There's a common story we tell about innovation — that it's a relentless march across the frontier, led by fundamental breakthroughs in engineering, science, research, etc. Progress, according to this story, is mainly about overcoming hard technological bottlenecks. But even in heavily optimized and well-funded competitive industries, there is a surprising amount of innovation that happens that doesn't require any new advances in research or engineering, that isn't about pushing the absolute frontier, and actually could have happened at any point before.

Road Cycling is an example of a heavily optimized sport - where huge sums of money get spent on R&D, trying to make bikes as fast and comfortable as possible, while there are millions of enthusiast recreational riders, always trying to do whatever they can to...

This is a linkpost for my book review from my personal blog, Trajectory. Read the original post (and subscribe to the newsletter) here: https://blog.jovono.com/p/book-review-abundance-by-ezra-klein

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, is the newest and most anticipated release of a series of books that have recently come out on the topic of improving progressive governance, like Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works, Demsas’s On the Housing Crisis, and Appelbaum’s Stuck. Particularly given the authors’ fame, Abundance has triggered a significant debate, much more than the other books in this subgenre.

Abundance exists in the context of a conversation the authors helped start that focuses on maximizing outputs rather than inputs. It goes by several names,...

I asked Claude to write new lyrics for Ode to Joy, with the theme of progress. The result was wonderful! So I am sharing it here.

Fields of plenty, golden harvests
Where once famine stalked the land
Human ingenuity triumphs
Food for every outstretched hand

Engines, circuits, wheels in motion
Labors eased by human minds
What once broke the backs of billions
Now by clever tools designed

Ships and railways, planes connecting
Distant shores to distant shores
Nations trade in peaceful commerce
Through their open, welcoming doors

City lights that shine like beacons
Where once darkness ruled the night
Voices, faces cross vast oceans
Binding hearts through waves of light

Plagues that once decimated nations
Now retreat before our will
Lives extended, pain diminished
Not by prayer but by our skill

From the shadows of past conflicts
Dawn of shared prosperity
Abundance flows through peaceful borders
As one human family

Solar has an average capacity factor in the US of about 25%. Naively, you might think that to turn this into a highly-available power source, you just need to have 4x the solar panels, plus enough batteries to store 75% of a day’s worth of power. E.g., for each continuous megawatt you want to supply, you need 4 MW of solar panels, and 18 MWh of batteries. During the day, you supply 1 MW from the panels and use the other 3 MW to charge the batteries. Overnight, you discharge the batteries to supply continuous power.

Turns out it’s not quite that simple. First, the capacity factor varies throughout the year, as the days get shorter in winter. So you at least need to build enough that even...

This essay is cross-posted from https://thegreymatter.substack.com/p/rethinking-the-palm-oil-boycott

What if the crusade to save the planet’s forests by boycotting palm oil is actually accelerating their destruction? Palm oil, vilified as the scourge of rainforests and orangutans alike, was ranked by consumers as the most environmentally damaging vegetable oil in a recent survey. That’s despite its lurking in nearly 50% of supermarket products—from doughnuts and pizza to toothpaste and lipstick. Yet, as environmental researcher Hannah Ritchie argues in her book Not the End of the World, this well-meaning activism could be backfiring, driving worse deforestation elsewhere.

Ritchie’s seemingly counterintuitive claim rests on palm oil’s hidden edge: it’s a productivity powerhouse. Oil palms churn out far more oil per hectare than any rival crop, so boycotting it pushes the world toward less efficient...

Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, Farcaster, Bluesky, or Threads.

Contents

• The 150-year history of d/acc
• We’re hiring a Developmental Editor
• Open Philanthropy Abundance & Growth Fund
• Jobs
• Events
• Announcements

For paid subscribers:

• “I didn’t think it was that unlikely”
• Oldie but goodie
• Bio links
• Short notes
• You’d give the Devil benefit of law!
• Architecture

The 150-year history of d/acc

I spoke at “d/acc Day” alongside Vitalik Buterin, Juan Benet, Mary Lou Jepsen, Allison Duettmann, and others.

If you haven’t heard of d/acc, I recommend reading Vitalik’s post “My Techno-Optimism” where he coined the term, and his followup “d/acc: One Year Later.” In short: d/acc embraces progress; it recognizes that progress has risks and we need to address them; and it advocates doing so in decentralized ways that don’t lead to authoritarian control...

1. What are non-deterministic elections?

Voting is at the heart of democracy—it's how we collectively decide who will lead us and shape public policy. Traditionally, most democratic elections rely on deterministic voting systems. These are the systems where the outcome is based on a clear majority, and the winner is the one who secures the most votes.
This approach has its objections, for example the problem of the "tyranny of the majority", where the minority's voice is often silenced, and the concentration of power is in the hands of just over half the voters.^[1]

In response to these concerns, recent research has started exploring non-deterministic voting systems. Unlike deterministic systems, these introduce an element of chance, beyond just using randomness to break ties.
It might be best if I first give...