The Progress Forum

• Tyler Cowen AMA is now done, read dozens of answers
• Vitalik on science, his philanthropy, progress and effective altruism
• On Eli Dourado’s “Heretical Thoughts on AI”

Announcements

• AllSearch.ai: “Google Books on steroids” (@dwarkesh_sp)
• Our World in Data is hiring a data scientist (via @MaxCRoser)

Links

• Zvi on gas stoves: ruining Nice Things for “marginally better health”
• A link from last week’s digest on quantum computing is probably bogus

Queries

• What is the case that ~4° C of warming by 2100 will be far worse for the world?
• What is the earliest technology where most users had no idea how it worked?
• Why is the learning curve on corn linear and not exponential?

Quotes

• The insane power potential of nanotech motors. See also the intro to Nanosystems
• “Don’t send that railway through our town! … Wait, build us a branch line!”
• There are no “natural” resources
• The dose determines the poison

Tweets and retweets

• My hypothesis about Solow’s computer productivity paradox
• One blast furnace produces ~170x more iron than all of England in 1720
• Stuart Buck’s grandfather hoped he would grow up to “get an indoors job”
• Satellite photo of anywhere on Earth for as little as $175 ($7/km²!)
• We had supersonic jets, lunar landers & nuclear reactors in the 1970s. We lost our way
• A nuclear design has finally received NRC certification after 6 years
• Skyscrapers used to be Art Deco and neo-Gothic, what happened? (@culturaltutor)
• The Hardiman, one of the earliest exoskeleton designs