This is a linkpost for https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2023-07-06
Opportunities
News
- A background of gravitational waves pervades the cosmos (via @QuantaMagazine)
- The Terraformer makes cheap natural gas from sunlight & air (via @TerraformIndies)
Obituaries
- Henry Petroski, “America’s poet laureate of technology,” author of To Engineer is Human, The Evolution of Useful Things, and other books
- John Goodenough, age 100 (!) “His discovery led to the wireless revolution and put electronic devices in the hands of people worldwide”
Links
- Great SpaceX video about iterating towards reusable rockets (via @pronounced_kyle)
- Scott Alexander on the “illusion of moral decline” (but see Matt Clancy’s pushback)
- Three auto maintenance philosophies, from @stewartbrand’s book in progress
- As the opportunity cost of time increases, so does our concern about wasting time
- How to do great work (by @paulg)
- The “undercurrent of tacit knowledge” in any scientific literature (by Tyler Cowen)
- GLP-1 drugs are amazing for weight loss, says Derek Lowe (via @curiouswavefn)
- Why you can ignore the “aspartame causes cancer” headlines (by @StuartJRitchie). Related, the IARC puts bacon in the same category as plutonium
Queries
- What use cases is hydrogen best for? And what are the front-runners for long-term energy storage?
- What are the best films about capitalism, business, and market economics?
- Why does DNA use base 4 rather than base 2 for encoding information?
- How to roll back as much bad regulation as possible in one tweet?
- Any indicators of misuse threat of adversarially fine-tune-able 10^25 LLMs?
- What intellectuals refocused New Left types towards remaking the physical world?
Quotes
- Real history is not politics but the story of those who make a better life
- Academics and nonprofits act as if someone else will translate their papers into policy
Tweets & threads
- The saga of Israeli water management
- A biodefense roadmap from Kevin Esvelt. Excellent work
- Chicago went all in on railroads and Cincinnati went all in on canals
- A path to prosperity for small cities within one hour of a major city/airport
- Update from prediction market Kalshi on regulated election markets
- I push back against Dustin Moskowitz’s list of AI safety “strawmen”
- Many good ideas are killed for reasons unrelated to their promise
- As we make progress on social problems, we broaden the definition of the problem. A case of the Shirky Principle
- In 1844, the Secretary of the Navy was killed during a military demonstration
- Most attempts to disrupt education do project-based learning, which is overrated
- SF can’t even find actual collisions to cite against self-driving cars
- As Bezos says: “Let me assure you, this is the best planet”
- “We can’t answer every question.” “No, but I think we can answer any question.”
Charts
