Progress links and tweets, 2023-01-17

[jasoncrawford]

Link post

The Progress Forum

• Tyler Cowen AMA

• “In Praise of Fast Food” by Rachel Laudan (excerpts and link)

• Construction of the World Trade Center (Brian Potter)

• The Pull of Cities (Anton Howes)

• Gift subscriptions to Jim Pethokoukis’s Substack

Opportunities

• The O’Shaughnessy Fellowship: 1 year, $100k for ambitious people

Links

• The Economist on progress studies and other “new tech worldviews”

• New Substack on nuclear power by Jack Devanney

• Quantum computers may break RSA encryption sooner than expected (via @tegmark) [UPDATE: this is probably bogus]

• How much does a gas stove shorten your life? Maybe ~53 days (by @dynomight)

• Time-to-violent-death of Roman emperors displayed a bathtub curve

• Caro is still working on the 5th and final volume of his LBJ bio

• Nathan Myhrvold wrote a five-volume anthology on bread (!)

Queries

• What should Dwarkesh ask Marc Andreessen? (@dwarkesh_sp)

• Recommendations for things to read on well-run scientific labs?

• Why didn’t the predicted demise of radiologists happen? (@BenGoldhaber)

• Good sources showing how labor-intensive industries tend to move to where low-cost labor is? (@_brianpotter)

• What would it take for 2022-2090 to be as transformative for medicine/​biology as 1870-1950? (@Willyintheworld)

• What are more examples of individual grant programs such as Thiel Fellowship or Emergent Ventures? (@William_Blake)

• What does the “progressive” vision of the future look like today? (@lo_commotion)

• Can anyone find a source for this quote?

Tweets

• The devastating human consequences of the Ehrlichs’ campaign against “overpopulation.” (@daniel_eth asks, why has this man not been canceled yet?)

• “Traditional foods” are not very old

• In the long run, we need a heat-management system for the Earth

• Amazing progress on tap water connections in rural India

Quotes

• Things we take for granted: that glass is transparent

• Sanger’s Rule for technical advances in scientific experimentation

• Building bridges and keeping the water running are underrated

• Penicillin was stalled for a decade after the initial attempt to extract it failed

• Bitumen was the Super Glue™ of the third millennium BC

• Technologies often start out with “trivial“ uses and become necessities

• No society has held technological leadership for very long

• “I have yet to hear anyone even mention the theoretical possibility that we could respond to a new variant … by trying to vaccinate people before they could get infected”

• A Department of Drugs and a War on Education?

Retweets

• Megascale engineering is already around us (@anderssandberg)

• Perhaps the most underrated invention is the corporation (@William_Blake)

• 2023 will make 2022 look like a sleepy year for AI (@gdb)

• It’s insane that we’ve decided to make housing scarce enough to consume a major fraction of GDP (@CJHandmer)

• There should be a Wikipedia for careers (@eriktorenberg)

• Students don’t need new ideas; they need good ones (@DanFChambliss)

[ChristianKl]

Quantum computers may break RSA encryption sooner than expected (via @tegmark)

I created a Metaculus question around that question a while ago:

[Yonatan]

According to Scott Aaronson the paper does not do what the title says: https://​​scottaaronson.blog/​​?p=6957

[jasoncrawford]

Thanks, updated