Nadia Asparouhova (previously writing under Nadia Eghbal) is an independent researcher with widely read essays on a range of topics most recently philanthropic funding including effective altruism and ideas machines, and recent ideas in funding science. She’s written books about the open source community. She has worked in start ups and venture. She set up and ran Helium grants, a microgrant programme. She is an Emergent Ventures fellow.
How are crypto billionaires most likely to change charitable giving Effective Altruism (EA) aside?
“Broadly my worldview or thesis around how we think about philanthropy is that it moves in these sorts of wealth generations. And so, right now we're kind of seeing the dawn of the people who made a lot of money in the 2010s with startups. It's the “ trad tech” or startup kind of cohort. Before then you had people who made a lot of money in investment banking and finance and the early tech pioneers, they all formed their own cohort. And then you might say crypto is the next generation after that, which will eventually break down into smaller sub components for sure but we don't really know what those things are yet, I think, because crypto is still so early and they've sort of made money in their own way.
And so, I think when we talk about how will, let's say, crypto billionaires change the world? The way I often see it discussed in public or in the media is we really hone in on individuals and their individual perspectives on the world. So we'll say, oh, Elon is doing this thing with his money or Jeff Bezos is doing that thing with his money. But I think what gets undervalued or discounted is that all these people are sort of products of their peers and their cohorts and their own generations.
When you have a group of people that have made money in a certain way that is almost by definition it's because it's a new wealth boom. They made their money in a way that's distinctly different from previous generations. And so, that becomes sort of like a defining theory of change or worldview. All the work that they are doing in this sort of philanthropic sense is finding a way to impose that worldview. …what will crypto's contribution to that be? I think it's going to be really different from the startup kind of cohort… for example, I think the trad tech cohort is much more interested in finding and uncovering top talent and in the meritocracy worldview where you have these young unproven founders that went on to start companies that rivaled or took down these huge legacy institutions and that really shapes the view of that sort of startup, a generation, where they saw over and over again that you can see someone who may not have a ton of experience in a topic, but it just has the right combination of ambition or grit, or seeing the world a certain way and they can take down these big legacy institutions. That's really what defines that cohort.
Whereas I think in the crypto kind of generation you might see instead of thinking about the power of top talent, I think they're more about giving people tools to kind of build their own worlds. So it's a lot more diffuse. I don't think it's really about going toe to toe against legacy institutions in the way that trad tech is kind of more obsessed with. It's much more about programmatically ensuring that people have access to tools to build their own worlds or build their own lives for themselves. And so again, you can kind of think about how is that going to play into their public legacy or what they do in the world and I just think it's way too early to really know what crypto's public legacy is going to look like.
I think we are really only in the very beginning stages. It's maybe similar to in the early 2010s where you saw some people who had made money from startups that were doing experiments in philanthropy, but it was so early that comparing that to now is just completely different. And so, yeah, I think we just don't really know yet, but think the answer to that question would just be think about what does crypto actually value that is distinct from what previous generations have valued and then try to extend that into thinking about how might that play into social public values.”
We speak about what she learned from microgranting and reviewing thousands of applications.
We discuss what she thinks about EA influenced philanthropy, and why she is personally pro-pluralism.
Nadia talks about why doesn’t consider herself a creator and the downsides and upsides on he creator economy as currently formed. We discuss parallels with the open source community.
We chat about Nadia’s work as an independent researcher versus her work at start-ups and how they are fulfilling in different ways.
Nadia examines what faith means to her now. We chat on the importance of intuition and the messiness of creative science and learning. We talk about science funding and how we might be the cusp of something new. Nadia expresses optimism about the future as we discuss possible progress stagnation.
On a more personal note, we chat about how Nadia was a vegetarian and how and why she changed her mind. But also that she could not be a complete only carnivore either. We discuss the importance of family stories that shape us and the role the stories of her grandmother played in her life.
We play over-rated under-rated:
Effective Altruism
Miami
Crowdfunding
Toulouse
Newsletters
Katy Perry
Nadia talks briefly about a seed of an idea around anti-memetics. Nadia ends with her advice to others. Follow your curiosities.
Nadia’s website is here. You can follow her on Twitter @nayafia and newsletter. There is a video, if captions are easier for you to follow (pictures only of me). Available where you get your podcasts or below (or aobve in the embedded player).
PODCAST INFO
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo
Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh
Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh
Transcript (only lightly edited)
Ben Yeoh (00:35): Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking with Nadia Asparouhova. Nadia is a brilliant independent researcher. She's written books about the open source community. She's worked in startups. Her essays are widely read. She's given away money with microgranting and is an emergent ventures fellow. Nadia, welcome.
Nadia (00:55): Thanks for having me.
Ben Yeoh (00:56): I read that you hate repeating yourself, so I hope I don't have to make you do too much of that given all the excellent essays you've written on your blog, but starting with the microgranting, I am interested in your view on what you have learned now from your experience with the program, maybe what projects or people did you find the most impactful to fund? And I think you ended up thinking independent research or independent research was a good area to fund, then you ended up being an EV fellow yourself. So I'd be interested to know how your thinking has evolved on microgranting.
Nadia (01:28): Yeah, it's a great question. I think I ended up gravitating towards independent research just because it was an area that I was interested in. So, the impetus for the helium grants was basically just saying why aren't more people just giving away small amounts of money from their own personal income and seeing what happens in the world because maybe a small amount of money-- So, the original grants were $5,000 and then a thousand dollars. Maybe that small amount of money can get someone to do something they otherwise wouldn't have done before and that came from my own experience from my first year out of college where I got a grant from a foundation to do my own research and that set me down this whole different career path, I think, than if I had just gotten a normal job out of college because it made me realize it was possible for me to pursue my own curiosities and design my own projects and then just sort of find ways to fund them and that is basically how I've structured the rest of my career.
Nadia (02:28): So, I wanted to, I guess, impart that worldview onto other people through the grants. And yeah, I think it was a really helpful experience to see that actually affect some of the people that I gave grants away to, and some of whom I still keep in touch with. There's definitely a lot of noise that you get as well and I think maybe one of the things I learned when I first started, I just kind of said, these grants are no strings attached. Turns out if you're just trying to give money away on the internet, no strings attached, a lot of people will flock in with a lot of ideas on how you should give your money away and so I think maybe starting from that sort of idealistic position of I just want to fund your great ideas to having to narrow it down a little bit more, just to sort of manage the inflow of applications that I was getting and just help set the right tone because in the end I realized that even though I wanted to be as wide reaching as possible, I am only human, I'm the person processing the applications and there are things that prefer to look for or not look for. And so, I don't want to waste other people's time either. So I think it was helpful to kind of see the idealism meet pragmatic reality in some ways, if only for my own sort of sanity managing applications.
Ben Yeoh (03:58): Sure. How many did you get in, I don't know, a six month period when it was all flying?
Nadia (04:03): Oh gosh.
Ben Yeoh (04:03): Or even a year? Like a couple of hundred types of things.
Nadia (04:07): I'd have to go back and look at the numbers. It was definitely in the thousands.
Ben Yeoh (04:10): In the thousands. Wow. That's the price of being a bit too famous.
Nadia (04:15): Yeah, and I didn't really expect it. I think the first time I posted it, there weren't really that many other microgrant programs like that at the time, I think. And so, I got a lot of inbound and then I just set up a mailing list and then would sort of pay people. I ran it quarterly, I think, and had a rolling application and yeah, it just got to be a lot to manage. And then I would also, you know, I only had so many grants to give away, so I think it's good on the other end to sort of help set expectations and just kind of manage who's coming in.
Ben Yeoh (04:50): Sure. I don't think Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures get thousands or at least it didn't in maybe its early days, it probably does now. I'm interested, how did you find the experience being, I guess on the other side, applying for, I guess it's a little bit bigger than a microgrant and maybe my second part to the question is obviously Tyler with Daniel Gross has written this book on interviewing and talent and questions, but what question would you ask Tyler if it was the other way around and he was applying for the EV grant
Nadia (05:21): Oh, I have to think about that one. I don't know. I mean, I think the thing that I'd be looking for in anyone applying for a grant is it should be something that is tickling your curiosity so much that you just-- I guess, another way of saying this is, there are a lot of things you can do with your career that pay a lot more money than getting [grants]. I feel like grants are there to sort of fill a little bit of a gap where you can't really-- there's no other sort of path for you to figure out how to scratch this itch or go down this little rabbit hole that has just been sort of bugging you for a while. Whether it's a side project or whether it's a full-time thing. I think seeing evidence of that in someone who's applying for a grant, regardless of what the grant is, is what kind of tips me over the line of, oh, this is something you've been thinking about for a really long time, and this grant is going to help get you over the line. One of the things that was surprising to me about helium grants, at least, was it's often not even about the money itself. I've heard some people say that about emergent ventures as well who've received grants and that's probably true for myself as well, where sometimes it's just about getting external validation or giving you excuse to think about something that on your own, it kind of gets relegated to the bottom of your to-do list or something like that. And so, yeah, it's often strangely not even really about the amount of money that's being given.
Ben Yeoh (07:01): Yeah. Someone's telling you your idea is valuable, you are not crazy, we back you, you should go for it. I think there is a lot of truth to that. I think I would maybe ask him one of his own questions about what his most irrational thought that he might believe to be true is, but it is quite interesting on that. Your recent essay ideas machine looks at effective altruism EA and philanthropic giving. I have a question from Tyler on this a little bit before we get into the EA and his question is how are crypto billionaires most likely to change charitable giving EA aside? So I kind of think this is interesting on the whole machine idea, but maybe there is this new class of different crypto billionaires. Obviously we have the future fund, which is more EA aligned, but they might well think about giving differently. Do you have any intuitive sense about what might happen there?
Nadia (08:02): Yeah, definitely. Although I think I could probably talk about this quite at length.
Ben Yeoh (08:07): Go for it.
Nadia (08:08): Broadly my worldview or thesis around how we think about philanthropy is that it moves in these sorts of wealth generations. And so, right now we're kind of seeing the dawn of the people who made a lot of money in the 2010s with startups. It's the “ trad tech” or startup kind of cohort. Before then you had people who made a lot of money in investment banking and finance and the early tech pioneers, they all formed their own cohort. And then you might say crypto is the next generation after that, which will eventually break down into smaller sub components for sure but we don't really know what those things are yet, I think, because crypto is still so early and they've sort of made money in their own way.
And so, I think when we talk about how will, let's say, crypto billionaires change the world? The way I often see it discussed in public or in the media is we really hone in on individuals and their individual perspectives on the world. So we'll say, oh, Elon is doing this thing with his money or Jeff Bezos is doing that thing with his money. But I think what gets undervalued or discounted is that all these people are sort of products of their peers and their cohorts and their own generations.
.
Nadia (09:31): And so, when you have a group of people that have made money in a certain way that is almost by definition it's because it's a new wealth boom they made their money in a way that's distinctly different from previous generations. And so, that becomes sort of like a defining theory of change or worldview. All the work that they are doing in this sort of philanthropic sense is finding a way to impose that worldview. And so, what will crypto's contribution to that be? I think it's going to be really different from the startup kind of cohort and I've written about [that]. I can go into it as well if you'd like, but for example, like I think trad tech cohort is much more interested in finding and uncovering top talent and in the sort of like meritocracy worldview where you have these young unproven founders that went on to start companies that rivaled or took down these huge legacy institutions and that really shapes the view of that sort of startup, [this] kind of generation, where they saw over and over again that you can see someone who may not have a ton of experience in a topic, but it just has the right combination of ambition or grit, or seeing the world a certain way and they can take down these big legacy institutions. That's really what defines that cohort.
Nadia (11:01): Whereas I think in the crypto kind of generation you might see instead of thinking about sort of like, yeah, the power of top talent, I think they're more about giving people tools to kind of build their own worlds. So it's a lot more diffuse. I don't think it's really about going toe to toe against legacy institutions in the way that trad tech is kind of more obsessed with. It's much more about sort of like programmatically ensuring that people have access to tools to build their own worlds or build their own lives for themselves. And so again, you can kind of think about how is that going to play into their public legacy or what they do in the world and I just think it's way too early to really know what crypto's public legacy is going to look like. I think we are really only in the very beginning stages. It's maybe similar to in the early 2010s where you saw some people who had made money from startups that were doing experiments in philanthropy, but it was so early that comparing that to now is just completely different. And so, yeah, I think we just don't really know yet, but I think we would expect-- I think the answer to that question would just be think about what does crypto actually value that is distinct from what previous generations have valued and then try to extend that into thinking about how might that play into sort of social public values.
Ben Yeoh (12:39): That's really interesting. So it's this idea that perhaps the world building element, which seems to come with crypto perhaps might enter the thinking, whereas your point was with the kind of tech startup Silicon valley basis, they were searching for talent and that type of thing which has kind of influenced their thinking. I hadn't thought of it like that. That's quite interesting. You asked the question also within your essay about why there are not more ideas machines, but I was unclear if you actually answered that question to your satisfaction. You came up with quite a lot of other ideas machines, which have kind of started going. Do you have a clearer view now maybe with some feedback on why there are not more and where that would be going?
Nadia (13:27): I mean, I guess, and part of the impetus for that essay is that I think to some extent effective altruism has had a little bit of a monopoly on idea machines in that, yeah, if you are someone who has an interesting idea that doesn't quite fit into the typical sort of startup machine, if we can call it that the only place for you to go is [EA] and try to convince them that your cause is interesting. I think the answer might just be as simple as there's a lot more capital slashing around now than there was before. And so, in the past we were sort of, and I kind of touched on that in the essay of, yeah, there's just so much more capital available and so many different people now that are controlling that capital that you don't kind of have to be forced into the same machine to get your ideas heard. So I actually do feel optimistic that this is going to be very different. It is already now different and is only going to be more different in the next few years, but I think we are starting to see more and more idea machines crop up. But yeah, I think the answer might just be simple, but there's just way more money now than there was 10 years ago.
Ben Yeoh (15:05): Sure. That makes sense. A lot of it is driven by the cash available. You talk about, or you seem to argue for a pluralistic view of the world that there are many types of giving or philanthropy that we might be interested in and I was interested what areas of giving or impact do you really rate, which don't really fall under an EA framework that you'd be interested that people should think about giving to, or spending their time on?
Nadia (15:36): I'm not sure that-- I get asked that sometimes, but I guess, I'm not sure that my opinion really matters that much to be honest because I am sort of pro pluralism. I think I'm oddly sort of agnostic on what people actually do with their money and I've never really resonated with this concept of doing good. I don't even know what good means. I think it means something different to everyone. So, what I mostly care about is that more people are experimenting and doing things right and that was again, sort of what was driving-- Writing that essay about idea machines was just like-- effective altruism is great, I personally don't resonate with its ethos, but like why aren't there more people trying experiments like that? That is the concerning question to me. So yeah, I think it's more about just wanting more people to be experimenting with more things.
Ben Yeoh (16:37): Sure. I think for me it's part of the kind of impact on systems and particularly the power of art, which I guess because some of it's got utilitarian roots, they somewhat dismiss. Although I think you noted this, for instance, the future fund has got a little bit of thinking about, well, what the power of media and arts and books and that type of thing can do for that type of movement. So maybe it will evolve again. And it seems to me you write, you blog, you do research that in a way you are part of the so-called creator economy, even if it's not readily understood by everyone by that term, but your work is kind of more open ended and less transactional than say social media creators who are trying to have to earn a living just via their channel or something. And you've also touched on your work about the importance of rituals and things like that. So I'd be interested in your evolving thoughts on what it means to be a creator today and how you think of yourself and whether you, do you think of yourself as part of that creative community and what that means?
Nadia (17:42): I guess by the book, I probably fit into the category of creators. I don't think I think of myself in that bucket and I'm not exactly sure why. I think I may have touched on this a little bit in this essay about sort of creator economy and my qualms with the concept of creators at least the way that they kind of look today. So, people will call me a writer for example and I don't really identify with that term either, because I think it feels like this terminal state of I exist to write versus I just think of myself as someone who's just driven by curiosity and I want to explore things, but for me, the writing and the research is all about trying to understand a question that has been bugging me for a really long time. And then once I've figured out I want to go do something about it, or I want to figure out how to translate that into action. I think getting to hung up on a sort of creator as terminal state can make people lazy or at least that's my fear of it is that you just sort of end up-- Like when you know that you're being rewarded just for thinking out loud or for your ideas or for whatever, you're kind of just like-- it's very low cost to you to kind of just like spit ideas out and I think a lot of creators or writers have had this strange of experience of realizing that it's almost a little bit easy to sort of game the system if you really wanted to.
Nadia (19:47): You start to notice the things that you can say online that will get you the clout and the attention if you really wanted it. You start to see the same sort of pattern of like yeah, just sort of attention that you can get and it can sort of soil the experience a little bit, I think, or at least that's my experience of it because it's like, well, I could just say, you know, I could just keep spitting out these things kind of mindlessly and people will pay attention to it, but that's not actually rewarding. And so, I think that's maybe what I want to fight against is feeling-- I always want to feel like the work I'm doing is rooted in action and not just sort of creating for the sake of people to consume content and maybe that's just a cope. I'm not really sure, but that's sort of how I think about it.
Ben Yeoh (20:43): Yeah. I think you did touch on that and that's the kind of transactional nature, you can kind of game the algorithm, or I guess you even see, like, I think one of the most successful YouTubers ever is Mr. Beast and he spent a lot of time figuring out what makes a great video on YouTube and obviously he's very successful and things like that, but there is an element which feels a little bit transactional, whereas your work is quite a much more open ended than that. But I do think that if you kind of consider well writing or being, say an essayist you do write essays and they are wonderful and thought provoking and all of that. So, I think that in some ways that is what it means to be a writer, even if you haven't got the transactional part of it and maybe, like you say, you've kind of gone down a, not quite patronage, but like a grant fellow type route in order to keep that thing alive rather than to having go a more transactional. And I think that's interesting because it seems to me that it's almost a thread that you can pull out from maybe some of your thinking around open source communities and being around that for so long.
Ben Yeoh (21:56): So, I'm kind of interested in that since your book, many of your insights still seem to be true, that for instance a small number of dedicated people maintain much of the open source code and what it is to be that community within that. But do you see any resonance there between your work and open source and how you're working kind of in public today? And is there anything maybe different around how you think about those types of communities since your book was published?
Nadia (22:23): Yeah. I definitely see that they're parallels between how open source works and how creator economy more generally works, which was part of the impetus for writing the book. And yeah, I think I've just sort of continued to see that play out like a huge thread that had not quite fully hit its stride at the time hat working in public was published was just sort of the explosion of web three and dows and like all these sort of new experiments in organizing creativity, I guess. So, I think if I were to write the book again today, I would absolutely include a lot more of that. There just weren't as many examples to draw from. I don't think web three even was a term people were using by the time that that book was published. So it's been cool to see it play out in all these different ways that I had not even fully covered in that book, but I still think like open source as a north star for me of like something that has been around for a while and that we have had the chance to see play out for, let's say, 20 plus years is a really just like yeah, helpful example to make sense of everything that's happening right now and all these different new incentive models and ways of people getting paid and doing things.
Nadia (23:53): In terms of its relevance to my own life or my own work, I mean, I think even probably one of the strange sort of paradoxes about open source developers is a lot of them have full-time jobs as software developers, not doing open source. They're just sort of working a typical software engineer kind of job, and then they do their open source on the side. But the thing that they're best known for is their open source work, which is on the side and I kind of feel that way about my own sort of writing and research as well, cause I mean, in the times when I'm more in full time writing research mode, as you've said, I'll do grants or contracts or whatever to sort of fund that lifestyle or just do it out of my own savings. But then I do go and work at startups as well. But I don't feel like I'm known for the work that I do at startups. To me, that's sort of the translating it to action component of research where I've already spent some time trying to deeply understand a topic and then I'm going to go work somewhere to put those ideas into practice.
Nadia (25:05): But I would hear from open source developers, some version of this, you know, it's really strange that the thing that I'm actually getting paid to do full time is not the thing that I'm actually known for. Why am I not getting paid for the thing that I'm actually known for? And I think I feel that way a little bit too around, yeah, I don't think people associate me with being a product manager at a startup, for example, they associate me with the work I've done that I don't necessarily get paid for that is like writing on the side or the periods in which I'm doing research.
Ben Yeoh (25:37): Sure. How did that contrast with having a more regular-- cause you did work for a startup, well, I guess two startups for a time? I guess you found that fulfilling but in a different way, but actually independent research is kind of where it went for you.
Nadia (25:52): Yeah. It is definitely very fulfilling in a different way. I mean I can only be in my head for so long. It's very different to get to work with a team and in every case where I've gone to work at a company it's also this really wonderful-- You can kind of sit in a corner and say, I think the world should work like this, but then when you're actually trying to make the world work like that you'll hit harsh realities of why things don't work the way that you expected and I think it's really good. And I've noticed this pattern in other independent researchers that I know, I think a lot of the reason why people who become independent researchers, like the reason why they don't go into academia is because academia is much more sort of sequestered away from practice. You really are spending time in the system of ideas and you don't get the chance to really translate your ideas into practice. You're just fully in academic mode. Whereas with independent research, you actually have the opportunity to sort build your life the way that you want and I've noticed that other independent researchers who are also very interested in this idea of both research, married with practice and that definitely is something that I care a lot about too.
Nadia (27:11): And so, yeah, I think being able to work at a company and sort of see your ideas play out and realize why certain things don't work the way that you expect or, oh yeah, that definitely works the way that I expect or whatever it is. I think that can be very rewarding and then, yeah, again, just sort of on the personal level, just being able to work with people and collaborate with people in that way is yeah, just being part of a team shipping things can be really satisfying. All of that is very fulfilling in a different way.
Ben Yeoh (27:44): Cool. Yeah, that's kind of really interesting seeing that balance, all those differences. And I guess it's part of like the pluralistic view of life that you can get different things from different areas all at the same time. Great. You created a personal reflection on faith with Henry Drew on a podcast where I think you concluded that maybe you had a little bit more faith or call it spirituality than perhaps you thought you had. Have your feelings around faith changed since then and what does faith mean? Or perhaps in a pluralistic view, some of the stuff that you might not think rationally in the mathematical world now mean to you?
Nadia (28:29): So yeah, I was just talking about this with my husband this weekend. I mean, some aspect of that has not changed in the sense of yeah, I think I'm very driven by and interested in the things that are sort of ineffable in the world. I always think about my friend Michael Nielsen, who I think this used to be his Twitter bio. I don't really know why I associate this phrase with him, but maybe it's still his Twitter bio, 'searching for the numinous' and he's, I think similarly, just sort of looking for that thing that creates that feeling of maybe being touched by God or having just like a strong feeling that you don't necessarily know how to explain. Let's put it that way. And I think that drives a lot of people who are interested in science and technology as well. I think there's this false divide that is placed between, let's say, science and art or science and religion. But a lot of scientists that I know are deeply moved by something spiritual or this sort of wonder about the universe. I don't think that's universally true, but think it's more true than it may often seem. And I feel like that drives so much of my work when people sort of ask, why do you choose the topics that you're interested in? Or how do you know what you want to pursue in research?
Nadia (29:58): I never have a great answer to that. To me, it's just sort of like, I have such a strong feeling or this thing has sort of gripped me or taken a hold of me and I have to just follow it to the end. I don't even have a choice in the matter. And to me that is sort of like spiritually motivated or moving. So yeah, I think that has been very consistent in me throughout my entire life but there's multiple roles that I think religion or faith or spirituality can play in someone's life and something that is definitely newer for me since exploring that that podcast series with Henry is, I think I've become more interested in ritual and tradition. Especially as we're talking about having kids now and thinking about what are the traditions that you want to pass down to your kids? And I think religion can provide a lot of continuity in that and it doesn't have to only drive from religion. There are obviously many different ways that you can find rituals in your life but I think that's one place that it can come from and that's something that I'm starting to explore and understand and appreciate more now than I did before.
Ben Yeoh (31:16): I think it's really good intuition to follow that first impulse that you have, which is why I'm putting you kind of in this bucket of creativity, because I think that's an impulse that a lot of creatives have. And for instance, I think accountants are sometimes quite creative, not in the bad sense, but they're having to follow some sort of intuition. And I think there is some research in the early science or science of progress. I can't remember the exact researcher, but he called two types of science progress, I think S1 and S2 where S2 was the formal scientific discoveries that you have, which you put in equation, which are declamatory statements that you can argue about and go into the cannon. But before you get into S2, you actually arrive in a state of science or creativity, which he called S1 and in that is much more messy, intuitive. You have a lot of individual stories or anecdotes, like how Einstein thought of relativity and all of this before, where it's really messy and unformed by its nature. You haven't got a declaratory piece of algebra that you can debate yet and actually a lot of the stuff in S1 is very interesting and less well discovered. And I think what you described there about following an intuition or a curiosity, or however it might be, is where a lot of progress happens in that S1 space.
Nadia (32:44): Yeah, definitely--
Ben Yeoh (32:44): So riffing on that-- go on.
Nadia (32:46): That definitely resonates.
Ben Yeoh (32:47): So riffing on that, I mean, there has been much talk about this science of science or progress, and you've written about science funding and tech over the last decade. But I'm quite interested to know where do you think it will go in the next decade? And maybe if there was anything special about what's happened in the last decade? I guess, you noted a lot of things which happened just in the last one or two or three years, arc Institute, different ways of science funding. But I was wondering, what you saw over the last 10, what does it mean for the next 10 and was there anything special that we've just gone through?
Nadia (33:25): Yeah, it's hard. I feel like I'll have a much stronger intuition on this in maybe two years because I really do feel like we are just on the cusp of something that has immediately turned. And so, it's so hard to know how it's going to play out. But I think one thing I feel like right now, the conversation in science funding is more about, there's a bunch of new tech wealth that has come in that's more from what I call like the trad tech or startup kind of cohort and it's now budding up against sort of the legacy ways of funding science, even within science philanthropy, but then also just sort of broadly science institutions. And so, the tension that I think people are sort of noticing or seeing is with this new tech wealth coming up against sort of like the old way of doing things. Whereas I think in the next decade, that's probably going to shift one more notch downstream where I think the tension we will be seeing is between sort of trad tech ways of thinking about funding and the sort of crypto influenced ways of thinking about funding.
Nadia (34:44): I feel like we are seeing that tension build and build now between the startup cohort and the crypto cohort in many different ways and I think it's hard to know really like what direction that's going to go in, but I think the question might become less about do I get government funding for my project versus take this sort of funny money from a bunch of weird startup people. It might be even more extreme than where it's like, do I go work at an Institute at all or do I do one of these crazy science dell things or something like that? And again, I think it's probably important to zoom out of all that and say all these experiments are really at the fringe. There is a whole world of science that fundamentally doesn't even care about any of the stuff that is happening. These are all very small drops in the bucket of more broadly how science is done but I think if I were taking a snapshot of it right now, I think people are vaguely aware there are these [Inaudible:00:35:49] initiatives that are happening and that people are experimenting, but it seems like really fringe and just sort of like who knows what's going to happen there, whereas maybe a decade from now we'll look and say, huh, like some of those experiments are actually starting to play out and people will be taking it a little bit more seriously.
Ben Yeoh (36:06): Sure. Do you have an intuition about what one or two of those might work out? Because I guess in some ways, this is the really interesting part because we haven't had the decade, so we don't know which of those, whether it's a dell thing or something else, or are you so uncertain that you wouldn't want to make a little forecast?
Nadia (36:26): Yeah. I still feel really uncertain. I think crypto land has proven itself to be so unpredictable in so many ways and it moves and changes so fast that it's hard to know, but I think that just broadly that the things that seem a little bit radical right now might, at least some of those might work out and start to seem like viable ways of funding your research or organizing your research or disseminating it.
Ben Yeoh (36:52): Sure. That seems fair enough. So, there's a lot of debate or I guess evidence that science or productivity or science may have slowed down in the last decade or two and now just recently there's been some sort of counter arguments that maybe there's some areas which have stopped slowing down perhaps in biotech and some other areas or maybe even increased again. And I think it's kind of interesting that if we are saying that there's an old blob of how science was funded and that was ticking along, and we're still getting some discoveries, but maybe at higher cost or lower rate, but you've now got this kind of tail end of more radical, or they seem radical because they're new that actually that might spark a little bit more innovation or different innovation, cause it's going to come from something that we haven't done. And maybe my kind of intuition is that's perhaps a glimmering of where we're seeing that actually this productivity is at least flat lining or maybe going to increase in a couple of areas, say AI and say biotech. Do you think there might be any truth to that kind of idea? Or do you think this is just such a small amount and it's so uncertain who knows what it does and do you sense that we have had this same slowdown in productivity or progress or science that people are kind of envisaging on the macro level from your experience in startup world and speaking to open source communities and the like?
Nadia (38:23): I don't know that I buy that progress has been slowing down or stagnating in any shape or form. I think I'd probably just say I'm fundamentally somewhat unopinionated on it because I just prefer to look forward rather than backwards. But in as much as any opinion I might have about it, I feel like, I don't know, it just doesn't-- I think I'm just fundamentally very optimistic about human civilization and I really, I don't know. I believe that we're capable of so many great things and I've just never really had this sort of like what I feel is a bit of a pessimistic view of us not doing as much as we could be. So yeah, I think my interest in a lot of these topics comes less from a place where science is slowing down or we need to sort of improve progress because it's stagnating somehow. I'm sort of unconcerned with it and I'm more about-- I just want to make sure that all the barriers are removed and we are moving as fast as possible to the future. But yeah, and maybe that's just a matter of aesthetics of what is the fundamental driving reason to get to the same outcome or the same area of interest but yeah, I don't know. I'm very, very optimistic that people are doing great things and I don't know, I have a very rosy view of the world in that sense.
Ben Yeoh (39:56): Well, someone told me there's a quote that, something like a pessimist never builds anything. Something like that. So maybe it's one of those things that even if it is true, we should fool ourselves into thinking something else because we build a better world that way.
Nadia (40:13): Yeah, totally.
Ben Yeoh (40:13): Even if it's not quite true. I was intrigued by something you wrote about how you were vegetarian and then not and I guess this is personal for me because I worry a little bit having met some [EAs], a lot of them are very into animal welfare and I had wondered whether not being a little bit more veggie was a kind of deep, moral failing of my own, or maybe not deep moral failing, but some sort of moral failing and every year I kind of eat a little bit less. Although, it's kind of strange, cause it's not really animals., I don't really eat octopus anymore because I've seen all of this research about how kind of clever and curious and alien they are, but it doesn't feel consistent cause I still eat pork and things like that. But I was kind of interested that you sort of went the other way and I'm meeting a few people who go the other way and said actually, you know what, it isn't too big a deal. Not having over thought that, has it been a big thought that you've had, or it was just kind of like, oh, well, it's time being vege is not a big issue.
Nadia (41:17): Yeah. I don't think I've ever been asked this before in an interview, so yeah, I'll think about it now. Yeah, I guess for context I became a vegetarian when I was, I think, 11 or 12 and then I remained a vegetarian for about 10 years and then I started eating meat again and now I eat a lot of meat. I even tried being a carnivore for about six months, but it was really hard to just eat steak all the time. And so yeah, I mean reasons why-- Originally, I became a vegetarian out of concern for animal welfare. I think I literally saw a pita something on the internet when I was 12 and I was like, oh my God, I can't do this. I mean, there were just so many-- it's funny cause it's really hard to know where to draw the line and I think being a vegetarian for a decade kind of gave me an appreciation for how there just really is no perfect black and white. I remember, cause I would be on all these vegetarian forums and stuff and there are some people that are really extreme. There are people that also troll vegetarians. All the fun of the internet, culture, early internet culture but I remember seeing things like, you know, there are field mice that are being killed in the fields when you're growing your plants or something. It's like, well, what are you going to do about those mice that are dying? It's impossible to get to a point. And then of course drawing a line between like vegan and vegetarian and then even within vegans, it's like, do you eat honey or not? Or do I wear leather products or not? If I'm a vegetarian, should I not be wearing leather?
Nadia (42:55): There's just so many things and I think at some point I think it just made me realize there is no perfect answer. One of the things that I felt I would run into a lot as a vegetarian was sometimes it's hard, you go to a restaurant and there's-- I've been places where there's literally nothing on the menu that doesn't have meat in it. And so, you end up being like, well, I need to eat something. So you order something and then you take the meat off and it's like, well, but now I've paid for a meal that I did order the meat, I just didn't put it in my body. But didn't I basically just still buy into the system and which isn't it almost worse that I'm now throwing away the meat and it's been completely unused instead of just eating it myself. So I just felt like there were just so many nuances and I think my interest in starting to eat it again, I was just kind of like, well, maybe I can-- So, I started eating meat again when I was whatever, maybe 10 years later, but then it was a very, very slow reintroduction of meat. For most of that time I think it was like, I have a meat of the month where I eat meat once a month and have it just kind of be a special kind of treat or I will eat it in this situation where I know that the animal was treated really well, very high bar for the meat I'm going to eat. And then I was like, only eating seafood and it was just sort of like slowly, slowly, slowly.
Nadia (44:26): I still don't really eat pork very much and also I didn't grow up eating very much meat, I guess. So, I still am a little bit, you know, I don't eat tons of certain kinds of meat and things like that but yeah, I don't even really know where I'm going with this, but now I'm just kind of going down memory lane on vegetarianism. But, I just think that maybe the TLDR is it's pretty gray and pretty difficult I think to have a perfect answer, to live this perfectly moral animal cruelty free life. Everything is tied to everything and everyone needs to figure out where to draw that line for themselves. And for me, my personal health improved drastically when I started eating meat again and so I felt like that was the best choice for me.
Ben Yeoh (45:19): Sure. That makes a lot of sense. Even going to being a complete carnival, which is maybe too much and actually completely fits into your pluralistic kind of worldview, which seems to be shaping and I'm also super glad from my point of view that I managed to ask you a unique question.
Nadia (45:38): First time thinking about that.
Ben Yeoh (45:39): Yeah. Somewhat and it is really complicated. So, from an EA point of view, you can actually argue for instance that beef, that cattle, if they're well treated and they only have one bad day has a lot less what they would call suffering risk or suffering with it. On the other hand, environmentalists will say, well, we have a lot of beef consumption, again depending on how you do it, that's very bad for methane and stuff like that. So, it's a tricky individual trade off like you say. Maybe sticking slightly with the personal as well on this one I picked up that it seemed to be that your grandmother was quite important in your life or at least seemed to have been an influence about where sort of she came from and what she was doing. I was wondering whether you had a reflection on what she might have taught you or that feeling of what you learned from knowing about your grandma's life.
Nadia (46:42): So my grandmother actually died before I was born. So, I did not meet her at all but the stories I know of are through my father, her son. I guess, I hadn't really thought about it, but there's the stories that get passed down throughout a family, of course, and I think something that I've really taken from both my dad and from the stories about his mother is just this sense of adventure and embracing uncertainty. I really get that from both my parents since they both came to the US, immigrated from other places and I think in both cases, I just really admire how-- My mom came to the US when she was, I think 29 and just basically upended and I can't imagine as a 29 year old sort of just upending her entire life and just moving to a different country and being like cause I just want something different is I think pretty cool and my grandmother similarly, my dad's mom. So my dad's side is Persian. So my grandmother's Persian and they left Iran when my dad was five or something and moved to Germany and nobody spoke German. My mom or my grandmother spoke a lot of different languages, but when she came to Germany, she didn't know anything. She was this older woman with two small kids and didn't speak the language, just had to figure everything out.
Nadia (48:18): This was also kind of post-world war II. Germany was not exactly a place that people are dying to move to and she just sort of, at least the way that my dad has sort of told stories about her and my relatives, she kind of just embraced it and was like, yeah, I don't know, I'm going to watch a lot of German TV, I'm going to try to make German friends and just figure out how to speak this language and at that point she must have been in her late forties, I want to say mid to late forties. And so again, just sort of imagining-- I think this theme has actually persisted throughout a lot of my parents and my extended family, just cause immigrant life, people's lives get upended by revolutions and things you don't really expect but I think, yeah, this sort of theme that has captivated me about a lot of my extended family has just been one day your life completely changes as you know it and I think we associate that level of sort of high intensity change with your teenage years or your early twenties or a time when you're kind of finding yourself. But other cases it's like, yeah, you're in your forties, you're in your fifties and suddenly everything you know is completely wiped away and you just kind of show up and have to start over and just embracing that uncertainty with this cheerfulness and saying I'm just going to figure it out. That's the way it is.
Nadia (49:44): I think that's the perspective that I really cherish and want to embrace in my own life. Anytime my life has seemed hard or there's something very, yeah, there's just been a lot of change happening in my life, I just kind of think about some of my other relatives where I'm like they have been through way worse and they got through it and it was fine. So I'll be fine too.
Ben Yeoh (50:07): Yeah. I think that family folk law, the stories we tell ourselves are really important in shaping how we are and I did wonder about that because of coming through that. So, is there a Zoroastrian influence running through your family as well then?
Nadia (50:21): There is not.
Ben Yeoh (50:22): Do you want to play a short overrated underrated then, maybe perhaps in honor of Tyler of a few things for that and then we'll just have a couple of questions.
Nadia (50:34): Sure. Sounds good.
Ben Yeoh (50:35): Sure. So you can pass, overrated, underrated, or you can just make some sort of comment. A couple of those we've already touched on. We'll start on the big one, I guess, effective altruism: overrated or underrated?
Nadia (50:48): Ooh, that's a tough one. I think it's both underrated and overrated. So it's just kind of a cop out but if I really had to pick I'd actually probably say underrated.
Ben Yeoh (50:58): Yeah. I think you could get there. It's probably underrated by those who don't know anything about it and maybe a touch overrated if you are very deeply in it or something like that. How about Miami, overrated or underrated?
Nadia (51:16): Ooh, wow. I guess I'm not very good at this game cause I'm going to just probably say both underrated and overrated for everything. Yeah, I think it's underrated as a real city. I think people associate it as a party city and I do not have that relationship with Miami at all and I love it here. Yeah, I'll just keep it underrated.
Ben Yeoh (51:34): Yeah, maybe underrated, right.
Nadia (51:35): Yeah, maybe just underrated.
Ben Yeoh (51:37): It is, I guess, underrated maybe compared to San Francisco or are you putting them in an equal bucket?
Nadia (51:43): That's where I feel like they're just kind of different. I don't think I have the same sort of density of like, I mean, nothing will-- Now I'm going to sound like an old person, but I'm just like nothing will ever really compare to 2010s San Francisco. That was just such a special time. I don't know that Miami is quite there yet but I do think it's a really wonderful place to live and it has a reputation for being a party capital, which I, again, just completely don't relate to at all. I love Miami because it's filled with sunshine and it feels very restorative and peaceful to be here.
Ben Yeoh (52:16): Yeah. And that's the thing about cities and places. It's also time and place and then actually it's probably time and place and people. In fact, I think you've mentioned something and I think it's really true now that we probably are somehow underinvested in being close to our close friends. I think of this now, I'm in my forties and I kind of feel like I would really love to be in walking distance of a handful of my close friends and we are not because of the way life has come about, but it seems to me that that's often the case and that might be perhaps a moderate mistake that we somehow all make.
Nadia (52:53): Yes, definitely share that.
Ben Yeoh (52:55): So underrated, overrated crowdfunding?
Nadia (53:00): Crowdfunding. Ooh. I do think crowdfunding is overrated. Yeah, I don't know. Again, pluralism, so maybe that's a cop out, but I've seen it work for friends really, really, really well. And so, I think it is absolutely an option that should exist and has transformed many people's lives. I just don't think it's the one panacea that is going to solve everyone's problems in large part because it depends on being able to market yourself really well and having a certain kind of audience and not every type of creativity or creative work is going to fit into that I personally have-- I don't think I've ever used crowdfunding to fund my work. And so yeah, I think it's overrated in the sense that there are other ways to do it.
Ben Yeoh (53:49): Yeah. And do you differ between project crowdfunding or kind of patronage Patrion type crowdfunding?
Nadia (53:57): Sorry, what was the first option?
Ben Yeoh (53:59): First one is where you just get a kind of project done, like a kind of Kickstarter Indiegogo. So you're just funding that as a sort of one time, I guess, versus this kind of patronage system, which I guess is the modern day incarnation of maybe old patronage. I'm not quite sure because you've got these fellowship grant things. I don't know if there is a difference.
Nadia (54:19): I don't distinguish between the two for the purposes of this particular conversation, because I think in both cases you're having to appeal to a wide set of people and get sort of small amounts of money. I mean patrons still exist. Patrion also exists, but it's also possible to just find a single source of funding.
Ben Yeoh (54:42): Sure. Toulouse?
Nadia (54:45): Toulouse. Oh no, my mother-in-law's going to be listening to this.
Ben Yeoh (54:52): Well then it has to be underrated then.
Nadia (54:54): Yeah. I just came back there, I was there for a week visiting my in-laws. The duck is definitely underrated. I did not know that Toulouse is basically the duck capital of France maybe. I don't know. There's a lot of duck in Toulouse and apologies to my former vegetarian self, but I absolutely love duck. So I was eating duck in every shape and form. Highly recommend going to Toulouse if you like duck.
Ben Yeoh (55:23): Great. Well, and would you family aside, would you like to go back?
Nadia (55:28): I don't know that I had enough of a sense of-- we were kind of doing a lot of family things, so I don't know that I had enough of a sense to have a strong opinion on it.
Ben Yeoh (55:35): Sure. We can go neutral. Newsletters?
Nadia (55:40): Newsletters. Oh boy. Maybe similarly at this point, I think they're just rated.
Ben Yeoh (55:51): Right. Neutral. Fair enough.
Nadia (55:53): Yeah. I would've said they were underrated maybe two years ago, three years ago and now I think they're appropriately rated.
Ben Yeoh (56:03): That feels fair. I still think they're underrated by the median person, but then I'm quite--
Nadia (56:08): Yes, actually.
Ben Yeoh (56:09): I started blogging in the first golden age of blogging and I still kind of really miss that and newsletters are sort of a rift slightly on that. Those are days of being a blogger and things like that. Okay. Maybe the last one, the last fun one, Katy Perry?
Nadia (56:28): Katy Perry. Oh boy. I don't know if I've thought about Katy Perry in quite some time.
Ben Yeoh (56:33): Well, yeah, you compared her to Mark Rothko. That's where this comes from.
Nadia (56:40): I'm vaguely remembering. The downside of putting a lot of your life in public is then you say things and you're like, oh geez, did I say that? I did say that.
Ben Yeoh (56:48): You could move on from it.
Nadia (56:49): Yeah, I remember saying this now, saying that people will look at Mark Rothko and kind of be like, I don't understand this guy's work, it's just a canvas that is entirely black or something, where is the art in that? And yeah, similarly with Katy Perry, although now probably updating those cultural references to someone more recent, but people look at, let's just say, any sort of pop star and kind of be like where is the art in that? But I think making it like-- simplicity often sort of hides a lot of the complexity and a lot of the work that had to go into making something look that simple. I think there's a lot of hidden art behind it. So yeah, I'll go with the underrated.
Ben Yeoh (57:32): Yeah. I think that's really interesting and that's why I kind of don't worry about the future of art in a kind of digital world, because art there's a big bunch of our, I don't know quite how much the percentage is, but it's representative. Like you have Duchamp's toilet, right? It's raising all sorts of other things behind the actual surface object and I don't know Katy Perry work that well, but I could see similar that there's a whole creative production, what it means, what it means in the world and that which is beyond just the kind of surface things and songs and things like that.
Nadia (58:07): Mm-Hmm.
Ben Yeoh (58:08): Great. Okay. So just final two or three questions. What do you think is something that you might understand or you think about the world that perhaps others do not?
Nadia (58:22): Ooh. I'm all sort of terrible at these something questions because I feel like my brain all wants to go into a lot of different directions. I don't know that I have any sort of unique insights on the world.
Ben Yeoh (58:38): Really. Fair enough.
Nadia (58:40): But I'll say something that defines how I think. I think I just tend to live a lot in the nuance of things and tend to resist oversimplification of the way the world can be and I think a lot of new ideas and a lot of creative work lives at the intersection of, and this is not a unusual statement but you can see over and over again. A lot of creative work comes from sort of mixing domains or having inspiration from these unlikely places and you kind of combine it with a different idea and you're just mixing and remixing ideas. And so, I think it's just very, very important to remain in that sort of nuanced open-minded kind of place because that's where all the unexpected ideas are going to kind of come from.
Ben Yeoh (59:36): Sure. I think that's maybe not absolutely unique, but not sure everyone thinks like that and I mean, you have an already, I think quite a significant interesting body of work where you have made some of these provocations and you go into things some in depth and now doing independent research. I think that's a particular form of brilliance. So last two questions. Are there any future projects or future thinking you'd like to share?
Nadia (01:00:07): Ooh. I don't know if there's anything I'm ready to share yet. In addition to sort of the interest and looking at kind of these new generations of wealth that we've talked about. I've had a couple little side projects on the brain. I have this piece I've been meaning to write about antiemetics. I don't know if that's a topic you've come across but--
Ben Yeoh (01:00:33): Referencing Girard?
Nadia (01:00:35): A lot of it has been driven by this I guess we call them sci-fi author quantum who wrote this book about anti-memetics and that was at least my first exposure to it. The medics being ideas that spread virally and antiemetic idea is something that is very compelling, but resists being shared. So taboo, for example, would be an example of something antiemetic. I just feel like there's room to explore those ideas on this spectrum of whether they're not just memetic or not. If we say something is not memetic, we think, oh, it's just not compelling. But the ideas that are very compelling, but don't get shared mimetically and so like, why is that and what does that kind of spectrum look like? So I have a lot of messy working notes on it, but I haven't actually taken the time to put together an essay about it, but I'm working on it.
Ben Yeoh (01:01:35): Yeah. Okay. That's really fascinating. I hadn't really come across that concept articulated like that, but that kind of makes some sense, like taboos. Even, I guess, some sorts of, I guess, conspiracy theories or not even right conspiracy theories, secrets, I guess. Some sort of secrets. I guess some sort of process and knowhow is sometimes like that as well.
Nadia (01:01:57): Yes. A lot of different categories to put ground on.
Ben Yeoh (01:02:01): Great. Okay. And then just ending this excellent conversation. Do you have any advice or thoughts for others? This could be life advice or thought advice or maybe advice for those who are thinking of following an independent researcher career path?
Nadia (01:02:18): Yeah. I mean, it sounds maybe simple or obvious, but I just would really encourage people to follow their own curiosities. I think a lot of people have really great ideas, but we often kind of dismiss it as oh, but I'm not really ever going to go down that rabbit hole or that's not realistic thing for me to pursue, but I think one of the most rewarding things about independent research is you get to make your own world exactly as you want it to look and if you take those sort of nagging curiosities or those intuitions, if you actually just take them seriously, instead of dismissing the little voices in your head and you just go all in on them, life kind of just reorganizes around you to make those things possible. At least that has been my experience. So yeah, I would encourage everyone to sort of listen to those little voices in their head and follow their own curiosities.
Ben Yeoh (01:03:17): That's a great note to end on, follow your curiosity. Nadia, thank you very much.
Nadia (01:03:23): Thank you for having me. This is great.
Ben Yeoh (01:03:26): If you appreciate the show, please like and subscribe as it helps others find the podcast.