Have you ever heard of "The Narcissist's Prayer"? It goes like this:

That didn't happen.

And if it did, it wasn't that bad.

And if it was, that's not a big deal.

And if it is, that's not my fault.

And if it was, I didn't mean it.

And if I did...

You deserved it.

Tether defenders are really working their way through the steps here.

18 months ago, it was "That didn't happen." (Tether is 100% backed by USD cash.)

6 months ago, it "wasn't that bad." (It might not be 100% USD cash, but it's cash-equivalent assets like short-term commercial paper.)

Now that there's strong evidence the commercial paper is just fake money shuffling between Tether/Binfinex/other shady crypto investments we get "that's not a big deal." (Look at the way banks work! They only need 4% collateral! Tether's probably got at least that much...)

Next step is finding out that their actual liquidity isn't capable of holding up under a real-life stress test, and the defenders will be talking about "not my fault." (This was a once-in-a-lifetime crash, they couldn't have foreseen it, crypto's still way better than the fiat banking system!)

When thousands of people lose their retirements in a gigantic defi crash, it'll be "you deserved it." (Everyone knows crypto is risky, you shouldn't have believed Tether was the same as USD.)

The part of the immune system being described is the germinal center reaction. The 1 million times faster mutation rate only occurs for B-cells dividing in these structures and it's caused by some kind of chemical signaling (the name has slipped my mind). Importantly, it only effects the mutation rate of the thing that codes for the antibody the B-cell expresses, but it has been observed that in this part the mutation is pretty much random.

On average, by the way, there is about 1 point mutation in the part coding for antibodies for every single division in the germinal center. But since the particular mutation is random, I'm not sure I like describing this as the B-cell editing its own genome. It makes it more mysterious than necessary.

I should probably turn this part of my PhD thesis into a set of blog posts once I've defended..."affinity maturation" is a weird and wonderful process.

An interesting aspect to this debate is: what kind of actions do we sort of instinctively judge to have very large tail risk, and should we trust those judgements? Of course, the argument here is about the precautionary principle. But the precautionary principle sort of assumes that we can correctly judge which actions have potentially disastrous (non-ergodic, to use Taleb's vocab) consequences. That in itself is an inexact science. Maybe these mosquitos are about to naturally cultivate some horrifying virus, and it's actually not genetically modifying them that would be catastrophic.

Taleb's ilk tend to respond with a kind of Chesterton's fence conservatism: things we haven't yet done, haven't wiped us out, so lets not do too much new stuff. But that's an anthropic argument, with weird Bayesian properties.

You’d be amazed just how much is still out there, unknown or forgotten. I’ve got around a fair bit over the years, and I’ve seen some incredible things that exist on no map, no online resource, in some cases not even in the minds of locals. I’m currently living in northern Portugal, which, as part of Western Europe, you’d think would be pretty well explored - but no. The local medieval castle, which is shockingly obvious sat atop a volcanic plug, was not recognised or documented until 1979 - and only in the 1990s did someone realise that this place was that place referred to in various historical documents. The locals knew about it, of course, but it was unremarkable to them. When we moved here, we wanted an old building to restore, somewhere surrounded by nature. We talked to realtors, to locals, young and old, nobody knew of such a place. I pored over satellite imagery, chose some spots to go for a ramble. Discovered a medieval watermill - a series of them, in fact. Talked to locals again, to the council - nobody had a clue they existed, and the land was public land - and they agreed to sell me one of them. Since we started work we’ve had a little trickle of people wandering down to say hello, and unanimously they’ve all lived there all of their lives, and they’re all agog when they see that this place exists. Exploring the land around the mill has been a blast - mines, from prehistoric to medieval, various ruins, water management channels, terraces, roads, all sorts - and nobody knew any of it was there - and the wildlife is like living in a zoo. Tortoises, snakes, foxes, deer, big damn lizards, eagles, you name it - and every time I wander up a random track I find something new, even if I’ve walked that way before.

There’s a huge amount around, everywhere, to explore - you just have to go where people aren’t, and observe.