Announcements

• The Roots of Progress email newsletter is now on Substack. If you have a Substack, I’d love a recommendation—thank you!
• The Science for Progress Initiative to catalyze research on the scientific process (announcement via @heidilwilliams_)
• Biotech startup hiring RAs and Scientists to develop therapies against aging and age-related diseases (@ArtirKel)
• Cameron Wiese (World’s Fair Co) is looking for an events/ops person “to help create a magical experience next month” (@camwiese)

Links

• Are technologies inevitable? (by @mattsclancy)
• Nuclear energy is misunderstood, rarely celebrated, and deeply underinvested in (by @juliadewahl)
• Econ paper claiming that part of the explanation for the British Industrial Revolution is that British engineers were working on more central/fundamental technological problems
• Sunny Bono says that “entrepreneurial capitalism” is the solution to extreme poverty, and he’s been reading Where Is My Flying Car? (via Marginal Revolution and @_TamaraWinter)

Queries

• What are the most interesting megastructure ideas? (@michael_nielsen)
• What is the right context & funding model for an inventor today? (@piammichel)
• Looking for good examples of technology overlapping S curves (@_brianpotter)
• What are some lesser-known enormous infrastructure, construction, or R&D projects in US history? (@_brianpotter)
• If a media company wanted to inspire hope & self-efficacy what type of content would they produce? (@willobri)
• What are all the attempts to create a pro nuclear coalition in the western world? (@PradyuPrasad)
• What’s the best way to get old annual reports for public companies? (@_brianpotter)
• What explains “maximalism”? (@kanjun)

Tweets

• We are problem-solving animals
• We live in the future
• Some events that took place in the same time in history but don’t seem like they would have

Retweets

• Cruise expands driverless service area to cover almost all of SF (@kvogt)
• 222nm light to kill pathogens is probably a decade or more away from widespread usage (@davidmanheim)
• Why the First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion (@BretDevereaux)
• Zeynep’s law: assume counterintuitive findings to be false, and second-order effects to be dwarfed by first-order ones (@zeynep)
• Search books by concept instead of keyword, using AI (@dwarkesh_sp). And: =GPT3(), a way to run GPT-3 prompts in Google Sheets (@shubroski)
• Every new Lego piece has to fit with every piece ever made, so the most variability allowed is 0.0005” (@TrungTPhan)
• Society ditched the well understood Health & Safety hierarchy of controls for covid (@Insect_Song)
• SFO once had a popular helicopter service (@zachklein)
• A bold vision for the future of cruise ships (@KelseyTuoc)

Charts

• Of 100 drugs entering clinical development, only 8 or so are eventually approved (@Atelfo)

• The global suicide rate has declined substantially in recent decades (@MaxCRoser)