And by viral, I mean the pandemic, because the tweet itself was not very popular at all.
In February 2020, on February 14th, 2020 in fact, Robin Hanson actually proposed infecting people with sars-cov-2 on purpose to spread out the load on the hospitals. It may have been Matt Stoller that had initially drew my attention to it — unfavourably by making remarks about Robin Hanson’s writing about surviving robot uprisings.(1)
This certainly made me revisit Robin Hanson’s “Great Filter Theory” which proposes that most civilizations will be wiped out at some point before interstellar travel, and that explains the so-called “Fermi Paradox” — which is not necessarily Fermi’s and not a valid paradox(2) — but the Great Filter theory is meant to explain why we aren’t being visited by extraterrestrials. And I came to see how much that theory presupposes all societies will be taken over ultimately by elite tycoons who forever pillage and wreck a swathe through whatever exists, running unsustainably roughshod over the bulk of their fellows and any shared resources, and make self-destruction completely unavoidable. This assumption settled into astronomy enthusiasts, sci-fi fans, and scientists without much resistance, which is certainly a pity.
Then came the Great Barrington Declaration later in 2020.(3) And in 2022 I learned about the Longtermism connection,(4) and the tech industrialist connection in 2023.(5) And the AI obsession connection to the TESCREAL philosophy cult.(6) And of course we’re meant to believe it’s just a big coincidence that AI chatbots that are being hyped are ever so similar to a lot of other addictive tech products.(7)
It seems like a lot of this stuff is eugenics(8) marketed to science nerds with tricky sales tactics — such as platforming the Great Barrington Declaration within an astronomy podcast supposedly about gravity(9) that turned into basically a right-wing rant about Doctor Fauci and a whine-fest of lockdown revisionism(10) and mythical cancel culture gripes. It’s elite panic(11) all the way down.
Robin Hanson isn’t in astronomy though, he’s a professor of economics at George Mason University.(12) It was found that the Charles Koch Foundation had a role in faculty positions in economics at George Mason University back in 2018.(13) Robin Hanson was at least at one time a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University,(14) founded by Nick Bostrom.(15)
As recently as June 2023 at least, Robin Hanson was talking about covid lab leak theory with a little poll on twitter.com.(16)
References:
1 — Matt Stoller @matthewstoller 5:13 PM · Feb 16, 2020 So a George Mason economist just recommended infecting swaths of people with #COVID19 as a preventative measure because reasons. It’s so cool that getting an economics degree automatically confers a working knowledge of virology and epidemiology. This George Mason economist was writing stuff in 2015 on how to survive a robot uprising instead of like, you know, let’s have enough syringes on hand. We should listen to him.
2 — Gray RH. The fermi paradox is neither Fermi’s nor a paradox. Astrobiology. 2015 Mar;15(3):195–9. doi: 10.1089/ast.2014.1247. Epub 2015 Feb 26. PMID: 25719510. Abstract — The so-called Fermi paradox claims that if technological life existed anywhere else, we would see evidence of its visits to Earth — and since we do not, such life does not exist, or some special explanation is needed. Enrico Fermi, however, never published anything on this topic. On the one occasion he is known to have mentioned it, he asked “Where is everybody?” — apparently suggesting that we do not see extraterrestrials on Earth because interstellar travel may not be feasible, but not suggesting that intelligent extraterrestrial life does not exist or suggesting its absence is paradoxical. The claim “they are not here; therefore they do not exist” was first published by Michael Hart, claiming that interstellar travel and colonization of the Galaxy would be inevitable if intelligent extraterrestrial life existed, and taking its absence here as proof that it does not exist anywhere. The Fermi paradox appears to originate in Hart’s argument, not Fermi’s question. Clarifying the origin of these ideas is important, because the Fermi paradox is seen by some as an authoritative objection to searching for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence — cited in the U.S. Congress as a reason for killing NASA’s SETI program on one occasion. But evidence indicates that it misrepresents Fermi’s views, misappropriates his authority, deprives the actual authors of credit, and is not a valid paradox.
3 — Important Context: New Scientist Group Calling For Pandemic Answers Has Ties to Right-Wing Dark Money. The Norfolk Group purports to be a group of independent experts, but familiar faces suggest a broader agenda. By Walker Bragman, Feb 16 2023 The 80-page Norfolk Group paper actually reads a bit like score-settling for the scientists involved. It takes particular aim at perceived enemies of the Great Barrington Decalration like Dr. Deborah Birx, the former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator. Birx notably refused to participate in a roundtable discussion with Bhattacharya and Kulldorff back in the summer of 2020, calling them “a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience.” “Did policy experts know about pre and early pandemic statements in which experts cast doubt on the ability of quarantine and lockdown measures to stop community spread without excessive collateral damage?” the document asks. “Why did Dr. Birx purposely avoid meeting with public health experts who had specifically proposed such measures?” Other targets include Drs. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, respectively the former directors of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the NIH. Both had been dissenting voices in the Trump White House as the administration embraced the Great Barrington Declaration.
4 — Aeon — Against longtermism — It started as a fringe philosophical theory about humanity’s future. It’s now richly funded and increasingly dangerous. By Émile P Torres 19 October 2021 Yet the implications of longtermism are far more worrisome. If our top four priorities are to avoid an existential catastrophe — ie, to fulfil ‘our potential’ — then what’s not on the table for making this happen? Consider Thomas Nagel’s comment about how the notion of what we might call the ‘greater good’ has been used to ‘justify’ certain atrocities (eg, during war). If the ends ‘justify’ the means, he argues, and the ends are thought to be sufficiently large (eg, national security), then this ‘can be brought to bear to ease the consciences of those responsible for a certain number of charred babies’. Now imagine what might be ‘justified’ if the ‘greater good’ isn’t national security but the cosmic potential of Earth-originating intelligent life over the coming trillions of years? During the Second World War, 40 million civilians perished, but compare this number to the 1054 or more people (in Bostrom’s estimate) who could come to exist if we can avoid an existential catastrophe. What shouldn’t we do to ‘protect’ and ‘preserve’ this potential? To ensure that these unborn people come to exist? What means can’t be ‘justified’ by this cosmically significant moral end? Bostrom himself argued that we should seriously consider establishing a global, invasive surveillance system that monitors every person on the planet in realtime, to amplify the ‘capacities for preventive policing’ (eg, to prevent omnicidal terrorist attacks that could devastate civilisation). Elsewhere, he’s written that states should use preemptive violence/war to avoid existential catastrophes, and argued that saving billions of actual people is the moral equivalent of reducing existential risk by utterly minuscule amounts. In his words, even if there is ‘a mere 1 per cent chance’ of 1054 people existing in the future, then ‘the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth 100 billion times as much as a billion human lives.’ Such fanaticism — a word that some longtermists embrace — has led a growing number of critics to worry about what might happen if political leaders in the real world were to take Bostrom’s view seriously.
5 — Tech Won’t Save Us podcast — 23 02 16 [#155] The Untold History of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris Instead of waiting till the horses are older to start training them to race really fast, we’re going to start training them as soon as they’re born. We’re going to try to start racing colts, and the ones that show us that they’re fast, we’re going to focus more and more attention and resources on them. We’re going to build the fastest, youngest, horses in the world, And they do. They do this very quickly. It’s funny that it becomes, very quickly, not just an inspiration for other horse breeders, who are mad that this rich asshole has totally transformed their whole sport, but have to admit that he did do it. But also for education reformers who are looking at the training of young horses and saying: We need to do this for kids! The kindergarten movement is happening at the same time in Germany, and is coming to the United States. One of the reformers cites the Stanford Stock Farm and says: These kind of resources early is what we need for children. So the Stanfords ended up supporting, not just what they called their kindergarten track, which was the first kindergarten in California that was a kindergarten track for these horses — so a shrunk down track for little horses. They also go on to support the first kindergarten for humans, as well. So very quickly you make this jump between horse stock capital to human capital — and as horses get replaced pretty quickly in the 20th century with motor power — you see this transition from focusing on horses to focusing on people and the power of invention.
6 — The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares. To understand the deepening divide between AI boosters and doomers, it’s necessary to unpack their common origins in a bundle of ideologies known as TESCREAL. Émile P. Torres Truthdig — Jun 15, 2023 If transhumanism is eugenics on steroids, cosmism is transhumanism on steroids. In his “The Cosmist Manifesto,” the former Extropian who christened the now-common term “artificial general intelligence,” Ben Goertzel, writes that “humans will merge with technology,” resulting in “a new phase of the evolution of our species.” Eventually, “we will develop sentient AI and mind uploading technology” that “will permit an indefinite lifespan to those who choose to leave biology behind.” Many of these “uploaded minds” will “choose to live in virtual worlds.” The ultimate aim is to “develop spacetime engineering and scientific ‘future magic’ much beyond our current understanding and imagination,” where such things “will permit achieving, by scientific means, most of the promises of religions — and many amazing things that no human religion ever dreamed.” This brings us to Rationalism and Effective Altruism. The first grew out of a website called LessWrong, which was founded in 2009 by Yudkowsky, Bostrom’s colleague in the early Extropian movement. Because realizing the utopian visions above will require a lot of really “smart” people doing really “smart” things, we must optimize our “smartness.”
7 — Cats in Wonderland — the Uncanny Valley of lying AIs It’s just a huge coincidence that AI chatbot services are very much like a lot of other tech products with problematic tradeoffs and just happen to be useful to a lot of the same questionable actors. CHLOE HUMBERT MAY 29, 2023 The distinct casino quality to the whole thing is obvious. Re-rolling is enticing, we know this. I don’t even know how chatbots work exactly. But did they design them to be this way? It seems to work pretty well for keeping one engaged for it not to have been deliberate, but I have no way of discerning this myself. That an AI service just so happens to be gamified, and just a happy accident that the marketing model they’re using, offering people a taste of the AI service for free at first, is just the perfect marketing model for a product that entices you to to re-roll and play again or keep scrolling. This is a known thing in tech products. Game apps. Online casinos. Cryptocurrency MLMs. And of course social media. It all seems to be designed in this way. But in the case of AI chatbots — this was all just a big coincidence?
8 — Eugenics as an ideology — Legal and political agendas have motivations to make semantic arguments that obscure eugenics and maybe that’s why we don’t have a separate word for eugenics as an ideological belief. CHLOE HUMBERT NOV 30, 2023 The proponents of this type of eugenics claim that they are leaving it up to “nature” or, alternately, specifically a divine power, depending on their religious or secular orientation. The point is to stop any intervention that would save people they think are “weak” or “undeserving” in some way as inappropriately countering the superior “nature” to do its thing. This includes resistance to all public health measures like masks, vaccines, food assistance, healthcare equity, or even disaster relief and universal education in public schools. Never mind that interventions are natural too, because humans do them, the same way birds build nests, but clearly people draw the line on “natural” wherever it’s convenient to their purpose.
9 — Event Horizon: The Problem With General Relativity with Prof. Brian Keating Jan 5, 2023 Auto Transcript: I recently had Jay Bhattacharya on the podcast is an eminent MD PhD at Stanford University and he was the one co-authored of the Great Barrington Declaration that basically advocated for common sense not locking down working on vaccinating the most vulnerable people in society and he was shut down he was investigated he was brought up on suspicious charges by his home institution Stanford University and it was a really a political Witch Hunt for someone who was approaching it purely scientifically as just answering the question what do we know about the efficacy of lockdowns not the vaccine not where did it originate and we can debate all those things and and it was really terrifying to know what he went through which eventually culminated with a email which was unraveled by the foia process Freedom of Information Act in which Dr Anthony fauci and Francis Collins the director of the NIH and the the chairman of the kova task force in 2020 colluded and conspired to quote take down this Lunatic Fringe element which sadly includes even a Nobel Prize winner which was postulating that we shouldn’t just have random massive lockdowns
10 — COVID-19 lockdown revisionism by Blake Murdoch, Timothy Caulfield, CMAJ Apr 2023, 195 (15) E552-E554; DOI: 10.1503/cmaj.221543 The term “lockdown” has become a powerful and perverted word in the infodemic about democracies’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdown, as used in public discourse, has expanded to include any public health measure, even if it places little to no restriction on social mobility or interaction. For example, a working literature review and meta-analysis on the effects of lockdowns on COVID-19 mortality misleadingly defined lockdowns as “the imposition of at least 1 compulsory non-pharmaceutical intervention.”1 This working paper therefore conflated mandatory isolation for people with confirmed infections and masking policies with heavy-handed limitations on freedom of movement, and since it gained viral fame, it has helped fuel calls for “no more lockdowns.” This working paper has been highly critiqued and is less convincing than comparative assessments of health measures, like the Oxford Stringency Index.2,3 Here, we discuss the spread of misinformation on lockdowns and other public health measures, which we refer to as “lock-down revisionism,” and how this phenomenon has damaged trust in public health initiatives designed to keep people safer. “Lockdowns” Anti-lockdown discourse is common on social media, in political rhetoric and in news articles.4–6 Lockdowns are often framed as a false binary of full lockdown versus no measures.
11 — Elite Panic. Big shots have different goals than the rest of us. Politicians should be representatives, businesses shouldn’t lead, even billionaires can’t seem to buy common sense, and tech won’t save us. CHLOE HUMBERT JUL 13, 2023 At least this should dissuade everyone from the idea that rich CEOs will save us, or will make the right decisions even when their own lives depend upon it. Historically, elites have absolutely ignored possibilities for human advancement, even technological advancement, if it doesn’t personally benefit their power situation, such as how the Roman Empire was capable of a steam engine, but the elites just said, nah. These blustery elites will absolutely break the rules, or fail to embrace good practices, for a chance at preserving power and status, even, apparently, if it winds up with them imploded on the seafloor.
12 — George Mason University — College of Humanities and Social Sciences — Faculty and Staff — Robin D Hanson — Associate Professor Robin Hanson is an Associate Professor of Economics, and received his Ph.D in 1997 in social sciences from Caltech. He joined George Mason’s economics faculty in 1999 after completing a two-year post-doc at U.C Berkely. His major fields of interest include health policy, regulation, and formal political theory. Dr. Hanson’s personal homepage includes his work in academic economics, class materials, and a sampling of his broader interests in economics, philosophy, political theory, alternative institutions, and the economics of science fiction.
13 — Inside Higher Ed — April 30, 2018 Uncovering Koch Role in Faculty Hires — George Mason says some of its past donor agreements with Charles Koch Foundation have afforded the organization a say in faculty appointments, in violation of the norms of academic freedom. By Colleen Flaherty The gifts, in support of faculty positions in economics, “granted donors some participation in faculty selection and evaluation,” Cabrera said, noting that one such agreement is still active (the rest have expired). All 10 of the now-public agreements relate to the university’s Mercatus Center for free market research, a locus of Koch-funded activity. Three of the agreements involve Koch. The two most recent, from 2007 and 2009, stipulate the creation of a five-member selection committee to select a professor, with two of those committee members chosen by donors. The other Koch agreement, from 1990, also afforded Koch a role in naming a professor to fund. George Mason also allowed Koch a role in evaluating professors’ performance via advisory boards. And while the agreements assert that final say in faculty appointments will be based on normal university procedures, the 2009 agreement says that funds will be returned to the donor if the provost and the selection committee can’t agree on a candidate. It is of course common for donors who support professorships to specify the academic field or subfield. So while the Koch family’s extensive giving to antiregulatory causes in politics is controversial, it is not necessarily controversial that they fund professorships in economics and even free-market economics. But academic values have long held that donors don’t get to pick who holds chairs, or evaluate them.
14 — Oxford Martin, University of Oxford — ‘The age of Em: work, love, and life when robots rule the earth’ with Prof Robin Hanson Date 19 October 2016, 6:00pm — 7:30pm Robin Hanson is Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute.. He has a doctorate in social science from California Institute of Technology, master’s degrees in physics and philosophy from the University of Chicago, and nine years experience as a research programmer, at Lockheed and NASA.
15 — Truthdig — Jan 23, 2023 Nick Bostrom, Longtermism, and the Eternal Return of Eugenics The techno-utopian ideology gets its fuel, in part, from scientific racism. Émile P. Torres Bostrom’s “apology” was passive in the extreme, not active. He showed virtually no evidence that he understands why claiming that whites are more intelligent than Blacks would be hurtful or wrong — both morally and scientifically — and seems more concerned about public relations than driven by genuine compunction.2 His dismissive attitude about the whole debacle, in fact, is on full display on his personal website, which he updated to say: “[S]ometimes I have the impression that the world is a conspiracy to distract us from what’s important — alternatively by whispering to us about tempting opportunities, at other times by buzzing menacingly around our ears like a swarm of bloodthirsty mosquitos.” He seems — so far as I can tell from this — to think of those speaking out against his racist remarks and shameless non-apology as “bloodthirsty mosquitos” who are “buzzing menacingly” around him as if part of a “conspiracy to distract” him “from what’s really important,” such as saving the world from superintelligent machines or suggesting that a highly invasive global surveillance system may be necessary to save civilization from itself.
16 — Robin Hanson @robinhanson 10:21 PM · Jun 26, 2023 Over 3/4 of 2165 respondents are over 50% sure of covid lab leak theory. Quote Robin Hanson @robinhanson · Jun 25, 2023 What is the chance that Covid19 resulted from a lab leak? · 9,334 Views