The Progress Forum

• Why growth in developing countries matters for progress (via @jmazda)

Opportunities

• Dwarkesh Patel is looking for a physics tutor

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

Charts

• Different types of single- and multi-causal explanations