Deeply researched interviews. Hosted by @dwarkesh_sp. https://nitter.cf/t.co/hq7epHY0dU https://nitter.cf/t.co/y9nO6uPNgf
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How did Lyndon Johnson transform the Senate Majority Leader into the second most powerful office in the United States?
The key was to know and manipulate the rules of the Senate to bully, cajole, and steer his colleagues as he saw fit.
Lyndon Johnson was the most skilled politician in the history of the American Senate.
Here’s how he pulled off his legislative masterpiece - the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
Instead of Space Age carbon fiber or aluminum-lithium, SpaceX is building its Starship rocket out of stainless steel.
Stainless steel is easy to weld, far cheaper, and under the right conditions, it has a similar strength-to-weight ratio as carbon fiber.
@elonmusk explains:
Starship, SpaceX’s largest and most sophisticated rocket, generates power equivalent to 20% of average daily U.S. electricity generation.
@elonmusk is trying to harness all that power without the rocket exploding - and then make it reusable.
President George H.W. Bush has gotten a lot of criticism for the Gulf War, usually for not “finishing the job” by overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
But leaving Saddam in power makes sense if you factor in Soviet involvement.
The USSR had been a Saddam ally (and creditor) for decades, and the US was thankful to have Soviet support in the Gulf War, but the Soviets only helped on the condition that Saddam would stay in power and US troops wouldn’t occupy the country.
Sarah Paine explains how the Gulf War was just a sideshow in the final days of the Cold War:
Gorbachev was obviously quite smart, but even the smartest communists bought into really dumb Marxist ideas.
Gorbachev thought that once a country moved from capitalism to socialism, it could never go back. He believed this was a scientific law of history.
He also thought that Poland, Hungary, and the rest of Eastern Europe would be so grateful for their communist regimes that they would always be loyal to the Soviet Union.
Sarah Paine explains how Gorbachev’s Marxist ideas undermined the USSR:
Lying destroyed the Soviet economy. Markets have prices, but command economies only have reports, and everyone was incentivized to lie on their reports.
Imagine what it would be like if almost every company were lying about its financials all the time. Imagine if the numbers put out by Amazon and Walmart were always wrong, if cost inputs were always undercounted and output was always exaggerated.
How would anyone know what any company was worth or whether it was net-productive? How would anything work?
Sarah Paine explains the Soviet economic system:
The contrast between what the Soviet Union was on paper and in reality was staggering.
There’s a story about future Russian President Boris Yeltsin coming to the US in 1989, walking into a random grocery store, and being so astounded by the quality and variety of goods that he realized the Soviet Union was going to fall.
Sarah Paine witnessed this sort of thing first-hand in Moscow.
Dwarkesh Podcast retweeted
I find it wild that @physical_int robotics models can work at all given that they only have a 1 second context length.
As the robot is moving around a room and cleaning up a table, it only sees the current timestamp of images from the cameras (plus the text description of its task).
I asked @svlevine was how this model can work at all. If a human had to execute a many minutes long plan in order to accomplish a physical task, but had her memory reset every second, there's no way she could pull it off
But somehow just knowing what state the world is literally in this moment is all you need to know to keep a reasonably complication plan going?
Sergey's answer calls on Morevac's Paradox, and I thought it was quite interesting.
Full episode out tomorrow!
Casey Handmer argues AI pricing is so elastic that Anthropic could raise subscription prices 10x to fund new gas turbines. If that’s true, why is solar still the future?
“The learning rate for natural gas is nowhere near as steep as solar… there are very few manufactured products easier to make than solar panels.”
Casey Handmer argues that investment in natural gas is doomed, even if there were no near-term geopolitical or financial risks from an AI bubble or China invading Taiwan.
The fundamental problem: gas turbines need 20 years to pay back, but solar and batteries have already won on price. You're financing infrastructure that's economically obsolete before it's even built.
Dwarkesh Podcast retweeted
As measured by GDP, AI will be super undervalued.
How would the datacenter of geniuses show up in GDP?
GDP would show raw inputs (aka chip & energy), and raw outputs (aka cost of tokens). But wouldn't clearly reflect the value of the crazy new shit that's being cooked up in those tokens.
Similar problem to how the Internet's value is undercounted today (since many products are free, and thus contribute nothing to measured GDP).
Perhaps the best way to measure the size of the future AI economy will just be our civilization's total energy use.
Full episode with @CJHandmer out in a couple hours!
(Credit to @jekbradbury and @gwern for mentioning this idea in conversation.)
Ruthlessly optimizing efficiency created the factory farming problem.
But in some cases, efficiency gains from tech can have a positive impact on animal welfare.
Here Lewis Bollard describes how in-ovo sexing "went from 10 years ago just being a vague idea to today, it's already a third of the European egg industry."
The largest meat producers exploit climate rhetoric as cover for avoiding reforms.
One of the biggest knows from its own surveys that consumers care more about animal welfare than climate.
So when asked to adopt higher-welfare breeds or give animals more room, meat producers argue this would raise the carbon footprint.
Dwarkesh Podcast retweeted
People don’t appreciate how effective corporate campaigns have been on animal welfare.
As opposed to policy change (often gets gridlocked by the meat industry) or moonshot cultivated meat tech (might be decades away from being competitive).
This is a pro-market story! We can improve the lives of billions of animals by convincing food companies that consumers would prefer them to use meat from farms with marginally more expensive but far lower suffering practices.
@Lewis_Bollard: US has gone from less than 10% cage-free to 47% cage-free. This transition has already spared over 200 million hens A YEAR from these battery cages.”
Dwarkesh Podcast retweeted
We're just getting started Lewis!
Dwarkesh's fundraiser to fight factory farming has now raised over $1M! ($535K doubled by the match.)
I'm very grateful to @dwarkesh_sp, @patrickc, and all the other generous donors!
This funding will impact millions of animals' lives.
Dwarkesh Podcast retweeted
It's hard to grasp the scale of factory farming.
@Lewis_Bollard described what he saw at one farm with 200,000 hens in battery cages (each hen crammed together with 4-6 other hens in a space the size of a microwave oven for years on end, unable to even flap their wings).
Consider an alternative civilization where factory farming didn't exist. If we had just discovered that there was one farm treating 200,000 animals this way, it would be a moral emergency.
But there are about 8 billion caged hens alive globally at any moment. Which means this one farm is literally just 1/40,000th of the suffering. And that's just for egg production.
The whole episode isn't so dire - it discusses the science and economics of the meat industry. But I wanted to highlight this point because it is so easy to flinch away, and not notice how big and important this issue really is.
When an industry optimizes for one metric, it often breaks everything else. In factory farming, this creates compounding suffering.
Lewis Bollard explains how trying to solve pig boredom opens a spiral of unintended consequences.
“At each step, there is a new solution that can’t solve the fundamental underlying parts of the problem. And sometimes just makes it worse.”