Links and tweets, 2023-03-01

by Jason Crawford · March 1, 2023 · 1 min read

The Progress Forum

• Anton Howes on what the Dutch did better than the English
• AMA with Gale Pooley & Marian Tupy, authors of Superabundance
• Ben Reinhardt AMA has concluded

Opportunities

• Lex Fridman wants to meet people, fill out this form to get coffee with him
• Essay contest: “What does a perfect research institute look like?” (via @akuataya)

News & announcements

• Works in Progress Issue 10 (thread from @s8mb)
• OpenAI announces its long-term strategy and principles
• BioGPT, an LLM trained on biomedical research literature (via @tunguz)
• Constitutional AI: training LLMs with behavioral principles (from @AnthropicAI)
• UAE turned on its third nuclear reactor in 3 years (@BrianGitt)

Articles & essays

• “How can anyone stop being fascinated for long enough to be angry?” Scott Aaronson on GPT
• Jerusalem Demsas on “permission-slip culture” in America (via @atrembath)
• “Cyborgism” as a strategy for using LLMs

Queries

• Can anyone intro Dwarkesh to Robert Caro? (@dwarkesh_sp)
• What’s the best book on Taylorism? (@davidtlang)
• What are the best books about insurance? (@ByrneHobart)
• Best writing to illustrate to the layman where we’re at with AGI? (@PatrickFinley_)

Quotes

• Everything has to be invented, including stop signs and numbered highways
• The great equalizer: indoor plumbing
• When your boat gets in an accident and works better afterward
• The restless motivation of Paul Ehrlich (the German microbiologist)
• A good metaphor for breakthroughs
• In the 19th century this was considered a sick burn

Tweets & threads

• Institute for Progress one-year anniversary retrospective (@calebwatney)
• All solutions reveal new problems. But to be solutions they must be better problems
• Virtually everything about spacecraft was figured out by a Russian eccentric decades before rocketry
• “The technology we have can do X. Therefore, it will always be limited to X”
• An easy way to trick ChatGPT
• Can China lead on AI if free speech is literally a feature the technology?
• Listen to people when you’re impressed by how they think, not when you agree with what they think (@AdamMGrant channeling @waitbutwhy)
• The invention of the modern pictogram

Charts

• Workers needed at S&P 500 companies to generate $1M in revenue (@tobi)

• UPDATE: Adjusted for inflation. Less dramatic but same trend

Comment: Progress Forum, LessWrong, Reddit