Progress links and tweets, 2023-06-01

[jasoncrawford]

Link post

Richard Rhodes, illegal floor plans, and cyborg insects

Announcements/​opportunities

• Plymouth Street can help top talent get an O-1 or EB-1 visa

• Econ Twitter science fiction summer book club, July 12

Works in Progress Issue 11

• Olivine weathering: “Fixing global warming is a simple matter of applying energy to an unfavorable material situation.” (Related, sulfur stratospheric injection is cheap and easy for solar radiation management)

• Edison as a technical entrepreneur (by @eric_is_weird)

• Also: why Britain is NIMBY, how we solved acid rain, and more in the full issue

Other links

• Richard Rhodes interview by Dwarkesh Patel

• The birth of the electrical grid (by @_brianpotter)

• Anton Howes in the Telegraph on a new Great Exhibition (based on the full essay featured in the last digest)

• The Manual of Illegal Floor Plans

News

• Neuralink receives FDA approval for a human clinical study (via @shivon)

• Oklo announces two more sites for nuclear plants (via @caorilne)

Queries

• Any private companies that hire metascientists to improve their internal processes?

• What is the best history of the climate crisis?

• Why did the open hearth process use external fuel, but Bessemer did not?

• As an economy grows, do zero-sum activities occupy a larger share?

• Before no-fault divorce, how widely did states differ in the “fault”?

• Is there a difference between an “institute” and a “center”?

Quotes

• Extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them

• What does rule of law require?

Tweets

• Why I am reluctant to share stories about supposed breakthroughs. E.g., did AI really discover a new antibiotic against resistant bacteria? (Domain experts: yes, but this isn’t actually interesting/​important)

• Allen vs. Mokyr on the limiting factor of innovation (excerpted from my recent post)

• I have questions for Bret Devereaux on “Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?”

• RL can’t learn long-horizon tasks with sparse rewards; LLMs can (e.g., in Minecraft)

• Alarmists, accelerationists, and pragmatists on AI (see also my essay on solutionism)

• The “mac” in “tarmac” comes from John L. McAdam, 1756–1836, British surveyor

• We already have a word for “degrowth.” It’s called impoverishment (@paulg)

• Why does it take three years to restore… a carousel?

• Childhood should be serious; your life should be serious

• Cyborg insects

Charts

• We are not running out of resources

[bhauth]

olivine weathering

Gravel costs money. Making olivine gravel costs maybe $20/​ton. You’d need to dig up 2.3 tons of pure Mg silicate to potentially absorb 1 ton of CO2, and realistically speaking your “ore” won’t be pure or react completely, so the correct ratio is >3.

Suppose you do that. Great, you exposed some fresh magnesium silicate to the CO2 in air, and now a very thin layer of carbonate will form on the surface as it very slowly reacts. If you crush it to fine particles and spread it over a large area, you can get it to actually react, but that involves transporting it to a grinder and then spreading it out, which would bring your cost to probably >$200 per ton of CO2 absorbed. Not great. (Plus, all this digging and grinding uses energy, and probably involves vehicles that burn fuel.)

The above link talks about the cost of electricity needed to grind up a ton of olivine. This is a weird approach because people already grind up a lot of rocks and we know a lot about how much that currently costs. You should always base cost estimates on the costs of the most similar existing things. (Why don’t people do that?)

[jasoncrawford]

The article has a detailed analysis that comes up with a much lower cost. If you think that analysis goes wrong, I’d be curious to understand exactly where?

[bhauth]

The article has a detailed analysis

I sure didn’t see one! I saw some analysis of the cost of energy used for grinding up rock, with no consideration of other costs. Can you point me to the section with detailed analysis of the costs of mining, crushing, and spreading the rock, or the capital costs of grinders? A detailed analysis would have numbers for these things, not just dismiss them.

If you think that analysis goes wrong, I’d be curious to understand exactly where?

OK then.

What is quite certain is that the vast majority of that expense, both financially and in terms of energy, comes not from mining or crushing but from milling the crushed rock down to particle size.

Digging up and crushing olivine to gravel would be $20-30/​ton. We know this from the cost of gravel and the availability of olivine deposits. That alone makes this uneconomical, yet the author just dismisses them as negligible next to the cost of milling. So either the dismissal is wrong, or the milling cost estimation is wrong, or both.

for an all-inclusive energy cost of 61 kWh ($9.15) per tonne of rock – about $7.32 per sequestered tonne of CO2

Why is the cost per ton of CO2 lower than the cost per ton of rock, when 1 ton of rock stores much less than 1 ton of CO2?

And the largest rock mills are large indeed; the biggest on the market can process tens of thousands of tonnes a day. It should be clear by now that capital expenditures, while not irrelevant, are small compared to the cost of energy

That’s quite a non sequitur! We know what grinding rock to fine powder costs. Use those costs, not the cost of electricity.