Progress links and tweets, 2023-02-08

[jasoncrawford]

Link post

The Progress Forum

• A catalog of big visions for biology

• London progress meetup, Feb 25

• A Cure for My Cancer, by Virginia Postrel

• Eli Dourado AMA has concluded

Announcements

• Metascience event at AEI, Feb 9 (via @AlecStapp)

• Visa Limbo, a site from IFP tracking visa processing delays (via @JeremyLNeufeld)

• OpenAI launches ChatGPT Plus for $20/​month (via @miramurati)

Links

• Let’s add AP Progress to the high school curriculum (by @JimPethokoukis)

• Marc Andreessen on Dwarkesh’s podcast. Also Dwarkesh now has paid subscriptions. And what should he ask Elad Gil?

• A vision for cargo airships (by @elidourado)

• This comment convinced me I was wrong: we are not “pre-theory” regarding cancer

• NASA, DARPA to test nuclear engine for Mars missions (via @elidourado)

Queries

• Is there a directory of all the open-ended grant programs?

• Who should Milan Cvitkovic meet in SF? (@MWCvitkovic)

• Who is hiring for robotics roles/​internships? (@momahmood_)

• What is the best way to bootstrap an advanced understanding of biology? (@danielgolliher)

Quotes

• The philosophers who told us not to celebrate progress

• History is biased to war and politics; progress is relatively neglected

• “Scientific management” was the precursor to 20th-century technocracy

• The need for ambition, from GH Hardy’s “A Mathematician’s Apology” (@nabeelqu)

• Bacon on lumpers vs. splitters

Tweets

• LLMs create a vector space for concepts

• We will get many specialized AIs, not a massive centralized Great Brain

• People’s work is defined more by their methods than their goals

Retweets

• How much more quickly things were done in the 1960s (@Gilesyb)

• ChatGPT as a universal translator (@YirenLu)

• 69 of 109 jurisdictions in SFBA now subject to the builder’s remedy (@Yimby_Law)

• “This might be my favorite 1-page philosophy paper” (@davidalanbuiles)

• A hypothesis about things capitalism gets blamed for (@mbateman)

Charts

• Auckland liberalized building rules and housing permits soared