Progress links digest, 2023-07-28: The decadent opulence of modern capitalism

[jasoncrawford]

Link post

Opportunities

• Applications are still open for The Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive, through Aug 11. Launch a blog, get into a regular writing habit, improve your writing, and begin building your audience

• Longevity startup Loyal hiring a Marketing Director (via @celinehalioua)

• Apply for the South Park Commons Founder Fellowship (via @adityaag)

• Niko McCarty in SF this weekend, meet him and chat about synthetic bio

Announcements

• Fervo Energy has demonstrated an advanced geothermal well that generated 3.5MW of electricity. Via @TimMLatimer: “Geothermal has long been held back by drilling costs. We just got a lot better at drilling”

• Llama-v2 is open source, authorized for commercial use. Pre-trained models available with 7B, 13B and 70B parameters (via @ylecun) [Update Aug 9: See @Zac Hatfield-Dodds’s comment below: “Meta is only offering a limited commercial license which discriminates against specific users and bans many valuable use-cases, both economic and in alignment research.” Zac works for Anthropic, although I assume this opinion is his own.]

• ChatGPT now supports custom instructions. Because even @sama knows that it is too verbose and caveats too much

Links

• Jake Seliger wants to make the FDA’s “invisible graveyard” a bit more visible: “I’m going to be buried in it, in a few weeks or months” (via @AlanMCole)

• A game that tests your ability to predict how well GPT-4 will perform at various types of questions. I scored 85th percentile (B+) and was only slightly overconfident

• Lessons learned about Focused Research Organizations (via @SGRodriques)

• Dan Wang’s China notes. China sees LLMs as akin to social media: “technologies with little economic upside and significant political risk.” Social media apps “are not increasing TFP … they are freewheeling platforms for expression, with the potential to create political unrest.” But: “Americans are now integrating these tools into their lives. And they will start showing up in productivity statistics…. The longer that most Chinese are unable to work with them, the greater the risk that China will be left behind in some way”

• “Despite the proven safety of rbST and its effectiveness in reducing the carbon and nitrogen footprint of dairy cows, the industry eliminated rbST use because of consumer pressure”

• An argument that ’Oumuamua is probably a natural object (via @Astro_Wright)

• Stanford President resigns over academic fraud (via @StanfordDaily)

• The term “late capitalism” was coined in the early 20th century and “began to be used by socialists in continental Europe towards the end of the 1930s and in the 1940s, when many economists believed capitalism was doomed”

Video

• Converting scrap steel to rebar (via @Jess_Riedel)

Queries

• How much nitrogen is required to grow a specific amount of produce, for various crops?

• If Niko wrote an introductory book on genetic design, would you read it?

• Compared to 100 years ago, are a higher or lower percentage of the goods consumed the rich the same as the ones consumed by the poor?

• What should Dwarkesh ask Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic?

• What great reporters are focused on deeptech /​ “American Dynamism” startups (other than Ashlee Vance)?

• How should students be selected for university admission?

Quotes

• Mokyr: Hope for progress in the 1700s was based on a metaphysical belief that nature is knowable

• Over the long run, progress accelerates

• A cool application of genetic engineering: “scuba rice”

• Andy Warhol (1975) and Harper’s Magazine (1957) on capitalist equality

• Back when we couldn’t figure out what to do with computers, in 1977

• The New Jersey Turnpike was built in less than two years

• Community participation turns into just another form of bureaucratic governance, putting power in the hands of those who have time to sit in meetings

• The moment humans invent a new vehicle, we want to race it

Tweets and threads

• Retweet if you have ever bought fresh fruit in winter and marveled in ecstasy at the decadent opulence of modern capitalism

• Someone should write about science news the way Matt Levine writes about finance news. Related, someone should do a historical, progress-studies take on money and banking

• Looking for big ideas? Scan through mid–20th century government research papers

• Anatoli Bugorski stuck his head into a particle accelerator, got hit with a proton beam, survived, and completed his PhD thesis. The 20th-century Phineas Gage

• We’re not at the end-state of capitalism until you can buy fresh peaches all year

• Banning targeted ads “dooms citizenry to toothpaste and detergent ads and small businesses to bankruptcy”

• Mega-scale physics experiments are like modern cathedrals: “Thousands of individual careers dedicated to constructing colossal works of cutting-edge engineering. To better know the mind of god”

• “Vannevar Bush: General of Physics”, TIME cover, April 1944 (via @calebwatney)

Closing thought

• What’s the most <you> thing you could be doing?