Drunk on wonder ❤️🔥 @conjectureinst fellow
this other Eden (🇬🇧)
Joined August 2012
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Tom Hyde retweeted
Isaac Newton spent decades huffing mercury fumes in a Cambridge cellar, grinding lead into a worthless sludge while praying to the gods of alchemy. Now Marathon can use its reactor blanket to turn mercury-198 into stable gold by the ton. The alchemist will lose to the atom.
Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10.
Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years.
Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.
Tom Hyde retweeted
This peninsula is so ripe for total Manhattanisation.
Zero architectural merit to any of the buildings currently there. Double down on the big park and surround it with gleaming glorious skyscrapers.
Tom Hyde retweeted
Love, trade, force.
These really are the only ways we can know, be known, move, and be moved by other people in modern society.
All of interaction summarised in three words.
I want to explore these systems in greater detail to reveal their individual logics, and, in the process, justify their applications on varying social scales.
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @tomhyde_
Seems oblique-verging-on-perverse to say but this plus Wikipedia only being like 50GB to download without images renders post-apocalyptic bunker stories—from the perspective of the people inside the bunker—barely apocalyptic.
All of human knowledge plus advanced semantic search and quasi-creative tutoring? Stored locally? That is better than basically every existing school by multiple orders of magnitude.
My mind is blown by how far ahead Apple is with local LLMs. The new Mac Studio M5 Ultra will have a 512 GB model for around 15-20k. You can chain 6 of them together using thunderbolt 5 and this have over 3 TB of ram and a massive amount of CPU and GPU cores. This means you can run a frontier model with over 2 trillion parameters locally for around 100kish. Nivida is around 500k for the same capability.
It is genuinely heartening from a risk science perspective. Making resilience technologies (those that facilitate the return to the original conditions or better) as cheap and abundant as possible effectively renders our existential risk from, say, nuclear warfare as zero.
Short of a relativistic asteroid or freak-onset stellar swelling I doubt that humans, as a species and civilisation, will ever go permanently extinct.
Tom Hyde retweeted
The problem that I'm trying to solve, and one of the guiding missions of Wonderism, is what C.P. Snow called 'the two cultures'.
This is the divide between science and the humanities.
There's an opacity between the two cultures, and I think that it has spread across the entire society.
I conjecture that this is the reason for a lot of disillusionment in modern society.
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @tomhyde_
Plagues, viruses, cancers, bombs—and now cows!
Misanthropes will invent whatever broken—and, for the most part, incompatible—metaphors they require to denigrate people.
Because misanthropy, itself a form of mysticism, is easy-to-vary.
It is a bad explanation.
beautiful explanation. this is 100% happening. xitter.cf/sotak/status/211179423…
Tom Hyde retweeted
Something exciting is happening in critical rationalism!
Meet the sensational team at the Conjecture Institute—fired up by ideas, criticism, discovery, and the endless adventure of growing human knowledge.
The Enlightenment is alive and kicking!
Tom Hyde retweeted
Elon Musk flips a vehicle upside down and everyone claps and cheers. But when I do it, suddenly I'm "recklessly endangering children" and "unfit to be a school bus driver".
Flying cars are one of the few, truly modern myths. They are what we grow up dreaming about, our stone and elixir.
Imagine what it would feel like to wake up in 1890 and read in bold black serif print that lead had been turned into gold.
It would feel like this.
Elon Musk's electric car manufacturer, Tesla, has unveiled what it calls a 'flying car'.
On #BBCBreakfast Charlie & Naga looked at images of the two-seater Roadster - which has been developed in collaboration with the rocket company, Space X
bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c8nq32…
Even gimmicks have utility: entertainment and—far more meaningfully—inspiration.
If the only benefit conferred by this wonder is to reveal a mistaken preference—it will have justified its expense.
But it will almost certainly afford for far, far more than that.
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Ordinary needs have always been payed for by extraordinary gains.
Flying cars could heat more homes than coal.
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Tangential point but I love how they are just continuously on their phones here: researching and fact checking in parallel with the exchange.
Any conversation principally without knowledge aids is folk fetishist sophism and you should distrust it.
Tom Hyde retweeted
The STEM/Humanities divide is killing us. Wonderism is the cure.
I conjecture that the divide between the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities is the cause of modern stagnation, disenchantment, "the meaning crisis", and doomerism.
If there's a spiritual disconnect between your intellect and your emotion, it's impossible not to feel disenchanted.
People who are in STEM think about the material and the worldly, while people who are in the humanities think about the spiritual and the meaningful.
There's very little cross-communication between the two.
It leads to a desolation of the discourse.
So what is the solution?
It is Wonderism.
~Conejcture Institute Fellow @tomhyde_