Max Novendstern
@mnovendstern
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cofounder @Worldcoin
San Francisco, CA
Joined September 2007
If no one likes your tweet it’s because you are founding a new school of thought.
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King’s Disease (noun): when the thing that makes you the king is precisely what keeps you from enjoying it. Many such cases.
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Knowing how to take high IQ edgelords “seriously but not literally” has been the biggest arbitrage of my adult life. Every important trend breaks here early, invisible to anyone who overweights respectability.
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the most underrated technology right now: the capacity to generate egg cells from stem cells in arbitrary quantity + capacity to select for IQ among embryos means IVF will enable the selection of children with one-in-a-million IQ markers. this is not priced in.
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The most expensive mistake this decade will be not being optimistic enough.
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Your worst sin was trading your capacity for love for a mid career.
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how it should work: . 1. get sick. 2. home testing machine → sequence viral DNA. 3. viral DNA → mRNA therapy specs. 4. mRNA therapy specs → automatic manufacturing of mRNA therapy patch. 5. mRNA therapy patch → overnight Fedex.
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Operation Warp Speed, but – hear me out – for everything.
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Is there any single technology that would improve my life more than a phone that’s not a misaligned dopamine machine? Why not 10x more experiments here?.
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"All roads lead to Rome: every successful (tech) company will become an AGI company" – @ilyasut via @ericjang11
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POV: SF thieves sawed down a parking sign to steal your bike in the middle of a residential block in the middle of the evening
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Why can eight year olds dominate top adults in chess but basically no other task?.
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how many social problems are downstream the psychic damaged caused by modern childrearing? no child cried alone for hours at night but now they almost all do
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The best path out of depression is to turn up the schizophrenia dial. (Depression == nothing has meaning; schizophrenia == everything has meaning).
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Because coding is expensive, we economize through generalized software (the best interface for the most people). When Codex + Replit drop the cost of coding to zero, we’ll learn there’s something else, personalized software.
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The fact that you can't really buy sleep or love saved capitalism. People don't euthanize the rich because they know they're not that much happier.
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The internet economy needs an investment bank. Prove your cash flows (via Stripe, Shopify, Patreon, etc. APIs) then sell debt or equity to anyone. Tokenize the instrument, so its liquid/borderless. Automate repayment/dividends. Would enfranchise many people.
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too bad Steve Jobs couldn’t complete his last project, which always felt like the culmination of his life’s interface work: Siri.
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Did you find God or just get too tired to sin.
A lot of what people call maturity is really just low energy.
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give me an e-reader with a chatbot and notes system and nothing else. give me a typewriter with the same. strip computers of their dopamine faucets, leave their crystal balls.
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The most brazen modernist experiment is child-rearing
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Christ’s solution to the game theory problem — love them no matter what — is underrated.
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pinned to my wall: “be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work” – Gustave Flaubert.
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hypothesis -- if we have a fast takeoff, it’s not because our models got larger; it’s because current-size models wrote software programs, chained them to other programs, and that recursive, self-assembling graph traverses the space of all industrial processes
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dismissing God as an artifact of the mind -- a place on the map of human consciousness -- isn’t the damning take atheists believe it to be. that every mind comes preloaded with this place is enough to call it sacred.
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Building tech for drones now is like starting a deep learning lab ten years ago.
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The political divide now isn’t traditional versus progressive; it’s whether pysops work on you or not.
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OH (by Nietzsche): the greatest period in your life begins when you gain the courage to rebaptize what’s most bad in you as the best of you.
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Around your thirties you get the resources to mentally retire or to double down . If you choose the former you lose your edge astonishingly fast and doom yourself to being mispriced for the rest of your life: your expectations are high, but your abilities no longer are. One of.
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@yacineMTB The redeeming logic of the prenup: if you want to maximize the probability the marriage lasts, don’t create a big financial payoff for choosing to walk out rather than to work through.
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The next one is in NYC this year: a mud pit with robots
@cwamidon @DavidZagaynov @isaiah_p_taylor @cameron62s @j_d_noone @mnovendstern knows a thing or two about organizing founder fight nights.
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that LASIK costs only $2,000 remains an astonishing whitepill on the power of free market biotechnology.
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Guy who boldly proclaims the contrarian view that is completely consensus within his peer group.
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management principles:. 1. go faster . the correct answer to “what should I be working on?” is almost always: “find new ways to squeeze out latency”. 2. delete requirements relentlessly. 3. raise your standards . then have the stamina to fight every day for that standard . 4. if.
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Because protein production is expensive, we economize through generalized therapies (the best proteins for the most people). When mRNA drops the cost of synthesizing proteins to zero, we’ll learn there’s something else, personalized therapies.
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overheard: your life will suck by default but you'll get complete freedom to make it as beautiful as you can imagine is America's deal on a spiritual level.
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Life in 2022 is to ask minute-by-minute, does this serve my goals or am being programmed by a dopamine faucet?.
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one of the great game-theoretical insights of Christianity is that “forgiveness” is actually strength (even though it’s coded as weakness). because forgiveness reifies free will . so long as you’re in the eye-for-an-eye regime your next move is dictated by your adversary. your.
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during The Technological Stagnation Era (‘90-‘20) the best investment was nevertheless tech. crazy how important owning tech equity will be during The Re-Acceleration (‘20-).
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Same with deworming—the other sin qua non of EA takes—it actually doesn’t work. For exactly the reason Marc says: anyone who’s engaged with the lived experience of deworming knows the proposed intervention was either mildly damaging to innocents —.
Also, bed nets are Bad Actually.
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@zinniaa_3 Though you’re not seeing the “average face” here, you’re seeing “an average of faces” — and if there’s more variance across faces given diversity, that gets more distorted over time. Similar faces averaged should increase symmetry. Different faces averaged will dull features.
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Overheard in Silicon Valley: there are only two subjects—love and computers.
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Please, someone, drop the cost of freezing eggs from $12,000 to $120. Would change so many lives for the better.
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Your goal this year is to make the story as interesting as possible.
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Avoid environments where you earn status by pretending to do the thing.
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GriftDAO:. A massive prize fund for evidence of government fraud. Prove fraud. Win cash. List every official and project in America. Set up a betting market for each.
You, a mark: we need more money in these programs. Me, a philosopher: we need more arrests in these programs.
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Every non-billionaire is a policy failure.
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Every IV bag, every tube, every surface, every lotion, every calorie of food that premature babies touch in the first period of their lives is full of hormone disrupting chemicals that provably distort their neurological and reproductive development — this is our world.
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act as if you’re living in the version of the world where you’re right, because if you’re not it doesn’t matter anyway, is often good advice.
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The point of technology is to solve the riddle of Genesis, to get back to the Garden by eating the whole apple.
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algorithmic music is like pornography: it can be an intense sensory experience but it cannot be “intimate,” because there is no chance of confronting shared human consciousness, and no chance of elevating your own consciousness through that confrontation.
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I buy that text is the “universal interface” but struggle with the claim that it’s the universal training set. for example I don’t think the set of all possible true sentences gets anywhere close to the set of all possible truths.
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One take on GPT-3 is it’s isomorphic to a search engine. Massively useful in the creation of meaning, but not creating meaning.
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“Infidelity was rampant in post-Soviet Russia,” he explained, walking into the restaurant with a mask on then immediately taking it off when he sat, “because communist mandates were absurd, so if you weren’t a fool you had to become a liar. And once you’re a liar you stay one.”.
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religion is the antonym of free thought, I was told, then discovered that every biblical parable celebrates the free thinker’s defiance of the crowd.
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internal family systems theory has this appealing idea: that all ‘parts of yourself’ are ultimately trying to help you — as best they know how. a good meditation is to extend this myth outward: *everyone on earth* is trying to help you, in the best way they know how.
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Technology that generates abundance, and institutions that spread the benefits — these are the goals of our ideology.
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if you failed it was because you were not good enough. learning any other lesson makes life less livable. you are spirited to the extent you sustain the rebellion against chaos.
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Autism diagnoses over time, out of 10,000 children:. 1970 0.7.1985 5.1995 20.2020 349.
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california is the spiritual center the west. today’s machines can’t be conscious because consciousness is a field and they lack the hardware to detect it. dyslexia is the opposite of asperger’s, each different extremes on the variance/bias tradeoff.
haven’t seen this as a twitter thread, so: . what true thing do you believe that few people agree with you on?.
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The older you get the more clear, if you don’t worship something worthy — utility, truth, God, etc. — everything gets unbearably boring.
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The only assets to hold right now are market neutral hedge funds and jobs that generate productivity growth.
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Being jaded and nasty is probably the best single predictor of someone who will be successful on Twitter and unsuccessful in life.
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for better or worse I don't think there's a future for humanity where genetic engineering doesn't play a major role. we're either a spacefaring species that changes its nature – its intelligence, fertility, longevity, and empathy – or we never get up there. upgrade or go extinct.
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pollution is more important than climate change. the latter’s solved by nuclear and is speculative. but microplastics, estrogenics, air particulates, glysophate, heavy metals, etc. — these are wrecking you now and require an industrial overhaul of unprecedented scale.
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Synthetic bio is to industrials what crypto is to finance—the prospect a commodities market denominated in trillions is restructured, with tech incumbents can’t seize. This supercycle’s Coinbase is Solugen.
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Make Trump fly commercial once in his life and he’ll clean this up by executive fiat fast; it’s not the biggest thing in the world but we’ve institutionalized the degradation of citizens by police at the airports and we should stop.
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Me to Claude: “I want to create a variety of macroeconomic gauges so I can understand why major assets are moving the way they do. Can you propose the gauges, the relevant time series to pull for each gauge, normalize the time series into a composite, then write the code”. Claude.
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if you want to be a great thinker pick a simple, true, consequential idea and take it a hundred times more seriously than you currently do.
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Imagine an AI that offered funding to every startup in the world, because for any given startup (equity, debt, tokens) it can price risk, such that {expected outcome} x {deal terms} > {LP return requirements}. This AI would become the front door to Silicon Valley.
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Things that will be obvious in retrospect:. 1. we're massively underinvested in Africa.2. we're massively overexposed to pollution.3. Adam Smith's legacy (the shift from moral discourse to incentive design as means of organizing society) wounded us in deep and unacknowledged ways.
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we truly live in a golden age for being highly curious. it’s so beautiful; i am grateful every day
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You would think VC would be a great asset class in "The Acceleration" but if AI can indeed one-shot vast software use-cases within the decade a lot of them are currently making very bad bets.
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props to the monotheists for saying “don’t take idols” — they knew the only thing crazier than worshiping God is worshiping anything else. that it’s better to long for a God who might actually exist than for anything human to be perfect (you, her, his art, their cause, etc.) when.
At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.
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@tszzl The sunset over Tam makes you want to conquer the world while the fog over the English countryside makes you forlorn about lost time. Vista Determinism
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To recap: Elon goes crazy hard on the left’s self-destructive wokeism, succeeds, gains allies on the right, gains power, then uses power to go crazy hard on the right’s racism — a patriot.
@stevenmackeyman The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B. Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot.
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1. read a paper in a field you don't know.2. put each new concept into ChatGPT.3. put each tuple of concept/explanation into Anki .4. review at the end. a very nice way to learn about the world.
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All progress is downstream intelligence and capital (shifts in bits and atoms) so it's a cause for optimism that our tech revolutions are in tools for thought and tools for capital (ML; crypto).
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what modern portfolio theory doesn’t account for is that if you blow up being massively long true technology it’s an honorable death. fuck diversification.
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it’s not a ‘black swan’ if you’ve seen it a half dozen times (SVB, Silvergate, FTX, Luna, etc.).
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OH: “the critics are not saying it’s impossible but are imagining what could happen if/when it works. The world has changed”.
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when the AGIs roam the galaxies humans will still want to feel healthy. human biology is the ultimate substrate where ‘meaning’ resides and thus biotechnology will be the terminal industry.
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@tszzl the whitepill/blackpill is that with 60s-era reactor designs — but mass-manufactured, scaled up, and heated up — you can get to $.01 / kWh . then you can electrify steel production, create cheaper steel, thus create cheaper nuclear, recursively till $.001 / kWh.
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At 33 they let you talk to God. (Christ when he died, Augustine when he wrote Confessions, Leonard Cohen when he dropped his first album, and so forth).
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