Works in Progress Issue 09 is out today. For future updates and exclusive posts, be sure to subscribe to our Substack. 

Here's a bit about each of the articles:

Patio11 writes: The story of VaccinateCA

Patrick McKenzie (Patio11) led VaccineCA, the extremely successful private, non-profit campaign to get jabs in arms by manning an intelligent phone bank which called all the pharmacies in California and creating a public API for vaccine availability. He writes the inside story of how the campaign worked: how they jumped regulatory hurdles, ignored lies, and focused on jabs over ideology.

Étienne Fortier-Dubois writes: The elements of scientific style

No one reads scientific papers unless they have to. In part, this is because scientific papers are written awfully. They are full of jargon, boring, and indecipherable. This is actually a choice – with scientific reform, and better technology (like Jupyter notebooks) we can fix this.

Paul Niehaus & Heidi Williams write: Developing the science of science

International development was revolutionized by experiments and evaluations of its methods. By looking to examples like the work of Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer or GiveDirectly, meta-science can learn from it.

Note: Heidi Williams recently joined the Institute for Progress.

Richard Williamson writes: Pandemic prevention as fire-fighting

Hundreds of thousands of people used to die in fires. In the developed world, this cause of death has vanished: firemen spend more time rescuing cats than putting out fires. Preventing fires depends on detection, passive protection, prevention, and preventing proliferation. We can do all of these for pandemics too.

Seb Krier writes: AI from Superintelligence to ChatGPT

A decade ago we could think of AI as science fiction, but now it’s science fact. Each week artificial intelligences cross some rubicon we expected to be years or decades away. This article reviews our progress in AI and what researchers are doing to make AI safe as its potency grows.

Mathias Kirk Bonde writes: Advancing antivenom

Perhaps a hundred thousand people die from snakebites every year. But we still depend on literally milking snakes manually for their venom, injecting it into horses, and extracting their serum, to produce our antivenom. No wonder there’s a crisis. But it’s a crisis we can solve.

Stephen Davies writes: History is in the making

We tend to see history as just one political leader after another: wars, revolutions, elections, conquests, campaigns, and coronations are the currency of history, in our standard view. But there is another way of looking at the past, where the most important currents of change are driven by science and technology instead of politics and war.