Early improvements are win-win, in that there’s upside for everyone in improving basic infrastructure, sanitation, and safety, that is to say, they’re positive-sum. As time goes on, however, the necessary policy improvements will eventually upset some constituencies. If they’re powerful enough, though, they won’t allow the policy to proceed even if it would benefit the country overall.

Economic Historian Brad DeLong, when interviewed by Tyler Cowen, describes it:

A society where the returns to engaging in positive-sum … let’s win-win, figure out how to cooperate productively …  are less than the returns from figuring out how to join some force-and-fraud, exploitation and domination machine.

The middle-income trap looks to me a lot like that thing expanding its reach.

This constituency would be called rent-seekers, or those who seek to enrich themselves without producing anything. They’re the bane of any economy, but will invariably show up as countries get richer, and the gains to extracting rather than producing improve.

However, there is a known antidote, and that is speed.

Speed is What You Need

By “speed” I mean the pace of economic growth. A country with ongoing, year-over-year growth in the upper single digits has at least has a chance of powering through the middle-income trap before it’s overwhelmed by budding rentiers. There are three reasons for this:

1. You need speed because fast growth makes the economy tilt positive-sum. The pie is growing quickly, so it’s comparatively attractive to try to grow with it, rather than build up an extractive apparatus to screw everyone else as a secondary actor. Capital and talent flow into high-growth sectors, whereas “in most countries, rent seeking rewards talent more than entrepreneurship does, leading to stagnation.”

2. The second is that rent seekers need time to first form coalitions to concentrate their power, and then even longer to insert their interests into the workings of governments and institutions. When the landscape is rapidly changing, who your allies are and the best way to interact with the economy is constantly in flux. A shoe-production license monopoly isn’t very useful when just a few years later everyone’s switched to making motorcycles.1

3. Finally, once high growth begins, it becomes a mandate to govern. Citizenry accustomed to getting richer every year demand this from governments, often forgiving other sins (like authoritarianism) in exchange. Governments feel existential pressure to keep delivering, so they continually check emerging cronyism before it can dampen growth. This was implicit with Deng Xiaoping, explicit with Park Chung-hee, and became part of the technocratic bargain for Lee Kuan Yew.
   

What Escape Looks Like

So does the data bear that speed predicts escape? If you look at the 43 countries that have spent recent time in the middle-income zone, two clear paths out of the trap emerge:

Path 1: High velocity (>5% per capita growth). South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Ireland. Possibly China, too, but time will tell. Speed alone was sufficient; the growth rate outran rentier consolidation.

Path 2: Moderate velocity (3.5-5%) + EU accession: Poland and Lithuania.2 Growth rates that were not sufficient on their own (Thailand and Malaysia had comparable rates and didn’t escape). What made the difference was the EU imposing binding institutional requirements: acquis communautaire, judicial reform, competition policy, anti-corruption frameworks, all incentivized by membership accession that had overwhelming domestic support.

There are some moderate growth close calls that still got trapped by rent-seeking, such as Malaysia and Brazil. Malaysia effectively codified rent-seeking into its constitution through mandated Bumiputera favoritism, while Brazil’s import-substitution regime allowed favored industrialists to grow rapidly and lock in rents simultaneously.

It could be said that very high early growth rates indicate an economy already has structural advantages to see it through the middle-income range. This is almost certainly true for newly commodity-rich countries that have become high-income, but places that were poor at midcentury were generally poor because they had no advantages to speak of.

Implications

First, the standard prescriptions, invest in education, build R&D capacity, improve competitiveness, and rule of law, mistake the symptoms for the disease. If you don’t address how decisions are made, these can never be effectively implemented. The binding constraint isn’t that the country can’t innovate; it’s that the people who benefit from non-innovation have veto power over reform.

Second, middle-income escapes may be more historically contingent than we hope, which is probably why they’re so rare. They’re helped by a combination of external discipline (Cold War security dependence, EU accession), growth as a governing mandate, and sheer velocity that outpaces the rent lock-in timeline.

Third, the speed thesis suggests a disturbing prediction about mature economies that have already escaped the trap. The mechanism that prevented rentier capture during high-growth periods doesn’t protect you once growth slows. Japan’s Lost Decades, and possibly the growing sclerosis of many Western economies, represent the same phenomenon at a higher income level: rent-seeking coalitions that were held in check by growth and now have nothing to restrain them.

(Perhaps we’ll soon start discussing the high-income trap.)

The trap is probably the natural state of political economy, so what requires explanation is why anyone makes it out. It seems that, briefly and under extraordinary conditions, they moved fast enough to get out before it snapped closed.

Exactly 36 years later, on January 3rd, 2026, the US repeats the excursion and captures Nicolas Maduro. However, this time, the entire mission was completed in only hours and without a single American casualty. Why the difference?

This time, the US had the “Discombobulator”:

When first asked about the special weapon that enabled such an lopisde outcome, the president said:

Trump: Well, I’m not allowed to talk about it.

Though immediately goes on:

Trump: Everything was discombobulated. Practically, a shot wasn’t fired…and when we came, they couldn’t do anything.

Intereviewer: …Nothing worked, including humans. It knocks the humans out.

Trump: Well, let’s put it this way, we lost no equipment…in a very bad environment.

Later, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt retweeted an account of the event, which corroborated the use of a disabling super-weapon:

Security Guard: …At one point, they launched something—I don't know how to describe it... it was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside. We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move.

Interviewer: And your comrades? Did they manage to resist?

Security Guard: No, not at all. Those twenty men, without a single casualty, killed hundreds of us. We had no way to compete with their technology, with their weapons. I swear, I've never seen anything like it. We couldn't even stand up after that sonic weapon or whatever it was.

So the US has a sonic or energy beam weapon that makes people vomit blood.

Just the US, though, right?

Havana Syndrome

From late 2016, US diplomats1 in Cuba started experiencing unusual health symptoms after an acute episode of pain, pressure, and a loud, localized sound. In almost all cases, symptoms lasted for months and included dizziness, headaches, and cognitive problems.

Named after where it first appeared, Havana syndrome (also known as anomalous health incidents) is “not recognized as a disease by the medical community.” A 2024 review listed possible causes as head trauma, viruses, or mass psychogenic illness.

Still, those affected have some recourse, as the 2021 HAVANA Act “authorizes the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of State, and other agencies to provide payments to agency personnel who incur brain injuries from hostilities while on assignment.”

But where should there be a HAVANA act if there may not even be a Havana syndrome?

It’s all part of the gaslight.

The Gaslight

Gaslighting is trying to get someone to question their sense of reality. The term has become popular over the last decade, though honestly, it’s often overapplied to ordinary disagreements.

That said, gaslighting does happen, and Havana syndrome denial increasingly looks like an example.

The critical differences between a disagreement and a gaslight are that 1) the perpetrator knows you know the truth, and 2) they try to manipulate, rather than argue you out of believing it. In this case, there are 4 parts:

1. Deny: Initially, Havana Syndrome was rejected entirely. The State Department blocked the CDC from accessing medical data for nearly a year. The 2023 intelligence community assessment found that five of seven agencies judged foreign involvement was “highly unlikely,” and officials said there was “no credible evidence” that an adversary had these weapon capabilities. Simultaneously, though, the CIA quietly shut down its Havana station after two more agents were affected.

2. Stigmatize: The FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit labeled the incidents “mass psychogenic illness” without interviewing affected personnel. A classified report by the JASON advisory group was selectively leaked as evidence that embassy sounds were crickets, though the report itself noted most recordings didn’t overlap with symptom onset and left directed energy as a possible cause. Senior CIA officials privately dismissed victims as exaggerating for financial gain.

3. Retaliate: Those who went public faced consequences. Mark Lenzi, diagnosed with brain injuries at the University of Pennsylvania along with his family, was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation after he warned colleagues of the danger, despite leadership knowing of similar cases. He was denied promotions, blocked from overseas assignments, and, as late as 2024, given a pre-written cable to end his tour for “personal reasons.” At the CIA, a whistleblower alleged potential obstruction and witness tampering, and dozens of officers filed formal complaints over the agency’s delays.

4. Hush: HAVANA Act payments, up to $204,000 for qualifying brain injuries, without admission. Claimants are compensated for injuries that are not formally acknowledged to exist.

The Science Catches Up

While acute symptoms reported in Venezuela and by Havana Syndrome victims are often described as accompanied by loud sounds, the microwave auditory effect is well established and was first observed among radar workers during World War II. Microwaves can cause popping or clicking sounds in someone’s head, with the proposed mechanism being slight brain heating that generates a pressure wave transmitted to the cochlea.

Still, not everyone believed the microwave mechanism was physiologically plausible, so in 2024, a Norwegian scientist decided to prove the theory wrong by building a microwave pulse generator and directing it at his own head.

As the Washington Post reports, “it didn’t go well.” He ended up with symptoms consistent with Havana syndrome, and these results were sent by the Norwegian government to the CIA, prompting visits by officials from the Pentagon and White House.

Directed Energy Weapons

The US has a whole suite of directed energy weapons, from lasers to particle beams to their current favorite, microwaves. The disclosed microwave weapons don’t cook people’s brains, but they do heat skin and destroy electronics.

The US “discombobulator” shutting down both troops and equipment, along with the known perceived sonic effects, suggests a microwave weapon. Combine this with the Norwegian scientist’s unfortunate self-experiment, and we have evidence that:

1. Havana syndrome is caused by microwaves.

2. The US knows about these weapons because it has its own.

3. Havana syndrome dismissals are more likely concealment than confusion.

So it was nice of the Norwegians to share their research with their ally, but the US is way ahead of them on “discombobulation”—and doesn’t want you to know.

Why the Cover-up?

There are a few possible explanations for why the US would want to suppress the reporting of Havana syndrome.

The first is simply to conceal the existence of this technology. Yes, one of their adversaries has these capabilities, presumably Russians operating in Cuba, but smaller regional powers (e.g., Venezuela) may not be aware, and this preserves the element of surprise (e.g., Venezuela).

Secondly, acknowledging the attacks creates response obligations at both the agency and national levels. Intelligence agencies would need to implement countermeasures across all sites, and there would be public pressure on the US to retaliate, thereby escalating the situation. The CIA is constantly waging small-scale, covert warfare against various actors, and it may be inconvenient to have its dirty laundry aired.

Finally, suppressing reporting on Havana syndrome also denies adversaries feedback on the effectiveness of their own efforts. Whether one’s efforts are working is among the most valuable intel, and historically, great effort has been made to obfuscate this. One of the most famous examples is Operation Double Cross, which misled Nazi rocket targeting and likely saved thousands of English lives.

However, we now all know, because despite not being “allowed to talk about it,” the president has described US capabilities in front of new cameras. Is this from a shift in US policy? I suspect it was more of a spontaneous Trump moment, both entertaining and confirmatory.

I would argue the best version of this is actually “extraordinary claims require extraordinary quantities of evidence”.

The difference is that the evidence itself doesn’t have to be extraordinary (an ill-defined term anyways), there just needs to be enough of it.

This is necessary to avoid the problem of trapped priors: when disconfirming evidence is always interpreted in a way that still reinforces a prior belief. To illustrate this, consider a person with cynophobia, a fear of dogs. To their mind, any interaction with a dog will feel like a harrowing brush with death:

Joyfully pouncing over to get a headpat gets interpreted as a vicious lunge; a whine at not being played with gets interpreted as a murderous growl, and so on... ‘the dog came this close to attacking me, I knew all dogs were dangerous!’

For this patient, “extraordinary” evidence that dogs can be safe will never arrive1 and each unremarkable interaction actually just further reinforces their prior belief that dogs are always dangerous.

Phobias may seem like an extreme example, but trapped priors show up everywhere. For example, in politics, when a partisan hears an argument from the other side, they disagree and decide it’s wrong and dishonest. This then just further strengthens their belief that their opponents are wrong-headed liars. They’re not only not convinced, but actually further stuck in their existing beliefs.

And it’s not just a problem for the masses either; some of history’s greatest minds have found themselves in the same dynamic.

Tycho Brahe

Tycho Brahe has “been described as the greatest pre-telescopic astronomer” with his unprecedentedly precise observations, and original astronomical instruments that provided the data to formulate Kepler’s laws of motion.

He was also one of the most prominent scientific opponents of heliocentrism:

Tycho had measured the apparent sizes of stars (now known to be illusory), and used geometry to calculate that in order to both have those apparent sizes and be as far away as heliocentrism required, stars would have to be huge (much larger than the sun; the size of Earth’s orbit or larger).

His conclusion:

“Deduce these things geometrically if you like, and you will see how many absurdities (not to mention others) accompany this assumption”.

It may not be that Tycho miscalculated star sizes simply to oppose heliocentrism, but unfortunately if you search long enough, eventually you’ll find something that seems to confirms your prior beliefs, but is actually mistaken.2

He also cited the Copernican system’s “opposition to the authority of Sacred Scripture in more than one place“ as a reason why one might wish to reject it.

After examining a position he opposed, he actually ended up thinking he had more contrary evidence than when he started! If one of history’s greatest astronomers struggled with trapped priors, so will all of us.3

Quantity can be extraordinary

We avoid this problem by allowing little bits of evidence to have little bits of impact.

Evidence is often dismissed as “inconclusive”, but evidence is nearly always inconclusive! That’s why it’s “evidence” and not “proof”. What inconclusive evidence is supposed to do is add up to a final conclusion. OJ having a cut on his hand isn’t conclusive that he did it, and the glove not fitting isn’t conclusive that he didn’t. Instead of dismissing either, we combine them to arrive at credences for various scenarios.

When Copernicus first suggested that the earth moved, there was evidence for this, like that the other planets varied in brightness over the year. There was also evidence against it, in that the stars’ relative positions didn’t seem to change due to the expected parallax.

There wasn’t yet extraordinary (empirical) evidence for this extraordinary claim, which wouldn’t happen until the following century’s observations of the phases of Venus. Hopefully though, Copernicus’s imperfect and inconclusive models would have at least marginally persuaded astronomers and got them to dig deeper, rather than entrenching the prior that heliocentrists were cranks and heretics.

Eventually these little bits add up, and either change the consensus or convince us to search for the extraordinary.

To quote someone who made a 150:1 odds bet against UFOs:

the supervast majority of probable alien intellects, would not come here across interstellar distances, quietly and hiding on arrival, and then occasionally fly around in giant visible vehicles

I agree that UFOs seem to act strange, but if they’re truly “alien” to us, then we probably can’t exclude any behavior as too nonsensical. Fellow humans from different cultures often seem bizarre; an intelligence from an entirely different biosphere is likely even more inscrutable.

(We should expect this to be doubly true for a civilization more advanced than ours, as a less complex system cannot model a more complex one.)

As an example, consider the Sentinelese. They’re a population of uncontacted hunter-gatherers, totally isolated from the modern world on a small island in the Indian Ocean.

In the last 50 years, their interaction with global civilization has consisted of:

• Researchers leaving gifts, such as coconuts, aluminum cookware and a pig. They accepted the coconuts, but killed and buried the pig.

• A fisherman drifting too close, who they killed. A helicopter was sent to retrieve his body, but retreated from a hail of the islander’s arrows.

• An American missionary attempting to speak to them in Swahili and only narrowly escaping with his life, an arrow literally shot into his Bible. Later he returned in a plastic kayak and was killed.

If you were these tribespeople, it would be difficult to explain the strange and illogical behavior of these aliens:

“They gave us coconuts and an impossibly light and strong dish, but also sent a horrible pink monster that we shot and buried.”

“They absent-mindedly floated by on their little wooden boats to be easily killed, but then summoned a huge and deafeningly loud insect with impervious skin.”

“He came with a boat and clothes of unimaginably fine quality, but spoke in a strange tongue and still didn’t get the message even when we shot his things full of arrows. We slew him when he returned.”

From our side of the beach, we can understand the intricacies of human civilization that could result in such wide-ranging interactions, but it’s clearly impossible that the Sentinelese would have a model of the outside world that simultaneously included plastic kayaks, anthropologists, domestic pigs, crazy missionaries and helicopters.

This example also conveniently gives an explanation of why UFOs might not interact with us more. When you’re that far ahead, you value primitive societies for their anthropological content, and don’t want to ruin it by getting involved.

UFO Tech Seems Bad

aliens can do whatever surveillance they want using far tinier devices; eg, covalent-bond-strong, micron-sized robots

One consistent thing about the future is that it’s both more advanced and less advanced than you’d think. An ancient Roman in late 19th century America would be impressed by 60 mph locomotives and steel so abundant that it could be used to build entire bridges. That said, urban dwellers still getting around on horseback and streets subsequently choked under mountains of manure would seem incongruously primitive.

Similarly, Back to the Future’s version of 2015 features flying cars, yet the protagonist is fired via fax.1

This is all to say that technology develops in uneven ways, sometimes for historical or path dependent reasons, but just as often because that’s how the laws of physics play out. We don’t use faxes anymore because data transmission speeds haven’t been especially physically bottlenecked, and old fax lines can now carry high-speed internet.

Compare that to aircraft propulsion, where our most advanced hardware is basically an incrementally optimized version of what was first deployed in the 1940s. Below are charts showing the progression of jet engine pressure ratios (an indicator of thrust) and data transfer speeds. Pressure ratios have improved only about 10x since their inception, while data transfer technologies have improved more than 10,000x (note the log scale).

This means that in 2025 we talk on smartphones but drive around in largely the same way we did over a century ago (the Model T came out in 1908).

When physics will decide to ruin your party isn’t predictable, and neither are the marvelous unlocks. From how we’ve seen the technological landscape has developed, we should expect any future to be uneven.

Why Do they Sometimes Crash?

I should note that believing UFOs doesn’t necessarily imply believing in UFO crashes, but I’ll address this anyways. As mentioned, technological progress is uneven, which means it’s possible to develop the ability to do something usefully before being able to do it consistently.

Our own spacecraft are an example of this, as rocket launches fail a whopping 1-2% of the time. Ironically, our most technologically advanced transport is also our most unreliable by far. We don’t know what technology UFOs might use, but if it’s near the technological frontier, that’s a reason it could have a non-zero failure rate.

There’s also the possibility that they simply don’t care. Craft could just be forgotten after completing a mission (like Voyager 1), or even intentionally disposable if they’re cheap and mass-producible.

But Why Go to Another Planet Just to Fly Around?

You’ll have to ask NASA.

1) Why is TFR squared?

Though there is a technical reason for squaring Total Fertility Rate (see appendix), really squaring was necessary so that BMI wouldn’t become yet another indicator of limited value due to a high correlation with GDP.

Below is a table of how BMI correlates to GDP per capital (PPP) when various exponents (n) are used in a formula BMI = GNI × TFRⁿ:

Exponent (n)BMI Correlation with GDP10.921.50.8120.612.50.3430.07

You can see that to have no more than a moderate correlation (r = 0.6 to 0.4), n must be at least 2.

A possibility would be to fine tune to some decimal exponent between 2 and 3, but the added precision seems less valuable than the simplicity of BMI = GNI × TFR². Also, people mostly seem to complain that TFR is overweighted, not underweighted, and n = 2 while large, is straightforwardly defensible.

(In fact, the other BMI, i.e. weight/height², also finds that an exponent of 2.5 might be better, but we continue to use 2 for simplicity.)

2) A Commenter Says North Korea is Actually the Worst :

the real lowest BMI country is actually North Korea

Reliable data on North Korea is hard to come by, from what I can tell for GDP per capita there’s a range from ~$600 (nominal) to $1800 (PPP). That last number is from 2015, but it doesn’t seem that the North Korean economy has grown in the past decade, so it may still apply.

My World Bank data set did have North Korea’s TFR for 2022, listed as 1.78. The commenter alleges that this is too high, but ultimately doesn’t affect its ranking because even using the official TFR and the higher GDP figure, North Korea’s BMI is only 5.7 kiloChads.

This puts it far behind Jamaica’s 19 kiloChads to make the probable, if not official, lowest BMI country on earth.

(North Korea seems like an out-of-sample prediction, and I find its low ranking validating for the metric.)

3) Cost of Living Compensation

What about adjusting for Cost of Living in different places?

In fact, all my numbers use the Gross National Income at Purchasing Power Parity(PPP), so this is already accounted for.

4) Why is Israel Both Rich and Fertile?

Israel is a clear outlier, and many have mused why. I don’t know enough to make specific claims, other than to refute the notion that it’s only because of fertility rates among the highly religious Haredi:

Even among Jewish women who self-identify as secular and traditional but not religious, the combined TFR exceeds 2.2, making it higher than the TFR in all other OECD countries.

Appendix: Math Why Squaring TFR is Reasonable

Regarding the footnote about “the GNI already being divided by a population term”, this is to deal with the fact that when you have higher fertility rates, you have more people, and thus your GDP per capita (i.e. per person) will be lower. Of course if all these people were working this wouldn’t matter, but above-replacement fertility rates results in a true population pyramid: there will always be more younger than older people at any given age.

As an example, let’s consider computing the GNI of an idealized country, where everyone is either a man, woman or child (e.g. no double counting).

Total Fertility Rate (TFR):

Therefore:

Total Population:

Income per Capita:

Substitute in:

As TFR becomes larger, the Men and Women population terms become insignificant:

In the limit, a country’s income per capita has TFR in the denominator. Therefore in the limit, to have a positive effect on BMI, the TFRⁿ exponent must be n > 1.

Of course no country has a fertility rate outside the single digits. This is just to demonstrate how the higher the fertility rate, the more income per capital is effectively divided by TFR.

I’ve finally figured out how to rank which countries are best; here’s a preview of the top 3:

1. Israel

2. Qatar

3. Faroe Islands

If you’re not upset, you’re probably at least confused. But trust the numbers, I arrived at them through the Baby Money Index (BMI).1

GDP per Capita Eats Everything

To explain why this index is best, let’s first talk about other attempts at rating national success.

The UN does this with the Human Development Index (HDI), which calculates the geometric mean of sub-indices in health, wealth, and education.

Using this fancy equation, you can determine that Germany (HDI 0.95) is doing better than Zimbabwe (HDI 0.55).

However, if you ignore all that math and only look at a single income indicator like GDP per capita, you get nearly the same ranking! HDI and GDP per capita correlate very strongly at 0.8.

Similarly, life expectancy, years of schooling, and life satisfaction (sorry Bhutan) all correlate with GDP per capita.

If all the stuff you care about correlates with GDP per capita, you can just measure that alone to figure out how well a country is doing. Additional metrics add comparatively little information.

Does anything good not positively correlate with GDP?

Crime

An important metric that appears to have no correlation with GDP is crime, but upon closer inspection, it may just be reporting bias. Poorer countries have less state capacity and, therefore, less ability to detect and report crime. If you look at crime victimization surveys, they do appear to show crime rates that largely correspond with income levels.

Environmental Impact

Sustainability is also valuable, but energy use per capita is just as strongly correlated with wealth. There are no examples of countries being low-energy and rich, and since GDP correlates with everything good, you’ll have to devalue everything else to be a low-energy-use country.

You might propose at least using cleaner energy, but carbon intensity (the amount of carbon released per kilowatt-hour of energy) is also negatively correlated with GDP per capita. Richer countries use cleaner energy, so it’s just another case of richer is better.

Total Fertility Rate – i.e. Babies

Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is the average number of children per woman, and “replacement level fertility” is typically 2.1 children per woman.

It’s the last important metric that’s not positively correlated with GDP because it’s moderately (~0.6) negatively correlated.

For a long time, this was considered a good thing; if you made a place richer, you got the added benefit of reducing the fertility rate. This would result in a reduction in the number of children and, therefore, an improvement in the dependency ratio.

However, if you reduce the fertility rate too far, you’ll again wind up with an unfavorable dependency ratio due to too many older retired people relative to the working population.

A high dependency ratio means worker productivity gains get counteracted by fewer people working, and GDP per capita suffers. Japan’s economy hasn’t meaningfully grown in three decades, despite robust productivity growth, likely because of unfavorable demographic shifts.

The Two Metrics That Matter

GDP per capita clearly matters if anything matters at all. I also happen to think that fertility matters, because people existing is good. However, even if you just care about life quality over quantity, Japan shows that aging populations eventually diminish quality of life.

If the only two uncorrelated metrics that matter are a country’s GDP and fertility, how should we rate them? I propose the Baby Money Index, which is the income per capita multiplied by the fertility rate squared.2

BMI = Gross National Income (GNI) per capita × Total Fertility Rate (TFR)²

Or in other words: BMI = Money × Babies²

Gross National Income per capita (PPP) is used instead of GDP because it better controls income distortions in a few tax-haven and oil-exporting countries (HDI makes the same choice for presumably similar reasons). The two figures otherwise are very close though, and overall correlate at 0.99.

The fertility rate is squared because of its compounding effect. To know what society will look like when today’s young are grandparents, take the number of children they’re likely to have, multiplied by the number of children their kids are likely to have, effectively squaring the TFR.

Fertility squared is the expected number of grandchildren at current levels and does a good job of appropriately weighting the knock-on effects of fertility rates.3

Chads and kiloChads

The Baby Money Index’s units are children per woman squared times international dollars, but that’s a mouthful, so let’s say children and dollars, or Chads for short.4 Currently, BMI’s are in the 5-6 figures, so for ease, we’ll use kiloChads or kC. Below is an interactive map of the results:

The top 10:

1. Israel - 432 kiloChads

2. Qatar - 371 kC

3. Faroe Islands - 331 kC

4. Saudi Arabia - 313 kC

5. Kazakhstan - 302 kC

6. Kuwait - 281 kC

7. Ireland 278 kC

8. Oman - 262 kC

9. Norway - 255 kC

10. Brunei - 252 kC

(Here is the ranking of all 239 countries/regions, along with GNIs and TFRs)

With the exception of Israel and the Faroe Islands, the top 10 places are either oil/gas-rich or tax havens. It does go to show how difficult it is for typical economies to maintain high incomes and high fertility simultaneously.

However (to the relief of the modern reader), other Nordics also do very well with Denmark (#18), Iceland (#22), and Sweden (#29), all in the top 30. Finland (#65) fares less well due to its abysmal fertility rate of 1.32.

The two largest nations, India (#213) and China (#223), do surprisingly poorly and perhaps should make us rethink any future east-west power realignment.

Other notable laggards are South Korea (#222), hurt by its record low fertility rate that shrinks each subsequent generation by roughly two-thirds, and dead-last Jamaica (#239), which combines Swaziland incomes with Japanese fertility rates.

Lastly, the United States (#14) outperforms every country with a population over 40 million, as well as the entire G12. It does so well that it brings up North America (#16) to be the top-performing region overall.

Again, it’s America, with its high BMI, leading the way.

Nobody wanted to defend fusion.

This surprised me, as I’m sure if they’d invited anyone from the fusion field, they’d have heard a defense. Perhaps this defense would have been unconvincing, but at least they could have claimed they gave fusion the opportunity.

They seem not to have invited anyone in fusion, though, so I thus feel obligated to provide that possibly unconvincing defense.

Scott’s summary goes on:

Fusion promises cheap, clean, limitless power if only we can solve difficult technological hurdles. But we already know how to produce cheap, clean, limitless power. The only delay is regulatory, and fusion doesn’t solve this.

He’s referring to nuclear fission power as the limitless power source we already have. I would quibble that nothing is really limitless; in fact, the World Nuclear Association estimates about 90 years of fissile Uranium reserves available at current rates. This is, in fact, less than coal, which is estimated to have 139 years of reserves available.

(Total years of reserves often go up over time, though, as we get better at prospecting and utilization.)

This isn’t to say that economical fissile Uranium is likely to be a problem in the near future, more that if you’re hoping to transition entirely to nuclear power and use 100X the energy, you might indeed eventually run up against limitations.

Fusion has the advantage of using isotopes of hydrogen (the most common element in the universe) as fuel, so it is “limitless” in a way that other energy sources aren’t.1Even if the world’s current energy needs were straightforwardly met by solar or nuclear fission power, humanity would still be working on fusion because its upside is so unbounded.

Won’t people be more willing to tolerate it because it’s meltdown-free? No; there are already designs for meltdown-free nuclear reactors, and we don’t use them.

Again, there are levels here. There’s a difference between “meltdown-free” and “meltdown-inconceivable”.

Nuclear fission reactors are self-sustaining chain reactions, so an analogy might be like getting heat from a burning candle. Until it runs out of wax, a candle will stay lit without outside intervention. In a well-controlled environment, it’s not going to cause problems, and you could even make cool new designs that self-regulate or automatically extinguish in an emergency.

Meanwhile, fusion reactors are like getting heat by rubbing your hands together. It requires constant, intentional effort or heat just immediately dissipates. The effect is not self-sustaining, and there’s no way for it to get hot enough to do any real damage–your hands would break first. Similarly, an out-of-control fusion reactor would immediately break itself and destroy the delicate balance required for a continuous fusion reaction to happen anywhere outside of a star.

This means that if you somehow got a pebble-bed or molten salt fission reaction to run away, it would be so shocking that it would have to be gross negligence or outright sabotage.2 However, if you got a fusion reactor to run away and meltdown, you’re more likely to end up with a Nobel prize, because with fusion, meltdown is so inconceivable that it would be considered a scientific achievement.

This is important because it protects fusion from bad faith and low-effort arguments. Saying “Chernobyl” or “Fukushima” can unfortunately work against nuclear power in a way that saying “The Sun” can’t. (Though it hasn’t stopped some from trying).

Also, fusion is not radiation-free..

Again true, but a question of scale. As nuclear activists like to point out, coal power plants release radiation too, but everyone seems fine with this.3

Fusion, importantly, doesn’t necessarily create long-lived, high-level waste. Combine the smaller accident risk, plus no need to indefinitely store waste (currently stored on-site at fission plants), and does it become plausible to regulate fusion reactors more like scientific or hospital equipment?

The conference says no:

...and the radiation alone would be enough excuse to regulate it to death. Is it theoretically possible that - since there aren’t existing fusion-related regulations - we’d have a fresh chance to fight the same battle and maybe win this time? Maybe, but everyone there thought that solar or small modular nuclear reactors would be an easier sell.

But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) says yes!

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced in a unanimous vote that fusion energy would be regulated in the United States under the same regulatory regime as particle accelerator

The first regulatory battle in the war that fission lost has now been won by fusion. There’s never any guarantee, but there’s a reason to be hopeful.

Below are thoughts that were too weird for the Wired piece, but may belong here.

Georgism, in some sense, is the idea that no one really owns land, but instead, you rent its exclusive use from everyone else through Land Value Taxes.

Thomas Paine describes this notion in Agrarian Justice:

“Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds”.

How do you get an intuition for this though? Owning land is so baked into our psyches that it’s hard to conceive of this as unnatural. Here are a few ways that have convinced me:

1) We find owning 1D or floating 3D space absurd, but owning 2D space perfectly natural.

If I claimed to own a 1-dimensional line that ran on the ground, and that you need to step over it, or that I owned a 6-inch cube floating off the ground, and you needed to duck under it, you’d rightly think I was insane.

However, if I own a plot of land, i.e. a 2D space on the surface of the earth, it’s considered either insane (or tragically primitive) to not believe in this.

(Yes, through air rights you own 3D space, but it generally has to be above 2D land, floating cubes still seem nonsensical).

2) You’re probably already a Georgist for other common goods.

“I contend that we are both atheists Georgists. I just believe in one fewer god ownership of common goods than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods ownerships of common goods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

-Stephen Roberts Atoms vs Bits

For example, most people don’t believe you can own a frequency, and neither does the FCC. For this reason, if you want exclusive rights to a particular radio frequency you need to pay for it at auction. It gets you temporary exclusive use of that frequency, but not perpetual ownership.

Radio frequencies are a common good similar to land in that no one created it, and no one destroyed it. It can even be seen as just physical space of another kind. Without any historical ownership precedent, it seems perfectly natural to divvy it up in this way.

Similarly, international treaties prohibit the ownership of the Moon or other celestial bodies, which sometimes applies to things like colors or beaches.

If you agree you can’t own any of these other examples, then why is land any different? I contend, as David Hume did, that there is no fundamental distinction; it is simply a societal convention.

3) A world where you must buy a deed for your brainwaves would seem dystopian.

Speaking of owning frequencies, your brain operates in cycles, or brainwaves, with frequencies of up to 35 Hz (i.e., 35 times per second). Now imagine being born into a world where 1) People could own frequencies and 2) All the frequencies your brain operates in were owned.

You’d suddenly find yourself having to buy, beg, borrow, or steal some frequencies for your brain to operate in. But do you need brainwaves to live? Tough luck, you’re born with that debt to the frequency-lords.

As strange as it sounds, this is the world we live in with land! There’s only a certain number of places a human being can exist in, but they’re already all taken and you have to hope to buy or rent some from those who have it. Landlords didn’t make the land any more than frequency-lords made the frequencies, but they control them now in order to sell your natural rights back to you.

However, for the past month and a half, I’ve done over an hour a day of meditation. I’ve meditated more in just these 6 weeks than I did all last year.

So what changed?

I moved across the street from a mediation center.

Hyperbolic Discounting

You may have heard of hyperbolic discounting from behavioral economics: people will generally disproportionally, i.e. hyperbolically, discount the value of something the farther off it is. The average person judges $15 now as equivalent to $30 in 3-months (an annual rate of return of 277%!).

This excessive time-based or “temporal” discounting is familiar to anyone who’s ever tried to delay gratification, and indeed, everything from calorie-counting apps to automatic retirement contributions are attempts to manage this.

But what about when something is farther off in space rather than time?

Travel Time

Say a 1-hour activity is 10 minutes away, compared to 5 minutes away. The total time usage would be 80 vs 70 minutes, about 15% longer. A linear model would predict that it would feel 15% more costly, and then proportionally affect your likelihood of going. In practice though, an extra 10 or 20 minutes of travel time will somehow frequently nudge you into non-participation.

(This makes sense for the most enjoyable activities, the activity itself is leisure, so the only “cost” is something like the travel time. It makes less sense for activities we are disciplining ourselves into doing.)

Curiously similar effects have been documented with travel time elsewhere:

• Bus passengers rate bus waiting time as twice as costly as bus-riding time

• Longer workplace commutes result in reduced well-being, even controlling for total commute + work hours

Both of these are examples where people are spending X amount of time for Y outcome. It doesn’t seem like different reasonable constructions of X should make that much of a difference, but empirically they seem to.

Brain Games

If small absolute differences in travel time have large effects on how likely we are to do something, how can we use this knowledge to our advantage?

Well for one we should just minimize travel time as much as possible if we’re trying to encourage a particular activity. Importantly, we need to recognize the hyperbolic nature of this, so 1-minute away may be many times more preferable than “only” 5 minutes away (and maybe worth paying for).

Of course, the closest you can get is having the activity available in your own living space, but as unused home treadmills and exercise bikes demonstrate, this has its pitfalls. There could be something about a thing always being available that means there’s never any urgency.

I think the ideal is to plan a regular time at a very nearby place, along with pre-commitment and accountability (such as with a class or workout buddy). This maximizes the pulls while minimizing the hurdles. For activities that don’t require a particular place, if you can arrange for the scheduled event to happen where you live you are basically guaranteed to participate.

(This is in fact how I learned Chinese. I pre-paid my teacher to come to my apartment, therefore no-showing wasn’t an option and as it was first thing in the morning, I couldn’t even cancel day-of.)

University of Airbnb

If living across the street from something can so massively impact your habits (as it did with my 6 → 60+ minutes of meditation), then maybe we should try just arranging our housing around this?

This could get complicated, but perhaps just temporarily getting an Airbnb or similar across the street from your gym/yoga studio/language school etc. could build up the momentum to create a resilient habit.

(Since this is my last week across from the meditation center for the next 2 months, I’ll be running this experiment and we’ll all get to see how it goes.)

You might procrastinate terribly on a task that takes 5 minutes, but then buckle down on some grueling project. Maybe you like the grueling project more? But then you’ll immediately do a 5-minute task but procrastinate on a nearly identical one. Were you in a more productive mood that day? But why didn’t you end up doing the other 5-minute task as soon as you were in a productive mood?

We think of procrastination as just not wanting to do something, that a task’s unpleasantness is the driver. This doesn’t seem to explain the quirks though.

A model that does seem to work better though is that it’s about the age, not the size, of the monster you’re avoiding.

By “size” I mean the intrinsic scariness of the task while by “age” I mean something like “how many times you’ve seen it and fled”. This is correlated to how long the task has been around, though really it’s about how much experience you have running away from it.

(Running away: Anytime you’ve thought “I should probably do that thing” and then not actually done it.)

Whenever you feel the pang of “I should do that” but then soothe that feeling with a “but not right now” you are rewarding yourself for not doing that thing.

Bad feelings → Do X → No bad feelings

This is textbook avoidance and escape conditioning, where X is “procrastinating”.

Of course, how initially scary a task is will affect whether you’ll procrastinate; you’re more likely to run away that first time, making a conditioning feedback loop more likely.

However, we procrastinate on many small tasks for no discernable reason, and on big tasks we avoid making even small, tentative steps. This is often something of a famous for being famous situation: you procrastinate because you procrastinate. Once you’ve started procrastinating for some tangential reason, e.g. you’re short on time at that moment, you further condition yourself whenever you again avoid the task. Eventually, it’s built up into a seemingly-unconquerable monster.

This I think explains why the advice of “break the task down into smaller, more manageable tasks” so often fails. The problem usually isn’t that the task is too big and scary (you probably already have a sense of the sub-tasks anyway), the problem is that you’re conditioned not to go anywhere near it! Breaking a 10-hour task into 10-minute sub-tasks isn’t helpful when you’ve proven yourself perfectly capable of procrastinating from 5-minute jobs.

What’s often more helpful is figuring out a painfully tiny way to start. This must be so tiny that it’s genuinely painfully embarrassingly to not do it. For example, with an email you haven’t replied to it would be something like opening the email and starting a blank draft—but nothing more.

You may get the urge to beat yourself up for needing to start so ridiculously small, but that’s when you need to remember it’s about the age, not size! You’ve procrastinated from this so you’re conditioned to find it especially aversive; the conditioning overwhelms the facts on the ground.

This reframing helps me not be too hard on myself because I’m reminded that “old” beats “small” any day of the week.

But more importantly, I’ve come to mostly recognize the feeling of task aversion and use it as a signal that I must do, delegate or delete immediately because otherwise, the monster will grow with each passing day.

In the hallway to your office, you see that a subordinate has displeased his boss; something about his uniform not being to spec. He’s violently shoved through the wall of a cubicle with a laugh while others hurry past, hoping to escape notice. The victim dusts himself off and scurries away, for that exchange counted as getting off relatively easy. Once, after transferring departments, you’d gotten beaten up by nearly the entire C-suite.

Your day consists of boredom punctuated by intense dread, the only real relief being lunch. On the way there you remember to take the long way around to avoid the accounting department, which is always a likely place to get jumped.

After lunch, as you sit browsing excel sheets, a passing colleague stops by to call you a sand n*****. You briefly remember HR’s suggested reply of “I know you are, but what am I?”, but alas, this colleague is not in fact a sand n*****, so you sit silent, defeated.

It will be several more years before you’re allowed to resign.

That’s not a dystopian future, it’s just an office-worker version of what many kids go through daily. Adults take for granted how much being a kid can suck, so let’s count the ways:

1. You might have to fight Shaq

The story illustrates the level of violence we accept amongst children in otherwise non-violent societies, but it gets even worse: differing speeds of development lead to huge differences in size and strength, meaning bullying is often like getting picked on by a Shaq-like giant.

(I remember there was a bully in middle school who was taking steroids given to him by his older brother. Most of us hadn’t even hit puberty yet, but our overlord was running supraphysiological levels of testosterone. I wouldn’t want to fight that kid now.)

2. You receive adult responsibilities, but not adult rights

We often teach children that rights and responsibilities are connected: they don’t have the responsibility of paying rent, but they also don’t have the right to pick their room.

This is the general principle on which we deny rights to children, but also the mentally ill or intellectually disabled. However, unlike those latter two groups, for children, showing competence or character will almost never result in rights “restored”.

It’s possible for a child to do something sufficiently heinous that they’re treated as an adult by the courts and receive life in prison, while there’s nothing so noble that a child can do where they’ll receive some comparable adult right. You may say that there isn’t a good equivalent to callously killing someone, but wouldn’t heroically saving another’s life be the symmetrically good act? Why can responsibilities be issued, but not rights, when a child has demonstrated that their character warrants it?

(Children are occasionally emancipated, but generally, this requires parental permission or parental negligence. An emancipated child is almost never purely the result of that child’s own good deeds.)

If you are potentially subject to a type of responsibility, it really just means that you have that responsibility. The legalism of being “tried as an adult” is a decision to evoke the responsibility that a child has always carried.1

Potential life imprisonment may be the worst, but unfortunately, not the only adult responsibility we’re happy to foist onto children without any reciprocal gain of rights. We’ll assign child support obligations (even in the case of statutory rape!) while denying them the right to marry without parental consent. 17-year-olds are even on the hook for the U.S. Militia despite being unable to legally sign a contract themselves.2

(Perhaps this is why adults choose to bleat on about how tough having a mortgage is; it’s one of the only things they can be confident a kid isn’t experiencing.)

3. It’s legal to beat you

This alone is so egregious that it singularly makes the entire point as far as I’m concerned.

Yes, in the developed world “corporal punishment” (literally “bodily punishment”, an eloquently Latinized euphemism for “beatings”) is on the decline, but if a 19th-century person told you that though wife-beating was still legal, it was on the decline, you’d look at them at least a little bit askance.

Corporal punishment, while permitted for children, is never allowed for adults, even for convicted murderers. It’s legal to beat a child for talking out of turn, but not adults who have repeatedly, viciously, murdered people.

Countries that do beat people for talking out of turn are universally regarded as brutal dictatorships, but only so long as those beaten include grown-ups.

4. You must be Christ-like, while adults are Pilate-like

Children are expected to never resort to violence. If on the playground they’re hit, they should not hit back, but find an authority figure instead. Generally, this authority will do nothing meaningful, and the only result will be the status penalty of being labeled a tattle-tale, resulting in an even more vulnerable personal position.

The effect is that in the face of violence there are only two practical choices: 1) do as the adults say and have Christ-like equanimity by “turning the other cheek”, or 2) defend yourself and reap the consequences (for, like in prisons, two-way violence causes too much of a commotion for authorities to ignore). In the latter case, almost assuredly, both parties will be punished, often under zero-tolerance policies.3

Meanwhile, if a reasonable adult simply feels threatened, such as from having popcorn thrown at them, they can shoot someone to death.

(You see for grown-ups, facts do care about feelings, particularly in regards to shooting people in the face.)

5. Lying to you is socially acceptable

The value of truth as a virtue and liars as dishonorable is universally held, except when speaking to children. The lies fall into 3 categories:

Innocent lies

Lies like Santa Claus or the tooth-fairy are told mostly because we prefer that children be innocent, but also perhaps because we think it’s more fun for them. These are probably the least harmful sort of lies, though they normalize lying to children more generally.

Noble lies

The most common version of this lie is compressing complex topics into black-and-white directives. When I was in school it took the form of abstinence-only sex education and the “drugs are bad, m’kay?” DARE program.

The problem with these simplistic lies is twofold:

1. Once the facts eventually emerge, children learn to expect only lies around anything contentious.

2. These lies may actually make bad outcomes more likely, not less likely: kids DARE lied to went on to do more drugs.

Deluded Lies

There are too many of these to list, but the most fundamental of these is that being a kid is really great and just wait until you get to the real world. I hope I’ve shown that going to an office could be much worse and that mortgages are an optional obligation that never results in your lender beating the crap out of you.

The corollary lie is that adults understand at all what some kids may be going through, or have any useful advice to give them. They’ll describe countermeasures fit for environments where HR polices micro-aggressions because macro-aggressions, like being stuffed into a locker, are unheard of.

I’ve thought to myself that we treat children exactly how you’d expect we’d treat a group that wasn’t allowed to vote and we weren’t accountable to. This may sound disheartening, but at least it means we have a model for reform:

Domestic violence was once legal, normalized, and depressingly common. While it still exists, at least it’s illegal and taken seriously by some.

By contrast, which would cause more alarm: a child reporting that another kid hit them in school, or an adult reporting that they’d been struck by their boss or spouse? The latter would result in calls for charges, firing, or divorce while the former…might start a conversation with a guidance counselor?

But who’s actually more vulnerable here? We won’t give kids coffee because it could mess with their development, yet dismiss actual violence against them.

So if you’re wondering where’s the next frontier in human rights, as a guideline, try starting with who it’s still legal to beat.

You’re reading this post, so no offense, I’m going to assume you were the latter.

If you’re a nerd, jocks are your outgroup, which often creates an aversion to their extrinsic values. I say “extrinsic” because I mean beliefs and practices that aren’t intrinsic to jock-ness; they just happen to be associated with it.

The problem is that oftentimes these values are good, so we do ourselves a disservice by neglecting them for silly reasons. If we follow the nerd value of truth-seeking, what will we discover we can learn from jocks?

Jock Value: Physical Activity

For one, the jocks may have been (inadvertently?) right about exercising all the time because it turns out exercise is really really good for you. One of the hardest parts of recognizing the virtues of the outgroup is admitting that they’ve had a point, especially when you suspect that they don’t even really appreciate it themselves.

In the face of overwhelming scientific evidence though, most nerds have come around to the belief that they should exercise. But it is often only begrudgingly and after years of inactivity, which puts them way behind in athletic conditioning, coordination, and skill.

You might say, “It’s hard to prioritize physical activity because I don’t care about it, I just value intellectual pursuits”, but that’s exactly why you should care! The key to maximizing your brainpower is physical activity.

It’s generally believed adults can’t increase their IQ. Brain training games will improve your performance at those particular games, but they don’t generalize—switch to any other intelligence task and you’re back to baseline.2

And not only does mental training not improve IQ, but despite the commonly held belief, it probably won’t mitigate age-related cognitive decline either.

What will help though, and is the WHO’s very first recommendation to stave off dementia, is physical activity.

(Before his own physical-embodiment renaissance, my co-blogger said he’d thought of himself as “just a brain in a vat”, wholly focused on intellectual affairs. Well, your brain-vat is dirty! Exercise to clean it and think better.)

Pumping Iron

So maybe you ran cross country, or played ultimate frisbee, or participate in something appropriately nerdy like a quidditch league or such. Yes, nerds can move too.

Unfortunately, the jocks even nailed the specific form of exercise that seems especially helpful: strength training. I’d like to just chalk this up to jock-vanity, but honestly, the football players were the only ones I ever saw squatting while the rest of us did bench presses and bicep curls.

Muscle strengthening is recommended 2 times weekly by the CDC, and muscle mass is a robust predictor of longevity in older adults, but again, nerds specifically should lift weights because it helps your brain more than practically anything else.

From this nootropic survey of nearly 2000 people, weightlifting was rated as the 3rd best intervention overall at improving cognitive performance.3 It was the only one of the top 3 that wasn’t an amphetamine, and it’s rated higher than even the infamous Ritalin!

Jock Value: Discipline

This may not sound like a jock value to nerds, but try googling “hardest working athlete” and compare the results to “hardest working scientist”. The former gives endless lists, think-pieces, and discussions, while the latter turns up a single, hastily written, Quora comment.4

I couldn’t tell you which famous scientists were more or less disciplined, but despite possibly never having watched an entire televised basketball game, I can say that Kobe was more disciplined than Shaq. Even for the scientists that do work day and night, it’s usually framed more as “passion” than “virtue”.

But why should nerds value discipline more? Well, for one because it’s something you can actually change. This is in contrast to the fact that just like you’re not getting any younger, you’re also not getting any smarter:

But if you want an even nerdier rationale, consider discipline as a democracy of selves through time. Mediated through discipline, your future selves get a vote in present decisions, versus the authoritarianism of your present-self unilaterally calling all the shots. Your present-self may want to eat an entire pizza, but with discipline, it can be outvoted by your future-selves who would actually be paying the price.

Just add a “Bill of Rights” preventing any sort of tofu-only tyranny of the majority, and you’re well on your way to enjoying your own personal democracy dividend.

I never thought I’d say this, but it looks like to become a better nerd, you’ll need to become a better jock.

No one cared.

In fact, someone probably got a dressing down for actually thinking anyone wanted to read about UFOs instead of what Donald Trump had tweeted.

But forget about whether UFOs are real; just consider whether the sightings are important. I’d say they are, because if you think about it there are only 3 possible explanations, and all of them are bananas.

Here are the possibilities, in ascending craziness:

1. Mistaken identity

The most commonly cited skeptical explanation for UFOs is simple mistaken identity, that witnesses were confused by weather or conventional aircraft. I accept this explanation for nearly every other UFO report, but the 2004 USS Nimitz incident described in the NYT seems to defy normal explanations. It was separately detected on radar by a Navy plane and ship, filmed on a fighter’s infrared, and witnessed by 4 Airmen.

Even if it were mistaken identity though, it’s still a big deal because:

• If some other man-made object fooled the US military to this extent, this represents a massive security weakness. Also, what happens when a nuclear early-warning system gets fooled?

• If this is a previously unknown natural phenomenon, it’s a huge scientific discovery, making giant squid or ball lighting look like peanuts. Whatever it was showed up on radar, then infrared, and flew around!

2. US Government PsyOp

To the more conspiratorial-minded, this could all be a big PsyOp (psychological operation) by the government. This would be even bigger news than mistaken identity, because of how unprecedented it would be for a peacetime operation.

One of the most famous PsyOps in history was the British WWII claim that carrots had improved RAF pilot’s nighttime performance, to cover for advances in radar technology.

If radar prompted the British to lie about carrots, what would it take to prompt the US to lie about spaceships? Regardless of the likelihood, this would be a fascinating path to speculate on was it not dwarfed by the final possibility:

3. Advanced technology

I’m going to group the wacky explanations (Aliens, time travelers, etc.) with the theory that the UFOs are actually secret US/Chinese/Russian drones. I do this because it doesn’t really matter where the technology came from, it is so advanced and paradigm-shifting that the story stops here as far as I’m concerned. If you agree that what was seen during the Nimitz incident indeed was a form of advanced technology, then its demonstration is the biggest news of the 21st century; any origin story is just icing on the cake.

Here’s why:

• Movement without apparent propulsion - Unlike propellers, jet engines, rockets, ion drives, or any other engine we know of, the UFO didn’t seem to require propelling mass behind it to move. This would confirm the possibility of something like the currently only speculative reactionless drive or field propulsion.

• Movement without interacting with the surrounding atmosphere - It exhibited incredible speeds that should have resulted in not only a sonic boom, but also aerodynamic drag that would heat the craft’s skin until it glowed white-hot and dazzled infrared cameras. Somehow, neither of these things occurred. (Video: a high-speed railgun projectile igniting the air from friction.)

• Materials that can either withstand or bypass massive g-forces - Based on the USS Princeton’s tracking, we can estimate that the craft sustained repeated acceleration on the order of 100+ G’s, far beyond any known aircraft.^[1] As a former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense put it “there’s nothing that we could build that would be strong enough to endure that amount of force and acceleration.”

• An enormous and highly efficient mobile power plant - The craft was able to operate for long periods of time, engaging in energetically expensive acceleration rapidly and repeatedly. A basic potential and kinetic energy estimate shows that there would be massive power and fuel demands, far beyond anything we have. What’s more, despite expending huge amounts of energy, it doesn’t appear to be throwing off any heat, implying an unheard-of level of efficiency. For comparison, modern engines and power plants discharge 1 to 2 units of waste heat for every 1 unit of useful energy.

Each of the technologies is so advanced that just establishing any of them as possible would earn you a Nobel Prize, let alone actually making one.

So what is it?

In the case of the Nimitz, mistaken identity seems unlikely because of the number of corroborations from sensors and trained professionals (who would generally rather not be associated with UFOs).

A PsyOp seems like the type of thing that the US government might use as a temporary distraction (like the “ammunition dump explosion” covering for the Trinity test), but maintaining the fiction for nearly two decades, all the way through a Congressional hearing, would be unprecedented. Even if UFOs are a cover story, it also requires an even bigger story worth covering.

Finally, the black-ops drone explanation seems the most unlikely of all, because it requires you to accept all the incredibleness of the UFO tech, but additionally tack on a conspiracy theory that it was covertly built by early 21st-century humans many generations ahead of schedule (so much for the great stagnation).^[2]

Thus I’m in the awkward position described by Sherlock Holmes:

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.^[3]

That said, while only the improbable remain, there isn’t evidence for any particular improbable. We may gravitate towards Aliens, but that was our favorite explanation long before there was anything that needed explaining. If The Terminator were as popular as Star Wars, would we say time travelers?

(My pet theory, because it’s funny, is that we’re in the Simulation and the UFOs are sysadmins.)

Ultimately, the question of whether the UFOs are Aliens or not is a distraction and jumping the gun: the question should be whether it’s technology or not–and the implications are huge regardless. If it is technology though, the “How?” is so far beyond our limited understanding that we must also be humble about the “Why?”

1. Certain missiles can experience g-forces on the lower end of this order of magnitude, but only once and only briefly, meanwhile aircraft top out at ~10 G’s. ↩︎

2. Ancient Greenland Inuit were found to have iron tools, despite being decidedly stone-age technologically. How could they have come to possess such advanced technology? Naturally, it came from space. ↩︎

3. I honestly don’t want to be the UFO guy. I’ve spent enough time trying (often unsuccessfully) to pass as sensible, yet now I can’t seem to stop myself from adopting these scarlet letters. But I’ve kicked around the thoughts for years, and there are at least a few smart people similarly willing to make fools of themselves, so I really have no excuse for staying shy about it. ↩︎

Addendum: Why does nobody care?

My first reaction to belatedly hearing of the UFO reports was astonishment, but not at the reports themselves, but that no one seemed to care. No debate between skeptics and true believers, it wasn’t even in the cultural zeitgeist (unlike Flat Earth for example).

I once made it through 15 minutes of the film What the Bleep Do We Know? All I remember of it was a feeling of exasperation, and this:

We only see what we believe is possible — Native American Indians on Caribbean Islands couldn’t see Columbus’s ships [sitting on the horizon] because they were beyond their knowledge.

I found it eye-rolling at the time, but now, though I don’t think of it as literally true, I see what they were getting at.

Actual UFOs are just so far outside of our conception, that like the European ships, we just don’t see them. It’s not that we are carefully looking and considering the unusual blob on the water, then deciding that it’s not anything; we just don’t regard it at all.

The author’s candid account of these southern Venezuelan Amazonians wasn’t well-received by some and he was eventually accused of being a “virtually amoral eugenicist bent on conducting inhumane and deadly field experiments on a phenomenally vulnerable population” while conspiring to commit genocide by introducing “a potentially fatal contraindicated measles vaccine to the Yanomamö, probably inducing the 1968 epidemic, allowing him to test his eugenic theories.”

Needless to say, I was intrigued.

I learned that “the American Anthropological Association (AAA) saw fit to take [these] claims seriously by conducting a major investigation into the matter”, partly spurred on by anthropologists who objected to Changnon’s sociobiological theories of behavior.

Ultimately, the accusations against Changnon were deemed totally false, though not before he was banned from studying the Yąnomamö and forced to retire from the field.

It was at this point that I realized that this book belonged to my favorite class of controversy: forbidden knowledge.

Most controversial books are not forbidden knowledge. Usually, they are “hot takes”, i.e. contentious opinions based on a combination of assumptions, assertions, and widely-available facts. Forbidden knowledge is instead a type of evidence, and it’s uniquely precious for two reasons:

• The effect of being forbidden: It’s hard to come by.

• The cause of being forbidden: It’s likely to change your prior beliefs.

Evidence that is either widely accepted or is not taken seriously isn’t suppressed. Censors are worried about the marginal case, and therefore target knowledge that’s most likely to shift opinion into unacceptable territory. This means the most controversial evidence is both especially convincing and supportive of an unacceptable position.

So here’s what I found most controversial or unexpected in Yąnomamö:

1. They’re kinda dicks to each other

I say “kinda” because it’s more complicated than them being either totally brutal or totally noble. The more you learn about a thing, the more the situation usually turns into “it’s complicated” (though it was painting this multifaceted picture that cost Chagnon his career).

The problem of course is that if humans in our “natural state” are dicks, then dickishness isn’t some modern construct. Indigenous groups vary in levels of aggression, but the fact is that the Yąnomamö are decidedly aggressive by modern standards. Rousseauian social constructionists thus are put in the awkward position of claiming that either all the supporting research is falsified, or that violence in these nearly-uncontacted tribes still really originates from the modern world.

A high capacity for rage, a quick flashpoint, and a willingness to use violence to obtain one’s ends are considered desirable traits. Much of the behavior of the Yąnomamö can be described as brutal, cruel, treacherous, in the value ladened terms of our own vocabulary.

As terrible as this sounds, you’ve probably seen something similar in abusive families, deprived areas, or depictions of historical periods. It supports the argument that this level of conflict is actually the default state of the world, and we’re socialized out of being awful to one another.

While first living among the Yąnomamö, Chagnon describes his loneliness and attempts at connecting with the tribe:

I tried to overcome this by seeking personal friendships among the Indians. This only complicated the matter because all my friends simply used my confidence to gain privileged access to my cache of steel tools and trade goods, and looted me.

However, he soon discovered that if he was willing to set boundaries on their terms, he could earn their respect:

I had to acquire a certain proficiency in their kind of interpersonal politics and to learn how to imply subtly that certain potentially undesirable consequences might follow if they did such and such to me. They do this to each other in order to establish precisely the point at which they cannot goad an individual any further without precipitating retaliation…each individual sooner or later had to display some sign that his bluffs and implied threats could be backed up.

The assessment that they’re “kinda dicks” seems correctly balanced between harshness and generosity. Their interactions reminded me of modern prisons or middle schools: an aggressive society, but a society nonetheless, shaped by the constraints put upon it.

The Yąnomamö… do not all appear to be mean and treacherous. As individuals, they seem to be people playing their own cultural game, with internal feelings that at times may be quite divergent from the demands placed upon them by their culture.

The “game” of it all is made amusingly apparent from Yąnomamö men’s nostalgia for simpler times:

Many of them later reminisced about the early days of my work when I was “timid” and a little afraid of them, and they could bully me into giving goods away.

(We may have to add “taking stuff off nerds” to our list of Cultural Universals.)

2. Being a Yąnomamö woman sucks, though gets better with age

Growing up as a girl:

Yąnomamö society is decidedly masculine...there is a definite preference to have male children, resulting in a higher incidence of female infanticide...Female children assume duties and responsibilities in the household long before their brothers are obliged to participate in useful domestic tasks.

Getting married:

Girls have almost no voice in the decisions reached by their agnate concerning their marriage. They’re largely pawns to be disposed of by their kinsman…In many cases, the girl has been promised to a man long before she reaches puberty, and in some cases, her husband actually raises her for part of her childhood.

Once married, wife-beating is endemic and downright encouraged. A Yąnomamö man beats his wife as punishment, but also to signal his capacity for violence to other men:

Many men, however, show their ferocity by meting out serious punishment for even minor offenses. It is not uncommon for a man to injure his errant wife seriously, and some men have even killed wives.

Women expect this kind of treatment and many measure their husband’s concern in terms of the frequency of minor beatings they sustain. I overheard two young women discussing each other’s scalp scars. One of them commented that the other’s husband must really care for her since he has beat her on the head so frequently!

This doesn’t even include intervillage warfare and abductions, in which case captured women are usually gang-raped before being married off.

With old age, women’s lives improve somewhat:

A woman gains a measure of respect when she becomes old. By then she has adult children who care for her and treat her kindly. Old women also have a unique position in the world of intervillage warfare and politics. They are immune from the incursions of raiders and can go from one village to another with complete disregard for personal danger. In this connection, they are employed as messengers and, on some occasions, as recoverers of bodies.

This reversal of fortune for old women may explain why there are at least two known cases of older women choosing to return to the Yąnomamö after having lived in modern society.

3. Anthropology before ethics committees was bananas

There are some really egregious examples like the anthropologist who married and impregnated a Yąnomamö teenager and then brought her back to New Jersey, but even the comparatively scrupulous Changnon engaged in some curious practices. The 60s may have been an Anthropology-story sweet spot where rigorous records were kept, but they also got up to some wacky hijinks.

The best of these is when the author decides to take his friend Rerebawä to the Venezuelan capital Caracas in a Coming to America-esque adventure. Rerebawä had never left the woods before, so naturally, they immediately fly him through a lighting storm in a cargo plane.

Our hapless traveler first wonders if the plane will collide with the “upper layer” of the cosmos, before being downright traumatized by violent turbulence around what he thinks is their giant metal bird:

I strapped Rerebawä into his safety harness. He had grown very quiet and was now obviously worried—if we weren’t going to crash into the upper layer, why was it necessary to tie ourselves into the seats? … The pilot tested the motors, and the roar was deafening: Rerebawä s knuckles were white as he clutched the edge of his seat… It was one of the worst flights I ever had, for we hit the storm soon after we gained cruising altitude.

Despite the rocky start, the trip turned out well enough:

The next week proved to be both sobering and outrageously funny at times as Rerebawä discovered what Caraca-teri [Caracas] and its customs and ways were like, and how much he would have to report to his co-villagers: the staggering size of the buildings reaching to the sky, built of stone laid upon stone; elevators; people staying up all night; the bright lights of the automobiles coming at an incredible speed at you during night travel, looking like the piercing eyes of the bore spirits; the ridiculous shoes that women wore with high heels and how they would cause you to trip if you tried to walk through the jungle in them; and the marvels of flush toilets and running water.

He was astounded at how clean the floors were in the houses, was afraid to climb suspended stairs for fear they would collapse, and could not drink enough orange soda pop, or get over the fact that a machine would dispense it when you put a coin in and pushed a button.

One of my favorite parts of the book is when Rerebawä returns to his village and tries to explain Caracas to the others:

“Is it bigger than Patanowa-teri’s shabono?” they asked him skeptically, and he looked at me, somewhat embarrassed, and knew that he could not explain it to them. We both knew that they would not be able to conceive of what Rerebawä had seen. His arm stretched out and he described a large arc, slowly, saying with the greatest of exaggeration his language permitted: “it stretches from here to—way over—there!” And they clicked their tongues, for it was bigger than they imagined.

If you’re going to read just one thing in this book, read the bit about this caper in chapter 7. It’s the sort of thing I’ve always wondered about but naively assumed no genuine academic would ever engage in.

(Sometimes I blow people’s minds by telling them that my grandfather, who grew up poor in a tropical country, didn’t know what ice was. As in he didn’t know that if water got cold enough it turned hard. Still, I have to think that his life was actually closer to ours, we who read blogs on the internet, than to a Yąnomamö of the Amazon.)

4. Yąnomamö life is violent, but norms exist to contain this

As aggression is necessary, it is encouraged from a young age:

Although Ariwari is only about four years old, he has already learned that the appropriate response to a flash of anger is to strike someone with his hand or with an object, and it is not uncommon for him to give his father a healthy smack in the face whenever something displeases him. He is frequently goaded into hitting his father by teasing, being rewarded by gleeful cheers of assent from his mother and from the other adults in the household.

However, totally unchecked aggression would result in unsustainable levels of homicide, so there are de-escalation mechanisms to diminish violence between both individuals and villages.

They have a series of graded forms of violence that ranges from chest-pounding and club-fighting duels to out-and-out shooting to kill. This gives them a good deal of flexibility in settling disputes without immediate resort to killing.

The customs of chest-pounding and club-fights have the same basic rules: contestants take turns hitting each other in a designated way until someone gives up. I was struck by how much these graded-violence customs resembled a game I experienced in middle school: bloody knuckles. The rules are exactly the same as the Yąnomamö customs, except you take turns striking the knuckles rather than thumping the chest or clubbing the head.

The interesting thing about all three of these games is that it’s hard to be good at them in a way that can be straightforwardly leveraged to bully everyone. Unlike say a wrestling match or sword duel, it’s more about durability than skill, and even the winner inevitably emerges worse for wear. After a hard-fought contest, you’re in no position to challenge anyone else for a while so there’s a natural limit to how often you can participate.

Personally, I’ve really appreciated these rituals. In middle school, I was a scrawny kid that didn’t do well in real fights, but I was reliable enough at bloody knuckles to generate a tiny bit of menace and respect that probably saved me from worse interactions.

5. Most of their food comes from agriculture

I’d always thought that “uncontacted” peoples were hunter-gatherers, or perhaps fishermen, but it turns out, by calories, the Yąnomamö are mostly agriculturalists and therefore Neolithic (sorry Paleo-dieters).

Although the Yąnomamö spend almost as much time hunting as they do gardening, the bulk of their diet comes from foods that are cultivated. Perhaps 85 percent or more of the diet consists of domesticated rather than wild foods—plantains are by far the most important food in the diet.

Further, plantains are an Old-world crop, first brought along long trade networks with intermediately-connected indigenous groups. The Yąnomamö are still in indirect contact with the modern world, which leads to the next surprising point:

6. “Uncontacted” peoples have access to technology fit for 19th-century Kings

You may have seen this photo before:

These are indigenous Amazonians photographed from the air. When I first saw this I was fascinated, but also confused by two items that seemed out of place. The first is what looks like a machete in the center boy’s hand, but even more interesting is the small white pot by their feet.

Chagnon explains:

Most Yąnomamö groups still use clay pots, although these are being rapidly replaced by aluminum ware, which is traded inland to the more remote villages.

Metallic aluminum is a modern invention, and early on it was incredibly expensive. A small block of aluminum was once displayed alongside France’s crown jewels, and Emperor Napoleon III (Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew) kept aluminum cutlery for his most honored guests (the less honored had to settle for gold).

Archeologists tell of paleolithic burial sites containing seashells, artifacts, and minerals from thousands of miles away. It had felt hard to conceptualize a prehistoric trade network that could move goods so far, but the movement of these pots illustrates this beautifully.

7. They hate stepping on thorns but haven’t invented shoes

Walking entails certain kinds of risks. The Yąnomamö have no shoes or clothing, so thorns are always a problem. A party of 10 men can rarely go more than an hour without someone stopping suddenly, cursing, and sitting down to dig a thorn out of his foot with the tip of his arrow point. While their feet are hardened and thickly calloused, walking in streams and through muddy terrain softens the callouses and then the thorns can get deeply embedded.

I knew that early people had walked around barefoot, but I’d assumed that their hardened feet offered protection from all but the worst environments (snow, pointy rocks, etc.). It seems that they don’t, and now I really appreciate shoes (sorry barefoot runners).

That said, cane sandals don’t seem particularly hard to make so I don’t exactly understand how they haven’t invented something to protect their feet, yet can come up with specialized contraptions for climbing thorny trees:

I’ve never worn cane sandals though, so maybe shoes below some level of sophistication just aren’t worth the fuss.

8. You can buy a canoe full of plantains for a few pocket knives

The Venezuelans who carried supplies upstream to the mission always bought plantains from the Yanomamo for ridiculously low prices and sold them for up to 800% profit

This exchange rate surprised me, though I soon remembered traveling in developing regions and buying unbelievable bounties for pennies. With enough of a technology gap, this makes sense though; if a futuristic alien showed up and wanted your house in exchange for a teleporter or something, you’d probably take the deal.

9. Their “plant medicine” seems more like PCP than ayahuasca

Psychoactive “plant medicines” like psilocybin, peyote, and ayahuasca are increasingly popular among Western techies and intellectuals, and many have origins in indigenous cultures. They’re often used with the goal of reaching deep truths and higher levels of conscientiousness, and I’d expected to see this from the Yąnomamö as well.

However, the Yąnomamö continue their inconvenient flouting of stereotypes by taking drugs mostly to get really stoned:

Now, it was time for them to take ebene, their hallucinogenic drug. They separated into several groups and began blowing the brownish-green powder up each other’s nostrils with 3-foot long hollow tubes. As the drug would be administered, each recipient would reel from the concussion of air, groan, and stagger off to some convenient post to vomit. Within ten minutes of taking the drug, the men would be bleary-eyed and wild, prancing around in front of their houses, stopping occasionally to vomit or to catch their breath. In each group there would be one man particularly adept at chanting to the hekura, the mountain demons, and he would soon take over the show, while the others retired to the sidelines in a stupor, green slime dripping from their nostrils.

That said, there is some hekura communing, so I can’t dismiss ebene as a party drug entirely. Perhaps it’s actually similar to psychedelics in the west—there’s a consciousness vs. partying use-case divide.

10. They’re pretty good sports all in all

The author would constantly have things stolen from him, and eventually, he learned to ask a local child, who would cheerfully identify the culprit. The author would then go steal the offender’s hammock, forcing the thief to return the item and endure village taunts about getting so easily caught. That would be the end of it until inevitably something else was stolen and the process repeated itself.

Once, in retaliation for stealing boards from his canoe, Chagnon set the perpetrators’ canoes loose into the river:

I then pulled out my hunting knife and, while their grins disappeared, cut each of their canoes loose, set it into the current, and let them float away. I left without further ado and without looking back.

You’d think with people as fierce as these he’d have earned some arrows in the belly or at least a chest-pounding, but they took it in stride and Chagnon even had the backing of the village:

The headman of the village later told me with an approving chuckle that I had done the correct thing. Everyone in the village, except, of course, the culprits, supported and defended my action.

The juxtaposition of nonstop aggression alongside the capacity for letting bygones be bygones continually impressed me. There were certainly long-term feuds, but somehow these never seemed more than a feast or counter-alliance away from possible resolution.

So should you read it?

Yąnomamö was forbidden because it presents compelling evidence against certain social constructionist shibboleths, though even the constructionist-skeptical will find themselves frequently taken by surprise.

Earlier editions of the book are something of a catalog of descriptions, while later editions are expanded and have a more narrative structure.

The above highlights cover most of the unusual bits; the other factoids won’t be that surprising to anyone who’s seen a few nature documentaries. Changon doesn’t especially seem to be courting controversy, just depicting what he saw. It’s short for an anthropology book (the first edition is only ~140 pages), so worthwhile reading for those with particular anthropological interest or curiosity about the finer details of the above points.

However, I think the biggest reason to read it is to travel to a world unlike your own. You may have experienced this before by reading old books; the world has evolved so much that even a mundane story from the 19th century will unintentionally illustrate dramatic changes.

Tribal warfare in the Stone Age is about as far from our world as you can get, so Yąnomamö’: The Fierce People is like an “old book” on jungle psychotropics. It will be harsh and possibly nauseating, but ultimately rewardingly mind-altering.

The name has become uniquely synonymous with intelligence: products like “little Einstein”, memes of “that student’s name? Albert Einstein” and selection as Time’s Person of the Century have cemented him into the popular culture as the prototypical genius.

Is this right though? The world needs an intellectual hero, but was Einstein really the smartest person ever?

Extreme outliers are inherently hard to quantify, and there is plenty of debate around this. For example, I’ve noticed that the connoisseur’s favorite is usually John Von Neumann (see this enormous list of stuff named after him).

Even if Einstein wasn’t strictly the smartest, could he at least be crowned the most influential scientist of the 20th century? Again, views differ; from the perspective of the Nobel Committee, it’s probably Marie Curie.

However, while Einstein’s position as the “smartest person ever” or “most influential modern scientist” is debatable, his position as the cultural archetype of “really smart person” is not. The fact is, if anyone can name just one scientist, it’s nearly always Einstein:

Humanity only had one spot for “famous genius”, and picked Einstein.

So how did we do?

I would say we couldn’t have done better.

I say this because we shouldn’t be the maximizing intelligence of our archetypal smart person, we should actually be maximizing their good character.

Why character instead of intelligence? For one, hardly any of us are in a position to meaningfully judge the intelligence of anyone that smart. We’d be judging their lofty thoughts with our middling thinking. It would be like a pet trying to figure out which of its similarly-smart owners is smarter.

Since we can’t tell the difference anyway, it doesn’t matter that we get the intelligence part precisely right. And even if we could discern between smarter and smartest, it’s not like we would be able to do anything with that information. Myths about Einstein failing math aside, all the “smart person” candidates were so obviously exceptional from a young age that most of us can be confident that we’ll never seriously emulate them intellectually. (Though you can still go start Amazon or whatever.)

However, it’s character where mere mortals can differentiate and imitate; a dog may not be able to judge human intellect, but they can actually make judgments of character.

Not only can we tell which “smart person” acted better or worse, but we can put the lessons from their good example into practice! Most of us will rarely make any decisions of serious intellectual importance, but we’re constantly making impactful ethical decisions, like what to buy, where to work, and how to vote.

This is doubly important for those in power: would you rather Xi Jinping’s intellectual hero be the committed desegregationist and pacifist, Albert Einstein, or the German nationalist and Nazi nuclear program leader, Werner Heisenberg? Do their respective scientific merits even matter here?

Einstein looks remarkable even when compared to his more typical contemporaries. During the Manhattan Project, his pacifist leanings were considered a security risk, so he was excluded, unlike practically every other eminent physicist in the country.

Though he did sign the Einstein–Szilárd letter urging President Roosevelt to start an American nuclear weapons program, it was out of an understandable desire to beat Nazi Germany to the bomb. Later he remarked:

Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb, I would have done nothing.

No disrespect to any scientist who worked on nuclear weapons during World War II, but I do have to note that Einstein looks unusually good in this regard.1Add this to his early opposition to the oppression of African-Americans (starting no later than 1931),2 and he seems like a clear moral standout.

Ultimately, our “smart person” role model should really be the most moral person we can find that’s at least passable as a “smart person”.

What we got, though, is a moral sage that’s passable as the most influential mind of all time.

We picked right.

So why care about this sportsman?

Because maybe you care about a migrant’s journey. Or what it means to do hard labor as a child. Or just plain old the greatest rags-to-riches story of the 21st century.

Care because even if Francis Ngannou had gone on to become an accountant in Cleveland he’d be a Shackelton-like figure—his tale of overcoming adversity could be a Hollywood movie.

Except he didn’t become a Cleveland accounant. He became World Champion.

Growing up in a Sand Mine

His story even starts like a folk tale.1 Poor even by the standards of his native Cameroon, Francis lived with his grandmother in a one-room, brick-and-dirt house in the village of Batié. From the age of 10, he worked in a local sand mine to supplement their meager income,2 but still often missed school because of lack of tuition, or was thrown out for being without a notebook and pen.

I hated the sand mine, I hated my life.

All through his schooling, he worked in the sand mine, after school and on weekends, but especially during the wet season:

That’s the wet season...so it rains all the time. Kids go to vacation...adults don’t want to work because it’s raining all the time. Guess what? That was our opportunity when they don’t want to work, so we have a chance to work. [We’d] get back home shaking [from the cold], because all day long it’s been raining.

Even when he could attend school, it meant waking at 5 am for a 2-hour trek each way. He often went without food for most of the day; even if he managed to get his hands on some breakfast, he’d ration it so he’d be able to make it through the day.

At school, he was visibly impoverished in his tattered school uniform and ostracized by the other students. But he recognized that being a child who worked to attend school in fact made him exceptional:

They were looking at me like I was nothing, but...I was more than them because I’m working. Even though what I have is less than what they have, I deserve what I have, I worked hard for it...They are just kids, they don’t deserve shit!

I’m going to do something that’s going to prove [to] these kids that I’m not beneath them.

Beyond Cameroon

After leaving school at 17, he worked odd jobs, eventually owning a motorcycle and working as a moto-taxi. Though local gangs attempted to recruit him, he wanted his path to be different from his father’s, who’d had a reputation as a street fighter.

He thought boxing could be a more positive outlet and started training at age 22, though he knew that any chance of achieving his dreams would require leaving Cameroon. So he saved money for the trip, and by the spring of 2012, at age 26, he was prepared to leave for Europe.

Before he left he spent a few weeks seeing his friends and relatives in his village, knowing it could be the last time he ever got the chance. During the visit, his mother even asked “why are you looking at me like this?”

But he couldn’t tell anyone because they’d invariably object to the immense risk he was taking. He just said he was “going to the North” and left some of his savings with his little sister, anticipating being robbed along the way. He knew the danger, but also thought:

I don’t want to live with the regret of not trying

Smuggled to Algeria

Francis first crossed into neighboring Nigeria by car and train, and then onto Niger. Travel through Nigeria had been straightforward because Cameroonians could enter legally, but once in Niger the situation changed:

There we started to be, like, illegal...we didn’t have a visa, so we start to have to deal with the police, with the border protection...you get caught, they ask you for money...they want everything...every thing of value that they see they will take it.

We’d wrap our money...and swallow it.

In Niger, he met with professional smugglers who’d take him into Algeria. The trip involved clinging to the side of a pickup along with 25 others as it raced across the Sahara desert:

You have to be lucky that the car don’t [break down] in the middle of the trip, because if the car [breaks down] in the middle of the trip. Most of the time, it’s over...you guys might just die.

Hanging on for dear life, he ignored the pain of his hands lest he fall off and certainly be left for dead. At one point a woman standing in the bed of the truck couldn’t hold her baby any longer and nearly dropped the child over the side, but the other passengers took turns carrying the infant for the 24-hour journey.

Severely dehydrated because they were allowed only minimal water, once they’d reached Algeria they came upon a well:

It was so dirty, with dead animals in it, birds everything. Man...I’m going to drink this water, and it might kill me. But...if don’t drink this water, I’m not lasting long. So you drink it.

While in Algeria, he used a fake passport to purport that he was from Mali and had visa-free access. As a visible “African” his false documents were checked often:

I give [the policeman] my ID, I look him straight to his eye...because when you look somebody in the eyes, your eyes call his eyes. [He thinks] “yeah, it might be him, because he’s so confident.” But I was afraid as shit!

He traveled to northern Algeria in order to cross into Morocco. At this point, the journey had gone by relatively quickly, only 2 weeks had passed since leaving Cameroon. Though it seemed that the worst was over, he had no idea what was yet to come:

At every step, you think the next step’s going to be easier...It always gets harder.

A Year in the Moroccan Woods

Morocco is a nightmare for migrants.

The European Union finances the DGSN (Moroccan border police) to control the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean and into the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. Apprehended migrants were usually beaten and dropped off in the desert on the border.

Ngannou tried crossing into Ceuta a few times, on one attempt he was cut badly by the barbed-wire border fence. He retreated to the Moroccan woods where the migrants lived but realized that he was bleeding to death, so went to a local hospital despite knowing that he’d be discovered.

While receiving stitches, he was arrested. As usual, after holding him in custody for a few days, he was taken south and thrown into the desert.

As with all the other times, he’d have to crouch, scramble and crawl his way back into Morocco to avoid being shot by border guards, guided by the lights of a distant Airport.

After 3 failed attempts to cross into Ceuta, Francis headed to Tangier to try his luck on the water. This meant sneaking to the shoreline with a crew of migrants and trying to cross the sea on literally an inflatable pool toy:

[The raft was] just a small one, the one that they use in [a] swimming pool...This is how we’re trying to get in the ocean.

He tried repeatedly, only to be thrown back into the desert after each attempt:

Sometimes you get caught even before you touch the water, and sometimes you get in the water, after a few hours you get caught.

Each boat had a “captain” who avoids chipping in to buy the boat in exchange for their skills and leadership. On one attempt, Francis’s boat made it onto the water, but the crew members carrying the paddles had been caught. They thought they’d need to turn back, but their Ivorian captain roused them to paddle with just their hands. Indeed, they did make it many miles across the sea but the border patrol eventually found them, knowing of their presence from having caught the paddle-holders.

The others on the raft surrendered, but their captain chose to slip into the water and try to swim:

As time goes by, you’re open to taking more risk. At first, you’re like “I don’t know about this, it’s risky”...and then after a time...“damn, whatever it takes, I’m doing it.” ...He was at that point, we weren’t there yet, he was there already.

Though they were all yet again caught, Francis counted his blessings:

We got lucky, we didn’t get beat up because [their] officer was there.

Captain Van Damme

Through his sheer number of failed attempts, Ngannou became experienced enough to captain his own raft.

On his first trip as captain, he waited for the earliest prayer of the day, knowing the guards would be occupied. The waves were high that day, and several other migrant boats didn’t even make it past the surf, but Francis alone was able to time the crashing waves and successfully pass the pounding waves.

His crew paddled for nearly 3 hours, making it into international waters and passing fishing boats. It looked as if they may have made it, but they happened to be spotted by a Moroccan Army ship and captured anew.

It was another failure, but his successful launch when others hadn’t made Francis’s reputation as a captain, and his crew would report:

“He’s a hell of a captain..named Van Damme.”

They always had [a] nickname for me.

Known for his martial aspirations, he’d been named after Jean-Claude Van Damme.

That would be the final attempt of the year. He’d left Cameroon in April of 2012, it was now December and too cold to make more attempts by sea. The migrants retreated to the woods to wait out the winter:

Cold all the time, no clothes, no food...you have to go to the market at nighttime, to go find food in the trash...sometimes arguing with rats in the trash...like: “hey get away from these tomatoes, it’s mine, these rotten tomatoes, it’s mine!”...go back in the forest and figure out how to cook that in [an] aluminum bucket.

Meanwhile, the police conducted raids on the woods:

[We were] living under plastic sheeting. You’d need to grab your plastic and blankets so the police won’t confiscate it, and you run and hide, sometimes for hours.

It was then that Ngannou resolved that his next time on the water would be the last. He was at that point, like the Ivorian captain.

Across the Sea on a Pool Toy

It would be his 7th time on the water.

Now a sought-after captain, he organized his final try. He instructed that the raft be covered with aluminum foil to evade radar, a tip he’d gleaned from a sympathetic border guard.

The crew waited for favorable weather, then paid off a taxi driver to secretly drive them down to the water. Their intended launch point turned out to be heavily patrolled though, so they walked a great way along the coast, eventually clambering down a seaside cliff.

The cove at the base of the cliff hardly even space to inflate their delicate raft amongst the jagged rocks and crashing waves. A tiny beach provided just enough space to launch from.

Most of the migrants were first-timers, so had never experienced firsthand what would be required of them. Newly facing the crashing waves and open sea, Francis knew that some would try to turn back, but any who did would eventually be caught and alert the guards to the others. In a scene reminiscent of Roman soldiers who were more scared of their commanding Centurions than of the enemy:

I have to change... how I talk. I have to ... not only motivate them...you have to scare them, they have to [be more] scared of you, than of the waves.

If somebody quits, you’re getting caught. So I took a paddle, just start yelling at them, feinting [swings at] them.

[They] get scared of the waves, but turn around see me, get scared of me.

The crew tried to enter the surf but were repeatedly turned around by the thunderous waves. On the 3rd try though, they made it into the water.

They’d made good progress on the open water when they noticed a helicopter following overhead. The presence of the helicopter would certainly alert the Moroccans, but could also be used to guide potential rescuers to their location. Using a cell phone with a Spanish SIM, Francis took his chances and called the Red Cross for help. With the helicopter as a landmark, a Red Cross ship was able to find them and take them to the Spanish coast.

It was April 3rd, 2013, exactly one year had passed since Francis had left Cameroon.

Spanish Prison to Paris Parking Garage

Moments before being picked up by the Red Cross, the migrants threw any identity documents, genuine or otherwise, into the sea. In Algeria, Francis had been Malian, in Morocco, Senegalese, but Spain did not have a repatriation policy with Cameroon, so in Spain, he was finally again Cameroonian.

There he was taken into custody:

They call it a detention center... but man this is a harsh prison...at some point...I think I was good being in the forest of Morocco, at least I was free.

After 2 months of interrogation and imprisonment in Spain, he was released. A local charity provided temporary shelter, but his goal was not Spain. Free and unhunted for the first time in a year, he called his family in Cameroon one last time to scrounge the last of his savings together in preparation for the final leg of his trip.

He’d originally intended to go to the UK, as it was a better fit for his boxing aspirations. Now though, he’d grown weary of migrant life and could travel freely in most of continental Europe.

Many other migrants were heading to France, and he went with them. There, he went with a friend to the local Malian community, but was shocked to the see the poor conditions in which they lived:

I almost died for this? This is France that they’re talking about?

He resolved not to live with the Malians or in a homeless shelter, believing that either would trap him in that dismal state of affairs:

I’m getting out of here... this kind of thing drowns your energy...So I found a parking lot.

He moved into the bottom of a parking garage and immediately began searching for a gym:

The next day I found a boxing gym, all day long I was walking, asking

Upon finding a gym, he explained his situation to the trainer: though he was homeless, he didn’t want anything other than a place to train, for one day he would be a world champion.

The trainer accepted him and even gave the penniless Ngannou 50 euros. It was enough for shorts, a t-shirt, and a towel. He was without the boxing basics of hand wraps and a mouth guard on his first day of training, but after a 14-month journey, he was ecstatic just to have finally begun.

UFC Heavyweight Champ

After 2 weeks, the coach told him he had potential, but that he should try mixed martial arts (MMA) instead of boxing. Boxing required connections and a promoter, while Ngannou could get some paying MMA fights right away.

At the time, Francis didn’t even know what MMA was, and was still dead-set on becoming a boxer. However, he’d been volunteering at a charity that happened to be across the street from the MMA Factory gym. When his boxing gym closed temporarily, he headed there to train. Owner and fellow Cameroonian Fernand Lopez realized Ngannou was homeless when he asked if he could leave his gear at the gym, and began letting Francis sleep at the gym.

Only training boxing at first, he eventually started MMA classes out of curiosity and a desire to stay in shape. Lopez recognized Francis as a phenomenal athlete and fast learner, not to mention a towering and muscular 6’4”.

He subtly encouraged Francis to pick up MMA, and eventually, Francis decided to see how he would fare in a local MMA tournament. He won his first fight by submission, despite not even knowing which technique he was using, by following directions shouted from the side of the ring.

After his first tournament, Francis went on an impressive winning streak despite not having begun training until the age of 27. Known for tremendous knockout power, his fights were often dramatic crowd-pleasers and in 2015 was signed to the UFC. His iconic knockout of Alister Overeem in 2017 earned him an 11-1 record and a shot for the title.

His title fight was against reigning champ Stipe Miocic. Francis’s run-up to the title was so sensational, that even as one of the all-time greats, Miocic was somehow the betting underdog.

It was a one-sided affair: Miocic deftly avoided punches and dominated an exhausted Ngannou with wrestling and relentless ground strikes for 5 rounds. It was clear that Ngannou’s relative inexperience had left weaknesses with pacing and grappling that the veteran fighter could exploit.

Following this loss, Ngannou faced up-and-comer Derrick Lewis in what is regarded as one of the worst and most uneventful heavyweight fights of all time. Bizarrely tentative and refusing to engage, Ngannou lost via decision in a fight so boring that UFC president Dana White called it an “abomination”.

The experience of being so thoroughly dominated by Miocic had clearly shaken Francis deeply.

He knew serious changes were needed and made the painful decision of moving from Fernand Lopez, his first coach who’d helped him out of homelessness, to elite MMA camp Xtreme Couture.

Reflecting on his loss to Miocic:3

Nobody wants to lose, but I think at some point I needed a fight like that...my rise was very fast, very quick, and I didn’t have time to understand a lot of things…the fight against Stipe allowed me to understand many of those things.

He’d come to recognize his weaknesses and the necessity of addressing them if he ever were to be champion. Training with the best of the best, a more self-aware Ngannou would go on a 4-fight tear in which no opponent lasted more than 71 seconds against him, including two former UFC heavyweight champs.

Now armed with defensive wrestling skills and calculated striking, he again faced Miocic for the title in March of 2021.

Miocic lasted 6 minutes. Nearly a decade since first leaving Cameroon, as promised, Francis Ngannou was World Champion.

The very best predictions are so far ahead of their time that they answer questions no one is even asking. Predicting in 1921 that Adolf Hitler would start WWII would be prophetic, but by 1935 this was on enough people’s minds that there was bound to be someone taking the correct position (no disrespect to Mr. Churchill).

Einstein’s (and Newton’s!) gravitational lens or Mendeleev’s periodic trends are strong candidates, but I say the best prediction of all time was made by Charles Darwin in 1871. Now, Darwin made a number of famous predictions around that time, for example:

• Present organisms will be shown to have evolved from different earlier organisms, i.e. the Theory of Evolution.

• Most of the fossil record will be discovered and will demonstrate a history of increasingly complex organisms.1

• The (then largely undiscovered) fossil record will have fossils of intermediate organisms called “transitional forms”.

• This evidence will show modern Humans and Apes evolved from a common ancestor.

But the prediction I’m thinking of goes even further than that—in fact, it wasn’t even accepted as scientific consensus until 2003!

The full prediction, including the prerequisites, is:

Present organisms evolved from past ones, and the fossil record will be discovered to show this, including in-between organisms called transitional forms, demonstrating that humans and apes have a common ancestor and…

..this common ancestor lived on the continent of Africa.

Darwin’s Greatest Prediction Ever is all of the above-listed predictions combined, plus the Recent African Origin or “Out of Africa” model of human evolution.

This, by a guy who didn’t even know about germs.2 How was he able to make such a prediction?

Tracing the Founder Effect Backwards

In population genetics, the Founder Effect happens when a small group of “founders” start a new population that is not representative of the original sample. For example, the Indian state of Gujarat only has ~5% of the Indian population, but Gujaratis emigrated in such disproportionate numbers that nearly 1 in 10 Indian Americans have the Gujarati surname Patel (vs. ~0.5% in India).

This gets really interesting once you realize that the founder effect leads to homogeneity, and therefore you can look at the originating population to find more variation. This applies not only to genetics, for example:

• In China, you’ll see the widest variety of tea. There’s a stereotype that East Asians are green tea drinkers while the rest of the world drinks black tea, but actually, the Chinese invented black tea (they just call it “red tea”) and even have a semi-oxidized tea, oolong. However, the fact that black tea travels better means it became disproportionately popular in far-off lands.

• The closer you get to the Middle East, the more divergent the Christian traditions are. While nearly 90% of worldwide Christians are either Protestant or Catholic (largely thanks to exportation via colonialism), nearer to Christ’s birthplace you’ll find ancient and distinct traditions like the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Maronite Church.

• Listen to the accents of these American women, one from near Seattleand the other from near Miami (~2700 miles apart). To me, they are hardly distinguishable and either of them could be from anywhere in the US. However, with these English women from East Sussex and West Midlands County (~150 miles apart), the difference is obvious even to an American and makes evident where the language originated.3

Now hopefully it’s clearer how Darwin made The Best Prediction Ever. From The Descent of Man:

It is, therefore, probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are now man’s nearest allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.

Darwin saw that the greatest variety of hominids was found in Africa, so reasoned that Africa was the origin of all hominids, including us.4

First, the definition of opportunity cost from the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:

When economists refer to the “opportunity cost” of a resource, they mean the value of the next-highest-valued alternative use of that resource.

For example, if I could only eat either a pizza or hamburger for lunch, the opportunity cost of eating the pizza is the value of eating the hamburger. By eating the pizza, I am forgoing the opportunity to enjoy the hamburger.

This example assumes I like hamburgers, so the value of eating a hamburger is positive, and the opportunity cost paid is positive, i.e. more than zero.

But what if I don’t like hamburgers? What if I find them unhealthy, so eating one actually has a negative value to me? Would that mean that eating the pizza has a negative opportunity cost because the next-highest-valued alternative has a negative value?

According to some, the answer is no:

Negative opportunity costs are impossible because a business can always choose not to act on available opportunities

They mean that I can always choose to not eat anything for lunch, rather than eat something unhealthy.

Is this always true though? Can one always choose to not act on “available opportunities” i.e. resist junk food? I assume we’ve all had times when we’ve eaten something which was actually worse than eating nothing because it was the only thing available and we were hungry.

Why We Pack Salad

Now suppose that the lunch options are a salad or a hamburger, again assuming I definitely am going to end up eating something. In this case, the opportunity cost of choosing the salad is missing out on the unpleasantness of eating a hamburger I don’t like, a negative value.

That means even if I get absolutely no enjoyment or value from eating the salad, the fact that it has prevented me from eating the hamburger means it has displaced a negative value. The option to not eat anything is not available in practice, so the next-best alternative has a negative value. By choosing the salad, I “pay” the negative opportunity cost of the negative value hamburger and therefore actually benefit.

This explains why we pack salads that we don’t particularly care for: they can still prevent us from otherwise eating hamburgers.

Negative opportunity costs arise when no positive or zero value alternatives are available, but still, an option must be chosen.

Examples

Where do you find examples of negative opportunity costs? The Theory of Displacement Value post details a number of these, but here are a few summarized:

• Good gut bacteria have numerous benefits, but they also simply crowd out pathogenic bacteria by taking up space and consuming all the available nutrients. The alternative to good gut bacteria is bad gut bacteria: having no bacteria, i.e. a sterile gut, is not an option.

• Homeopathy is an innocuous water-capsule placebo, preferable to other expensive or dangerous placebos. A desire for alternative medicine seems constant within societies, so this harmless and cheap placebo is valuable for displacing worse options.

• Traditional religions have had the chance to moderate over time to become mostly benign. If total religiosity is truly conserved and some sort of religious-type belief is inevitable, traditional religions displace more recent and dangerous political religions and cults.

You can find examples of negative opportunity costs everywhere once you start looking for them. I’ll leave you with this one from The Streets:

Today I have achieved absolutely nowt
In just being out of the house, I’ve lost out
If I wanted to end up with more now
I should have just stayed in bed like I know how

The U2 incident even convinced then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that it was all over; upon hearing of it he reportedly “turned absolutely white, and yelled hysterically, ‘This means [nuclear] war with the Soviet Union!”’

It illustrates not only how close we have come, but just how many stakeholders could have started a nuclear war. There is this claim that only the highest levels of government could possibly order a nuclear strike, aided by the theatrics of the “nuclear football”. From what we know historically, that has been a complete and total lie.

MAD - Hair-trigger Weapons are a Feature, Not a Bug

The principle of Mutually Assured Destruction2 requires that a nuclear first strike be responded to with annihilating force. Therefore even if communication with command and control were severed, subordinates would still need to be able to retaliate. During the Cold War, both sides accomplished this with “predelegation” which ended up allowing hundreds, if not thousands, of people to launch nuclear weapons without higher orders.3

You may say that was way back in 1962. Is predelegation better now? As one DoD source put it: “It’s still sensitive.” Consider that we only know about predelegation in 1962 precisely because it was from long ago and therefore have old leaks and declassifications. At that time there were only three nuclear weapons states. Now there are three times as many, not even including nuclear sharing.

The takeaway should be just how startlingly easy it is to push one of the numerous nuclear buttons. Which is where AI comes in.

AI’s Low-Hanging Fruit

Folks like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have highlighted the risk posed by a superintelligent AI, but what would the destructive mechanism be? A popular example is an incentive misalignment that causes an AI to uncritically turn the world into paperclips because it’s instructed to “make as many paper clips as possible”.

This is certainly a future possibility, and algorithms can break our markets if not our bones. For the near future, however, there is only one system capable of immediate worldwide destruction, and it’s been set on a hair-trigger: Nuclear weapons.

This is especially relevant because an AI catastrophe is more likely earlier than later. Early on, humans will have had less experience with AI and less time to properly align it. At that point, the lowest hanging fruit for AI to kill everyone would be to just push one of the many “Kill Everyone” buttons already conveniently available, rather than trying to invent paperclip nano-factories, etc. 4

The below Sankey diagram shows how I rate the probability of nuclear and AI outcomes. The exact numbers aren’t important,5 you can even try playing around with them yourself (appendix).

My reasoning:

1. If there’s a pre-AI nuclear war, there’s a much lower chance of having AI in the 21st century. AI existing at all is conditional on civilization not ending beforehand.6

2. If there’s no 21C catastrophe, I estimate a 50/50 chance of inventing an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

3. If there is an AGI, I estimate a 50/50 chance of it being bad.

4. If it’s bad, it’s most likely to be catastrophic early (because humans will be inexperienced with AI, plus the Lindy effect).

5. If it’s catastrophic early, it’s most likely to use nukes i.e. the only sufficiently powerful system (or at least the lowest-hanging fruit)

Thus most of the AI catastrophe risk involves nukes.

Nuclear Security: Highly Rated, Yet Underrated

Most of us know about nuclear war risk, but we leave it to governments, treaties, and Big Organizations to manage this. It seems more appropriate to protest about climate change or COVID policies than to comment on the fact that nearly everyone reading this has a nuclear weapon pointing at them right now.

For example, this survey of Effective Altruists, a group with a significant number of “Longtermists”:

Nuclear security is the lowest-rated priority.

Why is this? From 80,000 Hours: “Nuclear security is already a major topic of interest for governments, making it harder to have an effect on the situation”.

It’s true that at a high level smart and important people are working on this, but what about the general public? Do you know which political parties have better or worse nuclear security policies? Which politicians? Which countries? Exactly what does better or worse even mean?

Now repeat these questions with “climate change” or “abortion” and it will become clear that nuclear security is hardly in the public consciousness at all.

Solution: Baby-Proof the Nukes

What to do about this? How to address this still-underrated problem? I suggest treating the coming of AI like we would the coming of a new baby.

Clearly you prioritize Baby Safety. You’ll want to teach it how to stay safe: don’t take candy from strangers, look both ways before crossing the street, no unhealthy obsession with paperclips. That said, there’s only so much you can do before the baby arrives. A concrete thing you can do in advance though is baby-proof your home. You soften sharp edges, install baby gates, and make sure dangerous things aren’t just lying around.

Similarly, we must AI-proof our home planet by not leaving a nuclear Sword of Damocles hanging around.7

What does AI-proofing the nukes look like? Two measurable steps and AI-relevant steps:8

• Reduce the total number of warheads to below the threshold needed to cause a catastrophic nuclear winter. Split this quota across nations so that everyone will still have some of our beloved A-bombs, but at least if an AI detonates them all, it will be short of armageddon.9

• No-first-use pledges. This may sound aspirational, but in fact, China and India currently have a no-first-use policy, and Russia had one from 1982 to 1993. Bilateral pledges can be used to reduce the risk between great powers while maintaining most of the strategic advantages of a nuclear state. A no-first-use pledge means that faulty intelligence, misinformation, or impersonation could not initiate a nuclear launch in the absence of a detonation (or possibly a launch warning). Even if a bomb goes off, there will be slightly more cause to investigate before pursuing retaliation.

I know the Nuke-AI angle may seem like an unoriginal take, we did all see Terminator. But risk profiles are usually Pareto distributed, where a small proportion of the factors accounts for a large proportion of the risk. Clichéd as it may be, nuclear war has historically been our biggest existential risk, and as long as thousands of weapons are pointed at one another, it is likely to remain that way.

Making an AGI might change the triggerman, but it’s still nuclear holocaust at the end of the trigger.

The U2 incident even convinced then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that it was all over; upon hearing of it he reportedly “turned absolutely white, and yelled hysterically, ‘This means [nuclear] war with the Soviet Union!”’

It illustrates not only how close we have come, but just how many stakeholders could have started a nuclear war. There is this claim that only the highest levels of government could possibly order a nuclear strike, aided by the theatrics of the “nuclear football”. From what we know historically, that has been a complete and total lie.

MAD - Hair-trigger Weapons are a Feature, Not a Bug

The principle of Mutually Assured Destruction2 requires that a nuclear first strike be responded to with annihilating force. Therefore even if communication with command and control were severed, subordinates would still need to be able to retaliate. During the Cold War, both sides accomplished this with “predelegation” which ended up allowing hundreds, if not thousands, of people to launch nuclear weapons without higher orders.3

You may say that was way back in 1962. Is predelegation better now? As one DoD source put it: “It’s still sensitive.” Consider that we only know about predelegation in 1962 precisely because it was from long ago and therefore have old leaks and declassifications. At that time there were only three nuclear weapons states. Now there are three times as many, not even including nuclear sharing.

The takeaway should be just how startlingly easy it is to push one of the numerous nuclear buttons. Which is where AI comes in.

AI’s Low-Hanging Fruit

Folks like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have highlighted the risk posed by a superintelligent AI, but what would the destructive mechanism be? A popular example is an incentive misalignment that causes an AI to uncritically turn the world into paperclips because it’s instructed to “make as many paper clips as possible”.

This is certainly a future possibility, and algorithms can break our markets if not our bones. For the near future, however, there is only one system capable of immediate worldwide destruction, and it’s been set on a hair-trigger: Nuclear weapons.

This is especially relevant because an AI catastrophe is more likely earlier than later. Early on, humans will have had less experience with AI and less time to properly align it. At that point, the lowest hanging fruit for AI to kill everyone would be to just push one of the many “Kill Everyone” buttons already conveniently available, rather than trying to invent paperclip nano-factories, etc.4

The below Sankey diagram shows how I rate the probability of nuclear and AI outcomes. The exact numbers aren’t important,5 you can even try playing around with them yourself (appendix).

My reasoning:

1. If there’s a pre-AI nuclear war, there’s a much lower chance of having AI in the 21st century. AI existing at all is conditional on civilization not ending beforehand.6

2. If there’s no 21C catastrophe, I estimate a 50/50 chance of inventing an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

3. If there is an AGI, I estimate a 50/50 chance of it being bad.

4. If it’s bad, it’s most likely to be catastrophic early (because humans will be inexperienced with AI, plus the Lindy effect).

5. If it’s catastrophic early, it’s most likely to use nukes i.e. the only sufficiently powerful system (or at least the lowest-hanging fruit)

Thus most of the AI catastrophe risk involves nukes.

Nuclear Security: Highly Rated, Yet Underrated

Most of us know about nuclear war risk, but we leave it to governments, treaties, and Big Organizations to manage this. It seems more appropriate to protest about climate change or COVID policies than to comment on the fact that nearly everyone reading this has a nuclear weapon pointing at them right now.

For example, this survey of Effective Altruists, a group with a significant number of “Longtermists”:

Nuclear security is the lowest-rated priority.

Why is this? From 80,000 Hours: “Nuclear security is already a major topic of interest for governments, making it harder to have an effect on the situation”.

It’s true that at a high level smart and important people are working on this, but what about the general public? Do you know which political parties have better or worse nuclear security policies? Which politicians? Which countries? Exactly what does better or worse even mean?

Now repeat these questions with “climate change” or “abortion” and it will become clear that nuclear security is hardly in the public consciousness at all.

Solution: Baby-Proof the Nukes

What to do about this? How to address this still-underrated problem? I suggest treating the coming of AI like we would the coming of a new baby.

Clearly you prioritize Baby Safety. You’ll want to teach it how to stay safe: don’t take candy from strangers, look both ways before crossing the street, no unhealthy obsession with paperclips. That said, there’s only so much you can do before the baby arrives. A concrete thing you can do in advance though is baby-proof your home. You soften sharp edges, install baby gates, and make sure dangerous things aren’t just lying around.

Similarly, we must AI-proof our home planet by not leaving a nuclear Sword of Damocles hanging around.7

What does AI-proofing the nukes look like? Two measurable steps and AI-relevant steps:8

• Reduce the total number of warheads to below the threshold needed to cause a catastrophic nuclear winter. Split this quota across nations so that everyone will still have some of our beloved a-bombs, but at least if an AI detonates them all, it will be short of armageddon.9

• No-first-use pledges. This may sound aspirational, but in fact, China and India currently have a no-first-use policy, and Russia had one from 1982 to 1993. Bilateral pledges can be used to reduce the risk between great powers while maintaining most of the strategic advantages of a nuclear state. A no-first-use pledge means that faulty intelligence, misinformation, or impersonation could not initiate a nuclear launch in the absence of a detonation (or possibly a launch warning). Even if a bomb goes off, there will be slightly more cause to investigate before pursuing retaliation.

I know the Nuke-AI angle may seem like an unoriginal take, we did all see Terminator. But risk profiles are usually Pareto distributed, where a small proportion of the factors accounts for a large proportion of the risk. Clichéd as it may be, nuclear war has historically been our biggest existential risk, and as long as thousands of weapons are pointed at one another, it is likely to remain that way.

Making an AGI might change the triggerman, but it’s still nuclear holocaust at the end of the trigger.