The Progress Forum

• Welcome to the Progress Forum, the online home for the progress community
• How fear of the ‘Mega-Machine’ helped end America’s postwar Golden Age
• Anton Howes on why we waited so long for the optical telegraph
• The curse of plenty (by @mattsclancy)
• How Karl Compton believed a research department should be run

Announcements

• Andy Matuschak launches a research fellowship for “transformative tools for thought” (via @andy_matuschak)
• Britain Remade, a new campaign focused on British economic growth (@samrichardswebb)
• Waymo and Cruise are now both operating robotaxis in SF (@kfury)
• The American Dynamism 50, from A16Z: “companies tackling our nation’s most pressing problems” (via @rmcentush)
• The Progress Dashboard, a collection of progress links and resources
• Facebook AI launched Galactica, a large language model for science (via @paperswithcode). Looked cool but did not actually work super-well and got pulled quickly
• We hit 8 billion people (@yishan)

Links

• For Thanksgiving, why we should be grateful for modern textiles (Virginia Postrel)
• Planes are still decades away from displacing most bird jobs (by @alexeyguzey)

Queries

• Intuition for why you can knock off a piece of a rock by hitting it with a piece of wood/bone?
• If you know Bret Victor’s “Inventing on Principle,” what’s your principle? (@Prigoose). (If you don’t know it, see here)
• A good writeup of the Gates Foundation’s role in covid response? (@benlandautaylor)

Quotes

• Incandescent light is “so wasteful… as to render its practical application impossible” -Nature, 1878 (via @_brianpotter). I added some context
• “Toys with as much power as the great IBM computers” (@arbesman)
• Von Neumann on existential risk (@IvanVendrov)

Tweets & retweets

• My meta-level take on “why did everything take so long?” (thread version of this previous post)
• AGI will get built sooner than most people think, but take longer to “change everything” (@sama)
• 10 things underrated about America (@zachtratar)
• Patterns across bubbles
• RIP Fred Brooks, who wrote the classic book on software engineering, The Mythical Man-Month
• A misheard word caused a $500M nuclear cleanup (@curiouswavefn)