Announcements/opportunities

• Plymouth Street can help top talent get an O-1 or EB-1 visa
• Econ Twitter science fiction summer book club, July 12

Works in Progress Issue 11

• Olivine weathering: “Fixing global warming is a simple matter of applying energy to an unfavorable material situation.” (Related, sulfur stratospheric injection is cheap and easy for solar radiation management)
• Edison as a technical entrepreneur (by @eric_is_weird)
• Also: why Britain is NIMBY, how we solved acid rain, and more in the full issue

Other links

• Richard Rhodes interview by Dwarkesh Patel
• The birth of the electrical grid (by @_brianpotter)
• Anton Howes in the Telegraph on a new Great Exhibition (based on the full essay featured in the last digest)
• The Manual of Illegal Floor Plans

News

• Neuralink receives FDA approval for a human clinical study (via @shivon)
• Oklo announces two more sites for nuclear plants (via @caorilne)

Queries

• Any private companies that hire metascientists to improve their internal processes?
• What is the best history of the climate crisis?
• Why did the open hearth process use external fuel, but Bessemer did not?
• As an economy grows, do zero-sum activities occupy a larger share?
• Before no-fault divorce, how widely did states differ in the “fault”?
• Is there a difference between an “institute” and a “center”?

Quotes

• Extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them
• What does rule of law require?

Tweets

• Why I am reluctant to share stories about supposed breakthroughs. E.g., did AI really discover a new antibiotic against resistant bacteria? (Domain experts: yes, but this isn’t actually interesting/important)
• Allen vs. Mokyr on the limiting factor of innovation (excerpted from my recent post)
• I have questions for Bret Devereaux on “Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?”
• RL can’t learn long-horizon tasks with sparse rewards; LLMs can (e.g., in Minecraft)
• Alarmists, accelerationists, and pragmatists on AI (see also my essay on solutionism)
• The “mac” in “tarmac” comes from John L. McAdam, 1756–1836, British surveyor
• We already have a word for “degrowth.” It’s called impoverishment (@paulg)
• Why does it take three years to restore… a carousel?
• Childhood should be serious; your life should be serious
• Cyborg insects

Charts

• We are not running out of resources