Links and tweets, 2022-11-15
by Jason Crawford · November 15, 2022 · 2 min read
Announcements
- The Roots of Progress email newsletter is now on Substack. If you have a Substack, I’d love a recommendation—thank you!
- The Science for Progress Initiative to catalyze research on the scientific process (announcement via @heidilwilliams_)
- Biotech startup hiring RAs and Scientists to develop therapies against aging and age-related diseases (@ArtirKel)
- Cameron Wiese (World’s Fair Co) is looking for an events/ops person “to help create a magical experience next month” (@camwiese)
Links
- Are technologies inevitable? (by @mattsclancy)
- Nuclear energy is misunderstood, rarely celebrated, and deeply underinvested in (by @juliadewahl)
- Econ paper claiming that part of the explanation for the British Industrial Revolution is that British engineers were working on more central/fundamental technological problems
- Sunny Bono says that “entrepreneurial capitalism” is the solution to extreme poverty, and he’s been reading Where Is My Flying Car? (via Marginal Revolution and @_TamaraWinter)
Queries
- What are the most interesting megastructure ideas? (@michael_nielsen)
- What is the right context & funding model for an inventor today? (@piammichel)
- Looking for good examples of technology overlapping S curves (@_brianpotter)
- What are some lesser-known enormous infrastructure, construction, or R&D projects in US history? (@_brianpotter)
- If a media company wanted to inspire hope & self-efficacy what type of content would they produce? (@willobri)
- What are all the attempts to create a pro nuclear coalition in the western world? (@PradyuPrasad)
- What’s the best way to get old annual reports for public companies? (@_brianpotter)
- What explains “maximalism”? (@kanjun)
Tweets
- We are problem-solving animals
- We live in the future
- Some events that took place in the same time in history but don’t seem like they would have
Retweets
- Cruise expands driverless service area to cover almost all of SF (@kvogt)
- 222nm light to kill pathogens is probably a decade or more away from widespread usage (@davidmanheim)
- Why the First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion (@BretDevereaux)
- Zeynep’s law: assume counterintuitive findings to be false, and second-order effects to be dwarfed by first-order ones (@zeynep)
- Search books by concept instead of keyword, using AI (@dwarkesh_sp). And: =GPT3(), a way to run GPT-3 prompts in Google Sheets (@shubroski)
- Every new Lego piece has to fit with every piece ever made, so the most variability allowed is 0.0005” (@TrungTPhan)
- Society ditched the well understood Health & Safety hierarchy of controls for covid (@Insect_Song)
- SFO once had a popular helicopter service (@zachklein)
- A bold vision for the future of cruise ships (@KelseyTuoc)
Charts
Comment: Progress Forum, LessWrong, Reddit
