Progress links and tweets, 2023-06-21: Stewart Brand wants your comments

[jasoncrawford]

Link post

Opportunities

• Dwarkesh Patel is hiring a COO for his podcast, The Lunar Society

• Join a new campaign for nuclear regulatory reform (via @BuildNuclearNow)

Announcements

• Stewart Brand is serializing his book on Maintenance and inviting your comments

• Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization, a new book by Ed Conway (via @lewis_dartnell). Conway also has a blog

• Dan Romero is offering Twitter subscriptions, will donate it to The Roots of Progress (thank you, Dan!)

• The OpenAI API now supports function calling (via @gdb)

• Waymo now covers all of San Francisco ²⁴⁄₇

Links

• A coffee mug full of nucleic acids could store all the data from the last two years

• Why Mark Lutter is building a 21st Century Renaissance charter city in the Caribbean (via @JeffJMason). A followup to the interview in last week’s digest

Queries

• A curriculum that motivates science through engineering/​technology projects?

• Who should Anastasia talk to at the forefront of ambitious cardiology research?

• What’s the earliest depiction of nuclear waste as green ooze in a drum?

• Books on all things economics & finance? Seeking a really wide overview

Quotes

• Speculation from 1900 about how short skirts might help prevent disease

• A complaint about tech stagnation… from 1926

Tweets & threads

• AI “decelerationists”

• The “good old days” of anything was always 50 years ago (via @johanknorberg)

• The experiment that measured the rotation speed of ATP synthase

• Should we destroy all malaria-carrying mosquitoes now?

• ChatGPT seems to have gotten worse? (Not the only similar comments I’ve seen)

• “I am only afraid of death since I became convinced that it is optional”

• The O-1 and EB-1 are wildly underused visa categories for top talent

• Individualized education will reduce variance at the bottom but increase it at the top

• Lectures are better than “interactive discussions”

• When Lydia Williams died at age 43 in 1858, only five of her ten children were still alive. “Of all 10, just two survived to adulthood. This used to be normal”

[Viliam]

With proper individualization of education, you should expect:

1. That the floor will be raised consistently, reducing lower bound differences in student outcomes

2. That the *ceiling* will be raised *unevenly*, *increasing* upper bound differences in student outcomes

Uhm, why?

I think there are at least three different ways to do “individual education”. First is to assign the same time to all subjects as you would do otherwise, but teach each subject at the speed optimal for the individual. Second is to also change the schedule, such as assign more time to subjects the student has problems with (because they need most to improve there), and less time to subjects the student is good at (less needs to improve). Third is the opposite of that, assign more time to subjects that the student is good at (because those are the superpowers), and less time to subjects the student is bad at (because what’s the point anyway).

I would expect different results of those three. Also, depends on how exactly you measure the “floor” and “ceiling” for students that are good at something but bad at something else. (If we take a student that would otherwise be average at everything, but we make them e.g. excel at math and suck at everything else, was the ceiling increased?)

My guess would be that most school that implement “individualization of education” choose the second way, fixing your weak places. That increases the floor, but has no impact on ceiling, or possibly even lowers the ceiling, because the students are discouraged from spending too much time on their strengths.

On the other hand, I imagine that a typical LW reader would understand “individualized education” as “help me become awesome at math and computer science, and don’t bother me with the rest”, which indeed would raise the ceiling unevenly.

I once attended a discussion on “The Future of Textbooks”. In attendance, but silent, was a co-founder of MIT Open Courseware & the CEO of one of the world’s most innovative textbook companies. Discussion was instead dominated by a VP at Amazon who appeared to have read 3 Medium posts on the subject.

Priceless.

I used to give lectures on various subjects in the past, typically followed by a discussion, and it is my experience that people who know the least try to dominate the discussion, unless you push really hard against them. If an “expert” corrects me to provide additional information that I am not sure at the moment whether it is correct or not, most likely it turns out to be wrong when I later check it.

But considering that the guy is a VP at Amazon, seems like in real world overconfidence pays off handsomely.