Progress links and tweets, 2022-11-01

[jasoncrawford]

Link post

Announcements

• The Reef Starter Innovation Challenge, to identify startups that could benefit from operations in Low Earth Orbit

• AI startup Generally Intelligent has launched and open-sourced their research environment (via @kanjun)

• Deep Science Ventures is launching a doctorate to put venture creation at the heart of the PhD (via @isabel_thomp)

• Interintellect launches a fellowship/​microgrant program (via @TheAnnaGat)

• At Story Summit, founders will come together to communicate the futures they see in three immersive days of writing (via @AlexandriaLabs)

• Ben Reinhardt seeking help to build a website for his private ARPA project (@Ben_Reinhardt)

• The Foresight Institute is hiring an executive assistant (via @allisondman)

• Prediction market Metaculus launches a “Forecasting Our World In Data” tournament (via @metaculus)

Links

• Progress is driven by impatient optimists by Hannah Ritchie (via @BillGates!)

• How to escape scientific stagnation in The Economist, Matt Clancy is quoted (h/​t @heidilwilliams_)

• Works in Progress special issue on abundance and the technological frontier

• A proposed agenda for the “abundance movement” (by @s_r_constantin). See also her follow up list of policy organizations

• Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? (by @antonhowes)

• Improving the culture and social processes of science (by @michael_nielsen and @kanjun)

• For the first time ever, humans changed the motion of a celestial object (via @NASA)

• The Long Now republishes my essay “Can Growth Continue?”, based on my 5-minute Ignite talk (via @longnow)

• The breast cancer treatment that got funding from the billionaire owner of Revlon (Virginia Postrel)

• A NEPA explainer from @elidourado. Related, 3 years and $1.7M to build a single public toilet in SF

• Exposure to markets makes people behave more cooperatively and in less self-interested ways (Alex Tabarrok)

• 22nd cohort Emergent Ventures includes Jackson Oswalt, who achieved nuclear fusion at age 12 (yes, this is a thing)

• Vox announced the Future Perfect 50 list of people building a better future. I’m on it (via @voxdotcom and @bryanrwalsh)

Queries

• How should creatives respond to the advance of AI?

• Best thinkers/​writing on how we can evolve the NRC to help us build more nuclear? (@juliadewahl)

• Good blog or Twitter feed of Notion power user tips?

• Books that examine the drivers and limits of technological innovation? (@brunoswerneck)

• Good histories of how governments figured out how to run stuff? (@F_McCullough)

• What should Dwarkesh Patel ask Kenneth Jackson about Robert Moses? (@dwarkesh_sp)

• Anybody working on habitation domes? (@Ben_Reinhardt)

Quotes

• Isambard K. Brunel refused to participate in lowest-price bids. (Dominic Cummings approves)

• Bacon: whatever exists deserves to be known

• The Greeks’ unique view on geometry

• Montessori appreciated progress and knew it should be celebrated

• DDT was credited with controlling an epidemic of typhus

• The counterculture “embraced decentralized and appropriate technology to counter large-scale technology”

• The stock ticker machine was to the 19th century what social media is to today

• How people today take the modern standard of living for granted

• Alexis De Tocqueville on social media cancellation (@curiouswavefn)

Tweets & threads

• Fuel synthesis as an alternative to batteries for energy storage

• Controversy over vaccines is not just about technology, but about technocracy

• Eripuit caelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis – He seized the lightning from the heavens and the scepter from the tyrants (epigram for Benjamin Franklin)

• “Why don’t more tech billionaires try to improve SF city governance?”

• Why don’t we paint cooling towers at power plants? (via Virginia Postrel)

Retweets

• We should teach the history of progress in public health as part of a standard curriculum (@stevenbjohnson). I agree

• Energy superabundance versus our current path of permanent scarcity (@PatrickJBlum)

• Sow complacency, reap a crisis; sow hustle and grit, reap abundance (@elidourado)

• It’s been a great year for vaccine discovery (@salonium)

• GPT-3 versus Google Search (@dweekly). As I commented, one thing LLMs might be useful for now/​soon is as a kind of search engine

• BioNTech founders expect a cancer vaccine “before 2030” (@therecount via @jmhorp)

• The product culture that ignores fatal flaws (@warren_craddock)

• Peer review is a mechanism for political legitimacy, not scientific quality (@calebwatney)

• Autocracies promote developments in tech that don’t matter, but dazzle people (@ZachWeiner)

• How much old stuff gets dragged along into the first versions of new things (@paulg)

• The astronaut as the visual successor to the cowboy, 1959 (@ChasingMoonBk)

Charts

• The space race vs a Seattle bus/​bike lane (@pushtheneedle)