Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 34

Ciro Santilli is a fan of this late 2010's buzzword.

It basically came about because of the endless stream of useless software startups made since the 2000's by one or two people with no investments with the continued increase in computers and Internet speeds until the great wall was reached.

Deep tech means not one of those. More specifically, it means technologies that require significant investment in expensive materials and laboratory equipment to progress, such as molecular biology technologies and quantum computing.

And it basically comes down to technologies that wrestle with the fundamental laws of physics rather than software data wrangling.

Computers are of course limited by the laws of physics, but those are much hidden by several layers of indirection.

Full visibility, and full control, make computer tasks be tasks that eventually always work out more or less as expected.

The same does not hold true when real Physics is involved.

Physics is brutal.

To start with, you can't even see your system very clearly, and often doing so requires altering its behaviour.

For example, in molecular biology, most great discoveries are made after some new technique is made to be able to observe smaller things.

But you often have to kill your cells to make those observations, which makes it very hard to understand how they work dynamically.

What we would really want would be to track every single protein as it goes about inside the cell. But that is likely an impossible dream.

The same for the brain. If we had observations of every neuron, how long would it take to understand it? Not long, people are really good at reverse engineering things when there is enough information available to do so, see also science is the reverse engineering of nature.

Then, even when you start to see the system, you might have a very hard time controlling it, because it is so fragile. This is basically the case of quantum computing in 2020.

It is for those reasons that deep tech is so exciting.

The next big things will come from deep tech. Failure is always a possibility, and you can't know before you try.

But that's also why its so fun to dare.

Stuff that Ciro Santilli considers "deep tech" as of 2020:

As of 2018, Ciro Santilli believes that this could be the next big thing in biology technology.

"De novo" means "starting from scratch", that is: you type the desired sequence into a computer, and the synthesize it.

The "de novo" part is important, because it distinguishes this from the already well solved problem of duplicating DNA from an existing DNA template, which is what all our cells do daily, and which can already be done very efficiently in vitro with polymerase chain reaction.

Many startup companies are attempting to create more efficient de novo synthesis methods:

Notably, the dream of most of those companies is to have a machine that sits on a lab bench, which synthesises whatever you want.

TODO current de novo synthesis costs/time to delivery after ordering a custom sequence.

The initial main applications are likely going to be:but the real pipe dream is building and bootstraping entire artificial chromosomes

News coverage:

Ciro once read that there are two types of mathematicians/scientists (he thinks it was comparing Einstein to some Jack of all trades polymath who didn't do any new discoveries):

TODO long after Ciro forgot where he had read this from originally, someone later pointed him to: www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200212p.pdf Birds and Frogs by Freeman Dyson (2009), which is analogous but about Birds and Frogs. So did Ciro's memory play a trick on him, or is there also a variant; of this metaphor with a gopher?

Ciro is without a doubt the bird type. Perhaps the ultimate scientist is the one who can combine both aspects in the right amount?

Ciro gets bored of things very quickly.

Once he understands the general principles, if the thing is not the next big thing, Ciro considers himself satisfied without all the nitty gritty detail, and moves on to the next attempt.

In the field of mathematics for example, Ciro is generally content with understanding cool theorem statements. More generally, one of Ciro's desires is for example to understand the significance of each physics Nobel Prize.

This is also very clear for example after Ciro achieved Linux Kernel Module Cheat: he now had the perfect setup to learn all the Linux kernel shady details but at the same time after all those years he finally felt that "he could do it, so that was enough", and soon moved to other projects.

If Ciro had become a scientist, he would write the best review papers ever, just like in the current reality he writes amazing programming tutorials on Stack Overflow.

Ciro has in his mind an overly large list of subjects that "he feels he should know the basics of", and whenever he finds something in one of those topics that he does not know enough about, he uncontrollably learns it, even if it is not the most urgent thing to be done. Or at least he puts a mention on his "list of sources" about the subject. Maybe everyone is like that. But Ciro feels that he feels this urge particularly strongly. Correspondingly, if a subject is not in that list, Ciro ignores it without thinking twice.

Ciro believes that high flying birds are the type of people better suited for venture capital investment management: you know a bit of what is hot on several fields to enough depth to decide where to place your bets and how to guide them. But you don't have the patience to actually go deeply into any one of them and deal with each individual shit that comes up.

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980) episode 1 mentions as quoted by the Wikipedia page for Eratosthenes:That's Ciro.

Some related ideas:

Ciro Santilli believes that molecular biology technologies will be a large part of the next big things as shown at: Section "Molecular biology technologies".

Bibliography:

So that he can work full time on OurBigBook.com and revolutionize advanced university-level science, technology, engineering, and mathematics eduction for all ages.

Donating to Ciro is the most effective donation per dollar that you can make to:

Ciro's goal in life is to help kids as young as possible to reach, and the push, the frontiers of natural sciences human knowledge, linking it to applications that might be the the next big thing as early as possible. Because nothing is more motivating to students than that feeling of:rather than repeating the same crap that everyone is already learning.

To do this, Ciro wants to work in parallel both on:

Ciro believes that this rare combination of both:produces a virtuous circle, because Ciro:

As explained at OurBigBook.com and high flying bird scientist, Ciro is most excited to make contributions at the "missing middle level of specialization" that lies around later undergrad and lower grad education:But on that middle sweet spot, Ciro believes that something can be done, in such as way that delivers:in a way that is:

Ciro believes that today's society just keep saying over and over: "STEM is good", "STEM is good", "STEM is good" as a religious mantra, but fails miserably at providing free learning material and interaction opportunities for people to actually learn it at a deep enough level to truly appreciate why "STEM is good". This is what he wants to fix.

The following quote is ripped from Gwern Branwen's Patreon page, and it perfectly synthesizes how Ciro feels as well:

In addition to all of this, financial support also helps Ciro continue his general community support activities:

Ciro Santilli is against affirmative action university entry quotas that reserve spaces e.g. for students from discriminated races or poor families. Instead, he believes that affirmative action should take place on earlier stages of education as described at: free gifted education.

Notably, Brazil has implemented a very heavy university entry quota system after Ciro had left university there: www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23862676

This is of course easy for a white male from a privileged background to say, and infinite debate has already been had on this matter, but here goes again.

First, in defense to the personal attack, Ciro raises the fact that he has dedicated large chunks (all?) of his life to open source software and knowledge in general, which Ciro believes is the only way to actually make the world fairer to poor countries. His money (time) is where his mouth is.

One good argument in favor of the Brazilian quota system, is that the kids who enter university because of quotas do just as well as those who don't.

Ciro has actually believes that this is possible, and offers the following possible explanation: most of pre-university knowledge is useless, and university selection system is crap, and Ciro wants to destroy it with a system in which anyone can learn university stuff from home.

Both the top end of the quota and non-quota kids are basically equally capable of doing useful stuff therefore.

Only a tiny fraction of what you learn in high school is useful for university or your career.

And possibly more importantly than knowledge, Ciro saw many of his colleagues (basically all of which were from relatively privileged backgrounds) "do badly" in university, because of lack of motivation, because they had chosen a course only to find that they were not interested in it because the existing high school educational system is crap and does not help them find what they love and because it costs you several years of your life to change your choice in most universities (long live École Polytechnique).

Maybe the fact that poor kids know that they are fucked if they fail, and so they have to succeed at any cost, might also help with motivation. Which is a terrible terrible thing, because only those who have to leeway to take risks end up taking them and making the the next big thing.

Ciro believes instead that only once kids have learnt university level stuff in their area of interest for free on the Internet should they go through selection based on that specific and much more concentrated useful knowledge.

And this competition must only be used to distribute resources which you can't learn from fucking computers:

Once this point knowledge is reached however, it starts to become unclear if a single "everyone takes the same test to avoid discrimination" test is feasible anymore, and we start entering the much more relevant (and potentially discriminatory) "I am a teacher trying to advance the state of the art, and I need a person mildly skilled in the art to do some slave labor for me", which is PhDs selection work.

If quota are in place, what will happen is that parents of the rich kids will start investing less in education, and possibly just put their kids in high schools, and do home schooling instead. This would therefore reduce the total investments the country makes in education!

Outside of the obvious technical evolution proposed, Ciro is a huge proponent of free gifted education. Or closely related, creating scholarships that focus on poor students. The entry requirements should be the same, but once you qualify, everyone should have enough money to lead a decent life during their studies.

Then let those kids pass exactly the same university entry exams, and watch them crush the average privileged kids.

This advice is similar to what is mentioned at: what poor countries have to do to get richer. When you don't have money to do everything, you must select a few good bets and focus on them. You can't pay a lot to every public school teacher, so you must select a few select places that need it the most. As those smart bets pay off, you start to have more and more money to expand the system further.

Many of the student exchange programs Ciro witnessed in the 2010's in Brazil were inefficient because they were requiring students to come back immediately after university or PhD in fear that those students will never come back.

This is useless, because you don't learn anything unique during university: the truly valuable knowledge is obtained when you work for several years as a postdoc in a world class research laboratory or as an engineer in a world class company.

Therefore, Brazil should learn from the Chinese exchange system, which lets students go do whatever they want, and once they are Gods of the domain, entices them back with great positions and pay as heads of laboratory back in China. Just don't do fraudulent stuff like this like China did, or else you will get a bad rep.

To help this university collaboration happen, we should create communication channels between exchange students and professors of the origin country who work on the same domain so that they can discuss the subject. For example, once Ciro Santilli wanted to contact some of his former teachers at the University of São Paulo about "advanced" topics he had been exposed to as part of his job. However, they didn't even reply to his email, and Ciro didn't know who else to contact. This must never happen. We need a way to informally contact several professors of a given domain informally, to increase the chances that at least one might be interested. It is pointless to just let students loose abroad and hope that they will bring things back to their home country: a more cohesive infrastructure is needed to nurture that.

There is basically one sane way to achieve these goals: the exchange programs must be organized at a national level, not in an ad-hoc per-university manner.

Another good idea is to have taxes that depend on your nationality alone and which only start collecting when you reach a very high amount of net worth. So e.g. if someone leaves the country and makes it big, then and only then does the Government starts clawing back the benefits of its investments in the person. Furthermore, such taxes could be reduced if the person brings some of the business back to the country. And mandatory taxes should be charged if the person decides to drop their nationality at some point.

The above points would also be greatly eased by having a national-level exchange program. E.g. in Brazil in the 2010's which Ciro experience, every university had different terms and conditions, which made everything a mess. Exchange programs must be treated as a unified federal policy.

Ciro actually had to return for just six months from the École Polytechnique to the University of São Paulo, to finish a course he had only done the generic Maths/Physics introduction to. Students from other Brazilian universities were forced to return for up to 3 years even to get their Brazilian diplomas! Ciro was lucky that his teachers understood the situation, and allowed him to develop online learning projects instead of his supposed control engineering projects, which hopefully will have led to changing the world with motivation one day. And for this, Ciro is eternally thankful.

This shows the complete and total lack of any Brazilian strategy to send its students abroad to really learn valuable things and then come back. There is no strategy at all. Things have just reached an equilibrium point of bureaucracies, Brazilian universities trying to bring students back to validate useless diploma pieces of paper, and foreign universities no caring about that, and just wanting the students to say abroad forever.

Ciro was once talking about why so few Brazilians go study abroad compared to the Chinese. Besides the likely true "there are a lot of Chinese" argument, his wife made another: good point Brazil is not so bad to live in, because you have good food and freedom, while China only has good food.

But Ciro still fells bad that so few of his University of São Paulo colleagues, who learnt automation and control engineering, are doing deep tech. Nor physical engineering. They have all basically become computer people like Ciro.

This is not their fault. They basically don't have a choice: all physical science and technology is done in rich countries.

Yes, someone has to implement the newest tech to improve local country efficiency in projects that will never spread abroad.

But who will be left then for the next big thing problems that would really make Brazil richer? 6 out of 30 person class ended up working on a gaming company at one point, even though they were not crazy passionate about the field! What could possibly be a worst investment for society?

This lack of technological innovation can also be clearly seen when you research investment options available in Brazil. Huge emphasis is put on fixed return financial products (often inflation adjusted) linked to base non-tech business such as housing market and agriculture. And when you look to the returns of the stock market on s&P 500-analogue backed exchange-traded funds, they do not seem obviously better, especially considering inflation and taxation benefits that exist for some of the other investment possibilities.

When the companies of a country are not clearly the best investment, you know that something is wrong. They are highly specialized money making machines, remember! And housing and agriculture are not such innovative markets where people can hugely influence efficiency.

When it is best to send students is a good question. Undergrad studies could be easily reproduced in poor countries if they had any intelligence at all, since even in rich countries laboratory usage is always limited. Masters and PhD are generally more valuable moments to send people out. The question is if the students will actually have a fighting chance without having been out, in particular in terms of language skills. Ciro feels that Masters are a good focus point for entry, as that is where PhD links are more actively done.

Poor countries don't have a lot of money.

Therefore, you have to pick a few key the next big thing deep tech bets, and invest on those enough.

These have to be few, because your country is poor, and so you can't invest on everything.

Therefore, the bets have to be well selected, because it is useless to make several insufficient investments: you have to pick a few ones, and put enough time and money into each one of them for them to stand any chance. These bets should be made and reevaluated on 5/10 year horizons.

The key things that you have to select are:

And then you only tax those companies heavily when the start to bring in real money. These are startups remember! You only need 5 unicorns a year to call it a success. And countries should not be greedy and invest through equity, but rather recoup their investment through taxation alone.

Ciro's second removed uncle, who was a physicist at the University of Campinas, one of the best universities in the country, told him an anecdote. He had moved from fusion energy research to solar cell research. At some point, there was a research lab that needed 10 million to buy a machinery critical for their experiment. They asked and asked, and finally the government gave them only 2 million. So in the end they spent those 2 million in random ways, but of course did not achieve their research goal and no money came out of it.

He also explained how as a result of the insufficient investments, he felt clearly that some of the semiconductor production facilities related to solar power he saw simply were not able to control the production process adequately to produce consistent silicon. As a result, everything failed sooner or later as people found more and more bugs that they did not have the time to solve.

Another key investment is enticing back experienced exchange-students who have learnt new techniques to be heads of laboratory/founders to back in your country.

A fantastic initiative from Brazil for example is BRASA, which aims to put together Brazilian exchange students to make a difference back in Brazil.

Do not try to forbid external companies from selling in your country. Instead, fund your own companies to be able to fight the external market off. And if they can't, let them die and pick a different bet. Video "How Taiwan Created TSMC by Asianometry (2020)" has a good mention. Protectionism is something that Brazil notably tried to do, and look at what it led, not a single international success.