make notes

For almost everyone on Earth, I recommend making more notes about your life.

Why?
 - You will likely gain a deeper understanding of various aspects of your life.
   - It could be fundamental things like what your likes, dislikes, values, etc. are.
   - It could be practical things like how to dress or what to eat or how to write good emails.
 - You will retain thoughts that are otherwise temporary and easily forgotten.
 - It'll help you make long-term plans.
 - You'll notice patterns over long periods of time, such as problems that repeated themselves multiple times. and solutions that have worked multiple times.

How?
 - Pen/paper or digital works. I prefer digital because it's easier to edit and easier to preserve. (Yes, paper survives 100+ years, hard disk survives only ~5 years, but you can make copies of digital work more easily and preserve the copies.) Preserving long-term is very important, you want to be able to preserve your notes for 30+ years.
 - I've never made paper notes. If you're making paper notes, it is best you get advice from someone who does this. If I remember, state of the art is using acid-free paper with archival ink and storing backup in a secure location with low humidity. (The paper is more important than the ink.)
 - If you're making digital notes, the easiest option is google drive or apple notes or something similar.
 - If you don't have or want to use KYC/phone number/digital ID, protonmail/protondrive is a good option as of 2024-12. Most websites (like Google, Apple, etc) force you to enter phone number which is tied to KYC in many countries.
 - Also it is a good idea to keep a backup on a disk in a secure physical location. Check the disk for errors once a year and swap it every few years, most disks fail in ~5 years.
 - If you know basic software development, I recommend you rent a linux machine, ssh into it and store plaintext/markdown notes instead. File formats, folder structure, account login methods, payment methods, UI/UX and lots of other things change every few years. Many of these rapid changes are causally downstream of the war between Big Tech companies, and it's better if your second brain isn't stored in some random file format you don't understand.
 - Some people like the fancy features of Roam, Obsidian, hackmd and so on. I've personally not found any of the features worth sacrificing the ability to preserve your notes 30+ years. If any of these tools support import/export in plaintext (NOT json, csv, rtf, docx or anything else), you could consider using them while also maintaining a plaintext backup outside of the tool.
 - Beyond this how much security you need is upto you, as additional security takes a lot more effort. Most people don't critically "need" more security, although it would be nice to live in a world where higher security could be obtained for little effort. Make sure to define your threat model. If your threat model is defending against targetted govt investigation and intelligence agencies, you could look into: LUKS disk encryption, anonymous server host paid anonymously (or better, host your own server in a secure location), separate devices and locations to login, PGP-encrypted ASCII paper backups along with disk backups, cronjob or custom deadmans switch, study enough network programming that you actually understand network vulnerabilities of your system, and so on. You'll get good security recommendations on the dark web. An airgapped machine in a faraday cage is the most secure setup, but most people want network access.
   - If you're using an NSA-proof security setup like this, maybe consider publishing the details so the rest of us can converge on best practices. (I understand people who use maximally secure setups are the same set of people who will not talk about their secure setups. That's why I'm nudging you a little bit here.)
   - Also remember that if you're operating this sort of setup, 50% of your opsec is the people you surround yourself with, not cybersecurity stuff. Spend as much effort studying that as you spend studying cybersecurity.


## Advice for everyone - Learn from the internet

 - You can improve nearly every aspect of your life by learning from the internet.
 - As of 2024, most google search results are SEO-optimised crap. (The website author deliberately wants your search to hit their page so they can serve you ads, and they don't care if they actually answer your question or not.) 
 - Popular platforms worth using as of 2024
   - Reddit - honest recommendations, life perspectives, technical Qs. Use "site:reddit.com" in your search query to get responses from reddit. Reddit users are not being paid to answer your query, and are more likely to be honest.
   - Libgen - free books
   - scihub - free papers
   - Youtube - podcasts, life perspectives
   - Stackexchange - very technical Qs, academia-heavy audience
   - Twitter - I hate the forced login and politics, but its good for following latest news in any community
   - Tiktok - yes lol you can even get latest news and technical tips on tiktok
   - discord - fastest way to audio/video call strangers, can follow open source (usually tech) projects
   - hackernews - basically the number one forum for software developers
   - lesswrong - niche forum I follow. In general whatever niche interests you have, there's probably a very small number of places on the internet that have its userbase. Find these places and follow them.
 - As of 2024, attention on the internet follows a power-law distribution. A very small number of websites have almost all the attention of all people on Earth. If you want to get answers to your queries, you have to learn to post your queries on these platforms.
 - LLMs like GPT4 (ChatGPT) are also good for receiving advice, and getting better.
 - Search even things you'd not think about searching. Every question you can imagine can have answers online. For example, how to become better at running, how to ensure house remains heated, how to sleep better, how to win arguments, etc etc etc.
 - Learn to get good at filtering information.
   - Most of the people around you in real life are a biased audience, they represent a very small portion of humanity. They are selected based on nationality, class, profession, religion, style of thinking, etc. Most of the people on the internet are also a biased audience. Different websites filter for different types of people. (And yes, please remember that people on the internet are people, with an entire life outside of the handful of comments of theirs you read.)
   - For example chemsistry stackexchange will predominantly attract people with a chemistry degree and predominantly from US/Europe. Whereas a subreddit about your country will attract the upper and upper-middle class of your country, all degrees, and likely only one political side. (The people of the other political sides were probably annoyed and went to a different subreddit or website instead.)
   - [Social dark matter](https://homosabiens.substack.com/p/social-dark-matter) is another very important idea to internalise here. Almost everyone has things they will avoid talking about or be dishonest about, especially on the intetnet, because of their irl situation. You will get a skewed picture of reality if you trust their internet representation to completely capture the irl version of them.


## Advice for (almost) everyone - Make a website

 - For almost everyone I recommend making your own website
 - How much and what types of content you post on the website is a personal decision. However, having a website will remind you that you have this option.
 - As of 2025, if you lack software skills, it's easier to host content on substack and youtube respectively. I'd still recommend making atleast a one page website that links to your substack and youtube. You can learn to use github pages for this, or pay someone who knows a bit about software.
 - If you have non-zero software skills, here's a simplified version of the setup I use. Rent the cheapest Hetzner Cloud server you find. Store your plaintext and other static files in `/var/www/Website`. Store the config file below in `/etc/nginx/sites-available/yourwebsitenamegoeshere.conf`. Delete the default website and config file found in these folders. Then `sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo apt install nginx -y && sudo systemctl start nginx`. Whenever modifying static files do: `sudo systemctl reload nginx`. Purchase a domain from cloudflare or anywhere else (cloudflare does free DDOS protection), and set `A` records to your server's IP (IPv4). You can also use AI to write a more elaborate nginx conf and write CSS files for you.
```
server {
    listen 80;
    server_name yourwebsitenamegoeshere.com www.yourwebsitenamegoeshere.com;
    root /var/www/Website/;
    location / {
        autoindex on;
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
}
```

## Advice for people who publish content online

Please consider keeping plaintext (not json, docx or whatever format) backups of your work.
Why?
 - Your favourite publishing platform (be it substack or wordpress or whatever) is not guaranteed to exist in 5 years, and if it does it might look like a different company altogether.
   - Payment policy might change
   - KYC / identification policy might change
   - business model or revenue stream might change, which changes everything about a company (even Big tech companies are not immune, Apple is the only whose revenue is not ad-based, LLMs might change the ad revenue landscape, etc.)
   - company might be acquired or lose talent etc. Check lifespan of median tech company.
 - Your account might get censored, hacked, lose access etc.
 - Popular file formats might change in 5 years. Plaintext lasts forever.

## Using AI to accelerate learning

AI can help you learn anything faster. It is best if you know basic software developer skills and can write simple bash scripts. (If you're on windows please rent a linux machine. Don't learn windows commandline, it's a waste of time.)

If you don't have software skills, you can probably still find online websites that can do most of the following. The tools may have rate limits, ads, higher cost etc but you'll find them.

Some specific tricks using AI to speedup learning:
 - Transcribe youtube videos: yt-dlp + ffmpeg silenceremove + whisper API
 - Extract plaintext from any webpage: curl + htmlq
 - Extract plaintext from epubs: unzip + find + htmlq
 - Once you've extracted plaintext, you can use AI to generate summaries and notes, simplify complex terminology, ask specific questions, generate quizzes or anki decks, etc.
 - Ideally you should be able to embedding-search everything. As of 2025-01-14 I'm not aware of any embedding search solution where you can "bring your own plaintext" and it'll do embedding generation and inference. But I'm expecting this will soon exist.



## Trading and investment advice

Proof: I have personal experience. I have invested and traded my money, and worked at trading-related companies.

Investments and trading will likely not be the primary determinant of your life trajectory, unless you make it your full-time job. Increasing your income or revenue is more useful than trading/investing your existing money.

If you are very ambitious, there's probably some projects you actually believe in that you can make concentrated bets on - finanically and otherwise. But for most other people, its worth knowing about investment basics and making a handful of investments in the background.

If your savings cover less than 3 months of your living expenses (and this isn't expected to increase over the next 5 years), most of this information is not relevant to you. I'd recommend keeping your money safe in your bank account for emergencies, and not trading or investing it. You can still acquire some of the knowledge, without putting in any money.

#### Investments

I have used IBKR to buy S&P500 as a long-term investment (>5 years hold). I may or may not also own some BTC and ETH.

If you are considering buying S&P500: Make sure to look at S&P500 100 years historical chart. Consider studying basic concepts of finance like probability, expected value, variance, tail risk and timeframes. This knowledge is not mandatory but it'll prevent you from buying too much / too little or selling your investment too early.

IMO studying finance is somewhat useful even if you're not investing your own money. Looking at the world through a lens of probability and linear optimisation is a skill that many finance/econ people have and many non-finance people could benefit from.

#### Trading

It is possible to self-study trading from the internet. However, trading knowledge has an uncanny valley where someone who has a medium amount of knowledge and experience will tend to lose more money than someone who has no knowledge or experience. You have to cross this valley to become an expert. If you practice trading for multiple years you'll probably be profitable eventually, but consider if the time invested doing this is worth it. Long-term passive investment is good when you don't have a lot of time to devote to trading.

If you'd like to learn trading, practice with a small amount first, but take your decision-making process as seriously as if you had invested a significant amount. Don't bother with paper trading, just use a small amount of real money. Make sure to list multiple possible outcomes of each trade, their probabilities, the underlying hypotheses behind your trade and what could invalidate it.

"Technical analysis" is mostly a scam IMO, ignore it. Fundamentals-based trading is fine. Using an algo to predict trends in other people's trades is fine. Small cap is usually better than big cap for trading due to less efficiency. Shorter timeframe (seconds, minutes) is usually better than longer timeframe (weeks, months) if you're writing a bot, and vice versa if you're not.

Being successful at options trading is harder than it looks, I've lost money almost everytime I've done it and I don't personally recommend it unless you can devote atleast a year full-time just to options. This also applies to any unusual derivative whose theoretical valuation model looks at all similar to black scholes. (For example, binary options, there are mobile apps that try to addict you to it.)


## If you are a software developer

Proof: I have personal experience as a software dev.

Every development in how information transmits - be it printing press, semaphore, radio, television or telephone - has brought significant changes to how war and politics are practised. Consider studying the political implications of your own work. I only recommend studying this if you genuinely care or are genuinely curious.

No matter which country or company you're in, the technical knowledge you produce as a developer will likely eventually transfer to the Big Tech companies. This could be via a chain of acqusitions, via people leaving your company to start another, or via blogs and github repos. You might therefore have some influence on where your work finally ends up being used.

The fraction of Earth's population using Big Tech services has been going strictly upward for 20+ years. Every new business idea that succeeds is likely to increase this number, as businesses get acquired or their key ideas replicated.


## If you want to learn software dev

As of 2024, software development is one of the highest paying professions that you can get just by self-studying for 1-2 years on the internet. This is because a software business can serve millions of customers while investing very little money. Most other industries either can't serve millions of customers, or require significant initial investment to do it.

`Net revenue = number of customers * (profit per customer - cost per customer) - initial investment`

w3chools has good tutorials for learning software development.

Start with their tutorial on Python. Python is a good language to start. After learning some python, you can learn C (not C++). Don't make javascript your first language.

Ask a friend who knows software to install the tools for you, such as compilers/interpreters, libraries, etc. Installing things is not beginner-friendly and you should not spend time on it as a beginner. Making a friend who knows software dev is also useful to ensure you're not on the wrong path.

Initial concepts worth learning are: how to do standard input/output, data types, arithmetic, loops, functions. At first, ignore concepts that are not in this list, and become experienced with these concepts first.

Write code in a simple text editor like Notepad, Notepad++, Sublime Text, etc. No need for fancy IDE. Online code editor is okay but also learn how to do things on your own machine.

Also learn some linux commands such cp, mkdir, rm, mv, etc. Sign up to a platform like aws ec2 or gcp to get access to linux machines. You might get free credits.

Only after you have done all of this, try learning a language for a specific task. For example ReactJS for frontend web development or Java for mobile app development or whatever. It is possible to directly jump into building a website without knowing fundamentals, but you will eventually end up going back to fundamentals anyway.

Do whatever keeps you motivated. It's better to learn things the wrong way than to give up and not learn.



# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/advice_for_you/advice_for_you_india_knowledge.md

2025-01-20

To do for myself:
 - Rewrite page so it's simpler and more people can understand
 - Make it easier to directly navigate to relevant section

# Advice for you (India, knowledge class)

You can read [Advice Disclaimer](./advice_disclaimer.md) first. The disclaimer says you should not take my advice too seriously, because there could be a lot about you and your situation that I do not not understand.

Figure out which section of this page is meant for you. Also, you can read the sections which are not meant for you. If you are very ambitious, they might still help.

If you don't understand anything on this page, please ask me about it. Even if you don't live in India, you can read this page, you might find something useful.

## If you have atleast 50,000 INR in savings (and live in India) - career advice

Proof: I don't have personal experience with this.

Consider finding a job that provides you with a lot more savings. Making more money may reduce your anxiety of the future. Making more money may allow to make less compromises on your moral values. Also you might get more free time to devote to something or someone you care about.

I understand you might be happy not trying to increase your income, and that is also fine. Don't let me ruin your happiness. Depending on how much free time your job gives you, you may also choose to start a side project or hobby around things you care about. This is great, although I would usually recommend starting it part-time and not quitting your job.

(If you are very ambitious, you can also read the section after this section.)

How?
 - Independent decision-making
   - The more ambitious you are, the more you have to take your own career decisions instead of blindly copying what your friends and family are asking you to do. The decisions required to climb one step in society's status heirarchies may look smart to them and the decisions required to climb five steps may look stupid to them, if none of them have climbed five steps or seen anyone else who has done it. For example if you're a shopkeeper it's easier to propose to your family that you'll buy a second shop, than to propose that you will campaign for your town's MLA seat. How ambitious you are is a personal choice. I am not telling you how ambitious you should or should not be.
   - If they dislike your choices, sometimes you can simply explain to them why you think your decisions are better than the decisions they are proposing. If that fails, there are non-violent ways to resist other people trying to influence your career in a negative way. Whether you choose to use such methods is a personal decision and depends on the exact details of your situation. See my [Controversial ideas page](../my_ideas/controversial.md) for more.
 - Work ethic
   - I should maybe start by repeating all the advice that should already be obvious to you. If you want to work hard in order to increase your income: don't be addicted to substances, get good diet, sleep and exercise, don't gamble your money, etc. (If you don't want to work hard or make money, that is a different matter.)
 - Degree and credentials
   - If you can get a bank loan to pay for your college, you should probably take it. If someone is willing to loan you money for the same, maybe you should accept. But there are more details here which I can't explain in short.
   - A lot of the really good jobs do not require a degree but require skills. However entry-level and easier jobs have a lot of competition hence employers use the degree as a filtering criteria. It is easier to climb up if you have a degree, but don't let lack of degree discourage you, your chance of success is still high if you work hard and smart.
   - If you already have some skills but lack credentials, upload short videos on youtube showcasing your skills. Good candidate includes competent and aligned. Youtube videos can quickly showcase that you are trustworthy, that you can function in a professional context, and that you are competent. Basically, you want to reduce the number of hours the employer or human resources (HR) department has to invest to find out if you are a good candidate. Every hour of additional work for HR is a cost, and credential-based filters (like degrees) are a way for HR to reduce that cost. If you lack credentials, you have to find other ways to quickly get their attention.
 - How to actually study
   - Getting access to a laptop is extremely important if you want to acquire new skills, as most useful skills require atleast some amount of self-studying, which is difficult to do on a phone or using books. If you can't buy a laptop or borrow it from a friend or family member, consider going to an internet cafe.
   - Try to find videos of people's day-to-day life doing the job you wish to acquire. There is a lot of "tacit knowledge" you will quickly pick up from such videos, which you won't get from textbooks.
     - For example if you want to be an architect, see a video of an architect while they're working. You'll get to know which features of their CAD software they actually use versus ignore, which parts of their work are original versus googled, and so on. A textbook that teaches you how to use the same CAD software won't teach you this.
   - A lot of the actual learning you can obtain by self-studying on your computer. However, making friends who know that skill is useful. Some ways they may help: they will be able to tell you which resources are useful and which ones are not useful. If you go on the wrong track, they'll be able to correct you. They may also motivate you and support you emotionally.
   - Making friends will also tell you about the job besides knowledge itself. For example how much it pays, which companies and cities/countries have good opportunities, what is valued within the field, what people pay attention to and ignore in general, the social structure inside the job etc.
   - You can also consider just observing them while they do their work. There is a lot of tacit knowledge that can be acquired this way.
 - Selecting a job to study for
   - This process is likely going to take some hit and trial. It'll depend a bit on your interests, on your current educational background (what you actually know, not what degree you have), and on who you know and what skills they can help you learn. The first skill you try to learn isn't necessarily the skill you will finally end up making money from.
   - Figure out how much time you are willing to invest. Learning a skill like software or finance will pay more, but will require atleast 1-2 years of full-time hard work. (If you're only studying part-time it'll take a lot more time.) Learning a skill like digital marketing or copywriting (well enough to get a job) may be doable in 6 months of full-time hard work, with the right guidance.
   - In general acquiring a skill that allows you to sell something over the internet is a good idea. For example: software, writing, marketing, research, podcasting, consulting, coaching, graphic design, composing music, game development, etc. An internet business can get 1000 or 1000000 times the paying customers without putting in 1000 or 1000000 times the work.
   - If you are joining an internet business like the options listed above, it is common to see the following:
     - Earnings if successful: Founder > Employee at small company > Employee at big company
     - Time required to be successful: Founder > Employee at small company = Employee at big company
     - For a lot of people, your best option for a first job is an early employee at a small company that sells services online. Expect to put atleast 3 months searching for such a job, after you have requisite skills.
     - You can also found your own company. Expect to wait atleast 5 years before you make any money. This is unless you have some special insight why you'll do it faster than that.
   - In general I recommend picking a skill or job you have atleast a little bit of genuine interest in. If you hate it, you might lose motivation to study for it and give up. It does not have to be your number one passion, but you should not hate it. You may have to self-study for multiple years till you get a job, so you need to know how to stay motivated for a long time. Even once you get the job, you don't want to end up stuck for many more years doing something you hate.
   - Try to experiment as much as possible (without spending money). It will help you learn what you are good at and what you like doing. I did this in college and benefitted a lot from it. I tried editing music, writing a book, writing rap, practising debate and public speaking, starting a college club, and a bunch of other stuff. Most of the experiments flopped but I learned about what motivates me.
   - I have basics of software development skill which I mostly self-studied. If making money is your goal, becoming a software developer is unambiguously a good option. You must be good at math and average at english to pursue it. (See your class 10 math and english marks to know if you're good, otherwise go and study class 10 syllabus first.). You can ask me more if you want to learn software.
   - Some random opportunities you can look into:
     - Join French foreign legion, its part of the army in France - no degree needed, but you have to pay for flight yourself, and selection not guaranteed (you have above 50% chance if you take the opportunity seriously)
     - Teach English in southeast Asia - any degree ok, get TEFL certificate for $40 online, you can find job only after reaching destination country, contact me to know more.
     - Start a kitchen for a niche (less popular) cuisine. Many Indian cities and towns lack this. For example if you live in Kolkata, start an Odisha restaurant. If you live in Silchar, start a Manipuri restaurant. If you live in Delhi, start a Thai restaurant instead of a generic (indianised) Chinese one. Monopoly is good for business, 4-5 kitchens competing for the same customers is bad for business.

I will update this section once I have more data or spend more time thinking about it. 


## If you have atleast 10 lakh INR in savings (and live in India) - career advice

I assuming you have the skills and credentials to make this money yourself, i.e., you didn't inherit it or win it in a lottery or something.

(If you are very ambitious, you can also read the section after this section.)

#### Making 1 crore INR might or might not be a good goal

Proof: I don't have personal experience with trying to make 1 crore. Consider getting the opinion of people who have tried this.

If one of your main life goals is to make > 1 crore INR and you believe this will make your life more happy/peaceful/meaningful/etc than it is today, I strongly recommend you try the following experiments. I don't think I'll be significantly happier with 1 crore, and I don't think I'm the only person whose brain is wired this way. The following experiments may help you get more clarity on whether the money will actually help you.

Experiments to run to test if you *really* want the money or not
 - Make a list of things that you will be able to afford with more money that you can't afford today. Maybe a bigger house, maybe more international trips every year, maybe a gaming PC in higher price range, or so on. Try getting a test version of this today, and see if this indeed makes you happy. For instance take an international trip once or rent a really big house for a month or rent a gaming rig for a month.
 - Imagine you had a button that could switch off the part of your brain that generates anxiety when you pursue a higher risk career path. Imagine you had a similar button that could switch off the part of your brain that internalises social pressure from family and friends to make more money. What would be a good decision for this hypothetical person?
 - Notice the people in your immediate social circle who have above 1 crore, versus people who have 10 lakh to 1 crore INR. Ask them to how happy they are, and take an average of both categories. Try to find people who are self-aware and trust you enough to be honest with you. (In particular, try to notice whether the people who have more money are happier because they can buy more stuff or because their family and acquantances are no longer pressuring them to make more money.)
 - Take a few months off from your job. Make a list of things you'd like to do that don't require a lot of money, but require a lot of time. Maybe you want to learn a language or learn an instrument. Maybe you want to become better at video editing or study some college math courses online. Actually spend the few months doing some of these things. Notice how this feels and compare this to when you were making money.

For me personally, things I don't consider major benefits of 1 crore INR, assuming one already has 10 lakh INR:
 - house, bigger house
 - vehicle, bigger vehicle
 - more travel
 - more tasty food, higher-end clothes, home decor, other consumerist stuff
 - safety net for medical emergencies

For me personally, things I consider major benefits of 1 crore INR:
 - going really deep into a hobby
   - For example one could setup a private research lab or a recording studio or a high-end kitchen. A hobby of this sort is capable of capturing my sustained attention for multiple years.
   - I have met only a few people in India doing this sort of thing with their money. If you are doing something cool, please [let me know](../contact_me.md). I'd love to learn more about you and what you're working on.
 - school education for (potential) children
   - But also like, consider homeschooling your kids, if your and your child's aptitude exceeds the school teachers'. 80% of my school education was a waste of time and money (no offense intended to my schoolteachers, most of them were decent people). Your kid can socialise with other kids elsewhere for free, and they may be eligible for a loan for college.

If you still conclude at the end of these experiments that making this money will make you significantly happier, feel free to do what as your heart desires. Ignore my advice and any social pressure I might be providing. I'm happy for you to do what makes your life most happy/peaceful/meaningful/etc. Consider reading the section on how to make 10 crore anyway.

#### Making 10 crore INR might be a good goal

Proof: I have some experience trying to make this amount and failing at it. I don't have personal experience with having this much money. Consider getting the opinion of people who do have this amount.

For me personally, main benefit of 10 crore INR:
 - You can get an investor visa and live in any country in the world. You are no longer beholden to the laws and culture of a single nation, and you'll feel more safe.
 - The main determinants of your quality of life no matter where you live will probably be your work and your handful of close relationships. Living in a different country is especially valuable if it will lead to better work or better close relationships.

For me personally, not a benefit of 10 crore INR:
 - FIRE (become Financial Independent and Retire Early) is not an interesting goal for me, most people who spend > 10 years to achive FIRE seem to get bored at the end anyway. Travelling and relaxing 24x7x365 is not enjoyable for most people, you will probably have to start your own projects to keep yourself occupied.

How?
Most stable career paths in India take too long (>10 years) to make this amount of money. If this is your goal, you are much better off doing one of the following:
 - upskilling and getting YoE on resume to the point where you can get a job from a developed country, either in-person or remote. This could involve getting foreign degree, or Indian job and in-company transfer
   - I don't have personal experience with this so ask people who do. I know this is quite common.
 - starting your own startup or business
   - I have a lot of resources on this, but here's not the place to share it. Read Paul Graham's blog, even if you are not founding a tech startup.
 - cracking UPSC
   - I generally don't recommend UPSC to most people, as most UPSC preparants can get higher rate of return on their time by studying a skill like software or writing or research or finance
   - Consider studying like 1/4th of the syllabus and give previous year exam papers on just that portion. From your marks you'll get a rough idea whether you're on track to cracking the exam or not.

Pursuing either of these requires you to quit your current job in India and not worry too much about leaving the "low risk" path.

There are a few other edge cases, for example you could marry someone with money or network with them and become their consultant or become a sex worker or something. I won't discuss them much here.

#### Becoming a major politician or a billionaire might be a good goal

Proof: I don't know much about this. Consider asking someone who does.

If you want significant influence over society, this is an option. You will have to work very hard, in order to acquire the required attention or capital. Also you will have to learn some of the behaviours of a socioeconomic class different from yours. You will definitely lose some of your current family and friends in the process, so it will be socially isolating. Also there may be an aspect of luck, many self-made billionaires admit to the role luck played in their success. (Although most people who do report luck as a factor report odds like 10% or 30%, not something unlikely like 1%. So don't let the luck factor dissuade you.)

I don't have a lot to say because it isn't something I know enough about yet. But I am interested in studying this, whether or not I ever seriously pursue this myself.

#### Not making money might be a good goal

Proof: I have over a year of personal experience with this.

Assuming you live on 10k INR per month, and assuming you have 10 lakh INR in savings, you can spend 8 years not working. If you don't want to live on 10k/mo and need 20k/mo to be happy, you can spend 4 years not working. (Adjust this for the actual numbers relevant to you.) The important thing is to measure your money not in number of lakhs but in number of years it buys you. 

Personally I realised I would be miserable trying to start a tech startup to make 10 crore INR, hence I gave up on this goal. (I'd probably be happier once I had the money. I'm talking here only about the process of acquiring it.) I'd much rather work on projects I care about. Figuring out which projects are worth doing takes time. I am still in the process of figuring this out for myself, but I'm confident I'm better off this way compared to when I tried to make money.

I might still take a job at some point, but atleast I'm clear the primary reason I chose this was not money but instead learning or social connections or something else. This is a huge privilege and I'm grateful to have it.

I don't recommend my current life path to everyone, but I recommend atleast considering it as an option.

## If you have 10 crore INR - career advice

Proof: I don't have 10 crore INR. Consider getting opinion from those who do.

Consider reading my advice on the other advice page.

If you are sufficiently ambitious, I would generally recommend not living in India. There are better opportunies available outside of it. There is very little India-specific advice that I can think of that would be relevant to you. One exception would be if you are already running a business in India and feel you have a significant edge in running this, compared to all the other opportunities you could be exploiting instead.

Business cultures vary *a lot* depending on country, based on my limited experience. Consider experiencing business cultures in multiple countries, no matter where you finally settle.


## Trading and investment advice

Read the section on the other advice page.

Real estate underperforms S&P500 by a lot unless you have insider knowldge. Buying real estate as an investment (not for living in it) is the number one financial mistake I see people make in India.

NIFTY is also a decent option if you can't or don't want open a foreign account to buy S&P500 ; difference between NIFTY and S&P500 performance is not large if I remember correctly.


# ... I might expand this doc in future



# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/advice_for_you/advice_for_you_elite.md

2025-01-13

# Advice for you (elite class)

## If you have above $1M net worth and want influence over society

Proof: I don't have personal experience with this, I just read a lot.

Consider studying politics. Many rich people (even billionaires) don't understand politics and this limits how much influence they can have. Money does not directly translate to political power, the relationship between the two is more complicated. If you only focus on making money, you might be disappointed at the end.

Consider studying maths and physics, if you don't know it. Since the Enlightenment, most power in society is built via technology. No amount of hired experts will substitute for the fact that you don't understand calculus. You won't know how to hire the right people or verify the truth of what they're saying. If you understand technology, you will have much better options available to you in life.

Consider sharing more about your life experience and opinions in the public domain. Your money buys you a degree of safety most people don't have, and many people can benefit from someone who can safely talk about controversial topics. If people verbally attack you it's fine, you are still safe.


## If you have above $100M net worth or could get atleast 10M votes in a hypothetical election

#### My pitch on raising your ambition

A handful of actions taken by you can literally mean the difference between human extinction and world peace and prosperity beyond our current imagination. The fate of 10,000 years of human history and 1,000s more in the future sits on your individual shoulders. If you play your cards right, you could found a nation state. You could bridge differences between leaders of existing nations, and help form a world government. You could figure out sane policies and institutions for technological progress, and also teach other elites to have sane well-informed decision-making on it. You could even start a new religion that lasts centuries after you die, and provide people with safety and meaning.

Please don't limit your own imagination, and go for a small goal like "I will buy a seat in XYZ political party and that's it, the sum total of my legacy".

You don't need to wait for the support of a lot of other elites, you can just start making moves by yourself and wait for others to follow.

You may be able to derive a lot of personal meaning and happiness from this. If you do, you might come to the conclusion that one person's suffering or risk of humilitation is a price worth paying, when considering the stakes. (Or you might not, I am not claiming I'm good at predicting what gives people in your situation meaning or happiness.)

A lot of people including me are counting on you to take good decisions. You might or might not have a healthy way of handling this burden psychologically, but it is a true fact about reality IMO and I think you should know. I'm generally not a fan of psychological strategies that involve hiding yourself from the truth.

#### Other things you can try

 - Maybe try explaining your moral code and your general life situation to people outside your socioeconomic class, without dumbing it down or pretending to be a common person. I would like to understand your perspective better here. I think this could help increase empathy and understanding across the class difference. (No, many people will still not get it, but a handful of people might, if you explain it well enough.)
   - Examples of this: people who do podcasts, people who post on twitter
   - "Born Rich" by Jamie Johnson (owner of Johnson and Johnson) seems like one example, although it mostly covers (relatively) unambitious elite, not the ambitious ones. Also I think there's way to shoot that exact same documentary in a more positive light.
   - Naval Ravikant's writings also are a good example to learn about elite class noems



# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/advice_for_you/advice_for_you_india_labour.md

2025-01-20

To do for myself:
 - Rewrite page so it's simpler and more people can understand
 - Make it easier to directly navigate to relevant section

# Advice for you (India, labour class)

You can also read the other post on knowledge class. If you are sufficiently ambitious, you can climb classes by following the advice in that post.

## If you don't know english (and live in India) - career advice

Proof: I have learned many skills from the internet, and this has helped me a lot. Most of my college education did not directly help me do this, but being good at english and math did.

There are a lot of benefits to knowing english. Think about it. Maybe studying english should be the number one priority of your life. (Or maybe not, but I want you to think about it.)

(If you are very ambitious, you can also read the section after this section.)

Why?
 - Most of the good job opportunities require you to study english.
 - A lot of good educational resources are available only in english.
 - A lot of people have a lot of useful knowledge but they don't know your local language. If you both learn english you can both learn something useful from each other.
 - If you can't afford to go to college, that is fine, there are other ways of making money.
 - For example, you can learn some skills by asking friends with those skills. If you don't have such friends, you can make new friends.
 - If you are ambitious, you can study how to do the job from the internet.
 - Your current family and friend circle probably does not know which job opportunities are best for you, and you will have to make new friends to guide you.

Proof: I learned English and Hindi as a kid and don't have much personal experience learning a language as an adult. I am just copy-pasting language learning advice from the internet.

How?
 - Do not waste time reading English textbooks. Do not study grammar.
 - Spend atleast a few months listening to movies or TV shows or podcasts etc in English. Start watching something that uses simple words. Do not use Hindi subtitles. This can be boring at first, but doing this for a few months will change your life.
 - Once you have spent enough time listening, you can practice speaking with friends who know some english. (If you don't have any such friends, make friends in-person or online.)

## If you have less than 50,000 INR in savings and live in a village or town (in India) - career advice

Proof: I have seen more than one person shift to a city and the struggles they face in first couple of months. I have not experienced this myself.

Think about shifting to a big city.

(If you are very ambitious, you can also read the section after this section.)

Why?
 - This decision is not permanent. You can go back later if you try it out and you don't like it.
 - If you live in a city, you can meet people who know a lot of skills and know how to make money with those skills. You can befriend them and learn these skills, and make more money yourself. However, learning new skills is a slow process. When you first shift, you will have to take a job you know how to do. After that, you can try learning a new skill.
 - If you live in a city, you can meet people who think and behave differently than you. This is not just about career. This includes what their personality is like, how they approach relationships, what beliefs they think are important, what are their hobbies and interests, etc.  You might want to learn some good things from them, or you might not. Until you try, you probably won't know. It is difficult for someone to explain this to you if you haven't experienced meeting lots of people yourself.
 - If life in your house or neighbourhood is not good right now, shifting away from it can improve all the aspects of your life. In cities, your friends might not know each other, so they might gossip less about you. And you might feel less pressure to behave one way in front of others.

How?
 - Very important things you must carry with you:
   - ID cards - aadhaar card, driving license, etc
   - Debit card - make sure you have money saved in your account and you are not carrying all your money as cash
   - Smartphone, SIM card
   - Laptop, if you own one
 - Important things you should also carry:
   - Induction stove, cooking utensils, food storage containers - it could be expensive for you to buy these again
   - Clothes
 - Important things you should practice before coming:
   - Learn to use Google Maps and practice using it
   - Learn to use Whatsapp, SMS, phone call, UPI, if you don't already know how to
   - Learn to use IRCTC online website to book train tickets, and MakeMyTrip app to book bus tickets.
 - Important things you should do after coming:
   - Find a PG to stay on the first day itself. Do not waste a single day of your time finding a PG. Every day you waste means loss of money.
   - Pick your PG roommate carefully, if they are depressed or an alcoholic for example, it will affect your mood a lot. 
   - Find a job soon after you have a place to stay. Do not waste more than 3-4 days of your time finding a job.
   - Do not relax once you have a job. Make sure you have some backup job if the first job you pick later turns out to be a bad choice. Ask your coworkers to make sure you will get your salary on time.
   - Within the first month, try to make some acquaintances of the same gender. This is especially important if you are a woman. It is fine if you don't trust them a lot at first.
   - Nobody is guaranteed to help you when you run out of money. Try your best to keep some savings at all times.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/about_me_summary.md

2025-01-26

# About me

DOB 2001-01-03, Male, Indian citizen and resident

Completed schooling in Delhi 2018, Graduated IIT Delhi biochem engg BTech+MTech 2023, Worked at cryptocurrency startup Rari Capital. Have basic skills in software, finance, biotech and idk what else.

Currently working on independent research projects and independent software projects. Projects focussed on topics such as history of technology and mass surveillance. See [my ideas](./my_ideas/world_models_im_currently_building.md) for more. Culturally influenced by effective altruism / lesswrong rationality in the US.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/my_people.md

2024-12-12

# My people

Here's my current model for deciding how to interact with people in my life.

Reasons to have people in your life:
 - physical intimacy
 - regular emotional support
 - regular financial support
 - regular logistical support
 - emergency financial support
 - emergency emotional support
 - emergency logistical support
 - advice
 - casual interaction

The first two are the most dependent on living in the same place as the other person.

Scarce resources include time, money and location.

Receiving and giving advice, and casual interactions require very little time commitment. So I can freely do this with many people. I value novelty and ideological diversity, so I want to get advice from and casually interact with many people.

I am wary of promising regular emotional / logistical / financial support to anyone.

I have promised emergency emotional and logistical support to a set of people I consider close. I'll provide a 6-month notice period if I ever want to break these commitments. I'm hoping most of these commitments last multiple decades. (If you're unsure if you're on this list, please message me and ask.) Even if I haven't promised you anything, feel free to ask me for help when you need it. I'm generally helpful, time and location permitting.

I am wary of promising emergency financial support to anyone. I have offered financial support before (loan or donation) and I am open to requests for the same. If you are asking me for financial support, it will help your case if you have:
 - a good reputation verifiable by your social circle, and they are informed about the support you've received
 - what a bank would consider credit-worthy, such as a source of income or collateral


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/use_ai_with_my_website.md

2025-01-22

# Use AI with my website

Here's some ways to use AI to improve your experience browsing this website.

/raw/ contains all the static files of my website, including markdown, images and audio.

The broader thesis I'm betting on is that as long as the raw content is present in a folder, AI can do everything else with the content - simplify it, summarise it, style it, translate it etc.

I'm aware the implementation of some of these features sucks right now and requires technical skills. I'll try improving all this when it's a priority for me and I have free time.

#### Audio voiceover

I have already used elevenlabs to convert all the text into audio files. They are available at /raw/english_audio_ai_generated_{date}/.

This may have inaccuracies or be outdated. You can also use AI to generate the voiceover yourself.

#### Search

To search my website using AI, copy-paste the contents of /raw/english_singlepage_{date}/singlepage_{date}.md into the prompt window, and follow it with whatever question you want to ask about my writings.

I have dumped my entire website contents into a single page, so it is easier to copy-paste.

#### Simplified english

I have already use OpenAI o1 to generate simplified english version of my website content. Available at /raw/english_simplified_ai_generated_{date}/

This may have inaccuracies or be outdated. You can also use AI to generate the simplified version yourself.

#### Translation

I have already used OpenAI gpt4 to get hindi translations. They are available at /raw/हिंदी_अनुवाद_ai_generated_{date}.

This may have inaccuracies or be outdated. You can also use AI to generate the translations yourself.

#### Styling

If you don't like the styling (font family, font size, line spacing, etc) on my website, you can do the following.

1. Give an AI the [current CSS](https://samuelshadrach.com/viewer.css) and [current HTML](https://samuelshadrach.com/viewer.html) file as input, and ask it to generate a modified CSS file based on your preferences.
2. Upload the modified CSS file to any online file storage such as google drive or aws s3.
3. Paste the (publicly accessible) link to the modified CSS in the form input at the bottom of the page. It will persist for the duration of your browsing session.

P.S. The default css and js are also mostly written by AI, so it's unlikely anything you generate is much worse.


#### Full stack

If you want to do something more complicated (such as doing many of the above steps together), you can download /raw/english_tarball_{date}/english_tarball_{date}.tar and then ask AI to write a bash pipeline for you that does all the necessary steps.

## Future features

In short, I really don't want to host a (not static) backend or manage user payments. And I don't see why the use cases below should should require me to host one.

The features I'm personally most interested in:
 - WebRTC client connecting to OpenAI Realtime API (audio), with this website's content injected as context
   - This is a common enough use case that I wish someone else would offer hosted backend for this.
 - Better payment system
   - An important reason AI app devs need to host a backend is because OpenAI wants to be paid by app devs, who will then optionally collect payments from end users.
   - For my use case though, ideally OpenAI collects payments from users and issues (ephemeral) API keys to the client directly. Then no backend would be required.
   - Legal liability might be a reason they're avoiding doing this. I'm unsure. Maybe OpenAI wants an app dev who they can hold responsible for API inputs with malicious intent.

Other features that would be cool:
 - Ability to ask OpenAI to crawl my website directly. No "singlepage" needed. I have updated my robots.txt but OpenAI still refuses to crawl my website.
   - Legal liability might be a reason they're avoiding doing this. I'm unsure.
   - Maybe they don't want to be held responsible for sending GET requests on IPs with bad reputations. Or they don't want to handle responses containing data of malicious intent.
   - If legal liability is the only reason, then ideally the crawler runs client-side.
 - Browser allows changing UX using AI. Some of the features above like translation and changing CSS are UX features that could ideally be supported by the browser itself. Until then someone could write a browser extension for it.
   - So far I don't see a reason this can't happen. Maybe it will happen eventually.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/my_projects/my_projects.md

2025-01-13

# My projects

[Tokens for tokens](http://tokensfortokens.samuelshadrach.com/sender.html)
 - Pay for OpenAI API using cryptocurrency, at discounted rate, anonymously


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/my_ideas/my_ai_timelines.md

2024-12-31

# My AI timelines

DISCLAIMER
 - I'm not a deep learning expert. I understand theory of LLMs, RNNs, CNNs, etc. but I don't have experience training large models or curating large datasets or doing original DL research.
 - Please consider getting the opinion of many people other than me. Many of the signatories on [this list](https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk) have made individual statements, search for their podcast interviews, blogposts, research publications and so on. Lesswrong is also a good forum.
 - I strongly recommend you form your own independent opinion on this subject, and not blindly copy the views of others, no matter how smart or trustworthy they seem. This field would make a lot more sense if more people formed independent opinions. (And yes forming a good opinion takes a lot of time and effort, and you have to decide whether the time investment is worth it for you personally.)

This document is mainly aimed at lesswrong (LW) rationalists / effective altruists / adjacent people, since a lot of my work is culturally downstream of theirs, and a lot of my potential research collaborators exist in their communities. This doc will make less sense if you haven't encountered their writings before.

Most of this doc is guesswork rather than models I have a lot of confidence in. Small amounts of evidence could upend my entire view of these topics.

**If you have evidence that my view is wrong, please tell me**. Not having to spend any more time thinking about AI will improve my quality of life. I am being completely serious when I say I might thank you till the day I die, if you persuade me either way. I can also pay you atleast $1000 for convincing me, although we'll have to discuss the details if you really wanna be paid.

The last time I read papers on this topic was early-2023, it's possible I'm not up-to-speed on any of the latest research. Feel free to send me anything that's relevant.

I have ~15% probability humanity will invent artificial superintelligence (ASI) by 2030.
 - If it happens, this will be the most significant event in ~10,000 years of human history on many metrics of what counts as significant. (If the intelligence gap is sufficiently large it might even be the most important event in the ~14 billion year history of the universe. My probability for this is smaller.)
 - This will more-likely-than-not use transformers + data and compute scaling.
 - I define artificial superintelligence to be AI superior to the best humans (not median human) at basically every task humans can do on laptop with internet access.
 - See my usual disclaimer on predictions shaping reality. If you are involved in building ASI, please consider *not* doing that or atleast talking to me once about it. I don't want ASI to be built by 2030 unless many aspects of society change first.

Conditional on ASI being invented by 2030, I expect ~30% probability it will kill everyone on Earth soon after. In total that's ~5% probability of humanity killed by ASI by 2030.

I have chosen not to work on this problem myself. This is downstream of ~15% not being large enough and the problem not capturing my curiosity enough. I am not a utilitarian who blindly picks the biggest problem to solve, although I do like picking bigger problems over smaller ones. If you are working on safety of AGI/ASI, I think you are doing important work and I applaud you for the same.


## Reasons for my beliefs

*Mildly relevant rant on consensus-building:* Both these probabilities seem to involve dealing with what I'd call deep priors. "Assume I take a random photo of Mars and a random pixel from that photo, what is the probability its RGB value has higher Green than Blue?" Humans tend to agree better on prior probabilities when there's enough useful data around the problem to form a model of it. Humans tend to agree less on prior probabilities when they're given a problem with very little obviously useful data, and need to rely on a lifetime of almost-useless-but-not-completely-useless data instead. The "deepest" prior in this ontology is the [universal prior](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_inductive_inference).

~15% is lower than what many people in EA/LW communities assign, because I reject a lot of the specific models they use to forecast higher likelihood of ASI.
 - Total amount of neurons in human brain has nothing to do with compute required to build ASI, as evolution produced human brains and evolution used a lot more compute than an individual brain.
 - Nobody has a proposal that's IMO likely to work at replicating biological evolution in-silico. How to capture initial conditions? How much compute do you require to simulate the environment? I haven't seen convincing arguments for why these details aren't important.
 - I have a prior that most STEM research that promises bold outcomes fails. This is the default not the exception. To study this prior you have to go back in time to each of the failed research agendas of the past 100 years, and notice what it would have **felt like** if you were born then and were hyped up by a research agenda you didn't know would succeed or fail.
 - Update (credits: someone on LW): I have seen some basic arguments from neuroscience saying neurons (or the genetic information that produced the neurons) don't by themselves encode much of whatever it is that produces human intelligence, most of it is learned after birth. I'm open to arguments of this type but I'll probably have to study neuroscience to evaluate them.

[Discontinuous progress in human history by Katja Grace](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CeZXDmp8Z363XaM6b/discontinuous-progress-in-history-an-update) is the closest thing I could find to work that tries evaluating the prior probability of any reserach agenda succeeding with radical outcomes. I have not spent a lot of time searching for such research though. Convincing me either way may require publishing or pointing me to a lot more work of this type.

Alternatively you have to provide me a gears-level model that explains why the LLM scaling laws empirically hold.

~15% is higher than what many AI researchers assign, because I reject a lot of the specific reasons they give for why LLM scaling cannot possibly achieve ASI
 - I have read some arguments for why specific unsolved problems are *hard* when compared with already solved problems, and why there's no specific reason LLM will crack them.
 - However most of the problems LLMs have already cracked also got cracked without anyone having an actual model for why LLMs will or won't crack them. LLM scaling has consistently proven itself (to me) to be black magic; both its supporters and its detractors fail to accurately predict which problems it will or won't crack. Predicting loss curve doesn't tell which problems will or won't be cracked.
 - Some people cite architectural limitations of LLM as a bottleneck. For instance LLM has a theoretical upperbound on number of calculations per forward pass, and a certain ratio of "memory access" to "computation" steps. But solving a real world problem can use multiple forward passes + non-LLM scaffolding + non-self-attention layers. For example, you can often use layers from two different architectures (let's say self-attention layers and CNN layers) in a single model, train this model and get good performance.
 - Some people say we will run out of data required as per empirical scaling law but my guess is this is more likely than not solveable. I'm very unsure on this. (And I lack sufficient expertise to evaluate this argument tbh.) I'm guessing you can teach a model simple reasoning using a smaller dataset, use this model to fill holes in a bigger dataset, and then teach the model more difficult reasoning using this data.

~30% probability for extinction conditional on ASI invention by 2030 is because I am more optimistic about boxing an ASI than some LW rationalists. I do believe misalignment happens by default with high probability.
 - The intelligence difference between Einstein or Churchill or Hitler, and a hyperpersuasive AI is large, relative to the intelligence jumps shown by scaling so far. I understand there's no natural scale for intelligence. I am open to the idea a hyperpersuasive AI can exist in theory. (In this context, a hyperpersuasive AI is an AI that can gain complete control over your mind with near 100% probability simply by talking to you.)
 - I am assuming a high level of competence among the people boxing the ASI. I have low probability of ASI coming completely by surprise. A lab building ASI in this decade will almost certainly employ many people who take the prospect of ASI seriously.
 - I am assuming that pausing ASI research will be politically possible, even obvious, once we have built a boxed ASI with empirical evidence of a lack of safety. I think I have better intuitions on politics than the median LW poster.
 - I have some confusion on how the AI will reason about the hardware-software abstraction. At what point does an AI translate "maximise XYZ assembly variable" into "maximise the number of electrons in positions in semiconductor underlying XYZ"? My guess is whether an AI wants to "break out" of its machine depends on how it reasons about this. I accept that an ASI could understand that its variables are made up of positions of electrons in a semicondutor, I'm just unsure what it'll do once it knows this.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/my_ideas/world_models_im_currently_building.md

2025-01-24

# World models I'm currently building

This doc is a mix of existing world models I have and holes in said models. I'm trying to fill some of these holes. The doc is not very well organised relative to how organised a doc I could produce if needed. Often the more time I spend on a doc, the shorter it gets. I'm hoping that happens here too.

I'm mostly going to study this stuff by myself. However if you would like to help me by speeding up the process, please [contact me](../contact_me.md). If your attempt to help me answer these questions is in good-faith, I will be grateful to you no matter how successful or failed your attempt is.

*tldr* How do we safely navigate technological progress or personal growth in a world without privacy? How does tech progress shape incentives and culture, and how do incentives and culture shape tech progress?

#### DISCLAIMER

It is difficult to predict the future without altering it. My writings may have unintended effects on the future. (I'd like more accurate likelihood estimates of these effects, both mean outcome and tail outcomes.)
 - I am aware that simply by thinking of a question like "will some dictator implant microphones in everyone", I am personally increasing the probability that this ends up happening. Once I have thought something I'm unlikely to forget it, and will eventually say it to others. Eventually one of them may leak it to the internet and eventually the idea may reach the relevant politically powerful people who can implement it in real life. (LLM embedding search >> Google, don't underestimate it.)
 - This is unfortunate, as my platonic ideal is to be able to think through various possible futures (alone, or with a group of research collaborators) without actually influencing the world, pick the best future, and then only start taking steps that push the world towards that future.
 - However I'm still going to write publicly about certain topics as that's one of the best ways for someone in my situation to get feedback.

## Topic: Which organisations are capable of keeping secrets in present and near future (10-20 years from now)?

Specific questions
 - How easy is it for TSMC to backdoor all their chips so they can secretely capture private keys, for example?
 - How many S&P500 companies have publicly available evidence of their key business knowledge being leaked to China? (Be it via hacking or espionage or voluntary disclosure by ex-employees etc)
 - Is it possible to read WiFi IP packets using handmade radio?
 - Is it technically possible to implant microphones in the human body? What about cameras?
 - Is gigapixel photography from 10 km altitude possible as of today? What about in next 10 years?
 - Am I missing any technical challenges in paying ~10,000 drone pilots to surveill a city 24x7x365?

Broader questions
 - How much time does it take to write code that understands metadata?
   - Suppose all the world's computers were hacked and their data ended up in NSA datacentres (or their Chinese equivalent, which keeps getting renamed). Suppose all text-based formats are converted to plaintext, existing metadata the users may have left is preserved as is, and NSA appends metadata of the MAC, IP, timestamp, etc of capture.
   - How much software developer time would be require to make sense of most of this metadata. This could be to answer individual queries on "suspicious" inviduals or analyse aggregate trends (such as societal respones to certain govt policies).
 - Will there be more espionage orgs operating independent of nation states or elites (major politicians, billionaires) in the future?
    - Internet and information tech has reduced the financial cost of both journalism and espionage. Cameras, hard disks, internet bandwidth, smartphone processors are all much cheaper than 10 or 20 years ago.
    - Independent journalism has clearly increased in many countries, most notably the US.
    - Independent cyberhacking has clearly increased. (Although it's less clear to me if independent hackers are able to keep up with state-spnsored cyberhackers. I may have to read more.)
    - Independent espionage has also increased, see The Mole (anti-North Korea) or Edward Snowden (anti-US), but it is less clear to me if these are isolated examples or the beginning of a trend.
    - Theory (based on incentives and culture) says independent espionage should go up, I'm waiting on the empirical evidence though.
 - Speed advantages
   - Individuals tolerated by society benefit a lot from being public. Hiring, fundraising, research feedback, making friends and dating, nearly everything goes better if you can do it on the internet. For instance, people can prove trustworthiness and competence faster, and obtain benefits from other people faster (advice, first-hand personal info, allies, etc).
   - Same goes for orgs such as companies. Orgs that are tolerated by the (people with power in) society can move faster if they opensource a lot of their processes and outputs (except their key competitive advantages). For example, hiring, research, etc. Also they can move faster, and win race conditions against orgs that try to maximise secrecy.
 - What are the psychological effects of keeping secrets? What are the failure modes of various groups that try to keep secrets? This could be small groups like families or C-suite executives of a company, or big groups like military research projects or intelligence orgs.
   - **I vaguely suspect that the best way to keep important secrets in the modern world is to found a ~~cult~~ community of a few hundred people that blackholes information as follows:** people disallowed from leaving the geographic area for >30 years, internet download allowed but upload disallowed, everyone is forced to find both work relationships and personal relationships inside the area, raise families within the area, etc.
   - I want more data on previous attempts at founding secret-keeping orgs in order to prove my hypothesis right or wrong.
   - Some major concerns of founding such a group are ensuring people in it lead emotionally healthy lives, ensuring ideological diversity (in both thought and action), and allowing people to leave relationships that don't suit them to find new ones. Hence I'm biased towards inviting a few hundred people rather than just two (such as a marriage) or ten (such as the C-suite executives of a company).
 - How do you actually secure a computer against adversaries with billions in funding?
   - Physical methods in cybersecurity seem to trump both hardware-based and software-based methods. Hardware-based methods can be beaten by hardware backdoors installed by manufacturers. It seems better to assume there's an evil demon possessing your computer, and develop security with that in mind.
     - Most secure way of erasing a private key from RAM is to cut the electricity. Otherwise cold boot attack is possible.
     - Most secure way of erasing a private key from disk is to smash it with a hammer. Otherwise a microscope may be able to recover the data from disk.
     - Most secure way of verifying someone's public key is to meet them in person. Video footage with your face and the key is the second-best option, atleast while AI cannot produce convincing deepfakes. 
     - Most secure of ensuring no information leaves the machine is to weld the machine into a Faraday cage.
     - Most secure way of sending a message to another user without third-parties recording metadata is probably printing it on paper and sending a post. Copying to disk and sending that by post is second-best. Sending the message over the internet is worst in terms of preventing third-parties from capturing the message and associated metadata (timestamp, message size, sender and receiver identities). The server host and any other intermediary servers that are hit (think google analytics or cloudflare) can sell this data to data brokersa, fiber optic capables can be tapped, wireless signals can be triangulated and routers can be hacked.
   - I wonder if there's way to build a physical firewall that requires near-zero trust in other people to work. Like, build radio or networking equipment that isn't manufactured in some centralised backdoorable factory, so you can verify what's inside every IP packet exiting and entering your machine. It seems okay for the typical use case if this slows down internet speed by many orders of magnitude.
 - As a dictator, how to build 100% surveillance instead of 99%, to increase the stability of your dictatorship?
   - This is basically a redteaming exercise. Put yourself in the dictator's shoes and then put yourself in the shoes of someone trying to evade him.
     - The "predictions shape reality" disclaimer especially applies here. For instance I might end up finding solutions more creative than the average engineer hired by a dictator is capable of, which could implicate me personally. I wish someone had clearer solutions to how redteaming is to be done safely.
   - Political considerations
     - I currently model various levels of democracy as states in a markov chain, each state has some probability of being stable or decaying to a different state.
     - The difference in half-life of a dictatorship with 99% surveillance and 100% surveillance is large. People organising revolts are the 1% who will endure the maximum inconvenience to bypass surveillance.
     - Very little technology is needed to organise a revolt. Just a few people (then a few hundred, then a few thoushand etc) meeting at a common location is enough. There are ways to organise a revolt even if surveillance can successfully enforce curfew. Mics alone are not enough because this 1% of people can communicate using pen and paper when organising. Cameras are needed for surveillance.
   - OODA loop: Information capture, analysis, decision-making, enforcing penalty or reward
     - O: Information capture
       - This seems like the hardest part, both at technical level (doing the engineering work and building infrastructure) and cultural level (building a culture where everyone is okay with it)
       - Hence I've spent a lot of time analysing information capture in particular.
     - O: Information analysis
       - Becoming easier with LLM-based search, language translation, etc. As of 2025-01, LLMs are not smart enough to fully automate surveillance. At the extreme end, this 1% of protestors could invent an alternate language to communicate. An army of human censors must assist the system.
     - D: Decision-making
       - Some edge cases may be worth analysing, but in general decision-making does not feel too complicated to me, from the pov of a dictator. A dictator can often be overly harsh on ambigious edge cases, punish a number of false positives, and not face any repercussions themselves.
     - A: Enforcing reward or penalty
       - This doesn't feel hard to me either, from the pov of a dictator. As long as the population of protestors is not large, if everyone has been ID-ed, one can cut off their access to all digital services (SIM cards, ID checkpoints, bank accounts) and send policemen to arrest them. As of 2025 they may be able to escape arrest, but they will have restricted access to the rest of society they wish to influence.
   - How to capture 100% of human-generated information? People move a lot.
     - Technical Option 1: Move the cameras and mics on ground along with the person
       - Mics and cameras in static locations can be escaped. Unless you literally imprison people, total land area to cover with mics and cameras is too large to do perfect surveillance this way.
       - If the mic/camera travels on ground there can be charging stations, but robotics knowledge in 2024 is not good enough to traverse uneven terrain.
         - This could change in future, especially if AI for robotics improves due to scaling laws or related advances.
     - Technical Option 2: The person carries the camera and mic
       - The person carrying the mic/ camera themselves is possible (such as a smartphone or an implant)
       - Biologically implanted microphones and cameras seem like one obvious way to do perfect surveillance, assuming you could engineer culture to the point everyone was okay with it.
     - Technical Option 3: Acquire more data per camera or mic
       - Update: I will look more into satellite/aircraft/drone imagery when I find time.
       - One can increase land area covered per mic or camera, by increasing resolution of each individual mic or camera. However it is difficult to get 100% rather than 99% surveillance this way. Maybe you can make it illegal to make noise or build opaque buildings, and ensure 100% data acquisition. This seems difficult. Unless you do this, the 1% of protestors can deliberately make noise to drown out their audio or hide inside an opaque building to drown out leaked light / EM radition.
       - If increasing area covered per camera or mic, it seems best to place it in the air as opposed to at ground level.
       - Image and video data are acquirable at three altitudes: Space satellties (>200 km), aircraft/helicopters (1-10 km) and small quadcopter drones (<1 km)
         - (People often also call AI-driven helicopters and aircraft as drones, I find that terminology confusing. UAV is a better terminology IMO. A lot of military "drones" are aircraft driven by AI.)
         - [Example of satellite data as of 2025: Sentinel 2 by ESA, open source data](https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu/). You can browse your favourite city here. Open source satellite data is currently at 10 metre resolution and private satellite data is currently at 0.5 metre resolution
           - I have to look into whether telescopes of future satellites can improve resolution beyond this.
           - I'll have to look into satellites at lower orbits and whether orbital decay is solveable in practice.
         - Gigapixel photography is becoming possible in the last 10 years, by digitally stitching together images from many megapixel lenses. This could allow obtaining sufficient resolution from individual images of an entire city (let's say 30 km x 30 km) at 10 km altitude, from a helicopter or aircraft.
           - I need to read more on this. Out of all the approaches, my guess is this is the one that has highest odds of working first.
           - US army has already [commissioned gigapixel photography from helicopter](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16358851).
         - Obtaining data from drones at 100 m altitudes is possible, but requires multiple drones (drone swarm) to coordinate and divide the region into smaller regions per drone.
           - As of 2025, AI knowledge is not good enough to autonomously pilot a drone swarm for this purpose. Travel paths can be fixed, but one needs to be able to handle errors autonomously, like winds, collisions, internet connection loss, etc.
           - This could change in the next few years, if AI improves ability to autonomously pilot drones.
           - Paying a large number of drone pilots is possible but expensive, depending on how many drone pilots need to be paid. This depends on frequency of snapshots required. See below.
           - Flight time
             - Electric drone flight time < Energy stored per unit mass battery / Energy required per unit mass payload per unit of flying time = (100-300 kWh/kg) / (100-300 kWh / kg / h)
             - Flight time is typically below an hour for electric-powered drones, after which one typically swaps the battery with a charged one. Gas-powered drones can run as long as a day due to higher calorific value, but have been mostly abandoned by industry for other reasons (what reasons??). P.S. Has anyone tried hydrogen?
             - Flight time might (or might not??) be improvable by custom designing a drone that can also cruise along the wind. I'm not sure if this is feasible at low altitude though, I'll have to read more.
             - Maximum flying speed of (small quadcopter) drones developed so far is ~400 km/h, which could improve the numbers somewhat.
           - Area sweeped per drone
             - Total area sweeped per flight = Flight time * Max drone speed * (Altitude / 2tan(FOV/2)) < (1 hour * 100 km/h * 0.1 km) / (2 * tan(90 degrees / 2)) = 20 km^2
             - Assuming city area of 30 km * 30 km, this means 45 flights of 1-hour each to cover the entire city.
             - You get one snapshot per region every 2 days, per drone pilot hired. Hiring 1000 drone pilots could get a snapshot every ~3 minutes. Hiring 20,000 drone pilots means the drones could all be positioned at static locations and ensure full coverage ((30 km * 30 km) / (200 m * 200 m)).
             - Flight altitude
               - If higher camera resolutions are used, one can increase flight altitude and area covered per flight. Hence the number of people who must be hired can be reduced.
           - Drone could do information analysis on-board, if it has a GPU and disk with embedding search data (such as embeddings of a facial recognition database). If done this way, significant internet bandwidth would not be required to get useful information about "suspicious" activities or people from the drone. However this also means the data on-board has higher chances of being stolen.
           - Am I missing any technical difficulties in this entire plan? The fastest way to investigate would probably be to test it out using: off-the-shelf drone, SIM-card internet, SOTA open source facial recognition model and embedding model, construct your own embedding database from scratch by flying the drone.
         - I also want to look into hot air-balloon suspended cameras. This is a very old technique but can now be done with modern camera resolutions, possibly even gigapixel cameras.
      - Technical Option 4: Track data footprints besides image/audio/video
        - For example one could setup 1 million DNA collection sites across the city, and try to (partially or fully) automate transporting samples to the sequencer. As of 2025, I don't know of any such tech that can be developed within 10 years, but ofcourse this could change in the future beyond 10 years.
      - Non-technical Option 1:
        - You can engineer incentives such that everyone reports on themselves or report on each other (example: stalinist russia), but I'm unsure how you get beyond 99% surveillance with this sort of system either. A group of close friends and family can collectively choose to not report each other, and distance themselves from the rest of society so no one else can report them. Can you prevent people from distancing themselves from others? Maybe I should read more about the historical examples where this stuff has been tried.
      - Non-tehnical Option 2:
        - North Korea's technique of keeping the population illiterate and starving is effective, but still only reaches <99%. There will need to be a 1% of cvilians who are well-fed and educated from diverse intellectual sources.

## Topic: What are the consequences of this reduced secrecy?

Broader questions
 - **Assuming no organisation can maintain significant lead time on any technology (and it will immediately get copied by orgs united by a different morality and culture), what are the implications for technological progress in the future?**
   - There is an assumption embedded here, that no org can keep secrets. I'm unsure if it is true. Supposing it is true though, what are its implications?
   - The most obvious real world example of this is US versus China, neither seems able to keep significant secrets from the other.
   - However I want to figure out general principles here, and not spend too much time studying individual examples like Obama or Michael Hayden or whoever. Metaphorically speaking, I want to study the dynamics of a particular initial position of Chess960, not how Magnus Carlson plays that particular initial position. This also connects to ideas on theories of history. Whether one should study game theory, sociology etc, versus the psychology of individual leaders, depends on which theory of history one subscribes to.
 - Will inability of organisations to keep secrets force homogeneity in the behaviour of civilians, and punish people who behave in outlier ways? Will this reduce the rate of invention of technology in future?
   - Many important technologies in history seem to be invented by individuals who the median member of that country or society would not be able to relate to, and not easily tolerate as a friend / neighbour / family member.
   - This relates to another confusion of mine - how do you merge the high-trust benefits of living in (some) small towns with the individual freedoms of living in (some) cities? It seems to me like high trust and reduced individual freedom are both causally downstream from the same thing, namely densely connected social graph that can gossip information about you.
   - Also seems related to ideas on class. My guess is that people of both low (labour) socioeconomic class and high (elite) socioeconomic class are on average more dependent on maintaing unchanging social ties if they want to climb up within their class. (I'm not talking about climbing up a class, that is much harder.) People of middle (knowledge) class are less dependent on social ties if they wish to climb positions within their class. Being dependent on static social ties constraints people's behaviour (and actions and thoughts) along certain dimensions. How will the class structure interact with increased surveillance? (Tbh I really want to get more raw data here, what is it like in the classes outside my own? I have some data already but want more.)
   - Also relates to ideas around morality. Living close to a set of people often increases social pressure to have shared values, but it especially increases social pressure to have shared ideas on morality.
   - Also relates to ideas around physical safety being 2nd level on Maslow's hierarchy, and how militaries couple physical safety with cultural preservation.
   - There's also psychological literature worth reviewing on all these topics, be it secrecy or physical safety.

I haven't written a lot of points here because I'm still making up my mind on a lot of the implications.

## Topic: How much power do science fiction writers and early enthusiasts have in deciding which technologies humanity chooses to pursue?

Specific questions
 - Would Shane Legg and Demis Hassabis have cofounded Deepmind if Eliezer Yudkowsky hadn't talked about AI at all in time interval 2000-2008?
   - Shane Legg claims he was inspired by Ray Kurzweil. Yudkowsky helped broadcast views of people like Ray Kurzweil by organising MIRI and Singularity Summit.
   - Yudkowsky got funding and attention from Peter Thiel, and may have also helped Deepmind get their seed round from Thiel. (As of 2014 Founder's Fund owned over 25% of Deepmind)

Broader questions
 - I generally want to read 1990-2015 history of biotech. Who or what inspired Illumina's parent companies that worked on next generation sequencing? Who or what inspired Kary Mullis to work on PCR? Who inspired the inventors of CRISPR? Who inspired Kevin Esvelt to work on gene drives?
 - The standard pipeline for how technologies come into society: scifi -> theory -> practical (lab demonstration) -> engineering (scale up). If an individual of my socioeconomic class wanted to maximise their influence on this pipeline, my hypothesis is they should study scifi and scifi -> theory stages. I would like evidence that proves my hypothesis is wrong.
   - Example of evidence that would prove me wrong: a list of technologies that had scifi writers and early enthusiasts, got proven in lab demos, failed to obtain funding for scale up at first, got scaled up many decades later and significantly changed society when they did. This would prove that studying the engineering/scaleup and funding landscape is more important.
   - For example, world war 1 and 2 lead to the creation of a lot of tech in 20th century. I would want to understand whether this was primarily due to ideas and culture inspiring researchers, or whether the increased funding was more important.
   - Another example of evidence that would prove me wrong: a list of technologies that had scifi writers and early enthusiasts, got many researchers interested who ran experiments, did not achieve successful lab demos, but got proven in lab many years decades later once some other necessary precursor technology was invented. This would prove that studying the practical research is more important as many plausibly good ideas turn out to just not work despite inspiring people.
   - **If my hypothesis is right, could a handful of people consistently meme-ing in favour of BCIs or gene drives or whatever for five years, basically bring these technologies into existence?** Assume the memes are technical enough and interesting enough to attract the curiosity of researchers in the relevant research fields. And assume most outlier-brilliant researchers are driven primarily by curiosity not altruism or money or fame, which I think has been true throughout history.

## Topic: Which technologies can possibly influence the future of humanity?

Specific STEM questions:
 - What is the consensus among neuroscientists for Neuralink's timelines?
 - Did MKULTRA actually discover anything useful? Could it have discovered anything useful, if ran for more time with more funding?
   - Many documents are FOIA-ed but I haven't spend enough time reading them. My guess is they didn't achieve much.
 - How much useful work did Biopreparat actually do?
   - My guess is they didn't achieve much, but I wanna know the facts.

Broader technical questions
 - I'd like to study pharmacology and neuroscience till I'm no longer at a beginner level, as those are the two of the following six categories I have least knowledge about.
    - Human (or human-like) brains are likely to shape the future. Technology that will directly alter what human brains do seems worth paying special attention to. 
      1. Information tech - search engines, interest-based communities etc
      2. Digital minds - superintelligent AI, mind uploads, etc
      3. Neuroscience - brain computer interfaces, etc
      4. Pharmacology - barbiturates ("truth serum"), psychedelics, opiates etc
      5. Genetics - CRISPR, etc especially if done to alter human brains
      6. Nanotechnology - especially bionanomachines

 - I'm particularly interested in studying MKULTRA, history of barbiturates and history of psychedelics. MKULTRA is AFAIK rare example of pharmacology research with the explicit goal of altering human brains and human society as a result. Also it's aimed at changing human brains, not fixing "disabilities".
   - Are there ethical pharma research agendas not aimed at fixing disabilities?
   - As of today, pharmacology seems to operate more on the reactive/emotional/primitive part of the brain, sometimes with the hope this also percolates to higher order cognition. For example injecting oxytocin can increase feelings of safety, injecting adrenaline can reduce feelings promoting self-preservation, SSRIs can affect serotonin levels and hence mood regulation, and so on. But what exact thoughts they cause in the mind is less predictable or controllable. Similarly, lasting changes in worldview as a result of the drug are less predictable. 

 - I want to study more about bioweapons research. I suspect its mostly borrowing techniques from biotech that I'm already vaguely aware of, but I wanna study more and confirm.

 - I want to study more about possibilities for biotech automation
   - DNA sequencing is automated and cheap but the process to figure out whether any given sequence is actually useful (often gene cloning and protein expression) is not fully automated or cheap. Current cost is ~$100 for reagents and 10-100 researcher hours.
   - This seems like the hamming question for biotech (as per my limited knowledge) so I'd like to look more into it.
   - Update: Nuclera seems relevant. [Demo video](https://www.nuclera.com/resource-library/how-to-set-up-a-run/) Credits: a friend

 - I want to study more materials science. I know very little about it today.
   - Most STEM research fields go through three phases:
     1. Invent new tool to (cheaply) acquire lots of data from some physical system
     2. Acquire lots of data - from nature or from experiments
     3. Understand the physical system using all this data
     - Step 2 and step 3 often inform each other and run in an iterative loop
     - Step 1 could be the invention of microscope or cyclotron or radio telescope or anything else really.
   - Step 1 usually depends heavily on getting the right materials
   - A lot of practical inventions also seem to depend on material science. For instance fusion energy research is AFAIK basically containining 10M Kelvin plasma using fields, an alternative pathway might (???) be discovering materials that can contain it. Quantum computing research will benefit from having better nanomaterials and better superconducting materials I guess?
   - I understand an intro to materials science textbook won't teach me about better superconductors or whatever, but it still seems worthwhile to study.

Broader non-STEM questions
 - I'd like to build a "gears-level" high-level framework of the more indirect ways technology shapes society. (Not the stuff listed in the six categories above)
   - Often technology shifts offense-defence balances between various actors in society - individuals, small groups and large groups. An oversimplified way of categorising some historical examples would be as follows:
      - Tech that increases power of individuals relative to small groups: cities (drainage systems, etc), printing press, guns, cheap airplane fuel
      - Tech that increases power of large groups relative to individuals: radio, social media ?
      - Tech that increases power of large groups relative to both small groups and individuals: nuclear bombs, nuclear energy, cheap steel
   - Also some technology gives power to certain individuals over others:
      - Tech that increases power of old people relative to young people: elderly healthcare (treatments for cancer, poor eyesight, neuro disorders etc), anti-aging if ever discovered
      - Tech that increases power of women relative to men: condoms?
   - Tech that gives power to large groups of people (relative to small groups and individuals) fuels most of geopolitics as far as I understand
     - Countries and large corporations want to be the first to discover and deploy some tech and then use their military, spies, immigration policy, export controls, R&D budget etc etc to monopolise or maintain lead time on tech. US tech policymaking is the most obvious example.
     - Large groups that have achieved monopoly or lead time in some tech often use this as a bargaining chip to export their culture or religion or whatever morality unites that group in the first place.
     - Very often a large group of people controls production of some tech (individuals or small groups can't produce it), but once produced, individual units are sold as a commodity which gives power to individuals. Tech wih centralised production, decentralised ownership is very common, and has geopolitical dynamics more predictable than tech that is not like this. For example, geopolitics of solar PV modules is easier to model than geopolitics of railway networks IMO.
   - I'm choosing to use a game theory lens here, by modelling cost of attack, defence, coordination of various actors in society.
     - Incentives predictably shape behaviour of most people, even if some ambitious individuals are able to break out of them.
     - Over past 300 years technological progress has been very fast relative to human lifespans, so every generation faces incentives different from the previous generation. One can imagine a hypothetical civilisation with slow technological progress, where the existing technologies create incentives that make people's behaviour more predictable in certain ways across many generations, even if we know nothing about the psychology of the individual people or the details of the culture their future society creates.
     - I am somewhat optimistic that studying incentive structures created by tech will help figure out which tech is worth pursuing versus not, and ensure better trajectories in the future when people like me may no longer be around to think about it. **(This is a plan I think a lot about.)**
     - When deciding which tech is worth pursuing, many people today use a lens of "will the good guys get the tech before the bad guys" for some pre-defined idea of "good guys" that matches their moral and other values. I am not so optimistic on this plan. This is because as of 2025, a) we seem to lack the ability to lock-in who the elites of post-2100 society will be or what their values will be, and b) we seem to lack the ability to lock-in our society to a particular paradigm of technological progress sufficiently, such that elites post-2100 are left with no meaningful choices and everything is already pre-determined. 
     - I am also not optimistic about the plan of just trusting people post-2100 to figure it out, and not thinking too hard about it today. If there are ways for us to exert influence far into the future, I think it is good for us to try to do so. Future people are not to trusted blindly IMO, by default I assume they're capable of making the same mistakes in governance that our society in 2025 already makes.
   - I want a framework that I can fit all the historical examples into, right now my framework is messy (not "gears-level").


## Topic: Information people don't feel safe enough to share

Specific questions
 - Is there any way to increase public access to therapy-client records from over 30-60 years ago? Is it a good idea to do this? What about personal diaries and letters?
 - Is there any way to increase the number of therapy-client records collected from today onwards that will be released publicly 30-60 years from now? Is it a good idea to do this?

Broader questions
 - How do you design societies where more people feel safe enough to share more information about their personal lies publicly?
   - A lot of information about individual human experiences does not reach the public domain because people don't feel safe enough to share it publicly. (They're many reasons for this and they're often valid, from the perspective of that individual).
   - This information is however extremely useful, be to empathise with other individuals at a personal level or provide them useful advice with their life problems or make policy recommendations to govts that benefit individuals or even design new forms of govt more conducive to individuals.
   - Iteration speed of psychology as a field is slower than it would be if there were public transcripts of conversations. Each therapist must form hypotheses based on the limited private data they have, and their guesses of whether to trust hypotheses from other therapists who also work with private data. (This is related to my posts on knowledge versus common knowledge, common knowledge can bring down govts or dominant research paradigms for example, widespread knowledge alone cannot).
   - This also applies broadly to individuals trying to help other individuals with personal advice (which is often atleast partly based on psychology). It doesn't have to be restricted to people trained as psychologists/therapists/whatever.
 - How to best nudge people to leave behind their private information (such as that shared only with friends and family), so that some years after they die we get this information in public domain?
   - I want to study more about the culture around this, in different countries. What are the different cultural attitudes to personal and sensitive information?
   - I should also probably looking into succession planning for big tech companies. What happens once (say) Mark Zuckerberg dies and his (Facebook's) entire plaintext database fits inside a football. Who gets the football next?
 - How to better organise all the historical information we do have on personal and emotionally sensitive matters? I would like to spend some time looking at existing datasets, to see if I can convert everything to plaintext and embedding search it.

## Topic: Interplay between incentives and culture

Definition: In general when I talk about incentives I usually mean these three: social (people giving you respect/compassion/admiration/sex/etc), financial (people giving you money/food/goods/place to live/etc) and safety (people imprisoning/injuring/raping/murdering you, or protecting you from others who might). Doing "X" gets you more respect or money or safety, or not doing "X" gets you less of it. Maslow's hierarchy is a decent model, if you ignore the ordering of the hierarchy.

Broader questions
 - How much power do elites have to take decisions that go against their local incentives and local culture?
   - (For example if the prime minister of a country is in favour of declaring war but other people in his party and other parties are not, how much power does this person have to single-handedly shift the situation?)
   - What are the psychological traits required to do this? How do you train more of our elites with these traits?
   - What is the political knowledge required to do this sort of manoeuvre? Can we teach our elites to do more of this?
   - (Yes I am biased lol, I think most elites don't do anything interesting with their lives. This is causally downstream of incentives and culture of the people around them. "Interesting" is defined as per my tastes, ofcourse each elite may have their own unique tastes.)

 - How do you ethically run experiments to see the outcomes of unusual incentives (social, financial, safety) and culture on people?
   - There is a lot of existing data available to be collected, on how existing incentives and culture influence people. The three socioeconomic classes have different cultures and incentives, people in different countries have different cultures and incentives, people in different professions have different cultures and incentives.
   - But this data is finite, and it would help to be able to run experiments of different circumstances not occurring naturally.
   - Ethical problems abound, for instance threatening someone's life or disrespecting them or depriving them of important information about the world is usually considered unethical in the context of a research experiment. What are some techniques to bypass this?
   - Theory goes only so far when predicting human behaviour, experimentation is needed. (I mean, I basically see STEM versus non-STEM as prediction and control of systems not including and including human beings respectively. Human brains are the most complex known object in the observable universe and predicting them with >90% probability is hard in many situations.)
   - Hmm I should prolly first make a list of experiments I'd love to run, assuming ethics is not an issue. Then filter the list on ethics. Will update this section when I do.

 - How to think about morality and how to teach morality in a world where morality is dependent on circumstances?
   - Different people face different incentives and culture. A moral principle that is easy to follow in one person's situation is difficult to follow in another person's situation. For example honesty is generally easier when you have some money saved than if you don't, because if someone dislikes your honesty and is abusive in response, you have more options to escape them or fight back.
   - A significant threshold for whether an ideology or institution has power over you is whether it has shaped your sense of right and wrong. For example (some) communists believing private property is bad and theft is okay, or (some) anarchists believing big govts are bad and tax evasion is okay, or (some) religious people believing sex before marriage is not okay and denying couples houses for rent, etc.
   - Morality is a political question, as whichever ideology or group can recruit more soldiers to be morally okay killing enemy soldiers in its name is one that will be more powerful. Political circumstances of a society change with time, and this correlates with changes in moral thinking of a society.
   - People generally suck at understanding is-ought distinction.
   - People (including me) also suck at imagining what they would be like if they were born in hypothetical cultures they are not actually a part of.
   - The practical result is people find it very hard to understand what morality is like from the perspective of someone in a sufficiently different circumstance than them.
   - Will the internet force homogenisation of our ideas of morality worldwide? Or does an eternal culture war just become the new normal? I'm guessing it'll be a mix of both. I want to build a more gears-level model for memetics with a focus on morality.


## Topic: Miscellaneous

 - What do "replicators" in politics look like?
   - Businesses that hire very few people and sell self-contained products are easier to replicate than other businesses, because people are harder to predict or control than physical systems. For example: a large farm with automated equipment is easier to manage than a farming village with thousands of labourers.
   - What are some easy-to-replicate involve-less-people playbooks in politics or non-STEM more broadly? A lot of political events seem to me to be one-off events without an underlying theory that will enable replicating them in other contexts.
   - I would love to discover/invent playbooks for regime change or good tech policy or maintaining law and order etc. that are replicable across multiple cultural contexts.
   - A major bottleneck here is that law and order in many groups (including nation states) plays two roles at the same time - protecting physical safety of its members (which is low on maslow's hierarchy), and preserving culture of its members (which can be higher level on maslow's hierarchy). Forming a military that is loyal to certain values is often seen as instrumentally valuable to preserving those values in the world. **I'd be particularly excited about ways to decouple physical safety from cultural preservation.**

 - Why didn't the US nuke USSR cities immediately after nuking Japan to establish a nuclear monoppoly, before USSR got nukes? Are the transcripts of these conversations available? (Between the people who were pro-nuke and the people who were anti-)

 - Should I just stop caring as much about grammar and spelling in my writing, and invent more shorthands?
   - English in 2024 is more concise than English from the middle ages, this is good as it reduces cognitive load, and saves time.
   - I sometimes want to invent jargon for concepts. I want to skip articles (a, an, the), ignore verb conjugation, skip pronouns sometimes, etc. I suspect future humans will be doing this anyway.
   - I don't want to raise the entry barrier for people viewing my work though, atleast while my work is not that popular. My current guess is that this is a change I should try to nudge people towards once I'm a lot more popular.

 - How good are Israeli research univerities exactly?
   - After US, UK, China, Israel seems like it might occupy 4th place in any tech race. Israel is nuclear-armed (hence won't listen to US or China) + great cyberhacking/espionage (so they can steal everyone's research without much lag time) + decent research talent (so they can implement stolen research)





# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/my_ideas/controversial.md

2025-01-20

# Controversial topics thread

Please consider first reading the page on [Disclaimer on value differences](../value_differences_disclaimer.md).

## Freedom of speech

I live in India, upper-middle socioeconomic class (college-educated, net worth $20k-$100k). This might place certain restrictions on what I can say and how I say it.

Some topics that are considered sensitive:
 - criticism of people in my immediate social circle
 - criticism of any religion or religious leaders, including related issues like dating, caste, etc.
 - criticism of any political party or politicians in India
 - criticism of India
 - ???

All my opinions on these topics are within this one post, and I will avoid mentioning them in other posts. 

(I might use pseudonyms to talk about these topics anonymously. I understand that someone putting enough effort can probaly doxx them anyway.)

## No movement pls

Social change happens not when 10% of people want change, but when 10% of people know that everyone in that 10% wants change. Establishing "common knowledge" is a major part of it. See also: [Blue Eyes Puzzle](https://xkcd.com/blue_eyes.html), [Scott Alexander's political posts](https://slatestarcodex.com/about/), [Srdja Popovick's book](https://www.amazon.com/Blueprint-Revolution-Nonviolent-Techniques-Communities/dp/0812995309#customerReviews)

**I am NOT interested in acting as a leader for social change around any topic mentioned on this page.**

Goals of this website:
 - Find high quality research collaborators, receive high quality feedback
 - Spread knowledge

NOT Goals of this website:
 - Establish "common knowledge", start a political movement


## Rule of law

Protecting your safety, belongings and relationships requires living in a culture that allows you to protect these things. Law enforcers are usually members of your culture and ultimately accountable to members of your culture. It is not practical for law enforcement to protect you if most members of your culture don't feel you deserve to be protected.

Physical safety is the second level of Maslow's hierarchy, after having enough food and water. In today's world (and particularly in India), it is rare to find someone dying of thirst or starvation. But it is not rare to find someone who feels unsafe.

Fear begets fear. If you are afraid of people of a different value system from yours, you're less likely to advocate for rule of law to protect them. They will then use extra-legal means to protect themselves. Now both you and them are less safe.

People who feel less safe can be less empathetic, less honest, less trusting and more isolationist. If many people collectively feel unsafe, this has impacts on nearly every aspect of culture. These damaging effects can persist multiple generations, as it is transmitted from parents to children.

In particular, if you are benefitting in any way from making others feel less safe, please consider whether your benefits are worth inflicting this sort of damage on another person. The damage can persist long after you die, the benefits may not.

Please consider protecting people in your daily life from harm irrespective of their value system. Please consider advocating for a rule of law that protects everyone. This way everyone can peacefully coexist despite their differences.


## Individualism

I am quite individualist. I take my life decisions myself, and I want to ensure I'm the primary person responsible for the outcomes of my life. IMO some people, but not necessarily all people, could benefit from being more individualist. How you want to live your life is a personal decision. I am not recommending everyone copy me.

Why?

Some important ideas that I believe in are as follows.

1. Almost nobody likes being controlled by another person.
 - This could be a parent or sibling or spouse or employer or political leader or anyone else. Voluntarily following someone almost always feels better than following them under threat of violence or starvation.
 - Ideally you can negotiate boundaries and agreements with people in your current social circle in a mutually beneficial way, be it when deciding your actions or when expanding or narrowing your circle.
 - I'm strongly in favour of consensual social connections over non-consensual ones.
 - I'm also generally in favour of making long-term commitments not only short-term ones. Consensual agreements doesn't necessarily mean no commitments or responabilities.
 - However, sometimes people in your existing social circle might restrict you and seek control over you. If you are currently under someone else's control, and you would prefer to break out for any reason, this might be possible. See below for how.

2. There are 8 billion people on this planet. The probability that your family and friends are among the wisest / most knowledgible / happiest / kindest / etc people out of these 8 billion is approximately zero.

 - You can still selectively learn good things from your family and friends, but it'll help to also consider learning from others.
 - You can increase the odds you have an awesome life by deliberately choosing what you learn and from whom. Your source of inspiration and learning could be a podcaster or religious leader or politician or filmstar or anyone really.
   - Copying other people's decisions tends to get you life outcomes similar to those you're copying. Make sure to track what outcomes your role models got in their own life.
 - If you are not satisfied with your role models' life outcomes and want something better (or even just different) for your life, you must learn to think independently and act independently.
   - Becoming an independent thinker starts with exposing yourself to books, people and situations that others in your social circle are not being exposed to. Your brain is a computer, its output depends on its input.
   - I have gained a tremendous amount of value in my life doing this, arguably more than my entire formal education (although it's kinda hard to compare, they both support each other).

3. Approval / disapproval of you by your social circle is one of the largest predictors of your behaviour.

 - Social incentives (what your friends and family approve of and disapprove of) are often a stronger predictor of your behaviour than financial incentives (what makes you more money) or culture (what other people around you usually do).
 - If you choose your social circle deliberately, you can alter your own thinking and behaviour.
 - Pain of social disapproval is often greater than reward of social approval, atleast in terms of how it feels inside your head. You should be especially careful about what your peers disapprove of, as this will affect you more strongly.
 - See also: Asch's conformity tests and other research that confirms these hypotheses in a specific lab setting


#### See also: Dealing with abusive situations

DISCLAIMER: I am not an expert on dealing with abusive situations. If you are in such a situation, try to get advice and support from people who have more experience with it than me.

How to break out of another person's control?
 - Two things you need:
   - a source of income or sufficient savings not under this person's control. If you do not have this, obtaining this should be your life priority.
   - moral convinction that you are not anyone's slave or property.
 - Conflicts of this type that I've seen are often more psychological warfare than actual war.
   - If you believe you are not under their control, this reduces their control over you.
   - Non-violent resistance is powerful and ensures you retain the moral high ground. Keeping this internal sense of morality and self-respect is important in order to break out.
   - If they threaten violence, it is often a bluff, they lose their power if you call their bluff.
   - Even if they are violent, spending one month in a hospital may be better than spending decades as their slave.
   - Some situations are extreme enough that your abuser would literally rather murder you than let you go free. In this case, you may have to be more strategic, move slowly, find allies before making any move. Your opponent is not willing to play fair and neither do you have to. You may end up scarred whether you stay in this situation or attempt to break free. Remember that one day you are going to die, and your choices will affect your life many years to come.



## Cosmopolitanism

I am extremely cosmopolitan.

If this at all interests you, I recommend making friends (or atleast acquaintances) of people from countries other than your native one. I would also recommend making friends with people of different cultures in your country, of different socioeconomic classes, and of different value systems.

How?
 - This could be online or by travelling to other places or by finding people from those places visiting or living in your city.

Why?
 - Friends can tell you things you won't learn as easily from social media or elite-funded news channels (i.e. almost all news channels).
 - Also you'll be able to empathise with actual people rather than figments of your imagination. I've personally had good experiences doing this.
 - The really optimistic version of this is, maybe wars will become less likely if everyone had friends from other countries, maybe class boundaries would reduce and so on. But I think the benefits to you as an individual alone are worth it, ignoring the societal benefits.


## Religion

I am atheist. I strive to be tolerant of people of other faiths, although there are some topics we may have to avoid in casual conversations in order to have a pleasant interaction.

Which religion you choose to belong to is one of the most important decisions of your life. You don't want to blindly pick whichever religion you happened to be born into. It is better to think deliberately about it.

How?
 - If you are interested in exploring further on this topic, there are lots of freely available websites, books and videos online. Consider reading the writings of all the major world religions, and reading materials from multiple conflicting points of view.
 - I'm not sure what the best intro resource on atheism is, maybe [this one?](https://www.suchanek.name/texts/atheism/ChapterUniverse.html).

**The rest of this section elaborates my personal views on religion. If you're not interested, you are free to ignore it.**

There's a bunch of separate threads of evidence in favour of atheism that I consider worth studying. Which ones you study more deeply may depend on your interests. The most important thing is you actually study these topics yourself from the ground up, so you aren't blindly trusting a bunch of scientists or scientific institutions.

Stuff I've studied reasonably well:
 - biochemistry, genomics, computational genomics ([example](https://asia.ensembl.org/info/genome/compara/mlss.html?mlss=1098))
 - newton's laws, quantum mechanics, newton's laws implying deterministic universe, philosophical implications of human brains also being deterministic
 - occam's razor, solomonoff induction
 - chalmer's hard problem of consciousness

Stuff I've studied at surface level:
 - radioactive carbon dating of fossils
 - particle physics, esp. particle physics around big bang, star formation
 - evolutionary explanations for mammalian morality
 - redshift of stars due to universe expansion
 - psychology, evopsych, sociology of groupthink

Stuff I wish I'd study sometime:
 - reading holy texts of all major religions (I'm still halfway on this)
 - CMB radiation
 - neuroscience and psychology research on meditation, prayer, community rituals

Some potential advantages of being atheist:
 - In the very long run, you might help humanity find the truth. Truth tends to survive the rise and fall of civilisations, as information is easy to preserve and hard to destroy. A record of your beliefs and actions may be preserved and later read by others even if your nation gets nuked to dust, for example.
 - People around you might benefit in terms of material wellbeing. Post-Englightenment, there's a direct correlation between countries' GDP growth and their cultural tolerance of atheist scientists and engineers. (I also suspect there's a direct correlation between this tolerance and rate of new inventions by country, but this is harder to prove.)
 - You might avoid some traps like using medicines that haven't undergone double-blinded randomised control trials and may hence be toxic.
 - It might improve your critical thinking skills. Many cognitive biases are due to social pressure, learning to resist social pressure will make you a better thinker. Your beliefs may be less compartmentalised, as knowing the truth in one subject also aids with knowing the truth in other subjects (and vice versa knowing falsehoods deteriorates it).

Some potential disadvantages of being atheist:
 - You may end up distanced from people who no longer share your values. Coordination is easier between people with shared values and beliefs. You may find it harder to coordinate with others.
 - You may end up distrusting of other people's beliefs. You'll realise truth-seeking is really hard and a lifetime of effort is not enough to discover all the important truths about the world.
 - You may have more anxiety about the future. You'll realise many events in life are random and beyond your control. (For example, this could be who you date or how good your health is or how a particular exam result went.) You'll realise people often imagine fictitious narratives to make sense of random events, because they don't like random events.
 - You'll realise most problems in life don't solve themselves, someone needs to actually put in the work to solve them.
  - You'll have to take life decisions while facing more uncertainty about potential outcomes. You'll realise many facts about our past, present and future are currently unknown. Many of these facts will remain unknown even after you die.
 - You may become more confused about your morality. You'll realise that different cultures produced people with different moral values.
 - You'll realise the world is not a fair place, karma doesn't always work. History is full of mass murderers who received more love and popular support than you ever will.
 - You may end up less satisfied with your present circumstances. Most religions teach some degree of contentment with one's present circumstances.

If you have recently become atheist, I encourage being kind to yourself while you figure out its implications for your life. This took me many years to figure out, and could take you as well.



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2025-01-14

# Polyamory

I'd probably be polyamorous if I were living in the US. As of today though, I am not practising polyamory.

Why?
 - I'm sympathetic to the idea of compound benefits. Investing 10 years into the same person has compound benefits you don't get if you choose a new person to date every year. I don't have a deep understanding of what the compound benefits are, but I'm convinced they're real and significant. I'm also sympathetic to the idea of planning your life many years into the future instead of just doing what feels good for the next day or month or year.
 - I'm sympathetic to the idea that different people provide different forms of values that are hard to compare, say on a scale of 1 to 10. If I'm forced to pick only one partner for my whole life, I will naturally have a high bar for who I wish to pick. I will have to eventually breakup with anyone who fails to meet this bar, no matter how good they are for me or I am for tham.
   - I do think nobody can be perfect at everything, and there will ways in which this ideal person falls short no matter who they are. There will be meaningful value (trustworthy advice, knowledge, emotional support etc) I can get from people other than this one person.
 - I like gradients over sharp cut-offs. If you're monogamous you're forced to either consider someone as having potential to become one of the most important people in your life, or remove them from your life completely. There is no in-between. In the past I have not done well with staying friends with people I'm romantically interested in, so I end up removing them from my life completely. If you're polyamorous you can increase or decrease time commitment more gradually.

Poly combines the benefits of both.

How?

Scarce resources include time and location.
 - I used to think time is a constraint for practising polyamory but I'm less convinved by this now. Even if you have only 4 days a month to spend with other people, you can split that as 2 days a month per person. Doing this over 10 years still likely gets some of the compound benefits I mentioned before.
 - Place is a significant constraint. Since I plan to eventually shift to the US, one way or another, any social bonds I form while in India will eventually need to adjust to that. (This is the kind of annoying tradeoff that makes me wish billion-person cities existed.)

The biggest constrait by far though is that I, and more importantly the women I date, will face significant societal judgement from religious people while I'm in India, and I'm not sure dealing with that is worth the benefits. Therefore I plan to be monogamous as long as I'm in India.

I also hope to remain friends with religious people and be included in their social circles, to whatever extent that is possible. Some of the kindest people I have met in my life are religious, for example, and I expect I can grow as a person by spending more time with them. This is easier to do if I weren't actively practising polyamory. (I'm sure there's people who think I'm committing evil simply by thinking about the idea and not practising it, but I can't do anything about that. I can censor my actions and words to some extent, but I can't censor my thoughts. That is sacred to me.)

Navigating this is confusing and I don't have all the answers. In my mind there's a clear pareto frontier where both increased and decreased self-expression come with significant upsides and downsides.






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2024-12-05

# My role models

I'm generally against the idea of having a single role model in my own life. (You can have a role model in your life, I have no problem with that. I'm talking strictly about myself here.)

That being said, here's an incomplete list of people I rely on for motivation. (Motivation is not the same as Advice)

 - Eliezer Yudkowsky
 - Tim Urban
 - Moxie Marlinspike
 - Vitalik Buterin
 - Yeonmi Park


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/elite_class_social_norms.md

2025-01-14

# Elite social norms

I have been raised in upper-middle class India which means I have internalised many of the social norms of the middle (knowledge) class and am blind to many of the social norms of the upper (elite) and lower (labour) classes. I am very sympathetic to perspectives such as [this analysis by siderea](https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1237182.html) on why social class is more important than economic class, and this helps explain why I am blind.

This entire post is therefore a bunch of guesswork from someone who does not have enough first-hand data. Everything here is to be read with the understanding that it could be completely incorrect with significant probability.

If you are an elite, please correct the incorrect parts. It'll mean a lot to me if you do.

#### Disclaimer

Publishing this article in public makes me nervous for a couple of reasons.
 - I am still in a knowledge-gathering phase of my life. I want to spend more time interacting with people outside my class and learn more about what life is like for them. I'm worried I will get reduced opportunities to do that if people know I'm going to publish some of my learnings on my blog.
   - This is especially true if what I publish includes criticism, and isn't just descriptive of the facts.
   - This is especially true if I publish includes incorrect guesses of what it's like in other classes. People could think I'm naive and overconfident, and not be willing to correct me. (If you think I'm naive and overconfident, please correct me, I will appreciate more for this than if you keep quiet. If I don't accept your criticism that's okay, I'll still appreciate the attempt.)
   - In general, if I have published anything that you don't like, please let me know. I'll usually be willing to take it down or atleast rewrite it in a way it no longer feels like it is criticising you specifically.
   - (There may be exceptions. Maybe you've done something especially immoral from my perspective, and I want to call you out publicly and pick a fight with you. But this is rare, I don't usually start conflicts with other just because their values are different from mine. If you are afraid that something you say to me will end up on this blog against your wishes, please ask me first.)
 - If I had a magic wish, I would love to be part of the elite class instead of my current socioeconomic class. I think there's a lot of good that can be done in the world only by elites (or by people of my class who join the elite class).
   - However some of my current behaviours and actions in the world are already indicating my membership of the knowledge class, and my potential lack of eligibility to other classes.
   - For instance my ideal attitude to criticism is a lot closer to people of my class than the elite, whenever I hold back on offering criticism I feel like I am betraying my inner ideals for instrumental gain. In practice yes I often hold back on offering criticism for various reasons, but I hate the fact that I have to do this. (Yes, all 3 classes withold criticism, but elite class does this the most IMO, atleast for public criticism not private.)
   - If I choose to give up on my ambition of becoming an elite, I could still have significant influence, for example by influencing and advising existing elites. But this influence will still be reduced (by how much??) if I refuse to adopt any of the social norms of the elite class myself.

**I still remain unsure whether this article should stay published. If you think I would have a better life if I took this article down, please let me know.**

## Elite social norms that differ from knowledge class' social norms

A bunch of the social norms seem explainable just through incentives. I probably don't actually have to spend 10 years living as an elite myself to figure it out.

If I have to summarise this entire post in two lines it's probably the following:
 - Elite social circles are a small world, there's a small number of people like you. Your entire life - personal and professional - depends on allying with some subset of this set of people.
 - In labour class, others can destroy you so you must be careful how you behave. In elite class, you can destroy others so you must be careful how you behave. It's only the knowledge class that lives in this fictitious zone of "equality".

Now that the summary is over, I'll talk about details.

 - My guess is elites can get away with a lot more weird or even immoral behaviour in private, compared to people of other classes.
   - My guess is elites on average have a stronger demarcation between their private and public life than people of other classes. (Although yes ofcourse all 3 classes maintain this demarcation.)
   - Elites can get away with a lot more things in private simply because of the power they wield. If an elite ever got into a conflict with someone of the knowledge class, they are likely to "win" in many ways.
   - This includes self-expression that would be punished in other classes. If an elite wants to architect their house in a 16th century style, or consume a range of non-FDA-approved supplements, or go live in a monastery for a year, or have multiple partners, it's easier for them to do that. Many people of other classes would love this level of freedom and self-expression, but get restricted by their immediate social circle.
   - [Trigger Warning: Rape] This also extends to immoral actions. For example, it's a lot easier for an elite to get away with rape than someone of other classes. I also think the number of men of other classes who would rape others if they could get away with it is surprisingly high (atleast 5%, global average), but elites get to act on it instead of just thinking it in the privacy of their minds. There are 3000 billionaires today, I'm pretty sure atleast 150 of them are rapists (I'm not including paid sex work here, and I'm not including edge cases like a 50-year old sleeping with an 18-year old here).
     - Disclaimer: Predictions shape reality. Please don't turn my prediction into reality. It would be nice if I was wrong, and this number was a lot less than 5%.
 - My guess is elites are on average more lonely.
   - It is a small world at the top, there's less than 10000 elites globally. For the knowledge class it's easier to do something weird and trust that you eventually find a find people who are not just tolerant but actively supportive of anything weird you want to do. For example, if you want to suddenly convert from hinduism to christianity, you can probably find an existing community of hindus-converted-to-christianity of your class. If you are a Nepali immigrant to the US, you can probably find other nepali immigrants to the US, of your class. As an elite it's a lot harder to find another elite who shares your unique set of life experiences. (Also it takes a lot of time and effort to forge social bonds outside your class that are based on honest foundations, see my next point.)
   - As an elite you're basically 24x7 exposed to non-elites who are engaging in varying amounts of deception to get access to some of the capital and attention you wield. This is true both in professional life (other companies and non-profits who want to ally with you) and in personal life (people who want to befriend or date you). This also seems obvious based on incentives. If someone has $1M it might be worth spending 1 year trying to entrap them, if someone has $1B it might be worth spending your entire life trying to entrap them. Forging trustworthy bonds outside your social class takes a significant amount of time and effort, in fact a significant part of designing your company or government or whatever is basically figuring out how to get people of other classes to do your work without you ever having to trust them.
   - As an elite, if you're ambitious and trying to get something done, you need to interact with a lot of people where you cannot let your guard down emotionally. You cannot choose to avoid interacting with people if you are ambitious and wish to climb further upward. (This is true for basically all 3 classes, but it is an added factor here. I'm not claiming it's worse or better in this class.)
   - There is also cultural spiralling here. If the other people you know are also more lonely and less willing to take bold risks, this will also rub off on you.
 - My guess is elites can get away with less weirdness on things that actually matter, in business and politics, than people of the knowledge class.
   - There's a lot of nuance here that's hard to summarise.
   - This is especially true if they wish to keep their elite social circles (including friends and family) or climb up within their class.
   - This is especially true if the elite wields or aspires to wield attention rather than capital. Elites often wield a lot of attention by crafting a public image that is entirely separate from their private image.
     - Getting a large number of people behind cause may require you to support the average of their views, and the average of a large number of people's views is by definition conformist.
     - [Side note: I wish there was an honest way to do this. For example, I have massive respect for a politician who says "my private beliefs are X, however the voters have voted for Y, therefore if I were elected I'm going to do Y" and I have a lot less respect for someone who just pretends their private beliefs are Y. I understand that the former has disadvantages. For instance, your voters may be too unintelligent to understand the nuance. Also, your message will get mutated as it spreads across place and time, and competes with other ideas, so you may prefer communicating a simpler message over a more complicated one. If someone figures this stuff out, I'd be grateful.]
 - Elites can get away with less criticism of other elites. People of the knowledge class can tolerate more criticism on average, both on the giving and receiving end.
     - Criticising another elite in public is essentially rallying a mob against them. An elite's words in public carry a lot more weight than someone of the knowledge class. (Arguably, being able to rally people using words is basically the most important role an elite plays, in a sense.)
     - An elite's words also end up setting up status heirarchies across all the organisations they control. If you as an elite criticise only one particular type of behaviour by someone, people across all your organisations will go out of their way to avoid that particular type of behaviour.
     - The elite who receives the criticism can also do a lot more damage in response. See again, "it's a small world". The elite on the receiving end can influence their network of other elites to demand conformism or else cut off their ties with you. The extreme end of this phenomena is countries going to war over personal rivalries involving trivial matters.
     - Even when elites do use their media houses to push criticism against other elites, it's done via abstractions. It's "The New Yorker published X" not "the Newhouse family who owns Conde Nast allowed X to be published", it's "the NSA helped kill X" not "Michael Hayden the NSA director helped kill X", it's "climate non-profit got shutted because X" not "Mohammed bin Salman the prince of Saudi Arabia shuttered climate non-profit". Most of us don't even know the names of the people who own the media houses and companies and nonprofits that we interact with on a day-to-day basis, this alone is proof that abstractions work. (I'm not claiming anything about these specific examples, they're just examples.)
     - [Side note: My guess is a lot of criticism being extinguished top-down on the internet, is downstream of this phenomenon. Elites own the social media and knowledge workers publish on them.]
   - Knowing when to do things "how things are usually done" and when to invest on your personal beliefs around better ways of doing things - seems like one of the strongest markers of an elite's good judgment.
 - My guess is elites look at morality differently than people of the knowledge class.
   - Elites are less likely to register the harm done by the organisations they wield as harm that they personally have done. See also: [Power buys you distance from the crime](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fB4gvoooNYa4t56S/power-buys-you-distance-from-the-crime)
     - (Arguably knowledge workers do the same blame deflection, just in a different context. If a smartphone manufacturer uses slave labour to mine their rare earth metals for their smartphone, then the people purchasing the smartphone typically think they're blameless with "if not us then someone else would do it" as a potential justification, and the CEO and investors of the company also typically think they're blameless with "if not us then someone else would do it" as a potential justification.)
   - Elites are basically above the law, the only law that matters is the rules set by other elites. The only way people of the knowledge class get to enforce rules on the elites is to find another elite who is willing to do the enforcing.
   - Most large organisations end up doing some harm to someone. Some of this is an accidental byproduct of governing a large organisation.
     - Often organisations was designed by people other than you. Even if you as an elite have the ability to re-design them better, it's often not worth the time and effort invested to do this, if your goals in life are something else.
   - Some of this is deliberate. Governments often deliberately suppress their citizens using the military for example. Companies often have armies of salesmen, lawyers and scientists aimed at addicting people to various products. These armies don't spontaneously spring into existence, there are elites who devote their entire life to trying to build them. A full analysis of deliberate harm done by elites and why this happens is out of the scope of this post.
   - Again, "small world" phenomena means as an elite, you have less ability to cut people out of your network if they have done evil things. If you want to raise as much capital or attention as possible towards a cause, you have to be more willing to tolerate receiving it from people who have done evil things. How much you tolerate depends on your negotiating position, which could depend on how rich you are, for eexample. A knowledge worker's moral line might be "I will not accept money from anyone who is rude to all their friends."; an elite's moral line might be "I will not accept money from anyone who has committed genocide.". An aspiring elite with $10M may be more tolerant of a billionaire rapist, another billionaire may be less tolerant of the first billionaire, because the former is more dependent on the billionaire's support. (I don't know where these lines actually get drawn in practice, I'm just guessing they get drawn differently.)
   - Elites are definitely more sympathetic to utilitarian ethics - ensure good done is greater than harm done. Elites accept as a matter of course that they will end up doing a bunch of both good and harm in their life. Knowledge workers are more sympathetic to deontological ethics - do not harm, how much good you do less important.
   - The net result of all these dynamics makes elite morality noticeably different from that of knowledge workers.
   - [Side note: I wish some elites could help explain their morality to the rest of us. I'm afraid many elites have given up on trying to explain anything to anyone, and this makes me sad. Many knowledge workers think that if an elite must have high moral standards, they must copy the values of the knowledge workers themselves. This is not possible due to all the incentives mentioned above. The net result of making such a demand is that you get politicians who pretend to "live like a common man" while thinking in ways very different from one. I wish some elites could explain to us what high ethical standards look like *from their own perspective*, and then actually try to uphold those standards. Forging genuine empathy and understanding between members of both classes is going to require work of this sort.]
 - My guess is elites trade a lot of favours, especially the ambitious ones.
   - Keep tracking of debts owed and incurred to other elites, not just financial but favour-based, seems like a non-trivial part of the job of an ambitious elite. Not keeping good records puts you at a disadvantage.
 - My guess is elites, especially the most successful ones, make plans with time horizons longer than the other two classes.
   - This is definitely not true of all elites, I'm sure many are just trying to improve status among their peers or find a better partner or whatever.
   - Having more wealth does allow you to make plans on the timescale of multiple generations though, so a handful of elites make use of this opportunity.
   - Sucessful elites put a lot of time into thinking what happens to their wealth, position and organisations after they die. They try finding successors (for example grooming their children for the role) and try modifying their organisations such that they can survive their death. They especially do this when they are old themselves. They care about what story they are remembered for.

[Side note: I basically think the internet is going to disrupt the social norms of all three classes. I would first like to understand what the current norms are, before trying to predict how they will be disrupted.]


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2025-01-06

# README for "unimportant" folder

Attention is a scarce resource. Whenever I make a bid for your attention (be it in person or online), I only want to push a small amount of content. Anything I do not think is important enough to push on someone with limited attention goes into the "unimportant" folder.

My standards for how crisp a world model is or how clearly it is communicated are lower in this folder.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/taboo_words.md

# Taboo words on this website

2025-01-12

I am sympathetic to the lesswrong social norm of taboo words. Basically you avoid the usage of words that are not defined in a clear way where everyone agrees on the definition. If you think somsone is using a word without clear definition agreed by everyone, you can ask them to repeat their point without using this word.


Taboo words on this websites:
 - can, possible, because
   - On this website I almost will never say "X happened because Y". I will almost never say "X is possible" or "X is impossible".
   - Saying "X happened because Y" means in an alternate universe where X did not happen, Y would not have happened.
   - Especially when studying history it is difficult to construct this alternate universe thought experiment in a way everyone agrees what the thought experiment should be, and what its outcome would be. (I accept that in theory this thought experiment works fine. Human brains don't violate deterministic universe. It's just in practice we don't know how to get the outcomes of these experiments.)
   - In practice often multiple pre-conditions existed when an event happened. The combination of those pre-existing conditions is not simple linear algebra, "A and B and C => Y", it's "f(A,B,C) => Y" for some poorly understood f.
   - I prefer the phrases "causally upstream" and "caually downstream" over the word "because".
   - There are different levels of "impossible". There are events that would have required people to have different ideas or imaginations in order to happen, there are events that merely required the right amount of funding or the right set of social bonds to form, there are events that required increased amounts of engineering resources, there are events that would straight up violate the laws of physics if they happened. Unless an event would violate the laws of physics, I'm hesitant to say it is impossible. And if it violates the laws of physics, I may be open to its possibility, human understanding of our current physical laws is less than a century old, it could have exceptions.
   - If nothing is impossible, then saying "X is possible" also conveys zero useful information so I avoid saying it.
 - less, more
   - I will almost never say "X is less" or "X is more". Scales are relative, and where exactly the middle of the scale gets defined to be is often a political question. I will almost always say "X is less than Y" or "X is more than Y". This could be when referring to any adjective. X could be more beautiful, powerful, wealthy, empathetic, knowledgible etc. than Y, but X will never just be more beautiful, powerful, wealthy, empathetic, knowledgible etc. period.



# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/embedding_search.md

2025-01-10

# Embedding search

I'm writing a post on why I'm so excited by embedding search.

It may have massive upsides and downsides. Also the ingredients for it seem mostly ready. So it'll be difficult to un-invent even if the downsides are greater. It seems better to adapt to a world where better embedding search is present.

A lot of distinct problems in life seem like they could benefit from better embedding search.
 - Finding a life partner
 - Finding funding or a job
 - Finding books, articles, etc relevant to your research
 - Establishing trust. Getting diverse information sources about a person helps build trust faster.

Some dual use implications:
 - Finding people who are trying to stay hidden because they are afraid of or competing with you or someone else. (This is dual use.)
 - Finding secrets leaked to the internet (or any private database) by powerful organisations. (This is dual use.)
  - In general, even things like finding funding or becoming better at research, etc accelerates everyone irrespective of what their goals are. 

Attention markets on the internet right now are quite power-law distributed.
 - If you want to find people of a specific niche, often you have to first get attention of the mass public, and then filter out the subset of this that is interested in your niche. This is especially true if there doesn't exist an already well-established community with organisers and funders.
 - Attention markets are power law-distributed because there's atleast 1 million people competing for attention, but any random user has not more than 10 or 20 internet sources they regularly follow. (Sure, you might follow 1000 instagram pages, but you're not paying attention to all of them.) If you can't get into someone's top 20 follows, you're at a massive disadvantage when trying to get mass attention.
 - There aren't clear rules for how to give or receive attention. In practice this leads to an arms race, one side invents ever new techniques to spam all the platforms, and the other side raises the entry barrier to allow anything in.

Embedding search might (??) also help fix the attention market. For example, I could list 5000 people I'm interested in, and the other person could also list 5000 people they're interested in, and if there's overlap then we connect. At no point do either of us need to send a DM without knowing a good probability estimate of whether this is useful or spam for the other person.

Elites use filters
 - The more you wield a scarce resource such as attention or money, the more people are competing to get in your network or influence your thinking. And the more you need to be deliberate about what filters you use to let people in or out.
 - A lot of problems in society are causally downstream of principal-agent problems. Elites don't know who to trust and get fooled into doing massively suboptimal things, basically all the time.
 - Building better filtering mechanisms for elites seems useful.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/ai_enabled_cloud_gaming.md

2025-01-18

# AI-enabled Cloud gaming

AI-enabled cloud gaming seems like one of the hardest applications to do on cloud rather than locally. However I expect it'll get done in 10 years.

If you're a game developer you might want to work on this.

Why?
 - Latency limits of human body
   - Video output - Most people can't distinguish individual frames in video above 90 frames per second (~10 ms / frame)
   - Audio ouput - Some audio engineers on reddit find 10 ms latency when playing music digitally to be noticeable but acceptable.
   - Keyboard + mouse input - Human motor reaction times are generally estimated above 100 ms. Upper bound on nerve conduction velocity is around 120 m/s, covering 1 metre of neurons from hand to brain requires >10 ms. Anticipating inputs and reacting to them can lower response time (often happens in games).
   - End to end - Many cloud gamers have reported on reddit that <10 ms latency is where FPS and other action-heavy games feel as fast as playing them offline.

 - Internet bandwidth limits
   - streaming 24x7 video requires lot more bandwidth than text/image/audio
   - 1 gbps fiber connection (with no upload/download cap) is becoming increasingly popular in US, which is more than sufficient to stream UHD 90 fps video.
   - Streaming 3D content directly is not possible though. VR headsets-based use cases might (?) still prefer streaming 3D content over the rendered 2D output, I haven't studied VR well enough.

 - Latency limits of computers
   - Input/output device latency - 1 ms latency (1000 Hz) has been achieved on keyboards and mice, and gamers generally feel increased latency won't be detectable.
   - Game engine, 3D rendering latency - I don't know much about this, but seems doable for most games today in under 1 ms? It depends a lot on the exact application though, there's definitely lots of 3D apps that can't be built with 10 ms latency constraint.
   - Network roundtrip latency - <10 ms has already been achieved on consumer fiber connections in many US cities, there's no fundamental reason paying customers can't get this in cities across the world. Light travelling from Netherlands to California (9000 km) one-way takes 33 ms, in practice roundtrip latency is reported around 100 ms (50 ms one-way). As long as the closest datacentre is within 1000 km, there's no physical limitation on achieving <10 ms via fibre connection.
   - AI inference time - As per Jacob Steinhardt, [forward passes can be significantly parallelised](https://bounded-regret.ghost.io/how-fast-can-we-perform-a-forward-pass/). 1 frame of video can be generated in under <1 ms, assuming you build an ASIC just for that specific model.
   - AI inference cost - This is the biggest bottleneck. Diffusion models use maybe 0.1-1.0 PFLOP for 100 sampling steps, for one frame. At 90 fps that's 10-100 PFLOP per second of video generation. For 1 second per second output, you need a GPU cluster with 10-100 PFLOP/s. H200 is 4 PFLOP/s fp8 rentable at $2/hour. Assuming Epoch AI scaling laws of FLOP/s/dollar doubling every 2.5 years, we should get 16x more FLOP/s/dollar in 10 years, so 100 PFLOP/s rentable at $2/hour.

Effects on IT ecosystem
 - If this application can be done on cloud, then almost any application can be done on cloud
 - Cybersecurity and user control will be the only reasons to do things locally, performance will no longer be a reason. Financial incentives to build anything in favour of security or user control are a lot weaker than the incentives in favour of higher performance. Big Tech will no longer need to fund open source software for performance-based reasons, hence open-source software could lag behind. 
 - Client device could also change. End state of this vision is 99.9% of people own machines with touchscreen (keyboard+monitor) and network card (but no CPU, no disk, no RAM) and it is not practical to do anything unless you submit the job to a server. (This will probably a Big Tech server, unless small cloud is able to compete on getting low latency connections with ISPs who have inherent network effects.). See example of mobile being more locked down than desktop, but having more users. It is possible to live without a phone, but you lose access to jobs, friendships, etc. and are at a disadvantage relative to everyone else.
 - This incentive structure makes it technically less challenging for the NSA (or its equivalent in your country) to get 99% surveillance over people's thoughts. As of today they need to backdoor lots of devices, routers and cables, and send whatever is useful back to their servers. This might be possible technically but requires more developer time and coordination/coercion of intermediaries to pull off.
 - Incentives push in the direction of them using this data for political purposes and also leaking the data itself.



# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/project_ideas_for_you.md

2025-01-20

# Project ideas for you

Here's a (incomplete) list of projects that I wish existed. Feel free to complete any of them if you find them interesting enough. You'll probably also get other ideas if you browse through my website. I hoping to minimise duplication of info on my website.

I might work on some of these myself in future.

It's possible some of these ideas are completely off-base. If so, please let me know.

# Most important projects as per me

What is "important" depends on one's worldview. This list is biased towards my subjective worldview that considers future of surveillance, future of tech and geopolitics as very important. I would encourage to form your own independent view of what is important or meaningful to you and select projects based on that, instead of blindly copying my view.

#### Meta work

For each of the projects listed below, you can directly work on the project. Or you can do "meta" work that enables other people to complete the projects.

Examples of meta work:
 - find people who can fund the work
 - find people interested in doing the work and connect them to each other
 - raise media attention for the work to find more interested people
 - figure out business models if possible (Usually the most impactful+tractable+neglected opportunities to improve the world are hard-to-commercialise. Once you can find a way to commercialise them they become less neglected)
 - set up research labs or offices with infrastructure conducive to the work, and reduce entry barrier for interested people to get access to the infra
 - publish reviews of existing work. write about failed agendas so researchers won't waste time on the failed ones.
 - train people who are interested in doing the work but lack skills

Depending on the project, you can identify which of these meta work will be more useful and which will be less useful.

#### Anyone

Writing
 - Write a book about your life that will be released after you die. Prefer including information that you don't feel safe sharing while you are still alive.
   - Objective: People of later generations will get unfiltered view of the good and bad in your life, and can use this information to make their lives and their society better.
   - If the information will negatively affect other people who'll outlive you (such as family members), consider leaving the book with a young lawyer / trusted person and a date when they should release the book.
   - Publishing it (getting an ISBN or whatever) is optional. Put the book online and pay a trusted person to ensure the server hosting it doesn't ever go down.
   - You can also start a non-profit that popularises this "autobiography after death" idea and handles legal, payment, webhosting aspects for everyone else who wants to launch such a book.

 - If you hold any well-paying job, record videos of your day-to-day life at work. This will help others more quickly acquire the necessary tacit knowledge for them to get your job.

#### Politics

 - Consider starting a youtube channel and getting enough attention to influence politics.
   - Which niche you want your initial userbase to come from is upto you, the important thing is to not stop there and go for mass appeal eventually.
   - Which country's politics you'd like to influence is upto you. Probably you'll pick the country you live in.
   - This is the kind of insanely ambitious plan I wish I was the right person for, but might not be.
 - Look into industrialisation of agriculture in India, in particular the politics involved in consolidating small land holdings into big ones so that large-scale automation becomes possible.
   - 500 million plus people's lives depend on it.

#### Media/journalism

 - Consider starting an independent espionage org to infiltrate and HD video record an org doing something of questionable morality. For example, the Mole (anti-NK) or Edward Snowden (anti-US).
   - Consider NOT mentioning my name anywhere; I make no public claims on which orgs do or don't deserve to be spied on.

#### Psychology

 - Consider starting a youtube channel on psychology or or cultural issues.
   - IMO a lot of problems in modern world can be solved through changes in culture, even if there are no significant changes in material circumstances. So a few people like you could many countries' populations on a better path.

#### AI research - artificial superintelligence

 - Please read my post on [AI timelines](../my_ideas/my_ai_timelines.md) or related posts made by others.
   - They explain my guesses on why the AI labs in San Francisco might invent artifical superintelligence in the next 10 years, and what its outcomes could be.
   - If such arguments persuade you, consider working in the field of AGI/ASI safety.
   - I won't make specific recommendations on which exact project or job role is good, you have to figure that out for yourself. Please don't blindly defer to others when making this decision.

#### Any STEM researcher

Writing
 - Make a blogpost with photos of the latest equipment in your lab, short descriptions of what each equipment does, and short videos showing how to operate it.
   - Target audience: STEM-degree holder who know nothing about your research field
   - Objective: someone can quickly get an idea of what your field of research does on a day-to-day basis, without having to complete a bunch of courses.
   - Ideally you could even publish video recordings of all your experiments which are published in journals. It will be easier to understand, replicate and notice errors in experiments if there is publicly available video recording of them.
 - Identify Hamming questions in your research field and write about them. Hamming questions are basically the set of questions that would accelerate the research field *the most* if solved, and have a non-negligible chance of being solved if people tried solving them. For many fields, the Hamming question is IMO inventing a data collection tool (like microscope, brain probe, cyclotron, etc.) that provides data at a resolution/cost/speed not available with existing tools.
 - In general if you have any sort of expertise that is rare on Earth, consider writing about it. If you're patient you may be positively surprised how many people read it.

#### Fusion energy

Research, writing
 - Consider working on fusion energy, or writing about it.
   - IMO a lot of cultural problems would be improved if everyone involved was more wealthy. (Assuming wealth is measured in terms of real resources like food, water and energy consumption per capita, and not measured in terms of dollars.)
   - IMO this is one of those rare ideas that is radical and yet agreed on most people as good, if they think enough about it. Unlike many of the other projects listed on this page, that have obvious downsides if executed well and even more downsides if executed poorly.
   - The main argument against fusion I've read is that all people should abandon all attempts at tech progress and put all their attention and energy into some social science projects instead. I am sympathetic to this perspective but don't fully agree. If this argument were true then most of the projects on this page would not be worth doing.

#### Biotech

Writing
 - Write about automation of biotech R&D. Optimistic/pessimistic/neutral take, anything is fine.
 - Write about history of 1990-present biotech.

Research
 - Look into feasibility of mics and cameras implanted into human body. (If this turns out feasible, carefully pick who to disclose this information to.)
 - Work in the bioweapons space, to reduce risk of anyone using a bioweapon or mitigating damage
   - I'm not sure what the best projects are in this space, go ask someone who knows about it.
 - Work on genetic engineering of humans
   - Again, I'm the wrong person to ask what the best projects here are, see [this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JEhW3HDMKzekDShva/significantly-enhancing-adult-intelligence-with-gene-editing) for example.

#### Cybersecurity

Hardware
 - Improve airgapped tech
   - Test all the Faraday cages available online for security. Suggest recommendations based on security, price, blending in with society, etc
   - Handmade radios that can read wifi IP packets. (I'm not sure this is even possible.)

Software
 - Improve internet anonymity
   - Payment-based (or proof-of-work-based?) firewalls so server owners don't need to deanonymise and demand "reputation-building" of IP addresses to defend against DDOS. Proton and Brave already have working implementations of proof-of-work captcha, I'm unsure why they haven't replaced Cloudflare yet. So you could figure that out.
   - Pay-for-bandwidth on Tor (or something Tor-like), so nobody has to altruistically donate bandwidth on Tor
   - Invent something Tor-like that resists analysis of metadata and traffic stats better than Tor
 - Improve airgapped tech
   - Increase ease-of-use of LUKS disk encryption.
   - Help with mature implementation of Shamir secret-sharing that can ship with linux.
     - `ssss` already exists, I'm not sure what's the process to make it as trustworthy as pgp for example. Probably just more cybersecurity researchers using it and reporting issues?
   - Linux phone that doesn't suck.
     - Will need to get popular enough that all popular apps (food delivery, ride sharing etc) also ship a linux version of their app. 
     - ios and android (and the mobile browsers) would be a lot less locked down if linux phones existed as a competitor.
 - Misc
   - Good SFTP GUI clients for android and ios (iphone)
     - Support image/audio/video thumbnails and previews, GUI file browser, support internet connections that are really good (low latency) and really bad (high latency, high packet loss)
     - ios filesystem probably sucks on purpose so people are forced to purchase icloud subscription (or purchase macbook+airdrop) instead of renting a linux server. The bigger move to play here is to launch a linux phone (see above).

Writing
 - Write about hardware backdoors.
 - Write about cyberwarfare from a game theory lens.

#### AI and information tech

Software
 - LLM embedding search projects
   - Obtain upperbound on effectiveness of LLM embedding search-based stylometric doxxing.
   - LLM embedding search over Libgen books' text.
   - LLM embedding search over CommonCrawl plaintext.
   - LLM embedding search over ethereum blobdata or another hard-to-censor data store.
 - LLM language translation projects
   - Integrate LLM language translation better with browser and OS.
   - Realtime voice language translation for in-person conversation. Connect to two pairs of headphones and two screens. Play the translation while the person is still speaking, and subtract the original from the headphone mix.
 - One-click LLM-generated summaries of every ~10 pages of any libgen epub.

 - [TIMEBOUND] Solve [VNC challenge](https://codex.flywire.ai/app/vnc_matching_challenge) in drosophilia connectome. No neuroscience knowledge needed. Fully map vertices between two graphs (~19k vertices each, ~2-4M edges each) to maximise number of common edges.
   - This investigates the connectome hypothesis. Is a weighted graph of neurons (connectome) alone sufficient to learn useful things about C elegans or Drosophilia melanogaster brains, or is lower-level information such as electric signal data needed?

Infra
 - Hard disk "dead drop" marketplace - as a replacement to torrent for large datasets

#### Pharmacology

 - Figure out substances that do any of the following, but without the downsides and side effects that existing substances have:
   - improve socialising similar to alcohol and cannabis, or similar to oxytocin. Especially focus on changes in ability to experience trust or love that are long-term.
   - render someone incapable of lying, similar to barbiturates but more effective. (If you find this, disclose this very carefully, it has huge political implications.)
   - improve fluid intelligence (IQ), focus, executive function, working memory, long-term memory, etc.
   - increase human lifespan
 - In general any sort of work in pharmacology that is aimed at improving the baseline human condition, rather than fixing disabilities, is someting I'd be a fan of.


# Some more projects

Here's some more cool projects. I'm less confident they're important or worth doing, but consider looking into them anyway.

#### AI and information tech

Software
 - Language learning content
   - Possibly produced by video generation AI
   - Produce video content aimed at language learning based on "comprehensible input". (Video content of real-life scenarios where visuals help explain to the viewer what the audio means.). Prefer near-zero large gaps in the audio, entertaining not just educational, and progressively increase vocab size and grammar complexity based on the learner's language level. Repeat this for all pairs of popular source and destination languages.
 - Look into Denuvo game crack and study state-of-the-art in beating code obfuscation.
   - Using deliberately complicated data structures is one of the last defences against perfect surveillance, see how well it actually holds up versus not.
 - Find zerodays, leaked identity databases, hacking software etc and publish about them publicly.
   - It would be nice to get more public information on what state of the art looks like here.
   - There's a responsible way to do this, figure that out for yourself and follow it.
 - Write better RAM-only software
   - We're reaching a point where the whole world's plaintext data and most of its programs can run entirely in RAM, rarely ever touching the disk. Even backup can be done to another machine's RAM instead of to disk. Performant RAM-only databases and software are still hard to write however.
 - Improve DevOps to setup cloud machine in < 1 second
   - Within one second it should be possible to get the following ready: launch new machine, install requested software (apt install xyz, snap install xyz), libraries (npm install xyz, pip install xyz, etc), load user API keys to respective tools, load user dataset on disk
   - There are two software dev paradigms: where developer time costs more and where hardware+electricity costs more, this is to speedup the former
   - (Maybe) Increase ease-of-use of attaching/detaching block storage from processor, and resizing block storage without corrupting data. A user can quickly attach external block storage (with existing dataset). Instead of downloading over internet, or from same cloud's s3.
   - (Maybe) Provide block storage with various popular libraries installed. A user can quickly: rent + attach external block storage
   - (Maybe) Provide external RAM with RAM filesystem with various popular libraries installed. A user can quickly: rent external RAM + attach external RAM + copy to internal RAM + detach external RAM.
   - (Maybe) Don't install anything at installation time, but fetch from the external RAM fs at runtime
   - (Maybe) Distribute .pyc bytecode instead of python wheels (for all combinations of OS, python and library versions)
   - (Maybe) Figure out why npm installs are slow and speed them up
   - (Maybe) Standardise a keystore where someone can dump all their API keys, and import them on any internet-connected machine with one-liner command + password + 2FA (optional).
   - (It's possible some of this can already be done a different way, and I'm just ignorant)
 - Global notification app
   - Allow any website to register with your app and push mobile notifications through your app
   - Why?
     - Ease of ensuring user security from everyone except the server themselves: Websites (Google, Apple do security via chromium, safari security features) > Mobile apps (Google, Apple do security via android and ios security features, and app store approval system) > Desktop apps (User must figure out which apps to trust)
     - Open source mobile browser is easier to maintain than open source mobile OS. In general, software complexity is a moat. Easier to maintain reduces cost-of-exit from Google and Apple ecosystems, which reduces decision-making over future direction of ecosystem exerted by Apple and Google. (ios+android market share is 99.5%, adding Samsung android-skin its 99.8%, whereas chromium+safari mobile browsers are ~97% with firefox and UC browser as minor competitors)
     - Most mobile apps could be mobile websites instead, if they had a way to send notifications while closed.
     - (Launching a linux phone is still a bigger move though.)

Infra
 - Setup low latency ("edge") GPU datacentres in hundreds of cities across the world
   - i.e. as many geographic locations as cloudflare, not aws
   - its possible cloudflare themselves do this over next 1-2 years
   - This is a "cool" project that benefits a few use cases (such as AI-enabled cloud gaming) but doesn't necessarily improve the world in terms of amount of surveillance.

#### Games

 - Write a game that does not blindly copy ideas from existing game genres.
   - Games allow you to express a strictly larger set of ideas than films or books. However as of 2024 it's still more common for a person to say that they changed their life over a book or film, than a game. If you're imaginative enough, you can change this.

#### Robotics

 - Run an automated kitchen operating at medium scale (1k-1M meals/day), or advance robotics and AI for the same.
   - If you compare society before Newton and today, cooking is one activity that still consumes a huge number of man hours as it did then.
   - "Scaling laws" + robotics has lots of low hanging fruit, see DeepMind's end-2024 papers for example. Even if you don't work on the AI yourself, there may be other work (such as hardware) which helps bring the AI into the world faster.

#### Biotech

 - Look into making meal replacements (Huel, Soylent etc) more tasty, run longer scale trials etc
   - I don't know much about freeze-drying proteins/vitamins/minerals or about chemistry of taste, so I'm the wrong person to guide you here.
 - Work in the artifical meat protein space
   - Again, don't know much about this space personally.

#### Urban planning

 - Figure out why don't we build one city with one billion population
   - Assuming end-to-end travel time of 2 hours via bullet-train, max population = (200 km/h * 2h)^2 * (10000 people/km^2) = 1.6 billion people
   - Is there any engineering challenge such as water supply that prevents this from happening? Or is it just lack of any political elites with willingness + engg knowledge + governing sufficient funds? If latter, will a billion-person city become feasible after 20-50 years once the world is richer and more elites govern enough capital to make it happen?
   - Bigger cities will probably accelerate tech progress, and other types of progress, as people are not forced to choose between their existing relationships and the place best for their career 






# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/connect_with_me/contact_me.md

2025-01-16

# Contact me

## Online

**My email:**

samuel.da.shadrach@gmail.com

Please consider emailing me if you at all believe either you might benefit from it, or I might benefit from it. Please don't waste words writing formal salutations and filler words, just get to the point.

I find call faster than text for extended conversation. To maximise value you get from me, consider writing a short document about what you'd like to talk about and attach it to the email. Then we can schedule a quick call where I go through your document and provide input to you.

Just in case I ignore your email, you can get my attention by [donating me](./donate_to_me.md) a tiny amount and attaching proof in the email.

I'm okay being spammed. Worst case I'll ignore your email. It doesn't consume a lot of your time to write me a one para email, so you shouldn't overthink it. I don't mind spending one-hour calls with lots of strangers to help them. I expect some fraction of these callers will repay the favour back to me when I need it.

It does not matter if we've spoken before or not, or if you're approaching in a personal or professional context, or what your message is about, as long it'll add value to me. Even if you're criticising or accusing me for example, it's possible this adds value to my life, and I might appreciate you for the same.

## In person

Probably first meet me on audio/video call, and if it goes well, we could meet in person.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/connect_with_me/hire_me.md

# Hire me

You can hire me for $200k / annum or $150 / hour for almost any task in any location.

Use common sense though, I might make exceptions for moral reasons, threat to my safety, etc.

[Contact me](./contact_me.md) for the same.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/connect_with_me/date_me.md

2025-01-20

# Date me

Writing this doc is hard because:
 - I have an incomplete model of what I could one day appreciate in other people, and an incomplete model of what other people could appreciate in me.
- See [culture war thread](../my_ideas/culture_war_thread.md), what is appropriate to discuss depends on where I live.

I value novelty highly so if you're interested in me romantically, you should probably reach out even if the criteria below don't match. Cost of failure is very low from your point of view, I would appreciate the attempt even if it fails.

[Contact me](../contact_me.md) if you'd like to talk.

Relationship style
 - **This doc is mostly about criteria for long-term relationship - which I'm willing to share publicly.**
 - I probably want to get married. I'm straight. I can likely tolerate mono. I have no clue if I want children, and haven't put enough thought into it. I'm not particular about what age I get married or what age you are. (I could change my mind on these points later.)

Money
 - I'm quite particular about keeping our finances separate. I could make exceptions if you're earning less than 10k INR / month but even so, I'm probably not the best match for you.
 - I'm okay dating someone with significantly less or more money than me. It comes with additional challenges, but my current guess is it can sometimes be worth putting the effort to solve them.

Place
 - If I get financial backing, I probably want to live in San Francisco.
 - Otherwise I could probably live in any tier-1 city in India.
 - I might be open to living outside India or living in India but not in a tier-1 city. For this, I should end up liking the people and environment of your city, it's not enough if I like you. Another restriction with living outside India for the long-term is that I don't want to take a job so I may not be eligible for visa.
 - (All of this could change depending on which phase in life I'm in.)

Time
 - I probably can't spend more than 1-2 days per week with you. I try to spend a good amount of time working. I also value a minimum amount of alone time. (This could change depend on which phase in life I'm in.)

Values
 - I value authenticity and emotional vulnerability highly, among close relationships.
 - I'm atheist and can be annoying about this in private. We'd be a better fit if you're atheist too.
 - I'm somewhat altruistic and ambitious. We'd be a better fit if you are similar yourself, or atleast understanding of this aspect of me.
 - I don't let anyone else take my life decisions for me. We'd be a better fit if you take your own life decisions yourself too. I'd rather not start a long-term relationship with you if I know other people (such as your family members) are going to interfere in a negative way some months or years later.

I'm sympathetic to [Paul Graham's advice](https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html) on this.

> Don't marry someone who doesn't understand that you need to work, or sees your work as competition for your attention. If you're ambitious, you need to work; it's almost like a medical condition; so someone who won't let you work either doesn't understand you, or does and doesn't care.

Personality traits
 - Introvert. Nerd. Very curiousity-driven. I look at the world through a very intellectual lens. This could be a plus or minus depending on your own outlook of the world.
 - High openness-to-experience. Not that interested in stability or minimising risk. If you're too low on openness-to-experience or risk tolerance, we're probably a bad fit.
 - Direct communication style, can give and receive feedback and criticism. I can dial this down on request but only so much, if you're very sensitive we're probably a bad fit.
 - I can put significant efforts (including one-sided) for others, can share past examples of the same.
 - I'm not the most happy or emotionally stable person as of today. You will inevitably have to shoulder some of the burden despite my best efforts to find other solutions. (This could change in future.)

Intimacy
 - I find "actually wanting the other person to have a good time" to be more important than just "not technically violating consent". My previous partners seemed mostly happy with me in this domain lol.

Social circle
 - See my doc on [my people](../my_people.md) for more on this. My social circle is still evolving. Not everyone I know gets along with or even knows each other, so it's okay if you don't get along with some of the people in my circle either. Likewise I'm probably not going to put a lot of effort trying to impress your social circle, although I might put in a little effort if requested.

Hobbies
 - Hobbies don't matter to me for relationship compatibility but I'm listing them anyways.
 - Travelling, board games (chess, catan), music (rap, rock, nightcore, etc), books (nonfiction, you can read my posts on my research for more)
 - I tend to shift places often so I prefer hobbies that are easier to carry arround. Extreme end of this is obviously hobbies you can access on a laptop. (This is not a hard constraint, and could change in future.)
 - I might be open to trying your hobbies too.



# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/connect_with_me/donate_to_me.md

2024-12-31

# Donate

If you like the work I do, consider donating money to me.

Do not donate:
 - if your expected networth in next 5 years is below $500k. There's a possibility you need this money more than me.
 - if you feel you have obtained most of your money by morally grey or immoral means. This is true whether or not I ever get to know how you obtained your money.

#### Donating less than $1000

For amounts below $1000, I only accept Monero (XMR) from anonymous donors.

**My XMR address:**

446uMYQvFeN5kmwC4TKs4h9BLTbDmXD9ECTTpe5NfnXKby7XSeY876LMpSryKMLFBAYLYWumrxdftLcqnp2F1CSQMHrHpPb

I prefer anonymous donations because I don't have time or interest in doing a background check on small donors. And I would not want to entangle my reputation with yours without a background check.

How?
 - If you've donated to me, do not message me saying you've donated to me, as that can break the anonymity.
 - The best way to buy XMR is usually buying BTC first using a bank transfer, then swapping that for XMR. Reddit has recommendations for both KYC and no-KYC options. If you find this hard or time-consuming, consider finding a friend who can buy it for you and paying them a commission. Learning these skills can be fun and can come in handy in the future.

#### Donating $1000 to $500k

The above XMR address still works. However I can likely support other payment modes such as wire transfer (SWIFT), Paypal/Stripe or US equity.

I can also list you on my website after a background check, if you prefer this.

[Email me](./contact_me.md) and I'll quickly figure out the best way to accept your donation. If you're undecided on whether to donate and want a 1-hour call with me first, please email me.

#### Donating above $500k

I'd recommend donating $500k first, and giving me a couple weeks to figure out the legal aspects. Once I'm ready, you can send the remaining amount. [Email me](./contact_me.md) and I'll figure it out.

Allying with a politician or billionaire would be my lifetime goal. If you are one, I'm willing to put in a lot of effort to build such a relationship. It could be a standard donor-recipient relationship, in which case I will insist on maintaining autonomy over my decision-making. Or it could be a relationship that involves shared decision-making, in which case we may both have to make compromises.

## Consequences of donating to me

Money donated to me is not earmarked for a specific project, it is given so that I have more agency in the world. **If I spend all of the money on having fun or on some fruitless endeavour, I have not done anything unethical.** I'll try not to do that, but I make no legally binding promises.

Receiving $500k cumulative donation would significantly change my life, as that would let me get an EU citizenship and fast-tracked US green card. If I were to live in the US (most probably in SF), I could meet potential collaborators and mentors, and abide by the free-speech norms of the US. I am not keen on shifting to the US on a visa that lets someone else arbitrarily restrict what I do or say.

Receiving small donations will not significantly change my life but would provide me encouragement, and allow me to tell others that I get paid for my work, instead of telling them I'm unemployed.

I am not dependent on donations. I currently live in India on approx $200 per month (approx $2500 per year). The exact amount I spend can go up or down, for example depending on the projects I'm working on. I can sustain myself on my savings for atleast a few years.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/value_differences_disclaimer.md

2024-12-24

# Value differences (Disclaimer)

Your first impression after meeting me in person or via audio/video call may be noticeably different from what you'd expect if your only impression of me is from this website. Different contexts elicit diifferent slices of one's personality.

My website attempts to have high information density of things not already obvious to you, and things you may disagree with. Whereas if we meet in person or on call, and don't know each other well, it may be better to find things we agree on first.

Also, if I'm meeting you in person, I'm likely to put more effort trying to understand your values and beliefs, as compared to preaching my own values and beliefs. I want to understand you and be able to empathise with you even if I don't agree with you.

I am still trying to figure out the optimal balance between sharing my own views and trying to understand other people's views. This is my current best attempt.

My core values include truth and empathy. If you practice these in your daily life, we are more likely to get along, no matter what our specific values and beliefs may be.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/advice_for_you/advice_disclaimer.md

2024-12-13

# Advice (Disclaimer)

I am quite confused which audience I should tailor this advice page and generally my entire internet presence to. I'm currently experimenting with trying to tailor to everyone simultaneously. I think maintaining multiple separate identities on the internet does not work well over long time horizon. I probably won't update these pages regularly, as giving advice is not my primary life goal.

I generally hesitate on giving advice. There is a lot of advice on the internet and a lot of it is noise to me. 

#### 1. Evidence behind the advice

Assuming I was the recipient of advice, here's the hierarchy of how seriously I'd take that advice:
 - advice empirically proven to work
   - the more meaningfully distinct circumstances it has worked in, the better
   - a theoretical model for why the advice works is a bonus, but sufficient empirical evidence always trumps theory
   - IMO there are entire fields where the replication crisis can be solved by making larger sample sizes the norm and small sample sizes as abnormal (by getting the funding, culture etc so this is possible)
 - theoretical model of why some advice would work 
   - the more distinct types of people are confident in the model, the better
   - empirical evidence about similar-but-not-same situations is a bonus

Whenever you are taking advice from me, try to figure out where exactly on the hierarchy the advice sits. Even if something worked for me, please remember I am just one person. And if I don't have personal experience with it, please remember this is just one person's guess with no empirical evidence.

#### 2. Context-dependence of advice

I rarely ever tell people that they "must" or "should" do xyz. If I make this mistake please correct me.

You have information about:
 - how your brain works - your likes, dislikes, what motivates you, etc. Conveying information about your feelings to me is difficult, even if you genuinely want to convey it. So I assume I lack this information about you. In particular there is an is-ought distinction where transmitting information is easy ("if you do X, Y will probably happen") and transmitting values is hard ("you should do X"). So I mostly do the former.
 - your context, your unique life circumstances. Conveying this information to me is possible but takes a lot of time. So I may also be lacking this information about you.

This doc is full of me saying "consider" doing xyz. If I use the word "consider", that means there may exist exceptions to the advice. Sometimes I may be aware of the exceptions but I'm not listing them out, and sometime I may not be aware of the exceptions. The point is to use your own judgement. You are the master of your own life and I'm not interested in being your guru.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/advice_for_you/advice_for_you_knowledge.md

2025-01-15

To do for myself:
 - Rewrite page so it's simpler and more people can understand
 - Make it easier to directly navigate to relevant section

# Advice for you (Knowledge class)

If you don't understand anything on this page, please ask me about it.

Please read [Advice Disclaimer](./advice_disclaimer.md) first.

## Advice for everyone - Make notes

For almost everyone on Earth, I recommend making more notes about your life.

Why?
 - You will likely gain a deeper understanding of various aspects of your life.
   - It could be fundamental things like what your likes, dislikes, values, etc. are.
   - It could be practical things like how to dress or what to eat or how to write good emails.
 - You will retain thoughts that are otherwise temporary and easily forgotten.
 - It'll help you make long-term plans.
 - You'll notice patterns over long periods of time, such as problems that repeated themselves multiple times. and solutions that have worked multiple times.

How?
 - Pen/paper or digital works. I prefer digital because it's easier to edit and easier to preserve. (Yes, paper survives 100+ years, hard disk survives only ~5 years, but you can make copies of digital work more easily and preserve the copies.) Preserving long-term is very important, you want to be able to preserve your notes for 30+ years.
 - I've never made paper notes. If you're making paper notes, it is best you get advice from someone who does this. If I remember, state of the art is using acid-free paper with archival ink and storing backup in a secure location with low humidity. (The paper is more important than the ink.)
 - If you're making digital notes, the easiest option is google drive or apple notes or something similar.
 - If you don't have or want to use KYC/phone number/digital ID, protonmail/protondrive is a good option as of 2024-12. Most websites (like Google, Apple, etc) force you to enter phone number which is tied to KYC in many countries.
 - Also it is a good idea to keep a backup on a disk in a secure physical location. Check the disk for errors once a year and swap it every few years, most disks fail in ~5 years.
 - If you know basic software development, I recommend you rent a linux machine, ssh into it and store plaintext/markdown notes instead. File formats, folder structure, account login methods, payment methods, UI/UX and lots of other things change every few years. Many of these rapid changes are causally downstream of the war between Big Tech companies, and it's better if your second brain isn't stored in some random file format you don't understand.
 - Some people like the fancy features of Roam, Obsidian, hackmd and so on. I've personally not found any of the features worth sacrificing the ability to preserve your notes 30+ years. If any of these tools support import/export in plaintext (NOT json, csv, rtf, docx or anything else), you could consider using them while also maintaining a plaintext backup outside of the tool.
 - Beyond this how much security you need is upto you, as additional security takes a lot more effort. Most people don't critically "need" more security, although it would be nice to live in a world where higher security could be obtained for little effort. Make sure to define your threat model. If your threat model is defending against targetted govt investigation and intelligence agencies, you could look into: LUKS disk encryption, anonymous server host paid anonymously (or better, host your own server in a secure location), separate devices and locations to login, PGP-encrypted ASCII paper backups along with disk backups, cronjob or custom deadmans switch, study enough network programming that you actually understand network vulnerabilities of your system, and so on. You'll get good security recommendations on the dark web. An airgapped machine in a faraday cage is the most secure setup, but most people want network access.
   - If you're using an NSA-proof security setup like this, maybe consider publishing the details so the rest of us can converge on best practices. (I understand people who use maximally secure setups are the same set of people who will not talk about their secure setups. That's why I'm nudging you a little bit here.)
   - Also remember that if you're operating this sort of setup, 50% of your opsec is the people you surround yourself with, not cybersecurity stuff. Spend as much effort studying that as you spend studying cybersecurity.


## Advice for everyone - Learn from the internet

 - You can improve nearly every aspect of your life by learning from the internet.
 - As of 2024, most google search results are SEO-optimised crap. (The website author deliberately wants your search to hit their page so they can serve you ads, and they don't care if they actually answer your question or not.) 
 - Popular platforms worth using as of 2024
   - Reddit - honest recommendations, life perspectives, technical Qs. Use "site:reddit.com" in your search query to get responses from reddit. Reddit users are not being paid to answer your query, and are more likely to be honest.
   - Libgen - free books
   - scihub - free papers
   - Youtube - podcasts, life perspectives
   - Stackexchange - very technical Qs, academia-heavy audience
   - Twitter - I hate the forced login and politics, but its good for following latest news in any community
   - Tiktok - yes lol you can even get latest news and technical tips on tiktok
   - discord - fastest way to audio/video call strangers, can follow open source (usually tech) projects
   - hackernews - basically the number one forum for software developers
   - lesswrong - niche forum I follow. In general whatever niche interests you have, there's probably a very small number of places on the internet that have its userbase. Find these places and follow them.
 - As of 2024, attention on the internet follows a power-law distribution. A very small number of websites have almost all the attention of all people on Earth. If you want to get answers to your queries, you have to learn to post your queries on these platforms.
 - LLMs like GPT4 (ChatGPT) are also good for receiving advice, and getting better.
 - Search even things you'd not think about searching. Every question you can imagine can have answers online. For example, how to become better at running, how to ensure house remains heated, how to sleep better, how to win arguments, etc etc etc.
 - Learn to get good at filtering information.
   - Most of the people around you in real life are a biased audience, they represent a very small portion of humanity. They are selected based on nationality, class, profession, religion, style of thinking, etc. Most of the people on the internet are also a biased audience. Different websites filter for different types of people. (And yes, please remember that people on the internet are people, with an entire life outside of the handful of comments of theirs you read.)
   - For example chemsistry stackexchange will predominantly attract people with a chemistry degree and predominantly from US/Europe. Whereas a subreddit about your country will attract the upper and upper-middle class of your country, all degrees, and likely only one political side. (The people of the other political sides were probably annoyed and went to a different subreddit or website instead.)
   - [Social dark matter](https://homosabiens.substack.com/p/social-dark-matter) is another very important idea to internalise here. Almost everyone has things they will avoid talking about or be dishonest about, especially on the intetnet, because of their irl situation. You will get a skewed picture of reality if you trust their internet representation to completely capture the irl version of them.


## Advice for (almost) everyone - Make a website

 - For almost everyone I recommend making your own website
 - How much and what types of content you post on the website is a personal decision. However, having a website will remind you that you have this option.
 - As of 2025, if you lack software skills, it's easier to host content on substack and youtube respectively. I'd still recommend making atleast a one page website that links to your substack and youtube. You can learn to use github pages for this, or pay someone who knows a bit about software.
 - If you have non-zero software skills, here's a simplified version of the setup I use. Rent the cheapest Hetzner Cloud server you find. Store your plaintext and other static files in `/var/www/Website`. Store the config file below in `/etc/nginx/sites-available/yourwebsitenamegoeshere.conf`. Delete the default website and config file found in these folders. Then `sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo apt install nginx -y && sudo systemctl start nginx`. Whenever modifying static files do: `sudo systemctl reload nginx`. Purchase a domain from cloudflare or anywhere else (cloudflare does free DDOS protection), and set `A` records to your server's IP (IPv4). You can also use AI to write a more elaborate nginx conf and write CSS files for you.
```
server {
    listen 80;
    server_name yourwebsitenamegoeshere.com www.yourwebsitenamegoeshere.com;
    root /var/www/Website/;
    location / {
        autoindex on;
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
}
```

## Advice for people who publish content online

Please consider keeping plaintext (not json, docx or whatever format) backups of your work.
Why?
 - Your favourite publishing platform (be it substack or wordpress or whatever) is not guaranteed to exist in 5 years, and if it does it might look like a different company altogether.
   - Payment policy might change
   - KYC / identification policy might change
   - business model or revenue stream might change, which changes everything about a company (even Big tech companies are not immune, Apple is the only whose revenue is not ad-based, LLMs might change the ad revenue landscape, etc.)
   - company might be acquired or lose talent etc. Check lifespan of median tech company.
 - Your account might get censored, hacked, lose access etc.
 - Popular file formats might change in 5 years. Plaintext lasts forever.

## Using AI to accelerate learning

AI can help you learn anything faster. It is best if you know basic software developer skills and can write simple bash scripts. (If you're on windows please rent a linux machine. Don't learn windows commandline, it's a waste of time.)

If you don't have software skills, you can probably still find online websites that can do most of the following. The tools may have rate limits, ads, higher cost etc but you'll find them.

Some specific tricks using AI to speedup learning:
 - Transcribe youtube videos: yt-dlp + ffmpeg silenceremove + whisper API
 - Extract plaintext from any webpage: curl + htmlq
 - Extract plaintext from epubs: unzip + find + htmlq
 - Once you've extracted plaintext, you can use AI to generate summaries and notes, simplify complex terminology, ask specific questions, generate quizzes or anki decks, etc.
 - Ideally you should be able to embedding-search everything. As of 2025-01-14 I'm not aware of any embedding search solution where you can "bring your own plaintext" and it'll do embedding generation and inference. But I'm expecting this will soon exist.



## Trading and investment advice

Proof: I have personal experience. I have invested and traded my money, and worked at trading-related companies.

Investments and trading will likely not be the primary determinant of your life trajectory, unless you make it your full-time job. Increasing your income or revenue is more useful than trading/investing your existing money.

If you are very ambitious, there's probably some projects you actually believe in that you can make concentrated bets on - finanically and otherwise. But for most other people, its worth knowing about investment basics and making a handful of investments in the background.

If your savings cover less than 3 months of your living expenses (and this isn't expected to increase over the next 5 years), most of this information is not relevant to you. I'd recommend keeping your money safe in your bank account for emergencies, and not trading or investing it. You can still acquire some of the knowledge, without putting in any money.

#### Investments

I have used IBKR to buy S&P500 as a long-term investment (>5 years hold). I may or may not also own some BTC and ETH.

If you are considering buying S&P500: Make sure to look at S&P500 100 years historical chart. Consider studying basic concepts of finance like probability, expected value, variance, tail risk and timeframes. This knowledge is not mandatory but it'll prevent you from buying too much / too little or selling your investment too early.

IMO studying finance is somewhat useful even if you're not investing your own money. Looking at the world through a lens of probability and linear optimisation is a skill that many finance/econ people have and many non-finance people could benefit from.

#### Trading

It is possible to self-study trading from the internet. However, trading knowledge has an uncanny valley where someone who has a medium amount of knowledge and experience will tend to lose more money than someone who has no knowledge or experience. You have to cross this valley to become an expert. If you practice trading for multiple years you'll probably be profitable eventually, but consider if the time invested doing this is worth it. Long-term passive investment is good when you don't have a lot of time to devote to trading.

If you'd like to learn trading, practice with a small amount first, but take your decision-making process as seriously as if you had invested a significant amount. Don't bother with paper trading, just use a small amount of real money. Make sure to list multiple possible outcomes of each trade, their probabilities, the underlying hypotheses behind your trade and what could invalidate it.

"Technical analysis" is mostly a scam IMO, ignore it. Fundamentals-based trading is fine. Using an algo to predict trends in other people's trades is fine. Small cap is usually better than big cap for trading due to less efficiency. Shorter timeframe (seconds, minutes) is usually better than longer timeframe (weeks, months) if you're writing a bot, and vice versa if you're not.

Being successful at options trading is harder than it looks, I've lost money almost everytime I've done it and I don't personally recommend it unless you can devote atleast a year full-time just to options. This also applies to any unusual derivative whose theoretical valuation model looks at all similar to black scholes. (For example, binary options, there are mobile apps that try to addict you to it.)


## If you are a software developer

Proof: I have personal experience as a software dev.

Every development in how information transmits - be it printing press, semaphore, radio, television or telephone - has brought significant changes to how war and politics are practised. Consider studying the political implications of your own work. I only recommend studying this if you genuinely care or are genuinely curious.

No matter which country or company you're in, the technical knowledge you produce as a developer will likely eventually transfer to the Big Tech companies. This could be via a chain of acqusitions, via people leaving your company to start another, or via blogs and github repos. You might therefore have some influence on where your work finally ends up being used.

The fraction of Earth's population using Big Tech services has been going strictly upward for 20+ years. Every new business idea that succeeds is likely to increase this number, as businesses get acquired or their key ideas replicated.


## If you want to learn software dev

As of 2024, software development is one of the highest paying professions that you can get just by self-studying for 1-2 years on the internet. This is because a software business can serve millions of customers while investing very little money. Most other industries either can't serve millions of customers, or require significant initial investment to do it.

`Net revenue = number of customers * (profit per customer - cost per customer) - initial investment`

w3chools has good tutorials for learning software development.

Start with their tutorial on Python. Python is a good language to start. After learning some python, you can learn C (not C++). Don't make javascript your first language.

Ask a friend who knows software to install the tools for you, such as compilers/interpreters, libraries, etc. Installing things is not beginner-friendly and you should not spend time on it as a beginner. Making a friend who knows software dev is also useful to ensure you're not on the wrong path.

Initial concepts worth learning are: how to do standard input/output, data types, arithmetic, loops, functions. At first, ignore concepts that are not in this list, and become experienced with these concepts first.

Write code in a simple text editor like Notepad, Notepad++, Sublime Text, etc. No need for fancy IDE. Online code editor is okay but also learn how to do things on your own machine.

Also learn some linux commands such cp, mkdir, rm, mv, etc. Sign up to a platform like aws ec2 or gcp to get access to linux machines. You might get free credits.

Only after you have done all of this, try learning a language for a specific task. For example ReactJS for frontend web development or Java for mobile app development or whatever. It is possible to directly jump into building a website without knowing fundamentals, but you will eventually end up going back to fundamentals anyway.

Do whatever keeps you motivated. It's better to learn things the wrong way than to give up and not learn.



# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/advice_for_you/advice_for_you_india_knowledge.md

2025-01-20

To do for myself:
 - Rewrite page so it's simpler and more people can understand
 - Make it easier to directly navigate to relevant section

# Advice for you (India, knowledge class)

You can read [Advice Disclaimer](./advice_disclaimer.md) first. The disclaimer says you should not take my advice too seriously, because there could be a lot about you and your situation that I do not not understand.

Figure out which section of this page is meant for you. Also, you can read the sections which are not meant for you. If you are very ambitious, they might still help.

If you don't understand anything on this page, please ask me about it. Even if you don't live in India, you can read this page, you might find something useful.

## If you have atleast 50,000 INR in savings (and live in India) - career advice

Proof: I don't have personal experience with this.

Consider finding a job that provides you with a lot more savings. Making more money may reduce your anxiety of the future. Making more money may allow to make less compromises on your moral values. Also you might get more free time to devote to something or someone you care about.

I understand you might be happy not trying to increase your income, and that is also fine. Don't let me ruin your happiness. Depending on how much free time your job gives you, you may also choose to start a side project or hobby around things you care about. This is great, although I would usually recommend starting it part-time and not quitting your job.

(If you are very ambitious, you can also read the section after this section.)

How?
 - Independent decision-making
   - The more ambitious you are, the more you have to take your own career decisions instead of blindly copying what your friends and family are asking you to do. The decisions required to climb one step in society's status heirarchies may look smart to them and the decisions required to climb five steps may look stupid to them, if none of them have climbed five steps or seen anyone else who has done it. For example if you're a shopkeeper it's easier to propose to your family that you'll buy a second shop, than to propose that you will campaign for your town's MLA seat. How ambitious you are is a personal choice. I am not telling you how ambitious you should or should not be.
   - If they dislike your choices, sometimes you can simply explain to them why you think your decisions are better than the decisions they are proposing. If that fails, there are non-violent ways to resist other people trying to influence your career in a negative way. Whether you choose to use such methods is a personal decision and depends on the exact details of your situation. See my [Controversial ideas page](../my_ideas/controversial.md) for more.
 - Work ethic
   - I should maybe start by repeating all the advice that should already be obvious to you. If you want to work hard in order to increase your income: don't be addicted to substances, get good diet, sleep and exercise, don't gamble your money, etc. (If you don't want to work hard or make money, that is a different matter.)
 - Degree and credentials
   - If you can get a bank loan to pay for your college, you should probably take it. If someone is willing to loan you money for the same, maybe you should accept. But there are more details here which I can't explain in short.
   - A lot of the really good jobs do not require a degree but require skills. However entry-level and easier jobs have a lot of competition hence employers use the degree as a filtering criteria. It is easier to climb up if you have a degree, but don't let lack of degree discourage you, your chance of success is still high if you work hard and smart.
   - If you already have some skills but lack credentials, upload short videos on youtube showcasing your skills. Good candidate includes competent and aligned. Youtube videos can quickly showcase that you are trustworthy, that you can function in a professional context, and that you are competent. Basically, you want to reduce the number of hours the employer or human resources (HR) department has to invest to find out if you are a good candidate. Every hour of additional work for HR is a cost, and credential-based filters (like degrees) are a way for HR to reduce that cost. If you lack credentials, you have to find other ways to quickly get their attention.
 - How to actually study
   - Getting access to a laptop is extremely important if you want to acquire new skills, as most useful skills require atleast some amount of self-studying, which is difficult to do on a phone or using books. If you can't buy a laptop or borrow it from a friend or family member, consider going to an internet cafe.
   - Try to find videos of people's day-to-day life doing the job you wish to acquire. There is a lot of "tacit knowledge" you will quickly pick up from such videos, which you won't get from textbooks.
     - For example if you want to be an architect, see a video of an architect while they're working. You'll get to know which features of their CAD software they actually use versus ignore, which parts of their work are original versus googled, and so on. A textbook that teaches you how to use the same CAD software won't teach you this.
   - A lot of the actual learning you can obtain by self-studying on your computer. However, making friends who know that skill is useful. Some ways they may help: they will be able to tell you which resources are useful and which ones are not useful. If you go on the wrong track, they'll be able to correct you. They may also motivate you and support you emotionally.
   - Making friends will also tell you about the job besides knowledge itself. For example how much it pays, which companies and cities/countries have good opportunities, what is valued within the field, what people pay attention to and ignore in general, the social structure inside the job etc.
   - You can also consider just observing them while they do their work. There is a lot of tacit knowledge that can be acquired this way.
 - Selecting a job to study for
   - This process is likely going to take some hit and trial. It'll depend a bit on your interests, on your current educational background (what you actually know, not what degree you have), and on who you know and what skills they can help you learn. The first skill you try to learn isn't necessarily the skill you will finally end up making money from.
   - Figure out how much time you are willing to invest. Learning a skill like software or finance will pay more, but will require atleast 1-2 years of full-time hard work. (If you're only studying part-time it'll take a lot more time.) Learning a skill like digital marketing or copywriting (well enough to get a job) may be doable in 6 months of full-time hard work, with the right guidance.
   - In general acquiring a skill that allows you to sell something over the internet is a good idea. For example: software, writing, marketing, research, podcasting, consulting, coaching, graphic design, composing music, game development, etc. An internet business can get 1000 or 1000000 times the paying customers without putting in 1000 or 1000000 times the work.
   - If you are joining an internet business like the options listed above, it is common to see the following:
     - Earnings if successful: Founder > Employee at small company > Employee at big company
     - Time required to be successful: Founder > Employee at small company = Employee at big company
     - For a lot of people, your best option for a first job is an early employee at a small company that sells services online. Expect to put atleast 3 months searching for such a job, after you have requisite skills.
     - You can also found your own company. Expect to wait atleast 5 years before you make any money. This is unless you have some special insight why you'll do it faster than that.
   - In general I recommend picking a skill or job you have atleast a little bit of genuine interest in. If you hate it, you might lose motivation to study for it and give up. It does not have to be your number one passion, but you should not hate it. You may have to self-study for multiple years till you get a job, so you need to know how to stay motivated for a long time. Even once you get the job, you don't want to end up stuck for many more years doing something you hate.
   - Try to experiment as much as possible (without spending money). It will help you learn what you are good at and what you like doing. I did this in college and benefitted a lot from it. I tried editing music, writing a book, writing rap, practising debate and public speaking, starting a college club, and a bunch of other stuff. Most of the experiments flopped but I learned about what motivates me.
   - I have basics of software development skill which I mostly self-studied. If making money is your goal, becoming a software developer is unambiguously a good option. You must be good at math and average at english to pursue it. (See your class 10 math and english marks to know if you're good, otherwise go and study class 10 syllabus first.). You can ask me more if you want to learn software.
   - Some random opportunities you can look into:
     - Join French foreign legion, its part of the army in France - no degree needed, but you have to pay for flight yourself, and selection not guaranteed (you have above 50% chance if you take the opportunity seriously)
     - Teach English in southeast Asia - any degree ok, get TEFL certificate for $40 online, you can find job only after reaching destination country, contact me to know more.
     - Start a kitchen for a niche (less popular) cuisine. Many Indian cities and towns lack this. For example if you live in Kolkata, start an Odisha restaurant. If you live in Silchar, start a Manipuri restaurant. If you live in Delhi, start a Thai restaurant instead of a generic (indianised) Chinese one. Monopoly is good for business, 4-5 kitchens competing for the same customers is bad for business.

I will update this section once I have more data or spend more time thinking about it. 


## If you have atleast 10 lakh INR in savings (and live in India) - career advice

I assuming you have the skills and credentials to make this money yourself, i.e., you didn't inherit it or win it in a lottery or something.

(If you are very ambitious, you can also read the section after this section.)

#### Making 1 crore INR might or might not be a good goal

Proof: I don't have personal experience with trying to make 1 crore. Consider getting the opinion of people who have tried this.

If one of your main life goals is to make > 1 crore INR and you believe this will make your life more happy/peaceful/meaningful/etc than it is today, I strongly recommend you try the following experiments. I don't think I'll be significantly happier with 1 crore, and I don't think I'm the only person whose brain is wired this way. The following experiments may help you get more clarity on whether the money will actually help you.

Experiments to run to test if you *really* want the money or not
 - Make a list of things that you will be able to afford with more money that you can't afford today. Maybe a bigger house, maybe more international trips every year, maybe a gaming PC in higher price range, or so on. Try getting a test version of this today, and see if this indeed makes you happy. For instance take an international trip once or rent a really big house for a month or rent a gaming rig for a month.
 - Imagine you had a button that could switch off the part of your brain that generates anxiety when you pursue a higher risk career path. Imagine you had a similar button that could switch off the part of your brain that internalises social pressure from family and friends to make more money. What would be a good decision for this hypothetical person?
 - Notice the people in your immediate social circle who have above 1 crore, versus people who have 10 lakh to 1 crore INR. Ask them to how happy they are, and take an average of both categories. Try to find people who are self-aware and trust you enough to be honest with you. (In particular, try to notice whether the people who have more money are happier because they can buy more stuff or because their family and acquantances are no longer pressuring them to make more money.)
 - Take a few months off from your job. Make a list of things you'd like to do that don't require a lot of money, but require a lot of time. Maybe you want to learn a language or learn an instrument. Maybe you want to become better at video editing or study some college math courses online. Actually spend the few months doing some of these things. Notice how this feels and compare this to when you were making money.

For me personally, things I don't consider major benefits of 1 crore INR, assuming one already has 10 lakh INR:
 - house, bigger house
 - vehicle, bigger vehicle
 - more travel
 - more tasty food, higher-end clothes, home decor, other consumerist stuff
 - safety net for medical emergencies

For me personally, things I consider major benefits of 1 crore INR:
 - going really deep into a hobby
   - For example one could setup a private research lab or a recording studio or a high-end kitchen. A hobby of this sort is capable of capturing my sustained attention for multiple years.
   - I have met only a few people in India doing this sort of thing with their money. If you are doing something cool, please [let me know](../contact_me.md). I'd love to learn more about you and what you're working on.
 - school education for (potential) children
   - But also like, consider homeschooling your kids, if your and your child's aptitude exceeds the school teachers'. 80% of my school education was a waste of time and money (no offense intended to my schoolteachers, most of them were decent people). Your kid can socialise with other kids elsewhere for free, and they may be eligible for a loan for college.

If you still conclude at the end of these experiments that making this money will make you significantly happier, feel free to do what as your heart desires. Ignore my advice and any social pressure I might be providing. I'm happy for you to do what makes your life most happy/peaceful/meaningful/etc. Consider reading the section on how to make 10 crore anyway.

#### Making 10 crore INR might be a good goal

Proof: I have some experience trying to make this amount and failing at it. I don't have personal experience with having this much money. Consider getting the opinion of people who do have this amount.

For me personally, main benefit of 10 crore INR:
 - You can get an investor visa and live in any country in the world. You are no longer beholden to the laws and culture of a single nation, and you'll feel more safe.
 - The main determinants of your quality of life no matter where you live will probably be your work and your handful of close relationships. Living in a different country is especially valuable if it will lead to better work or better close relationships.

For me personally, not a benefit of 10 crore INR:
 - FIRE (become Financial Independent and Retire Early) is not an interesting goal for me, most people who spend > 10 years to achive FIRE seem to get bored at the end anyway. Travelling and relaxing 24x7x365 is not enjoyable for most people, you will probably have to start your own projects to keep yourself occupied.

How?
Most stable career paths in India take too long (>10 years) to make this amount of money. If this is your goal, you are much better off doing one of the following:
 - upskilling and getting YoE on resume to the point where you can get a job from a developed country, either in-person or remote. This could involve getting foreign degree, or Indian job and in-company transfer
   - I don't have personal experience with this so ask people who do. I know this is quite common.
 - starting your own startup or business
   - I have a lot of resources on this, but here's not the place to share it. Read Paul Graham's blog, even if you are not founding a tech startup.
 - cracking UPSC
   - I generally don't recommend UPSC to most people, as most UPSC preparants can get higher rate of return on their time by studying a skill like software or writing or research or finance
   - Consider studying like 1/4th of the syllabus and give previous year exam papers on just that portion. From your marks you'll get a rough idea whether you're on track to cracking the exam or not.

Pursuing either of these requires you to quit your current job in India and not worry too much about leaving the "low risk" path.

There are a few other edge cases, for example you could marry someone with money or network with them and become their consultant or become a sex worker or something. I won't discuss them much here.

#### Becoming a major politician or a billionaire might be a good goal

Proof: I don't know much about this. Consider asking someone who does.

If you want significant influence over society, this is an option. You will have to work very hard, in order to acquire the required attention or capital. Also you will have to learn some of the behaviours of a socioeconomic class different from yours. You will definitely lose some of your current family and friends in the process, so it will be socially isolating. Also there may be an aspect of luck, many self-made billionaires admit to the role luck played in their success. (Although most people who do report luck as a factor report odds like 10% or 30%, not something unlikely like 1%. So don't let the luck factor dissuade you.)

I don't have a lot to say because it isn't something I know enough about yet. But I am interested in studying this, whether or not I ever seriously pursue this myself.

#### Not making money might be a good goal

Proof: I have over a year of personal experience with this.

Assuming you live on 10k INR per month, and assuming you have 10 lakh INR in savings, you can spend 8 years not working. If you don't want to live on 10k/mo and need 20k/mo to be happy, you can spend 4 years not working. (Adjust this for the actual numbers relevant to you.) The important thing is to measure your money not in number of lakhs but in number of years it buys you. 

Personally I realised I would be miserable trying to start a tech startup to make 10 crore INR, hence I gave up on this goal. (I'd probably be happier once I had the money. I'm talking here only about the process of acquiring it.) I'd much rather work on projects I care about. Figuring out which projects are worth doing takes time. I am still in the process of figuring this out for myself, but I'm confident I'm better off this way compared to when I tried to make money.

I might still take a job at some point, but atleast I'm clear the primary reason I chose this was not money but instead learning or social connections or something else. This is a huge privilege and I'm grateful to have it.

I don't recommend my current life path to everyone, but I recommend atleast considering it as an option.

## If you have 10 crore INR - career advice

Proof: I don't have 10 crore INR. Consider getting opinion from those who do.

Consider reading my advice on the other advice page.

If you are sufficiently ambitious, I would generally recommend not living in India. There are better opportunies available outside of it. There is very little India-specific advice that I can think of that would be relevant to you. One exception would be if you are already running a business in India and feel you have a significant edge in running this, compared to all the other opportunities you could be exploiting instead.

Business cultures vary *a lot* depending on country, based on my limited experience. Consider experiencing business cultures in multiple countries, no matter where you finally settle.


## Trading and investment advice

Read the section on the other advice page.

Real estate underperforms S&P500 by a lot unless you have insider knowldge. Buying real estate as an investment (not for living in it) is the number one financial mistake I see people make in India.

NIFTY is also a decent option if you can't or don't want open a foreign account to buy S&P500 ; difference between NIFTY and S&P500 performance is not large if I remember correctly.


# ... I might expand this doc in future



# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/advice_for_you/advice_for_you_elite.md

2025-01-13

# Advice for you (elite class)

## If you have above $1M net worth and want influence over society

Proof: I don't have personal experience with this, I just read a lot.

Consider studying politics. Many rich people (even billionaires) don't understand politics and this limits how much influence they can have. Money does not directly translate to political power, the relationship between the two is more complicated. If you only focus on making money, you might be disappointed at the end.

Consider studying maths and physics, if you don't know it. Since the Enlightenment, most power in society is built via technology. No amount of hired experts will substitute for the fact that you don't understand calculus. You won't know how to hire the right people or verify the truth of what they're saying. If you understand technology, you will have much better options available to you in life.

Consider sharing more about your life experience and opinions in the public domain. Your money buys you a degree of safety most people don't have, and many people can benefit from someone who can safely talk about controversial topics. If people verbally attack you it's fine, you are still safe.


## If you have above $100M net worth or could get atleast 10M votes in a hypothetical election

#### My pitch on raising your ambition

A handful of actions taken by you can literally mean the difference between human extinction and world peace and prosperity beyond our current imagination. The fate of 10,000 years of human history and 1,000s more in the future sits on your individual shoulders. If you play your cards right, you could found a nation state. You could bridge differences between leaders of existing nations, and help form a world government. You could figure out sane policies and institutions for technological progress, and also teach other elites to have sane well-informed decision-making on it. You could even start a new religion that lasts centuries after you die, and provide people with safety and meaning.

Please don't limit your own imagination, and go for a small goal like "I will buy a seat in XYZ political party and that's it, the sum total of my legacy".

You don't need to wait for the support of a lot of other elites, you can just start making moves by yourself and wait for others to follow.

You may be able to derive a lot of personal meaning and happiness from this. If you do, you might come to the conclusion that one person's suffering or risk of humilitation is a price worth paying, when considering the stakes. (Or you might not, I am not claiming I'm good at predicting what gives people in your situation meaning or happiness.)

A lot of people including me are counting on you to take good decisions. You might or might not have a healthy way of handling this burden psychologically, but it is a true fact about reality IMO and I think you should know. I'm generally not a fan of psychological strategies that involve hiding yourself from the truth.

#### Other things you can try

 - Maybe try explaining your moral code and your general life situation to people outside your socioeconomic class, without dumbing it down or pretending to be a common person. I would like to understand your perspective better here. I think this could help increase empathy and understanding across the class difference. (No, many people will still not get it, but a handful of people might, if you explain it well enough.)
   - Examples of this: people who do podcasts, people who post on twitter
   - "Born Rich" by Jamie Johnson (owner of Johnson and Johnson) seems like one example, although it mostly covers (relatively) unambitious elite, not the ambitious ones. Also I think there's way to shoot that exact same documentary in a more positive light.
   - Naval Ravikant's writings also are a good example to learn about elite class noems



# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/advice_for_you/advice_for_you_india_labour.md

2025-01-20

To do for myself:
 - Rewrite page so it's simpler and more people can understand
 - Make it easier to directly navigate to relevant section

# Advice for you (India, labour class)

You can also read the other post on knowledge class. If you are sufficiently ambitious, you can climb classes by following the advice in that post.

## If you don't know english (and live in India) - career advice

Proof: I have learned many skills from the internet, and this has helped me a lot. Most of my college education did not directly help me do this, but being good at english and math did.

There are a lot of benefits to knowing english. Think about it. Maybe studying english should be the number one priority of your life. (Or maybe not, but I want you to think about it.)

(If you are very ambitious, you can also read the section after this section.)

Why?
 - Most of the good job opportunities require you to study english.
 - A lot of good educational resources are available only in english.
 - A lot of people have a lot of useful knowledge but they don't know your local language. If you both learn english you can both learn something useful from each other.
 - If you can't afford to go to college, that is fine, there are other ways of making money.
 - For example, you can learn some skills by asking friends with those skills. If you don't have such friends, you can make new friends.
 - If you are ambitious, you can study how to do the job from the internet.
 - Your current family and friend circle probably does not know which job opportunities are best for you, and you will have to make new friends to guide you.

Proof: I learned English and Hindi as a kid and don't have much personal experience learning a language as an adult. I am just copy-pasting language learning advice from the internet.

How?
 - Do not waste time reading English textbooks. Do not study grammar.
 - Spend atleast a few months listening to movies or TV shows or podcasts etc in English. Start watching something that uses simple words. Do not use Hindi subtitles. This can be boring at first, but doing this for a few months will change your life.
 - Once you have spent enough time listening, you can practice speaking with friends who know some english. (If you don't have any such friends, make friends in-person or online.)

## If you have less than 50,000 INR in savings and live in a village or town (in India) - career advice

Proof: I have seen more than one person shift to a city and the struggles they face in first couple of months. I have not experienced this myself.

Think about shifting to a big city.

(If you are very ambitious, you can also read the section after this section.)

Why?
 - This decision is not permanent. You can go back later if you try it out and you don't like it.
 - If you live in a city, you can meet people who know a lot of skills and know how to make money with those skills. You can befriend them and learn these skills, and make more money yourself. However, learning new skills is a slow process. When you first shift, you will have to take a job you know how to do. After that, you can try learning a new skill.
 - If you live in a city, you can meet people who think and behave differently than you. This is not just about career. This includes what their personality is like, how they approach relationships, what beliefs they think are important, what are their hobbies and interests, etc.  You might want to learn some good things from them, or you might not. Until you try, you probably won't know. It is difficult for someone to explain this to you if you haven't experienced meeting lots of people yourself.
 - If life in your house or neighbourhood is not good right now, shifting away from it can improve all the aspects of your life. In cities, your friends might not know each other, so they might gossip less about you. And you might feel less pressure to behave one way in front of others.

How?
 - Very important things you must carry with you:
   - ID cards - aadhaar card, driving license, etc
   - Debit card - make sure you have money saved in your account and you are not carrying all your money as cash
   - Smartphone, SIM card
   - Laptop, if you own one
 - Important things you should also carry:
   - Induction stove, cooking utensils, food storage containers - it could be expensive for you to buy these again
   - Clothes
 - Important things you should practice before coming:
   - Learn to use Google Maps and practice using it
   - Learn to use Whatsapp, SMS, phone call, UPI, if you don't already know how to
   - Learn to use IRCTC online website to book train tickets, and MakeMyTrip app to book bus tickets.
 - Important things you should do after coming:
   - Find a PG to stay on the first day itself. Do not waste a single day of your time finding a PG. Every day you waste means loss of money.
   - Pick your PG roommate carefully, if they are depressed or an alcoholic for example, it will affect your mood a lot. 
   - Find a job soon after you have a place to stay. Do not waste more than 3-4 days of your time finding a job.
   - Do not relax once you have a job. Make sure you have some backup job if the first job you pick later turns out to be a bad choice. Ask your coworkers to make sure you will get your salary on time.
   - Within the first month, try to make some acquaintances of the same gender. This is especially important if you are a woman. It is fine if you don't trust them a lot at first.
   - Nobody is guaranteed to help you when you run out of money. Try your best to keep some savings at all times.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/about_me_summary.md

2025-01-26

# About me

DOB 2001-01-03, Male, Indian citizen and resident

Completed schooling in Delhi 2018, Graduated IIT Delhi biochem engg BTech+MTech 2023, Worked at cryptocurrency startup Rari Capital. Have basic skills in software, finance, biotech and idk what else.

Currently working on independent research projects and independent software projects. Projects focussed on topics such as history of technology and mass surveillance. See [my ideas](./my_ideas/world_models_im_currently_building.md) for more. Culturally influenced by effective altruism / lesswrong rationality in the US.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/my_people.md

2024-12-12

# My people

Here's my current model for deciding how to interact with people in my life.

Reasons to have people in your life:
 - physical intimacy
 - regular emotional support
 - regular financial support
 - regular logistical support
 - emergency financial support
 - emergency emotional support
 - emergency logistical support
 - advice
 - casual interaction

The first two are the most dependent on living in the same place as the other person.

Scarce resources include time, money and location.

Receiving and giving advice, and casual interactions require very little time commitment. So I can freely do this with many people. I value novelty and ideological diversity, so I want to get advice from and casually interact with many people.

I am wary of promising regular emotional / logistical / financial support to anyone.

I have promised emergency emotional and logistical support to a set of people I consider close. I'll provide a 6-month notice period if I ever want to break these commitments. I'm hoping most of these commitments last multiple decades. (If you're unsure if you're on this list, please message me and ask.) Even if I haven't promised you anything, feel free to ask me for help when you need it. I'm generally helpful, time and location permitting.

I am wary of promising emergency financial support to anyone. I have offered financial support before (loan or donation) and I am open to requests for the same. If you are asking me for financial support, it will help your case if you have:
 - a good reputation verifiable by your social circle, and they are informed about the support you've received
 - what a bank would consider credit-worthy, such as a source of income or collateral