This is a linkpost for https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2023-01-17
The Progress Forum
- Tyler Cowen AMA
- “In Praise of Fast Food” by Rachel Laudan (excerpts and link)
- Construction of the World Trade Center (Brian Potter)
- The Pull of Cities (Anton Howes)
- Gift subscriptions to Jim Pethokoukis’s Substack
Opportunities
Links
- The Economist on progress studies and other “new tech worldviews”
- New Substack on nuclear power by Jack Devanney
Quantum computers may break RSA encryption sooner than expected(via@tegmark)[UPDATE: this is probably bogus]- How much does a gas stove shorten your life? Maybe ~53 days (by @dynomight)
- Time-to-violent-death of Roman emperors displayed a bathtub curve
- Caro is still working on the 5th and final volume of his LBJ bio
- Nathan Myhrvold wrote a five-volume anthology on bread (!)
Queries
- What should Dwarkesh ask Marc Andreessen? (@dwarkesh_sp)
- Recommendations for things to read on well-run scientific labs?
- Why didn’t the predicted demise of radiologists happen? (@BenGoldhaber)
- Good sources showing how labor-intensive industries tend to move to where low-cost labor is? (@_brianpotter)
- What would it take for 2022-2090 to be as transformative for medicine/biology as 1870-1950? (@Willyintheworld)
- What are more examples of individual grant programs such as Thiel Fellowship or Emergent Ventures? (@William_Blake)
- What does the “progressive” vision of the future look like today? (@lo_commotion)
- Can anyone find a source for this quote?
Tweets
- The devastating human consequences of the Ehrlichs’ campaign against “overpopulation.” (@daniel_eth asks, why has this man not been canceled yet?)
- “Traditional foods” are not very old
- In the long run, we need a heat-management system for the Earth
- Amazing progress on tap water connections in rural India
Quotes
- Things we take for granted: that glass is transparent
- Sanger’s Rule for technical advances in scientific experimentation
- Building bridges and keeping the water running are underrated
- Penicillin was stalled for a decade after the initial attempt to extract it failed
- Bitumen was the Super Glue™ of the third millennium BC
- Technologies often start out with “trivial“ uses and become necessities
- No society has held technological leadership for very long
- “I have yet to hear anyone even mention the theoretical possibility that we could respond to a new variant … by trying to vaccinate people before they could get infected”
- A Department of Drugs and a War on Education?
Retweets
- Megascale engineering is already around us (@anderssandberg)
- Perhaps the most underrated invention is the corporation (@William_Blake)
- 2023 will make 2022 look like a sleepy year for AI (@gdb)
- It’s insane that we’ve decided to make housing scarce enough to consume a major fraction of GDP (@CJHandmer)
- There should be a Wikipedia for careers (@eriktorenberg)
- Students don’t need new ideas; they need good ones (@DanFChambliss)