The Progress Forum

• AMA: Matt Clancy, Open Philanthropy
• The Rise of Steel - Part I, by Brian Potter

Opportunities

• Sloan Foundation offering $75k–250k grants for history of science, technology, economics, and social science (via @SloanFoundation and @epistemographer)
• Our World in Data is hiring a Human Resources Manager (via @OurWorldInData)
• Virginia Postrel wants stories about progress in materials, and writers to tell them

Links

• Video: Works in Progress interviews leaders of ARIA (the “UK DARPA”) (via @s8mb)
• In 1858, The Atlantic published a poem about the telegraph (via @LouisAnslow)
• Tyler Cowen on LLMs: “We are going to have a whole new set of channels”
• “Regulation provides the fulcrum but it’s interest groups that man the lever”
• Interferon λ cuts covid risk by ~50% (but the FDA won’t let you have it)
• LessWrong 2021 Review. I got a bronze prize for my history of factory safety, and honorable mentions for book reviews on nuclear power and Andrew Carnegie

Quotes

• When carriages were a culture-war issue
• Agriculture as a governance problem

Tweets & retweets

• A review of Seeing Like a State in six tweets
• “Megaprojects breed extraction,” and other lessons from the Second Avenue Subway
• “Biden admin is determined to make infrastructure spending more expensive”
• Imagine living in San Francisco in the 1930s
• An 1813 locomotive prototype used mechanical legs to push itself along the ground