This is a phenomenal interview with Richard Rhodes, author of the legendary The Making of the Atomic Bomb, an expansive history of the Manhattan Project and the development of nuclear weapons technology.
Dwarkesh Shah’s show The Lunar Society is generally excellent and highly recommended. Just listen to how long he lets Rhodes answer and expound on questions without interruption. These are my favorite types of long-form interviews.
I’m out in San Francisco for a few days. We’ve got typical SF weather — big change from the Florida summer suncoast. Got a few meetings to hit, but we’ve got a sailing trip set for Tuesday evening. Hope the weather stays steady.
A harebrained scheme to flood deserts, create ecosystems out of dead zones, sequester carbon, and create new economically productive geographies — through “seaflooding”. Take places like the Dead Sea, which is already well below sea level, and fill it up by pipelining in water from the Med or the Red Sea.
All of this would create a much bigger sea where algae could grow, fish could feed on the algae, and birds could feed on the fish. Plants would grow on the shoreline with the added moisture, and more animals would come… It would transform a desert into a new Mediterranean.
This, of course, would not just create a thriving biological environment. It would create amazing economic opportunities for more agriculture and more tourism. These would justify more infrastructure, which would further increase the wealth of the area.
I’m a pretty big skeptic about terraforming as a realistic endeavor. Not only on grounds of costs or feasibility, but on the fear of tampering with pre-existing natural systems. The Ian Malcolm in me is hesitant to confuse feasibility and viability. Just because it’s plausible, doesn’t mean a) it will work or b) it won’t have even worse second-order effects. It’s well worth the debate and thought experiment, though!
If you haven’t checked it out, it’s worth taking a look at Farcaster, a new permissionless protocol for building social networks. Think permissionless Twitter — a protocol for communities to build their own Twitters. Here’s me on Warpcast, the pillar first app on the protocol.
Developer Carlos Matallín is building a cool tool for discovering interesting content on the Farcaster. Pincaster currently supports books, where you can see a feed of posts on the network discussing the topic. Interesting idea, built permissionlessly thanks to the Farcaster network model.
Arnold Kling raises interesting points here about the nature of big companies. The incentives and physics of large company dynamics essentially demand that they move slowly. Sometimes this slowness looks like indecision or lack of conviction (and sometimes those are in there), but for the most part it’s a function of the upside/downside balance. As a business expands, the downside for failure starts to outweigh the upside of success:
Amar Bhide, in The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses, classifies business opportunities along two dimensions: capital and ambiguity. If a project requires a lot of capital, then it is not suitable for a small business, unless it can somehow obtain a lot of funding from venture capitalists. If a project has a lot of ambiguity, meaning that the path to success is unclear, then it is not suitable for a large, established business.
A useful explanatory reasoning from Kling here.
There are exceptions that prove the rule, though. One could argue that the Amazons, Shopifys, and Teslas are able to maintain a sense of forward progress and risk comfort out of band with their size. Disruption theory tells us that the conservative, rear view mirror-oriented view of a large business is baked into the cake. In a lot of ways it’d be rash and illogical not to service your existing customer base and prioritize preservation of business over creation of new markets. But even given these rational perspectives, BigCos have more control over their destiny and their internal cultures than they’d admit. Maintaining “builder” mentality is entirely possible.
Kevin Kelly argues that utopias and dystopias are each popular in cultural imagination, but both are unlikely to play out. In the case of utopia, literally unattainable. Dystopia is possible, but the Mad Max or Escape from New York depictions we’re familiar with aren’t what would likely happen. Real dystopias do exist, but they look like the Soviet Union or Gaddafi’s Libya: strangling, tyrannical bureaucracies that completely capture societal rewards.
I love his idea of “Protopia” — the realistic state we should be collectively pursuing:
I think our destination is neither utopia nor dystopia nor status quo, but protopia. Protopia is a state that is better than today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better. Protopia is much much harder to visualize. Because a protopia contains as many new problems as new benefits, this complex interaction of working and broken is very hard to predict.
The emerging field of progress studies is all about this. Understand our own history of progress, how it happens, and how to make this incremental progress continue ad infinitum.
While the technical oriented consultancies may do some good, it’s obvious at this point that the management consultancies do not serve any socially useful purpose in modern society. Mostly, they are a self serving group who exist to support their in-group and their customers. By “customers” I don’t mean the corporations and shareholders, I mean incompetent bureaucrats who have been promoted beyond their capabilities. Mind you, people from these groups have a lot of polish: they dress up nice and give good powerpoint. If you wanted to hire, say, a lobbyist or something like that requires diplomatic skills, someone formerly at one of these firms would probably be ideal.
Subscribed to the feed purely on this piece alone.
Visa founder Dee Hock had a great saying: “A belief is not dangerous until it turns absolute.” That’s when you start ignoring information that might require you to update your beliefs. It might sound crazy, but I think a good rule of thumb is that your strongest convictions have the highest chance of being wrong or incomplete, if only because they are the hardest beliefs to challenge, update, and abandon when necessary.
An interesting discussion between Patrick Collison and OpenAI founder Sam Altman on a predictably fascinating assortment of subjects. AI developments, stagnation, long-term bets, and what’s preventing us from having more founders.
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