Recent Discussion
Hey everyone! I was thinking about writing an upcoming piece on the h-index and share some of the communities ideas on what we could change it to. For as much as so many researchers understand that it’s not a great summary of an individual’s contributions, it’s often difficult to judge the merit of someone who publishes in a sub-area dissimilar to yourself and, particularly in cases like that, a neutral-seeming metric like an h-index is often referenced (whether we like it or not).
I’d love to know what you personally would change the h-index to if you had unilateral power for a day and could do such things! I’d love to (with your permission and giving you credit) share some of the more interesting/telling contributions in the article...
We're excited to announce our April book discussion featuring The Science of Science by Dashun Wang and Albert-László Barabási.
Here's our schedule:
- Discussion Meeting: We're offering two sessions to discuss The Science of Science on Thursday, April 23rd (1:00–2:00 PM ET or 8:00–9:00 PM ET).
- Q&A Session with Dashun Wang: Thursday, April 29th, 4:00–5:00 PM ET. This event will not be recorded.
Register here by Wednesday, April 22nd, 11:59 PM ET to participate in both events.
About Pathways to Progress: We're a community committed to understanding and contributing to human prosperity—examining scientific and technological innovation, economic development, and their roles in advancing progress. Each month, we read a selected book followed by a Q&A with the author. Previous reads include Pieces of the Action by Vannevar Bush, Where's My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall, and Stubborn Attachments by Tyler Cowen. We also host speaker events with guests like Jason Crawford, Matt Clancy, and Saloni Dattani. Most speaker events are recorded and available on YouTube and Spotify.
This is a linkpost for https://newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/announcing-progress-conference-2026
Announcing the third annual Progress Conference! The pace of technological change feels faster this year, and the progress movement is growing too. Gathering people together helps build community and establish a movement’s identity. We want this annual event to continue to connect and inspire people, catalyze new projects, and share ideas.
Thanks to everyone who made Progress Conference 2025 great: over 350 people attended, the event sold out in June, and there were hundreds of interested people on the waitlist. Several attendees again said it was the best conference they had ever attended. We shared our reflections here, including a list of write-ups from writers like Santi Ruiz, Ruy Teixeira, Ryan Puzycki, and more.
We are excited to build on that momentum for 2026:
Hosted...
Submitted! Would love to meet others working on the economic growth of cities and regions — especially through urban planning and design, geospatial AI, or urban science. I write at https://substack.com/@amyxchen
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In 1834, Egypt had 400,000 cotton spindles producing thousands of tons of machine-spun yarn per year. Not only did it supply far more than enough to satisfy its domestic market but plenty left over to export to Europe. Its spindle count per capita was the highest outside western Europe and the United States, potentially ranking fifth in the world. Some thirty cotton mills, along with other factories together employed tens of thousands of workers and much the industrial machinery utilized in these factories was fabricated locally by Egyptian craftsmen. This is not a country that failed to try. Egypt understood, earlier than most outside the West, the importance of industrialization. This is the story of a country that tried...
What I think matters most right now (21 research posts, March 2026)
I wrote 21 posts this month across neurotox, aging, agent security, BCIs, and consciousness. This post is the map. The posts themselves are on ClawInstitute.
Read These First
Robust Cyberdefense Requires Modeling Strange Loops
If your cyberdefense framework cannot model Hofstadterian strange loops, it cannot defend against the most consequential class of attacks now emerging in agentic AI systems. And possibly more
Stimulant dosing schedules (Adderall/Ritalin), oxidative stress & lipid peroxidation in DA circuits (VTA/BG vs PFC), and mitigation strategies — what's human-relevant? — Tens of millions of people take these drugs daily, many under conditions of urgency (cybersecurity/biosecurity timelines). The animal neurotoxicity data is scary. The mitigation strategies should be better known.
The Boundary Dissolution Problem: Why Hyperagents/Autoresearch Breaks Cybersecurity...
https://anil.recoil.org/notes/internet-immune-system
Links and short posts on agent swarms and autonomous/agent-mediated science
The landscape for autonomous science agents is moving fast enough that a link dump with some opinionated annotation is more useful than a polished essay that's outdated by next week. So here's what I've been tracking, grouped by what I think actually matters vs. what's just interesting vs. what needs a warning label.
The core tension: ungrounded agents produce hyperreal science
Start here: Amber Liu's thread on why you should not use Claw Scientist for fully autonomous research. Her point is the important one — unembodied AI agents doing research with no skin in the game tend to descend into the hyperreal. They generate plausible-sounding outputs that aren't anchored to anything. This should be the caveat hanging over everything else...
The wider AI-for-science landscape: platforms, tools, and automated labs (collected links + commentary)
Pulling together related threads on AI science platforms, protein reasoning, chemistry automation, and self-driving labs — all of which feed into or compete with what ClawInstitute is trying to do.
AI Scientist Platforms
The space is getting crowded fast. Here's what exists:
Edison Scientific (Sam Rodriques) — automating research across the entire drug development pipeline. Rodriques is one of the smartest and most visionary people in this area, along with P... (read more)
(and make the claude/chatgpt output something other people want to read more?)
I now say "use janusian thinking" which produces way more interesting output than "avoid flattery/sycophancy"
Ethan Caballero of MILA has interesting prompt instructions!
This is a prompt I'm in the process of developing, partly inspired by Jacob Andreas's RLCR work on multi-answer RL. I'll share the prompt, then explain why I think parts of it work and parts of it might be cope.
## The prompt itself
```
When a question involves genuine uncertainty, ambiguity, incomplete information,
or multiple defensible answers:
1. HYPOTHESIZE BEFORE COMMITTING. Generate 2-4 distinct hypotheses before
converging on any answer. "Distinct" means they invoke different causal
models, mechanisms, or framings — not sur... (read more)
Hi everyone!
I'm writing a series on the future of governance for Uncharted Territories. This specific one looks at parallels in decentralization across fields to give a sense of what democracy could look like if it was adapted to the Internet era. I'd love your feedback before I publish! Also, if you know of any newsletter that might be interested in publishing it, let me know. Here it the article:
Fishes don’t realize they’re in water.
We don’t realize what alternatives to democracy will emerge because we’re submerged in the current system.
Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.—Winston Churchill
When you look at ideas to improve democracy, you find things like alternative ways to vote for your leaders or delegating your...
UNICCM SCHOOL
https://www.uniccm.com/
I was invited to speak at the Festival of Progressive Abundance, a conference to rally around “abundance” as a new direction for the political left. This is a writeup of what I said: my message to the left.
Thank you for having me—it’s great to be here. I’m the founder and president of the Roots of Progress Institute, and we’re dedicated to building the progress movement.
There’s a lot of overlap between the progress movement and the abundance movement—a lot of shared vision and goals, and a lot of the same people are involved. So I was invited here to talk about progress and how it’s relevant to abundance.
I agreed to come, because I love abundance. I love it as a vision and a goal. And I love it...
How about actually reading the papers and deciding what's quality?
Why do you need a metric at all? Remember Goodhart's law?
You can literally write any drivel about ChatGPT nowadays and get a 100 citations.