The Progress Forum

• Derek Thompson interviews Patrick Collison on progress

Opportunities

• Essay contest: “How could science be different?” (via @moreisdifferent)

Marc Andreessen is blogging again

• “What’s my hope? To show you that we live in a more interesting world than you might think; that it’s more comprehensible than you might fear; and that more things are possible than you might imagine”
• “This is the most normal and placid things are ever going to be”
• “We are heading into a world where a flat screen TV that covers your entire wall costs $100, and a four year college degree costs $1 million”

Links

• The U.S. is a build-nothing country. See also @ericgoldwyn’s comment
• Samuel Smiles, industrial biographer and founder of the self-help genre
• Adversarial collaboration on how income relates to well-being (via @amandaegeiser)
• Be careful inferring causality in the presence of control loops
• Brass Birmingham is a board game set in the Industrial Revolution (h/t @ejames_c)
• The Iconographic Encyclopædia of Science, Literature, and Art

Queries

• Who are the most influential essay writers who never wrote books?
• What should Dwarkesh ask Scott Aaronson? and Eliezer Yudkowsky?
• Is there any study comparing independents to employees on job satisfaction?
• What’s the best book about pre-21st century General Electric?
• What should Anastasia read after Kuhn relevant to research and progress?
• Any other authors have data loss problems with Scrivener?
• What has happened since this was made in 2017? Is pharma IRR negative now?

Tweets & retweets

• Are we going through a crisis of meaning in our jobs?
• What does solar look like in the limit? (thread)
• We have created the heaven our ancestors dreamed of
• A Keatsian science sonnet. “More scientific heroes in literature please”
• The real effect of LLMs on software will be felt after 6–18 months of the product cycle
• AI problems that were considered “nowhere near solved” in a book published 2021
• In SF a pedestrian bridge costs $200M and presents ”daunting logistics”
• Academia encourages historians to prioritize tenure at the expense of social value
• Predicting the future is hard, Bertrand Russell edition
• Shape rotators 📈, wordcels 📉
• The first radio telescope was built by an amateur in his back yard

Charts

• Last week’s chart on worker/revenue ratio adjusted for inflation, a bit less dramatic