yarvin_sub

    6:52PM Oct 27, 2023

    Speakers:

    Razib Khan

    Curtis Yarvin

    Keywords:

    people

    poetry

    world

    music

    work

    read

    great

    ai

    poem

    eliezer

    man

    good

    real

    space

    talking

    drone

    call

    china

    risk

    poetic

    This podcast is brought to you by the Albany Public Library main branch and the generosity of listeners like you. What is a podcast? God daddy, these people talk as much as you do! Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning.

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    Hey, everybody, this is Razib with the Unsupervised Learning podcast. And I have very special guests, longtime coming, my friend Curtis Yarvin, who most of you will probably know of, from his substack Gray Mirror. He also had his old blog, under Mencius Moldbug, Unqualified Reservations. And then, you know, you've done variety of writing in various places, you know, American Mind, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And if you just like I, you know, sometimes I just like, check what comes up. If you type in Google, your role is like, shall we say, an online political theorist, has been extensively profiled, and so we're not really going to talk too much about that, at least initially. Because you can find that elsewhere, I want to talk about something different. A side of you that I think a lot of people may know, but maybe they don't, but I know it. Because I've seen you know, you know, when we've hung out in real life, this is something that's very important to you. And it's like morally aesthetic, cultural, literary aspect. And I want to talk about poetry. I know poetry is important. I know poetry is important to you, because I vote.

    Poetry is important - Hey, man, hey, man, hey, man, poetry is important to everyone, man, they just don't know it .

    Like, let's go, let's go to it. Like, how is it important on the individual level? And how is it important, culturally, socially, in your opinion?

    Wow. You know, I mean, on an individual level, you know, it's a form that I've worked at, for many years, it's a form I've been trained at, it's a form in which, you know, poetry in many ways. It's a sort of canary in the coal mine, it's a very delicate flower, it really shows the state of the society it's in, in some ways, I mean, let's compare, for example, Soviet math, to Soviet poetry. Now, you probably don't know anything about Soviet poetry. And you might know something about Soviet math, but you're gonna say right away that basically Soviet math is pretty much just math. And Soviet poetry is probably pretty much worthless. And if you were asked why Soviet or pro Soviet poetry, poetry, Russian poetry from the Soviet period is pretty much worthless, you would say that, basically, in order to appear, one of two things has to be true about it, either, it has to, at the very least contain anything, nothing, that sort of, in any way noxious to the regime, or to sort of this kind of total power that be that kind of, you know, hangs over everything in the Soviet Union, or it has to be flavored with the conceits of that power. And when you look at the equivalent in, you know, American, you know, late 20th century American poetry, what you'll see is, you'll see, you know, has sort of very similar issues in some ways, mid 20th century American poetry is really some of the best work ever done. I think it'll stand across the centuries and the millennia. Now I think, is very, very weak. And so for example, if you read like, say poetry in The New Yorker, you'll find a mix of stuff, you'll find a certain amount of stuff that sort of celebrates the kind of official contexts. You know, like my, my late wife used to call the genre ‘race opera’, which I think is a really excellent term that should be used more. And because of course, there's race opera, not just in poetry, but in fiction, in plays. And you know, and this is what you know, as woke Hollywood, but of course, it's been a thing. Well, well before that, that regrettable word got loose. And then you also have stuff where it's basically sort of the best that you can do is kind of be content free, and it seems kind of inconsequential, risking nothing, just like barely even daring to try to be pretty. And you look at that, and you sort of noticed the distinctively bureaucratic origins of that kind of work where, okay, I have a copy of The New Yorker in my hand, there's a poem in it, how did it get there, and the answer of how it got there typically involves someone who works at this extremely esteemed publication, who has a lot of favors to hand out. And basically, every poem that appears in The New Yorker is a favor given to someone and that favor often goes through two or three levels of connections, in order to get there. And so it is very desirable that this work not be offensive to any of these layers of connections, unfortunately, you know, not even offensive that it not be in any way bad. Unfortunately, that leads to a culture of writing poems where the purpose of having written a poem is to have written a poem that's not bad, which means that you're basically - if you're - if a poem is not risking being bad in any way, then the best I can do is to be mediocre. And so you basically see stuff that is actively bad because it's sort of reeks of the current official. I mean, it goes beyond even official that reeks of it reeks of the present moment, in a way that will just become sort of will have the same smell that we get off of, say, Victorian poetry, where it's sort of celebrating these kind of very hackneyed values. And we read that instantly from the modern perspective. And we're like, Whoo, that's like stuffy unless it's like Emily Dickinson, which is the exception that proves the rule. And, or it's just like, kind of actively mediocre. And so I think, sort of the relevance of kind of this art form being, frankly, somewhat lost in the present day is actually quite significant. Because when we look at eras that can't produce good poetry, they tend to be sort of mediocre eras in one way or another.

    Wait, so here's the question I have for you. You know, there has been some discussion right now, as we're recording about Emily Wilson's translation of the Iliad, she, she already translated the Odyssey I think. You know, the Iliad or the Odyssey, these works, they have been relevant for I mean, was it like 2800 years now? Why are they, and these are long works, why are they still relevant?

    Where are they still relevant? My gosh, well, I mean, they, first of all, they're simply just good. And I can't read. Unfortunately, I’m a barbarian I was not in any way educated. And so I can't actually read these texts. And you know, when you're when you're reading a translation of the Iliad, you're reading of course, the Italians have the saying, “traduttore, traditore” which means, you know, ‘translator traitor’, you know, you're reading, they have this this doctrine officially with the Quran, when you're reading a translation of the Quran, you are not reading the Quran, you are reading a work, which is basically derivative derivative of the Quran. And so when you're reading a translation of the Iliad, you are not reading the Iliad, you are reading a poem, a long poem in English, which is basically derivative of and inspired by the Iliad, but the way in which it functions as a poem is going to be completely different, right? You know, because Greek and poetic effects in Greek and English are completely different. For example, in ancient Greek, you know, poetry relies on accents and stresses, it relies I think, it's acts, it has like a long and short vowel rhythms structure completely lost in English, which is, you know, I mean, we'll get - the prosody of English is a complicated subject that we'll get into, but the like, and so every poet who comes to this, you know, and it has to be a poet, it's not just someone who knows both languages, sort of produces a different kind of work. I'm trying to remember I mean, so you have things like that, you know, the Fitzgerald, the the Lattimore translations of, Fagles, you know, that's sort of the core mid century 20th century, you know, translations. You know, funnily enough, Richmond Lattimore, one of the best translators of the Odyssey and Iliad was the brother of the other Lattimore. What is it, Owen Lattimore, the who is the communist Orientalist or the you know, probably communist Orientalist. Kind of what is his first name? I don't have his first name right. Is it Owen Lattimore. or?

    No, you’re correct it is Owen Lattimore. Yeah, he wrote a bunch of stuff about China. And you know, I'm yeah, I've read some books. He’s interesting

    Yes. They're interesting. They're good books. And he was one of the Shanahan's who lost China , as they say, but we're going down the, he was one of the pro Mao people basically. And you know, all the best people were pro Mao and Stalin, let's be honest about this. And so, yeah, I mean, you know, whatever. There were many problems with the midcentury, period, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, produced amazing, amazing work. And so, you know, to say that you're someone who should be entrusted with this means that you really have to be a you know, a poet in your own right. And I don't know, about this this Emily Wilson person, but maybe I saw some comparison of her translation at some point. I'm sure it's dismal, you know, and you know, what, that's, that's just the, you know, age, I don't know, you know,

    Well, I mean, so we don't really produce epic poems. And, I mean, do you think it's just because modern society has too many distractions?

    Oh, our own epic poems. I mean, you know, so, you know, a Vikram Seth, in the 1980s, a fellow brown person, wrote a poem called The Golden Gate, which is a, you know, kind of a comedy of manners in verse, which I read about 20 years ago, it's really, it's really not bad. I mean, you know, let's like, to call it an epic. I mean, epic, you know, implies sort of a dramatic purpose, which I don't think is present in that work, but the, you know, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know, like, we're just - we're not a heroic age, we're not, you know, we have heroes, we have warriors, at least, but you know, we know, like very little about them. We're not terribly interested in them. You know, I mean, this is, of course, the age of Nietzsche’s last man. Right?

    Well, I mean, so do you think, but I mean, what do you think about the idea that some of our music, you know, hip hop, you know, these sorts of things that they, they fill that same role in our society?

    I think we have very good music in our society. I think this is a period of very good music, very good film. I think there's a lot of very strong creative efforts, you know, being being made in that direction. They're just kind of more visceral than intellectual in a certain way. I mean, you know, that's, it's hard. It's hard for politics to destroy like music, right? I mean, short of like, you know, banning instrumental - banning vocal music and sort of Taliban or banning instrumental music sorry, in a Taliban kind of, kind of style. I mean, and you know, and even there, you get, like, these Nasheeds, do listen to Nasheeds Razib? You're familiar with it concept of the of the Nasheeds, though.

    Yeah. I'm not a very, I'm quite a bit of a Philistine compared to you. So I don't I'm not a big consumer of a lot of these things. Although, yes, I know the dictionary word -

    Sure. Interesting. Well, I mean, you know, if you make any kind of video and you put it in a Nasheed on it, it becomes an ISIS video. Basically, it's you know.

    Okay, you know what, you know what, I got an idea now for the outré - the intro, the intro.

    Exactly, exactly, exactly. It just really nothing sets the tone, like, you know, I'm gonna like, you know, Pakistani minibus like a Nasheed

    I can, I can, I should do it. sometime. I still, I can memorize. I have some parts of the Quran memorized, obviously. Just from my childhood.

    Right, which parts? what's, what's your-

    Surah Fatiha, which is like that? That initial surah?

    That's not the one that's the cow, the cow? Is it? The one the cow?

    I don't? I don't think so. I don't think so. But -

    You didn’t memorize the one where, where it said, you know, find - find the Jew behind the rock the tree and you know, the rock and the tree will cry out, you know, ‘oh, Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me!’ No?

    I'm gonna to have to look that up. I want to look that up. But like a lot of it, a lot of it is quite poetic, actually.

    Uncle Yarv: oh sure,

    And that's why it's not super important. Well, I mean, it's not super important that people know the meaning because the whole idea is it's the word. The word is what you know the word and the meter. And then the sounds. They have magical property. Right. And so I think that is telling us kind of what the role of poetry had and has, because Arabs still actually patronized Poets rich Arabs still patronized

    Moldbug: It's a very poetic cultural,

    Yeah, yeah, they'll they'll still they'll still you'll be patrons of poets, right. And poetry competitions. And there's some cultures that still - I think the Welsh in Western Europe are still super into. Arabs, you know, there's certain certain cultures with central part of, you know, just their ethos, I guess. I don't feel like Anglo Americans, like Americans were very poetic, like, we have folk songs, like we have country music.

    You know, there's, there's, there's Cowboy Poetry. You've got to consider the Cowboy Poetry. Yeah.

    Yeah, that's true. That's true. But I think, you know, in terms of like, in terms of this discussion, you know, so for example, like, just concretely, when I've seen people being emotionally aroused, and just like, taken away by poetry, I think that those emotions normally in our society, are associated with music, with instrumental and vocal music. And I just wonder if there's been a substitution effect in terms of time or just like, you know,

    yeah, well, I mean, you know, it's, they're just, they're very different forms, you know, like, like, there's certainly a resemblance between poetry and lyrics. But like, I wouldn't necessarily overplay that. I think that, especially with the kind of, like, mid century poetry that I like, I mean, there's just not much in common between, like, the effect of like, you know, Robert Lowell, and you know, let's say, a band with like, really good lyrics, like the National or something. I mean, you know, sure, they're good, but it works in very, very different ways. And it produces, I think, very different effects. And, you know, you can't really say, Oh, well, this kind of music is a replacement for the poetry of Constantine Cavafy or something. Can I read a Cavafy poem? Could I do a poem?

    Yeah. Do your thing.

    Let me do let me do it. Let me Yeah. All right. Let me do my thing. Hang on one sec. All right. This is by Constantine Cavafy. Who was I know, it sounds like Qaddafi. He was actually a Greek from Alexandria writing around the turn of the last century. He was a gay Alexandrian Greek poet and the great Russian poet Joseph Brodsky turned me on to to Cavafy. But let me just read the poem. The reference, the title is a reference to Dante, you don't need to know the reference, but it means who makes the great refusal. And it's called Che Fece ... Il Gran Rifiuto: “For some people the day comes, when they have to declare the great Yes or the great No. it's clear at once, who has the Yes ready within him; and saying it, he goes from honor to honor, strong and his conviction. He who refuses does not repent. Asked again, he’d still say no. Yet that no —the right no— drags him down all his life.” There you go. That's a, you know, very short Constantine Cavafy poem, you can find it online, you can read it over and over again, you can decide how it applies to you or doesn't apply to you. I think it might apply to you actually Razib, you know, I think you do have the great no. And you probably know the people who have the great Yes. And you know, they are probably just simply a mystery to you just can't understand how this person can you know, can possess this Yes, can contain it all within himself. And yet, and yet he does and it goes from honor to honor

    So listening to you to you reading it out loud, though. I also am struck or I think, you know, the power of poetry, to a great extent is also is in its speech in its delivery.

    Oh sure, its prosody. It's prosody is the word. And and actually, when you even when you read, when you read silently, functional MRIs will show your vocal tract being activated. And so you know, essentially the, you know, there's a sort of, you know, what makes poetry poetry, and there's a lot of like definitions. But for me, the essence of poetry is that it's broken into lines, if it's not broken into lines, it's not poetry. And the reason that it's broken into lines is essentially that a line of poetry is at least in some kind of conceit, a line is a breath. And the reason that poetry has a sort of spiritual impact is related to the relationship between the word breath and the word spirit, which of course are the same word, poet poetry, essentially, by breaking into lines synchronizes with your breathing in a sense, it's not necessarily that you sort of say it that way. But conventionally, a line stands apart from another line. And of course, you can vary this. There are all sorts of tricks for varying this. But like that, that sense of like, this line that I've said is sort of a breath. And I'm thinking in a thought, divided into breaths in this sense, and it has these kinds of pauses, is really essential. So yeah, I mean, knowing knowing how to read poetry, the way I just read that is something of a skill, and just knowing how to read poetry silently and understanding how the words should sound in your head based on the way they're put on the page or the screen, it you know, is also a little bit of a skill. And just the way in which the linebreak turns into a natural, as you're reading turns into a natural breath turns into a natural like stoppage. Of course, you know, there are things for making that stopage shorter, like an enjambment, and then you can also have a caesura, which is a pause within the middle of a line. But the for example, you know, in there's an enjambment in that the, you know, there’s no really strong enjambment in this actually, like, yeah, there's actually there's an enjambment between “for some people come the day comes” pause “when they have to declare the great Yes or the great No” there wouldn't naturally be a pause there. But you know, when you say, ‘for some people the day comes when they have to declare the great Yes, or the great No’ and you can feel that those sentences are not not naturally broken on the line break actually, all the all the lines in the first stanza, they are enjambment, “it's clear at once, who has the Yes” break ready” within it within him and saying it” stanza break. Again, a little bit unnatural. So you're sort of playing with just by the way, you're arranged the words on the page. If you wrote that down in prose, eliminating the line breaks and had me read it justice prose, not knowing where Cavafy wanted to break the lines, it would sound completely different read out loud, and I think its effect would be much weaker. Does that resonate a little to all the Philistines out there.

    Well, you know, I'm not sure if I'm a rationalist. I definitely am a Philistine. So I mean, do you think do you think - okay, this is just a random because you were talking to like the heroic age and Heroism, you know, obviously, epic poetry that we think about from the past. Heroism, a heroic figure, a tragic figure off it, you know, looms large, and we do kind of live you know, the age that we live in low mortality rate, we fear death. You know, we're plagued by obesity and sloth and gluttony. Were just like consuming -

    Sloth. Sloth sloth. Sloth is a sin. The sloth is the animal. That's how it works

    Okay, okay. But um, do you think? What if? What if we, what if we go into space? What if we start doing all that space stuff? And that's dangerous all of a sudden? I mean, do you think that we could be in a heroic age again?

    How many? How many people are gonna go into space? Six?

    Razib: Not many.

    No, no, no, no, no, the solution, the solution is staring us you know, straight in the face. It's gun control. It's a return to fighting wars based on the arme blanche, you know, naked steel. And that's the only way that that, you know, war is just - and armed combat, is fundamental to what it means to be a human male or even a chimpanzee male. It's war is built into, you know, war among males, you know, of course, Wrangham’s “Demonic Males,” war is built into the male psyche incredibly deeply. And it's just the abandonment of war that has basically resulted in the last man everywhere and we've abandoned war because war has become this like, horrific, industrialized thing where you're just like, blown up by a shell with you know, what is heroic about being blown up by a shell, you know, if you read if you read Homer, I mean, one of the great things about, you know, the Iliad, especially as it's just like, incredibly gory, anatomical, you know, descriptions of like, you know, what happens to you when you get, like, the wrong end of the spear in the back of your throat and it'd be like, you know, ‘the spear was was driven into his throat and, you know, there was a crunch as the, as the, you know, that they had penetrated penetrated the crispness of its palate, and, you know, a great wave of red rose up in his vision and he fell like a stone’ You know, something like that, right? You know, and, and like, over and over again, and many you can tell that really, you know, Homer, Homer is really a poet of death, right? I mean, the, you know, the Iliad is just full of death. And now of course we fear loathe death, you know, how can you be a hero? When you're afraid of death? It's ridiculous, right? You know, and so you get some heroes out of, you know, extreme sports, sailing alone around the world, climbing Everest, you know, something, something you're probably familiar with a genre of nonfiction that I know as climbing porn. I don't climb but I do like climbing porn, you know, but yeah, I mean, it's sort of it's - it doesn't, you know, man against nature

    you have to recreate risk.

    You have to recreate risk, and it has to be not just man against nature, but man against man. And, you know, I mean, even even, for example, just sensible legal reform on the mixed martial arts that would commit that would permit, conduct gladiatorial contests to the deaths, like you know, I think would hugely with weapons, you know, I think would hugely enliven our society. I think that would be just - like MMA is incredible TV, but like to watch MMA, like real gladiatorial contests with with with edged weapons, I would be incredible TV, it would be surreal, especially with a with a slow-mo. You know, the like drone cams? You know, it would be it would be riveting. Unfortunately, most people couldn’t still participate in it. But you know, and then of course, enormous prizes would be would be given to the winners, and they probably would become our political leaders and so forth. I think that would be a very, very logical reform, I think that would do a lot to cure, you know, the evils of age, but, you know, what do I know, I'm just a -

    what? So, you know, it's interesting, you bring up these, you know, bringing back, like eliminating, say, projectile weapons or something like that bringing back hand to hand combat. That actually,

    I think I think I think it's okay, like elastic forces are okay, I think it would just prohibit explosions and compressed gases. I think actually, like bows and arrows do do add something. There's a type of, you know, they bring variety, they bring a certain kind of complexity. I don’t know about the crossbow. Was it Pope Leo who had a thing with it, there was some Pope who tried to ban the crossbow, which I think was incredibly based and prescient. You know, because it basically, the crossbow also allowed, like, you know, of course, combat was really for athletes, it was for like superbly trained individuals. And something like the crossbow, which allows like, a sort of barely trained like, you know, peasant, you know, to like, kill a trained Night is just, you know, you could see in that innovation, kind of the start of what Ted Kaczynski is talking about when he talks about the Industrial Revolution. It's really a disaster.

    No, I'm crossbow, crossbows, guns, all these things actually, there was all across the Mediterranean in particular, there were attempts to ban them. And it just obviously, it just failed. Because they’re too useful

    They’re too useful. You know, and the question of the question of sort of how you go about banning this is also fascinating. I mean, personally, the future order that I believe in is sort of kind of a little bit prime directive inspired. It's actually very Star Trek, it's like you have a sort of global governance, you have like multiple shells of governments that don't interact. And so you have sort of a global orbital, like Nerd government from space that's very, like Ian Banks, you know, or Gene Roddenberry or something that basically consists of like all the world's nerds, you know, an island, and a launch facility, and they rule the world from space. But they're so totally hands off that they actually believe in the prime directive. And the prime directive says to them, it's as irresponsible for the orbital authority to intervene, you know, in a war, say, between Sweden and Norway or something as it would be for like, the FTC to step into the light contest between Twitter and Facebook. Like, actually, we understand in the capitalist domain, that there's a sort of secondary level of sovereignty, in which, you know, warfare is carried on solely on an economic basis, and the dynamism that's created by that warfare benefits everyone, you know, but extending that to the sovereign level where we're like, No, you know, the world is not going to have quality Vikings unless the Swedish Vikings are free to go up against the Norwegian Vikings. And like for realsies, you know, and like they're not fighting with like wooden swords or like, you know, fake, fake fake anything. They're like actually trying to kill each other and whoever conquerors will rule, you know, that's what created these incredible Nordic civilizations. And you know, when we sort of relaxed like, you know, this this energy, we see these peoples decay, I mean, I have no hesitation in saying that the average Norwegian of ad you know, 723 is a far superior human being just as a specimen as an absolute unit to the average an average Norwegian in 2023. Really, it's not even close, you know, and like, the least of us is less of a man you know is the greatest of us is less of a man than that then then the least of us because they actually had a culture and facilities for producing just these these amazing specimens, you know, and what do we have? We have video games and, and weed and all of our work is done by immigrant serfs. Like you know, what's the future in that and in future we won't even need immigrants will have robots, you know, and it's like a really it's just these are returning into the Eloi like H.G Wells was right about everything and

    Humanity obsolesces itself.

    Yeah, yeah, no, really like, you know, the Eloi is the vision of the Eloi is an incredibly prescient vision. And so in a way is the vision of the Morlocks. And you know, the time traveler has really been, you know, H.G Wells I mean, he was, of course, a communist, like all of them, but he had some real vision.

    Well, okay, so, you know, we're talking about society, I want to pivot more broadly now, to aesthetics. And, you know, you know, music and entertainment, all these things that you're talking about what they say about our culture. So, as we are recording right now, I think Taylor Swift is on track to gross a billion dollars in her concert tour. She is I mean, she is at the center of our culture now, in terms of music, in terms of pop culture, what does that say about American culture?

    I wouldn't know because honestly, I don't believe I've ever listened to a Taylor Swift song, you know, of course, about American culture. I mean, you know, like, you know, Plato, Plato, like the Muslims, had very mixed feelings about music as probably, you know, and so, you know, I mean, what it says about general popular culture is that it's somewhat debased culture for somewhat debased people, you know, at the same time, there is excellent and music, which is not that far removed from the number, the size of the Taylor Swift audience and so forth. Like it does exist. It's just like, you know, and like, again, I don't know, Miss Swift’s work, I apologize if I'm pin holing or but it's like, you know, the difference between, you know, Taylor Swift and say, Lana Del Rey is not that great. And yet, you really have to conceive of Lana as a serious artist, you know, whose work well, I think be much more lasting than Taylor Swift's. And so you know, there is actually high - there is quality stuff that sort of reaches out, that's obviously lasting, you know, it's like, when I was a kid, I listened to, like, you know, I had this sort of musical breakthrough in my listening tastes when I discovered like, new wave and like, New Order, and, you know, I could tell at the time that there was really something special about Joy Division and New Order. And sure enough, my kids love Joy Division and New Order, you know, and it's just naturally like, you know, okay, some of their later stuff kind of trails off. But like, their classic albums are really like, you know, stand very highly as creative works. And so yeah, I think there are forms like that, in which the West has done really well, you know, you don't want to think of like, I mean, sales is, you know, and it takes us strictly sort of democratic perspective, but the, to the extent that like, good work can sustain a career and even in some ways, outcompete bad work. I think that's, that's significant. That tells you something positive about our, the screwed up excuse for a society,

    Just like on the music thing. You know, one thing I want to ask you, because I've heard people say, This is modern rock music and hip hop, and just like pop music, in general is very, you know, of the late 20th century and early 21st century, it's pretty, I guess, I could say base, like, it's very focused on, like, a particular impulse, particular impulses, often sexual, or like some simple relationship, as opposed to, you know, I don't know, better music, more complex music that has deeper meanings. I mean, what do you think about that? I'm just, I'm, as I said, I'm kind of a Philistine due to things I've heard. I haven't thought about it deeply. But do you think that's true?

    Well I mean, you know, like, you know, I don't want to sound like some, you know, Malcolm Muggeridge talking about rock and roll or something, you know, I don't know. I mean, sure. There's, there's, I mean, there's plenty of you know, Rolling Stone songs that you know, celebrate the sexual impulse. But I think that that to talk about that as the only product The Stones would denigrate The Stones, there's plenty of that in the Beatles. There's plenty of genuine kind of spiritual impulses somewhat drug inspired in the Beatles. Yeah, I think that there's, you know, I don't I think that like, you know, to sort of condemn the works of the 20th century, and, you know, I believe in, you know, the great German historian Leopold von Ranke said, all eras stand equal before God. And I think, you know, you have to give, in order, like, we resent the 20th century, in many ways in the way, like a teenager, you know, resents its parents, we have to give it its due, we have to look at the ways in which it was a success and actually didn't suck. And, you know, so like, for example, no qualms whatsoever about saying that, you know, mid century, mid 20th century, a Anglo American poetry is really one of the high points of history in the writing of poetry, I believe that will always be true. We've very much descended from there, as the field has become sort of bureaucratized in various ways. But yeah, I believe people will still be reading Robert Lowell or Constantine Cavafy in 1000 years, I don't see why they wouldn't. And and as for music, yeah, I think that there's plenty of music produced in the 20th century that will stand that kind of test of time. But and plenty that won't, obviously.

    Yeah, that's the way the world Okay. I want to repeat it a little bit. Actually, like, as I was just getting ready to like, talk to you, I was thinking about various topics. And I got some questions in here. And I, I sent you one of them, but several of them. But there's one thing that I forgot to send you, because I was just thinking about it. I think couple of years ago, you put a post on Gray Mirror, ‘there is no AI risk’. And there's a lot that's happened, or maybe not your opinion in AI, since since that post with the LLM and GPT and etc, etc. And then, you know, we've had these arguments between Eliezer Yudkowsky, and a bunch of, you know, people that say he's either crazy or dumb or, you know, whatever insane cetera. Elon seems to be. Elon Musk seems to be taking a little bit of a more alarmist tack, obviously, Sam Altman and others have not, it's kind of over the last six months that the discussion in the discord has kind of blown up. Where do you stand on it?

    Oh, there's absolutely no AI risk. I mean, the concept is, is entirely fallacious. You know, one way. One way to think about this is just to think about the way - what AI is AI, you know, AI is a tool. And over time, as basically tools get better, we see tools improving in terms of their, like, tractability, and predictability. And we don't see them, you know, getting crazier, we see them getting more controlled and understandable. And the thing is that so there's a couple of different things going on with a sort of AI risk question. Normally what I do when talking to someone who is sort of very, very convinced of this question is, I say, Okay, let's postulate that a docile AI has been constructed, which basically always follows the wishes of whoever is using it, clearly, the docile AI is what is actually demanded by the user of this tool. But the thing is, the docile AI is controlled by an evil genius, right? And then you basically want to look at, okay, what are the diminishing returns in this system? Because almost all systems, you know, admit some kind of diminishing returns and the, you know, so for example, a lot of the those sort of fantasies, in which intelligence involves no diminishing returns are fantasies that really confuse two very different kinds of computation. So for example, when Eliezer is like, well, it's going to design nanobots that instantly kill everyone on the planet in a single whatever. Okay, those nanobots, whatever a nanobot is, I'm not really actually entirely sure. Whatever a nanobot is, it's operating in the physical world and because it's operating in the physical world it's a physical system. And when you look at basically the things that AI models can and can't do, what you see is that accurate simulation requires basically a lot of number crunching. And large language models are actually quite bad at number crunching, they don't actually improve the ability to crunch numbers at all. They don't improve the ability to simulate hydrodynamics or something. They actually there are all of these problems involved in creating these nanobots that are simply computationally intractable, I always remind people that it's almost impossible just based, you know, although we understand the physics perfectly, it is almost impossible to simulate even the boiling point of water. There are actually people who research this, they're like, What if we have 64 water molecules, and then even in order to get those water molecules to like compute the state of what happens when you heat them up, you started having to make simplifications really fast. And then you start having to like add fudge factors to make your new shit come out, right. And it's just actually really not tractable. And so when we basically think about, you know, extreme infinite intelligence, and then we ascribe the ability to solve computationally intractable problems, to Infinite Intelligence, we're doing a stupid. And like, you know, I don't think Eliezer Yudkowsky is crazy. Or, you know, I think he's just kind of artificially stupid in a way and that he's kind of let the kind of religious excitement of what is clearly a like classic sort of Joseph Campbell mythic structure, which is the Golem myth, the Sorcerer's Apprentice, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. He's basically let this you know, he has of course, as a rationalist, he has absolutely no familiarity with any kind of right brain thinking. And so he thinks he's thinking with his left brain, but he's actually thinking with his right brain, he's thinking in terms of narrative, in terms of story, and he comes up with this, like, compelling story. So, you know, for example, one of the I used to read a lot of science fiction short stories as a kid. And I was a huge fan of Isaac Asimov, you know, who isn't. And Isaac Asimov, I remember vividly had one story about self driving cars, which he wrote in like, 1949, or something like that. And, of course, the self driving cars, develop personalities, and of course, they become wonky, and eventually tried to kill their humans, right? You know, and you're just like, the attraction of this myth is whatever. Now, I have heard from people who drive Tesla's, and sometimes it feels like the Tesla is trying to kill them, but it is, you know, not at all the same kind of phenomenon at all. And so there's this actually, you know, in the mind of, basically, you know, when you're a rationalist, you know, you basically, you valorize, this kind of left brain thinking, and then you basically valorize it so completely, that you don't notice when you yourself are engaged in classic right brain thinking, and are basically, you know, sort of spreading mythology. And so, you know, when I basically look at, you know, and this applies, you know, the sort of, you know, not in terms of simulating atoms, but in general, these systems find it very difficult to operate in the real world, because they're basically, constantly doing mysterious things in unknown edge cases. And we call that in the LLM context. We call that hallucination. But, you know, think about that, in the self driving context, the self driving context is basically, your car does something, you know, behaves like a very skilled driver, 99.99% of the time, and then it does something where even like a six year old would press the brakes the other time and so it basically, you know, winds up seeming like utterly crazy. I mean, I think I was I was talking to an AI researcher, unfortunately, I forget who, who had kind of a good term for what large language models do. They're essentially intuition machines, they develop very strong intuitive models of their latent space. And so they sort of think they're actually very good at, they're very good at things that we really used to consider to be the domain of humans like creativity, like these things actually can be very, very creative, which is really scary, and unnerving. To those of us who have, you know, creative interests, they can't write good poetry or, you know, they can write good poetry in inferior forms. And that's one of the things that tells you that the form is inferior. Ask them to compose a Shakespeare play and you'll get utter garbage right you know, and the like, but But ask them to like, you know, imitate a certain kind of, you know, ask them to imitate Rupi Kaur or whatever. And they'll actually do a very serviceable job because Rupi Kaur is a lot more like a large language model than she wants her readers to think, you know, but in terms of basically having the sort of intuition machine, and then you're like, suppose you know, Kim Jong Un, to go back to my evil genius, you know, model has like an intuitive wizard, you know, at his elbow that can have any, like, sort of intuitive dream up kind of any brilliant, intuitive concept, you can't, how's that really going to help you take over the world, you know, these attempts to basically create, you know, auto GPT, or something agents that operate in the real world are just like, like, comical, you know, they're like comically bad. And that badness, which comes out of the fact that, you know, these things don't, they have an intuitive picture of the latent space, but what they can't do very well at all is logic. And, you know, and logic is a, you know, a fundamental piece of strategy. And you don't really have strategy without logic, and you don't really take over the world with that strategy. And so that's sort of one objection to this. The other objection is so much simpler objection, which is that, essentially, it's essentially a Misesian philosophical objection, which is in the concept of human action. And when you say that only humans act, you're like, you know, it's a tautological statement. It's actually a definition of action. So you might say, for example, forgetting the AI, okay, it's rudimentary AI, you know, suppose you program a quadcopter, you put a lock on a quadcopter, camera on the quadcopter, program it to recognize

    Spaniards. It's an anti Spanish, you know, racist drone, and this racist drone goes around killing Spaniards, right? Well, the thing is, it's not really even though the drone is flying free by itself, and no one's controlling it. It's not really the drone that's committing a hate crime. It's whoever built the drone. And so when you put basically this sort of stochastic agent and an LLM is inherently stochastic, when you put the stochastic agent in command of resources that can have a meaningful effect on the real world, it's not the LLM that's acting, it's you who are acting, and you are acting in a very, very capricious way. That is, you know, yeah, if it's in charge of like real resources, it could be dangerous in some sense, but it's just a weird and capricious and ineffective thing to do. And so and I feel that basically, moreover, you know, to be frank, I'm sure Eliezer is because of all of the attention he's getting right now. I'm sure he's basically and I don't know, if you think he's lost weight, he used to be rather overweight, and now he's got a lower BMI than me, which is frankly, embarrassing. And I'm sure the man is just like swimming in pussy right now. To be frank. Right. You know, and, and yet the like, like, really? Like -

    It's good. It's good to be a Doomer it's good to be a doomer.

    That's a 200. It's, yeah, it's a good, it's good. It's good to it's good to it's good to get press, you know, and he's basically doing the 200 meter butterfly out there. But I think that is people basically see the essentially banal nature of large language models. And like, you know, incorporate this into being, you know, that they'll sort of lose let the like every new generation of computing is like, giant electronic brains are about to out compete mankind. Remember when a chess computer beaten beat Garry Kasparov? You're old enough to remember that shit, and people thought it meant something. And then people are like, Well, my, like Apple Watch can beat Garry Kasparov. And I'm like, Wow, this actually doesn't really mean jack shit, you know, any more than it meant, you know, something really important. It's the first time a computer could like multiply faster than Johnny von Neumann. Right? And the and so I think that basically, this narrative, the current sort of Doomer narrative has its own fate, you know, built in, and I think that basically as qualitative, as you sort of hit that S curve of, of diminishing returns, and as sort of the qualitative breakthroughs happen and are absorbed. I think that you know, AI Doomerism in five to 10 years, will actually get rather tired at which point I hope, I hope, I hope Eliezer has settled down and found the love of a good woman, which I know he deserves.

    Yeah, I mean, one thing that I'll say as we move from this topic is I've asked a lot of people this question about AI

    But they I've never given an answer quite like quite well, like mine have they?

    Yeah, you know, I mean, there are fragments of people and people from computer science backgrounds are not Doomers people that are not computer scientists and people that are quite intelligent actually. So I'll give you a concrete example. I have a friend, he's a, he's a, you know, academic statistician, you know, he's very smart guy. He is very, very worried. So there are a lot of -

    Eliezer. Eliezer is a very smart guy. He's just stupid. Like, you know, these things go together. Like, yeah, sorry, go on.

    No, no, it's just, it's just, it's an interesting observation that it's stratified very, very neatly on people like you, Perry Metzker, you know, all of the computer - the hardcore computer science people tend to be just like, whatever, like, this is not going to be, you know, you know, diminishing marginal returns all of these things, you know, you guys also like, there's probably like, I mean, like, we are going to be like, rate limited, we are going to be limited at some point how much Nvidia can crank out? Right.

    Yeah, you know, I don't know. I mean, there's always new factories. That's, that doesn't last for that long. Yeah, it's somewhat, it's somewhat limiting. I mean, maybe maybe people will actually get those AMD chips to work. You know, I don't know. But

    All right. So another question that I have to ask you, you know, you're obviously an outside the box thinker. You know, we've known each other for a while you have a lot of, quote, heterodox opinions, I mean, so do I. So whatever, I'm not like a dis or anything like that. So China, like, over the time that we've known each other, or known of each other, known each other, you know, it's been like, It's been too long, or whatever, over 15 years, right. But the world has changed in a lot of ways. Not like totally transformed, but it's changed, you know, China, Chimerica is gone. Now we have like, you know, kind of more great power competition, again, it looks like America is actually in pretty good shape compared to like, the demographic issues with China, India's staying India, you know, we are having. So I will tell you, I know, I have friends who work in say, like applied plant genomics, I'm gonna give you a real specific example, because it's a real example. I have friends who work in applied plant genomics, and they have told me, Look, China is producing more publications than us, and it's not all fake stuff. Like they are doing real things. So,

    but they're not gonna they're not gonna, they're China, China, but China, China is still not going to be the first country. You know, that pushes the, you know, the THC content of cannabis above 40, 45, 50%. Right. You're not gonna see that from the Chinese. So, you know, America has like, you know, it's like the, you know, Snow Crash, the high speed pizza delivery, you know, like, I just don't think yeah, you know, so we're still ahead some ways.

    But at some ways, in some ways, like China, India, you know, these like new new countries, I mean, mostly in China, really. They are replicating the institutional setup of American r&d and American science. Do you think that that's actually hobbling them? Because you have kind of criticize the way America or, you know, the West has set it up? You know, in terms of institutional capture?

    Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, you know, the problem is that China and India tend to lose the best people. And so, you know, there's still Yeah, I think that's possible to produce a scientifically, you know, establishment, that's much less hide bound, that's really where the best people want to work, or the way in which the best people want to work, you see, little, little there little spots of that typically, in sort of places that fund the person, not the project, like HHMI, you must be familiar with. And, you know, so there's, I mean, you know, you can still, there are still very good scientists in our, like science world, and the world of Chinese Science. I mean, you know, the reputation, right, you know, and there's no such - I mean, people are like, when people are like, COVID came out of Chinese Science, I'm like, There's no Chinese Science, these people were Chinese people working in China, on an American funded and American organized, you know, research program. And, and so, there's a lot of like, mediocrity there. At the same time, you can't avoid the fact that this is the country that like manufactures everything. And basically all they're missing in terms of the stack, especially when you combine them with Russia with its natural resources. Basically, all they're missing is is TSMI, TSMC and ASML. Right. And so, you know, how hard is that really, to do that's more applied engineering than like scientific genius. Somehow, I think the Chinese will be able to make, you know, extreme ultraviolet light at some point. And so it's a very it's a very limited sort of period of advantage. And it's not like another thing, of course, is SpaceX and, and starship. And you know, basically, I think it would be possible for a really decisive US government to use the heavy lift capacity of starship to, you know really established monopoly control of space and therefore established kind of, you know, an ultimate, real sort of global military hegemony. And unfortunately, I'm afraid that's not going to be done. Because should I go? Should I go? Should I go into that a little bit? Let me go into that a little bit. So So So, you know, SDI, aka Star Wars, and one particular component of Star Wars was almost practically even the 80s with 80s Lift technology, and an 80s, of course, electronics. And that was Brilliant Pebbles, basically a launch denial infrastructure, if you think about, for example, Starlink, which has surrounded the world with, you know, 1000s of satellites moving in a Cloud, basically, you know, it's a pretty easy sensing and physics problem to say, anything that rises up out of the earth on a ballistic trajectory, gets a rock vectored into it. And so it's possible once you basically build this, you have essentially a universal launch denial capacity, that can blow up anything coming into space, that's a perfect ICBM shield. And then you add to that, another piece of military design called rods from God, which is you use all this enormous Elan generated lift capacity to just lift a bunch of tungsten telephone poles into space. And then those can come down anywhere you want, like, you know, 10 minutes later, it's just like, there's no after that, like, there's just no point in resisting like, all these systems should just be turned off. That's where my hypothesize, you know, orbital authority gets the power to, you know, implement military gun control, you know, in a proper way, which is really what we're the only thing that can restore civilization, or restore man. But, you know, the prospect of course, you know, what's what's really matters. In Washington, DC, we have an enormous respect for treaties. There's a treaty prohibiting militarization of space, it was signed by not only Lyndon Johnson, but also Leonid Brezhnev. And our respect for Lyndon, you know, if we violated that LBJ and Brezhnev would be rolling over in their graves with just dire ritual consequences for the world, they would curse us, they would curse us, you know, and so that's basically why we don't do it. Eventually. The Chinese you know, did they sign the treaty, maybe they signed it, you know, but I don't think they have these kinds of compunctions or respect, frankly, for LBJ and Brezhnev, it's difficult to imagine, but, but they would, you know, basically just, like, rip off SpaceX and basically do this, and then we'd really be living in a Chinese future, which I mean, there's, there's worse outcomes, right? You know, it's an old civilization they've done well. But yeah, I admit, like I am I there is something lacking in I mean, I'm a European I like, I like the European way of doing things, you know, so I would prefer, obviously, the kind of hegemony that I'm describing, but who knows what will actually happen?

    You know, as opposed to going, I want to, I won't ask you this. This isn't on the list of questions, but it's, I think it just organically, I thought about it, we are both above replacement, above demographic replacement. And I think that's pretty actually

    Who's this ‘we’ white man?

    I mean, both of us.

    That's true. We're both we're both we have both passed the replacement line, you know, it's true. It's very true.

    So but that's pretty rare for our I think socio economic. You know, it's not too common

    Sure. I mean, my ex was a Burner and I used to joke with her that the mother of my son, and I used to joke were there that the total fertility rate of Burning Man was like, 0.2 it makes like Iceland look like Niger you know, and, yeah, yeah, sad because this is a modern aristocracy. You know, I mean, as you well know, like aristocratic birth rates have been a huge problem, since Augustus was a little boy and

    So, okay, that that brings up something separate, but I'm gonna go to this first. You know, you're talking about like civilization, and our future and heroism and all this stuff. Are you I'll just, I'll just say like, I am worried about the demographic composition of the human species as we get older and older. and all societies tend not to be. I mean, they're, they're risk averse. They don't want to do things. They they're set in their ways, et cetera, et cetera. I'm worried about what the 21st century is going to look like the gray century.

    Um, yeah, well, it's not gray in Africa isn't I mean, you know, so maybe it'll be the African century. Do you think do you think Bill Gates? Do you think Bill Gates is right about Africa? Razib? Is it? Is it full of human potential? Are there, you know, hundreds of 1000s of Einsteins just waiting to be unlocked?

    I mean, I don't think that there's dozens of Einsteins in the world right now. Just looking around. You know what I'm saying? If they're, I mean, maybe the issue here is like, oh, there's no discoveries to be made. But or maybe they're, they're working at a hedge fund. Maybe they're working at Renaissance capital? I don't know. But yeah, I mean, I think maybe, maybe we need to, like brush up, our kids need to brush up on their Yoruba. You know, I don't know, you know, the future, the future, the future belongs to those who show up. You know, obviously, I'm trying to practice what I preach. You don't know what you preach about that. But you definitely practice it,

    The future that belongs to those who show up. But the future, on the other hand, also belongs to those who control the telephone poles in space, you know, and so there's a kind of natural tension there really, you know, and and like, it's, you know, we're not, I mean, ultimately, all questions of power are ultimately military. And we've really passed from the age in which military power depended on the number of people with simple firearms you could basically put together on the battlefield and it started to be, you know, sort of somewhere between who can design the best drones and the kind of like, late 20th century really professionalized warfare you see in Ukraine, can I put in a plug for a movie actually? Yeah. All right. So this is kind of hard to find, in some ways, although it was made just last year, by the late great, Yevgeny Prigozhin, or his like people and among other crazy shit that this wild wonderful, you know, I once I was asking after the Wagner coup, I was asking someone who knew Russia very well about what was going on and then what happened and he's like, the first thing you have to understand Curtis is that Russian history is a Coen Brothers movie. And and it really is, and and so, you know, we have to salute like, this was a, this was what my friend Sami Burja calls a live player, this was a real man, you know, he bestrode the world. And one of the things that he did while bestriding the world was make a movie, he made actually a feature film, a scripted feature film, a war film called Best in Hell, which is basically shows the reality of urban combat in Ukraine and all the actors in this are actual, were, who knows how many of them are still alive were actual Wagner mercenaries. And so you're basically seeing these people who are really, you know, despite their somewhat primitive equipment, the best in the world at urban combat, doing their thing, and it's sort of like watching a Hollywood film about the NFL, which is cast with like real NFL players. And and it's just, it's astounding how good these guys are, you know, but of course, their their survival is - so there is a little bit of, you know, if we can sort of close it out with some Homeric you know, heroicism, there is a little bit of heroicism there. And yet, I just feel like even these kinds of heroes will just get crushed by like, you know, fleets of AI controlled suicide drones, you know, the human element will ultimately fail.

    We're imagining a future where drones controlled from nursing homes, against human waves of children from Nigeria, or like teens.

    Yeah, something like so. I mean, that, you know, it's just no. I mean, you know, the question was really presented in that, you know, Jean Raspaille book. The question is not if you can shoot, of course you can shoot, the question is, Will you shoot, and you know, the last man will never shoot and he'll be overrun and his, his bones will bleach upon them on the pastures, you know, and we'll see a new a new order develop I don’t know. So yeah, I'm kind of I'm kind of a doomer you know, in that sense, but it will be a slow and complicated Doom and there will be many, many opportunities for the clever and wise and lucky to escape.

    I mean, that's, that is a fitting and poetic end to this podcast. I think we've kind of close the loop gone full circle.

    Yeah, I think we have I think we have I like to have I like to have a good arc in a podcast. And, you know, I feel like we've done we've done some fairly good work here Razib have we not?

    Good content as the Zoomers would say,

    Good content, premium content, I believe I'm a producer of premium content. That's what I put on my tax return. I'm like, I'm producer of premium content. You know, that's the, you know, that's how I mean, I've produced a lot of different kinds of content. But frankly, it's all been premium. And that's how I want history to remember me

    Yeah, all that matters is quality, quality, you know?

    Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's not all that matters, but it's all that you can worry about. And, like, creators everywhere. take that to heart. Alright, Razib. Thank you so much for this opportunity. It's great talking to you. Have a great one.

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