Progress links and tweets, 2023-01-25

[jasoncrawford]

Link post

The Progress Forum

• Tyler Cowen AMA is now done, read dozens of answers

• Vitalik on science, his philanthropy, progress and effective altruism

• On Eli Dourado’s “Heretical Thoughts on AI”

Announcements

• AllSearch.ai: “Google Books on steroids” (@dwarkesh_sp)

• Our World in Data is hiring a data scientist (via @MaxCRoser)

Links

• Zvi on gas stoves: ruining Nice Things for “marginally better health”

• A link from last week’s digest on quantum computing is probably bogus

Queries

• What is the case that ~4° C of warming by 2100 will be far worse for the world?

• What is the earliest technology where most users had no idea how it worked?

• Why is the learning curve on corn linear and not exponential?

Quotes

• The insane power potential of nanotech motors. See also the intro to Nanosystems

• “Don’t send that railway through our town! … Wait, build us a branch line!”

• There are no “natural” resources

• The dose determines the poison

Tweets and retweets

• My hypothesis about Solow’s computer productivity paradox

• One blast furnace produces ~170x more iron than all of England in 1720

• Stuart Buck’s grandfather hoped he would grow up to “get an indoors job”

• Satellite photo of anywhere on Earth for as little as $175 ($7/​km²!)

• We had supersonic jets, lunar landers & nuclear reactors in the 1970s. We lost our way

• A nuclear design has finally received NRC certification after 6 years

• Skyscrapers used to be Art Deco and neo-Gothic, what happened? (@culturaltutor)

• The Hardiman, one of the earliest exoskeleton designs