before and after

note: this post went through exactly zero rounds of editing, so forgive me if there are errors or generally unsavory sentence structures. I just wanted to start writing :)

I got my O-1A visa yesterday!

Now, I have to live the rest of my life. I thought I'd write a bunch of word vomit about everything I'm thinking about to sort out the thoughts in my head :)

There are a lot of things I want to do now that the goal I'd been working towards for the last 4 years has come to fruition. Some of the main ones are:

• Get healthy, ripped, and generally Bryan Johnson and Superpower-maxxed
• Non-trivially change the trajectory of Aire and make sure we win
• Reverse and stabilize climate change
• Find a girlfriend

I had the bad habit of mentally putting off going all-in on making myself healthy until I got my O-1, and my internal argument was that I'd have to keep traveling and stressing and until then it wasn't really worth it. Terrible argument, objectively speaking, and I probably shaved a couple years off my life (though I intend to live at least a couple hundred years, if not forever), but it's quite alright and I intend to change this immediately. I'm putting this out there for my own accountability; health-wise, I want to get to the optimal weight for my age and height, get all my biomarkers within the range of the healthiest 18-year-olds (although I'm 19 and will turn 20 three days after the time I'm writing this), and I want to build muscle mass to an ideal range. I would also like to do this for the sake of vanity as well, since I think with the right amount of time I can build myself a great wardrobe but it's not worth it if I'm not fit, too.

Aire sponsored my visa, and I feel immensely grateful. I want to make us win, not just because of how they've helped me, but because I strongly agree with a lot of the principles we've discussed and come around to around how intelligence should be shared. I can't speak more on this, but I hope to in the coming months.

Another thing which continues to bother me is the impending threat of climate change. The current stance of many American technologists as it stands today is that we need to build ASI and have it solve climate change, do longevity and disease research, etc. I think this is a valid direction, but I also think that reversing climate change is a colossal industrial undertaking which cannot be one-shot by a benevolent machine god. The actually viable methods of reversing climate change are limited by scale and physics, and no amount of intelligence can compensate for a late start on this problem. I know the solutions to this problem, and they are viable, but they require a generational amount of capacity build-out to happen. There are a couple trillion dollars in value waiting to be created just from taking a percentage of savings that the large insurance providers and sovereign wealth funds have set aside for climate-related disasters for the next three decades.

And of course, I do want to find a girlfriend. This is well-correlated with getting healthy, though, so it's not particularly top-of-mind for now.

In many ways, my life looks quite similar to when i wrote my Quarterly Shareholder Update last December (as many of my friends have so helpfully pointed out, yes, I have not posted one since. I apologize, but though the point is to track my intrepid adventures, I didn't feel motivated enough because my life felt like a series of unfortunate events for the first half of the year and I wanted to wait until I had good news to share to write more which eventually snowballed into nearly a year's worth of procrastination!), and in many ways, it has changed so, so much. It's a little strange, I do still feel like the same person even though in my mind getting my O-1 felt like the dividing line between the beginning of my life and the start of my true story. I suppose that's what it will be, if I try hard enough over the next few decades :)

I'm glad America has given me the chance of a lifetime. Despite everything, against all odds, it seems the era of American exceptionalism has not ended. I will continue to do my best to contribute to its continued existence, because I know the things I'm able to do here are not possible anywhere else, and it's not even close. I'm truly beyond honored that such an incredibly bureaucratic state maintains the ability to recognize me, a teenager, as someone deserving of recognition as an alien of extraordinary ability. I may have been too harsh on the American bureaucracy, though this perspective is likely also skewed by my survivorship bias.

How much of the world do I have left to see? Will I ever, in my lifetime, watch humanity begin building a Dyson sphere? Will I travel to countries whose cultures stretch far back into the millennia and interact with them before the sands of time erase them from memory? How many books will I read, how many trashy isekais will I watch, how many people will I meet and how many of their stories will I listen to? I think I would like to live to gather and experience as much information as possible. So, in theory, the best way to do all this would be to do it myself, consciously.

I realized that there's a certain method I've been applying in my life where I over-leverage my resources to the absolute fullest to get where I want years before I really predict is likely to happen. I intend to continue, but I think I haven't yet experienced a large enough setback to really make me toe the line carefully. I want to think hard about how to do so without losing my ability to take good bets on myself, but while also making sure I don't lose anything important in the process. A good example here is that I really, really need my friends. I rely on my friends to a ridiculous degree, and I assume there are other people out there who do this. That's what friends are for, after all! I always go out of my way to help my friends too. Will this always work? I'm not sure. I generally apply the principle that people are more willing to help than you'd think, but at what point does this stop holding true? I expect it goes quite far, if I look at myself and think about what I'd be willing to do for my friends. But not everyone thinks that way. I have no answer to this question for now.

Another absolutely vital thing I need to do is read more. I realized almost spontaneously this month as I wallowed in nervousness and boredom in wait for my visa decision, that reading fiction again was solving a lot of the things I wanted to work on myself. I felt, for the past year, as though my mental facilities were degrading in some strange way, and I wasn't sure why. I was clearly capable of doing highly technical, challenging work, but my reasoning and the amount of time I spent applying rational thought to the actions I took everyday seemed to be very muddy. Turns out, it's a pretty simple answer. I was simply drifting away from the practice of being an active player. When I started reading more and began writing again, it all came back to me. My thoughts are more clear (despite how unstructured and relatively wishy-washy my writing may seem), and my ability to reason about things I'm doing by instinct is improving. Hopefully I can improve my meta-reasoning drastically over the next few months (yes I've been reading HPMOR, how could you tell? But also Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang).

I have decided to view my life as a series of opportunity costs. What would be the cost of not being healthy? Ludicrously high, since I can't do anything else if I'm not healthy. What would be the cost of not making friends I love and can do cool stuff with (thankfully, I seem alright on this front)? Still extremely high, since I value company while I go about my day quite a lot. Also for smaller things. What would be the cost of not going to a concert? Assuming relatively little financial impact, I would be losing out on a whole lot of fun and memories. This is, of course, how I justify spending about $5k on concert tickets every year, and that number is not likely to go down ;)

Other things I'd like to do:

• Thiel fellowship/Interact/Paradigm/etc (I want to meet the most interesting people my age and befriend them)
• Get better at hardware and robotics
• Help a certain friend solve alignment
• Visit LA, San Diego, NYC, Chicago, and lots of national parks :)
• Buy an upright piano and get back to playing classical, jazz, anime covers, and of course hosting salon concerts at softmax!
• Write more :D I think I'm going to take slightly less care with the quality of editing of my writing at first just to build up momentum, and write short essays as thoughts come to mind. And then, once it's natural, I'll work on making sure the quality of what I put out gets better over time.

Anyway, that's all I had to say for now. I'm going to write some more next week about some side projects I've been working on and likely a whole bunch of other thoughts as I have them, but until then, you can reach me on twitter! :)