This is a linkpost for https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2023-05-23
The Progress Forum
Opportunities
Announcements
- Arnold Ventures is launching a major new infrastructure initiative
- “Building a Better NIH,” a paper series from IFP and others (via @calebwatney)
- New book from Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson against “techno-optimism.” I expect to learn a lot from this, and to find much to agree and to disagree with
- Blueprint for a new Great Exhibition (by @antonhowes)
News
- RIP Robert Lucas. His most-quoted line: “The consequences for human welfare involved in questions [of economic growth] are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.” More from @srajagopalan, @lugaricano, @singhabhi, and many others.
- NASA: Blue Origin will build a second Human Landing System for the Moon
- Longevity startup NewLimit raises $40M (via @garrytan)
Articles
- How will AI impact science? (by @michael_nielsen)
- Britain shows what degrowth looks like in practice (via @s8mb). So does South Africa
- King Tut and his meteorite dagger (by @WillRinehart)
Queries
- A case against AI x-risk by someone who understands the case for x-risk well?
- Are there any good examples of “nuclearpunk”?
- Technologies that were expected to have huge impacts but never got cheap?
- Which public figure combines intellectual rigor and moral forcefulness?
- Who decides what kinds of business are good for private equity?
Tweets
- What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came? (the intro to my recent post, ICYMI). Also: The American Information Revolution in Global Perspective
- How people without research training can push forward the frontier of technology
- Everything has to be invented. Even spaces and punctuation
- How to fight antibiotic resistance. Also, human DNA can be sequenced from the air
- Nuclear fracking (!) But, our nation’s nuclear reactor laboratory has gone 56 years without building a new reactor
- Landmark Experiments in Twentieth-Century Physics
- Self-imposed challenges (sports, games, music) are sufficient for human flourishing
- Regulatory costs explain ~⅓ of the increase in market power in the last 50 years. Also, whatever AI regulations we write today will sound ridiculous 50 years from now
- Learning exactly how San Francisco governance works. Related, most people pay no attention to the deficit or how it constrains political choices
- The Story of Education, Chapter 1: Primates to Primary Schools
- Why some rich people keep working hard
- A mark of the master craftsman
- Excellent reply guys
