Meher Roy

Chemical engineer, biotechnologist, entrepreneur

[Kevin Sekniqi 🔺 @kevinsekniqi]

avalanche is on the precipice of absolutely obliterating bandwidth capacity upper limits of all other networks

[Meher Roy @MeherRoy]

And now. my last wish.. stop picking fights with cool nations like Canada and Denmark, and you*'ll be one of the best.

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

America will be the Bitcoin superpower of the world.

The Golden Age of America has BEGUN!

[Dmitri Tsumak @tsudmi]

Congrats to @ChorusOne on receiving a 131 ETH block reward in their @stakewise_io vault: https://t.co/i8Dblq5VhC
Lucky you if you were staking and boosting through their vault. 🚀

[Meher Roy @MeherRoy]

@BradStanfieldMD @ElJudge2020 Indeed, the vaccine thing makes him out to be a quack

[William Mougayar @wmougayar]

All the @ethereum news in real-time from https://t.co/wuvC7w8DxW.
Subscribe for a daily email.

[Meher Roy @MeherRoy]

The joker and the penguin have taken over Gotham, and Batman is nowhere to be seen

https://t.co/jD7uz9SG8R

[Meher Roy @MeherRoy]

The moment fun turns into disaster. Party is over.

[Meher Roy @MeherRoy]

RT @MarcosArrut: On the one hand, aspartame: a massively sold chemical linked to the increase of cancer. On the other, CCR5 gene editing in…

[Meher Roy @MeherRoy]

Haha, the walrus!!

https://t.co/W3iw9FWOKH

[Meher Roy @MeherRoy]

@r1p0st3_crypt0 @JBSchweitzer There is no uniform rule. Democracy can be shit, monopoly over power can be amazing. And the reverse too.

[Meher Roy @MeherRoy]

Trump should be dictator, and then Elon should be next in line. Simple.

[Meher Roy @MeherRoy]

@r1p0st3_crypt0 @JBSchweitzer Very true. But also see Lee Kwan Yu. In India, congress party (ruled for 40 years).

[Meher Roy @MeherRoy]

@heckerhut Maybe Trump and Elon are too early. The next cycle of plutocrats will be the ones to take over.

[Meher Roy @MeherRoy]

@heckerhut Society is transitioning into a plutocracy. Wealth ever concentrated, AGI incoming, all jobs are going to be lost. It's only natural absolute power concentrates with wealth.

[Meher Roy @MeherRoy]

@JBSchweitzer Haha.

It would be the most fascinating timeline.

[Meher Roy @MeherRoy]

This would be the most interesting timeline.

[Brian Fabian Crain @crainbf]

Is there something that could disrupt Proof-of-Stake?

In my view, the most likely contender would be zk proofs. In the end, PoS tells you the state of some system. And you can trust it because economically it would be infeasible to lie. With zk proofs you can also get the state of some system, but potentially much cheaper.

Of course, zk is not consensus and you often still need consensus. But you could have a single chain provide consensus for many zk systems. And that might dramatically reduce the need for PoS chains some day.

[Alexey Guzey @alexeyguzey]

Why you shouldn't build your career around existential risk.

I feel weird writing this because the core of the argument is almost metaphysical for me. I believe that attention is the most powerful thing in the world and I have a very deep sense that whatever we pay attention to -- whether positively or negatively -- we bring more of into the universe. [1]

Patrick MacKenzie once noted that if you want a problem solved, you give it to someone as a project. If you don't want a problem to be solved, you give it to someone as a job [2]:

"The Department of X, for the 25th straight year, has reported that they did a lot about X, that they have made progress on initiatives A, B, and C with metrics to show for it, that X is nonetheless more pressing than last year, and that they need more headcount."

If you're anti-capitalist, you need capitalism. If you're anti-communist, you need communism. "Any PR is good PR". Any attention is good attention. If you're anti-something it means that something exists and it's important enough to be anti-it. In fact, the bigger it is, the better for your career.

I'm especially bothered by people having existential risk jobs and careers. If you built your entire career around a certain existential risk, then what happens to you if this risk is dealt away with? You no longer have a job. You no longer have a career.

I mean, what happens to Eliezer Yudkowsky's -- the biggest advocate of stopping all AI research due to AI existential risk -- career if it turns out that AI risk is simply not an existential concern? Would anyone care about him at all? And what would he do with his life then? Become an e/acc? People believe what they must believe. And they bring their beliefs into the world with all of their life force and intelligence.

(notably, Nick Bostrom, who taught Yudkowsky about AI risk -- but hasn't centered his entire career around it -- has recoiled and now believes the risks are overblown. [3])

There's clearly a way in which this argument is stupid. Like, if there's a giant asteroid hurtling towards Earth that will reach us in 10 years causing a mass extinction, that's an existential risk. And I think working on it would be amazing. But it would be amazing because it's a concrete problem facing us and nobody will build their careers around it. We'll deal with the asteroid and move on to other things.

There's also the immense opportunity cost of working on existential risks.

All of these incredibly talented and smart people, all of the capital, and instead of working towards building a better future, solving real problems, they got one-shotted by scary thought experiments when they were in high school and college, built their entire career around these thought experiments, and are now stuck. That's just so sad.

How many diseases would we have cured? How much physics and engineering progress would we have made? How much great art would've been created? But instead we have some of the smartest minds of the generation staring into the abyss most of their waking time, waiting for the abyss to stare back.

In fact, it has already stared back at many of them. Sam Altman noted that Eliezer Yudkowsky probably did more than anyone else to speed up the advent of AGI by waking everyone up to AI, inspiring Altman to start OpenAI, and helping Hassabis to fundraise for DeepMind very early on. [4]

Let's not wait until the abyss stares at the rest of us as well. Let's work towards the future we want, not against the future we don't want. After all, the fate of the universe might depend on this.

[Meher Roy @MeherRoy]

@evan_van_ness @WeekInEthNews Well done over the years. Sad to see it be retired.

[Ezra Klein @ezraklein]

https://t.co/4ajUvJs4zS