Roots of Progress Institute
@rootsofprogress
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Pinned Tweet
Announcing Progress Conference 2024: Toward Abundant Futures
Hosted by
@rootsofprogress
together with
@foresightinst
@HumanProgress
@TheIHS
@IFP
@WorksInProgMag
Keynotes from
@patrickc
@tylercowen
@jasoncrawford
@sapinker
Berkeley, Oct 18–19
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When I first heard the stagnation hypothesis, I was skeptical. But as I studied the history of progress, I slowly came around, and now I’m fairly convinced
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We need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. One that teaches people not to take the modern world for granted. One that acknowledges the problems of progress, and offers solutions. And one that holds up a positive vision of the future
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The “principal investigator” model of science funding is deeply broken and needs to be replaced. Instead, funding should go in a single block to a relatively large research organization. Here’s why
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Today, The Roots of Progress officially becomes the Roots of Progress Institute (RPI).
The new name represents the new identity we took on ever since we announced our first program last year, the Roots of Progress Fellowship.
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When I wrote my post on technological stagnation, the top question I got asked was: So, how do we fix it?
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I’ve said before that understanding where our modern standard of living comes from, at a basic level, is a responsibility of every citizen in an industrial civilization.
Let’s call it “industrial literacy.”
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Things invented/begun in 1973:
• Recombinant DNA technology
• Measles-mumps vaccine
• Fosfomycin (antibiotic)
• Cell phones
• SQL databases
• Internet (TCP/IP)
• A NYT columnist who can't think of a major problem tech has solved in our lifetimes
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Our mission is to establish a new philosophy of progress for the twenty-first century.
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We shouldn’t be against AI safety any more than we are against seat belts, fire alarms, or drug trials.
Why confronting AI risks is important even for optimists:
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Big news: We're planning a major expansion of our activities, and we are seeking a CEO to lead the new organization (
@jasoncrawford
will remain Founder & President)
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Excited to announce that I’m now working on The Roots of Progress and related projects full-time:
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In the 1950s, nuclear was the energy of the future. Two generations later, it provides only about 10% of world electricity, and reactor design hasn‘t fundamentally changed in decades.
What happened? A recent book addresses this question:
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What is steel? Why is it so hard to make? And how did it come to be everywhere around us, though it was once considered a gift of the gods?
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Today we’re opening applications for the 2024 cohort of The
@rootsofprogress
Blog-Building Intensive, an 8-week program for aspiring progress writers to start or grow a blog.
Get into a regular writing habit, improve your writing, and build your audience
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Build!
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“Progress studies” is crucially important for the future of humanity. Here's what I'm doing about it—and how you can help
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The ideal human population size is not “much smaller,” but “ever larger.” A large and growing world is a dynamic world that can create and sustain progress
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The Techno-Humanist Manifesto is a new book from Roots of Progress founder and president
@jasoncrawford
:
Announcing The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, a book by me laying out my philosophy of progress.
“Techno-humanism” is what I am calling that philosophy, a worldview founded on humanism and agency.
To read it, follow me here or subscribe to my newsletter (link below).
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The early history of steam power, with interactive animated diagrams! From Hero's engine to Savery's pump, with many highlights in between that aren't in the standard telling of this story
Text by
@antonhowes
, animations by
@xtrrdnryfclty
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“Would you intend to do anything for the advancement of science?”
“No, I believe scientific progress is too fast as it is.”
“I share your feeling about this point, but then why not do something about the retardation of scientific progress?”
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Announcing the Study Group for Progress
Weekly reading/discussion group with Q&A from featured guests including:
@rjg_gordon
Margaret Jacob
Richard Nelson
@ProfAroraAshish
@pierre_azoulay
@ericgoldwyn
@mattsclancy
@patrickc
@antonhowes
@DrAliciaJackson
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Seeking help to create interactive diagrams—an “explorable explanation”—of the history of the steam engine, with content based on
@antonhowes
’s research.
Looking for a technical illustrator, animator, and/or front-end developer who can deliver this:
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The number of protons in an atom determines what element it is; the number of electrons usually matches. But how many neutrons are in the nucleus? Does it even matter?
It turns out that it matters *a lot:*
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We need progress not only because of the poor. We need it for everyone. Because *we are all poor*—compared to where we can be and should be in the future, if we can keep progress going
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The bicycle was a simple mechanical invention. Why wasn’t it invented until the late 1800s?
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A few months ago we announced a major expansion of our activities, and we launched a search for a CEO to lead the new organization we are building for this program. We're very happy to announce that we have found a CEO:
@heikelarson
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Smallpox was one of the worst diseases in history. It is also the only human disease we have ever *completely eradicated.* It led to fierce debates, some of the first clinical trials, and the first vaccines.
The story of smallpox—and how we killed it:
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Is stagnation permanent? Robert Gordon argues yes; I'm not convinced:
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We're sponsoring the creation of a Progress Forum: an online discussion forum for the progress community, modeled after
@lesswrong
. Here's why, and how you can get involved in building and launching it:
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Why did it take so long to invent…
… the wheel?
… the steam engine?
… the bicycle?
… the flying shuttle?
… the cotton gin?
Starting to collect articles here (let me know any others):
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The Roots of Progress has received a grant from the “progress studies tranche” of
@tylercowen
's Emergent Ventures! Announcement here:
I'm receiving other support as well, which I'll announce soon.
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The metaphor of environment as infrastructure implies that we should neither trash the planet nor leave it untouched. Instead, we should maintain it—and upgrade it
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I’m hiring a part-time research assistant to support work on my essays, talks, and the book I’m writing on the history of industrial civilization:
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A survey of funding models for R&D, including:
• Independent wealth
• Patronage
• Sinecures
• University
• Foundations
• Military
• Other government agencies
• Corporate research labs
• For-profit
• Prizes
• Lotteries
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Of all the weapons against infectious disease—vaccines, antibiotics, antiseptics, pest control, sanitation, hygiene—which mattered most? To answer the question, we should look at mortality rates over time and correlate them with specific interventions:
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I recently picked up a book that surveys major US inventions from ~1830s to WW1, and skimmed through the entire thing to find how each venture was funded.
Here’s what I found:
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Why a pandemic should push us to redouble our efforts to make scientific, technological, and industrial progress on all fronts. “No matter the odds, applied intelligence is our best weapon against disaster.”
My World Health Day article for
@leapsmag
:
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Some lessons about funding progress:
• Progress requires funding
• Corollary: progress can stall for lack of funding
• Funding isn’t automatically allocated to the most productive uses
• Funding models themselves are not obvious
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“With so many achievements in science and technology, how many more examples do you need to increase your confidence in human ingenuity?”
A letter on optimism, to
@theandrewglover
via
@LetterWiki
:
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Other fantastic speakers include
@jburnmurdoch
@salonium
@juliadewahl
@elidourado
@CJHandmer
@ChadJonesEcon
@bkugelma
@NikoMcCarty
@johanknorberg
@fuelfive
@vpostrel
@kanjun
@Ben_Reinhardt
@bscholl
@AlecStapp
@chandlertuttle
@Marian_L_Tupy
@calebwatney
and more to come!
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Most biologists think there's no such thing as a cure for cancer,
@SGRodriques
wrote recently, because it is “many diseases”. But infection was also “many diseases”, and we still reduced every major metric of infection by 90%+. A historical analogy:
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In reading stories of progress, one thing that has struck me was the wild, enthusiastic celebrations that accompanied some of them in the past.
Read some of these stories. Somehow it’s hard for me to imagine similar jubilation happening today:
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Why the for-profit model is underrated and should be used whenever possible:
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Next Wednesday, Sep 4, I'll be giving an informal talk in SF at the first Progress Studies meetup! I'll cover the research I've been doing into the history of steel, and my view on progress studies in general.
Sign up here (required):
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“For two centuries the Western world has been sustained by a profound belief in the doctrine of progress.… Since 1918 this hope has perceptibly faded.”
A clue to the decline of the idea of progress:
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“No man, however bold or however high he may stand in his profession, can resist the benumbing effect of rules laid down by authority.”
Isambard K. Brunel on the need for “the free exercise of engineering skill”:
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-
@TerraformIndies
Terraformer Mark One
-
@slatestarcodex
on the “illusion of moral decline”
-
@stewartbrand
on auto maintenance philosophies
-
@kesvelt
's biodefense roadmap
-
@ATabarrok
on why we feel harried
-
@DerekLowe
on GLP-1 agonists
- and more
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One of the ideas
@DKThomp
explores in his recent feature for
@TheAtlantic
is that what matters for progress is not just the moment of invention, but what happens after that. Here are some ways I think this is true
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Churchill had many hobbies. He wrote more than a dozen volumes of history, painted over 500 pictures, and completed one novel.
But did you know he was also a futurist?
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Keynes famously predicted that by now we would only be working 15 hours a week. What is less well-known is that Charles Steinmetz, Buckminster Fuller, and others made similar forecasts.
So why is the 40-hour work week still standard?
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Happy New Year! Here's a look back at 2021 for The Roots of Progress, including highlights of the books and papers I read this year
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*Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia* is an ethnographic account of Russian peasants around 1900. I went in expecting poverty; I did not expect to also find a disturbing degree of cruelty and abuse
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• Build Nuclear Now, a new policy campaign from
@TheBTI
• An online PhD-level course in the economics of innovation from
@IFP
•
@DeepMind
has released structures for almost every known protein
•
@Convergent_FROs
and
@longnow
are hiring
• And much more
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“Inventor” is not a role one can be hired for. The aspiring inventor finds themselves straddling science and business
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A proposal to measure progress by a set of metrics, instead of just one such as GDP. They are as broad as possible while still being objective and well-defined, and are deliberately chosen from across the breadth of the economy:
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There is not a single, narrow path to industrialization, but you have to get there through *some* path, and ancient Rome was simply nowhere close
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The threshing machine was a crucial advance in agricultural mechanization, but diffusion/adoption took many decades.
As with the bicycle, the flying shuttle, or the cotton gin, we have to ask: what took so long?
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Announcing Progress Studies for Young Scholars, a joint project of The Roots of Progress and
@to_higherground
Announcing Progress Studies for Young Scholars, an online high school summer program in the history of technology:
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Talk I gave on the history of iron & steel at the first SF progress studies meetup:
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I’ve said that we need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. This implies that the world needs, not just progress studies, but a progress movement: the advocacy of a set of ideas.
What are those ideas?
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7
21
Progress Conference 2024 now has more speakers and sponsors!
Five more great speakers:
-
@jasonjoyride
, documentary filmmaker at S3
-
@celinehalioua
, CEO at Loyal
-
@catehall
, CEO at Astera
-
@knowledgeprob
, professor at Northwestern
-
@hannu
, HelixNano founder & sci-fi author
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In recent essays I’ve outlined the need for a progress movement, and the core ideas that I think this movement is based on.
What would a thriving progress movement look like, in terms of activities, programs, and institutions?
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21
How do we know that people in the late 19th century saw glory, romance, even poetry in progress? One way we know is that they literally wrote poetry about it:
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When you get your covid shot in 2021, take a moment to think back on the 300 years of progress that got us to this point:
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2020 year-end review: 47 articles, over 64,000 words; two new speaker series; 30 podcast and conference interviews; thousands of new followers and subscribers; and a high school summer program
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A cast iron stove might still be working after 100 years; modern stoves have a much shorter lifespan. Is this “progress?” Yes:
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20
Announcing a workshop on the Moral Foundations of Progress Studies. What major moral/ethical questions are at the foundations of a study of progress, and what broad answers to these questions have been proposed?
Get details and apply here:
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5
20
The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, by Roots of Progress founder and president Jason Crawford, is a book laying out a new philosophy of progress.
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Suppose you could reach into the mirror universe and pull out the exact opposite of Robert Gordon’s book *The Rise and Fall of American Growth*.
You would get *Where Is My Flying Car?*, by J. Storrs Hall:
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8
18
Quick concept sketch / wireframe of an electric power grid simulator, an “explorable explanation” (a la
@worrydream
or
@ncasenmare
).
What do you think, should I build it?
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The story of workplace safety illustrates both the serious problems that progress can cause, and how the solution to those problems can be found in further progress.
#longreads
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Tomorrow is Giving Tuesday, so it’s a good time to announce that The Roots of Progress has received its 501(c)(3) determination letter from the IRS, officially recognizing its non-profit status:
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5
19
A two-day event to connect people in the progress movement. Meet great people, share ideas in deep conversations, catalyze new projects, get energized and inspired.
Info and registration:
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•
@civic_future
's UK Great Stagnation summit
•
@OpenAI
's $1M in cybersecurity grants
•
@annasofialesiv
's new magazine about future tech
•
@MTabarrok
tours the Extropian archives
•
@ATabarrok
on Orwell vs. progress
•
@s8mb
on Coasean democracy
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7
17
I’ve previously said that progress compounds, creating a flywheel effect. Here’s another way of looking at the same idea. Why wasn’t the threshing machine invented in, say, the 1300s? Consider all the barriers to such a thing:
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If you want to ask, “why did it take so long to invent X”, what are the epistemic standards for the answer? My opinions on how to think about this—and how not to
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7
18
Podcast interview about progress and “capitalism appreciation” with
@eriktorenberg
and
@Tracinski
, covering everything from “sustainability” to what it felt like to live under the threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War:
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In the wake of disaster, a common reaction is to add a review and approval process. But I now believe that the review-and-approval model is broken, and we should find better ways to manage risk and create safety
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7
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Humanity has had a pretty good run so far. In the last 200 years, world GDP/capita has increased by almost 14x. But “past performance may not be indicative of future results.” Can growth continue?
Video and transcript of my talk for Ignite
@longnow
2022:
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SF folks: Join the local Progress Studies Meetup Group:
Next meeting Thurs, Feb 13! Tentative agenda of lightning talks includes the polio vaccine, advances in immunoprofiling, and how to get unstuck from local maxima
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16
- $10k Atlas Fellowship for high schoolers
-
@eriktorenberg
hiring a researcher
-
@packyM
on intelligence superabundance
-
@slatestarcodex
on IRBs, also AI risk
-
@ATabarrok
on mosquitoes, also Costco
- Freeman Dyson on AI, also nuclear power
- & more
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7
15
Mechanization not only decreases costs, but also improves quality. If we want a fuller picture of how goods were improved through the Industrial Revolution, we should think of cost and quality together
0
9
17
“A 6% increase in battery energy density” might sound boring and technical—with industrial literacy, it is downright exciting
0
6
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The “tech stagnation” hypothesis:
• Refers to a slowdown, not zero progress
• Is not about global development, or about science
• Is purely descriptive and backwards-looking (historical)
• Does not posit a single cause (or any particular cause)
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Mike turned my high-level summary of the industrial era into table format, complete with emojis:
@rootsofprogress
Hey thanks for sharing this article. I recently read Gordon's "Rise and Fall of American Growth" too & found it thought-provoking. I found your article to be a great summary and I liked your mental model so I turned it into a table👇🏼 So - what can we do as a society to go faster?
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Recently
@AlecStapp
responded to a Twitter thread by
@goinggodward
disparaging the Industrial Revolution for what it “did to humanity.”
@michaelcurzi
,
@jonst0kes
, and others criticized this response for missing the point. Here's my take
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How would society change if we cured aging, and people could have as many healthy years of life as they wanted?
A common concern is that this would ossify our institutions. But here are three reasons why curing aging could *help* progress:
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•
@rootsofprogress
is now on
@SubstackInc
• The Science for Progress Initiative (via
@heidilwilliams_
)
• Biotech startup hiring RAs and Scientists (via
@ArtirKel
)
• Are technologies inevitable? (by
@mattsclancy
)
• and more
1
3
16
New cover image for our launch as a nonprofit: First launch of the
@rSpaceX
Falcon Heavy. Credit: Wikimedia / Daniel Oberhaus
0
0
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The risks of technology are the best argument against a naive or heedless approach to progress. Consider this a preliminary sketch for a philosophy of safety
2
5
16
I’m hosting a new monthly series of online panel discussions for
@TheAnnaGat
's
@whatstheii
, titled “Doing Better at…”
Our first topic is funding research, with panelists
@michael_nielsen
and
@celinehalioua
, this Sunday:
1
7
15
How do inventors choose what to work on? What or who inspires and directs them?
I was thinking about this after coming across a little gem buried in Herbert Casson’s biography of Cyrus McCormick, inventor of an automatic reaping machine.
1
7
15
Highlights from *Pieces of the Action*, the memoirs of Vannevar Bush (now out in a new edition from
@stripepress
with a foreword from
@Ben_Reinhardt
). On invention, leadership, war, politics, and more:
0
6
15
I’ve started another conversation about “sustainability” on
@LetterWiki
, this time with
@ALeighMP
:
0
5
15
• An encyclopedia of megastructures (h/t
@Ben_Reinhardt
)
• City Journal on the campaign to save Diablo Canyon (h/t
@atrembath
)
• De-extincting the Tasmanian tiger (h/t
@QuantaMagazine
)
•
@ID_AA_Carmack
has raised $20M to build AGI
• and more
0
3
14
•
@NucleateHQ
biotech founder program
•
@ADoricko
' Rainmaker is seeding clouds
•
@Monumental_Labs
is making stone-carving robots
•
@dwarkesh_sp
interviews Dario Amodei
•
@tylercowen
interviews
@paulg
•
@NikoMcCarty
guide to synth bio
0
5
14
•
@longnow
is looking for a Development Director
•
@open_phil
is hiring global health R&D Program Officers
•
@ARIA_research
“will be ambitious in everything it does”
•
@DietzVollrath
on “additive growth”
•
@GavinNewsom
proposes keeping Diablo Canyon
0
3
14
The top 5 posts of 2020, by page views:
1. My protein folding explainer, after the
@DeepMind
AlphaFold announcement
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13
When we consider the question of “stagnation,” we are assuming an implicit answer to an underlying question: relative to what? What should we expect?
I have a simple answer:
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