Links and tweets, 2022-11-01
by Jason Crawford · November 1, 2022 · 3 min read
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)
- The Long Now republishes my essay “Can Growth Continue?”, based on my 5-minute Ignite talk (via @longnow)
- The breast cancer treatment that got funding from the billionaire owner of Revlon (Virginia Postrel)
- A NEPA explainer from @elidourado. Related, 3 years and $1.7M to build a single public toilet in SF
- Exposure to markets makes people behave more cooperatively and in less self-interested ways (Alex Tabarrok)
- 22nd cohort Emergent Ventures includes Jackson Oswalt, who achieved nuclear fusion at age 12 (yes, this is a thing)
- Vox announced the Future Perfect 50 list of people building a better future. I’m on it (via @voxdotcom and @bryanrwalsh)
Queries
- How should creatives respond to the advance of AI?
- Best thinkers/writing on how we can evolve the NRC to help us build more nuclear? (@juliadewahl)
- Good blog or Twitter feed of Notion power user tips?
- Books that examine the drivers and limits of technological innovation? (@brunoswerneck)
- Good histories of how governments figured out how to run stuff? (@F_McCullough)
- What should Dwarkesh Patel ask Kenneth Jackson about Robert Moses? (@dwarkesh_sp)
- Anybody working on habitation domes? (@Ben_Reinhardt)
Quotes
- Isambard K. Brunel refused to participate in lowest-price bids. (Dominic Cummings approves)
- Bacon: whatever exists deserves to be known
- The Greeks’ unique view on geometry
- Montessori appreciated progress and knew it should be celebrated
- DDT was credited with controlling an epidemic of typhus
- The counterculture “embraced decentralized and appropriate technology to counter large-scale technology”
- The stock ticker machine was to the 19th century what social media is to today
- How people today take the modern standard of living for granted
- Alexis De Tocqueville on social media cancellation (@curiouswavefn)
Tweets & threads
- Fuel synthesis as an alternative to batteries for energy storage
- Controversy over vaccines is not just about technology, but about technocracy
- Eripuit caelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis – He seized the lightning from the heavens and the scepter from the tyrants (epigram for Benjamin Franklin)
- “Why don’t more tech billionaires try to improve SF city governance?”
- Why don’t we paint cooling towers at power plants? (via Virginia Postrel)
Retweets
- We should teach the history of progress in public health as part of a standard curriculum (@stevenbjohnson). I agree
- Energy superabundance versus our current path of permanent scarcity (@PatrickJBlum)
- Sow complacency, reap a crisis; sow hustle and grit, reap abundance (@elidourado)
- It’s been a great year for vaccine discovery (@salonium)
- GPT-3 versus Google Search (@dweekly). As I commented, one thing LLMs might be useful for now/soon is as a kind of search engine
- BioNTech founders expect a cancer vaccine “before 2030” (@therecount via @jmhorp)
- The product culture that ignores fatal flaws (@warren_craddock)
- Peer review is a mechanism for political legitimacy, not scientific quality (@calebwatney)
- Autocracies promote developments in tech that don’t matter, but dazzle people (@ZachWeiner)
- How much old stuff gets dragged along into the first versions of new things (@paulg)
- The astronaut as the visual successor to the cowboy, 1959 (@ChasingMoonBk)
Charts
- The space race vs a Seattle bus/bike lane (@pushtheneedle)
