Note: this is a crosspost from my Substack, Positive Sum. 

I'm spending the next six months reading 30+ books about innovation policy, trying to understand a perspective I've been disregarding my whole career.

Our tech policy debates are stuck because we're talking past each other. Arguments continually circle back to one thing: whether regulation will harm innovation.

Usually, us leftists see “protecting innovation” as a weak, catch-all excuse used by people on the right. A superficial one at best, a cover for greed at worst.

But now, because of progress writers, AI, and my decade in government, I am intensely curious:

What actually is the nature of innovation? Which regulations helped or hurt? How do you prevent the kind of public backlash that killed nuclear power? What types of private governance actually...

This is a linkpost for https://rootsofprogress.org/more-great-speakers-join-progress-conference-2025/

Progress Conference 2025 is on track to once again be a main event for the progress community, now bringing together well over 300 attendees. Over the last two months we’ve added:

• 21 more great speakers. Additional speakers include Sampriti Bhattacharyya (Navier), Seemay Chou (Arcadia Science), Justin Lopas (Base Power), Emmett Shear (Softmax), Jan Sramek (California Forever), and more. Full speaker list here. Our speaker list is now closed—though we are taking ideas for 2026—and we’re excited about many additional interesting sessions that attendees will organize during the unconference slots.
• 7 additional sponsors. We welcome Jane Street, Renaissance Philanthropy, Common Group, Works in Progress, Halcyon Ventures, Inclusive Abundance, and Circulate Planning as new sponsors. A couple of sponsorships at levels of $25K and $50K are still available. View sponsorship

The Roots of Progress Institute is seeking to commission stories for a new article series, “Intelligence Age,” on future applications of AI.

These will be reported essays, not science fiction. We want to understand how AI might change individual sectors of the economy and the working lives of the people within them. What happens to traditional filmmaking when AI can make good movies? What will it be like to date with an emotionally intelligent AI vetting the pool of potential partners?

Or: we’d like to commission one or more stories about the future of the legal profession in the age of AI. We can partly understand that by talking to lawyers on the cutting edge of AI use, but we also want you to extrapolate out and think multiple...

It’s been way too long since the last links digest, which means I have way too much to catch up on. I had to cut many interesting bits to get this one out the door.

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

• Apply to the Roots of Progress Fellowship by June 1st (tomorrow!)
• Edge Esmeralda next week!
• My writing (ICYMI)
• Other people’s writing
• Jobs
• Grants & fellowships
• Events
• AI announcements
• Introductions
• Career moves
• Nuclear news
• Aviation news
• Other announcements

For paid subscribers:

• Stagnation was the goal
• Is stagnation a measurement illusion?
• Eroom’s Law
• Cembalest on AI
• More on AI
• Bio
• Podcast interviews
• Links and short notes
• Politics
• Housing
• Gratitude
• Quotes
• Charts
• Aesthetics
• Fun

Apply to the Roots of Progress Fellowship by June 1st (tomorrow!)

Applications are still open for the 2025 Blog-Building Intensive! Launch a blog and improve your progress-focused writing with expert guidance and an amazing...

Social media exploded with pent-up frustrations, swirling like an inexhaustible tornado, after the UnitedHealthcare tragedy. Why does health insurance produce such a wellspring of anger? In other markets, if you don’t like your meal, you send it back or pick a different restaurant. If your TV is faulty, you speak with customer service, or, if you do level up and tag the company on social media, there’s a good chance you’ll get an immediate, penitent resolution. Why does it seem like we’re screaming into the void with insurance?

1. Two’s company, three’s a complicated financial relationship

In the simplest version of an economic transaction, you, the consumer, buys an apple and pays the producer directly. A two-person party. Healthcare services are different from other parts of the economy because...

Movement alone isn’t progress, and there are dangers in ignoring dimensions and directions of acceleration.

Note: This is cross-posted from my Substack on Exploring Cooperation, responding to a recent post by Helen Toner,  and I think that post, and hopefully my long-form reply, will be of interest to the progress studies community.

Progress, Acceleration, and the Fragility of Civilizational Defaults

In debates about progress, societies seem trapped between two crude narratives. On one side, all progress is framed as inherently heroic—proof of human ingenuity, resilience, and ambition. On the other, any concerns about technologies, much less calls for regulation or opposition, is cast as luddism and bureaucratic overreach fighting the engines of prosperity. But the simplistic counter-narrative that technology leads to ruin, while slow and natural changes were what created...

In the progress movement, some cause areas are about technical breakthroughs, such as fusion power or a cure for aging. In other areas, the problems are not technical, but social. Housing, for instance, is technologically a solved problem. We know how to build houses, but housing is blocked by law and activism.

The YIMBY movement is now well established and gaining momentum in the fight against the regulations and culture that hold back housing. More broadly, similar forces hold back building all kinds of things, including power lines, transit, and other infrastructure. The same spirit that animates YIMBY, and some of the same community of writers and activists, has also been pushing to reform regulation such as NEPA.

Healthcare has both types of problems. We need breakthroughs in science...

[I am relatively new to this forum. I recently published this post on my substack inspired by the progress studies mindset. I hope some of you can resonate with this.]

Ever since broadening my views on how to help animals, I've been learning about more movements and ideas that may provide new insights for animal welfare. I believe progress studies is one such movement.

The Progress Studies Framework for Animal Welfare

While lot of progress studies ideas are great, I don't completely agree with the progress studies movement on everything, notably...

The US is experiencing a great decline in trust. According to the US General Social Survey, people who agreed with the statement "most people can be trusted" went from 49% to 25% between 1984 and 2022.^[1]

Trust in institutions is also falling. Over that same period trust in the government fell from 42% to 20%.

For civil services it fell from 56% to 41%, for the police it fell from 74% to 68%, and for congress it fell from 52% to a whopping 15%.^[2]
Even international institutions, like the United Nations, are losing trust, going from 47% to 44%.

It’s not just institutions, organizations are also losing trust. According to the WVS, over that same period public trust in the press declined from 49% to 29%, trust in major companies declined...