Progress links & tweets, 2022-09-08

[jasoncrawford]

Link post

Opportunities

• Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross are investing $10M in AI-first products, apply here (via @natfriedman)

• Congressman Jake Auschincloss is hiring a Chief of Staff, @MarkLutter encourages the progress community to apply

Announcements

• Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet is a new book out from Tupy & Pooley. Jeremy Horpedahl has a brief review.. Arnold Kling is slightly critical; I found his comments interesting but not fully convincing

• Prediction market Kalshi is seeking approval to create election contracts, add your comment to the CFTC (thread from CEO @mansourtarek_)

• Aletheia is a new platform for communicating peer-evaluated research (via @namalhotra)

Links

• I don’t think we can assign quantitative probabilities to all our beliefs, but this essay argues that if we make coherent choices, then we have them at least implicitly

• “Not even death can exempt you from TSA screening”

Queries

• Is there a case in the last century where a new technology didn’t become cheap enough for everyone? (@davidmanheim)

• Who should Derek Thompson talk to about why the British economy is such a mess? (@DKThomp)

• Is there a nice comparable table of rocket turbopumps by flow rate and pressure head? (@anderssandberg)

• Did Queen Elizabeth I really inhibit the development of the stocking frame?

Quotes

• Gutenberg had to solve many intricate problems to make the printing press

• Bacon anticipating Lakatos

• Jefferson anticipating Paul Romer

• Sawmills outnumbered even gristmills in 19th-century America

• “Life in the big city,” London, 1850s

Tweets & retweets

• Norway’s tunnel: < $7M/​km; Seattle’s tunnel: $1,167M/​km

• Diablo Canyon will continue operations until at least 2030 (@ANS_org)

• The more money an organization gives out, the less likely it is to fund unusual people (@SamoBurja)

• Beware the deepity (@JeremiahDJohns)

Charts

• The shift to WFH is saving ~200M hours and 6B miles of commuting/​week in the US alone (@I_Am_NickBloom)

[DirectedEvolution]

• Is there a case in the last century where a new technology didn’t become cheap enough for everyone? (@davidmanheim)

The original question was actually:

Does anyone know of a case in the last century where the argument against that not everyone will get access to a new technology (rather than via accruing capital /​ wage disparity,) wasn’t falsified by falling prices?

In response to the original question,

• Abortion pills

• Insulin

• Broadband (6% of all Americans, 25% of rural Americans, and ¹⁄₃ of people in tribal areas don’t have access)

• Smart homes (because homes in general are too expensive for many people)

• Clean air (due to shifting of industry to less-regulated areas that allow more pollution in order to deliver cheaper prices to consumers; the people who live near polluting factories are the people who most need “access” to smog-avoidance technology, not the industrialists who choose whether or not to use it)

• Access to the latest and greatest scientific literature

• I know what the original question is talking about, but it still seems worth pointing out: older people don’t get to benefit from technologies invented to solve the problems of youth. For example, the first egg donation took place in 1983. Anbody who exited their childbearing years before that didn’t get to access it.

In general, look to local bans and underinvestment in public infrastructure to find more examples.

Also, the original question is a little underspecified. Quality, amount, training, and other factors are all key to meaningful access to technology. If I have dialup, I technically have internet “access,” but it’s a vastly different experience than with broadband. On a national scale, there are plenty of militaries with “access” to US military technology by buying it from the US government, but that lack the training to employ it to greatest effect. If we generalize the question to “are there any examples in the last century where falling prices have not allowed everyone equal access to the highest-quality new categories of consumer goods and services,” then I think the answer is “yes, tons.”

Usually falling prices are coming with lots of compromises. The question is whether or not the mass marketed version allays our concerns about “access.”

[ChristianKl]

According to https://​​carafem.org/​​how-much-does-the-abortion-pill-cost/​​ :

So you’re researching the costs for a medication abortion, aka the abortion pill, and you need to know more! At carafem, the abortion pill costs $250-600 depending on if you choose a video visit or which location you visit. At other providers, the abortion pill typically costs between $300-800, again depending on your health insurance, your state, and your provider.

That price doesn’t sound to me like it’s out of reach given that actually having a child is orders of magnitude more expensive. Even in lost wages due to pregrancy are likely a lot more meaningful than $250.

Even in those areas where they can not be accessed legally, I suspect that black market prices (online ordering via crypto) is relatively cheap.

Access to the latest and greatest scientific literature

Access to “the latest X” is not a technology in the sense of the question. The latest X is often too expensive for everyone and the question is about whether the cost to access it go down over time.

[DirectedEvolution]

I think we’re having an argument over the technical definition of a word (“access”) that never was defined in the original tweet :)