My motto: First, don't die. Speed up biological research.
Joined September 2009
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Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
Russia is celebrating Ukraine’s decline. “This is not just a crisis,” Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said in May, “but evidence of the biological death of a nation.” Such remarks suggest Russia is starting to view depopulation as a war objective.
economist.com/europe/2026/11…
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
Any Harvard graduate student who participated in this planned class disruption should be disciplined to the fullest extent possible under Harvard’s policies.
The professor tried to move the class and couldn’t. His students were disrupted while trying to complete an in-class exam.
Completely unacceptable.
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
A Democrat running for state senate in NH did not meet residency requirements and publicly withdrew 8 weeks before the election.
48% of people still voted for him, even when he literally could not win.
We have to model most voters as knowing quite close to nothing at all.
People keep trying to tell me that BEING A FREE STATER was part of the reason a couple dozen free staters lost their elections. Yury did even better than he ever had over the other Republican who’s not a free stater. It had nothing to do with him being a free stater that he lost, it is simply the fact that independent chose blue this time around. Last night on the show I named all the free staters I personally know are out and proud who made it in, I should have counted but there are still like 12 in.
Are there 12 crypto libertarians in your state house outside of New Hampshire? No.
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
2 grad student roommates with a combined income of 102k USD (144k CAD/91k EUR) are not in a place where they "can't pay rent or buy groceries". The "downwardly mobile gradstudentification" of unions will be (and has been) a disaster for organized labor.
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
Most important takeaway from Ezra Klein’s comments on the permitting reform bill:
Democrats just won in a blue tsunami on an affordability message.
BAAJA is a test of whether those campaign promises were real.
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
Pass BAAJA now.
As the Senate takes up a landmark permitting overhaul next week, what can history teach us about making interstate power lines easier to build?
Yale's @ZLiscow and UC Berkeley's @_josephshapiro in @washingtonpost: washingtonpost.com/opinions/…
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
Both this permitting reform deal (BAAJA), and the last bipartisan bill (EPRA), took nearly 2 years to negotiate.
Waiting essentially means starting from scratch.
And no one in DC trusts Huffman to negotiate a better deal that Republicans could support.
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
Des musulmans qui mettent le feu à un lycée catholique. Je n’ose imaginer l’extraordinaire déchaînement médiatique et politique auquel nous aurions assisté si des catholiques avaient mis le feu à une école coranique en hurlant "Deus vult !" (Dieu le veut).
🔴🔥🇫🇷 𝗙𝗟𝗔𝗦𝗛 𝗜𝗡𝗙𝗢 — « Oh zebi ! Sale wallah ! »
Deux individus cagoulés sont recherchés après avoir incendié l’entrée du lycée privé catholique Saint-Rémi à Roubaix, le 4 novembre.
@MaelCamerlynck, conseiller municipal de Roubaix, réclame que les auteurs soient retrouvés et « punis de peines exemplaires ».
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
🚨BAAJA now includes Nuclear (!!) and help for communities dealing with data centers!
In addition to technical fixes and important concessions to Tribal interests, the BAAJA amendment adds cool new several new provisions! 🧵
1. Nuclear: A whole new title with targeted fixes for nuclear
– Removes requirements for trial-style hearings if nobody requests one
– Allows companies to begin preliminary construction before final licensing (operation still requires licensing)
– Clarifies timelines for licensing decisions
– Allows NRC to pay officials more in order to hire more senior staff
2. Program to support communities dealing with data centers:
– New program at DOE to provide communities with information on the costs and effects of data centers.
– DOE is required to support individual communities that request info on how data centers will affect local electricity, water, the local economy, etc.
3. Fix for wildfire prevention
– The Clean Air Act puts limits on air particulate pollution that states have to stay under. Current rules say "exceptional events" like wildfires do not count towards those limits
– Prescribed burns are intentional fires used to clear underbrush and prevent disastrous wildfires.
– Current rules do not always exempt prescribed burns from counting towards clean air limits, disincentivizing states from conducting important wildfire prevention
– The new amendment fixes this, allowing controlled burns to count as an "exceptional event"
4. Reauthorizing brownfield clean up:
– The bipartisan infrastructure law created a program for cleaning up abandoned industrial sites. That program's authorization lapsed in 2023
– BAAJA authorizes the program through 2031 up to $200M per year.
teapawt.net/SiegelScribe/status/21…
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
Nobody ever talks about this, but the reason you have to go to college is A, because Griggs v. Duke Power Company made it illegal for presumptive employers to IQ test, and B, inner city High-Schools basically aren't allowed to fail a student as long as they physically show up.
So you end up in this trap where a High-School diploma that you worked very hard for means nothing, because a kid who did coloring books and addition and subtraction got a paper saying he has the same qualification. Ok, then just give me an intelligence test, oh wait you cant, thats also illegal because it causes "disparate impact". So now the only proxy for basically literacy and ~105~ IQ is a 4 year meaningless degree that costs 10s of thousands of dollars.
But wait, now they hand those out to anyone, (1/4 of 4yr grads have an IQ of or below 95), so now you need a Master's, or specialty training, or a million other bullshit things. So you get them, but wait, a diploma mill in Hyderabad cranked out 100M guys who also have a Master's on paper, and will work for 1/3 the price, so now you dont have a job. Ok, ill work construction, but wait, you dont live in a State with strong Unions, so any non-specialized construction work is done by slaves from Guatemala, so you decide to stay home and take Percocet instead.
Awesome system we've built.
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
All university rankings are very flawed.
I wondered how we could rank unis as purely as possible? So I looked at the career path of ~100,000 engineers over 10yrs. Universities rank high when its graduates work at companies, ranked PageRank style, that engineers compete harder to join.
Stanford, MIT, Harvard were top 3, but the extent they were above the rest surprised me. Brown at #6, Waterloo at #7!
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
LLMs are both an instance and a non-instance of the bitter lesson of AI research. First they enabled scaling with massive computation, then they are held back, and may be largely superseded, because of their over-reliance on human knowledge.
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
Dave Chappell was on stage this weekend and said he was happy that Charlie was murdered. He was giddy about it.
Here is Charlie in ‘22 defending Chappelle’s right to speech and condemning political violence that had caused a lunatic to run up on Dave during a live show.
Be aware of where we are at.
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
“Ever since that guy Charlie Kirk got murdered, and I shouldn’t say this publicly but…. I feel better.”
- Dave Chappelle
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
Lay people don't appreciate how much of post-1960s scholarship has been invalidated by ancient DNA, nor the extent to which it's vindicated earlier scholars, nor how generations have been mal-educated.
The post-60s errors are all in a single direction too: they interpret evidence through a model of human nature that predicts behaviors that run contrary to everyday intuition and observation. For example, for decades, dogma was that violence was rare until the bronze age. Of course, violence was, in fact, ubiquitous. Pots changed because people changed, not because (as scholars asserted with straight faces somehow) ideas diffused through word of mouth.
You can draw your own conclusions about why the academy pushed this model so hard, but it happened at exactly the same time the academy was pushing tons of other ideas inconsistent with an intuitive understanding of human nature.
Ancient DNA has made late 20th century revisionist historiography untenable, but other disciplines are still pushing related nonsense. All of it must be defunded and rebuilt.
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
This is really worth emphasizing: you can get incredible increases in welfare but the GDP growth numbers would barely move. Economics of how automation translates into aggregate statistics can be non obvious and counterintuitive.
Google DeepMind's @alexolegimas explains how millions of AI agents could transform the economy while GDP growth stays at just 4-5%.
The reason: AI could make production so cheap that the economic boom barely shows up in GDP.
"Let's say you have tons of autonomous organizations, millions of agents. There’s a state of the world where you’re still in the four to five growth number."
"Agriculture got automated. What happens to agriculture as a part of the economy? It went from like 40% to 2%, even though there was way, way, way more agriculture."
"Whatever gets automated becomes cheaper, and if those firms are producing a lot of output for not a lot of cost, the price of that output drops, and hence they might not necessarily lead to huge growth numbers."
"We could see incredible flourishing, incredible amounts of cheap output that we’re all consuming and we’re all happy with, and when you look at the GDP numbers, they’re in the regular sort of ballpark."
@GoogleDeepMind
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
A statistic that sounds fake but isn't: Not one single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker.
It's not because they stopped writing. It's because The New Yorker has refused to publish them. The publishing industry has blacked out a generation of male writers & then they wonder why boys don't read.
About 70% of publishing professionals are women.
Because agents and editors tend to select books they personally relate to, an increasing number of male authors are being sidelined in the publishing industry, resulting in an overwhelming number of female protagonists on our shelves—and a dearth of male ones.
No wonder young men are no longer reading.
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
The economically devastated Rust Belt resident asked God, “I had faith in you, but you didn’t save us. You let our town die. Why?”
To this God replied, “I sent you three data-center proposals. What more did you expect?”
This is the main street of Monroeville in Huron County, Ohio. The town voted against building a $1 billion data center nearby.
Let’s just be honest here, does this town look like it’s doing well enough to reject a $1 billion opportunity for economic development?
How are you supposed to fix cost of living when people vote against $1 billion opportunities for jobs and economic development?
NIMBYism is killing the West. The same people who hate data centres hate nuclear energy and hate new factories for manufacturing and reindustrialisation.
Literally what are you supposed to do? People want 5% GDP growth a year with 0 inflation and then you try to give them new industry and they reject it.
Foreign backed information war on the American people has done massive damage to America. People voted against their own jobs and their own economic development because they watched a TikTok saying Donald Trump and Epstein ate Jon Benet Ramsay inside a data center or something.
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
How can we be confident that permitting reform will lead to more transmission lines getting built?
Because we already ran this experiment 80 years ago with natural gas pipelines.
After federal control of interstate gas pipelines, mileage rose to 6 times the pre-1947 baseline.
As the Senate takes up a landmark permitting overhaul next week, what can history teach us about making interstate power lines easier to build?
Yale's @ZLiscow and UC Berkeley's @_josephshapiro in @washingtonpost: washingtonpost.com/opinions/…