Links and tweets, 2023-06-01
Richard Rhodes, illegal floor plans, and cyborg insects
by Jason Crawford · June 1, 2023 · 1 min read
Announcements/opportunities
- Plymouth Street can help top talent get an O-1 or EB-1 visa
- Econ Twitter science fiction summer book club, July 12
Works in Progress Issue 11
- Olivine weathering: “Fixing global warming is a simple matter of applying energy to an unfavorable material situation.” (Related, sulfur stratospheric injection is cheap and easy for solar radiation management)
- Edison as a technical entrepreneur (by @eric_is_weird)
- Also: why Britain is NIMBY, how we solved acid rain, and more in the full issue
Other links
- Richard Rhodes interview by Dwarkesh Patel
- The birth of the electrical grid (by @_brianpotter)
- Anton Howes in the Telegraph on a new Great Exhibition (based on the full essay featured in the last digest)
- The Manual of Illegal Floor Plans
News
- Neuralink receives FDA approval for a human clinical study (via @shivon)
- Oklo announces two more sites for nuclear plants (via @caorilne)
Queries
- Any private companies that hire metascientists to improve their internal processes?
- What is the best history of the climate crisis?
- Why did the open hearth process use external fuel, but Bessemer did not?
- As an economy grows, do zero-sum activities occupy a larger share?
- Before no-fault divorce, how widely did states differ in the “fault”?
- Is there a difference between an “institute” and a “center”?
Quotes
- Extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them
- What does rule of law require?
Tweets
- Why I am reluctant to share stories about supposed breakthroughs. E.g., did AI really discover a new antibiotic against resistant bacteria? (Domain experts: yes, but this isn’t actually interesting/important)
- Allen vs. Mokyr on the limiting factor of innovation (excerpted from my recent post)
- I have questions for Bret Devereaux on “Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?”
- RL can’t learn long-horizon tasks with sparse rewards; LLMs can (e.g., in Minecraft)
- Alarmists, accelerationists, and pragmatists on AI (see also my essay on solutionism)
- The “mac” in “tarmac” comes from John L. McAdam, 1756–1836, British surveyor
- We already have a word for “degrowth.” It’s called impoverishment (@paulg)
- Why does it take three years to restore… a carousel?
- Childhood should be serious; your life should be serious
- Cyborg insects
Charts
Comment: Progress Forum, LessWrong, Reddit
