Tyler Cowen decides to SMI2LE

Tyler Cowen

It's an easy criticism to say that the space colonies and dramatic life extensions forecast by Robert Anton Wilson haven't arrived yet, but readers of this blog will notice that I like to point out indications that SMI2LE isn't dead, it's just not moving as quickly as predicted.  I recently mentioned Balaji Srinivasan and Zoltan Istvan; here is another example. 

Tyler Cowan has a project called Emergent Ventures, funded by donations, a "fellowship and grant program from the Mercatus Center" which "seeks to support entrepreneurs and brilliant minds with highly scalable, 'zero to one' ideas for meaningfully improving society." 

Tyler periodically announces Emergent Ventures grants on his Marginal Revolution blog; the latest announcement was published Sept. 10. It lists 13 winners; I want to quote what Tyler says about two of them:

"BeyondAging, a new group to support longevity research."

"Nina Khera, 'I’m a teenage human longevity researcher who’s interested in preventing aging-related diseases, especially those related to brain aging. In the past, I’ve worked with companies like Alio on computation and web-dev-based projects. I’ve also worked with labs like the Gladyshev lab and the Adams lab on data analysis and machine learning-based projects.'  Her current project is Biotein, about developing markers for aging, based in Ontario."

Here is an article on SMI2LE, and if you follow the link and read the whole announcement at Marginal Revolution, you will see some of Tyler's other announcements arguably promote increases in intelligence. There is a grant to "Zena Hitz, St. John’s College, to build The Catherine Project, to revitalize the study of the classics" and a grant to "for a project to make the Great Books on the web easy to read." I have bookmarked the blog of Sam Enright,  a university student studying in Scotland; some of you may enjoy Enright's blog post, "A Beginner's Guide to Miles Davis."