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)