Jason’s links and tweets, 2023-04-24

[jasoncrawford]

Link post

Here on the Progress Forum (ICYMI)

• Atlas Fellowship: $10k scholarship + 11-day program for high schoolers

• AMA with Bryan Bishop has concluded

Opportunities

• Erik Torenberg hiring a “researcher in residence”

Links

• What a simple toy could tell the past about their future

• IRBs save a few people while killing 10,000–100,000 more and costing $1.6B

• Science depends on promoting good outliers, not preventing bad outliers

• Breeding mosquitoes to prevent disease (strong XKCD 938 energy)

• New, high-grade cache of rare earth elements was discovered recently

• SF mayor introduces wide-reaching housing reforms (via @anniefryman who has a good explainer thread). And how to build a house in a day (via @Vernon3Austin)

• Alex Tabarrok on Costo, channeling Voltaire

Quotes

• Freeman Dyson: “Nobody builds reactors for fun anymore”

• Why it’s more important to “raise the ceiling” rather than the “floor”

• “Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics”

Queries

• If you heard the term “intellectual entrepreneur,” what would you think it means?

• Why is a protein’s shape so important?

• Is there a dataset of very granular TFP by industry?

• What’s an example of a proactive regulation or policy that worked well?

• Is anyone working on reducing the modern bureaucratic workload on researchers?

AI

• The increased supply of intelligence will create more demand for tasks that require intelligence (via @packyM)

• Observations on two years of programming with GitHub Copilot

• A Turing test would be a dynamic, evolving, adversarial competition

• “GPT agents” are cool experiments, but the demos look sort of fake?

• Freeman Dyson gave a very short answer to the 2015 Edge question

AI safety

• Both AI doomers and anti-doomers believe that the other side has a weird conjunction of many dubious arguments. Related, a critique of pure reason

• Something the government can do now about AI safety: define liability

• Scott Aaronson on what to do now about AI risk

• Scott Alexander on “not overshooting and banning all AI forever”

• Norbert Wiener was concerned about machine alignment problems in the 1960s

• Will AI be safer if it has cost/​efficiency constraints?

• What are the implications of LLMs for AI interpretability?

• Can Man create a machine so smart he can’t turn it off?

Other tweets

• Rocket launches as our aesthetic contribution for the age. (Compare to this painting)

• Job posting for a position at Shockley Transistor, 1960

• John Quincy Adams: hero of progress?

• On sending your life in a dramatically better, more ambitious direction

• “The reductionist hypothesis does not by any means imply a ‘constructionist’ one”

• One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens…

Maps

• The map of undersea cables is like a wiring diagram for the planet. See also this 1996 piece by Neal Stephenson (non-fiction)