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Patri Friedman 🌆🚀 Profile picture
Patri Friedman 🌆🚀
@patrissimo
Alleviating global poverty with startup cities @PronomosVC; previously founded @Seasteading @Ephemerisle
Mar 7 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
In 25yrs, I've heard 2 types of arguments against artificial minds ever becoming as smart as people:

Those which explicitly depend on human capabilities being enabled by some irreplicable metaphysical property (soul, etc), and those which implicitly do the same. There are no other options: either we have a magic spark (soul, anima, quantum consciousness), or our thinking is a computational process mapping inputs to outputs, that happens to be currently implemented in a physical, wet matter device (brain).
Nov 3, 2020 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Here’s a crazy idea for a new rule for society, the “Elitist Populist Futarchy”

Make the wealthy bet annually on prediction markets for outcomes the masses value. Ideally, a significant fraction of wealth. Ideally, betting for the outcomes valued by the masses. Like, Jeff Bezos must bet $1B/year on markets for US GDP, racial justice, life expectancy, happiness, suicide rate. Professional bettors (hedge funds) would take the other side of the bet.

What would this accomplish?
Sep 26, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Here’s a way to think about the illusion that low effort can produce great results. It applies to any power law field, whether actors, entrepreneurs or meditators.

Suppose there are 300 incredibly successful ppl in a field - 100 who put in high effort, 100 medium, 100 low. It seems like any level of effort can achieve huge success. But this ignores the huge disparity in how many people will put forth each level of effort.

Those 100 high effort folks come from a tiny population of 1,000 who worked 10-15 hours/day for years to maximize their odds.
Sep 8, 2020 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
I want to start a podcast / livestream called “Anything Goes”, where people can ask or say anything- however transgressive - however critical - however unreasonable - and I’ll try to wrestle with it with grace.

Even nihilism & personal attacks would be welcome. We would have a policy of no premature, unrequired censorship. Meaning that if our platform bans a topic or video, they ban it, but we post it. If we find there are clear rules we have to follow to post, we’ll follow them, while looking for a more open platform.
Aug 14, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Let's set aside both all moral arguments about wealth taxes, and the association with totalitarian collapse states.

Tactically, CA enacting a wealth tax is still an idiotic move, harming their competitiveness at the very moment when high-income residents are fleeing in droves. CA has incredible weather, incredible human capital, and an incredible economy, hampered by high taxes, high regulation & incompetent state & city govts.

As in so many places, COVID & remote work have meaningfully tipped the balance s.t. for many, cons now outweigh pros.
Jul 14, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Working in a shared, long-lived codebase is very different from hacking bash scripts for yourself. Because many others will see your code many times, you spend far more time on docs, clarity, and organization.

I'm realizing the same mindset applies to cloud-first orgs. When your job is to collaborate with others via a shared database (Docs, Notion, ...), you need to invest WAY MORE
on clarity, organization, cleanups.

"This doc doesn't link to it's related data" should "smell" awful in the same way as a variable named "x".
Jun 18, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The FDA did something right on covid, even though it's cutting edge and a little weird! Excellent!

For those unaware: pooled samples is where you run one test on a group of people (say the 150 kids in the same grade at a school). If negative, you saved yourself 149 tests. If positive, ofc you now do subtests. Computer scientists will immediately realize that a single case can be found in O(log(N)) tests, much more efficient than the O(N) algorithm of testing everyone.

Algorithms matter!
Jun 16, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
1/ I think it's really important that all you smart ppl who can influence the path of society understand that 2020 is *not an accident*. We didn't get unlucky with Trump, with pandemic, with BLM. Those are just the form that our decay happened to take. 2/ It's not about R/D, left/right, rich/poor, any of that. What is it about? Well, there are a few people like @Peter_Turchin & @mgurri who saw this coming, based on historical analysis & big picture reasoning. This was predictable - we know because it was predicted.
Jun 9, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
If you're interested in a multi-century, species-wide view of how we might look to upgrade not only policing but all of our social/expert services, including doctors, lawyers and politicians, @robinhanson has a wonderful take in his call for Science 2.0:

overcomingbias.com/2020/06/scienc… I have a sense that this might be one of those Robin posts that becomes part of my permanent mental models, like Dreamtime, X is not about Y, income growth as piecewise linear forager/farmer/industrial, etc.
Jun 5, 2020 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
I say I'm against tribalism, but my Twitter likes tell another story. It feels good to signal-boost polarized ingroup statements, and it feels like no one is watching (whereas when I write I hold a higher standard). I am going to try to be more consistent going forward. I have genuinely thought for a decade that polarization might be destroying my once-great country, and I believe this now more than ever as the culture war has escalated to street violence.

So it behooves me to boost the calm & ignore my side's clever provocateurs.
May 31, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Fasting is the fundamental paradigm of self-improvement:

Fasting: a break from food.
Sobriety: a break from substances.
Meditation: a break from thinking.
Solitude: a break from interaction.
Humility: a break from ego.
Shabbat: a break from working.
NoFap: a break from PMO. Why is fasting such a universal tool? Because taking a break from Thing is BOTH 1) Creates a great space to review Thing in your life, evaluating benefit/harm, and 2) For beneficial-but-draining Things, a great way to recharge your Thing battery.
May 22, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
"Changing World Order" by @RayDalio is a must-read for anyone interested in geopolitics and long-term history. It starts with a 500-year analysis of the rise and fall of empires, using 17 factors, and applying it to today linkedin.com/pulse/changing… Dalio's essays resulted from a multi-year research project in collaboration with top historians & policy makers, and is itself a summary of a book-length body of research, hence it's impossible to summarize. Topics incl USA v. China, reserve currencies, debt cycles & history.
Apr 18, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Nice write-up by @mappum on the accumulated evidence that @Masks4All makes a huge difference in reducing #COVID19 spread. A great resource to share. This is the type of approach needed to re-open the economy.

medium.com/@llebttam_4576… Reminder: the proper way to think of "lockdowns" and other virus reduction measures is not as a black and white "lockdown or no". Rather, each intervention has a cost (usually economic) and a benefit in reducing R0.
Apr 14, 2020 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Many therapists in this thread saying to go easy on yourself & don't expect much right now. I don't agree.

Self-compassion is critical, but if you have time off b/c of #COVID19 & you aren't using it to improve yourself and your life, you're missing a huge opportunity. Yes, we're anxious, so what? There are always worries, you were always at risk of death; your parents even more so. There was always huge uncertainty & risk, you just focused on it less.

If you can't work when there's a worry, now's a great time to fix that bad habit.
Apr 11, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I still stand behind my answer from 18 years ago, which is to view govt as a poorly structured sector which generates bad coordination mechanisms through lack of competition & innovation.
patrifriedman.com/old_writing/dy… This is more useful for reformers than the intuitive view of govt as "our representatives" (ignores incentives), the philosophical view that it embodies our shared ethics (ignores that govt is mostly org/incentive engineering)...
Apr 9, 2020 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
So excited today when my Oura asked me to join a #Covid19 body temp prediction study. This is an incredible way to scale up testing in parallel with PCR-based tests. I think immediate isolation of ppl with body temp changes (at govt expense) would have a huge impact on R0. Image As @paulmromer and others have pointed out, population-wide testing is the only sustainable way to stop this virus and get back to work. At half retail, buying an @ouraring for every American would only cost $45B. Compare that to the $2T welfare package.

Tracking >> Bailouts! Image
Apr 5, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
"The terrible truth the virus revealed is that the US & UK are not even countries. They are free-trade zones. Our govts are bureaucratic anarchies with ceremonial elected monarchs. Pitting them against a ruthless virus is sending Don Quixote to Vietnam."

medium.com/@curtis.yarvin… (Curtis Yarvin, of course). As usual I find myself agreeing with his diagnosis, while finding the proposed remedy quite implausible. Still quite a useful exercise. Some more of my favorite quotes below.
Apr 1, 2020 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
I see a lot of questions on all my feeds about what causes differences in covid between cities, regions, and countries. These anecdotal comparisons are a time-wasting trap.

Instead of all these myopic, siloed comparisons, let's do the damn math on all of it! ($ Prize below) Use Worldometers data for cases. Maybe normalize dates by days from 100 to 333 to 1000 cases, deaths.

Look up all the factors ppl are talking about: pop density, weather, masks, date of shelter orders, type of shelter orders, age, etc

Then run a regression.
Mar 27, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I'm a libertarian and a fiscal conservative. I think most govt spending is at best wasteful and at worst counterproductive (@US_FDA = 💀💀💀).

But I support COVID welfare. People on lockdown who can't work need financial support. Yay Denmark! Yay Singapore! And, as far as I can tell, yay US? I expected to find the $2T was mostly pork, and be explaining how "fiscal stimulus", while maybe barely defensible in a monetary shock, is awful in what's essentially a labor supply shock (wasting more when we're making less? NO!)
Mar 26, 2020 • 10 tweets • 6 min read
I'm scared of my parents getting sick, my country going bankrupt, and of the growing emotional trauma to my entire species.

But hot damn am I going to get my schedule, routines, and processes dialed in during lockdown, and catch up on self-improvement debt! Thread 👇 I'm lucky enough to work remotely, so I still have income. Spending that income on therapists, fitness coaches, and productivity software helps keep them in business, and creates the GDP to pay the taxes to keep the UBI going until we get through this thing.
Mar 7, 2020 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
If you favor taxing billionaires more, that means you want to transfer resources from @BillGates, who is revolutionizing philanthropy and saw #COVID19 threat years ago, to the US govt, who have disastrously bungled our response to the virus.

Here's why that's wrong. Humans are deeply egalitarian, and it's our nature to be concerned about economic inequality. Through the 10,000 yrs of agriculture, those who amassed wealth did it by conquering mass regions and controlling masses of people. So that's our intuition about billionaires.