I’ve been traveling, so this one is covering the last few weeks.

The Progress Forum

• Patrick McKenzie AMA. See also his retrospective on VaccinateCA
• Works in Progress Issue 9
• A “progress” alternative to GiveWell?
• Applications open for AGI safety fundamentals course
• Maybe a little bit of naïveté is good? (Eli Dourado). My take: not naïveté, but vision
• The false dichotomy between peace and prosperity versus ambition and exploration
• Two bits of wisdom about research that are often in tension (Ben Reinhardt)
• The Empire State Building and the World Trade Center (Brian Potter), also Part 2
• When scientists thought heat was a fluid (Anton Howes)
• The state of NYC housing abundance
• Progress book recommendations thread (add your recs please!)

Announcements

• OpenAI launches ChatGPT (via @sama)
• Net energy gain from fusion achieved (@jordanbramble)
• The Collegiate Propulsive Lander Challenge: students building self-landing rockets (!)
• Nucleate venture fellowship + $2M in prizes for bio founders (via @MichaelRetchin)
• Cruise expanding coverage to the full 7x7 of San Francisco, 24/7 (@kvogt)
• The Academy of Thought and Industry (who commissioned my progress course) is hiring a liberal arts teacher (@mbateman)
• ARIA Research is hiring for many roles (@ilangur)
• Readwise launches their read-later app (via @homsiT)

Links

• The world needs processed food (Hannah Ritchie in WIRED, via @tonymmorley)
• Why the age of American progress ended (Derek Thompson). See my reactions
• Mike Maples interviews Blake Scholl about supersonic flight and Boom
• The climate field as an assortment of “tribes” (Nadia Asparouhova)
• Warren Weaver’s 1946 guide for Rockefeller grantmakers (via @abiylfoyp)
• Homelessness is a housing problem (Jerusalem Demsas in The Atlantic)
• Green card backlogs are impossibly long (some measured in centuries!)
• China will depopulate over the next 40 years, while India will add the same number of people as China loses (Shruti Rajagopalan)

Queries

• Suggested readings on progress and energy intensity?
• Stories where the good guys have the grand plans / projects? (@TylerAlterman)
• Why was the B-21 built in budget while the F-35 was a mess? (@Scholars_Stage)
• How did printers “photocopy” before photocopy? (@PMatzko)
• Book recommendations on modern medicine or public health? (@salonium)
• What are the best books/podcasts/people to follow on nuclear energy? (@sriramk)
• If we get transformative AI, what will GDP per capita be in 2040? (@elidourado)
• Why so few takes on permitting reform from nuclear folks? (@J_Lovering)
• Do you have a model of how to approach the problem of progress?
• What sports were being played 200 years ago? (@waitbutwhy)
• What are some stories that feature getting spare parts for inventing from a junk yard?

Quotes

• Mark Twain to Walt Whitman: “What great births you have witnessed!”
• Nuclear power construction can require creative solutions—like midget welders
• The field of physics moved very rapidly in the ’30s
• The spirit of progress, from an 1848 abolitionist pamphlet by Theodore Parker
• “A hedgehog… cannot accept that he knows only many things. He seeks to know one big thing, and strives without ceasing to give reality a unifying shape”

Tweets

• Why we stopped using draft horses, despite the romanticism of certain French towns
• AI is giving computers intuition
• LLMs will take either side of an argument depending on the prompt
• Your can improve your “gut” judgment by priming it with rational thinking
• Brandolini’s Shadow

Retweets

• Science has fulfilled Jesus’s message beyond his wildest dreams (@curiouswavefn)
• The tin can is underrated (@_brianpotter)
• Golden Rice is finally arriving (@stewartbrand)
• Why steam turbines are not a good idea for fusion energy (@elidourado)
• It’s time to close the book on the amyloid hypothesis (@schrag_matthew)
• ChatGPT scores 1020 on the SAT (@davidtsong)
• AI progress has gone exponential and is likely to speed up even further (@zachtratar)
• Startlingly effective AI tutoring is coming (@mbateman)
• Cheating is a minor issue and the AI cheating arms race doesn’t matter (@mbateman)
• Chaining ChatGPT and Midjourney to generate images from a concept (@GuyP)

Charts

• Your income would be double today if TFP growth hadn’t stagnated (@elidourado)

• It’s a very good time to get a mortgage, taking the long-term view (@charlesjkenny)