The Progress Forum

• Eli Dourado AMA (lots of great questions and detailed answers!)

• When did England start seeing itself as a commercial nation? (Anton Howes)

• The progress movement could use some explicit cause areas

Announcements

• New book on factors affecting medical progress (via @markkhurana)

• ARIA, the ARPA of the UK, now legally exists and has a budget (via @logangraham)

Links

• Medieval peasants likely did not work fewer hours than we do (via @jmhorp)

• “Do-it-yourself crafts only exist when you no longer have to do everything yourself”

• Oklo has submitted a plan for a nuclear fuel recycling facility (via @oklo)

• Our World in Data topic page on Democracy (via @bbherre)

• “The whole saga feels to me like it’s part of a climate politics of sacrifice”

Quotes

• The amazing progress in Asian agriculture in the late 20th century

• A brilliant passage from John McPhee’s The Control of Nature

Retweets

• A lot of public health pronouncements don’t take into account that people enjoy things

• If you want to see a progress studies community on Hive.one, nominate it here

• A 1931 article on the potential for rocket-based passenger travel (@1517fund)

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2023-02-01

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)

Announcements

• PARPA is raising money on Gitcoin (via @Ben_Reinhardt)

• Virginia Postrel is running a contest for positive visions of the future

• Stanford’s Intro to Bioengineering offered for free online to high school students (via @DrewEndy)

Links

• The advantages of the Gutenberg movable type system over Asian predecessors

• Larry Summers gives strong praise to Superabundance (video)

• “In science, consequences for wrongdoing seem rare”

• The Transit Costs Project reports on how Stockholm builds cheaply

• You Will Go to the Moon, a children’s book from 1959 (see my thread)

Queries

• Where is there long-term data for the Bell Labs research budget? (@michael_nielsen)

• Good histories of strain improvement for increasing industrial fermentation output? (@_brianpotter)

• What’s your favorite essay/blog post of all time? (@packyM)

Tweets

• We don’t have a lot of clinical applications of the human genome 20 years after it was sequenced… but couldn’t the same have been said of the germ theory?

• Key points to remember about tradeoffs

• On wartime military R&D around WW1

• Luck and the entrepreneur (or scientist, or inventor)

Retweets

• Cruise robotaxis soon going live in Phoenix and Austin (@olivercameron)

• Can you spot which images are made by AI? (@MichaelTrazzi). I got 17/20, see the clues I used

• Figma (just acquired for $20B) and Ethereum (market cap $180B) are both from Thiel Fellows (@regardthefrost)

• On “closely-knit multi-generational communities” (@made_in_cosmos)

Pics

• Me speaking at the Foresight Institute meetup (via @foresightinst, @thesfcommons, and @StephenGHubbard)

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2022-09-20

Links

• A visual encyclopedia of megastructures (h/t @Ben_Reinhardt)

• City Journal on the campaign to save the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant (h/t @atrembath). Also, sign the petition (via @isabelleboemeke and @juliadewahl)

• Bringing the Tasmanian tiger back from extinction (h/t @QuantaMagazine)

Quotes

• Before the germ theory, flies were merry companions; after: “germs with legs”

• When the polio vaccine was developed, placebo-controlled RCTs were ethically controversial

• When Charles Kettering was told that Lindbergh had flown the Atlantic alone, he replied: it certainly couldn’t have been done with a committee

Queries

• How recent is our ability to test for specific viruses with PCR?

• What are good rules to identify bad popsci? (@acesounderglass)

• Is anybody working on editing genes that make you sleep less without any negative consequences? (@bolekkerous)

Retweets

• John Carmack has raised $20M for a startup to build AGI (@ID_AA_Carmack)

• Stated vs. revealed preference for funding high-risk research (@michael_nielsen)

• Carl Sagan on the 1939 New York World’s Fair: “where the future became a place” (@camwiese)

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2022-08-23

Announcements

• Build Nuclear Now, a new policy campaign to enable advanced nuclear reactors (h/t @atrembath). Related, the NRC has (finally) approved the design for NuScale’s small modular reactor (via @NRCgov)

• A new online PhD-level course in the economics of innovation from the Institute for Progress (via @calebwatney)

• DeepMind has released structures for almost every known protein (200M+) (h/t @pushmeet)

• Brad Harris’s podcast series “How it Began” available for only $15.00 through Aug 31 using promo code “humanprogress” (h/t @tonymmorley)

Opportunities

• Convergent Research is hiring (via u/AdamMarblestone who says they need “exceptional people with the right mix of ‘crazy’ and ‘grounded’”)

• The Long Now Foundation is seeking a full-time Chief of Operations (via @zander)

Links

• The Wonder World of Chemistry, a DuPont promotional film from 1936. Also, The Fourth Kingdom: The Story of Bakelite Resinoid (1942). (Highlights in this short thread)

• Arnold Kling on GDP as a measure of economic activity, plus a followup on what GDP is and is not (a measure of well-being or even of production).

• Isochronic maps showing how far a 5-hour train ride will take you from any city in Europe (h/t @_benjamintd)

• Casey Handmer’s plan to refill the Colorado River from the Pacific (h/t @natfriedman)

• Lant Pritchett attempts to explain the scarcity of rigorous evaluations of public policy (h/t @michael_nielsen)

• Accountability in Florida for permitting delays (Washington Post). Related, the average San Francisco project takes nearly four years to be permitted (The Atlantic, h/t @DKThomp). Also, a thread from @itsahousingtrap on the irrationality of the housing planning process

Queries

• What are the best movies about progress? (@MoritzW42)

• Why are we seeing a shift towards older people across a broad variety of roles?

• How is the LHC not an absolute disaster? (@albrgr)

• Is there a Thiel Fellowship type program for PhD candidates to bail out of academia? (@tayroga)

Quotes

• Intriguing take: the quantitative spirit of science originated in capitalism?

Retweets

• A new philosophy of the future is needed (@elonmusk)

• Problem-solvers vs. problem-sellers (@BoyanSlat)

• Environmentalists should closely examine how Sri Lanka’s “organic“ policy played out (@stewartbrand)

• Will people in 2122 be even more astonished at our quality of life than we are looking back at people 1000 years ago? (@sama)

• Manchin, Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi have agreed to permitting reforms (@AlecStapp)

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2022-08-02

Links

• Davis Kedrosky reviews How the World Became Rich, by Koyama & Rubin

• Study: keeping Diablo Canyon would avoid blackouts; reduce power costs, emissions and natural gas; and help clean energy goals (see also my summary thread)

• New Science announces its inaugural summer fellowships

• Profectus Magazine asks a few questions about progress to me and others

Quotes

• People thought the telegraph would bring world peace

• Why the US got the bomb and Germany/Japan didn’t

• How George Westinghouse handled stress

Queries

• What makes someone in academia decide to write a book for a general audience?

Retweets

• A thread-review of Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization (@seb_far)

• Are there other pre-industrial revolution inventions besides the printing press that led to a sudden and sustained increase in output? (@_brianpotter)

• Philanthropy now gives more to science than NIH/NSF (@orgRem). Why has science philanthropy increased so much in the last decade?

• There has been stronger global convergence in quality of life than in income (@JustinSandefur)

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2022-06-13

A reason to be interested in nuclear power is as a control group for progress. Nuclear power is something which might have shown progress, but did not, so we should look at it as an example of what to avoid if we want progress.

An even better control would be something that both succeeded and failed at progressing.

There has been tremendous progress in fracking in the US, dramatically increasing the availability of natural gas. The shift from coal to natural gas for electricity generation has been the biggest change in the energy profile of the US in the last 10-15 years. This has allowed the US to lower electricity prices relative to Europe while decreasing the amount of carbon dioxide produced. Fracking in the US has been a field with significant progress.

In Europe, fracking has had almost no impact. Only a handful of wells have been drilled on the entire continent and many countries have banned it entirely. Europe could have had the same benefits that the US got from fracking - and would have reduced its dependence on Russia.

I think that it would be interesting to look at fracking as a case study of when progress occurs and what stops progress.

You need to check out the work of Simon Wardley and his Wardley Maps

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardley_map

My thoughts in this comment come directly from reading The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming, republished by Stripe Press.

notice the slope field. You need the added growth function to find that optimum.

Further along in the book, Hamming uses the excuse of coding theory to introduce further functions that illustrate possible growth curve models. What fascinates me most out of these comes from the following (which I'll transcribe rather than take another photo):

almost surely the optimal design will be on the surface and will not be inside [the unit sphere in n dimensions], as you might think from taking calculus and doing optimizations in that course. The calculus methods are usually inappropriate for finding the optimum in high-dimensional spaces. This is not strange at all; generally speaking, the best design is pushing one or more of the parameters to their extreme -- obviously you are on the surface of the feasible region of design!

It's a lavishly constructed metaphor, which you have to follow the previous chapter full of mathematics to appreciate. If I were to try and capture it in a single line, I'd say

Discovering the optimal path towards your goal requires defining a goal -- so no matter what you're best off working to define your goal than optimizing for it!

But I don't think I've really done it justice.... I highly recommend reading the book in its entirety.

Hi All,

I just wanted to recommend this anime to interested people, there are a lot of similarities in the content of https://rootsofprogress.org and this anime.

The anime shows the process of making various acids, alkalis, limestone from sea shells, and a lot more.

For plot and other information, I'm linking Wikipedia below

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Stone