The Progress Forum

• Tyler Cowen AMA
• “In Praise of Fast Food” by Rachel Laudan (excerpts and link)
• Construction of the World Trade Center (Brian Potter)
• The Pull of Cities (Anton Howes)
• Gift subscriptions to Jim Pethokoukis’s Substack

Opportunities

• The O’Shaughnessy Fellowship: 1 year, $100k for ambitious people

Links

• The Economist on progress studies and other “new tech worldviews”
• New Substack on nuclear power by Jack Devanney
• Quantum computers may break RSA encryption sooner than expected (via @tegmark) [UPDATE: this is probably bogus]
• How much does a gas stove shorten your life? Maybe ~53 days (by @dynomight)
• Time-to-violent-death of Roman emperors displayed a bathtub curve
• Caro is still working on the 5th and final volume of his LBJ bio
• Nathan Myhrvold wrote a five-volume anthology on bread (!)

Queries

• What should Dwarkesh ask Marc Andreessen? (@dwarkesh_sp)
• Recommendations for things to read on well-run scientific labs?
• Why didn’t the predicted demise of radiologists happen? (@BenGoldhaber)
• Good sources showing how labor-intensive industries tend to move to where low-cost labor is? (@_brianpotter)
• What would it take for 2022-2090 to be as transformative for medicine/biology as 1870-1950? (@Willyintheworld)
• What are more examples of individual grant programs such as Thiel Fellowship or Emergent Ventures? (@William_Blake)
• What does the “progressive” vision of the future look like today? (@lo_commotion)
• Can anyone find a source for this quote?

Tweets

• The devastating human consequences of the Ehrlichs’ campaign against “overpopulation.” (@daniel_eth asks, why has this man not been canceled yet?)
• “Traditional foods” are not very old
• In the long run, we need a heat-management system for the Earth
• Amazing progress on tap water connections in rural India

Quotes

• Things we take for granted: that glass is transparent
• Sanger’s Rule for technical advances in scientific experimentation
• Building bridges and keeping the water running are underrated
• Penicillin was stalled for a decade after the initial attempt to extract it failed
• Bitumen was the Super Glue™ of the third millennium BC
• Technologies often start out with “trivial“ uses and become necessities
• No society has held technological leadership for very long
• “I have yet to hear anyone even mention the theoretical possibility that we could respond to a new variant … by trying to vaccinate people before they could get infected”
• A Department of Drugs and a War on Education?

Retweets

• Megascale engineering is already around us (@anderssandberg)
• Perhaps the most underrated invention is the corporation (@William_Blake)
• 2023 will make 2022 look like a sleepy year for AI (@gdb)
• It’s insane that we’ve decided to make housing scarce enough to consume a major fraction of GDP (@CJHandmer)
• There should be a Wikipedia for careers (@eriktorenberg)
• Students don’t need new ideas; they need good ones (@DanFChambliss)