Links
- The challenge of corrosion and how engineers fight it (YouTube)
- Arnold Kling claims that we over-consume medical services in the US
- The lessons of Xanadu (on my personal blog)
Queries
- Has anybody done serious, detailed work on the mechanisms that drive technological s-curves? (@Ben_Reinhardt)
- Who are the smartest people working on battery storage? Best writing on the topic? (@juliadewahl)
- What are examples of projects getting done really fast by organizations that are normally very slow? (@_brianpotter)
- Is there a Thiel Fellowship type program for PhD candidates to bail out of academia? (@tayroga)
Tweets & retweets
- “Appeal to nature” fallacies are ethically problematic for progress (thread by @RafaRuizdeLira)
- Josh Barro on Matt Yglesias on “induced demand” (@jbarro)
- US immigration as an important-but-not-urgent policy disaster (@sama)
- The US basically stopped building large-scale water infrastructure in the 1980s (@_brianpotter)
I’ve had very similar experiences—I’ve become skeptical of any free-market medical system proposal, since you can’t freely choose for cost-optimality when the product is both necessary, heavily time-bound, and likely to be bought while in an impaired state of mind.