I’ve a Bayesian theory around why “believe in science” and “believe in technocratic progress” are so high, even if the counter-evidences are strong.
Thread 🧵
1/N
Many of those professions have taken out the core aspects of “motherly nature” and “empathy”, and run as corporate business under DEI hiring mandates, terrible work culture (men has out-group bias, women has in-group bias)
Who have mandated teachers, nurses, child care etc will be majority women ? DEI ?
“Girl Boss” usually refer to corporate management positions given to incompetent women, mandated on DEI.
My wife and many women I know, wouldn’t work under another women.
Go figure out the evolutionary basis of that.
> Australia is a fortress with unlimited natural resources. Let’s terraform the whole thing! Incentivise small business, families, creativity. Create 40 new states and let them self-govern. Australians are pioneers and innovators. Not economic serfs.
Only country that has achieved something closer to this, is US after a brutal civil war kicking out all Tories, before the Fed got created in 1913
But individual communities can do a lot.
- Terraform basics:
Instead of going in outback, building a sustainable Hydrogen city with solar & waters from aquifers, offering tax credit to companies in order to move there, setting up innovation hubs for BioTech, AI & EnvTech across these sustainable cities, creating massive job opportunities, a bunch of politicians and silver-spoon-fed businessmen are angry on their abysmal ROI from commercial REs.
First snapshot is picked from a now-obsolete AU government document
Politicians and majority of the immigrant populace (mandatory psychometric test to allow migrants with value alignment, not some nepotist technocrat) lack vision:
Second pic is artistic vision of sustainable desert/outback cities.
@tideoftime1 What I have seen is, unless research is an intended part and high-value and doer has a PhD associated, MBAs / Managers treat all tech workers as a discretionary worker slave.
Lots of people who are repulsed by DEI bs, latest “cool framework fads” learned programming the hard way -
C, assembly language hacking, softice assembly hacks, game mods / game engine development / 3D basic physics simulation etc.
Programming was art. Not a corporate job with lots of processes, frameworks, controls and BS.
Right and wrong.
“Models that could cure diseases and save lives get capped, gated, rationed, because one man and his court concluded humanity isn’t ready but they are.”
- You didn’t build the model. researchers and private capital did. They will do whatever they want.
- It’s idiocy and failure that Pentagon/Governments are bed with Tech/AI. Why not ? Government/Empire is mutually related with Tech/Industry since the formation of State/City-state.
- It’s the idiocy of public (“I love Elon, I’ll buy whatever Elon builds, humanity belong to stars”) to be “exit liquidity” of private capital. Stars will come later. Save earth and its ecology now. No that’s “commie” to some “capitalists”
- You don’t need some stochastic model to search through molecular spaces or knowledge to cure cancer. Study any remaining hunter-gatherer tribes, their ecosystem and medicinal plants. You’d find cancer and cardio-metabolic diseases are mostly absent. They usually die by violence / infection or fatality. You don’t need “Silicon Valley”’s private capital and bio-hackers to cure cancer. Beyond base rate most of cancers are induced by modernity, and then private capital tries to cure it to “save the world”
Reality is world doesn’t need to be saved. These are stories we keep telling each other so that we don’t have to face the long term reality of industrial society.
World needs human to be less egoistic.
Mushroom and DHA/Fish are core to human evolution and neuronal health.
Mushrooms are known to “red pill” you against the “Matrix”. That’s why governments hate them.
Literal toxic drugs and porn are allowed, but therapeutic mushrooms are banned.
I completed the most measured psilocybin experiment in history. The data from my experiment suggests that psilocybin may be a longevity therapy.
https://t.co/BpIKdISQ5G
@ekwufinance Yes. Valuations.
But there is a deeper truth:
You need stable short-term cashflow to able to comfortably sit on equities long-term.
A boring business (high Agency as bonus) or cash-flow positive RE is a good way to fund the equity.
Tech job is not anymore.
Government/Empire and Corporations/Industry have evolved together.
Understand Industrial Revolution, debt, bonds, rights of corporations in detail.
Capitalism has no Nationalism code built in.
Gov and Corporations with MOAT, don’t care for peasants, but they tend to show that they are for peasants.
What I have learned in last 3Y that being too-contrarian around bigger events is a fool’s errand.
Being contrarian on things I have control (such as health and business) is better.
In alternate timeline,
- AI bubble will collapse, lots of blood in streets, next AI wave slowly gets built on causal models. Government will start to use more and more tech/AI as all surveillance states do.
- Techno-feudalism would arrive. Nothing to cheer on AGI or not.
- Ageing is mostly solved. Have MRI scans after 40, and live an anti-modern life as much as possible. Sun/sweat/Agency/Faith/evolutionarily baseline food/little or no stress.
- BTC or “hard money” standard will never come. Politicians and bankers know the taste of blood. Once in, there is no going back. Majority of populace is not interested in self-custody or decentralisation benefits. BTC better be quantum-safe before 2028/9.
- UFO/aliens are creations of Government and bored minds.
Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder.
On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures.
But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first!
As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise.
Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours.
Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure.
Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice!
The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :)
Part 2: neutral atoms and qday
The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers.
Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low.
Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts.
My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom".
Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions.
So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030.
Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years.
Part 3: post-quantum cryptography
There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation.
These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer.
The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security.
Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.
@shaguncrypto Along that line, a variant would be to replace BTC altogether with PAXG
PAXG as cash equivalent.
SOXX, and Nuclear ETFs that can return higher than PAXG.
Monitor and rotate.
Valuation needs to be taken account to decide when to sell back to PAXG
@shaguncrypto Use BTC as cash-equivalent.
Only invest in niche ETFs like semiconductor and/or nuclear themes that can have expected 3Y/5Y return more than BTC.
Monitor and rotate.
Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder.
On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures.
But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first!
As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise.
Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours.
Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure.
Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice!
The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :)
Part 2: neutral atoms and qday
The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers.
Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low.
Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts.
My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom".
Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions.
So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030.
Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years.
Part 3: post-quantum cryptography
There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation.
These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer.
The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security.
Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.
@shagbark_hick Yes.
“Social status” and “fiat inflationary economics”
Middle-class who will continue to play these rigged and “artificial games” will see their lineages disappear.
Amish and wealthy (those sitting now at $5-10M mostly liquid or stumble asset) will do fine.
Humans are the only divergent species that would brainwash peers/self-delude/self-bondage oneself against an evolutionarily-hostile place/situation just for “economics” or “social status”.
Around 85% of global workers are reported to be dissatisfied or hate their jobs. Yet they have to go to office next morning to bear debt/mortgage/status-linked CoL and maintain “social status”.
https://t.co/Dm1Sxeftip
One of the core reasons of dissatisfaction is “I hate my boss and workload and lack-of-meaning”
Given human psychology under hierarchical power dynamics and lack of novelty involved in running a company, it comes down to Authenticity / Having Agency
Let’s go back to evolutionary biology. Across 300,000 years of human evolution, 95% of human existence was:
- Decentralised
- Non-hierarchical (or very flat)
- Flexible work rhythms
- Shared decision-making
- Seasonal, not clock-measured
- Autonomy-preserving
James C. Scott, Against the Grain — early states reduced autonomy significantly compared to hunter-gatherer life.
Marshall Sahlins, “The Original Affluent Society” — hunter-gatherers worked ~15–20 hours/week with high autonomy.
Human neuropsychology (and animals alike) evolved for autonomy, self-direction, and distributed decision-making.
Not for rigid hierarchies, repetitive labor, or imposed meaninglessness. Sure, there was short-term flight-and-fight stressors, but no long-term self-delusional self-bandage to meaningless work.
“Industrial Revolution” (IR) it was not, barring few improvements in ACUTE healthcare/immunotherapy etc) changed that:
- Time discipline (E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”)
- Factory discipline
- Hierarchical supervision
- Fragmented tasks (Adam Smith > Taylorism > Fordism)
- Loss of meaning in work
- External metrics and surveillance
E.P. Thompson shows that the single largest psychological transformation of the Industrial Revolution was:
“The subordination of human rhythms to mechanical time.” That is an explicit loss of agency.
Unless small-scale agriculture made impossible by mechanisation (so that peasants can go to city to work in factories / tech were the premise of many economists’ BS) and early migrants to cities showed TFR, there was no way we could have self-deluded ourselves into this IR-driven mechanistic & soulless existence.
Being Authentic and having Agency is core to life, healing and all animals.
It’s the humans who continue to brainwash others (as an example accounts like @kimmonismus who gains agency by running a media business on AI but never worked as engineering/AI) and self-delude to shove a IR-driven mechanistic life through everyone’s throats.
PS: There should be studies on “Lack of Authenticity / Meaning / Agency” as the root emotional causal factor behind many chronic diseases including cancer.
Agency / Fertility / Health — are real metrics on which modernity is failing. However, a set of billionaires and e/acc accounts are trying to “manufacture consent” for tech accelerationism
Let’s keep deluding ourselves for “stock portfolio goes up, shiny tech and cool AI”
Kernis, M. H., & Goldman, B. M. (2006).
A multicomponent conceptualization of authenticity: Theory and research. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 38, pp. 283–357). Elsevier Academic Press.
40/N
Australia’s fertility rate has plummeted.
They’ve hit the lowest rate in history at 1.48 — well below the 2.1 replacement rate.
The average age of mothers was 25 in 1971, and now it’s 32.
This is a human catastrophe.
@japan_nobunaga Trust is truly a precious thing, but it was not normal everywhere. High-trust societies are those that stopped marrying relatives, essentially the West, Japan, and Korea. When people stopped living in clans and began to cooperate with other people, trust evolved.