Links and tweets, 2023-04-24
by Jason Crawford · April 24, 2023 · 2 min read
The Progress Forum
- Atlas Fellowship: $10k scholarship + 11-day program for high schoolers
- AMA with Bryan Bishop has concluded
Opportunities
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)
