Open Thread 169

What is Preventing You from Moving to Próspera?

What is preventing you from moving to Próspera?

This is the inaugural Open Thread for the Nooceleration blog, which will be my primary blogging venue for the foreseeable future.

For those new to my work - list of best posts from prior years.

But for now I will also take the opportunity to run over my plans for this blog, and in general.

Blogging

I wrote about my vision for Nooceleration earlier this month. I planned to start writing off the bat, but in between travel to Roatán, intensive networking, and exploring everything Vitalia and Próspera have to offer, the timelines got shifted out a couple of weeks more than I initially planned, but it is what it is.

Anyhow, the blog is officially open now and regular posting will resume now with some of the following in the pipeline:

• I will be developing on my ideas about the Biosingularity and noetic escape velocity (NEV) as central to minimizing the risk of adverse 21C outcomes such as a dysgenics-driven Dark Ages or AI paperclips - and why the path to it needs to route around traditional state and academic institutions, with their sclerotic bureaucracies and lack of vision.

• Series of posts - one of them for Aporia - on the case for network states as a superior political structure to classical nation-states.

• I will soon have a post on 2024 predictions and (hopefully) a new partnership.

• The case for Open Borders (I haven’t actually read Caplan on this so the arguments will be new).

• The case for coupling legalized euthanasia with mandatory cryonics.

• Longread listing rebuttals to all the major arguments against radical life extension (something I started writing in 2018).

• The promised longread on the Elite Human Capital meme (which is not really a meme) developing on Jail is Programmed For All Rightoids.

And much more.

La Ceiba, Honduras.

So What Have I Been Up To Anyway?

Going by recency: As I mentioned in my recent podcast with Richard Hanania I am spending the first 2-3 months of 2024 in Roatán, Honduras at the Vitalia pop-up city, where I have been doing:

• Ongoing longevity and biotech conferences.

• Learning about Próspera so that I can write about it in an informed and value added fashion, as well as the wider world of network states and #DeSci.

• Meeting the sloths and capuchin monkeys.

• Cow brain dissections.

• Scuba diving.

• Vitalia book club.

• Preparing various other projects from an opinion survey of Vitalia attendees to the work on the intelligence enhancement DAO.

• Visits to mainland Honduras and the Morazán ZEDE.

However, all of this is a diversion from the real essence of Vitalia, and that is the community that forms around it. Anyone you bump into on the streets has a common “Gray Tribe” background that tends to be transhumanist, rationalist, social libertarian, and non-Woke/rightoid. Consequently, conversations and social interaction come much easier than in the digital nomad experience while recreating many of the aspects of being embodied within a traditional community. This is something that Vitalia shares with Zuzalu or the Network States conference in Amsterdam, and on that note, while I have no end of theoretical arguments on the superiority of network states to nation-states, it is this psychological lodestar that underpins my conviction psychologically.

On this note, digital nomadism is now something I have some modest experience with, and while 2023 was an unproductive year for intellectual output outside Twitter, it was certainly my most well-traveled one.

• Eight new countries: Montenegro (Zuzalu), Serbia, Hungary, Austria, Slovakia, Czechia, Turkey, Morocco.

• First visit to the Islamic world and an Arab country.

• First true visit to a desert clime (passing through Reno on the way to ski resorts probably doesn’t count).

• Three new network state residencies/citizenships: Zuzalu (ZuPass), Praxis (Steel Visa), and Vitalia.

Now I am in the tropics. On this note, I finally grok the truism of economic history accounts which stressed the centrality of air conditioning to the takeoff of the American South and Singapore. This place is a non-stop hammam even in January.

But more to the point I have a lot more observations on the Balkans, ECE, Turkey, Morocco that would be ample content for the Travel longreads I used to do. However, those posts took up a lot of time, and are not very Nooceleration-adjacent, so they will take a backseat for the time being. Probably just releasing them in the form of bullet point observations at akarlin.com will be the eventual solution. However, the network states observations projects are much more germane to my interests and are something that barely anyone else is currently writing about, so I aim to become one of their premier chroniclers.

Some 2024 Goals

I will avoid making concrete predictions/commitments, since I am historically bad at meeting them and when I start lagging, this just worsens my tendency to “analysis paralysis” and I get even less done than I would have otherwise.

However, to the extent I have aspirations for this year, it is the following:

(1) Develop a conceptual ecosystem around the concept of The Biosingularity - the idea of biological intelligence augmentation through genetic enhancement and other methods as central to avoiding existential risks (in addition to the standard pro-eugenics arguments centered around personal choice and accelerated socio-economic development).

This consists of a three-pronged approach that are all in early progress:

(a) A short book provisionally titled The Biosingularity: The Forking Paths of the 21st Century, which is to essentially be a merger of my existing longform writings such as Apollo’s Ascent and The Age of Malthusian Industrialism. The main inspirations are Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State, the ideological manifesto of this emerging movement, and Jonathan Anomaly’s book Creating Future People, which fulfills a similar role with respect to the ethics of human enhancement.

(b) Getting back into the habit of regular longform blogging.

(c) Setting up a DAO to fund fundamental research in the human intelligence enhancement space and democratize access to investment opportunities in the sphere beyond the VCs. This is, to a significant extent, why I am spending two months at Vitalia.

Otherwise, regarding more personal/self-development goals, these are quite modest:

(a) Travel - Argentina in spring, then probably India or Taiwan. I aim to spend at least 25% of this year in network states.

(b) Languages - Spanish.

(c) Books - The goal is not so much to read more but to get into the habit of reviewing them even if said reviews are short. (The perfect being the enemy of the good is often an appropriate slogan).