Hopefully, there are some who desire to advance genetic selection for the betterment of humanity in deference to short-term monetary gain. As is the case many times in scientific research, the ignorant are able to delay advancement.
Great episode! Very much enjoyed this wide-ranging discussion on a number of very interesting topics.
The wordcel class has been a disaster for American governance.
Unrelatedly:
Assuming there is no major US-PRC military conflict (which would overdetermine the fate of Asian-Americans and Chinese-Americans writ large), the identity piece for Asian-Americans very much interests me.
It's one thing to be Chinese-American in the early 90's, when China was a middle-income country - with all of the postcolonial shame that this implies - and it's another thing to be Chinese-American in a multipolar world order (or even a bipolar world order) where the PRC has emerged as a peer to the West ("near-peer" is a term that increasingly sounds like cope).
Fascinating interview -- you two covered a remarkable range of topics! I like how it ended; I agree that having kids is, in a way that's hard to explain, deeply satisfying and mind-altering.
Amazing talk, wow. One question I will put to the ether. If all our best people do hard sciences early in they life and wait till later to figure out they humanities and social science, who's gonna write the humanities and social science books that the hard scientists depend upon later for they knowledge? We not gonna have a Jonathan Franzen or Ian McEwan (humanities) or a Richard Posner or Franklin Zimring (social science, law), as just a few examples, if they all devote they early education to science. To get historical, we not gonna have a Shakespeare or J.S. Mill.
1) At around 6 minutes, he mentions something that sounds like "mo wem, mo wu". I'm having trouble googling it. Could you write it out either in characters or in English for me to look into it deeper?
2) I heard a lot of advice about careers, whether physicists going into finance or ML, or going from STEM->Humanities but not Humanities->STEM, or startup vs academia, so I'm curious about if there's advice for someone like me. I've got a master's in Mechanical Engineering, and have done programming on the job, but don't really get taken seriously for ML or other programming-heavy jobs. I'm now in my mid 30s, but feel like I would have a better professional future if I could hop over to AI somehow. If I wanted to make myself attractive to ML employers (for simplicity, let's say Steve Hsu specifically for one of his AI focused startups) , what would be my most likely course? Go back for a PHD mid-career? Home-lab hardware setups? Experiments using rented compute? Or maybe just a simple "it's probably never going to happen, just be a good mech E and live a happy life"?
Probably the latter. Evaluate why you choose mech E in the first place. If you like and enjoy doing something, it is wise to stay with it. Chasing after a career to get rich is probably not a happy choice.
Me? I am undoubtedly a groundhog. And in my case my one big thing really is a Deus Ex Machina: a machine in the garden: https://shorturl.at/4HeSy. I came upon the big idea in this book while searching for the fairest and most beautiful possible thing, given everything we know. That search in fact is the name of my religion, no faith required. It is, like all searches, a challenge to the human imagination. What corners of reality have we overlooked. What is yet to be found. For physicists of course this means the search for new laws of nature governing the physical universe. But for humbler brains such as my own it means the search for new and better ways of arranging society such as were never possible before, but now made possible by the appearance of modern technology. And the funny thing is, this "thing" it turns out can be understood within the Judeo-Christian religion, no faith required. Best of all, anyone can participate in it no matter how dumb or smart you happen to be. Which is what makes it beautiful.
Tremendous interview
It was a pleasure to speak with you Steve! Future episodes will be announced on Twitter if people enjoyed it. x.com/loubohan
Hopefully, there are some who desire to advance genetic selection for the betterment of humanity in deference to short-term monetary gain. As is the case many times in scientific research, the ignorant are able to delay advancement.
Great episode! Very much enjoyed this wide-ranging discussion on a number of very interesting topics.
The wordcel class has been a disaster for American governance.
Unrelatedly:
Assuming there is no major US-PRC military conflict (which would overdetermine the fate of Asian-Americans and Chinese-Americans writ large), the identity piece for Asian-Americans very much interests me.
It's one thing to be Chinese-American in the early 90's, when China was a middle-income country - with all of the postcolonial shame that this implies - and it's another thing to be Chinese-American in a multipolar world order (or even a bipolar world order) where the PRC has emerged as a peer to the West ("near-peer" is a term that increasingly sounds like cope).
Fascinating interview -- you two covered a remarkable range of topics! I like how it ended; I agree that having kids is, in a way that's hard to explain, deeply satisfying and mind-altering.
Can the interview be put on youtube please ?
I think I'll release it on Manifold at some point, so it will be available on YT and other platforms.
Dr Hsu, what are your thoughts and opinions on Human Accomplishments by Charles Murray?
Amazing talk, wow. One question I will put to the ether. If all our best people do hard sciences early in they life and wait till later to figure out they humanities and social science, who's gonna write the humanities and social science books that the hard scientists depend upon later for they knowledge? We not gonna have a Jonathan Franzen or Ian McEwan (humanities) or a Richard Posner or Franklin Zimring (social science, law), as just a few examples, if they all devote they early education to science. To get historical, we not gonna have a Shakespeare or J.S. Mill.
Two questions:
1) At around 6 minutes, he mentions something that sounds like "mo wem, mo wu". I'm having trouble googling it. Could you write it out either in characters or in English for me to look into it deeper?
2) I heard a lot of advice about careers, whether physicists going into finance or ML, or going from STEM->Humanities but not Humanities->STEM, or startup vs academia, so I'm curious about if there's advice for someone like me. I've got a master's in Mechanical Engineering, and have done programming on the job, but don't really get taken seriously for ML or other programming-heavy jobs. I'm now in my mid 30s, but feel like I would have a better professional future if I could hop over to AI somehow. If I wanted to make myself attractive to ML employers (for simplicity, let's say Steve Hsu specifically for one of his AI focused startups) , what would be my most likely course? Go back for a PHD mid-career? Home-lab hardware setups? Experiments using rented compute? Or maybe just a simple "it's probably never going to happen, just be a good mech E and live a happy life"?
The phrase I used is 能文能武 néng wén néng wǔ. Which means a person is capable of both literary and martial arts, essentially a renaissance man.
Probably the latter. Evaluate why you choose mech E in the first place. If you like and enjoy doing something, it is wise to stay with it. Chasing after a career to get rich is probably not a happy choice.
Me? I am undoubtedly a groundhog. And in my case my one big thing really is a Deus Ex Machina: a machine in the garden: https://shorturl.at/4HeSy. I came upon the big idea in this book while searching for the fairest and most beautiful possible thing, given everything we know. That search in fact is the name of my religion, no faith required. It is, like all searches, a challenge to the human imagination. What corners of reality have we overlooked. What is yet to be found. For physicists of course this means the search for new laws of nature governing the physical universe. But for humbler brains such as my own it means the search for new and better ways of arranging society such as were never possible before, but now made possible by the appearance of modern technology. And the funny thing is, this "thing" it turns out can be understood within the Judeo-Christian religion, no faith required. Best of all, anyone can participate in it no matter how dumb or smart you happen to be. Which is what makes it beautiful.