The Progress Forum

• A catalog of big visions for biology
• London progress meetup, Feb 25
• A Cure for My Cancer, by Virginia Postrel
• Eli Dourado AMA has concluded

Announcements

• Metascience event at AEI, Feb 9 (via @AlecStapp)
• Visa Limbo, a site from IFP tracking visa processing delays (via @JeremyLNeufeld)
• OpenAI launches ChatGPT Plus for $20/month (via @miramurati)

Links

• Let’s add AP Progress to the high school curriculum (by @JimPethokoukis)
• Marc Andreessen on Dwarkesh’s podcast. Also Dwarkesh now has paid subscriptions. And what should he ask Elad Gil?
• A vision for cargo airships (by @elidourado)
• This comment convinced me I was wrong: we are not “pre-theory” regarding cancer
• NASA, DARPA to test nuclear engine for Mars missions (via @elidourado)

Queries

• Is there a directory of all the open-ended grant programs?
• Who should Milan Cvitkovic meet in SF? (@MWCvitkovic)
• Who is hiring for robotics roles/internships? (@momahmood_)
• What is the best way to bootstrap an advanced understanding of biology? (@danielgolliher)

Quotes

• The philosophers who told us not to celebrate progress
• History is biased to war and politics; progress is relatively neglected
• “Scientific management” was the precursor to 20th-century technocracy
• The need for ambition, from GH Hardy’s “A Mathematician’s Apology” (@nabeelqu)
• Bacon on lumpers vs. splitters

Tweets

• LLMs create a vector space for concepts
• We will get many specialized AIs, not a massive centralized Great Brain
• People’s work is defined more by their methods than their goals

Retweets

• How much more quickly things were done in the 1960s (@Gilesyb)
• ChatGPT as a universal translator (@YirenLu)
• 69 of 109 jurisdictions in SFBA now subject to the builder’s remedy (@Yimby_Law)
• “This might be my favorite 1-page philosophy paper” (@davidalanbuiles)
• A hypothesis about things capitalism gets blamed for (@mbateman)

Charts

• Auckland liberalized building rules and housing permits soared