Balaji Srinivasan on medicine & the FDA
Balaji argues the FDA has reversed technological progress in drug development: it minimizes side effects instead of maximizing benefit, is never measured on the drugs it wrongly blocks, and so bears responsibility for the patients who die while drugs wait for approval. He thinks its 20th-century model cannot regulate a world of biohackers, and expects change to come through exit (right to try, off-label use, medical tourism, new jurisdictions) more than through internal reform.
12 points · 1 appearance · 2024
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2021–2025 · changed view
“Really these are two halves of the same coin because what crypto really does is its property and property rights and speech rights and encryption and civil liberties outside of the control of abusive states and if your state by the way is mostly convincing rather than coercing then people don't really need to use crypto quite as much I mean you can use it for lots of other things you'd use it for getting around centralized companies not just states because you you know the power of Facebook or a Twitter is also something you can decentralize with crypto which is very important so even if you don't buy the state argument all the corporate argument is important but the more abusive a state is like a Venezuela the more important crypto is it's kind of that last bulwark the check and balance is actually outside the state.”
2019–2025 · changed view
“Are new countries even possible? We know that we can found new companies like Google out of a garage, and new communities — the three billion person community that is Facebook started out of a dorm room. We know we can start new currencies like Bitcoin from a white paper. But can we start new countries similarly? That's the next step. That's what taking the internet seriously means.”
2021–2026 · changed view
“By analogy we have different categories for cash currency stocks bonds mortgages art et cetera all these scarce assets today the fundamental innovation of the blockchain was the ability to represent scarcity digitally because before blockchains you could you could transfer or rather you could you could copy rather than transfer something right I can copy a file to your hard drive what I couldn't do is transfer it in such a way that you knew I no longer had possession of it.”
2025–2026 · changed view
“So because when they talk about AGI, they talk about AGI as implicitly a unitary thing. we will get to AGI and then it will go to infinity and we'll be like you know raptured singularity kind of thing even though that's implicit and you know the way I because I've been thinking so much about crypto and other kinds of things I was like well there's a different sort of implicit school of thought which is polytheistic agi right do we have rather than the vengeful god do we have war of the gods do we have many superhuman intelligences all from different cultural backgrounds that have the mores and the values imprinted on them. And very early on, I had I had a tweet that said at a minimum there's going to be American AI and Chinese AI. And if we're lucky, there'll be decentralized open-source, you know, crypto style AI because at the time the American AI was woke, highly woke. This is 2022. And I knew I knew that China was going to like stop at nothing to copy it. So I knew we were going to get at least two.”