Recent Discussion
The Roots of Progress Institute is hiring a full-time, in-house event manager to run our annual Progress Conference and other events. See the job ad below, crossposted in full from the link above.
Event Manager
Fully remote, full-time
The Role
We’re looking for a super-organized self-starter who loves bringing people together in person around a shared set of ideas and who is great at creating magical experiences.
The Roots of Progress Institute is a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. We’re part of a larger progress and abundance movement, and one key role we play within this movement is to develop talent and to build community.
As the Event Manager, you’ll be in charge of our annual progress conference, which brings together 200-300 thinkers and doers...
We believe in progress. For many kinds of mobility, we can see what progress is going to be. For long-range air travel, it is the return of supersonic flight. For short-range air travel, it's electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing flight (eVTOL), known colloquially as 'air taxi'. For personal vehicles and for ridehail, it's driving automation.
What would progress in public transit be?
I've written a series of posts on my Substack to answer this question on my Substack. It's in four parts and the sum is ~10K words. The short version is:
Firstly, we need to understand the problem. In my view, the problem is 'the Endless Emergency': a bad equilibrium where transit agencies rely on public subsidy to operate, but that reliance leads to raft of warped incentives. The result is local...
We're excited to announce our December book discussion featuring Robert Paarlberg's Starved for Science as part of our ongoing book series dedicated to exploring the ideas of Progress Studies.
Pathways to Progress is a community of individuals committed to understanding and contributing to human prosperity. Through our discussions, we examine technological and scientific innovation, economic development, and their role in advancing human prosperity. Each month, we read selected book(s), followed by a Q&A event with the author. Previous books include The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce by Deirdre McCloskey, Where's My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall, and Stubborn Attachments by Tyler Cowen. We also host speaker events with guests such as Jason Crawford, Matt Clancy, and Heidi Williams. Most speaker events are recorded and available on...
The history of humanity can be summarized as a long series of “fuck around and find out.”[1]
It’s the cycle of innovation and consequence. We see a problem X, we invent a solution, we discover that solution creates a new problem, we can't stop doing X, and we have to invent another solution. And so on. This is our philosophy: to seek, to solve, to stumble anew.
We invented fire, which kept us warm and cooked our food, and also burned down our villages and killed us in wildfires. We invented knives and arrows and saws, which helped us hunt and build, and also cut off our fingers and stabbed us in the gut. We invented agriculture, providing food surplus, yet it sowed seeds of war, famine, and environmental...
Heike has posted a post-conference wrapup on the RPI Substack:
Tl;dr:
- The first progress conference was a huge success. Progress Conference 2025 will happen in October 2025, in Berkeley. More info early next year!
- We’re hiring an Event Manager to help us make this an annual event and to convene other in-person events for the progress community.
The links digest is back! I put it on hiatus this year to focus on my book, the RPI fellowship and conference, and fundraising for all of the above. Now I’m bringing it back—mostly for paid Substack subscribers, who get the full digest. All subscribers will get the announcement links, at the top.
Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Threads, or Farcaster.
Contents
- Announcements
- “And France had pride again”
- C. P. Snow on industrial literacy
- 130 hours in a Waymo
- Cost-minus contracting
- “Here ends the joy of my life”
- Tribal reservations as innovation zones?
- “Two Plus Two Equals Five”
- Pro-bat vs. pro-human
- Quick quotes and charts
Announcements
- Foresight Vision Weekend USA is Dec 6–8 in the SF Bay Area (@foresightinst). I’ll be giving a short
Cross-posted from: https://cleanenergyreview.io/p/grid-defection-is-coming-to-california
A decade ago, a specter haunted Europe.
No, not Communism; utility death spirals.
Utilities were faced with growing legions of subsidized rooftop solar customers who weren’t paying enough into the grid to cover system costs. Some were even leaving the grid entirely (otherwise known as grid defection). Their share of system costs would then fall on non-solar customers, causing more people to switch until the utility’s business had been irreparably eroded…
Except this didn’t come to pass, mostly because defecting proved too costly for customers once regulatory supports were reduced.
Rooftop solar was relatively expensive, and only produced power during the day. Batteries to make the system work 24/7 were even more expensive. Regulations were restructured to avoid unduly favoring renewables. As a result, regulators and utilities mostly stopped...
Where We Are
There is a sense of unease and aimlessness in the Western world. All the most obvious eternal human problems have been solved in the Western world: hunger, shelter, and security. This is great. This is huge. Our ancestors wouldn’t believe it. We live in their paradise.
But it leaves us with a big void where once we had a coherent, unifying purpose. What are we about now? What is it all about, if not getting through the next winter, drought, famine, or war? What are we doing here? Where are we going?
It’s not just a feeling, a passing thought. Our internationally agreed-upon metrics tell us we have made it, that we’ve developed our societies as much as we can. According to the Human Development Index and...
Thanks Donald, good feedback. I agree about maximizing good over minimizing bad. Curing aging, or extending healthspan, is a great one. Certainly an easier sell than becoming a multiplanetary species.
Thoughts on Dario Amodei’s “Machines of Loving Grace.”
By Niko McCarty for Asimov Press.
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, recently published an essay called “Machines of Loving Grace.” It sketches out his vision for how AI could radically transform neuroscience, economics, diplomacy, and the meaning of work. Amodei also imagines the ways AI could accelerate biological research and yield miraculous cures in the 21st century; everything from the prevention and treatment of nearly all infectious and inherited diseases to the elimination of most cancers.
“Biology is probably the area where scientific progress has the greatest potential to directly and unambiguously improve the quality of human life,” Amodei writes. “My basic prediction is that AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have...
I think this is presupposing the question isn't it.
If a risk is indeed very unlikely, then we will tend to overestimate it. (If the probability is 0 it's impossible to underestimate)
But for risks that are actually quite likely, then we are more likely to underestimate them.
And of course, bias estimates cut both ways. "Our primitive monkey brains are good at ignoring and underestimating abstract and hard to understand risks".