Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

I'm *super* excited about genetically modified humans. Looking forward to people who are not only healthier, more cognitively flexible and more physically capable, but also happier and more altruistic

I think it's a genuine possibility that human beings will solve some of our worst, seemingly-intractable cooperation problems as a result of modifying ourselves away from our species baseline on tribalism/aggression

tired: "you can't fix human nature" wired: "we'll see about that"

Gotta start playing god like we're in it to win it

Helping complex, paradoxical humans on the *individual* level is an extremely difficult technical problem - I can only imagine this (and this is how I work) with massive buy-in from the individual. But on larger scales -- we are frequently amazing, and the best is yet to come.

Agreed. Our baseline when operating in structured groups larger than Twitter echo chambers is creating skyscrapers and going to the moon, not tribalism and aggression. We’re the only eusocial mammalian species, and we’re honestly not that bad at it.

I'm not arguing we're not "frequently amazing," but I would say that we're staggeringly bad at certain types of cooperation problems, some of which create legit existential risk

That's very true. Crowds don't have brains the way people do. But this gets me right to my point: understanding and motivating an *individual* is super complicated and thus the buy-in more problematic. But a group, when motivated the right way.... That's some fast cool stuff!