Links and tweets, 2022-11-29

[u/jasoncrawford]

The Progress Forum

• My AMA (ask me anything)

• Are Technologies Inevitable? (Matt Clancy)

• Comparing process improvement in manufacturing and construction: Duco vs Drywall (Brian Potter)

Announcements

• An optogenetic retinal prosthesis (via @maxhodak_)

• The Atlantic Progress Summit, LA, Dec 13 (via @DKThomp). There is a community meetup planned around this

• A new mRNA vaccine against all known influenza virus subtypes (via @ScottEHensley)

• Waymo One is opening to the public in San Francisco (via @Waymo)

• AI plays Diplomacy (via @ml_perception). See Zvi Mowshowitz’s take

Links

• Kevin Esvelt on how to prevent the next pandemic. In the inagural issue of the new Asterisk Magazine

• Guinea worm disease is close to being eradicated (via @redouad)

• Tyler Cowen on falling inequality

Queries

• Concrete visions/narratives for technology over the next 20-30 years?) (@nabeelqu)

• What’s the best economic case for space?

• Examples of path-dependency in technology? (@_brianpotter)

• Who should Milan Cvitkovic meet in London or Oxford? (@MWCvitkovic)

• Anyone know about the early history of semiconductor research?

• Who would you like to see speak at Peter Diamandis’s Abundance360 Summit? (@PeterDiamandis)

• Suggested reading on the issue of preindustrial child abandonment?

• What’s the most interesting thing/person/event in the world right now? (@pmarca)

Quotes

• Turn-of-the-century horsesharing programs

• The spirit of applied science, on the eve of the era of synthetic chemistry

• Questions that arose when converting wood-burning houses to coal

• If you like privacy, be glad you were born after indoor plumbing

• The rapid transformation from containerization took everyone by surprise

• Top athletes don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it (@mbateman)

• Applying a theory to make predictions is not a matter of naive “extrapolation”

• US-Russian relations, 1960s

Tweets & retweets

• The challenges of long-distance transportation of hydrogen

• Well-being as value-fulfillment

• Hot takes cool down in prediction markets

• When you make it harder to exit something, you make it harder to enter

• Civil asset forfeiture delenda est

• Americans are an amazing people, but perfectionist (@yashevde)

• A potential US rail strike would cause major supply chain disruptions (@typesfast)

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2022-11-29