This is the Open Thread for October.
Project Updates
I have mostly been busy with Nooceleration (biosingularity book; ~30% done), networking and traveling (Switzerland; Hungary; Sweden), and optimizing my workflow.
I reviewed Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence at the SFF blog.
I will be staying in Berlin this October and much of November at a pop up city. More info soon.
I have also set up the infrastructure for doing podcasts. If everything goes well I’ll start releasing them this month, focusing on the transhumanism/network states and bio/acc space.
EHC World
🚨 Navigate below to Reader Interests for new events in the transhumanism/network states sphere that might be of interest to you.
Próspera Problems
The Honduran Supreme Court has ruled the special economic zones (ZEDEs) to be unconstitutional, and with retroactive effect to boot. Occupational problem dealing with banana republics: They can just declare you illegal and take your stuff in a way that, say, Switzerland or Singapore wouldn’t. Tracing Woodgrains and Scott Alexander have seriously addressed this issue from a legal perspective, and you can watch this more impassioned reaction from Niklas Anzinger, the founder of the Vitalia bio/acc pop up village and biotech incubator that has made its prime base in Honduras within Próspera. In short, the Supreme Court’s decision appear to be unconstitutional and a serious breach of contract, one that potentially puts Honduras on the hook for billions in international legal proceedings and will deter future investors.
I don’t know just how serious and threatening this is to the future of Próspera within Honduras (an important clarification since Próspera is primarily about its accumulated corpus of legal and governance innovations than its assets within any one particular jurisdiction). Really everyone is just waiting for the Supreme Court to clarify the details of its ruling. It’s easy and cathartic to call the Honduran government “socialist” and in cahoots with Venezuela/Cuba, mock it for not getting rid of “special economic zones” in its own gang-infested capital, and commiserate over the thousands of Honduran jobs that might be going down the drain. But at the end of the day that isn’t going to do much in a world where the state is the sovereign. If said sovereign wants to destroy any illusions about where it stands on rule of law and by extension its prospects for rapid development, then there probably isn’t much a motley crew of libertarian economists, transhumanist dreamers, and funny Internet money respectooors can do about it.
And this raises some important questions that network statists will need to debate and answer sooner rather than later. Questions about the optimal level of concentration (but eggs in one basket) vs. decentralization (but weaker network effects); about whether to focus on the First World (expensive, but reliable) vs. the Third World (virgin territory, but capricious - as we have just seen); and on the extent to which cooperation with nation-states is possible or desirable in principle. One of my intentions for this blog is for it to play a role in fostering these discussions.
Normie World
US Elections. I still think Kamala will more likely win than not. This isn’t a US politics, and I shitpost enough about this on X. But I’ll do a proper post here soon enough.
Israel/Lebanon. My IQ-centric theory on why Mossad is so competent, which appears legitimated by their destruction of Hezbollah with pagers. I have been expecting a Lebanon War since June and it looks like we are finally getting it. I expect Israel to win this handily. I have been very critical of Israel’s conduct in the Gaza War, but the moral calculus with respect to Hezbollah (and Iran) is far more straightforward.
UK. My comments on the UK riots from August. Pessimistic on Britain.
Elon’s Mars plans. FWIW color me skeptical.
Latam News. Venezuela’s elections were obviously falsified as Maduro loses even the the veneer of democratic legitimacy. Nayib Bukele’s anti-homicide campaign in El Salvador is probably overhyped. OTOH, Javier Milei’s first 10 months appear to have been a resounding success; developing into a big W for libertarianism.
China. VC formation has collapsed. Across multiple indices it increasingly looks like 2020 might have been something of a cultural peak for China, much as 1975 was for the USSR (or 2008 for Putin’s Russia).
Russia. It banned “childfree” propaganda. Meanwhile, California has the world’s highest density of fertility clinics.
Ukraine War: I will probably write a proper update at some point. My commentary on X about Kursk and the war broadly over the past few months.
Some thoughts on the ethics of surrender.
But beyond the philosophizing it remains a race between Ukrainian manpower attrition and the depletion of Russia’s Soviet hardware stocks.
Though speaking of philosophizing, “Prosecutie” Natalia Poklonskaya of 2014 “Russian Spring” fame has rejected Christianity and is now a PAGAN WITCH who's into runes and Perun and stuff. LMAO. AngloZ rightoids and Orthobros coping and seething.
Russian Opposition. There’s was something of a scandal in the Russian opposition now that it has emerged Leonid Nevzlin, a close Khodorkovsky associate, has been paying thugs to beat up other opposition members with whom he had personal beef. He was charged in 2004 for embezzlement and conspiracy to murder, chargers which were always regarded as politically motivated and illegitimate in the West.
EHC Poasts
The author of the Reprotech Newsletter
is now running it from his own Substack. Big plans. He had a great article on Israeli techo-natalism at Aporia a month ago. It’s amusing how Germans went from Aktion T4 under Nazism to #DisabledEmbryoLivesMatter under bioconservative “anti-eugenicist” ideologues. From one extreme to the other, never trying freedom in between. Sad.TIL John Maynard Keynes was a eugenicist. (Was there any early 20C smart cookie who wasn’t?).
Sarah Constantin: Superbabies: Putting The Pieces Together.
David Reich et al.: Pervasive findings of directional selection realize the promise of ancient DNA to elucidate human adaptation (2024). Emil Kirkegaard summarizes at Aporia. Continuous confirmation of Cochran and Harpending’s original thesis of accelerated positive selection in humans for important personality traits including educational attainment (≈ intelligence) in the past 10,000 years.
Tolga Bilge et al. just dropped a new AI control proposal. A Narrow Path is based on setting global bounds on the level of compute that can be used to train AI, with only an international consortium (GUARD) having access to the highest level. Goal is to identify the level at which superintelligence emerges under the maximally feasible controlled and surveilled environment. Probably the most comprehensive control proposal to date; it would have been nice to have done it in some more decentralized way, but that train has probably left the station. Summaries here and here.
Cremieux on The Ottoman Origins of Modernity. Even in the deep past, EHC routes around obscurantism and regression, honing in on beacons of tolerance instead. At the time, that was the Protestant world. (Everything is relative in life). Knowledge production, human capital accumulation, state capacity sharply diverged between German cities that passed Protestant Church Ordinances - often highly progressive documents for their time - and Protestant and Catholic cities that didn't. (These are all German cities, so HBD factors are largely immaterial). My comment and X.
Maxim Lott: Massive breakthrough in AI intelligence: OpenAI passes IQ 120
Max Tabarrok on whether the Romans could have had an industrial revolution. FTR, I doubt it; low literacy rates (1, 2).
Scott Alexander: Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases? Increasingly looking like the closest thing to a magical elixir in our world.
Roko Mijic: Ice: The Penultimate Frontier. Settle icebergs instead of trying to carve out network states from within existing jurisdictions or colonizing Mars. My comments.
Alice Evans: Netflix and Change: Tracking Cultural Flux in Autocracies. Saudi Arabia is softly pushing secularization from above, criminalizing sexual harassment, and promoting liberalism-loaded cultural products. Alice speculates this could even create a reversal wave against its previous exports of Islamic fundamentalism.
Inspirational story of how one libertarian Ukrainian escaped from mobilization in Ukraine by crossing the Romanian border.
Nick Land was cited in court LOL.
In London, Aporia organized a debate this July between Nathan Cofnas and Eric Kauffmann about what to do about Wokeness. My question to them was, “How do we cope with the inconvenient fact that cultural anti-Wokeness tends to load on regressive social and even anti-market attitudes that repel Elite Human Capital?”
Reader Interest
Vitalia
Vitalia Forever is launching from Jan 6 - Mar 3, 2025 and aims to attract twice as many people as its inaugural event this year. I will say that the 3 months I spend there this year were some of the most interesting ones in my life. I would strongly recommend you check them out if you interested in life extension, bio/acc, funny Internet money, libertarianism, charter cities, and their intersection.
If you buy a Vitalia Access Pass now you can lock in the price of $500 that gives you access to its events and premises for this year for several subsequent years. This offer is available until Oct 10. Accommodation is bought separately. Although they aren’t cheap by developing world standards, especially during the high demand months of Vitalia Forever. However, Vitalia does give out fellowships, so feel free to apply if you are a young scientist or entrepreneur.
Additionally, in light of the problems Próspera is having with the Honduran government, now is also as good a time as any to express support.
Longevity Raves
Tina Woods (Tina DJ Technotic) launched the inaugural Longevity Rave this July in London to celebrate and accelerate radical life extension. This is now becoming an international affair, with events in LA on Oct 26, London again on Nov 26, and Milan in March 2025.
Other Events
Balaji Srinivasan is doing a Network School near Singapore.
Next Vibecamp, which has become something like the Burning Man of TPOT, is in June 19-22 in Maryland, USA.
There is going to be a pop-up village called Zu-Grama in Bangalore, India starting January 2025.