Progress links digest, 2023-08-02: Superconductor edition

[jasoncrawford]

Link post

Opportunities

• Stripe Press is hiring a creative producer for video, audio, & special projects (via @_TamaraWinter)

• Astera’s new Science Entrepreneur-in-Residence program will support new tools for scientific publishing (via @mattsclancy)

Announcements

• The Frontier Model Forum is an industry body co-founded by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google/​DeepMind, and Microsoft “focused on ensuring safe development of future hyperscale AI models” (via @OpenAI)

• Impetus Grants has closed $10M for more longevity projects (via @LNuzhna)

• Emergent Ventures winners, 27th cohort (via @tylercowen)

• The Studies Show is a new science podcast by Tom Chivers and Stuart Ritchie, also on Spotify (via @TomChivers, @s8mb)

• The Lean FRO will work on “scalability, usability, and proof automation in the Lean proof assistant” (via @leanprover)

• Ed Yong is leaving The Atlantic. Subscribe to his newsletter to keep up with him (via @edyong209)

• Works in Progress is now available on Apple News (via @WorksInProgMag)

Superconductors

• Lots of chatter about LK-99, the supposed room-temperature superconductor. I have been holding off on speculating or sharing too many links until it is more solid

• Derek Lowe wrote an explainer and gave an update Aug 1 in which he is “guardedly optimistic”

• Andrew McCalip and some of his co-workers at Varda have been trying to replicate. Here is a list of all the replication attempts

• At least one paper suggested a theoretical basis for superconductivity in this material, but a physics prof who studies materials says it doesn’t matter, and gives a history of disappointments in the space

• Alex Kaplan shares a lot of news and is a good follow (even though IMO he got too excited too quickly)

• Andrew Cote has a long, technical thread on the implications if this is real

• Manifold Markets currently at about a 1-in-3 chance. Kalshi market coming soon

Video

• Where is my flying RV? The Helihome was “a fully furnished flying home based on the body of a surplus Sikorsky helicopter,” and it was actually built and sold

Other links

• NASA plans to launch a nuclear-powered rocket engine into space as early as 2027 (via @isabelleboemeke)

• Max Roser: The limits of our personal experience and the value of statistics

• How phosphorus was discovered by alchemists trying to make gold, via Molecule of the Month

• Candle clock, via @Rainmaker1973, who points out: “To set an alarm, you pushed a nail into the desired point and the nail would fall and clank on the metal holder”

Queries

• What can we conclude from the failed “growth mindset” interventions?

• Which thinkers do you wish had blogs?

• Most interesting historical non-fiction, accessible book about the Roman Empire?

• Good system to search the text of books in order to share quotes?

Quotes

• Andrew Carnegie and the opposite of the principal-agent problem

• Thanks, Gigi! The progress of milk cows

• Nitrogen makes up only a few percent of plants by mass, but its availability in the soil is often a rate-limiting factor on crop growth

• “The Space Age may well be defined as an era of hubris”

• When Soviet authorities in the 1940s showed The Grapes of Wrath as evidence of how miserable the poor were in America, it backfired

• In 1924, Bertrand Russell was certain that governments would one day be controlling our emotions by chemical means

• Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy

Tweets & threads

• Everything has to be invented—even boiling eggs

• The Lendbreen Tunic was a simple wool caftan from the Iron Age. It took 760 hours of work, almost half a working year, to produce (via @paulg and @asymmetricinfo)

• The sorcery of fracking

• Algorithmic feeds are great. I want an algorithmic feed for everything in my life

• Mass production gave us best-in-class commodity goods; AI will do the same for services

• Sometimes social problems have technical solutions, and vice versa

• A “props to ops” story

• Why not to say “I believe in science.” “Not everything that calls itself science is science, and even good science sometimes gets wrong results.”

• It’s time to scrap AML/​KYC entirely (via @Atabarrok, who adds that these laws are “expensive, ineffective and an insult to liberty”)

• One of the most important and underrated rationality techniques is to simply get into the right emotional state

• What agency is and how to develop it. “Build a shed, develop informed opinions about history, resolve your social anxiety, learn an instrument. These and like victories are the countless premises from which the conclusion ‘I can author my life’ follows.”

• “The world is full of couples who are married and functional and in love… romance and courtship are thriving, masculinity and femininity are alive and well and better than ever”

• “Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems but products that facilitate human connection and communication require a different type of social-emotional intelligence”

Maps & charts

• Progress in weather forecasting (or at least air pressure)

• 2.5% of the world’s population lives in Uttar Pradesh, and another 1.4% in Maharashtra (!)

• “Living in harmony with nature?” Megafaunal extinctions followed ancient humans wherever they went