Energy, Environment, Aging, and News Update
Q1 2024
The last update of this quarter will be a premium article focused on the Game Theory of Sex:
Why do women want more emotional connection for sex than men?
To whom do female hairdressers recommend shorter hair
The sexual role of crop tops
Game theory of glances
How the environment influences dating strategies
Why men approach women less
Evolutionary roots of kissing
Energy & Environment
Solar Is Getting Cheaper even Faster
In Solar Energy Solves Global Warming, I quote that solar costs are dropping by 12% per year, or about 23% every two years. It appears to be an underestimation! The true cost might be a drop of 25% per year!
This is because we used to look at cost drops per unit of time. But we don’t learn simply because time passes. We learn because we make things. The more we make them, the more we learn.
When weighing the learning speed of solar panels by volume built instead of time passed, we see that over the last two decades, since volume is doubling faster and faster, we’ve been accelerating our pace of learning.
This is momentous, because we’re living at a time when we are not using solar everywhere yet, so it hasn’t yet changed the economy. But it’s about to! It’s a matter of years now—before the end of the decade. And once the economy changes, society will change. How? Let me know in the comments!
Nuclear Is Back in the US
In Why Nuclear Is the Best Energy, I made the case for nuclear, complaining that its main drawback is its cost, which is heavily influenced by the unacceptable requirements from legislation, which focuses only on the risks of nuclear rather than on its costs and benefits. Undoubtedly, US lawmakers have been sharing this article and discussing it, because soon after I published it, they updated the law:1
Clearly my article was also shared in the Seattle area, and now Amazon is planning a data center next to a nuclear power plant:
Nuclear and data centers are a match made in heaven:
Continuous supply of cheap energy for a continuous demand of what must be cheap processing
Since data travels fast, you can place the data centers near optimal sites for nuclear plants.
Great for the environment!
Interestingly, one of the key use cases for data centers is Bitcoin mining, which can happen anywhere in the world, so it always chases the cheapest energy. The Economist suggests that could increase Africa’s growth rate: Bitcoin mining chases cheap energy there—for example from Ethiopia’s Renaissance Dam. Then, it can promote further electricity developments to cope with its demand. These electricity developments can reduce the cost of installing new electricity generation for locals.
China’s autocratic government has plenty of downsides, but one of its big upsides is that it can be realistic and rational about optimal technologies. It knows nuclear power is great, and acts accordingly.
Capitalism Is the Only Way Out of our Climate Emergency
People say they fear global warming, but the reality is that they’re not willing to make the efforts needed to stop it. A team of scientists proposed 11 interventions against climate change, and although they somewhat increased awareness, none was able to improve action (getting more trees planted).
Which is why the only way to solve climate change is if it’s economically beneficial to people. Luckily, we’re on that path. We just need more time, and that’s why the best solution in the meantime is to delay global warming with SO2 injections.
The German Government Would Rather Destroy Its Industry Than Admit It Was Wrong
After replacing its nuclear energy with coal, Germany is now replacing it with gas. It will cost the country $16B to build these new plants, plus the price of the gas. Luckily, replacing nuclear with gas gives you huge benefits: More dependence on authoritarian countries and more CO2 emitted into the atmosphere.
My biggest takeaway from my work since COVID is that governments are pretty dumb and are managed much more poorly than most companies I’ve worked at. This is a prime example.
Ukraine Doesn’t Believe War Threatens Nuclear Energy
In Why Nuclear Is the Best Energy, I claim that the fear that nuclear energy is dangerous in case of war is not valid. It’s no more dangerous than any other energy source and exposes the country to foreign powers less than, say, natural gas from Russia.
Apparently, Ukraine strongly agrees, as it’s starting to build nine latest-generation nuclear power plants!
What Kind of People Become Climate Activists?
What kind of environmentalist attacks Tesla?
In There Are 2 Types of Environmentalist, I differentiate between Degrowther Environmentalists, who want to return the Earth to a state before humans, and Progressive Environmentalists: People who try to improve the environment but from a realistic and rational perspective.2 I consider myself part of the latter group.
A recent paper analyzed the personality of environmentalists:
Results showed positive associations between environmental activism and Machiavellianism, narcissism, antihierarchical aggression, and anticonventionalism.
I assume this study refers mainly to degrowthers: I believe progressive environmentalists would not call themselves environmental activists, so they would probably not appear here. Or I might be biased.
Environmentalists Against the Environment
This dichotomy between Degrowthers and Progressives is the only way you can interpret things like this:
Without lithium, you don’t have electric vehicles to replace fossil fuel ones.
I see news like this every week: Conservation groups blocking new infrastructure key to improve nature. By “conservation”, they mean "keep things as is or revert everything”. That is no way forward.
SO2: Study or Act?
I talked with Dan Visioni for 1h last week. He is an Assistant Professor at Cornell studying climate interventions, including injecting sulfates into the stratosphere.
Interestingly, we do agree on the physics. He believes that based on what we know today, injecting sulfates into the stratosphere would be great for reducing global temperatures and has very few side effects. Where we disagree is on what to do about it. He believes we should study sulfate injection more, I believe we should act.
Surprisingly, I have not seen yet a good summary of what “study sulfate injection more” means. I can’t find a published plan for next steps anywhere. I have asked some academics in the field but haven’t heard back yet. I will let you know if / when I do.
Meanwhile, Harvard’s SCoPEx plan to test a new way to inject aerosols into the stratosphere is now cancelled.
They didn’t even want to release anything in the atmosphere. They just wanted to test a mechanism to release something! But conservation groups opposed it and it didn’t go anywhere. As far as I know, this project only tried to test the balloon in Sweden. Why not? Compare this to Make Sunsets: They tried releasing SO2 in Mexico, they got banned, so they kept doing it in the US instead.
Also, aside from Make Sunsets, I can only see a couple other groups who have actually done some releases.
Outside of Make Sunsets, the only other groups with plans of sulfate releases in the stratosphere are an Israeli company that has raised $15M (but has never done a live test) and a group in the UK. That doesn’t sound like an active academic community testing and learning with real-life data to me. How much urgency is there to learn?
I will continue believing the best path forward in SO2 injection is to actually do it rather than roll our thumbs until I see a clear academic plan outlining what is it that we want to learn and how we’re going to do it fast.
Aging
Research
In The 4 Ways You Might Live Forever, I highlight the interesting research happening in aging right now, and some of its obstacles. One of them was the FDA, which doesn’t consider aging a disease.
But the first drug against aging has been approved by the FDA!
And the test has started:
Although this is for dogs, it’s critical, because it means the FDA can treat aging as a disease more generally, which opens up aging drugs to the massive drug market—and to its research budgets. More will come from this!
Meanwhile, people are investigating the best ways to do science, and apparently prizes are one of these mechanisms. So the XPrize organization just released a $101M prize to find a therapy that reverses human aging.
What to Eat to Live Longer?
I’m not sure I ever shared this graph from our knowledge on the topic about a year ago:
A big UK study supports this data, although it appears to be more correlation than causation.
News
First: a correction. Last week, I mentioned that Claude learned Circassian from scratch based on content provided in a prompt. Apparently, that was not accurate: It had a good level of Circassian already.
Robots
I just did the AI update last week, but something else came up since.
In How Fast Will AI Automation Arrive? I explained how the Industrial Revolution had replaced some manual work, computers had replaced some cognitive work but AI was the only element left to eliminate all work. We just needed to combine AI with robotics.
I finally saw a demo that makes me think we’re getting there.
This is from Figure, an AI robotics company that has its robots powered by OpenAI.
This is good for humanity! Imagine we all had our own personal series of robots to do our bidding. The power it can unleash! The freedom!
As long as we can pay for them with our non-existent jobs.
Censorship in Social Media
In Who Owns the Megaphone? I discuss the tradeoffs of different media between misinformation and censorship. Here’s a crazy example: in Russia, how many people were arrested in 2022 for what they said on social media? Apparently, 400. In the UK? Over 3,000.
I only recently learned that the UK seems to be losing its freedom of speech:
A Belgian ex-parliamentarian will go to prison because of memes in a private chat group.
Edit: readers are suggesting that prison wouldn’t be because of memes, but because of serious crimes.
And France has banned some sorts of support to Islam.
While I don’t agree with these views, I live by Voltaire’s maxim:
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it
When you limit this type of view, what you get is a backlash from victimism. Ideas must fight each other in the public arena.
Don’t Read the News
In How to Consume the News I tell you to stay away from news, especially from news portals like newspapers, TV news, and the like. It’s a waste of time, because most of what they say becomes irrelevant quickly.
I think this illustrates it pretty well: Visualizing “the current thing” throughout 2023.
How many of these peaks really mattered? How much time did you waste following them?
Read These News Though
Apparently:
An mRNA vaccine now halves the recurrence of skin cancer!
The drug semaglutide doesn’t just reduce obesity. It might eliminate alcoholism! In fact, it might reduce all addictive behaviors. That would be huge.
When you call 911, the company Aerodrome will send a drone to your house within minutes, which immediately records the scene, allows police to track suspects without needing to send a helicopter, reports how many officers are needed… (I’m not affiliated).
The Earth from Saturn
Maybe the Solar System Is Unique
In The Secret of the Universe, I suggest an explanation of why the Solar System is the way it is. But this is speculation: This part of astronomy is not well understood yet. A new study suggests this might be off, because the Solar System appears to be quite unique in the order and sizes of planets:
Ours is broadly ordered (Mercury is very tiny, Venus is Bigger, the Earth is bigger, Jupiter is bigger…) and then starts shrinking after Jupiter. This is not common.
Maybe that’s yet another reason why life is so unique in the universe.
I Was Interviewed by Sotonye Jack
One of the least recognized figures in the media is the good interviewer. I discovered this during COVID, when some journalists were able to sync with me in two minutes, showing a deep understanding of what I had written and switching into presentation mode within a second, all while listening to me, to the people in their ear, and thinking of the next question and the next interview.
In the creator economy, Lex Friedman and Tim Ferriss are famous for their long and well-prepped interviews. I find Dwarkesh Patel less well-known but even better prepared, asking salient questions that show deep knowledge of the interviewee’s corpus and an uncanny ability to unearth the golden nuggets of wisdom or the things that don’t quite make sense.
Sotonye Jack writes NeoNarrative and interviewed me in one of his latest articles. I found his questions very interesting, showing a deep understanding of my work. It’s probably the most interesting interview I’ve ever had. The result is an Uncharted Territories-length interview that touches on many different topics and how they’re connected: How the game theory of sex connects to storytelling in The Sopranos, the first principles of the fertility drop, the market dynamics of content, and more. You can read it here:
Don’t forget to subscribe to the premium article if you want to receive the game theory of sex update:
Alternate interpretation: My timing is impeccable.
I still have to write an extensive article on why degrowth is bad, but that will take a long time. The short is I believe degrowth makes no sense because it takes for granted our current well-being, underestimates the horror of a world with a shrinking economy and population, is naive on how human progress happens, and is very attracted to ideas proven to fail by Communist and authoritarian regimes.
A few important points:
1. It is not possible for the UK to lose its freedom of speech because it has never had it. I think it would be worth thinking from first principles about speech and about freedom to understand this statement.
2. In the AI robotics section you imply that power and freedom are always good. I would make to same suggestion as I did in point 1, but substitute power for speech.
3. “Capitalism is the only way out of out climate emergency” sounds like a good example of solutionism and also of black and white thinking. I agree that capitalism may be an important part of the solution, but the world is grey and that does not preclude using other partial solutions as well.
4. The discussion with Bianca and your recent article on free speech are getting much closer to an understanding of The Problem so I feel more confident you will get there eventually.
5. It is obviously time I read and commented on some of your climate change articles.
"As long as we can pay for them with our non-existent jobs."
This is an enormous caveat. It was presented as an afterthought but may be worthy of an article in its own right. The future of work with AI is already the subject of a lot of writing but the economics of it haven't really been thought through. Robots are expensive to build, expensive to run and expensive to maintain.