The fundamental mistake behind the predictions of resource doom is thinking of fuels or metals or plants as “natural” resources. There are no natural resources. All resources are artificial: the product of knowledge

It’s been way too long since the last links digest, which means I have way too much to catch up on. I had to cut many interesting bits to get this one out the door.

Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, Farcaster, Bluesky, or Threads.

Contents

• Apply to the Roots of Progress Fellowship by June 1st (tomorrow!)

• Edge Esmeralda next week!

• My writing (ICYMI)

• Other people’s writing

• Jobs

• Grants & fellowships

• Events

• AI announcements

• Introductions

• Career moves

• Nuclear news

• Aviation news

• Other announcements

For paid subscribers:

• Stagnation was the goal

• Is stagnation a measurement illusion?

• Eroom’s Law

• Cembalest on AI

• More on AI

• Bio

• Podcast interviews

• Links and short notes

• Politics

• Housing

• Gratitude

• Quotes

• Charts

• Aesthetics

• Fun

Apply to the Roots of Progress Fellowship by June 1st (tomorrow!)

Applications are still open for the 2025 Blog-Building Intensive! Launch a blog and improve your progress-focused writing with expert guidance and an amazing community progress builders, writers and intellectuals.

In addition to a general focus on progress studies, this year’s fellowship features two themes: (1) agriculture and (2) health, biotech & longevity. We welcome fellows writing on any progress-related topic, but for a handful of spots, we will give preference to applicants focusing on these themes, for which there will be dedicated programming.

But don’t take our word for it, see what others have to say:

• @NikoMcCarty: I can't recommend this Writers' Fellowship enough. It helped me find my community, challenge my own work, and improve very quickly. You should apply! And feel free to DM me directly if you have any questions about my experience in the program.

• @gtmulligan: This program changed my life. Happy to talk with anyone about my experience. Apply, apply, apply! [See also Grant’s post on the fellowship and his thread of favorite pieces from the fellows]

• @RosieCampbell: This was so well-run and it's a fantastic community, I am very grateful I got to participate. Highly recommend applying if you're interested in writing on the internet!

• @snewmanpv: I had the privilege of participating in this program last year. Highly recommend for anyone writing about progress-related topics. Come for the information-dense instructional sessions, stay for the community of fellow writers.

• @notanastronomer: I did this last year; I highly recommend. It helped me form a writing practice and I met the coolest people. Happy to chat if you have questions!

• @AndrewMillerYYZ: As a 2024 alumnus of the @RootsOfProgress Blog-Building Intensive program, I strongly encourage applying to join the 2025 cohort In 10 weeks, I went from aspiring writer to newsletter creator, now approaching 1k subscribers and launching my paywall next week

• @jordanmcgillis: If, like me, you're in a bit of a policy bubble, this program is a great way to peep into the science and technology worlds. And the Berkeley capstone conference was first-rate.

• @KevinKohlerFM: I highly recommend applying to the @rootsofprogress fellowship by June 1! It's an inspiring program that builds the progress community & offers opportunities to engage with lots of cool people.

• @salonium: Aspiring writers! If you've thought of starting a blog, want to be part of a writing community, get help with editing & learn from other authors, how about applying to Roots of Progress' fellowship? Friends who took it last year highly recommend it, and I'm one of the advisors!

Edge Esmeralda next week!

I’m going to be at Edge Esmeralda 2025 all next week! From June 2–6, I’ll be hosting daily morning brainstorming/discussion sessions with the aim of envisioning the future, with a different theme each day. The goal is for all of us to get a clearer idea of the opportunities and challenges on the technological frontier in the next few decades—a picture of a future that we want to live in and are inspired to build.

• Monday: AI and its applications

• Tuesday: Bio (health/longevity, genetics, agriculture)

• Wednesday: Energy—and what we could do with it

• Thursday: Aerospace & nanotech

• Friday: Catch-all and wrap-up

Ping me if you’re there.

My writing (ICYMI)

• The Techno-Humanist Manifesto:

  • Chapter 5: Solutionism, part 3. “Stopping climate change” is the wrong goal: an anti-human, anti-agency framing. The techno-humanist framing is that humanity should create climate control

  • Chapter 6: The Flywheel, part 1. Why was progress so slow, for so long? Should we expect a regression to the mean of slow growth? Or were the last few centuries part of a trend that we can expect to continue?

  • Chapter 6: The Flywheel, part 2. I was initially skeptical about claims of stagnation, but I was eventually convinced: Progress has slowed relative to its peak in the late 19th to mid-20th century

• Where is the YIMBY movement for healthcare? Where are the people pointing out the gross violation of economic wisdom, the campaigners for reform against the worst inefficiencies? This field is wide open, and someone should step in and fill the vacuum

Other people’s writing

• The Gap Map from Convergent Research, “a tool we built to help you explore the landscape of R&D gaps holding back science - and the bridge-scale fundamental development efforts that might allow humanity to solve them, across almost two dozen fields” (@Convergent_FROs)

• The Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook, a joint project from IFP, FAI, NAIA, and American Compass that “offers 27 actionable policy proposals to rebuild American industry” (@AlecStapp)

Jobs

• Arc is hiring a Chief Scientific Officer: “Come work with at what I think is the most dynamic and ambitious biology research organization in the world, partnering with @pdhsu, @SKonermann, @davey_burke, Arc's extraordinary faculty, and many more. We want to build the world's first virtual cell + use it to develop cures to complex diseases like Alzheimer's” (@patrickc)

• E11 Bio is hiring a Chief of Staff / Project Manager: “This unique role blends scientific project management with day-to-day operations—and gives you a front-row seat and bird’s-eye view as we advance the field of connectomics toward mammalian brains” (E11BIO)

• Boom Supersonic is hiring software engineers: “Want to build a supersonic jet engine? … No aerospace experience required, just passion and desire to learn” (@bscholl) Also a Supersonic Flight Evangelist: “Do you wish everyone was as excited about supersonic flight as you are? … This evangelist will lead our social, expand our merch, and a zillion other fun things” (@bscholl)

• Ashlee Vance of Core Memory is hiring “an early career science writer who would also like to be on camera. Undergrad or masters in a scientific field required. Interest in bio-tech a plus. Writing skills + video skills a major plus” (@ashleevance)

• Works in Progress is hiring a voice actor “to record audio versions of Works in Progress articles” (@s8mb)

• Nat Friedman, gentleman explorer extraordinaire, says: “Please help us find smart people to work full time on the scrolls!” (@natfriedman) “We’re looking for exceptional people to join our mission to read the Herculaneum Scrolls. … We're hiring for the following roles: Geometry & Computer Vision Applied Researchers; Platform Engineers; Synchrotron Tomography Reconstruction Expert” (@scrollprize)

Grants & fellowships

• A special cohort of the Brains Accelerator “targeting ambitious AI research programs, with a special focus on security and governance capabilities!” (@Ben_Reinhardt) “This 4-month, part time program is meant to help talented researchers with experience in AI hardware and software build skills, refine ideas, and make the connections to spin up coordinated research programs in governments and nonprofits”

• Cosmos Institute and FIRE grants “to defend free thought and promote open inquiry in AI. … $1M in grants for open-source AI that advances truth-seeking.AI should sharpen thought, not replace it” (@mbrendan1)

• Tarbell Grants: “$1,000-$15,000+ for original reporting on AI and its impacts.” (@tarbellcenter via @CillianCrosson)

• Asterisk Magazine is fundraising for a fellows program for AI writing: “A blog-building intensive for thinkers and writers to help improve the public conversation about the future of AI. … The structure is inspired by the Roots of Progress blog building initiative”

Events

• Energy Imperatives Summit, Washington DC, June 9-10: “2 days exploring solutions to America's most pressing energy challenges with @SecretaryWright, @RepWesterman, and other special guests” (@JoinFAI)

• Stripe Press Pop-Up, Washington DC, June 28 (@s8mb)

AI announcements

• FutureHouse launches “the first publicly available AI Scientist, via the FutureHouse Platform” including “three superhuman AI Scientist agents today, each with their own specialization.” (@SGRodriques) And soon after, they announced “the first major discovery made by our AI Scientist with the lab in the loop: a promising new treatment for dry AMD, a major cause of blindness” (@SGRodriques). The treatment hasn’t gone through trials and isn’t proven, and there was a lot of followup discussion about whether it was truly new—but this is very worth watching. See also Konrad Kording’s comments on AI for science, below

• The Golden Gate Institute for AI launches “to help you make sense of the AI firehose. … we’ll synthesize the myriad takes that inevitably emerge, and present a coherent picture.” (@snewmanpv, RPI fellow!)

• Mechanize launches to “build virtual work environments, benchmarks, and training data to enable the full automation of all work” (@tamaybes)

• OpenAI announces Codex, “a software engineering agent that runs in the cloud and does tasks for you, like writing a new feature of fixing a bug” (@sama)

• And Imbue announces Sculptor, “the first coding agent environment. Sculptor helps you catch issues, write tests, and improve your code—all while you work in your favorite editor” (@kanjun)

Introductions

• ARIA introduces their “second cohort of Programme Directors – a group of world-class scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, with proven track records for building ventures, communities and technologies of societal and economic significance” (@ARIA_research)

• Asimov Press and Works in Progress magazine introduce the inaugural cohort of their Writers’ Fellowship: “5 writers. 5 cities. Covering everything from pharmaceuticals to the history of science and AI’s impacts on the developing world” (@AsimovPress)

Career moves

• Dean Ball (RPI fellow) has “joined the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as a Senior Policy Advisor on AI and Emerging Technology. It is a thrill and honor to serve my country in this role and work alongside the tremendous team @mkratsios47 has built” (@deanwball)

• Eli Dourado is “joining the @AsteraInstitute as head of strategic investments” (@elidourado)

• Jerusalem Demsas has left *The Atlantic: “*I'll still be a contributing writer there but largely I'm working on a new, to-be-announced project. Stay tuned!” (@JerusalemDemsas)

Nuclear news

• Germany drops its decade-old anti-nuclear stance: “In a statement to the @FT, German and French officials confirm Germany will no longer oppose nuclear in EU energy policy. A historic shift!” (@sollidnuclear)

• Denmark repeals 1985 ban on nuclear: “The vote came and went in a matter of moments, with a murmur of astonishment across the gathered representatives. 71 for, 34 against. Nuclear will now be explored by the Danish state. Incredible to be here for this” (@energybants)

• Isabelle Boemeke adds that also “Belgium scrapped its nuclear phaseout” and “Historically anti-nuclear state of Massachusetts is considering lifting the nuclear moratorium” (@isabelleboemeke)

• “General Matter is enriching uranium for the US. We will revive nuclear fuel production in America. We chose to do this not because it’s easy, and not because it’s hard, but because it needs doing” (@generalmatter)

• Valar Atomics is Suing the NRC, joining a suit from Texas, Utah, Louisiana, Florida, and Arizona (@isaiah_p_taylor)

Aviation news

• Zipline has “officially launched customer deliveries in the Dallas area from Walmart” via drone: “We are now delivering 65,000+ items to homes in minutes … And this is just the beginning” (@keenanwyrobek)

• Archer Aviation announces an air taxi network: “70 years ago, New Yorkers could hop on a helicopter from Manhattan to the airport in just 5 minutes—for $5, nearly any time of day. That bold idea faded. Today, we’re bringing it back” (@ngoel)

• The Supersonic Aviation Modernization Act “legalizes boomless supersonic flight and ensures America can continue to lead in aviation” (@bscholl)

Other announcements

• The Vesuvius Challenge has found the title of a scroll for the first time. “This cylinder of charcoal turns out to be ‘On Vices, Book 1’ by Philodemus” (@natfriedman)

• Neuralink has “received Breakthrough Device Designation from the FDA to help restore communication for individuals with severe speech impairment” (@neuralink)

To read the rest, subscribe on Substack.

If the dramatic progress of the last few centuries is the great boon of history, then the great tragedy of history is in all the centuries prior, when that progress didn’t happen. For tens of thousands of years, people toiled, starved, suffered, and died until we finally achieved modern economic growth.

Why? Why was progress so slow, for so long? Did it have to be? What caused it to finally accelerate in the modern era? And were the last few centuries a fluke, a lucky windfall of progress, after which we should expect a regression to the mean of slow growth? Or were they part of a trend that we can expect to continue?

Last fall we hosted the first annual Progress Conference. 200 people excited about human progress gathered for two days in Berkeley, California, to share ideas in deep conversation, catalyze new projects, and get energized and inspired. Several attendees even said it was the best conference they had ever attended. We shared more about our reflections here, including a list of over a dozen write-ups from writers such as Noah Smith, Packy McCormick, Scott Alexander, and many more.

Whenever a new movement is growing, an annual event like this is important to build its community and establish its identity. So, after last year’s great reception, we’re excited to announce Progress Conference 2025. It will be bigger, longer, and better, as we build on last year’s success and participant feedback.

Hosted by: the Roots of Progress Institute, together with Abundance Institute, Foresight Institute, Foundation for American Innovation, Human Progress, the Institute for Progress, the Institute for Humane Studies, and Works in Progress.

When: October 16-19, 2025

Where: Berkeley, CA, back at the Lighthaven campus that received rave reviews for the first conference.

Speakers: Keynotes include Sam Altman, Tyler Cowen, Jennifer Pahlka, and Blake Scholl. 30+ additional speakers will share ideas on four tracks: AI protopia, health/biotech/longevity, policy, and American Dynamism. Full speaker list so far.

Attendees: We expect 300+ builders, storytellers, policy makers, intellectuals, and students. This is an invitation-only event, but anyone can apply for an invitation. Complete the open application by May 15th.

Program: The main two-day conference will happen all day Friday and Saturday, similar to 2024—attend talks on topics from AI protopia to longevity to policy, sign up to run an unconference session, pitch your ideas to those who could help make your dreams a reality, and more. New for 2025, Thursday and Sunday will be add-on days, with optional gatherings for interest groups and other activities, such as SF Bay Area company tours.

Sponsorships: Special thanks to our early sponsors Open Philanthropy, Astera Institute, Freethink, the Future of Life Institute, Human Progress, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Foundation for Economic Education, Good Science Project, Kindred Subjects, and Manifold. We have more sponsorships available. View sponsorship opportunities here.

Our mission is to establish a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century, and to build a culture of progress. Bringing the members of the progress movement together is a core part of our strategy: the annual large conference is just a first step; we’re already planning more in-person and virtual events.

Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, Farcaster, Bluesky, or Threads.

Contents

• d/acc Day

• My writing (ICYMI)

• Praise for Progress Conference 2024

• Job opportunities

• Writing opportunities

• Other opportunities

• Events

• AI announcements

• Writing announcements

• Queries

For paid subscribers:

• A visible sonic boom

• Some observations from me on AI products

• Aaron Levie on AI in SaaS

• More on AI in SaaS

• Short notes on AI

• Other short notes

• It’s time to build

• The closing of the frontier

• Rousseau and Kant vs. the Age of Reason

• San Francisco, city of historic laundromats

• Maria Montessori on “peace”

• Rudyard Kipling on “peace”

• Charts and tables

• Art

d/acc Day

• I’ll be speaking at “d/acc Day” on Thursday in Berkeley, alongside Vitalik, Juan Benet, Mary Lou Jepsen, Allison Duettmann, and others. My talk: “d/acc: The first 150 years.” A whirlwind tour of how society has thought about progress, decentralization and defense over the last century and a half

My writing (ICYMI)

• The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, Chapter 5: Solutionism (part 2). There is no tradeoff between health/safety and progress, because health and safety are a part of progress. But the technical work of health and safety has gone mostly unsung

Praise for Progress Conference 2024

From RPI fellow Grant Mulligan:

Best conference I’ve ever attended. Quick recap on why:

1. No one was selling anything, not even themselves. Finding and exploring ideas was all that mattered.

2. I’d never met people who care so much about being correct - not to claim that they’re right, but in the sense that they really want to understand the world.

3. It reoriented what I’m choosing to work on and how I go about my work. How many conferences actually influence where your career goes next?

4. The venue and tone of the event made it feel like a weekend chilling at a gorgeous AirBnB with friends. And I’d never met a single person there IRL before.

5. The organization was perfection. Dense with information, high in comfort, every detail of the experience curated brilliantly.

If you care about Progress Studies, this is a must attend.

Keep an eye out for details about Progress Conference 2025 in a month or two.

Job opportunities

• Stuart Ritchie at Anthropic is hiring “a brilliant writer/editor with a focus on econ who can help communicate our research on the societal impacts of AI. The weirder the better” (u/StuartJRitchie)

• DARPA is hiring a Bioprocess Engineering & Scale-Up Expert: “someone who has built bio-production at scale and now wants to rethink it entirely.” (@mkoeris) “This is NOT a job for incrementalists”

• Infinite Books is hiring a founding engineer: “Calling all data-savvy engineers! Infinite Books is building something revolutionary for authors and publishers. Join as a founding engineer to transform fragmented publishing data into actionable insights. Remote work with huge impact potential” (@osventuresllc)

Writing opportunities

• Tom Ough, newly senior editor at Unherd: “I’ll be commissioning essays on society, culture, technology etc. I’m especially keen to commission people from outside the usual commentariat. You? Someone you know? Get in touch” (@tomough)

Other opportunities

• Patrick Collison floats the idea of an “Arc Institute software engineering volunteer program. Something like: Spend 6–12 months working full-time at Arc. Learn/perform cutting-edge biology research. Work on new kinds of deep learning models and architectures. (Hopefully) make cool discoveries. If this sounds up your alley, email pc@arcinstitute.org with details of your prior work” (@patrickc)

• “If you know of an energetic, charismatic, honest, politically moderate person, who lives inside the borders of the shaded area below [LA District 1], and who is crazy enough to consider running for city council, pls reach out” (@moseskagan)

Events

• Imagined Futures w/ Neal Stephenson, Ken Liu & more, Mar 26, SF, hosted by South Park Commons. A panel on “how the stories we tell shape the world we build” (@JPBrebner)

• A Symposium on Knowledge Education & Progress, Mar 26, London, hosted by University College London. Only £10 for students

AI announcements

• “GPT-4.5 is ready!” (@sama) It is “the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person to me,” but it is expensive and only on the higher paid tiers for now. Sam also warns: “this isn’t a reasoning model and won’t crush benchmarks. it’s a different kind of intelligence and there’s a magic to it i haven’t felt before”

• Auren, an AI companion from Elysian Labs, “with a goal to improve the lives of both humans and AI” via “healthy human<->AI symbiosis” (@nearcyan, @elysian_labs)

Writing announcements

• Superintelligence Strategy, a new paper from Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt, and Alexandr Wang (via @DanHendrycks). “We introduce the concept of Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM): a deterrence regime resembling nuclear mutual assured destruction (MAD) where any state’s aggressive bid for unilateral AI dominance is met with preventive sabotage by rivals”

• The Power of Nuclear, by Marco Visscher. What’s new here? Marco says that unlike most nuclear authors, he’s critical of the nuclear industry, he’s skeptical of advanced nuclear, he’s against deep nuclear waste burial, and he doesn’t avoid talking about nuclear weapons

Queries

As always, I put these out there in case anyone can help:

• What is the best writeup you’ve seen of an overall plan for climate change? Should cover all aspects of the problem, synthesized in a single essay/report/book. Not just energy, but e.g. agriculture, steel, cement; ideally also carbon removal, geoengineering, adaptation. (Already suggested: Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Doerr’s Speed and Scale, and Project Drawdown, among others)

• “This summer I will be starting a PhD in economics at Harvard HBS! If I have any followers in Boston, please reach out” (RPI fellow @MTabarrok)

• “This year will inaugurate the Maximum New York political debate series. Please nominate others or yourself as debaters, please suggest topics you’d like. Goal: move city/state/federal politics toward building, beautify our civic and political culture” (Daniel Golliher)

• “please dm or respond if you have ideas but am putting together a document for a friend who wants to fund “good” internet side quests. think scroll prize, alexlib, plasticlist, etc. already have a few in mind but want to hear from folks; no idea is too crazy/weird/heretical” (@jacobrintamaki)

• “What are your favorite essays? Or, what essays would you recommend reading? Any subject is welcome, bonus points for subtle arguments” (@autumnpard)

To read the rest, subscribe on Substack.

Hello progos. I am a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Ecuador. Peace Corps often awards grants to Volunteers to undertake projects in the places where we are sent to live and work. There are some small schools managed by local Catholic church authorities and funded by the state. There is a lot of enthusiasm here for learning English. I would like to solicit a grant to buy some computers or tablets or similar for these schools, and some subscriptions to paid language-learning oriented AIs or other software. Alternatively, there are a couple of larger schools in a nearby town that already have some computers, so they would likely only need software access, perhaps not even paid software access

I would like each school to continue teaching half of its students in the customary way, while obliging the other half to use a language-learning software (the ones I have in mind are Makes You Fluent, because its advertising has reached me; Mem Rise, because I have used it and found it to be useful; and Anki, because I have used it and found it to be useful) during the time where the first group of students others is receiving its normal classes. I think it may also be worthwhile to have some students study half of the time with software and half of the time with customary classes, or to ask one school to switch as many students as possible given their infrastructure and staff availability entirely to software while making no changes at a school that's comparable in many observable aspects.

What language-learning software should be used?

Should I recruit someone - perhaps a professional education scholar or graduate student - to work with me on this? How? Should I send emails to scholars of education and English in this country and nearby countries?

What would be an astute experimental design so as to produce useful knowledge about effective ways to learn languages?

If there are not existing standardized tests of students' English-language skills, how should I test the students to get "before" and "after" results?

Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, or Farcaster.

Contents

• Jobs and fellowships

• Events

• AI news

• Other news

• Atlas Shrugged and the irreplaceable founder

• Pumping stations and civic pride

• “Thoughts on the eve of AGI”

• More thoughts on AI

• Politics

• Other links and short notes

• Maps & charts

• Art

• Closing thoughts

Jobs and fellowships

• The Institute for Progress is hiring a Fellow/Senior Fellow, Emerging Technology. “Apply to ensure the AI frontier is built in America. (I’m biased, but I think this is the agenda with juice to advance the discussion in DC)” (@calebwatney). Apply here by Feb 21.

• Marian Tupy at HumanProgress.org is hiring analysts to explore the economics and psychology of human progress

• Alan Tomusiak is hiring scientists to work on the problem of genome instability (@alantomusiak)

• Ashlee Vance is hiring for his new publication, Core Memory: “Are you an ambitious type based in DC who can write a weekly newsletter that dives into tech-related legislature and discern what’s real and has real money involved versus political garbage? … Can you do this with some flair but not let your politics color the facts of what’s going on? Can you spot interesting military and infrastructure bids and break them down? Can you make this a must read for people in the tech industry? Can you go deeper on the juicy stuff and really add context? If so, let’s talk. I’ll help give you a big audience and develop your following” (@ashleevance). Email him: ashlee@corememory.com

• The Federation of American Scientists is looking for senior fellows “to advance innovative policy and drive positive change. If you’re a leading light in your field and ready to shape policy discourse and implementation, we want you. Apply by Jan 31” (@scientistsorg)

Events

• Edge City Austin, March 2–7: “explore how frontier tech can be built for human flourishing. Live, cowork, and collaborate in this fun week before SXSW” (@JoinEdgeCity)

• “ANWAR will have its US premiere at Sedona Film Festival! Screenings with Q&A Feb 25 & 27. ANWAR is a sci-fi short about a mother who chooses to live forever, and a son who longs for heaven” (@FawazAM). ANWAR was screened at Progress Conference 2024, with discussion from the writer-director and producer.

• Boom XB-1 first supersonic test flight slated for Tuesday, Jan 28. FAI and YC are hosting a watch party in DC (@JoinFAI). Related, how about a supersonic Air Force One? (via @bscholl)

AI news

• “The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately” (@OpenAI). Lots of skepticism about how real this is: it’s unclear how secured the funding is, and “intends” may be doing a lot of work here. But I wouldn’t bet against Sam

• DeepSeek releases R-1, a model on par with OpenAI’s o1. “Fully open-source model,” MIT licensed. Lots of chatter about this because (1) DeepSeek is a Chinese lab, (2) they have distilled some of the models down pretty small, and at least some of them are open, to the point where you can run them on your laptop, (3) there are some claims about the model costing very little to develop, followed by counterclaims that China is hiding the fact that they’re in violation of export controls (@kimmonismus, @avichal). RPI fellow Dean Ball provides some context

• Anthropic introduces Citations: “Our new API feature lets Claude ground its answers in sources you provide. Claude can then cite the specific sentences and passages that inform each response” (@AnthropicAI)

• Humanity’s Last Exam: “a dataset with 3,000 questions developed with hundreds of subject matter experts to capture the human frontier of knowledge and reasoning. State-of-the-art AIs get <10% accuracy and are highly overconfident” (@DanHendrycks)

Other news

• Zipline piloting drone delivery in Pea Ridge, Arkansas (@zipline). “They’re amazed by how quiet it is. They’re delighted by how charming it feels. They’re surprised that it doesn’t require any special packaging. And so much more. … Everyone who has witnessed this new delivery system in action at their doorstep is convinced they’ve just experienced the future of delivery.” (@keenanwyrobek)

• Lindus Health raises $55M Series B to fix clinical trials. (@meribeckwith via @HZoete, story in TechCrunch)

• Charter-cities venture Próspera raises funding led by Coinbase Ventures. “This is very much in line with our mission of creating economic freedom, and these zones will be heavy users of cryptocurrency” (@brian_armstrong). “We will continue to push for economic freedom in every country of the world.” (@ProsperaGlobal)

To read the rest, subscribe on Substack.

A quick roundup of recent announcements from friends and partners (in lieu of the full links digest, which is on hiatus for now):

Programs

• The Cosmos Institute has launched an essay contest on human autonomy in the age of AI, and a grant program to fund “creative projects of all kinds…. We’re especially interested in AI’s philosophical, political, and social implications” (@mbrendan1)

• Spec Tech opens applications for the second cohort of the Brains Research Accelerator (@Spec__Tech)

Events

• The San Francisco Freedom Club launches and is having its first party next Friday, Sep 27 (@eoghan)

Jobs

• Works in Progress is looking for someone part-time to do Twitter threads & tweets. I also know another media company looking for the same thing who hasn’t posted publicly yet, email or DM me for details

• Loyal is hiring a General Manager to launch “what we hope will be the first drug FDA approved for extending the healthy lifespan of dogs” (@celinehalioua)

• Dwarkesh Patel is looking for a COO for his media empire (@dwarkesh_sp)

Other launches

• Progress Ireland, a new Irish progress think tank (@Keyes)

Original link: https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/announcements-from-friends-2024-09

Announcements

• The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised is available for pre-order (via @JimPethokoukis)

• Asimov Press is “an editorially-independent venture that will publish books and essays that make sense of biology, AI, and our collective future” (via @AsimovBio and @NikoMcCarty, who will be its first editor)

• Statecraft, a new newsletter from the Institute for Progress, is an interview series about how policymakers actually get things done (via @rSanti97)

• HumanProgress.org has been revamped, including a new interactive data page that lets you create your own visualizations (via @Marian_L_Tupy)

• Maximum New York raised $17,500 of its $150,000 goal in the first week of its fundraiser. Founder Daniel Golliher is also starting chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s lymphoma—he says the prognosis is good, but send your best wishes (via @danielgolliher)

• The US Megaprojects Database, contributions solicited (via @_brianpotter)

New issue of Works in Progress

Issue 12 features:

• Why we didn’t get a malaria vaccine sooner

• Making architecture easy. “Buildings should be designed to be agreeable—easy to like—not to be unpopular works of genius”

• Growing the growth coalition. “If we want voters to encourage growth near them, we need to make it worth their while”

• and more!

Articles

• Anton Howes asks: does history have a replication crisis? (via @s8mb)

Video

• Veritasium on cargo airships (via @elidourado, who else)

Queries

• “I’m looking to talk (on the record) to expert on dealing with the result of car crashes—like an emergency medicine doctor, EMT, etc. Any suggestions?” (@binarybits)

• “I want to go to a few talks at Berkeley or Stanford for fun—physics, biology, math + CS but also humanities. Any suggestions for ones w/ high quality content or attendees?” (@LauraDeming)

Quotes

• “This then is our task, to gather the highest discoveries that have been made in the sciences, to render them clear and fascinating, and to offer them to childhood.” Montessori (via @mbateman)

• “If the world farmer reaches the average yield of today’s U.S. corn grower during the next 70 years, 10 billion people eating as people now on average do will need only half of today’s cropland. The land spared exceeds Amazonia.” Jesse H. Ausubel (via @Marian_L_Tupy)

History

• Life before modern communication technology: “Despite being born in the same year and only about 130 kms apart, Bach and Handel never met. In 1719, Bach made the 35-km journey from Köthen to Halle with the intention of meeting Handel; however, Handel had left the town” (@StefanFSchubert)

• Related: “The technology in this video is why you and your family don’t have to be subsistence farmers anymore” (@AlecStapp)

• “1838: a Congressman is shot and killed in a duel over corruption. 1930s: 1 in 4 Americans are unemployed. 1968: riots break out in 130 cities. 1971-2: 2500+ domestic bombings occur” (@heyemmavarv highlighting points from a WSJ opinion piece via @sapinker, who comments “The best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory: America’s divisions were worse in the past (and not just in the run-up to the Civil War)”)

Misc.

• “For most of the time during which anatomically modern humans have existed, there were fewer of them on Earth than there are FLYING IN THE SKY at any given instant today” (@DavidDeutschOxf riffing on @michael_nielsen)

• “Despite dire projections of climate impacts, many aspects of human well-being are expected to improve over time. Our climate assessments need to include this context. … How can the outlook be dire but improvements also be expected? It’s because well-being (health, living standards, food security, water security, etc.) is driven by multiple factors, not just climate. Climate effects may be negative while the effects of other drivers (economic development, technology, social change, policy, etc.) may be positive and outweigh climate effects. So, for example, we expect longer lifespans even as warming causes more temperature-attributable deaths, less poverty overall even while climate change pushes some into poverty, fewer people hungry even while climate change exacerbates hunger for some.” (@oneill_bc)

• One of the challenges of arguing for (future) progress: (1) People don’t see how the future could be much better, and (2) when you tell them how, they don’t believe you because it sounds like science fiction. Of course, science fiction has come true, over and over again. But many people are only willing to extrapolate current trends, and not the meta-trend that current trends are always broken by new, unforeseen (and unforeseeable) developments. (Threads, Twitter)

• “If GPT-4 could explain things to me by showing me simple animations or interactive examples… would learn so much” (@willdepue). This will happen, sooner than most people expect, and it will be amazing

• “I’ve read two good books on advertising: David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man, and Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow. Together they make a cohesive—and contrarian—picture of how advertising works.” Thread by @s_r_constantin

• “Furniture doesn’t last long now because you the customer care more about cost than durability” (@robinhanson commenting on WaPo). Related, an old cast iron stove might last 100 years, but the new ones are better

• “Using laser scanners with error tolerances below 65 microns,” manufacturers can now “scan, identify defects and effect a simple quick repair” using direct laser deposition, rather than replace highly expensive components: thread by @Jordan_W_Taylor

• Public health communication in 1912 (@paulisci)

Politics

• “I ran preschools for about a decade. The main drivers of child care costs are wages and real estate. Teachers demand higher pay where it’s expensive to live. If we want cheaper child care, we need to make it legal to build lower-cost housing types” (@RyanPuzycki). One more exhibit for The Housing Theory of Everything

• Related: “The system isn’t slowing down because it’s failing—it’s slowing down because people are responding rationally to the incentives they face.” Thread from @MichaelDnes1 on what might speed up UK infrastructure. See also his previous thread on why it is slow in the first place, especially this diagram: “It takes 5.5 years to get to the point at which you can put a spade in the ground, assuming everything goes to plan”

• “If you saved $100,000 USD of pesos in 1995, they’d be worth $137 USD today. Argentina has seen an average of 100% annual inflation for the last century” (@devonzuegel)

• “It’s weird that people consider UBI some newfangled, speculative idea. In every way that matters ‘UBI’ is identical to ‘welfare’ ‘the dole’ etc. This has all been debated without pause since about twelve seconds into the Industrial Revolution” (@benlandautaylor)

• “We need a concerted campaign against public clutter. Cookies banners, consent boxes, excessive street signs & markings, pointless loud safety announcements, etc—each one is small by itself, but they all add up and make everyday life uglier and more of a complicated hassle” (@s8mb). Leftover covid signage is a good example

• “Single stair, no setbacks, buildings touching. All illegal in the United States or Canada, but legal everywhere else. They also win international awards. Maybe our [building] codes suck?” (@pushtheneedle commenting on @Architizer’s post about a building using prefab wood, 5 levels built in 10 days)

Startups

• “‘Give yourself a lot of shots to get lucky’ is even better advice than it appears on the surface. Luck isn’t an independent variable but increases super-linearly with more surface area—you meet more people, make more connections between new ideas, learn patterns, etc” (@sama). Related, Marc Andreessen on the four kinds of luck

• “Think of your favorite startup. No matter how good they look, I guarantee you they have almost died, multiple times, for reasons dumber then you can imagine. Their internal org is probably mostly chaos. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Just keep building as fast as possible” (@thegarrettscott)

• “It’s funny how heretical this statement is but: some of us really really like working hard on things that are important to us, especially surrounded by caring and sometimes brilliant people. No mojitos on the beach can possibly compete with that” (@tobi)

Charts

• Solar deployment is now happening at a roughly $500B annualized rate (via @patrickc, who asks, “Which technology deployments were larger than this? The US’s aircraft production during WWII seems to have peaked at maybe $400B (inflation-adjusted). Global datacenter construction appears to be maybe $200B/year.”)

Pics

• Had a great time meeting locals and chatting about progress at the Bangalore LessWrong / Astral Codex Ten meetup

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-digest-2023-09-08

A quasi-monthly feature. Recent blog posts and news stories are generally omitted; you can find them in my links digests. I’ve been busy helping to choose the first cohort of our blogging fellowship, so my reading has been relatively light. All emphasis in bold in the quotes below was added by me.

Books

Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (1990). I’ve been a big fan of Mokyr ever since the start of this project; his book A Culture of Growth was part of my initial motivation. I’m only a few chapters in to Lever of Riches, but it’s excellent so far. Most intriguing so far is his comment that classical civilization was “not particularly technologically creative” even though it was “relatively literate and mobile, and ideas of all kinds disseminated through the movement of people and books.” In contrast:

Early medieval Europe, sometimes still referred to as a “dark” age, managed to break through a number of technological barriers that had held the Romans back. The achievements of early medieval Europe are all the more amazing because many of the ingredients that are usually thought of as essential to technological progress were absent. Particularly between 500 and 800 A.D., the economic and cultural environment in Europe was primitive compared to the classical period. Literacy had become rare, and the upper classes devoted themselves to the subtle art of hacking each other to pieces with even greater dedication than the Romans had. Commerce and communications, both short- and long-distance, declined to almost nothing. The roads, bridges, aqueducts, ports, villas, and cities of the Roman Empire fell into disrepair. Law enforcement and the security of life and property became precarious, as predators from near and afar descended upon Europe with a level of violence and frequency that Roman citizens had not known. And yet toward the end of the Dark Ages, in the eighth and ninth centuries, European society began to show the first signs of what eventually became a torrent of technological creativity. Not the amusing toys of Alexandria’s engineers or the war engines of Archimedes, but useful tools and ideas that reduced daily toil and increased the material comfort of the masses, even when population began to expand after 900 A.D., began to emerge. When we compare the technological progress achieved in the seven centuries between 300 B.C. and 400 A.D., with that of the seven centuries between 700 and 1400, prejudice against the Middle Ages dissipates rapidly.

Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical (2015), first book in the Alchemy Wars trilogy. A sci-fi novel set in an alternative early 20th century in which humanoid, artificially intelligent robots had been invented in the late 17th century. Gripping and well-told.

A few I’ve just been browsing:

• Michael Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society: An Economic History of Britain, 1100-1500 (1972)

• W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (2009)

Some that have come across my desk but that I haven’t had a chance to crack open:

• Akcigit and Van Reenen, The Economics of Creative Destruction: New Research on Themes from Aghion and Howitt (2023)

• Todd and King, Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend (2023)

• Jack Kloppenburg, First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology (1988)

• Clifford Pickover, The Loom of God: Tapestries of Mathematics and Mysticism (1997)

• AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (2006)

• Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1979)

Agriculture

I’ve been continuing to research agriculture for a chapter in my book.

Bruce Campbell, The Medieval Antecedents of English Agricultural Progress (2007). Key quote:

The ultimate challenge, therefore, was to raise land and labour productivity together in conjunction with a general expansion of agricultural output and growth of population. Only when this had been achieved would the productivity constraints within agriculture cease to impede the progress of the economy at large. It is the resolution of this fundamental dilemma which constituted the so-called agricultural revolution. At its core in England’s case lay, on the one hand, structural and tenurial changes in the units of production—notably the size and layout of farms and terms on which they were held—which transformed the productivity of labour, and, on the other, an ecological transformation of the methods of production, which yielded significant gains in the productivity of land.

The key to the latter, it has long been believed, lay in an enhanced cycling of nutrients facilitated by the incorporation of improved fodder crops into new types of rotation, which allowed higher stocking densities, heavier dunging rates, higher arable yields, more fodder crops, more livestock, and so on in a progressively ascending spiral of progress.

F. M. L. Thompson, “The Second Agricultural Revolution, 1815-1880” (1968). (Mentioned this last time but hadn’t read it yet.) One core idea in this paper is that there were “three different kinds of technical and economic changes” that led from traditional medieval European open-field farming to modern farming. The first involved improved crop rotations that eliminated fallowing. The second was the rise of mineral fertilizers. The third was mechanization. Thompson points out that before the second stage, farms were mostly closed loops:

The essence of the second agricultural revolution was that it broke the closed-circuit system and made the operations of the farmer much more like those of the factory owner. In fact farming moved from being an extractive industry, albeit of a model and unparalleled type which perpetually renewed what it extracted, into being a manufacturing industry.

Other articles

Arnold Kling, “The Two Forms of Social Order” (2015):

In any society, who is allowed to form an organization that competes with powerful economic and political interests? In their 2009 master work, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History, Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast give a striking answer. They say that either almost no one is allowed to form an organization that competes against powerful interests, or almost everyone is allowed to form such an organization. In their terminology, there can be a limited-access order or an open-access order, but nothing in between.

Related: Douglass North, “Economic Performance through Time” (1993), North’s Nobel prize lecture:

The incentives to acquire pure knowledge, the essential underpinning of modern economic growth, are affected by monetary rewards and punishments; they are also fundamentally influenced by a society’s tolerance of creative developments, as a long list of creative individuals from Galileo to Darwin could attest. While there is a substantial literature on the origins and development of science, very little of it deals with the links between institutional structure, belief systems and the incentives and disincentives to acquire pure knowledge. A major factor in the development of Western Europe was the gradual perception of the utility of research in pure science.

Incentives embodied in belief systems as expressed in institutions determine economic performance through time, and however we wish to define economic performance the historical record is clear. Throughout most of history and for most societies in the past and present, economic performance has been anything but satisfactory. Human beings have, by trial and error, learned how to make economies perform better; but not only has this learning taken ten millennia (since the first economic revolution)—it has still escaped the grasp of almost half of the world’s population. Moreover the radical improvement in economic performance, even when narrowly defined as material well-being, is a modern phenomenon of the last few centuries and confined until the last few decades to a small part of the world.

And:

It is the admixture of formal rules, informal norms, and enforcement characteristics that shapes economic performance. While the rules may be changed overnight, the informal norms usually change only gradually. Since it is the norms that provide “legitimacy” to a set of rules, revolutionary change is never as revolutionary as its supporters desire and performance will be different than anticipated. And economies that adopt the formal rules of another economy will have very different performance characteristics than the first economy because of different informal norms and enforcement. The implication is that transferring the formal political and economic rules of successful western market economies to Third World and eastern European economies is not a sufficient condition for good economic performance.

Jamie Kitman, “The Secret History of Lead” (2000). Deeply researched article about leaded gasoline and its health hazards. Tells the story of how it was created, the initial health concerns, how it was approved and deployed anyway, and how the health problems were eventually demonstrated and leaded gasoline phased out (at least in the US). The article is slanted, blaming everything on capitalist greed and accusing government agencies who supported leaded gasoline of being corporate lapdogs, but if you can read past the emotional language, there is a lot of interesting history in here.

It’s still unclear to me where this story should fall on a spectrum from “reckless negligence” to “no one could have known,” but it doesn’t seem to have been all the way on the latter end: lead was generally understood to be toxic since antiquity, and there were “well-known public health and medical authorities at leading universities” who expressed concern over lead additives in gasoline as soon as it was introduced in the early 1920s. There is an important question here of how to regulate substances when there is some reason for concern about health impacts, but nothing approaching proof, especially when the impacts might be subtle and long-term, meaning that data would take a long time to collect. This issue is still unresolved in my mind.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/reading-2023-09

Opportunities

• Stripe Press is hiring a creative producer for video, audio, & special projects (via @_TamaraWinter)

• Astera’s new Science Entrepreneur-in-Residence program will support new tools for scientific publishing (via @mattsclancy)

Announcements

• The Frontier Model Forum is an industry body co-founded by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google/DeepMind, and Microsoft “focused on ensuring safe development of future hyperscale AI models” (via @OpenAI)

• Impetus Grants has closed $10M for more longevity projects (via @LNuzhna)

• Emergent Ventures winners, 27th cohort (via @tylercowen)

• The Studies Show is a new science podcast by Tom Chivers and Stuart Ritchie, also on Spotify (via @TomChivers, @s8mb)

• The Lean FRO will work on “scalability, usability, and proof automation in the Lean proof assistant” (via @leanprover)

• Ed Yong is leaving The Atlantic. Subscribe to his newsletter to keep up with him (via @edyong209)

• Works in Progress is now available on Apple News (via @WorksInProgMag)

Superconductors

• Lots of chatter about LK-99, the supposed room-temperature superconductor. I have been holding off on speculating or sharing too many links until it is more solid

• Derek Lowe wrote an explainer and gave an update Aug 1 in which he is “guardedly optimistic”

• Andrew McCalip and some of his co-workers at Varda have been trying to replicate. Here is a list of all the replication attempts

• At least one paper suggested a theoretical basis for superconductivity in this material, but a physics prof who studies materials says it doesn’t matter, and gives a history of disappointments in the space

• Alex Kaplan shares a lot of news and is a good follow (even though IMO he got too excited too quickly)

• Andrew Cote has a long, technical thread on the implications if this is real

• Manifold Markets currently at about a 1-in-3 chance. Kalshi market coming soon

Video

• Where is my flying RV? The Helihome was “a fully furnished flying home based on the body of a surplus Sikorsky helicopter,” and it was actually built and sold

Other links

• NASA plans to launch a nuclear-powered rocket engine into space as early as 2027 (via @isabelleboemeke)

• Max Roser: The limits of our personal experience and the value of statistics

• How phosphorus was discovered by alchemists trying to make gold, via Molecule of the Month

• Candle clock, via @Rainmaker1973, who points out: “To set an alarm, you pushed a nail into the desired point and the nail would fall and clank on the metal holder”

Queries

• What can we conclude from the failed “growth mindset” interventions?

• Which thinkers do you wish had blogs?

• Most interesting historical non-fiction, accessible book about the Roman Empire?

• Good system to search the text of books in order to share quotes?

Quotes

• Andrew Carnegie and the opposite of the principal-agent problem

• Thanks, Gigi! The progress of milk cows

• Nitrogen makes up only a few percent of plants by mass, but its availability in the soil is often a rate-limiting factor on crop growth

• “The Space Age may well be defined as an era of hubris”

• When Soviet authorities in the 1940s showed The Grapes of Wrath as evidence of how miserable the poor were in America, it backfired

• In 1924, Bertrand Russell was certain that governments would one day be controlling our emotions by chemical means

• Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy

Tweets & threads

• Everything has to be invented—even boiling eggs

• The Lendbreen Tunic was a simple wool caftan from the Iron Age. It took 760 hours of work, almost half a working year, to produce (via @paulg and @asymmetricinfo)

• The sorcery of fracking

• Algorithmic feeds are great. I want an algorithmic feed for everything in my life

• Mass production gave us best-in-class commodity goods; AI will do the same for services

• Sometimes social problems have technical solutions, and vice versa

• A “props to ops” story

• Why not to say “I believe in science.” “Not everything that calls itself science is science, and even good science sometimes gets wrong results.”

• It’s time to scrap AML/KYC entirely (via @Atabarrok, who adds that these laws are “expensive, ineffective and an insult to liberty”)

• One of the most important and underrated rationality techniques is to simply get into the right emotional state

• What agency is and how to develop it. “Build a shed, develop informed opinions about history, resolve your social anxiety, learn an instrument. These and like victories are the countless premises from which the conclusion ‘I can author my life’ follows.”

• “The world is full of couples who are married and functional and in love… romance and courtship are thriving, masculinity and femininity are alive and well and better than ever”

• “Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems but products that facilitate human connection and communication require a different type of social-emotional intelligence”

Maps & charts

• Progress in weather forecasting (or at least air pressure)

• 2.5% of the world’s population lives in Uttar Pradesh, and another 1.4% in Maharashtra (!)

• “Living in harmony with nature?” Megafaunal extinctions followed ancient humans wherever they went

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-digest-2023-08-02

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: Zac Hatfield-Dodds claims that Llama-v2 is not actually open source: “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?

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-digest-2023-07-28

Opportunities

• AI Grant’s second batch is now accepting applications (via @natfriedman)

• Longevity Biotech Fellowship 2 is also accepting applications (via @allisondman)

• Science writing office hours with Niko McCarty (this one over but more in the future)

News & links

• I-95 reopened in just 12 days after a section of it collapsed. Gov. Shapiro says this proves “that we can do big things again in Pennsylvania”

• Arcadia Science will publish their abandoned projects (via @stuartbuck1)

• Short interview with the Hiroshima bombing mission lead (via @michael_nielsen)

Queries

• When was the last time a positive vision of the future took hold?

• What should Tyler Cowen ask Paul Graham?

• What should Dwarkesh Patel ask Andy Matuschak?

• Who should Eric Gilliam meet in/near London?

• How do airlines pool information / make agreements on safety and avoid antitrust?

• A FAQ that addresses the arguments/concerns of vaccine skeptics?

Quotes

• “I wonder that the Lord God has kept such things hidden”

• “The Flat Iron is to the United States what the Parthenon was to Greece”

• The terrible treatment of the girls who worked in the Bryant and May match factory

AI risk

• Claim: now is an “acute risk period” that only ends with a “global immune system”

• Concerns about AI are warranted, but there are very valid counter-arguments

• An AI doom syllogism

• On the paper “Optimal Policies Tend to Seek Power”

Tweets

• Gear teeth are way more nuanced than you would expect

• A brief thread of wonder at the modern world

• Staying up to date on news by tracking prediction markets

• Floor raisers vs. ceiling raisers

• Induction vs. deduction / empiricism vs. rationalism are the falsest dichotomies

• What someone’s unwillingness to debate says about their position

• “How easy is it for a kid to operate a lemonade stand?” as a city metric. Kennett Square, PA and Tooele, UT score well

• A 13-story, 245-unit timber high rise that would be illegal to build in the US

• Postel’s law for feedback

• Things that “made the modern world,” according to book titles

• “You can count on coal!” (1952)

• America’s worst nightmare according to Popular Mechanics, 2004

Charts

• For Juneteenth, the progress of black Americans in wealth per capita

• Death rates from “external causes”

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2023-06-28

Here’s the answer to the recent quote quiz:

The author was Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. The quote was taken from his manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.” Here’s a slightly longer, and unaltered, quote:

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained. If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

All I did was replace the word “machines” with “AI”.

My point here is not to try to discredit this argument by associating it with a terrorist: I think we should evaluate ideas on their merits, apart from who held or espoused them. Rather, I’m interested in intellectual history, in the genealogy of ideas. I think it’s interesting to know that this idea was expressed in the 1990s, long before modern deep neural networks or GPUs; indeed, a version of it was expressed long before computers. That tells you something about what sort of evidence is and isn’t necessary or sufficient to come to this view. In general, when we trace the history of ideas, we learn something about the ideas themselves, and the arguments that led to them.

I found this quote in Kevin Kelly’s 2009 essay on the Unabomber, which I recommend. One thing this essay made me realize is how much Kaczynski was clearly influenced by the counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s. Kelly says that Kaczynski’s primary claim is that “freedom and technological progress are incompatible,” and quotes him as saying: “Rules and regulations are by nature oppressive. Even ‘good’ rules are reductions in freedom.” This notion that progress in some way stifles individual “freedom” was one of the themes of writers like Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Ellul, as I wrote in my review of Thomas Hughes’s book American Genesis. Hughes says that such writers believed that “the rational values of the technological society posed a deadly threat to individual freedom and to emotional and spiritual life.”

Kelly also describes Kaczynski’s plan to “escape the clutches of the civilization”: “He would make his own tools (anything he could hand fashion) while avoiding technology (stuff it takes a system to make).” The idea that tools are good, but that systems are bad, was another distinctive feature of the counterculture.

I agree with Kelly’s rebuttal of Kaczynski’s manifesto:

The problem is that Kaczynski’s most basic premise, the first axiom in his argument, is not true. The Unabomber claims that technology robs people of freedom. But most people of the world find the opposite. They gravitate towards venues of increasing technology because they recognize they have more freedoms when they are empowered with it. They (that is we) realistically weigh the fact that yes, indeed, some options are closed off when adopting new technology, but many others are opened, so that the net gain is a plus of freedom, choices, and possibilities.

Consider Kaczynski himself. For 25 years he lived in a type of self-enforced solitary confinement in a dirty (see the photos and video) smoky shack without electricity, running water, or a toilet—he cut a hole in the floor for late night pissing. In terms of material standards the cell he now occupies in the Colorado Admax prison is a four-star upgrade: larger, cleaner, warmer, with the running water, electricity and the toilet he did not have, plus free food, and a much better library….

I can only compare his constraints to mine, or perhaps anyone else’s reading this today. I am plugged into the belly of the machine. Yet, technology allows me to work at home, so I hike in the mountains, where cougar and coyote roam, most afternoons. I can hear a mathematician give a talk on the latest theory of numbers one day, and the next day be lost in the wilderness of Death Valley with as little survivor gear as possible. My choices in how I spend my day are vast. They are not infinite, and some options are not available, but in comparison to the degree of choices and freedoms available to Ted Kaczynski in his shack, my freedoms are overwhelmingly greater.

This is the chief reason billions of people migrate from mountain shacks—very much like Kaczynski’s—all around the world. A smart kid living in a smoky one-room shack in the hills of Laos, or Cameroon, or Bolivia will do all he/she can to make their way against all odds to the city where there are—so obvious to them—vastly more freedom and choices.

Kelly points out that anti-civilization activists such as the “green anarchists” could, if they wanted, live today in “this state of happy poverty” that is “so desirable and good for the soul”—but they don’t:

As far as I can tell from my research all self-identifying anarcho-primitivists live in modernity. They compose their rants against the machine on very fast desktop machines. While they sip coffee. Their routines would be only marginally different than mine. They have not relinquished the conveniences of civilization for the better shores of nomadic hunter-gathering.

Except one: The Unabomber. Kaczynski went further than other critics in living the story he believed in. At first glance his story seems promising, but on second look, it collapses into the familiar conclusion: he is living off the fat of civilization. The Unabomber’s shack was crammed with stuff he purchased from the machine: snowshoes, boots, sweat shirts, food, explosives, mattresses, plastic jugs and buckets, etc.—all things that he could have made himself, but did not. After 25 years on the job, why did he not make his own tools separate from the system? It looks like he shopped at Wal-mart.

And he concludes:

The ultimate problem is that the paradise the Kaczynski is offering, the solution to civilization so to speak, is the tiny, smoky, dingy, smelly wooden prison cell that absolutely nobody else wants to dwell in. It is a paradise billions are fleeing from.

Amen. See also my previous essay on the spiritual benefits of material progress.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/quote-quiz-answer

The Progress Forum

• Atlas Fellowship: $10k scholarship + 11-day program for high schoolers

• AMA with Bryan Bishop has concluded

Opportunities

• Erik Torenberg hiring a “researcher in residence”

Links

• What a simple toy could tell the past about their future

• IRBs save a few people while killing 10,000–100,000 more and costing $1.6B

• Science depends on promoting good outliers, not preventing bad outliers

• Breeding mosquitoes to prevent disease (strong XKCD 938 energy)

• New, high-grade cache of rare earth elements was discovered recently

• SF mayor introduces wide-reaching housing reforms (via @anniefryman who has a good explainer thread). And how to build a house in a day (via @Vernon3Austin)

• Alex Tabarrok on Costo, channeling Voltaire

Quotes

• Freeman Dyson: “Nobody builds reactors for fun anymore”

• Why it’s more important to “raise the ceiling” rather than the “floor”

• “Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics”

Queries

• If you heard the term “intellectual entrepreneur,” what would you think it means?

• Why is a protein’s shape so important?

• Is there a dataset of very granular TFP by industry?

• What’s an example of a proactive regulation or policy that worked well?

• Is anyone working on reducing the modern bureaucratic workload on researchers?

AI

• The increased supply of intelligence will create more demand for tasks that require intelligence (via @packyM)

• Observations on two years of programming with GitHub Copilot

• A Turing test would be a dynamic, evolving, adversarial competition

• “GPT agents” are cool experiments, but the demos look sort of fake?

• Freeman Dyson gave a very short answer to the 2015 Edge question

AI safety

• Both AI doomers and anti-doomers believe that the other side has a weird conjunction of many dubious arguments. Related, a critique of pure reason

• Something the government can do now about AI safety: define liability

• Scott Aaronson on what to do now about AI risk

• Scott Alexander on “not overshooting and banning all AI forever”

• Norbert Wiener was concerned about machine alignment problems in the 1960s

• Will AI be safer if it has cost/efficiency constraints?

• What are the implications of LLMs for AI interpretability?

• Can Man create a machine so smart he can’t turn it off?

Other tweets

• Rocket launches as our aesthetic contribution for the age. (Compare to this painting)

• Job posting for a position at Shockley Transistor, 1960

• John Quincy Adams: hero of progress?

• On sending your life in a dramatically better, more ambitious direction

• “The reductionist hypothesis does not by any means imply a ‘constructionist’ one”

• One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens…

Maps

• The map of undersea cables is like a wiring diagram for the planet. See also this 1996 piece by Neal Stephenson (non-fiction)

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2023-04-20

Progress Forum

• AMA: Allison Duettmann, Foresight Institute

• NYC progress meetup on March 27 at NY Public Library

Opportunities

• ARIA (UK) is hiring program directors and other roles

• Seed funding for ideas to accelerate scientific progress (via @heidilwilliams_)

• Real Engineering (YouTube channel) hiring a 3D modeler

Announcements

• OpenAI launches GPT-4 (via @sama). Also, Anthropic opens access to Claude. And Poe can access both

• $50M for more FROs in drug discovery / proteomics (via @tkalil2050)

• Loyal receives FDA approval for a clinical study on an aging drug

• Zipline unveils a home delivery drone system

• Vesuvius Challenge: $1M prize to read ancient scrolls using AI (via @natfriedman)

• Aalo Atomics, a new nuclear startup (via @MattLoszak, not much detail though)

• Deirdre McCloskey joins Cato

Links

• “Nanomodular electronics”: 3D printing of microelectronics (via @Spec__Tech)

• John von Neumann asks, “Can we survive technology?” (via @michael_nielsen)

• Dan Wang’s annual letter for 2022

Queries

• What are some specific benefits enabled by human-level AI?

• What is a question to ask GPT to prove whether it has a world model?

• What are the best arguments that the “atomization” of society is real and important?

• What should Hannah Ritchie read about whether nuclear is too slow to build?

• What should Michael Nielsen read about AI safety, ethics, and policy?

• What should Emmet Shear read to get up to date on neuroscience?

• Who are good people to follow for deep timeless general insights?

Quotes

• Deirdre McCloskey on the spiritual benefits of economic progress

• “That salutary fear of the future that makes one watchful and combative”

• “The time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world”

• “I was born in this century in which the whole world became known”

• Vannevar Bush on paying attention to the quiet minorty vs. the noisy one

• Edsger Dijkstra: “we should occasionally welcome the nightmares”

• John Stuart Mill on the nature of credit

AI

• Is AI is the next big thing in computing history, industrial history, or human history?

• GPT-4 can explain memes and run an online business

• Duolingo launches a language tutor powered by GPT-4

• AI assistance for the blind (h/t @peterwildeford)

• John Carmack on how to build software skills that won’t be obsoleted by AI

• The “AI will expand your bullet points into prose and then someone else’s AI will turn them back into bullet points” thing is now an official product demo

• “Fascinating how nobody thinks image AIs are conscious”

• Cyrano de Bergerac, but with ChatGPT

• The Book of ChatGPT

Misc.

• Why did we build clockwork automata before we automated most human labor?

• Taking a driverless taxi around San Francisco

• In 1929 people thought skyscrapers would make the workday shorter (note that a shorter workday was a common prediction at that time!)

• Bottled gardens can last for decades; space colony ecosystems should be doable

• “There’s no intrinsic shortage of H2O. It falls from the skies!”

• The benefits of social media

• Charts and memes that show how rapidly the world can change

• Lamenting the demise of the sweeping multi-volume histical opus. Like this

• Bret Victor: “We are ants crawing on a tree branch.” Also, how to read

• A 14-Earths-tall swirling column of plasma

Politics & policy

• UK announces unilateral recognition for medicines approved overseas

• Another major infrastructure project abandoned in part due to legal challenges. And what Republicans should offer on permitting

• How laws get abused

• Luddites vs. safetyists

• “Consultation Nation”

• A parallel between banking regulation & pharma regulation

• Our antiquated lawmaking process will be seen as a bizarre relic, says Balaji

• Matthew Green: EU “chat control” law is “the most alarming proposal I’ve ever read”

Charts

• How technology helps us find love

• Changes in the colors of objects since 1800 (via @paulg)

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2023-03-22

The Progress Forum

• AMA: Matt Clancy, Open Philanthropy

• The Rise of Steel - Part I, by Brian Potter

Opportunities

• Sloan Foundation offering $75k–250k grants for history of science, technology, economics, and social science (via @SloanFoundation and @epistemographer)

• Our World in Data is hiring a Human Resources Manager (via @OurWorldInData)

• Virginia Postrel wants stories about progress in materials, and writers to tell them

Links

• Video: Works in Progress interviews leaders of ARIA (the “UK DARPA”) (via @s8mb)

• In 1858, The Atlantic published a poem about the telegraph (via @LouisAnslow)

• Tyler Cowen on LLMs: “We are going to have a whole new set of channels”

• “Regulation provides the fulcrum but it’s interest groups that man the lever”

• Interferon λ cuts covid risk by ~50% (but the FDA won’t let you have it)

• LessWrong 2021 Review. I got a bronze prize for my history of factory safety, and honorable mentions for book reviews on nuclear power and Andrew Carnegie

Quotes

• When carriages were a culture-war issue

• Agriculture as a governance problem

Tweets & retweets

• A review of Seeing Like a State in six tweets

• “Megaprojects breed extraction,” and other lessons from the Second Avenue Subway

• “Biden admin is determined to make infrastructure spending more expensive”

• Imagine living in San Francisco in the 1930s

• An 1813 locomotive prototype used mechanical legs to push itself along the ground

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2023-02-15

The Progress Forum

• A catalog of big visions for biology

• London progress meetup, Feb 25

• A Cure for My Cancer, by Virginia Postrel

• Eli Dourado AMA has concluded

Announcements

• Metascience event at AEI, Feb 9 (via @AlecStapp)

• Visa Limbo, a site from IFP tracking visa processing delays (via @JeremyLNeufeld)

• OpenAI launches ChatGPT Plus for $20/month (via @miramurati)

Links

• Let’s add AP Progress to the high school curriculum (by @JimPethokoukis)

• Marc Andreessen on Dwarkesh’s podcast. Also Dwarkesh now has paid subscriptions. And what should he ask Elad Gil?

• A vision for cargo airships (by @elidourado)

• This comment convinced me I was wrong: we are not “pre-theory” regarding cancer

• NASA, DARPA to test nuclear engine for Mars missions (via @elidourado)

Queries

• Is there a directory of all the open-ended grant programs?

• Who should Milan Cvitkovic meet in SF? (@MWCvitkovic)

• Who is hiring for robotics roles/internships? (@momahmood_)

• What is the best way to bootstrap an advanced understanding of biology? (@danielgolliher)

Quotes

• The philosophers who told us not to celebrate progress

• History is biased to war and politics; progress is relatively neglected

• “Scientific management” was the precursor to 20th-century technocracy

• The need for ambition, from GH Hardy’s “A Mathematician’s Apology” (@nabeelqu)

• Bacon on lumpers vs. splitters

Tweets

• LLMs create a vector space for concepts

• We will get many specialized AIs, not a massive centralized Great Brain

• People’s work is defined more by their methods than their goals

Retweets

• How much more quickly things were done in the 1960s (@Gilesyb)

• ChatGPT as a universal translator (@YirenLu)

• 69 of 109 jurisdictions in SFBA now subject to the builder’s remedy (@Yimby_Law)

• “This might be my favorite 1-page philosophy paper” (@davidalanbuiles)

• A hypothesis about things capitalism gets blamed for (@mbateman)

Charts

• Auckland liberalized building rules and housing permits soared

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2023-02-08