Naive and Misguided Questions

by

There is a common internet accusation. I write some articles on a topic and then there is some accusation if there is a financial connection. These question are from naive people who do not understand the internet, journalism or business or viable scams.

Are the sources above pretending to not have bias?

Why would IVO launch to space and fake it? There is NORAD tracking of the satellite. It has to move or it does not work. It is irrelevant what the public relations and promotions are.

But they could fake it? It went up on SpaceX rideshare. SpaceX is not sending up black boxes. There could be crazy or incompetent people who could send something that could explode and take out the rest of the rideshare. The engineering drawings and the payloads have to be tested and verified. DARPA will be checking these and the other launches, there will not be an obvious Hall Effect thruster pretending to be a Quantum drive.

Journalism. All journalists have biases. There are journalists and news sources who are self aware and know what those biases are and there are those who pretend and fake impartiality. There can be efforts made to impartiality. Mem11363 is a noob who believes the BS that journalists are impartial and there are unbiased new sources. If Mem11363 looked at what is happening, there would be the realization that there is all kinds of bias in business and technology reporting. There is reporting and reporting has bias. Bias by omission and addition.

Walter Williams was the first dean of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He is credited with starting the world’s first school of journalism in 1908. Williams believed that journalism education should be professionalized and offered at a university. This was a marketing tactic and power move to get journalism and journalists to be gatekeepers to information. Do the noobs try to ask whether they should believe the journalists when the journalists say only journalists should be believed? Grow up and learn some history and business and how the world works.

There were 20,000 newspapers in 1900. There was then consolidation under magnates like Hearst. There was then the emergence of radio, TV, cable cable news and the internet. From 2005 to 2021, about 2,200 American local print newspapers closed. From 2008 to 2020, the number of American newspaper journalists fell by more than half.

There are hundreds of millions of blogs on the internet today. More than 440 million blogs are found on Tumblr, Squarespace and WordPress alone.

In 2011, Google changed its algorithm, punishing blogs they deemed to contain thin content. Facebook and the platforms got many bloggers to shift over from independent blogs onto the platforms. There was more visibility but usually reduced monetization. Monetization is only achieved by those with critical mass. Merch is a means for smaller traffic niches to gain viable monetization or enhance monetization.

In the past year, Nextbigfuture has been ranked as high as 1200th in the world for all news sites. Last month, it was down to 2300 but is coming back up this month to top 2000.

Nextbigfuture is a lone independent blog on science, technology and whatever I, Brian Wang, am interested in. I am interested in what will change the world with science, technology or business. I want to be able to predict and anticipate the future.

If I can I want to influence things to a better world. Nextbigfuture has had impact. I was the first to popularize a research paper with the concept of deaths per terawatt for energy. This had millions of views over many articles. This was picked up by other media and is now in the World in Data. This would still have been found, I was the first to popularize it.

I was one of the first to write and promote Thorium and Molten Salt Nuclear reactors. I wrote the first articles interviewing Kirk Sorenson back in 2006-2009 and beyond. Kirk was keeping the concept of Thorium and Molten Salt alive after there was “Molten Salt winter” for about three or four decades. Kirk formed a company to develop it in 2011. I got no money for any of that and I did not get invested in his company. There are now other companies with more funding and traction in the Molten Salt Space. The scientists and engineers who chose to work on it did not all get inspired by the pioneer. They are smart people and they figured it out by themselves.

I have invested in some technology and science startups over the years and I invest in technology companies. You will notice that I am still writing this website. If one of those investments went truly next level, I might still write this site but activity might drop off a lot.

However, all of the people who make a business with youtube, content creation in general, websites and blogs, you have to love it and have motivation beyond the money. If the motivation is money then it has to compete with alternatives. Nextbigfuture is still going when 90% of the peer blogs are gone.

I am telling everyone. I hope that Quantized Inertia drive works. I also hope aging reversal and antiaging work. I want SpaceX to succeed with the fully reusable Super Heavy Starship. Any financial incentives I have are trivial relative to humanity being able to make a technological leap. I want AI and humanoid robotics to work.

34 thoughts on “Naive and Misguided Questions”

  2. I’m here because I like enough of what you do to keep me coming back.

    If’n a folk ain’t finding what they want here, they’re free to shop elsewhere, I’d imagine.

    It’s like someone complaining to the mcdonalds manager because they don’t have blue jeans in size 37.

    I myself take in info from as many varied sources as possible, then triangulate.

  3. Brian you are absolutely fantastic. I really mean it. All the stuff that interest you really interest me also. So almost 100% of the time you write something, it’s interesting to me.

    You do excellent summaries of technology and I find you impart just enough data to clarify things but not so much that it bogs down into techno speak.

    I have only one complaint. Get rid of that vile picture of you with what I call a, “I’m harmless” face. It’s terrible. I mean this one,

    https://nextbigfuture.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/08/brianheadshot.jpg

    Look at how much better this one of you in this comment is,

    https://twitter.com/nextbigfuture/photo

    Use that one, or anything, anything at all but the picture you have now.

    Other than your selection of personal pictures, you’re doing great.

    As for the comments of Jeremy Dunn,”…I like Brian’s optimism but I am 67 and have seen much enthusiasm washed away by reality…”

    I’m not quite as old as him, but close and I’ve seen a BUNCH of stuff that was predicted that came true. The internet itself is just the most extraordinary thing ever. People have no idea. When I was younger, the endless trek through library stacks and the ceaseless hunting to gather information that not only could I likely never find then, but now find in less than 30 seconds. It’s extraordinary. (in fact to go through the library stacks I used to have to walk ten miles up hill, both ways) 🙂 .

    My personal belief is that while right now a bunch of psychopathic maniac globalist evil people run things, they will not prevail. (Unless they kill everyone. They will still not prevail because the only people left will just as evil as them, and they will kill each other off) There’s a series of books written by James Dale Davis and Sir William Rees-Mogg that greatly influenced my thinking. They said that the structure of politics and society is based fundamentally on how force can be projected. A simple example, during the Middle Ages the Knights could have castles and be relatively secure. Meaning a lot of small principalities, but gunpowder blew this all away and larger political entities became the fashion. It’s not like the Knights decided they wanted to do something else. They were forced. And today with the microprocessor smaller more nimble players can fight off larger more weighty foes. In the past the Houthi wouldn’t stand a chance against all the players trying to get them to stop firing rockets at Israels ships, but now…hard to stop. I see this as eroding the oligarchs power and a good thing. Even better is the decentralization of energy, which really makes me happy. Hardly anything has been spent on it but there’s no reason, I can see, that ultimately we can’t grow cells of prime rib just like they brew beer for engineered microorganisms. That along with more and cheaper solar will really stir things up. People will, and are now, dropping out of the formal economy because the oligarchs being evil greedy bastards are driving wages down so that it’s better to do a little for yourself than slave away for some guy who will only lay you off the first chance he gets on a dip in stock prices.

    Unfortunately I suspect things will get MUCH worse before they get better. I will likely not live long enough to see some of these things. It appears, for no reason I can disconcert, it takes about 30 years, or more, for good ideas to become common and have everyone wonder why it wasn’t done before.

  4. Brian – I’ve enjoyed your site for more than a decade now. It seems every few months there is a product, an idea, or theory that doesn’t pan out but you have always covered those stories with an open mind and a fair amount of sincere enthusiasm. That’s one of the pluses of this site. If you love contemplating the future as I do there is no better site than this one.

    Note: I have no connection with this site or Brian.

  5. Naive and misguided? Talk about projection! All the person asked for is a little balanced reporting and you jump all over the person and start thumping your chest with your accomplishments. A whole lot about bias and the issue wasn’t even raised. I didn’t even think the comment was very insulting. It said the article read like a marketing release and it certainly did. Very biased pundits are frequently known to also explain known problems and what seems like hype. Most journalists of course have biases but the point is to produce content that is not so constrained. This all seems very snowflaky.

  6. Brian,

    Anyone who has ever read your blog, as I have for years, knows that it is amongst the very best on the internet.
    When you make something popular and well read, there will always be ill informed losers who want to make themselves feel better by attempting to drag you down.
    There is absolutely no need to justify yourself to these people.
    Your work speaks for itself.

    Keep up the excellent articles.
    The recent Barry-1 ones are fascinating to me.

  7. This site presents an informed view of all of the topics it covers. Most of the discussions are great. Ignore the haters Brian. I have read this site for years and will continue to do so. I work in immunology and some of the areas you have covered and your analyses are cogent. Thanks again for this site

  8. I like Brian’s optimism but I am 67 and have seen much enthusiasm washed away by reality. People talk about the new religion “the Singularity” with bated breath unaware that they were all preceded by Alvin Toffler who of course thought it was going to be just around the corner like fusion power. My only departure from Brian is that he paints population decrease as some kind of apocalypse with 0 positive attributes. Since he never considers these let me name a few:

    1. Lesser consumption of resources and creation of garbage.
    2. No need for intelligent cars since traffic is now down to a sane level.
    3. Smaller cities that are more humane environments.
    4. A surplus of empty houses that young couples just move into and not be in bondage their whole life.
    5. More at-risk species being able to survive such as fish.

    I don’t know if it makes up for the bad but it is not all bad. We had few people when the Renaissance happened Brian. We need better people, not more people.

    • This idealized view of depopulation can be matched against the reality in Japan where it has been happening for about 30 years.

      No GDP growth, GDP per capita decline, halving of real estate prices. Pension systems collapsing. People 70+ working hard labor jobs- road crews, selling stuff.
      People dying alone. Young people still in tiny apartments despite low cost housing. Empty houses. People dying alone, desicated bodies and skeletons discovered months and years after.

      We can increase fish populations with iron fertilization. This happened 2012-2016 off the coast of BC, Canada.

      Saying you want 1600ish world with 500 million people from 8.2 billion now. Means the decline and destruction of over 90% of homes and other buildings.

      This can happen and the banks and other stuff will all be good. Going up it is 3-10% per year GDP growth. Going down it is what -3%-10% GDP growth.

      How do you know you will get the better people that you want? With current trends of birthrates, the people left will be
      According to a 2019 Pew Research Center analysis,
      Muslims have the largest households worldwide, with an average of 6.4 people per household, Hindus (5.7), Christians (4.5), Buddhists (3.9), the religiously unaffiliated (3.7), and Jews (3.7).

      India fell below replacement.

      Only the most adherent to large families will be left. Concentrated in the most religious in Africa, Arab world.

      Who are the large breeders among the geniuses. Elon Mush has like 10 kids.
      The billionaire with the most children—he has 15—is Suhail Bahwan of Oman. David Duffield x-Peoplesoft has 10 kids.

    • I can’t believe I read this.

      Okay. Urban decay because there’s no tax base and no workforce for maintenance of infrastructure. Worsening global pollution because this is a public goods problem and there’s no tax base and no workeforce to clean it up – or develop the technologies to handle it. We had your “surplus houses” after 2008. The result was an explosion of mosquitoes after those backyard pools weren’t maintained. There will be *more* extinctions without humans to save these species. Corporate fraud has set in motion a chain of interacting, snowballing disasters that humans must endeavor to fix. Without us, the globe keeps warming up. We saw all of this in the fall of Rome. Why you would think this time is different speaks to your lack of understanding of these basic systems and their history.

      The fact is we lack journalism today because of the corporate profit forces mentioned. We’ve turned news into a gladiatorial arena producing spectacle simply to deliver eyeballs to advertizers, not to inform. Until this dynamic is fixed by creating a public utility model, the disinformation-for-profit problem will get worse. I predicted it in my work in the 1990s on the need for digital public utilities (and proposed a workable solution protecting digital property rights through encrypted ledgers). Ted Nelson predicted this chaos in his own way in the 1970s. Others like Neil Postman have outlined the problem in the analog domain. Information, like any product, requires quality control so the “consumer isn’t harmed. Like Boeing executives eating that budget for their bonuses, media executives have been in a downward spiral of shrinking quality control since the 1970s. Don’t worry about their transfats, junk food, pollution, bribery has been their motto since then. Now their corruption is eating the very budget we need to make more people and families. Their greed knows no shame.

  9. A straight-from-the-Heart post.
    I, for One, feel that the Blog is a credit to the techno-optimist movement and cause.
    The articles are thought-provoking, timely, and well-researched given the promptness of when they’re posted. The odd insert of political events, world dramas, and current affairs are not inappropriate. Of course, many of the posts are aligned with the author’s financial and personal and political interests – who cares? are people buying stocks, voting, or throwing their life’s savings at the site’s musings? I am doubtful. It’s further inspiring that it hosts such a commenter-community of techno-weirdos who are obviously way smarter than me. Let’s keep it civil but keep those ‘controversial’ musings going.

  10. “Nextbigfuture is a lone independent blog on science, technology and whatever I, Brian Wang, am interested in. I am interested in what will change the world with science, technology or business.
    ** I want to be able to predict and anticipate the future. **”

    You can only go so far with this premise while ignoring culture. Culture is at the root of it all.

    And you do not give it any consideration in most/all articles.

    • I am ranked 26 out of 5000+ public futurist predictors. I factor in everything when I make my predictions and I am right 95% of the time.

      https://www.metaculus.com/accounts/profile/110947/

      Going through all of breakdowns involved in making the predictions is boring and time consuming.

      People will not agree on the assumptions.

      It is like watching a sports handicapper on TV walking people through his pick of winners for the weekend games.

      This is literally Inside baseball. The is an American slang term that refers to detailed inner workings of a system that are only interesting to, or appreciated by, experts, insiders, and aficionados. It can also describe a subject that has too many uninteresting details.

      There would be a very tiny audience for an Inside the Technology Future and the future with cultural factors. Because the audience is so small, the deep dive tech reports are priced at $1000-5000 and sometimes $30,000 each.

      Tech wonk analysis does not include cultural adoption. They have market adoption forecasts. Positing a cultural model will not convince anyone. You have to have marketing and addressable market analysis. The reader can make any assumptions related to culture and markets on their own.
      People can be right all the time with their culture and political model forecasts, but are usually wrong.

      People who have a business and clients based upon insights into culture/political power dynamic factor predictions.

      Bruce Bueno de Mesquita.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Bueno_de_Mesquita#Work_in_Forecasting

      Scott Adams has his pursuasion and other models.

      I have no advantage there and would not be able to articulate anything as convincing.

      The vast majority who are right in those areas cannot get anyone to listen or believe them. Plus it is very difficult to get to actionable levels or predictive accuracy. I prefer to work on predicting technology trends where the financial benefits are beyond the noise and chaos of complex systems.

      x-Intel CEO, Andy Grove, talked about identifying 10X forces. It is better to see traction attained and identify that an unstoppable force has not been recognized.

      My coverage of things like Quantized Inertia is that it is an interesting attempt which if it works would be insanely transformational. It is in orbit, all we have to do is watch NORAD tracking. Those who are old enough. Evel Knievel is about to jump the canyon. It is an amazing spectacle alone. The even more interesting aspect is if IVO does it then the future becomes massively different. Since no cash is on the line for any of us, it is a free lottery ticket. The odds are likely very low, but it is a free lottery ticket and a free show.

      I have made factual and technically informed analysis with included military history analysis and an understanding of military theory analysis of the situation in Taiwan and with the future of drones. I think my analysis will be highly predictive. But everyone has opinions and assumptions about culture and other factors. I have the detailed analysis of population projections with core facts about the numbers of fertile females in each country. People do not accept the conclusions. The Taiwan-China thing people say well China has 1.4 billion people and an $18 trillion economy etc…

      So you want culture or other impact analysis. Do you agree with my population forecasts and predictions, my case in regards any future Taiwan war, the drone impact on future war? If you ignored that work and are already a reader, it seems even you as someone who says you want that are actually not caring about it.

      How do you see those things going from less than 1% of my traffic into the driving point of interest for my work and my site?

      • Brian I think you misunderstood.

        Take aging for instance. The primary block there is cultural. Because of it every day the world loses what could have been not tens but hundreds of years more contributed by each person; those years a direct factor in tech and econ formulas within that strictly a-cultural scope you prioritize.

        The justification for maintaining aging’s morbid status quo is absurd both ethically and pragmatically.

        Brief as that point may be, it’s arguably (inarguably imho) the most salient. Unless, in some way I dont understand, you care about writing articles and about progress, but not about contributing to the latter by passing novel ideas like freedom from aging to the reader via the former. A free lottery ticket.

        Is the reason for tech enthusiasm mere shiny spectacle, or because it makes life better? If the latter then I say my point above is irreducible: every reader not snapped out of the death trance is another person unwittingly contributing to the delay of the end of involuntary morbidity. Personal (their own well being and happiness) and worldwide (their contribution to the socioeconomic rube goldberg that among other things produces new tech).

        —
        I would say something about your seeming support of Musk but that horse is dead. I used to think his drug use was the main issue but i increasingly doubt it.
        There too, an irreducible cultural factor operates. On that one I would agree it’s more work than I have time to condense into a single concise comment fit for nbf.

        But I do know pretending he does nothing wrong worth denouncing, is wrong.

        • I talk about freedom from aging. I support Aubrey de Grey and the 180 companies working towards aging reversal. I have interviewed the people. There is no direct cultural restrictions on this. It is at the VC and high net worths funding stage. Getting the lab result of double the remaining lifespan of middle age mice will be a ChatGPT tipping point moment. Money and resources will flow when they are chasing the multi-trillion opportunity.

          My support or lack of support is irrelevent to did X business get the money needed to do its project or business. Have the businesses in Y domain achieved critical things ensuring a surge in funding? Have they reached sustainable profitability.

          Blah, blah Elon says crazy things and bought Twitter. Tesla made $15 B in net income in 2023.

          First profitable quarter 2019 Q4, First profitable year 2020.
          https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/net-income#:~:text=Tesla%20net%20income%20for%20the%20twelve%20months%20ending%20December%2031,a%20127.79%25%20increase%20from%202021.

          Tesla does stuff wrong. 4680 ramp was too slow by two years. Guidance on margins was wrong. Megapack ramp is too slow. Dojo chip from 18-24 months ago is outdated and uncompetitive relative to Nvidia and AMD AI chips.

          Other companies make more mistakes. GM, Ford, Volkswagen, Japan car makers, Lucid, Other US EV companies, etc…

          SpaceX launched 80%+ of all payload in 2023. Built over 60% of all satellites. Tested direct from satellite to unmodified cellphone texting. SMS messages are similar length to a tweet. Paypal and Wechat like payments and financial transactions are coming to X. 5 billion phones and devices with Starlink text, voice, low rate internet – how many of those cellphone user will be using X? How many using payments and financial transactions via x? Starlink mini using 30 watts to deliver 100 mbps. How about Starlink micro using 10 watts to deliver 10 mbps. Starlink mini the size of an iPad. Starlink micro the size of iPad mini or maybe a cellphone sized.

  11. You’re a young guy with your life ahead of you, living in an amazing time. Enjoy it to the fullest. Live long and prosper.

    Best wishes to you and all the Next Big Future crowd.

  12. Ignore the haters and keep posting content.

    One of the nice aspects of the site is that when something unusual pops up we get lots of posts on it. LK99, QI, etc.

  13. Keep up the good work, Brian. It is obvious to anyone who thinks about it for more than a millisecond, that you ARE invested in the articles-and-subjects that you cover. So? What else is new?

    Let’s hope that the QI teams get results that challenge our understanding of physics. And of course if it doesn’t, well … that’s ok too. Negative results are Science’s classic litmus test for evaluating hypotheses’ validity.

    Anyway… Just Sayin’

    • If it weren’t for the interventionist foreign policy of USA causing constant blowback on the multi-decade decade timescale, I’d probably only complain about the taxes I pay and the government waste these taxes enable.

      I don’t look at any nation on the planet as the enemy. I don’t support sanctioning populations because our overseers don’t like their overseers.

      Any media entity that fails to highlight historical context and nuance in foreign relations is the goon hand of the overseers shouting, “hey, look over there. It’s Iran. It’s Russia.” Never making effort to explain the back story.

      • @atomstroyexpert — Yeah whatever buddy. You are the one failing to point out why the listed dictatorships are considered not good. Goon hand seems like a good label for your work here. But it’s hard to tell the difference these days between crappy AI and paid idiot commentators. For now I’ll assume the latter.

  15. When it comes to the political articles, I’ve never seen you take anything other than the party line. Meaning you may actually be just another mainstream media entity.

    Russia = bad
    Venezuela = bad
    China = bad

    I don’t understand why the bulk population piles-on every time the criminals in charge declare another state to be pariah. I think it signals low intelligence on behalf of the buyer and perhaps high intelligence on behalf of the manipulator?

    • Well China is bad, Venezuela is a hot mess and Russia started a land war in Europe.

      Of the three as an American I would worry the most about China. Russia is FO part of FAFO and Venezuela is a clown show but the west seems to genuinely want to copy China’s technocratic-social-credit-score-authoritarianism.

      The better metric isn’t so much if you criticize Russia and China but if you are also willing to genuinely criticize your own country too as it is what differentiates someone from being an “establishment propagandist”.

    • Those regimes actively suppress freedom and actively terrorize (or simply kill) their own citizens so the despots in charge can line their own pockets essentially forever. “Bad” is an understatement. “Evil” is more accurate.

      • Wait. Wait.
        I really really want to hear a single redeeming feature or characteristic about Russia or its history or its citizens. Something that speaks about how individual russians are hard-working or motivated or benevolent or humble -or- how they work together under a repressive regime to make the best of things -or- how they believe in their ‘system’ and actively promote a communal ‘brotherhood’ to achieve great things that single units could not -or- that they are good parents or good comrades or good neighbours or actively try to stay healthy or wise or well-read or ANYTHING. though, i suppose they stood against the nazis ok in WW2.
        I remember hearing and laughing at that famous communist joke…
        “…they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work…” I no longer laugh.
        I never really believed before that if an entire ‘culture’ just fell off the earth that the World would be better for it…. well now I do.

        • I would suggest that that just means the Russian people are broken, not evil. The elites and politicians are pulling the strings so effectively, discarding the insubordinate people in the government’s quest to enrich themselves and promote their values across the World. Deep down, I would guess that the Russian greats – thinkers, chess players, athletes, may not have had much choice or happiness in their lives, but they likely feel happy to have contributed to something bigger than themselves. It’s something.

        • Oh do try to limit the hyperventilating. Go read some Fyodor Dostoevsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Andrei Sakharov, etc.

  16. I really like your blog and have found it a great source of knowledge for new technologies. so please keep up the good work!

    • I agree! The last thing we want is for Brian to have to STOP posting these awesome updates. I realize in AAA comments that there may be many posts of the same topic but those are updates that the readers want so we can do our own analysis and formulate our own viewpoints. This is my number 1 site!

  18. Brian, i think that the general issue is that technology improvement is generally incremental and boring with very few disruptive discoveries. But are the news about disruptive stuff the ones that drive the clicks. Unfortunately what seems too god to be true usually is not. You pushed hard on reasonable stuff like molten salt reactors, but you pushed also Rossi’s Ecat and the EMdrive. while the initial mention of such stuff was not (in my opinion) a bad faith error, pushing the news for months or years without any reasonable proof appears to many as part of an agenda. You have this tendency, also for the Korean room temperature superconductor. Instead of accepting that the issue has been disproved by dozens of labs you still push the one ir two pieces of news that keep the story alive. That does not mean that there is no possibility that the sample, by chanche, was a room temp superconductor, but if the authors have no reliable theory, realiable manufacturing, and reliable measures, their claims are naive/bogus/fraudulent and if you continue to push them (since you are scientifically literate) people think you might have vested interest. Regards.

  19. Brian is working with Trump, Kim Jong Un, Hillary, and Hunter to extract adrenochrome from dwarfs in order to extend their evil lives by 3 millennia. So sayeth Tucker, and I believe her.

Comments are closed.