Progress links and tweets, 2023-06-14

[jasoncrawford]

Link post

Announcements & opportunities

• The Long Now Foundation is hiring an Executive Director

• Terraform Industries (solar-powered carbon-neutral natural gas synthesis) is hiring

• A class on how politics works, so you can get involved productively

• Read Something Wonderful, writing that has stood the test of time (including my pieces on iron and smallpox)

• Turpentine Media, a new media network covering tech, business, & culture

News

• Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” has died in prison at 81. See Kevin Kelly’s summary of and rebuttal to his philosophy

Links

• Marc Andreessen on AI safety. Note what I highlighted and where I disagree

• Jacob Steinhardt predicts what will GPT look like in 2030

• What Lant Pritchett is for: productivity, state capability, education, labor mobility

• The Illusion of Moral Decline (via @a_m_mastroianni). One of many decline illusions

• The untold story of the precursors of the steam engine (by @antonhowes)

• Holden Karnofsky suggests “a playbook for AI risk reduction”

• Mark Lutter interview on his Caribbean charter city project (via @MarkLutter)

• Trailer for Nuclear Now, which is now on streaming platforms (via @oklo)

• Casey Handmer on why we don’t build underground. Building a road tunnel costs “$100,000 per meter, or equivalent to a stack of Hamiltons of the same length.” (!) Although I don’t know if Casey used Norway or Seattle figures

• Also Casey: 1 gram of stratospheric SO₂ offsets 1 ton of CO₂ for 1 year (!)

• “Existential Crunch” synthesizes research about social collapse (via @mattsclancy)

• Turnspit dogs (via @RebeccaRideal via @antonhowes)

Requests for books/​sources on…

• How Moore’s Law actually happened?

• Related, the modern history of chips/​AI?

• West Midlands in the Industrial Revolution and today?

• Programming design for Apollo 11?

• The history of commodities markets?

• The S&L crisis?

Other queries

• Who are the virtuosos of the ChatGPT form?

• What societies have successfully gone through degrowth? (If any…)

• Anecdotes of scientists eschewing management or calling for more autonomy?

• Term for the age you would have died at, if not for modern medicine?

• Best treatment of why actions often produce the opposite of the intended effect?

• How to square Cruise’s claim of 1 injury in first 1M driverless miles with SF’s claims? (Maybe three are actually Waymo, and none seem at-fault?)

Quotes

• “The flying machine is one of God’s most gracious and precious gifts”

• Admiral Rickover on academic reactors vs. practical reactors

• The stock ticker was the 19th-century equivalent of social media

• Straight, level roads were a new, non-obvious idea in the early 1800s

• How the precautionary principle became a weapon against new technology

• “Systems tend to malfunction conspicuously just after their greatest triumph”

Tweets & threads

• Cruise AVs learn to honk at human drivers to avoid collisions

• We have seen smoke blotting out the sky before, such as the “Dark Day” of 1780

• Bret Devereaux on what life was like as a typical Roman peasant. Among other things, children died young and yes, the parents mourned

• Author of “Mundanity of Excellence” responds to me on the value of talent

• “Progress studies showed me that ideas matter & can have true real world impact”

• A dam is sabotaged, and the main media concern is a nuclear plant at little risk

• The apathy that manifests when technology becomes invisible. Also, “pragmatic optimism” and “solutionism”

• What “consciousness-raising” feminism did and why it was necessary

• How well-intentioned government policy turns into implementation nightmares

• The O-1/​EB-1 are underutilized by top talent and many get bad info about eligibility

• SF changes the planning code to reduce burden on shop owners

• Treatment effect? No, selection effect

• I oscillate between “everything is screwed up” and “screwed-up is normal”. Also, the minimum competence of professionals is much lower than you would hope

• You can do Scylla and Charybdis as emoji 🐉⛵️🌀

• 150 years after Darwin’s finches, a biology paper identified the protein that made their beaks different

• Infrastructure that looks like sci-fi

Maps & charts

• Holding period of stocks over time

• Revenue evolution for various industries

• When Singapore needs more land, it builds more

• It used to be hazardous to breathe outdoor air for much of the year

[Nathan Helm-Burger]

copying top response to term for age you would’ve died at without modern medicine:
Bobby D. @Ancient0History

Technical: Medical Intervention Threshold

Untechnical: Bucket Point

For me, this would have been age 3, fever/​pneumonia.