What I'm thinking about these days

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Introduction

Some topics here I’ve been thinking about for years, some for months, and some for weeks. Some are personal problems, some relate to projects I want to pursue, and some are more philosophical. What unites all of these questions is that, despite my best efforts, I haven’t been able either to answer them or get them out of my head.

If you have thoughts on any of these questions, let me know.

How to fly to the stars?

I want to host a party at the center of the universe. There are several problems with this idea.

First, I’m basically scientifically illiterate and physicists I talk to tell me that the universe doesn’t even have a center. They say that the universe looks the same in every direction from any point regardless of where you start looking from and that therefore the idea of a “center” doesn’t even make sense. This seems like a big problem.

Second, even if we found the center of the universe, it would probably be way too far away from us to get there. The universe has existed for more than 13 billion years. Who knows how far away its center is?

If we’re talking about traveling to Mars, it’s very clear how to do that. Just get on Elon’s Starship and fly. If we’re talking about traveling to the nearest star system, it’s pretty clear how to do that as well. Build a giant sail. Construct solar-powered laser plant somewhere in the solar system. Point the laser at the sail. Get to 90% of the speed of light. Get to Alpha Centauri in less than 5 years. Or if you don’t want to do that, you can blow up a bunch of nuclear bombs and use that to propel your spacecraft.

But getting even to the center of the Milky Way galaxy is another matter entirely. Alpha Centauri is 4 light-years away. The center of the Milky Way galaxy is 26,000 light years away. The only way to get there would be either via (1) a multigenerational spaceship, a faster-than-light spaceship, or (3) by figuring out how to make human cryonics/hibernation work.

As far as I know, we have no idea how to do any of these. And this is just traveling within our galaxy. So I really have little idea how to host that party. We would probably need to figure out some kind of faster-than-light travel (e.g. via wormholes or yet undiscovered physics).

In any case, if you’d like to get added to my Partiful invite, let me know.

Relevant pieces of media: Spore (a 2008 video game), Project X (a 2012 movie), Interstellar (a 2014 movie), Soulless (a 2012 Russian movie [trailer, watch with English subtitles]), Skins series 1 (a 2007 TV show [trailer]).

Interlude: How can I get OpenAI to send me to Rome for a few months?

I’m currently a contractor at OpenAI. It’s a fascinating company and I want to get converted to full-time. At the same time, I really want to spend a few months hanging out in Rome and doing my own thing, talking to people, writing, thinking, etc.

I’m very confident that if I do that while employed at OpenAI, it will somehow be good for the company even though I have no idea how. Everything good that ever happened to me initially started as me just trying to do something very strange or interesting for unexplainable reasons!

In any case, I have no idea how I would pitch this idea to OpenAI, and my best guess is that if I really do try to do that, it will in fact severely jeopardize my chances of getting a full-time offer.

How to defeat death?

(my definition of “defeating death” means “getting to constant probability of death every year of life”. This still implies finite expected lifespan rather than immortality)

I’m very confused about this.

First, here are some answers that I don’t think are right: Christian afterlife. Eastern-style eternal rebirth. Atheist technological singularity bringing Heaven (and/or Hell) to Earth.

If we’re being more down-to-earth, the first thing we want to do is solve all diseases, including aging.

Whenever I talk to people about this I can’t escape the feeling that it’s just too early to be working on aging. I have some kind of intuition that while a problem seems like a scientific problem rather than an engineering problem, you shouldn’t work on it too directly or you won’t explore the space of solutions. And I’m pretty sure aging is a scientific problem for us today.

A few years ago, Ryan Flynn (supported by New Science), currently a Professor at Harvard discovered a new type of RNA molecule (glycoRNA).

In 2024, a group of scientists discovered a new type of viroid (a virus but without the capsid shell) which they called Obelisks in the human body. We have no idea what they do.

Just two months ago, in March 2025, Nature published a piece saying “A textbook assumption about the brain’s most abundant receptors needs to be rewritten”, reporting that GluA2-containing AMPA receptors in the brain are often orders of magnitude more permeable to calcium than previously thought.

I just don’t see how we’re going to make interventions on the human body that affect such complicated processes as aging while we still keep discovering new types of molecules and viral particles in the human body. If it was a monocausal disease, sure. You just find a way to destroy whatever the agent of disease is and you don’t need to know how the body works or what’s happening in it aside from that at all.

But for an endogenously-driven multi-causal process, the origin of which we don’t know, the markers of which are all very sus, the feedback loops on which are measured in years? I just don’t see it happening.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the blog post ‘The “it” in AI models is the dataset.’ and I wonder how much progress we can make given how bad our data collection abilities in biology are. I’m not even saying that we have to “understand” everything that happens in our body. But at least we need to be able to get good data on what’s happening.

I like Ed Boyden’s idea that we want to “see everything and control everything” but we seem to be very far from that. I continue to think that one of the best things anyone could do for science is to just give Boyden $1b/year budget for the next 20 years for his biological tool-building and then in 20 years for-profit companies with whatever that effort enables.

Finally, we haven’t solved a single brain disease ever. I would personally say that it seems to be one of the more important organs out there and our inability to intervene on it makes me pessimistic about our knowledge of how to reverse its aging (which seems like a strictly and significantly more difficult task).

I hope to be proven wrong here and I hope that companies like NewLimit, Retro, and Altos succeed, despite everything I wrote above.

Interlude: What should I do with my life?

I’m very emotionally attached to New Science and to the idea of building new institutions of science. I’ve been wanting to run a research institute since at least 2018.

I believe that science, as a study of God, is sacred, and there’s no sense of sanctity at all left in modern academia. As far as I can tell, most academics simply do not believe in truth. Academia as a broader cultural entity certainly doesn’t. This pisses me off, and this is why I started New Science in the first place: to figure out how to create institutions that actually believe in the pursuit of truth first and foremost.

But I feel very lost now. AI really is getting incredibly powerful. I think I’m AI-pilled after all. If – that’s an if that deserves good questioning – the main constraint on the progress of science is sheer intelligence, perhaps working on scaling intelligence is the best thing one can be doing. This is what I’m doing now by working at OpenAI.

However, if both AI and robotics are going to make most human scientists unemployed anyway, then what’s the point of building new institutions of science? We’re entering the age of Pure Will.

On the other hand, I don’t see for profit companies doing basic science research and pursuing truth just for the sake of it – and AI progress doesn’t really change that. So there’s a world in which building new institutions of science is the right thing to do after all. I hope we’re in this world. Thinking…

Also see: What Should You Do with Your Life? Directions and Advice, On Impact, Why you shouldn’t build your career around existential risk

What’s the fundamental nature of reality? How to study it?

People used to think that Newton’s laws were how reality worked but it turned out that if you push your system hard enough they break down. Today people think that QM and Relativity theory are how reality works. They debate all kinds of philosophical questions about multiverses, collapse, fundamental randomness or lack of it, based on our construction of these theories. I don’t understand why you’d do that.

I think the right way to think about current scientific physical theories is the same as the way we think of Newton’s laws: good approximations for the range of physical systems we can currently access. At some point in the future, we’ll invent better instruments and find the places where e.g. quantum mechanics breaks down and figure out new theories. And then the same thing will happen to those theories, and the theories after them, etc.

Why not think of known physics as a set of constraints on the real generative function of the universe, whatever it is, instead of the descriptions of the ultimate reality?

I often hear people say things like “consciousness is the only real thing and that’s what determines reality”. I mean sure, there’s a way in which everything we observe is just a product of our consciousness. But there’s a hard limit on how far you can push this argument: you can shoot yourself with a gun and you’re done. That’s it. Your conscious experience ends and yet the world – with all of its natural laws – remains.

So there are hard limits to hyperstition and there really are laws of nature, independent of individual consciousness.

How to find these “final” laws rather than just their approximations…?

Relevant media: Brian Skinner, From Eros to Gaia (1992 book).

Why does everyone I know believe that the world is going to end?

There’s something to the idea of Armageddon.

A couple of years ago I really got into my head the idea that the world will end in a few years due to AI singularity/doom and have been having trouble getting rid of it ever since. Plenty of my friends and people I know have never escaped.

I mean, what if it is true? What if the world really is about to end? Then nothing matters. Nothing except fully dedicating yourself to averting the end of course.

I understand early Christians much better now. If I were living then and saw Jesus doing the miracles and then telling me that the world is ending within our lifetimes, I probably would’ve dropped whatever I was doing, donated all of my money to him, and spent the rest of my life spreading the Word in an attempt to save as many souls as I could.

What I find notable is that in overtaking Christianity as the leading thought doctrine, science, and physics specifically, has replaced the Biblical story of creation, but also its story of Armageddon. Christianity said it was Rapture. Physics says it’s the heat death of the universe.

Every single story of Armageddon ever told so far has been false. I cannot help but to reject the idea of Armageddon – whether Religious, Technological, or Scientific – entirely. And yet every single person I know still believes some version of it.

I mean it literally: every single person I know believes in either religious Rapture, the heat death of the universe, or AI Utopia/Doom. Why?

Conclusion

In 2024, I didn’t know what to do, so I ran a Twitter poll posing this question to my followers (vox populi, vox dei). They told me to get serious about physics, so I flew into Boston at the beginning of the Spring term 2024 and spent 4 months auditing physics classes at MIT, going to a lot of research seminars, and talking to physicists.

I ended up auditing undergraduate Quantum Physics I, undergraduate Statistical Physics I, graduate Astrophysics I, and graduate Atomic and Optical Physics (I’m not claiming to have understood much in any of these classes; although, at the insistence of Isaak Freeman, I did show up for one of the Quantum Physics I midterms, had it graded, and successfully passed it, which I think shows that I wasn’t 100% just LARPing).

In any case, it was all very fun, I met a lot of great people, at some point a Harvard physics professor offered to write me a recommendation letter for grad school, apparently being impressed with all of the harebrained questions I was asking at the weekly research seminar he was in charge of, but it became pretty clear that I’m not becoming a Physics Professor any time soon.

I spent June in Mexico City with Misha Yagudin, July to October traveling around wherever people had a couch for me to sleep on, went to New York for November, hung out in Taiwan with Misha in December, but eventually figured that OpenAI would be a good place for me to think about the future of science, and started here in January.

For 2025, my #1 goal is to get out of debt. My #2 goal is to learn to drive. My #3 goal is to figure out if the thesis behind building new institutions of science still makes sense.

I want OpenAI to work out and I would love to continue pursuing my curiosity and thinking about science & AI at the company, but if it doesn’t, I’ll probably become unemployed for a bit again (and writing more). What’s afterwards? I’m not sure.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Mehran Jalali, Sundari Sheldon, Maksym Sherman, and Jackson Veigel for conversations and feedback.

Notes

Appendix: 2021-02-25 concerns

[this is from my personal notes written in February 2025; I announced New Science publicly on May 13, 2021]

ok i feel terrible like my project doesn’t make any sense at all in the first place…….

ok so what’s my project? building new scientific institutions, decoupled from existing ones

but you know what existing scientific institutions work totally fine

we have a shitton of basic science

the gap is translation

the gap is just people

the gap is not in us not having enough fundamental science or us not moving quickly enough

anyone really smart can get into science or if they don’t want that get a job at a biotech

besides there’s the whole issue of biosafety, maybe it’s more important to worry about it than about speed of science itself

also church lab exists - well but it will soon not exist!

so yeah this doesn’t really make sense to work on

basic science is bs lol

tony kulesa is in biotech

everyone else too

i don’t see a reason for why i would try to build new institutions of basic science

also there’s max planck institute in germany

given how few really brilliant people there are, i think we are doing good

…

yep……

George Church exists

“if you have low gpa you’re fucked” no you’re not, you work as a tech for 2 years and you’re golden

perhaps what i should do is find a goal that’s really helpful?

not just abstarctly build new scientific institutions…..

science is really doing fine

there’s thought emporium

ok but there’rs adam strandberg

what’s up with him? well yeah i can help him i guess?

but as i myself said, he’ll find a way

and he’s a big exception

and yes church is an exception

but what about adam marblestone, he didn’t get in

and in europe, there’s Crick institute!!!! take brilliant people, get them money

plenty of places to work on crazy stuff

shoudl i expose the corruption of NIH? that’s how everyone makes a name for themselves…!

there’s literally just one Boyden and just one Church

i refused an offer from church 1.5 years - he was interested in me being a fundraiser for him. this would actually be perfect i thought he was too old and too rich i should’ve thought more about this now i feel terrible lol

wait but biotech is not working on basic science lmao or Boyden or Open Phil… I firmly believe they could’ve brought me in and it would’ve been great for them.

ok but what about the publication system

you need to publish in CNS in order to graduate and do cool shit

anyway eLife is doing great there I think and the publication system becomes better too

but anyway what does new institutions of basic science even mean

suppose i have $10b per year budget

what exactly will be better in my system? or do i really believe competition is all we need?

more people should be going into biotech anyway?

are there many people stuck in tech positions? well i’m not aware of them!

like i’m just making an argument that it’s not enough

also jed was right – i need to figure out a way to justify my project. and if i couldn’t justify it then probably i just didn’t have a very good idea of what i’m trying to do!

like how do you even improve academia?

if we don’t even know what the problems are, how am i saying i’m going to build new academic institutions

if career progression is to be decoupled, it needs to be a separate system!!!

you can always get a job at a biotech these days anyway!

MOTIVATION PABLO ADAM STRANDBERG JP BIDA ADAM MARBLESTONE CHURCH Andrew York?

at the end of the day, everyone i talk to went to a top school! can’t turn this around!!!

like who are tehse mythical people who i want to support??? i can’t find them!!!!

but maybe academia is good – motivates people to work really hard!!!!!

idk man lol

maybe i can do this new science research and shit and then start a biotech fund lol –

ok let me find the most motivational aspects for me!! —–

the other claim is that i need to enable just a very small number of individuals

call with egan? look at it

look at the original essay version

also what about the whole issue of discoveries following one another…….

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vk4eKUbW9K6jg1QpQjeUbbDoQga6TqD1wVh9FwOMJ1U/edit#heading=h.27l98jja95yi

Noah reminded me that there’s so much fucked up shit with academia….that’s incredible. like grant cut offs… again, the entire competition system of academia… it just makes so little sense….it’s incredible… also I’m talking to people working in hot areas…but in not hot areas…shit’s fucked up…nobody is researching cryonics for example!!! ok, I’m inspired now. lol

the reason for my academia:

2021-02-27 i feel terrible anxiety for not delivering anything with new science in so long…

i just need to find one crispt, to enable a few lost geniuses

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CcOR4HERqVcRiZU6Nc37VckTB5Ywa-QWPNdYC2EFOso/edit#

expanding into space, colonizing mars is INCREDIBLY INSPIRATIONAL

The absolute pillars:

The pillars:

Appendix: how to speed up the future?

I’m very confused about this.

First of all, I think is the wrong question to ask. It’s trivial to speed up the future. (The reason this is what I’m titling the section is because “speeding up the future” is what my Twitter bio said circa 2018-2020.)

For example, I can go in to a biology lab right now (say Ed Boyden’s), join a few projects and contribute to a few discoveries or improvements to biological research tools. In this way, I would directly speed up the future. I don’t need to make any grand theories and to look for root causes.

Is the right question “how to speed up the future the most?”? I don’t think so. I think it’s basically impossible to know how your actions affect the future and whether they speed it up or slow it down.

Even the example I mentioned above – I don’t actually know if whatever I’ll work on will help or not. The world is just a very very strange place.

I’m tempted to ask the question “what are the root causes of technological progress?” but I always come out being extremely confused. Nonetheless:

What’s the root cause of technological progress?

Is it a given and is just a thing that happens to nature over time with organisms becoming more complex and eventually building systems that increase the complexity of their environments on top of them?

That doesn’t seem right. Over the course of human history, some parts of the world and some societies have produced an incredible amount of technological progress while others produced barely any and stagnated, despite significant populations. As much as I love thinking about the Roman Empire, the technological progress it created over the many centuries of its existence is laughable, given its level of societal complexity and available resources.

I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that Maya spent more than 3,000 years doing agriculture (i.e. they started before Rome was founded) but didn’t figure out the wheel, iron, or use of animal labor. In fact, they did encounter horses. They just killed them all instead of domesticating them (they did domesticate dogs, so it’s not like they didn’t have any idea what they were doing).

Is the urge to invent natural?

The Greeks did have automatons (e.g. Antikythera), steam engine, and all kinds of fun inventions. So did the Arabs in the middle ages (see the Book of Ingenious Devices published in 850 in Baghdad; as well as this very long List of inventions in the medieval Islamic world). So did the Chinese.

Does this mean that the urge to invent is extremely natural and there’s nothing special about the idea that things can get better? Just like we play naturally, perhaps we invent naturally too? Then it would mean that it’s the environment and the context being conducive to knowledge accumulation that is the key.

Is it about the preservation of knowledge and therefore freedom of speech and democracy?

Perhaps we always invent and discover things. But knowledge gets lost. For knowledge to grow, it needs to be spread and preserved. But the best way to preserve it is to spread it. So this makes me think about freedom of speech and democracy being the most important elements of knowledge accumulation.

What enables democracy? I have no idea. What we do know is that democratic societies are sparse through history. Even today the vast majority of countries are not democracies. Nonetheless they are uniquely associated with cultural and scientific golden ages (5th century BC Athens, 15th-16th centuries Italian city states, 17th-18th centuries Netherlands/UK).

The key thing about democracies I think is non-violent competition. Monopolies lead to stagnation. Violent competition leads to destruction. Non-violent competition forces people to create, in order to win, rather than destroy and therefore leads to progress.

So perhaps I’m not that confused after all and the answer is actually simple? Non-violent competition is the key and figuring out how to make it robust is how we get technological progress.

What about the random legal structures?

There’s something about almost random legal structures. Like the idea of a corporation as a separate entity that survives humans and therefore enables accumulation of resources including knowledge impossible over time. As far as I can tell Roman law was unique in allowing these kinds of legal entities. In the Arabic world for example, the death of a person triggered liquidation of assets of their businesses, making long-term capital accumulation nearly impossible.

ChatGPT tells me that a big reason the first parliaments emerged in Europe was due to primogeniture encouraging accumulation of assets in single families, while Quran ordered Muslims to distribute assets equally across all sons, therefore dissolving family wealth over time, and preventing the emergence of clans capable of challenging central authority.

What about the raw physical ingredients?

Then there’s something about the very raw physical ingredients. There would be no progress had there not been habitable Earth. There would be no progress had there been no Eurasia for agriculture and first civilizations to emerge. There would be no politically and intellectually fragmented and diverse Europe were it not for its mountain ranges and English islands. There would be no industrial revolution in the UK were it not for relatively easily accessible iron ore and coal.

At the same time, whenever I think about raw physical ingredients, I end up getting back to ideas. People like to say that the Soviet Union fell apart because of money problems. I don’t think this is the case. I think the people (and the leaders, specifically) just stopped believing in communism sometime in 1970s and that’s when the fall of the Soviet Union really happened. 1991 was just the final step. But the root causes were not economic, they were in people’s minds.

What about personal excitedness?

Then there’s something about energy. What we do best is what we’re most passionate about. And given how hard it is to predict the future, perhaps the best way to speed it up is to just work on whatever you’re most passionate about, provided some basic set of rules like (only use violence against entities that use violence more loosely than you; the equilibrium of adopting this rule is no violence, as all more violent entities are gradually eliminated by less violent ones).

What about Jesus?

I wonder how much of technological progress is directly attributable to Jesus. I think of science as the study of God and, as far as I can tell, it was Christianity that introduced that idea. Both Roger Bacon and his teacher were first and foremost Christian priests (notably, they lived in the 13th century, right when the UK got its first parliament). The first universities in the world were created by the clerics and were granted unique intellectual freedoms because they studied God and were explicitly not competing for power or money in any ordinary kind of way.

Should we even study history here?

How much is history even relevant here? If there’s one lesson I got from reading history it’s that history always changes – if it didn’t, then what would be the point of reading it? There would be no point in studying Napoleon, if there was someone in history who did what he did earlier. There would be no point in studying the Industrial Revolution if something very similar to it happened before already. The reason we study history is because things change. And the next big thing will not be like those in the past.

Perhaps the sources of progress itself change over time. The past determines the present. The present determines the future.

Mr. Milken built his career on a simple observation. When he was a student at Wharton, he realized that people commonly made the mistake of assuming that what happened in the past is necessarily a good indication of the future; if this were true, the railroad stocks would still make up the bulk of big board listings. From this insight, Mr. Milken came up with the hypothesis that the credit rating agencies, which investment bankers had long relied upon to assess the creditworthiness of firms, might systematically err in favor of firms with long histories and high reported earnings. He would in time conclude that what really counted was future cash flow and the quality of a firm’s management team. (Witness to a Prosecution: The Myth of Michael Milken)

At the end of the day, nobody can predict what the future holds. If we don’t do anything, then nothing will happen for sure. But if we do try to do create or discover something new, then it might contribute to the future in an interesting way. That is the only thing that I can think of that truly stays constant throughout history.

Relevant media: From Eros To Gaia (a 1992 book), Stubborn Attachments (a 2018 book), Занимательная Греция (a 1995 book).

Maksym Sherman writes:

Very complicated question. My first reaction would be that we should allow people to invent. They should be free to pursue their curiosity.

My personal sense is that preventing the discouragement of innovation is more important than the encouragement of more innovation. We need to make sure there are no dogmas that you should not ask these questions (like was the case during the height of wokeism).

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