DeSci🧬Biohacking - Researching Canine Longevity @DogYearsDAO | Advisor to @UnlimitedBio | As seen on #UnnaturalSelection & #CitizenBio | 🏳️🌈🏴☯️
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Joined December 2015
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Tristan Roberts retweeted
Israel just murdered a doctor featured in the film about Israel murdering doctors
My colleague and friend Dr. Rizk Abu Shaaira was killed yesterday at work when Israel, backed by the US as always, bombed the surgical recovery room at Nasser Medical Complex. Two of his colleagues were badly injured, and many patients were hurt and killed. Dr. Rizk is featured on the original poster for the documentary American Doctor, standing to my right as we did a redo laparotomy on a disaster abdomen.
Dr. Rizk was one of those surgeons we describe as "super enthusiastic". On rounds he would jump at the opportunity to change a dressing, clean a wound, or pull a drain. He always had an answer to any question anyone asked. He embodied the surgical wisdom that "a chance to cut is a chance to cure."
Dr. Rizk's shocking murder is yet another reminder of why we must get control of our country. Our government has no right to force us to subsidize the mass murder of doctors and children, not in Palestine and not anywhere.
Tristan Roberts retweeted
I know this is a predictable opinion from me but I don't agree with the strong emotional reaction against the anti-data-center movements that I've seen this week.
As I see it, algorithmic progress means that whatever you would be able to do with more and bigger data centers in 2 years, you will be able to do with the data centers we have today in 4 years - probably sooner. So nothing remotely apocalyptically bad will happen from even extreme levels of success by anti-data-center people.
Meanwhile we need all the time we can get to better harden the world against both already-visible cybersecurity issues and any bio and other risks soon to come. Science applications are bottlenecked by many things other than AI, so slowing AI down by one year will slow those down by much less than one year.
Given this, a slowdown in compute hyper-scaling seems quite net good? Notice this is without any controversial "doomer arguments", RSI etc. Even if net-bad, it's certainly not worse than like 10+ other political things.
Tristan Roberts retweeted
my spidey senses are telling me the labs are, as we speak, using unguardrailed versions of their unreleased models to systematically reverse-engineer ALL of the internet’s software, apps, and games, then feeding the reconstructed source code straight into their training pipelines while simultaneously building guardrails to ladder-pull the rest of us
Tristan Roberts retweeted
Positive visions of a future with powerful AI tend to leave questions around human meaning, judgment and power wide open.
@edelwax introduces telocracy: a vision for a society where AI holds institutions accountable to their purposes.
Tristan Roberts retweeted
Crypto has a reputation for being all about money. And looking at my feed lately, it's getting harder and harder to disagree.
Weren't we supposed to be building decentralised solutions that give power back to people?
We're in a very US-heavy space, yet I barely see serious conversations about the erosion of democracy under Trump, the upcoming midterms, or what's happening in Brazil, Georgia, Israel. Or even the recent victory of the student-led movement in Serbia, the protests against the rising cost of living happening around the world. Never mind the longer-term consequences of all this.
It feels like people avoid political, cultural and sociological discussions at all costs. But shouldn't we be doing the exact opposite?
This isn't about left versus right, or allegiance to any political ideology. This is about centralisation versus decentralisation. About who controls our money, our data, our tools, and ultimately our lives.
Meanwhile, democratic institutions are losing legitimacy, authoritarianism is on the rise, economic systems are under strain, and communities are increasingly fragmented. 74% of the world's population now lives under autocratic regimes.
At the same time, we're becoming increasingly dependent on social media and AI tools controlled by a handful of global players, collecting unprecedented amounts of data about our lives, while data breaches expose more of it at a scale and speed that's hard to comprehend. Power is becoming more concentrated, while people are losing control over their own lives.
And yet, somehow, the conversation keeps coming back to money.
We set out to beat the system at its own game.
Instead, we got seduced by it.
Our movement got hijacked.
Greed is real.
I find that genuinely depressing and infuriating.
Call me naive, but I'm still here for building. For building parallel institutions and solutions that are open, censorship-resistant, and difficult to capture.
I'd love to see more conversations about what we're building, why it matters, and the problems we're trying to solve, rather than how much money we can make from it. I personally want to commit to that.
Who is leading the way here?
Who is still building today?
Where is the hope?
Tristan Roberts retweeted
New thing we're trying on X 🧪
If you see a post with a dubious scientific claim, reply "@ResearchHub test this"
We will automatically generate a preregistered experimental design you can fund to test the claim in question
nitter.cf/jwmares/status/2115873…
Tristan Roberts retweeted
When this conversation comes up, I always go back to this really succinct quote from Fran Lebowitz.
Tristan Roberts retweeted
the NPC in deus ex calling to tell you he found proof the illuminati invented AIDS in the 70s while you crawl around an air vent like spiderman:
Tristan Roberts retweeted
Announcing Ikigai Grants:
Microgrants give early-stage, bootstrapped talent capital. But that’s not enough.
I’ve watched too many grantees become perpetual microgrant chasers, wasting time applying to one $5k grant after another. Worse, most programs encourage this by funding the blanket “smart people doing cool things,” with no real conviction behind it.
I wouldn’t be here without patronage from @tylercowen & @jposhaughnessy. But looking back, the mentors & community were worth much more than the money.
So I built the program I always wished existed:
- $50k total, avg. $5k check
- Matched with mentors & community across @RenPhilanthropy , Fulcrum Science, and my personal network of founders, fund leads, investors & scientists.
Cohort 1 backs emerging talent in areas I believe are deeply underfunded and undervalued. Every application is reviewed by me.
Ikigai Grants is a program of @RenPhilanthropy, with support from Fulcrum Science. Advised by many wonderful friends & colleagues including: @AshleyNAbel @RaianyRomanni @NeuroStats Bonnie EJ Maven @idatin @ashleyz413 @JackScannell13
Apply by Nov 9th, 9a PST:
alexaraki.xyz/ikigai
Tristan Roberts retweeted
Former managing director at BGC Group/British banker-turned-whistleblower Simon Andriesz, the man who told the FBI about Lutnick/BGC’s “financial irregularities,” fraudulent 9/11 charity, and revealed Lutnick’s business partnership with Epstein in Adfin, has been found dead.
Tristan Roberts retweeted
rationalists be like yeah this guy is probably a sociopath and maybe a rapist but he's charming and writes good so who can say if he's really bad
yeah I recall hearing a bit about someone getting kicked out of LO for sleeping over, maybe it was WBE. obviously if he's banned we won't have him at Manifest
maybe this reflects badly on me, but I've actually read a lot of this person's substack, and found it, idk, at least quite captivating. (while not endorsing a lot of his behavior). I find his writing better written than ~half of inkhaven
I also have a lot of sympathy for someone who just really doesn't have any money (he says, $800 net worth); but still wants to meet and talk to other interesting smart people. Manifest has historically provided many complimentary tickets to eg students for this reason
seems like the kind of thing jesus would do?
Tristan Roberts retweeted
Annie is wearing her dad’s fleece.
Jerry Altman had a known heart condition, but was overworking. Annie pleaded Sam to help their father’s retire. Sam never did. Then their father died of heart failure.
Jerry left a trust to support Annie if she struggled with income. Sam colluded to hide the trust from Annie. Then they blocked access for years. Annie became homeless, struggled with severe health issues, and had to turn to sex work.
This is all covered in the *second* lawsuit. Which btw, needs funds because Annie’s previous lawyers all left, and she had to get new ones.
Please help get the story out
nitter.cf/anniealtman108/status/…
ALT Annie says ‘My dad’s fleece’ in the deposition
Hello, my name is Annie Altman. My father, Jerry Altman, lived from October 4, 1950 until May 25, 2018. He loved sports, music, thrift shopping, and seeing his loved ones happy. I often wished and asked for him to be retired, especially due to his known heart conditions. Instead he died at age 67, while working more than overtime hours, including overnight road trips between St. Louis and Kansas City.
After my Dad’s death in 2018, his assets were supposed to fund a trust for my benefit. Instead, my “family” did nothing to fulfill his wishes and hid the existence of the trust from me. You can find a history of his estate in the court file and see for yourself their inaction on: ww.courts.mo.gov/casenet/
Case Number: 25SL-PR02320
In the time without the support my Dad intended for me, I was homeless for more than three years, began survival sex work, and managed Elhers-Danlos Syndrome, PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome), PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), and more.
In 2024, St. Louis attorney Mike Gras helped show that the Trust did exist and I now receive monthly payments for my basic needs. These payments, that my Father intended for me to have after his death in 2018, allowed me to: finally have stable housing again after a 2021 home invasion, slowly stop the sex work I had begun for survival, and finally get major ankle surgery after seven straight years (and 12 years since the first walking boot) of pain. I am sharing this from my fourth week of recovery from said ankle surgery, where scar and other tissues were removed and an internal support was attached to my bones.
The Trust is currently being managed by Parkside Financial Bank & Trust in St. Louis. I have not received all of the information I am entitled to about the assets in the trust, especially concerning my siblings' company Hydrazine. Hydrazine is a company founded by my eldest sibling Sam, and my other siblings Max and Jack have been employees of Hydrazine, all of whom I went no contact with in 2020.
I filed a lawsuit in St. Louis County for their failure to fulfill my father's wishes, which can be found here: courts.mo.gov/fv/c/Petition.…
Lawyers specialized in this kind of trust litigation require upfront retainers that are out of my capacity to afford. The court denied my request for the trust to cover my legal fees, so here I am.
Thank you for helping me protect my Dad's wishes and legacy.
Tristan Roberts retweeted
He was onto something
Tristan Roberts retweeted
I was very strongly influenced by rationalism/LessWrong/EA growing up. This is why I don’t emphasize claims that it’s all just a cynical ploy for power. I know what it feels like to sincerely believe these things. And that’s much worse.
By and large, I think these people really believe that not just the world but the entire lightcone is at stake, and the only hope for a good outcome is if they totally control AI development, which would require global governance and a surveillance state. And since the stakes are ~infinite, any means are justified in achieving this.
A cynical greedy person can be negotiated with and bought off. A true believer can’t. They’re much more dangerous, ironically for the same reason they say AGI will be dangerous: monomaniacal focus on a single goal leads via instrumental convergence to unconstrained power-seeking.
Tristan Roberts retweeted
Totally agree. I’d argue myostatin inhibitors and other muscle-preserving and generating therapies may even end up being bigger than GLP-1 drugs and a key second bridge to the longevity escape bridge in extending human lifespan.
Tristan Roberts retweeted
In two or three years there will be 10x the number of INDs and the same number of people you can recruit into a clinical trial. I don't understand what people think is going to happen. Everyone is funding molecular design but folks, we've got to also be funding new validation methodologies in a big big way.