Links and tweets, 2022-09-28

by Jason Crawford · September 28, 2022 · 1 min read

Announcements

• “Vast is developing artificial gravity space stations to expand humanity across the solar system”
• Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein are writing a book about abundance (@DKThomp)
• Foresight DAO to seed-fund “projects in longevity, nanotechnology, BCIs, private computing, and space tech that are too ambitious for legacy funders to support” (via @foresightinst)
• FTX Future Fund offering up to $1.5M in prizes to change their minds on AGI x-risk (via @leopoldasch)

Quotes

• Even before the locomotive, road and coach improvements alone sped up stagecoach travel by 4x in the 1700s
• If you think today’s food additives are unhealthy…
• The “control revolution”
• Engage with criticism, but don’t worry too much about critics

Retweets

• Thread from the International Manufacturing Technology Show, “devoted to CNC mills, grinders, robot arms, metrology, CAD, 3D printing etc” (@Ben_Reinhardt)
• With mRNA, we can create a much more effective annual flu shot (@calebwatney)
• Two schoolkids who don’t speak the same language chatted for a whole bus ride using Google Translate (@johnjhorton)
• Belgium closing a nuclear plant that produces almost 10% of its electricity is “civilizational controlled flight into terrain” (@patrickc)
• When you optimize a proxy, you make progress for a while, but then you start overoptimizing (@janleike)
• Frederick Douglass on “the good luck theory of self-made men” (@mbateman)

Queries

• Books on the founding of research universities? (@acesounderglass)
• What don’t people get, or fully appreciate, about your job? (@DKThomp)
• What do you call a newsletter writer? (@vgr)

Pics

• Me speaking at MIT to the Boston ACX and MIT EA groups (via @moreisdifferent). (That sketch on the chalkboard behind me was me trying to replicate this graph from Max Roser)

Poetry

• Apropos of nothing: “Compensation,” by Theodosia Pickering Garrison (1874-1944)

Comment: Progress Forum, LessWrong, Reddit