Joost Bonsen

Last Updated: April 18, 1996 by jpbonsen@athena.mit.edu Copyright (c) Joost Bonsen 1994-1996.

Keywords: transhumanist, extropian, objectivist, libertarian, romantic, technologist, educator, entrepreneur, venture capitalist.

Live really well, maximizing intensity and duration!

I'm currently working at MIT on various entrepreneurship and company founder-related projects. If you're interested in an opinionated view of what currently exists at MIT in this domain, consider my Guide: Entrepreneurship@MIT.

FYI, I'm basically an extropian transhumanist with objectivist inclinations. This means I'm a pro-technology, pro-reason futurist who thinks and acts purposefully, is passionate about freedom, seeks beauty, esteems inventors and wealth creators, and is optimistic about the potential for future progress. I highly value people with integrity and perseverance.

I'm a libertarian laissez-faire capitalist. Free-market capitalism is the most natural, practical, and moral approach to social systems, one emphasizing the ultimate responsibility and personal sovereignty of every individual versus the prejudices and hazards of the unbounded State, tribe, or group. I advocate decimating the role of government in our lives. Let's allow people to literally create a better future for themselves and loved ones, largely by producing and trading wealth.

I'm a classic romantic. I love the beautiful and inspiring, both natural and artifactual, in relationships as well as in things or objects. Why live ugly? Choose tastefully and make life's activities and daily things pleasing, even breathtaking!

My particular career interests are focused on wealth creation, hot technologies, new ventures, financial and philanthropic investments, and academia. My general interests & activities are broad and oriented towards a rich and better future for myself and others of good will. I'm an insatiable info-slurper.

If you'd like to, please send me an e-mail, say hello, and tell me what you think.

Transhumanism

Transhumanists think humanity can and should strive to higher levels, physically, mentally, and socially. Transhumanists seek to continue and accelerate the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life-furthering principles and values, while avoiding religion and dogma. General transhuman principles for living include:

(These points are Joost's variations on the Transhuman Principles 1.0a (due to Anders, Alex, Sasha, Romana, Mark, Rich, Chris, Nancie, and others) and paraquotes from works by Max, Arkuat, Anders, FM-2030, and many others.)

Extropy

Extropians are particularly individualistic and libertarian transhumanists who seek to increase intelligence, information, energy, vitality, experience, diversity, opportunity, and growth. In short, extropians seek to BEST DO IT SO:

(These principles due to Max More <more@extropy.org>, President, Extropy Institute (ExI))

Objectivism

Objectivists envision human beings in a free society pursuing happiness and fulfillment through their own productive actions based on their own independent judgement. In summary, objectivists hold:

(These are Joost's paraquotes from: The Ayn Rand Lexicon (HC) p344 quoted from "Introducing Objectivism," TON, Aug. 1962, 35.)

Libertarian

Libertarians agree people should not be forced to sacrifice their lives and property for the benefit of others, that people should be left free by government to deal with one another as free traders. The resultant economic system, the only one compatible with the protection of individual rights, is the free market. To go from where we are now -- the muddle-American mixed-economy -- to where we ought to be, libertarians tend to support:

(These are paraquotes from: Official LP Documents Available Online with several additional emphases added by Joost)

Romantic

If it must be, let it be aesthetically great! Nature has been "designed" by evolution into optimized flora and fauna in myriad ecological niches; many of the resultant shapes, structures, and patterns are quite fantastic. Humans, in turn, consciously design and may chose almost everything about themselves and their most frequent surroundings. My highly abbreviated personal love-list includes:

Career Interests

MIT Academia

I've got some radical, highly un-official ideas about what ails MIT and what should be done about it. In a nutshell, MIT needs to be run like the Research & Education (R&E) business it is and not like traditional (read: medieval) bureaucratic academic fiefdoms. Rather than grinding out well-trained worker bees, MIT needs to educate and inspire the founders, inventors, builders, and leaders of the businesses and productive activities of tomorrow.

Professor Emeritus Jay Forrester is right (once again) when he pointed out (in an MIT Faculty Newsletter) that MIT needs to cull the weakest 10% of activities on a regular basis in order to provide work capacity and investment capital for the bold research investments necessary to retain future leadership and reputation. Failure to do so is tantamount to stagnation and ever-diminishing differential superiority relative to up-and-coming national and international R&E institutions.

(It should be noted that "weakest" in the above context does not mean most nascent or least likely to achieve current funding. Rather, it's a measurement of the best-guess impact of the activity on leadership and reputation projected 5 to 15 years hence. This is a difficult assessment to make, but must be made.)

Re-engineering, in this regard, has scarcely gone far enough. To-date only administrative processes have been touched. And much like the phone company, MIT has found itself with excess layers of management. Unlike AT&T, however, MIT hasn't made significant cuts. Yet these cuts are necessary to set the stage for reinvestment in future leadership activities. Furthermore, cuts are only half the re-engineering formula. The second half is investment -- in dramatic new areas -- for growth and future primacy.

MIT should attract the most effective and appropriate people in the world for all positions and admissions. Age or youth should be irrelevant. Sex or gender should be irrelevant. Skin tone and genetic circumstances should be irrelevant. So irrelevant that all such factors should be completely ignored, much moreso than they are today.

Although I feel like I'm tilting at windmills here, I would urge consideration of the following policies:

Organizationally, MIT is reasonably divided into Schools (with Departmental disciplines) and cross-disciplinary Labs and Centers. MIT needs a few new Schools, though, for example:

Furthermore, MIT could use a few new cross-disciplinary Labs and Centers, perhaps:

There's plenty more to be said on this topic, but this's all for now.

Interests & Activities

Atheist

Naturally I'm an atheist. Someone told me "I agree with almost everything you write except atheism." First of all, fine, believe what you want. Second, however, I can't understand how one can agree with all I've said and, in a non-contradictory manner, still be theistic, i.e. believing in some supposed all-powerful, all-knowing being for whom evidence is scant. Atheists do not accept myths, nor that for which there is no evidence, nor that which must otherwise be taken on faith, hearsay, or human assertion. Most atheists would agree:

(Adapted from: An Introduction to Atheism by mathew < meta@harlequin.co.uk >)

The Hopeful Future

I'm completely, totally, hyper-optimistic about the future!

Ben Franklin wrote that he wished men knew how to pickle him in a reversable manner such that he could be revived and thus check out the fruits of human actions 200 years hence. Although I wouldn't say he or I were "born too soon," I share his intense desire to see things through the long haul because it all just gets better!

Sure, many people around us are idiots and plenty of those have the power to royally botch life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the rest of us. But if you sit around angsting about the downside, you're not creating the upside. Alan Kay supposedly said "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Well, I'm working on just that. And all of my friends are too.

People either produce or leech, either add value or diminish it, either behave extropically or entropically. Those in the second category better leave me alone! In fact, I wish they'd develop some sense of pride and start working for themselves. Maybe then we could trade as equals. (By the way, does anyone know of a polite but quick way of getting this message across to all the deadbeats cluttering the T and Harvard Square?)

I'm so optimistic in part because I see the long term trends: never have more people been more free, never has technology leveled the playing field more, never has the power of the government to interfere and botch things been so threatened. More people have more wealth today than ever before. The so-called "poor" in the USA live like royalty compared to the poor of past decades and centuries, and even the poor of the cultural-backwater countries of today. The beauty of modern technology and business is that it is mass-technology and mass-business -- the more people served, the better. And to achieve volume, technologists and entrepreneurs have ruthlessly driven prices downward while delivering better functionality.

But you might retort, technological progress isn't everything. What about "social" progress? False distinction, I answer. Or what if you can point to particular instances of inequity or backwardness? Well sure, that's the whole point, isn't it? There are always things that are relatively screwed up and in need of attention. If we were entirely contented, why act at all? The point here is that in general we are all absolutely better off and that things are both absolutely and relatively improving on nearly all fronts. The faster we achieve this progress, the better. But everything depends on how and if people act.

Towards this end of choosing how to act and towards what goals, I've been an ardent reader of science fiction, speculative engineering, and futurist literature. One worthy example futurist work is The Hopeful Future, by G. Harry Stine, about how he thinks things can and ought to be. As Stine says, there's a ton of work to do and people should either "lead, follow, or get out of the way."

I choose lead. I hope that you too, in your own way, lead yourself and perhaps the rest of us towards a better future.

Info-Slurper

Post Script

I invite you to think through the above ideas and decide after due consideration whether they have merit and application for yourself.

Joost Bonsen < jpbonsen@athena.mit.edu> http://www.mit.edu/people/jpbonsen/jpbonsen-home.html