Intro
Recently went to a talk from Vinay Gupta. Slides are here. I usually find most speakers disappointing in that their ideas aren’t really crisp, and/or too virtue-signally or hand-wavy. I was pleasantly surprised. It reminded me how much I respect how engineers think — first principles, clean slate, “how do we build this efficiently?” and seeing what comes out when you apply different constraints.
Foundation/Refugee Problem
He did a good job giving some foundation for the talk:
- We’re going to have a continued refugee crisis because of climate change.
- Old refugee system came out of specific circumstances from WWII. The military surplus became the standard, so that’s why we have things like tents.
- People were expected to eventually go back to Vienna or wherever they came from.
- This outdated system doesn’t work. Refugees/IDP often can’t go back “home”.
- Refugee camps don’t allow any growth or moving up and out.
- Incentives of funding for non-profits means it’s harder to take risks and innovation grinds to a halt, which is why the UN has stuck with the tent camp model for so long.
- “It’s a political will problem but these are often the most difficult problems we have.”
What are alternatives?
Vinay suggests establishing new cities. Integrating into old cities would be better but it’s harder to do because current residents mostly don’t want them. (I can’t blame them.) He mentioned Germany successfully integrated large numbers of immigrants from Syria as far as he knew. I’m skeptical but don’t know enough about it.
Poor
As somebody who spent a lot of time growing up poor, it gets really annoying listening to bleeding hearts who have no clue what they’re talking about. I was surprised at his insight. You know when you hear people talking and find yourself nodding along, seeing them get it right?
He made a good breakdown of the problem. The rural poor are worse off because they lack connection. This was certainly my experience being destitute in remote areas of the Central Valley of California. You can’t afford to fix a car that has constant problems. You’re constantly worrying if you have enough gas to get places. Are we going to make it to the closest food pantry? It’s harder to find work. Compare that to a city like San Francisco which is overflowing with services. (It’s a different question of whether that’s good/sustainable and incentivizes homeless people to come there.)
One big problem with being poor is the volatility. It’s incredibly stressful to not be stable. You unexpectedly have to go the hospital. Your car breaks down. You get laid off.
He’s saying that microinsurance could fix this. I don’t know enough about the actual benefits of insurance to form an opinion but his point was that we could smooth this over with basically no increase in cost to the welfare state.
Hexayurt
A funny series of circumstances in which he randomly met hippies led to him being interested in the puzzle of efficiently building a geodesic dome that can be put into the back of a truck. This led him down a rabbit hole to broader problems. “Watch out for the hippies, they’re dangerous.” aka they can set you off on a completely different life course.
He talked about the cool history of how the hexayurt took off and how Burning Man has become the testing ground for them with people innovating, sharing ideas. It reminded me of the DIY Soylent crowd on Reddit.
I had seen he had defended Richard Stallman on Twitter, but I was slightly surprised he had the balls to do it in The People’s Republic of Ann Arbor. He was saying that he made his hexayurt open source and that a lot of good came from that decision, and then talked about the importance of the open-source movement and people like Richard Stallman even if he “puts his foot in his mouth.”
I’m still agnostic on the open-source system vs for-profit system. I wonder what ancaps think.
He got in some nice digs on non-engineers. “The building industry is basically a rip-off.” “Have engineers build houses rather than architects.”
He talked about the importance of modular design and that firms like IKEA could switch over to making emergency supplies and back to tables and desks quite easily.
Political Science
He had an interesting definition of a nation-state. I majored in political science in college (you won’t find a bigger critic of poli sci than me!) so it was interesting to hear his definition of a nation-state. Compared to the Weber‘s famous “monopoly on violence“, he stated the defining feature was the ability to pardon crimes, a “state of exemption” in which you can okay people killing, etc. It’s similar but an interesting distinction. I wonder if others have written about this but couldn’t find good links with lazy Googling. Please send me some if you know of any!
I wonder which US democratic candidate he would support. Yang?
He applied that sexy, first principles, clean slate, “How do we build this efficiently?” and “What comes out when you apply different constraints?” to building a city with some very impressive slides.
In many instances, Vinay seemed to basically be advocating properly eliminating the negative externalities and having firms be properly charged for their environmental impact. His startup Mattereum seems to be trying to do that. He had a quick comment about working with William Shatner on Star Trek merch being an interesting place to start. When I was in the incubator for my blockchain startup, we met a lot of people trying to work on blockchain and supply chain stuff. Seems like a good use case for it. I think a lot of people in the audience wouldn’t have supported his point if they understood it, given they just want to burn down capitalism and install a red state.
Q&A
We went to a smaller room for the Q&A. It reminded me of film class, and by that I mean it was mostly annoying. Film class is listening to maybe one or two people discuss things in a way that makes you see something in a new way, and twenty-five people who are grating to listen to with how stupid their thinking is.
Update: I wrote a whole article on this phenomenon:
One girl who was obviously worked up emotionally about the environment pressed him on if this was another “quick fix” solution. He brought up the recycling rate of steel and how high it was and if it could be brought higher and other things like plastic that would be good. She responded: Don’t you need to heat it up to melt it, and doesn’t that energy have to come from somewhere? I felt like saying “What do you want him to do? Defeat entropy? TANSTAAFL, girl!” It’s common for people to get really worked up about things without accepting hard truths about reality or expect people to magically change and just “be good people” without changing the incentives.
There were some good questions, or at least questions that ended up bringing up good answers.
Who employs the refugee workers? He said they would be set up as special economic zones and foreign direct investment would come in. I don’t know enough about this either. Again, what do the ancaps think?
How do you stop people shipping contraband in shipping containers?
There will always be fraud but you have to keep trying to tilt the board in your favor. He didn’t use the word but he was saying it’s a Red Queen problem.
Object-level solutions: sophisticated barcodes, locks, tracking the officers who inspected it and others who had access.
Things I wasn’t convinced of or impressed by
Now, almost all of these things weren’t the main discussion so he could have nuanced points that may clear some of it up.
He made a comment critical of Boris Johnson suspending Parliament.
Important things to note:
I know very little about foreign politics.
I don’t know whether Brexit is a net good or net bad.
But I value consistency in evaluating the ethics of things. Hold both sides to the same standard. You can argue that suspending Parliament is immoral, which he was, but it doesn’t seem to be placing any consideration to the fact that the majority of the people voted Leave. Don’t only find fault in tactics used by those supporting Leave and not in tactics supporting Stay. I also don’t fault people for playing by the rules of a system. Change the rules or play them better.
Some of this reminds me of people criticizing Russian bots. Where is the criticism of people being stupid enough to be convinced by silly Facebook posts?!
World on Fire
He was saying something about the younger generation born after 9/11 coming into a world on fire or something like that, and that they aren’t going to take it anymore. I think he mentioned Greta Thunberg as well. World on fire? This reminds me of Scott Adams’ two different movies playing.
I understand x-risk and that some risks are increasing over time but still. I’m sympathetic to the Pinker “Better Angels” and Rosling” Factfulness” or the article by Luke Muehlhauser on how shit got way better after the industrial revolution. The “recognition that things are better than ever” movie.
I think that abstract pandering about the world being on fire is rather silly. Yes, you can watch a montage of all the horrible things going on in the world and link to fifty news articles. But that doesn’t change the fact that the average life is vastly better than it was before.
AI
I asked him what he thought about Bostrom, the alignment problem, and AI, and he said he didn’t believe in strong AI basically because only one species evolved verbal intelligence. There were more questions and little time so he didn’t have time to elaborate, but still.
Closing
I liked his epistemic awareness. He pointed out that he doesn’t know what the best solution is and there are other people in a better position to know.
He was warm and had a good handshake. I mentioned first knowing him from the SSC thing and he responded “Oh, that clusterfuck!” He seemed happy to chat more, but in the moment I was too distracted and couldn’t think of the things I wanted to discuss. Alas, that’s what Twitter is for, and a lunch invitation. I love the feeling of having so much to unpack, so much to explore. Most people you meet, it just deadens out. Everyone’s got stories, sure, but not everyone is connected to a valuable web of ideas to explore. That was Vinay.
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