The links digest is back, baby!

I got so busy writing The Techno-Humanist Manifesto this year that after May I stopped doing the links digest and my monthly reading updates. I’m bringing them back now (although we’ll see what frequency I can keep up). This one covers the last two or three weeks. But first…

A year-end call to support our work

I write this newsletter as part of my job running the Roots of Progress Institute (RPI). RPI is a nonprofit, supported by your subscriptions and donations. If you enjoy my writing, or appreciate programs like our conference, writer’s fellowship, and high school program, consider making a donation:

• If you can give $100, subscribe to our paid Substack
• If you can give $500, make it a founder subscription
• If you can give

“Slop” is Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year:

We define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” … The flood of slop in 2025 included absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real, junky AI-written books, “workslop” reports that waste coworkers’ time… and lots of talking cats. People found it annoying, and people ate it up. … “AI Slop is Everywhere,” warned The Wall Street Journal, while admitting to enjoying some of those cats.

Slop touches a nerve today. When Meta announced a product to create massive amounts of AI-generated short-form video, presumably with no goal other than entertainment to capture clicks and eyeballs, even my generally pro-technology circles exploded in disgust and...

Starting today, high school students can apply to Progress in Medicine, a new program by the Roots of Progress Institute.

What the Progress in Medicine program offers

In this summer program, high school students will explore careers in in medicine, biotech, health policy, and longevity. We will inspire them with stories of historical progress and future opportunities in medicine, help them think about a wider range of careers, and raise their aspirations about how they can contribute to progress in medicine. The program centers on this central question:

People today live longer, healthier, and less painful lives than ever before. Why? Who made those changes possible? Can we keep this going? And could you play a part?

Teens will:

• Learn about and be inspired by the heroes of the past—the people who

Ben Norman, Max Maton, Jian Xin Lim and I are working on a Progress Studies Society in London for students/professionals. Our initial experiment is an 8-week in-person project-based fellowship, aimed at helping talented individuals start working on concrete problems relevant to progress studies.

We're looking for lists of relevant project ideas -- similar to what people have done in AI safety (e.g. here and here). The people working on these would be lower context, but dedicated/smart. We would be very grateful if anyone has suggestions :)

Hi, I'm a philosopher specializing in epistemology and rationality. I learned about Karl Popper's Critical Rationalism from my mentor David Deutsch and I helped with his book The Beginning of Infinity. That gives a sense of the general point of view I'm coming from. I have two main things to suggest which are mostly independent but synergize well.

I developed improvements on Critical Rationalism, which I named Critical Fallibilism, which center around evaluating ideas in a binary way using decisive arguments rather than weighing arguments or evidence (which, like induction, doesn't actually work).

And I developed a plan for how to make progress in the world: encourage all public intellectuals to have written debate policies which specify in advance what debates they will accept and how they will behave...

Many technologies can be used in both healthy and unhealthy ways. You can indulge in food to the point of obesity, or even make it the subject of anxiety. Media can keep us informed, but it can also steal our focus and drain our energy, especially social media. AI can help students learn, or it can help them avoid learning. Technology itself has no agency to choose between these paths; we do.

This responsibility exists at all levels: from society as a whole, to institutions, to families, down to each individual. Companies should strive to design healthier products—snack foods that aren’t calorie-dense, smartphones with screen time controls built in to the operating system. There is a role for law and regulation as well, but that is a blunt...