I mostly wanted to make this video as kind of a conclusion to the last two
videos I made. So I made a video on, like,
AI risk and loneliness, and I made a video on dating.
And
I was not very happy with leaving it at that, because if I leave it at that, it becomes,
you know... Anytime anyone ever Goo- Googles me, the first two videos, they're just going
to see
me complaining, fairly negative mood about problems
and not seeming to do much to fix them.
And
I didn't want to leave it at that. I wanted to
conclude it with, "Okay, look, here's the next steps I'm taking on these problems.
Here's what I've understood."
And, you know, "Here's the next vibration of the game I'm playing."
That's how I wanted to make this video.
I
may not have that much to talk today, but I just wanted to conclude those two videos.
That's why I'm making today's video.
So...
Yeah, I mean, so there's, like, a more practical
thing to it, and there's a more, you know, theoretical, like, reasoning
kind of thing to it. So practically, what am I doing?
I mean, one is, uh,
I'm going to be applying for funding, uh,
to go to San Francisco for at least six months, uh, maybe one year.
Uh, but at least six months. I'm going to fill these applications over the next one week,
and
let's see how it goes. I mean, I do think it's in the self-interest of the people
funding me to fund me. Like,
that is something I've thought about, like, "Are you fooling the guy on the other side
or, you know, is it actually in their self-interest to fund you?" I think it's in their
interest to, you know,
get me to SF for six months to work on, you know, the guide for whistleblowers, which I
want to... You can see my website for that.
Uh,
but also, I'm not going to spend too much time on the funding applications.
I'm going to spend, you know, one week. That's it, done.
Uh, next Saturday, I will not be still, you know, thinking about the funding
applications. If I don't get funding, that's fine. I don't actually need the funding.
I'm just going to work on this
whistleblowing guide regardless.
Uh... Oh, and the connection
to the previous two videos. I mean, basically, in the previous two videos, I think both
of the videos directly, indirectly talked about, uh,
how communities that share attention on something that is actually
important,
is a great way to, you know, achieve
career goals. It's a great way to date.
It's great for multiple ways and I just seem to be lacking that, you know, here in India,
in Bangalore. Uh...
Yeah, because, again, as per my opinion, the things that
communities here get formed around are less important and...
At least less important to me and maybe to the future of the world, but...
I mean, I definitely get that it's important to them, you know, so...
It's just... yeah.
Therefore, if I want, let's say, community specific on, to AI risk, I'd probably need to
go to the US. Uh...
Like, that's just the simple solution, it's just a question of, you know, how long it
takes before someone thinks I'm worth, you know, funding for that to happen.
Or, or, I mean, I need to make the money and make that happen, either way.
One way or the other, like... That needs to happen in my lifetime, that's for sure.
Like, I need to get... To spend some months in SF at least. Uh...
So yeah, one week and spend funding applications. What else? Uh...
Yeah, I'm just going to go back to my... The guide I'm writing.
Oh, there's maybe longer
decision-making process on why did I say only one week and, like, you know,
don't... Like, why have I made, okay, working the priority not, you know, getting funding
for the work the priority.
That's kind of boring, I...
Yeah, that... I mean, I made up my mind, you know.
Now I'll sit and explain why I made the decision and like, "Eh, let it be," I think.
Nah, hmm,
yeah. Oh, coming to the theoretical things, so what I do feel is...
Yeah, I mean, I seem...
Oh, okay, no, sorry, practically there was one more thing I wanted to say.
Yeah, I mean, I did ask some people I know, you know, friends, acquaintances, strangers,
whether
my seeming sense of, like, loneliness can be fixed by finding a
co-founder for the project I want to work on, on the next, you know, one month...
one to six months. Which is this guide for whistleblowers.
And everyone mostly gave me the unanimous conclusion that,
you know, finding a co-founder
can help you achieve, you know, your goals, but it's not going to fix your loneliness.
Everyone universally just told me the same thing.
And
I think there is some truth to that. I'm not completely sure,
but...
Yeah, I mean, I do still have some personal, like, emotional stuff I do still need to
figure out, so... That's...
I think there is some truth in that. Yeah.
Um...
What else?
Yeah, um...
Okay, practically, I mean, I also mentioned the dating, right?
Like, I made a whole video on dating. Yeah, uh...
The conclusion to that is... Yeah, basically...
I mean,
I see mostly clear, look, I do want to find someone who's polyamorous even if there are
very few people in the city
who are that way and...
I guess it's fine for me to then not want to, you know, date people who are not
poly and...I never really spent
that much time with them.
Um,
it's...
I don't know. Maybe I should have made some notes on this.
Like, I'm still confused on how to understand it right now.
Yeah, I think broadly most of the conclusions I made in the dating video are actually
true, it's just there I was like, "Oh, this is so depressing that these things are true,"
and now I'm like, "Yeah, maybe these are true and that's fine." Like what's the problem?
Like what did I specifically say? I specifically said, you know, I don't think I will get
very good advice from a random woman I meet.
Like randomly selected,
which I still believe in. Uh, I said
I won't get emotional support from a randomly selected woman.
And yeah, I think there is some truth to that.
Like
there are some deeper things I need to fix within me which I don't think any other woman
is going to fix for me. And
maybe I still can, can rely on emotional support to some extent
on other people and maybe I need to explore why I am not able to do that very well.
Like, there may be
something going on there. You know, I made a lot of notes and, you know, what is
emotional support? What are emotions? Like I've not thought about these topics a lot.
Like I made just, you know, list of, you know, what are emotions and like, you know, a
list of 100 emotions and, you know, let's bucket these into categories.
And
when I say emotional support, okay, what exactly do I mean?
I, I don't want to talk a lot about that, like, you know, emotions and emotional support,
um, because I think I don't understand it very well yet.
But yeah, it's something I'm trying to understand better and when I do understand it
fairly well,
maybe then I will make a video on that topic. Uh, probably not. Not right now.
Uh,
yeah, coming back to dating, yeah, and advice and emotional support.
Yeah, and mostly I don't seem to want to do shared activities.
I think this again comes back to this community thing where,
you know, in an ideal world you do have a community that is united for the right reasons.
Like,
they're paying attention to things that will still matter 10 years or 20 years from now
and, you know,
group around hobbies. Those hobbies are probably not going to matter to any of those
people 10 years or 20 years from now. And maybe sometimes they do, but generally not.
And
that seems suboptimal compared to a world where, you know, those people
had joined a community where they do all focus on the same thing that will still matter
10 years, 20 years from now.
And
yeah, I think that's true. So I think not wanting a lot of shared activities is also
fine.
And...
Yeah, see the thing is, uh, like there's a part of me that actually enjoys all these
things, you know.
There's a part of me that actually enjoys shared activities.
It's just I think another part of me has just, you know, suppressed and like crushed that
part of me because of, you know, internal conflict and I- me having multiple
priorities in life and me realizing I can't actually achieve all of them.
Therefore, you know, go suppress some of your priorities
and, you know, have shared activities with random women or even men for that matter.
Uh, it's just kind of getting suppressed as less important.
And
yeah,
I think I don't have a very good way of resolving internal conflict.
Like, when two parts of me are saying, "You know, go do two different things" and I
realize I can't do both,
usually it's just like, okay, make notes, uh, make a guess, you know.
Look at my own emotions and see which of these things are more important than...
And I just would do the more important thing and keep doing it until you break,
like...
Yeah. I don't kn- Yeah, my way of figuring this out is just, you know, ex- go experiment
hard at something until I break, and
either I'm like miserable as fuck and I'm like,
oh, maybe I pushed myself harder than was necessary to get this done.
Uh, like I don't seem to care at all. So I can give you a practical example.
Uh,
fifth year of college there was a period of about six months where I felt like, oh, I
really need to, you know, go start a startup.
Like just a tech startup and I need to make a million dollars and a lot of problems in my
life will get fixed if I had a million dollars.
Uh,
yeah and by the end of it I was fairly unhappy and I realized, no, I do have some other
more personal things I do need to fix.
And
yeah, getting a million dollars will maybe help with some of them but it's not going to
fix them and it's going to consume, you know, around two...
It's going to consume more than two years at least.
Maybe five years at least of my life
working on something I
have zero interest in and because I have zero interest in, because I'll keep forcing
myself I will grow to actively resent it.
And do I want to spend five years of my life working on something I actively resent
just so I make a million dollars, just so I go partially but not completely fix some of
my life problems? Like, I ended up realizing that's a bad
bet for me, I think.
But the way I went, I ended up reaching that conclusion was kind of painful.
Like,
it was just miserably forcing myself, "Okay, do this, now you have to do this, now you
have to do this." You know, you have to go and meet these XYZ funders, you have to go
and, you know, learn how to do backend better, you have to go work with this
friend, you have to figure out is this friend and you are good fit, yes or no.
And
yeah, every single day it was like, you know, not wanting to get up and you know, getting
up and-Yeah, if I could figure that
out without, you know, burning through six months of my life, that would have been nice.
I would like not a repeat of that.
So yeah, that was the, I guess basically a failed experiment.
The semester before that is another failed experiment, which was starting a
club in college around effective altruism, which...
That on paper it doesn't look like a complete failure.
In my head it's a complete failure on my part,
but that's fine. I still learned valuable things by doing that, which I may not have
learned
if I didn't do it, uh, separately.
Uh,
sorry, I was... I started by talking about dating, right?
And now I'm talking about internal conflict. Right?
Yeah, I mean, I am internally conflicted about dating, like
how okay am I with this? Okay, dating is not a priority.
Just forget about it for six months. Like,
I think I'm internally conflicted about that.
There's a part of me that is like, yeah, that is fine.
And there's part of me that like, no, that's not fine.
So...
Yeah, I think the conclusion is just I'm kind of internally conflicted.
There's a rational part of me knows that obviously I'm going to
do much better at dating and even a lot of other things in life if I was less internally
conflicted, if I had clearer sense of what I was doing, if I was in a community that also
had a clearer sense of what it was doing, you know, independent of me.
All of this would help and yeah.
Anyways, when I started that train of thought on internal conflict dating, I'll just
finish with it, uh...
Yeah, I would like less painful ways of figuring out the
solutions to internal conflict in my head.
So I was saying, you know, in the college club failed, uh, startup failed, then what did
I do? You know, traveled for six months to a year.
I think that was successful experiment, but again, see there also there's a
problem. I felt like I
spent way too much money on some things I should not have.
And
yeah, I was not the most happy person there either.
Yeah, actually there are some things that happened during that phase of my life I kind of
just don't want to talk about publicly.
There are
other people's privacy involved, I'm just going to avoid that whole thing.
Yeah, like keeping... Keep the traveling aside, then what did I do?
I spent, you know, a few months working on this search engine for books, which was, I
guess, successful.
Yeah, I think that definitely felt good.
Like, I was able to stick to a topic, you know, long enough to actually successfully
complete it and be happy with, you know, the output I'd gotten at the end.
Like,
it was not like, "Oh, you did it." But, you know, like that was the thing I was afraid of
at the start, you know, I will end up building the search engine and I will finish
building it, but even after building it, I'll be like, "This is kind of meh.
The results are not that actually useful." And that did not happen.
The results were useful. I'm glad I could do that.
But then see, again, I complete- I completed that and then I moved to the next thing, the
next thing being, you know, right now like, oh, I need to write a guide for
whistleblowers.
And yeah, I seem to be jumping from project to project where they're successful or
failed, like,
okay,
uh, EA community, half successful, startup failed,
uh, traveling half suc- Well, I will say successful, I guess.
Traveling is not difficult. I think I learned important things from traveling.
I went in to UK travel... Traveled with the expectation that I'll learn important things
and I did in fact learn important things.
I would actually count that as a success, you know.
Traveling, success, you know, making a search engine for books, success.
Now writing a whistleblower guide,
I don't think I'm going to completely fail at it.
It's just a question of do I, you know...
Half success, do I like half-ass it or do I produce something really amazing and high
quality?
That's the question, yeah?
And
that just depends on, I think, how long I'm willing to stick to it.
Yeah, this I think comes back to the earlier thing around, like,
shared communities, like communities with attention on the shared things.
So it's like if there is one guy or girl, you know, uh, at the center of the
community who consistently puts their attention, their life force into one thing for, you
know, 10 years, 20 years,
they can actually just build that entire community from scratch
and
that requires that person to have, you know, resolved their,
you know, internal conflicts to the point they can say, "Here's this one thing that's
important to me in life and I'm just going to stick to it, you know, no matter how the
world moves, I'm not going to move.
You know, I'm going to be this person and that is it."
And once they do that, then, you know,
other people can, you know, gravitate towards them and, you know, that can be like a
stable foundation now on which you build your organizations and, you know,
funding and, you know, relationships and families and whatnot.
But that requires that person to have that much, you know, internal mental clarity about
what's important to them in life,
and
I don't seem to have that yet. Like, I don't have like, okay, here's the one concrete bet
I'm just going to go all in for the next 10 years of my life. I haven't found that bet.
Even when I look at my current thing, right?
Like, okay, I want to support whistleblowers.
Sure, I will do that for one month, a hundred percent.
I will do that for six months, probably yes.
Uh, I will do that for one year?
I can. I- If it seems valuable too, I'll do it. Will I do that for five years?
Will I do that for 10 years?
Probably not, but I'm also not sure. I might, but I
also might not. It's like me working on this for one year is going to tell me
a-Like, it's going to give me useful data to help me decide, do I really want to work on
this for the next five years? Like, not just data in terms of, you know, how successful
is the, is the project, but also like how much does this matter to me?
Like, let's say I succeeded. How much do I care about that success, you know?
Like that is the important thing. Like, if I make a really good guide and, you know, some
people really appreciate that
and, like, I get clear feedback, you know, I have made a tangible contribution to, you
know, human history by writing this guide,
that could happen and I could still end up internally feeling, you know, okay, fine.
Now what? Like, I could still feel like, you know, I don't care about this and I might
still choose to, you know, not work on it.
Like,
so it's not just a question of, like, can I get this done?
But also do I care about getting this done?
And
right now I do care to some extent, but
yeah, I don't have that clear sense to the point I can say, you know, this is the number
one life priority I'm going stick with for, you know, the next five years or 10 years.
And that doesn't mean, you know, oh, I drop it immediately and go search for that life
priority. I think, I still think the project is worth doing.
I think I'm going to learn useful things by doing it.
But
yeah, it does leave the open question of, you know, what am I actually willing to, you
know, go all in on for five years
or 10 years or, you know, even more than 10 years.
Like, people can spend their lifetime and their children's lifetime and their
grandchildren's lifetime on, you know, the same topic.
Like,
that's the thing people have. It's very rare.
Usually even if one guy spends their whole life on something, you know, their son or
daughter might be interested in something else.
That's more common case, but
there are rare situations, you know, one guy turns out a physicist and he trains, and
he's like a brilliant physicist, he trains his, you know, son.
Yeah, for some reason, you know, majority of history is with men, but yeah, he trains his
son to also become a great physicist. Like, there are examples of this.
If you Google, you'll find them. Uh...
Yeah, so broad themes, I think, that we talked about is okay,
dating and me being internally conflicted, me being internally conflicted and not being
able to make five-year, 10-year-long comm- commitments,
uh, not being able to
build a long-term community around myself because I cannot make these, you know,
five-year, 10-year-long commitments.
And...
Yeah, like, that just, just seemed at some level to be like
really important thing. Like,
either go join a community where there are people at the center who have made this, you
know, 10-year-long commitments, that this is the only thing they care about, this is the
only thing they will focus on, or I need to become one of those people myself.
And I think becoming one of those people myself is the better bet to me.
Like, definitely I can go to all of these communities and learn from them, but I want to
do that, you know. Like I said, when I'm applying for anything, I want to go to the US,
all that. It will be useful, but
that alone is not enough. Like,
I need to get more done and...
Yeah, do I need to or do I want to? I think that's a good question.
Yeah, I do want to, but...
Okay, there's a part of me that's like,
you have to get this done or you want to get this done.
I think you want to get this done will make you excited to
wake up and do something, and you need to get this done will be like, "Ugh, I have to do
it because, you know, I promised to my past self that I would do this and I don't want
to, you know, break my trust in myself, therefore I'm going to start to do it, but I
don't want to look at this." You know?
Like, there's a difference between those two feelings, like the latter is like, you know,
more internal conflict. And I'm not saying zero internal conflict
is possible or even the goal, but yeah, less internal conflict would be nice.
Yeah.
I mean, I can obviously talk about like broader world things about, you know,
why is nobody able to make these types of 10-year-long commitments?
Like,
why is it requiring a few rare people to build these communities?
Like, why
does this just not naturally happen?
Like,
like most people are ultimately fundamentally at heart in some ways.
They're like fairly similar, just the, just the fact we have similar biology and how
their brains work.
So why don't people just naturally come to some basic shared conclusions?
Why is everyone splintering off into, you know, tiny, tiny hundreds of communities?
Like...
I mean, it's definitely a thing about how the world is moving faster in some ways and,
you know, stripping most people of their agency in some ways and...
Yeah, I mean, technology inherently does that.
Like,
inherently any new, you know, breakthrough in technologies, you know,
maybe 10 people, maybe 100 people, maximum, you know, 1,000 people who are at the center
of that thing, making that thing, and that will just, you know, disproportionately,
uh, you know,
like shift life trajectories for the remaining of the billion people on the planet.
Like, this is not just about AI by the way.
This is about every technology ever, you know?
This could be the radio, this could be stethoscope, you know, this could be
steel, it could be an ABS process, it could be, you know, pencil and it's...
I'm just talking about any technology here.
Like,
and if you're not in one of these few groups making it happen, it kind of just fits under
your agency to do anything in the world,
like-... like there's
more and more of that happening, like, uh,
as technology is getting more powerful, the ability for
smaller and smaller groups of people to completely disrupt, you know,
everyone else on Earth's lives
and
their sense of what is important and their focus, what they...
Like, what, what are the remaining influence that people thought was important
previously,
uh, you know, a few hundred people can be like, "You know,
no, whoops, you're wrong. We're going to do this thing and now you're going to pay
attention to us because we are going to do this thing to your life." And I'm not saying
that's all bad. By the way, I'm not saying this like, oh, always people come and take
control, like...
Like, yeah, they do take control, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, uh...
Yeah, but there is
a thing happening here where it
makes,
yeah, the future more unpredictable for one, that's for sure.
And
then it becomes like,
okay, if I need to resolve internal conflicts in myself, I also need to have a very deep
understanding of the world. Like,
it's not enough for me to have deep understanding of myself,
which I do not have, by the way. I do not have a very deep understanding of myself.
Like, I try to, but yeah, I think a lot of work to be done there.
But even if I did that, that is not enough.
I also need to have a deep understanding of the world, or by default I'm just going to
work on some completely unimportant
crap, like no one will care about it, it's just...
Like you need
to have certain level of intelligence in today's world just to know what the hell is
going on so that you can go focus on something important.
Like, this seems generally true. And I'm not saying this is always true, this is
generally true. So,
maybe there are some people who are not that intelligent or not that knowledgeable about
the world and they still go end up, uh,
working on something really important.
That can happen, but yeah, that's not the norm.
Norm is, you know, fairly well educated, you know, above average IQ, above
average knowledge, people who ended up...
and other things also, who ended up, you know,
focusing on important things and eventually rest of humanity realized, "Oh, look, these
guys were in fact focusing on important things and maybe we should go focus on it too."
Yeah.
Yeah. So, um, you know, I think one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot
lately is kind of the, the internet and its role in kind of this process, uh, of
disinformation, and, you know, how the internet sort of helps or hinders it.
Um, do you think the internet, uh, helps or hinders this process at all?
Like, does it sort of... what's its role?
Uh... no, actually not. There's like two conflicting kind of forces going on.
So, the internet is
doing
couple of things. Uh,
one, the internet has broken a lot of traditional monopolies of attention that existed,
you know, before the internet. So,
lot of people straight up don't follow, you know, mainstream news channels.
A lot of people straight up don't care what politicians have to say today, you know.
Uh, a lot of people just don't care about what, you know, professors in academia are
saying. Like, their words are not worth as much as the ones were.
Where else is, straight up important? Uh...
yeah, let's just stick to these examples for now.
So, you know, academia, media, government, they just, they have less e- less of people's
attention because, you know, people
now realize a bunch of what they're saying is kind of lies.
And also,
there are other things we could be, you know, forming communities around.
Like, these people are not the only people who can help us form communities.
We can also form communities on our own apart from this.
Like, communities of, you know, hundreds, thousands of people focused on very niche
topics. Otherwise, it's kind of difficult to get those started, you know, before the
internet. You could, but it's just a lot more effort.
There's a sense in which that is happening, you know,
old attention monopoly is breaking down.
That naturally kind of leads to, you know, a lot more fragmentation of, you know,
attention, where, uh,
we have a lot more smaller groups, you know, two people, 10 people, 100 people, 1,000
people, all like just
focused on different, different
topics in like very small kind of niches.
So this would be, you know,
the... there is this one particular, you know, manga I like, you know, I can go talk to
people who like this manga.
Uh, uh, I'm not talking about myself by the way, I'm talking about a hypothetical person.
Like, so it's not just like it's a manga community, it's, you know, sub-community for
this particular show.
Or...
yeah, it could be, you know, even let's say
my thing of, you know,
AI research even that, there's like sub-community of let's say people are just doing
technical research, there'll be, you know, people working on policy and
they kind of talk to each other, but they don't necessarily have to be in the same
community, you know? Like...
yeah, there's definitely a lot of, let's say, mismatch between
journalists and YouTubers. So, in my head, you know, journalists and YouTubers are both
fundamentally doing the same thing.
They're just not aware that they're doing the same thing.
Or at least the journalists, people who are
trained as journalists by profession seem
kind of unaware that...
some of them seem unaware that they are being replaced by journalists and so on.
Uh, sorry, they seem unaware that they are being replaced by YouTubers and some of them
seem unaware. So,
yeah, again,
different sub-communities. You know, a lot of popular YouTubers probably talk to each
other if, like, this happens.
Mm-hmm.
Um...Even in India, if I say, okay, who are, let's say, top popular YouTubers, like all
five, 10 of them, they've definitely all had, you know, extended conversations with each
other, so they do have a little bit of community going on at the very highest levels.
(cellphone chimes) Oh, sorry. And...
yeah, they don't seem to be having
that many journalists in their network, that many, you know, traditional media channels
in their network. I mean, I'm sure some of them do, but
there is fragmentation going on.
Like, I'm giving very s- sorry, some... I'm going to ignore it. Uh...
This is a very specific random examples of the broader trend, which is, uh,
smaller and smaller groups of people
that are able to, you know, form communities.
And to some extent, that seems good.
Yeah, like I
definitely don't think you can form one community that can provide all the types of help
that a person needs. Like, that is for sure.
Like,
there's no, like ideal community where I can join that, you know, they know, they have
all the ideal advice and they have, you know,
all the ideal ways I can grow as a person and they have, you know, expert knowledge on
every topic I want to become an expert on. That's definitely not going to happen.
Some fragmentation obviously has to be there, you know, I go to the first community for
the first type of knowledge, you know, I go to maybe a cryptocurrency community to learn
cryptocurrency, I go to maybe an AI community to learn AI, I go to, you know, a
journalism community to learn journalism.
Some of that just seems
obvious, like yeah, that will obviously happen.
But yeah, the next step after this, like the next step of evolution after this has to
be where,
or at least in my head it has to be where, you know,
there is intermixing between these smaller communities and some of them kind of realize
like, "Okay, you know, maybe becoming expert in this type of
journalistic writing is important to me, but also maybe I should not be paying more
attention to that. Maybe I should not be a journalist as a person myself, maybe I should
switch my career so I can go do something else instead." Like,
that seems to be a realization very f- few people
seem to reach at least now. Maybe 10 years in the future when maybe there's some more
people, again, not a lot of, a lot more people, but at least when some more people are
more wealthy.
Actually, no, sorry, I just, I completely take that back.
The problem is not about wealth. Like on a 100 year timeframe, it's about wealth, you
know,
more wealth, more freedom to, you know, change careers,
pick new things. But on a 10 year timescale, I don't think that's the thing that's going
on. Uh...
On a 10 year timescale, uh, this might happen in the future actually.
Uh, more and more people realizing that their entire life trajectory is just built on
lies and based on bullshit, and based on things that no- don't matter.
And to some extent they will ignore that, but eventually the internet will be just kind
of screaming at you, you know, "You are
working
on the
wrong thing." You know, "Your relationship is kind of fucked up in this way," or,
"Marriage is fucked up in this way," or, "Career is fucked up in this way." And here is
what optimal, like here is what optimal looks like and this is where you are, like below
optimal, and here's an AI that's going to tell you exactly how you're below optimal and
it will understand your psychology better than you understand your own psychology.
And it will tell you, you know, here's exactly the steps you need to go to move towards
optimal. Like,
I think this kind of massive, you know, system level, like this disruption is
possible, maybe even likely.
How long it will take? I'm not
sure. So
there is that thing, right, about, uh,
you know, science progresses in funeral-like times, so maybe it just comes down to that
where
even when the internet has told people, "Look, you picked the wrong career, you picked
the wrong, you know, girlfriend, you picked the wrong city to live in." And
even if the internet tells you that, and you know that that is true,
you might still just be in a kind of denial like, "Okay, I accept this for my life, you
know, whatever," but then your child is not going to accept that.
Your child is going to demand, you know, their living
standard has gone up that much more.
Like that's def- there's definitely a generational thing where, you know, especially when
your
civilization is growing, you know, each generation sets higher aspirational standards for
their own lives than, you know, the previous generation, like
this is definitely, you know, literally happening in my own family right now.
Not to talk too much about my family, but
yeah,
like especially my aspirations versus my parents' aspirations versus like some of my
grandparents' aspirations, there are just huge differences and this is definitely a thing
that's going on.
I seem to be going on kind of a
tangent.
Actually no, this is directly related, it's directly related to the problems I started
listing out at the start of the video,
which is around,
you know, solving internal conflicts to make long term attention bets for 10 years,
to build communities around those, to, you know, shift
history, fix people's problems and so on. Uh...
Yeah, I don't have a solution to this today, but there's definitely
more and more questioning of peop- the fundamental assumptions.
Like, questioning fundamental assumptions is the hard thing, right?
Like, it's easy to be like, "Okay,
this is why you picked the wrong text pack for your app, you know, maybe go pick that
text pack instead." Like, that's an easy feedback to give.
But, "You spent six months working on the wrong app," that is a harder feedback to
give.You have made a mistake in life by becoming a software developer in the first place.
That's an even harder feedback to give.
You know?
You should not be even part of society. You should not have a career.
You should go join this cult because they are right and you are wrong.
Like, that's, again, next level harder feedback to give.
And, like, not just giving the feedback.
Like, saying things as cheap, you know, them actually taking it seriously and integrating
that into their life. Like,
the more fundamental into those assumptions you get, the harder
it becomes to attack them. But the more the internet is going to re- nevertheless attack
them.
And I mean, the internet is just the substrate, right?
It's ultimately other people who are being honest about, "Look, here's the different
choices in life they took and here's how it worked well for them."
And then you look at, "Oh, here's the choices I took in life and, you know, here's how
this fucked me up and it didn't seem to fuck them up because they took those other
choices instead." And then you're like, "Oh, 10 years of my life have built on
lies."
Ugh.
You know?
Like,
so the internet has allowed you to become aware of the existence of this person.
The,
it's not like, you know, when I say AI is telling you it's now, I don't mean it in the
sense of, okay, there's another sentient being that's telling you,
you know? That could also happen and that's a separate thing I'll talk about.
But yeah, right now I just mean it in the simpler sense of, you know, you connected with
other people and just observing those other people and how different they are from you
and you know how better they are from you in every sense.
Like,
they could be, you know, kinder than you, happier than you, more moral than you, you
know, more relaxed than you, more
powerful, wealthy, ambitious, honest, like
for any trait on which you want to get good at, there's someone on the internet that's
just unimaginably better, unimaginably better at it than you are.
Like,
you might imagine what it's like to be in their shoes, but you don't.
Like,
let's say you want to be attractive and there is
someone, let's
talk about, you know, maybe some
film star who climbed their way there partly as a result of just being attractive and,
you
understand at surface level, okay, you know, millions of people
watch them and
you have maybe some guess of, okay, here's what their personal life might look like,
here's what their films might look like.
But there's a lot of details about what's going on in their life that you're straight up
not aware of
and their lives are fairly atypical
as the result of this fame they've gotten, and
the internet is now going to tell you that. See, that's the thing.
Like,
you know, attractive women who became film stars existed 10 years ago, but you will know
a lot more about their private lives today than you knew about it 10 years ago.
And that's going to give you a much higher resolution, you know, here are the pros of
becoming that type of person, here are the cons of becoming that type of person,
than you knew, you know, 10 years ago.
And that could help you make better choices with your own life, you know, now.
Yeah, I think I'm getting a better sense of, you know,
what are the types of information that the internet is going to bring out into the public
that actually matter, because the internet is going to just bring everything into p- the
public, and not all of that is useful information.
Like, some of that is just, like, junk, it doesn't matter at all, a waste of your time.
Oh, I was even doing, like, you know, statistics on this.
Like, you know, every second that passes, you know, there are eight billion seconds of
other people's attention has also kind of passed and
what should I say, that kind of inevitably means most of human history is going to be
forgotten, despite being remembered.
Like, it will be remembered in the sense that it will be recorded, you know, in hard
disks. It will be forgotten in the sense that no human being will ever look at it.
At the most, you know, a human being will have an AI look at it and extract, you know,
some statistical pattern out of it. But,
yeah, like,
even if I had, you know, video feed of, you know, eight billion people on this planet,
and
let's say we let that run for 10 years, okay?
So now I have 80 billion years of, you know, HD video feeds before me.
What do I do with 80 billion years of HD video feeds?
There's no way I can pay attention to all of that directly.
Obviously, I'm going to use some, you know, statistical methods and AI to filter out,
uh, what's really important here
and then I will form a community of people who are doing this filtering and then we will
go tell the rest of humanity, "Okay. Out of these entire media feeds, here's what's
important, here's what you should be doing with your life."
Obviously, that's how it's going to play out.
So
yeah, I found that interesting to realize despite everything being remembered, everything
will be forgotten
and
therefore it's really important to figure out, you know, what will be remembered
and
what information is going to come out now in the next 10 years that will actually
matter
for, you know, the next 10, 20, 50, 100
plus years
of human history? And
that seems like an important thing for me to figure out,
and also an extremely hard thing to figure out but...
Yeah, I mean, a lot of this is just going to be in the things that, let's say
psychologists kind of know, you know, lawyers kind of know, just
there are people in society who have an under- better understanding of social or dark
matter. I call this kind of thing social dark matter.
Like,
oh, do I really want to be making an entire video on social dark
matter?Maybe
I should save that for another video.
Yeah, but this is all about social dark matter ultimately.
Like,
what is the information that is private to your life that would be valuable to other
people's lives, but that you can't share in public because there are disincentives for
you to do it, you know?
Your, you know, your family will shout at you, you'll get imprisoned, you know, some
politician will be pissed off, you know,
somebody in your career will get pissed off at this.
Just a lot of information like this, and typically, it's actually that type of
information that's more valuable for humanity to know about.
Like, you have more to learn from something if there is someone else who's trying to
prevent you from learning it. The fact that they're preventing you from learning it will,
itself is a signal that, okay, if you learnt it, you know something's going to change.
That is why they're preventing you from learning it.
And sometimes they're wrong. Sometimes, you know, they're too paranoid about what's going
to happen or whatever, but
it's like a heuristic. If someone's suppressing something, there's probably something of
value there,
and that is what social dark matter is about.
Oh, okay. So,
one social dark matter I kind of seem to be very fixated on is, you know,
what is going on inside the decision-making processes of these AI companies,
and that is extremely valuable for the world to know, but that's not the only social dark
matter in this world that is valuable for the world to know.
There are other such pieces of information.
I need to figure out what these other si- pieces of information are.
Like, that seems something I could maybe think more about.
I think I'm going to end this video now, because...
Yeah, I wanted this video to, you know, actually just be, you know,
a reply to the last two videos, "Here's how we're ending things," but now I've just
opened up an entire, you know, new topic on social dark matter and I think I should
leave that for another day, honestly.