Jason’s links and tweets, 2022-12-20

[jasoncrawford]

Link post

I’ve been traveling, so this one is covering the last few weeks.

The Progress Forum

• Patrick McKenzie AMA. See also his retrospective on VaccinateCA

• Works in Progress Issue 9

• A “progress” alternative to GiveWell?

• Applications open for AGI safety fundamentals course

• Maybe a little bit of naïveté is good? (Eli Dourado). My take: not naïveté, but vision

• The false dichotomy between peace and prosperity versus ambition and exploration

• Two bits of wisdom about research that are often in tension (Ben Reinhardt)

• The Empire State Building and the World Trade Center (Brian Potter), also Part 2

• When scientists thought heat was a fluid (Anton Howes)

• The state of NYC housing abundance

• Progress book recommendations thread (add your recs please!)

Announcements

• OpenAI launches ChatGPT (via @sama)

• Net energy gain from fusion achieved (@jordanbramble)

• The Collegiate Propulsive Lander Challenge: students building self-landing rockets (!)

• Nucleate venture fellowship + $2M in prizes for bio founders (via @MichaelRetchin)

• Cruise expanding coverage to the full 7x7 of San Francisco, ²⁴⁄₇ (@kvogt)

• The Academy of Thought and Industry (who commissioned my progress course) is hiring a liberal arts teacher (@mbateman)

• ARIA Research is hiring for many roles (@ilangur)

• Readwise launches their read-later app (via @homsiT)

Links

• The world needs processed food (Hannah Ritchie in WIRED, via @tonymmorley)

• Why the age of American progress ended (Derek Thompson). See my reactions

• Mike Maples interviews Blake Scholl about supersonic flight and Boom

• The climate field as an assortment of “tribes” (Nadia Asparouhova)

• Warren Weaver’s 1946 guide for Rockefeller grantmakers (via @abiylfoyp)

• Homelessness is a housing problem (Jerusalem Demsas in The Atlantic)

• Green card backlogs are impossibly long (some measured in centuries!)

• China will depopulate over the next 40 years, while India will add the same number of people as China loses (Shruti Rajagopalan)

Queries

• Suggested readings on progress and energy intensity?

• Stories where the good guys have the grand plans /​ projects? (@TylerAlterman)

• Why was the B-21 built in budget while the F-35 was a mess? (@Scholars_Stage)

• How did printers “photocopy” before photocopy? (@PMatzko)

• Book recommendations on modern medicine or public health? (@salonium)

• What are the best books/​podcasts/​people to follow on nuclear energy? (@sriramk)

• If we get transformative AI, what will GDP per capita be in 2040? (@elidourado)

• Why so few takes on permitting reform from nuclear folks? (@J_Lovering)

• Do you have a model of how to approach the problem of progress?

• What sports were being played 200 years ago? (@waitbutwhy)

• What are some stories that feature getting spare parts for inventing from a junk yard?

Quotes

• Mark Twain to Walt Whitman: “What great births you have witnessed!”

• Nuclear power construction can require creative solutions—like midget welders

• The field of physics moved very rapidly in the ’30s

• The spirit of progress, from an 1848 abolitionist pamphlet by Theodore Parker

• “A hedgehog… cannot accept that he knows only many things. He seeks to know one big thing, and strives without ceasing to give reality a unifying shape”

Tweets

• Why we stopped using draft horses, despite the romanticism of certain French towns

• AI is giving computers intuition

• LLMs will take either side of an argument depending on the prompt

• Your can improve your “gut” judgment by priming it with rational thinking

• Brandolini’s Shadow

Retweets

• Science has fulfilled Jesus’s message beyond his wildest dreams (@curiouswavefn)

• The tin can is underrated (@_brianpotter)

• Golden Rice is finally arriving (@stewartbrand)

• Why steam turbines are not a good idea for fusion energy (@elidourado)

• It’s time to close the book on the amyloid hypothesis (@schrag_matthew)

• ChatGPT scores 1020 on the SAT (@davidtsong)

• AI progress has gone exponential and is likely to speed up even further (@zachtratar)

• Startlingly effective AI tutoring is coming (@mbateman)

• Cheating is a minor issue and the AI cheating arms race doesn’t matter (@mbateman)

• Chaining ChatGPT and Midjourney to generate images from a concept (@GuyP)

Charts

• Your income would be double today if TFP growth hadn’t stagnated (@elidourado)

• It’s a very good time to get a mortgage, taking the long-term view (@charlesjkenny)