Links and tweets, 2022-12-20
by Jason Crawford · December 20, 2022 · 2 min read
I’ve been traveling, so this one is covering the last few weeks.
The Progress Forum
- Patrick McKenzie AMA. See also his retrospective on VaccinateCA
- Works in Progress Issue 9
- A “progress” alternative to GiveWell?
- Applications open for AGI safety fundamentals course
- Maybe a little bit of naïveté is good? (Eli Dourado). My take: not naïveté, but vision
- The false dichotomy between peace and prosperity versus ambition and exploration
- Two bits of wisdom about research that are often in tension (Ben Reinhardt)
- The Empire State Building and the World Trade Center (Brian Potter), also Part 2
- When scientists thought heat was a fluid (Anton Howes)
- The state of NYC housing abundance
- Progress book recommendations thread (add your recs please!)
Announcements
- OpenAI launches ChatGPT (via @sama)
- Net energy gain from fusion achieved (@jordanbramble)
- The Collegiate Propulsive Lander Challenge: students building self-landing rockets (!)
- Nucleate venture fellowship + $2M in prizes for bio founders (via @MichaelRetchin)
- Cruise expanding coverage to the full 7x7 of San Francisco, 24/7 (@kvogt)
- The Academy of Thought and Industry (who commissioned my progress course) is hiring a liberal arts teacher (@mbateman)
- ARIA Research is hiring for many roles (@ilangur)
- Readwise launches their read-later app (via @homsiT)
Links
- The world needs processed food (Hannah Ritchie in WIRED, via @tonymmorley)
- Why the age of American progress ended (Derek Thompson). See my reactions
- Mike Maples interviews Blake Scholl about supersonic flight and Boom
- The climate field as an assortment of “tribes” (Nadia Asparouhova)
- Warren Weaver’s 1946 guide for Rockefeller grantmakers (via @abiylfoyp)
- Homelessness is a housing problem (Jerusalem Demsas in The Atlantic)
- Green card backlogs are impossibly long (some measured in centuries!)
- China will depopulate over the next 40 years, while India will add the same number of people as China loses (Shruti Rajagopalan)
Queries
- Suggested readings on progress and energy intensity?
- Stories where the good guys have the grand plans / projects? (@TylerAlterman)
- Why was the B-21 built in budget while the F-35 was a mess? (@Scholars_Stage)
- How did printers “photocopy” before photocopy? (@PMatzko)
- Book recommendations on modern medicine or public health? (@salonium)
- What are the best books/podcasts/people to follow on nuclear energy? (@sriramk)
- If we get transformative AI, what will GDP per capita be in 2040? (@elidourado)
- Why so few takes on permitting reform from nuclear folks? (@J_Lovering)
- Do you have a model of how to approach the problem of progress?
- What sports were being played 200 years ago? (@waitbutwhy)
- What are some stories that feature getting spare parts for inventing from a junk yard?
Quotes
- Mark Twain to Walt Whitman: “What great births you have witnessed!”
- Nuclear power construction can require creative solutions—like midget welders
- The field of physics moved very rapidly in the ’30s
- The spirit of progress, from an 1848 abolitionist pamphlet by Theodore Parker
- “A hedgehog… cannot accept that he knows only many things. He seeks to know one big thing, and strives without ceasing to give reality a unifying shape”
Tweets
- Why we stopped using draft horses, despite the romanticism of certain French towns
- AI is giving computers intuition
- LLMs will take either side of an argument depending on the prompt
- Your can improve your “gut” judgment by priming it with rational thinking
- Brandolini’s Shadow
Retweets
- Science has fulfilled Jesus’s message beyond his wildest dreams (@curiouswavefn)
- The tin can is underrated (@_brianpotter)
- Golden Rice is finally arriving (@stewartbrand)
- Why steam turbines are not a good idea for fusion energy (@elidourado)
- It’s time to close the book on the amyloid hypothesis (@schrag_matthew)
- ChatGPT scores 1020 on the SAT (@davidtsong)
- AI progress has gone exponential and is likely to speed up even further (@zachtratar)
- Startlingly effective AI tutoring is coming (@mbateman)
- Cheating is a minor issue and the AI cheating arms race doesn’t matter (@mbateman)
- Chaining ChatGPT and Midjourney to generate images from a concept (@GuyP)
Charts
- It’s a very good time to get a mortgage, taking the long-term view (@charlesjkenny)
