Links and tweets, 2023-06-14
The illusion of moral decline, turnspit dogs, and more
by Jason Crawford · June 14, 2023 · 3 min read
Announcements & opportunities
- The Long Now Foundation is hiring an Executive Director
- Terraform Industries (solar-powered carbon-neutral natural gas synthesis) is hiring
- A class on how politics works, so you can get involved productively
- Read Something Wonderful, writing that has stood the test of time (including my pieces on iron and smallpox)
- Turpentine Media, a new media network covering tech, business, & culture
News
- Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” has died in prison at 81. See Kevin Kelly’s summary of and rebuttal to his philosophy
Links
- Marc Andreessen on AI safety. Note what I highlighted and where I disagree
- Jacob Steinhardt predicts what will GPT look like in 2030
- What Lant Pritchett is for: productivity, state capability, education, labor mobility
- The Illusion of Moral Decline (via @a_m_mastroianni). One of many decline illusions
- The untold story of the precursors of the steam engine (by @antonhowes)
- Holden Karnofsky suggests “a playbook for AI risk reduction”
- Mark Lutter interview on his Caribbean charter city project (via @MarkLutter)
- Trailer for Nuclear Now, which is now on streaming platforms (via @oklo)
- Casey Handmer on why we don’t build underground. Building a road tunnel costs “$100,000 per meter, or equivalent to a stack of Hamiltons of the same length.” (!) Although I don’t know if Casey used Norway or Seattle figures
- Also Casey: 1 gram of stratospheric SO2 offsets 1 ton of CO2 for 1 year (!)
- “Existential Crunch” synthesizes research about social collapse (via @mattsclancy)
- Turnspit dogs (via @RebeccaRideal via @antonhowes)
Requests for books/sources on…
- How Moore’s Law actually happened?
- Related, the modern history of chips/AI?
- West Midlands in the Industrial Revolution and today?
- Programming design for Apollo 11?
- The history of commodities markets?
- The S&L crisis?
Other queries
- Who are the virtuosos of the ChatGPT form?
- What societies have successfully gone through degrowth? (If any…)
- Anecdotes of scientists eschewing management or calling for more autonomy?
- Term for the age you would have died at, if not for modern medicine?
- Best treatment of why actions often produce the opposite of the intended effect?
- How to square Cruise’s claim of 1 injury in first 1M driverless miles with SF’s claims? (Maybe three are actually Waymo, and none seem at-fault?)
Quotes
- “The flying machine is one of God’s most gracious and precious gifts”
- Admiral Rickover on academic reactors vs. practical reactors
- The stock ticker was the 19th-century equivalent of social media
- Straight, level roads were a new, non-obvious idea in the early 1800s
- How the precautionary principle became a weapon against new technology
- “Systems tend to malfunction conspicuously just after their greatest triumph”
Tweets & threads
- Cruise AVs learn to honk at human drivers to avoid collisions
- We have seen smoke blotting out the sky before, such as the “Dark Day” of 1780
- Bret Devereaux on what life was like as a typical Roman peasant. Among other things, children died young and yes, the parents mourned
- Author of “Mundanity of Excellence” responds to me on the value of talent
- “Progress studies showed me that ideas matter & can have true real world impact”
- A dam is sabotaged, and the main media concern is a nuclear plant at little risk
- The apathy that manifests when technology becomes invisible. Also, “pragmatic optimism” and “solutionism”
- What “consciousness-raising” feminism did and why it was necessary
- How well-intentioned government policy turns into implementation nightmares
- The O-1/EB-1 are underutilized by top talent and many get bad info about eligibility
- SF changes the planning code to reduce burden on shop owners
- Treatment effect? No, selection effect
- I oscillate between “everything is screwed up” and “screwed-up is normal”. Also, the minimum competence of professionals is much lower than you would hope
- You can do Scylla and Charybdis as emoji 🐉⛵️🌀
- 150 years after Darwin’s finches, a biology paper identified the protein that made their beaks different
Maps & charts
