Early Life
was born in Moscow in 1988, and spent my early years there and in Volokolamsk. By ancestry, I am about 65% Russian/Slavic, 25% Lak (Dagestan), 3-5% Jewish. In 1994, on account of the post-Soviet collapse of the Russian science sector, my parents left for the West, first staying in Aberdeen, Scotland until 1996, and then in a bleak, post-industrial town in North-West England until 2006/8. Fortunately, it had Europe’s largest bus station, so at least getting out of there was easy after finishing high school.
I wandered about in California for a good decade or so, acquiring a degree in Political Economy from U.C. Berkeley in the process. I did a lot of skiing in this time, visiting Tahoe on most winter weekends while at university. Other interests included the SF Bay Area futurist/transhumanist scene, US-Russian relations, and Chinese language/culture. I liked California a great deal more than the UK, but I still felt like a stranger in a strange land. Having made some money from some boring business activities, and tiring of the anomie of my rootless cosmopolitan existence, I practiced what I preached and returned to Russia in 2016. There, I was a blogger, for which I got some money, and also did some writing, PR gigs, and consulting for Russian companies. I wasn’t a huge fan of the Sacred War against Gay Satanic Nazism (5% of GDP) so transitioned to digital nomadism by the end of 2022.
Blogging Career
I began blogging in 2008, initially about Russia. One early success was modeling and correctly predicting Russia’s demographic turnaround as early as 2008, when holding such a position made one a prime candidate for psychiatric institutionalization. I likewise presented what many considered to be a more realistic – or at the very least, data-informed – perspective, relative to prevailing standards in the MSM, on Russia’s comparative performance on human rights, corruption, and the economy.
That said, this did not stop me from posting material that didn’t portray Russia in the best light. For instance, I am the author of what remains the most comprehensive roundup of statistical evidence of electoral fraud in the 2011 Russian elections in the English language, and wrote at length about Russia’s technological backwardness. There is a good reason I never got a gig with any Russian state media organizations, despite being one of the world’s most well-known Russia bloggers in the 2010s, and my post The Z of History on Putinism’s accelerating institutional bankruptcy has put the kibosh on any future relationship with the regime.
Though I began as primarily a Russia blogger, I have always had a wide range of interests, and soon after I also ventured into topics such as geopolitics, history, human biodiversity (HBD), intelligence research, and and transhumanism. You can access a broader survey of my work at the curated Blog Archives page. Some concepts that I consider notable include the Age of Malthusian Industrialism, Apollo’s Ascent, and the Elite Human Capital meme (subsequently popularized by Richard Hanania).
My interest in IQ-related topics dates to at least the mid-2000s, when I first encountered IQ stats for different stats. Already been obsessed with poring over statistical compendiums such as the CIA World Factbook, and at the time unaware of the existing scholarly literature on the topic, I quickly realized there must be a correlation between that, GDP per capita, and other indicators of national success. I was writing about the importance of human capital towards economic growth since 2008.
I have made several significant contributions to the debate, such as uncovering the (remarkably good) scores for mainland China in PISA 2009 and writing what is perhaps the most detailed popular account of the history of intelligence testing in Russia and the regional distribution of Russian IQ. In a 2013 survey of professional IQ researchers, my blog was acknowledged as one of the world’s best three sources for accurate IQ reporting. In 2018, I wrote perhaps my most popular post on The Idiocy of the Average. Although I am primarily a blogger, not a researcher, I also co-authored a few papers on this topic.
I became interested in transhumanism at about the same time as I got interested in IQ, thanks largely to Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near. In this sphere, probably my most notable contribution is the Katechon Hypothesis, an explanation of the Fermi paradox that meshes the Dark Forest theory with the Simulation Argument.
Ratings
I have reasonably comprehensive ratings lists of books, films, and video games in the Reviews section.
Here are my 2-3 top picks for each category:
- Non-Fiction: The Singularity is Near (Kurzweil); Bell Curve (Charles Murray)
- History: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Kennedy); Wages of Destruction (Tooze)
- Literature: Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky); Labyrinths (Borges)
- Fantasy: The Wheel of Time (Robert Jordan); LotR (Tolkien); HPMOR (Yudkowsky)
- Sci-Fi: A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller)
- Films: The Matrix; Dr. Strangelove; Solaris
- Video Games: Age of Empires 2; Deus Ex: Human Revolution
- Cities: Moscow; Vienna; San Francisco
- Music: Chopin; Tchaikovsky
- Artists: Escher; Friedrich; Aivazovsky
- Philosophers: Nick Bostrom; the Cosmists; J.S. Mills; Adam Smith; Galton
- Cuisines: Indian
- Drinks: Cappuccino, prosecco
- Hobbies: City walking, skiing, poker
Ideology/Politics
Though I prefer to avoid labels, you can probably assign me to the libertarian, network state, d/acc, and abundance clusters. I generally support free markets, social liberalism, Open Zero Borders, decentralized governance, and extreme bioliberalism from artificial wombs to voluntary eugenics. I want to accelerate biotech (bio/acc), radical life extension, and human intelligence enhancement (IQ/acc). My goal is to replace the world’s nation-states with network states running on a decentralized global constitutional trust layer that offers a global UBI from taxes on transactions and safe AI compute.
My politics are too schizo to adequately summarize, but “libertarian” and “cyberphunk” might be a good first approximation. My ideal future would be to use aligned AGI to automate the boring stuff, give all verified humans a UBI, and solve biology in order to solve the problem of death (radical life extension) and stupidity (human intelligence enhancement) – something that I was calling the Biosingularity since 2017. I am leery about AI encroachment on art, and oppose its militarization; as an IQ realist, I am obviously woke to the dangers posed by a potential life form much smarter than biology. I think we should think hard before pushing deep ASI territory.
I would also prefer to see the nation-state displaced by network states. It seems better to organize political life around voluntary societies of shared interests and values, as opposed to coercive structures controlling arbitrary lines on the planetary surface which don’t allow competition in governance and corral people who otherwise don’t care for or each hate each other by force. I think cryptographic and zk-tech can play a central role in this transition, as well as on AI alignment and coordination.
In more classical Political Compass terms, I am an economic libertarian, and a social and political liberal. I endorse Open Borders. I am extremely bioliberal from abortion rights to reprotech, Right To Try, and voluntary/positive eugenics. I have always accepted the mainstream science on intelligence because it is scientifically correct; if that makes me Far Right, then it is what it is. I am not religious, though I suppose you can call the simulator and/or the underlying digital physics God, if you wish. In line with my support for globalization and network states, I submit that support for Open Borders is a natural corollary.
I used to oppose mass Third World immigration, and was sympathetic to MAGA and Russian nationalism from the mid-2010s until 2020 (COVID/Qanon) and 2022 (the Ukraine War), respectively. During my Russia sojourn I popularized HBD/IQ insights and helped launched the era of Russian right-wing podcasting through ROGPR. Although I was often classified as part of the “Dissident Right”, Neo-Reaction (its “technocommercialist” faction), or even the Alt Right (AR), the reality is that to the extent I have ever affixed partisan ideological labels to myself from the mid-2010s to 2022 in the Western context it was as a “Radical Centrist” or “Alt Left” (e.g. see here, “The Alt Left considers itself a subset of the wider Alt Right but with less thot hate and more rocket ships and radical life extension“, or here, “I’m Alt Left relative to the Far Right. By normie standards I’d be Alt Center but it just doesn’t have that ring.“). As I explain in Why Jail is Programmed for All Rightoids, I view the coalescing Rightoid International as a far greater threat to civilization than SJWs or Wokeness.