In this update:

• Meetup in SF, June 11: Progress Studies + Effective Altruism

• Reinventing the wheel

• Links and tweets, 2022-05-30

Meetup in SF, June 11: Progress Studies + Effective Altruism

There will be a Progress Studies + Effective Altruism meetup in San Francisco on Saturday, June 11, 2-4 pm. Food will be provided, and kids are welcome. I’ll be there. Find details and RSVP on Meetup or Facebook.

Reinventing the wheel

Someone posted this photo recently. I can’t find a definitive original source, but multiple social media posts (Reddit, Twitter, Instagram), with different photos of the same object, all identify it as a 4,000-year-old wagon found in Lchashen, Armenia:

It reminded me of some fun facts I had learned about the history of wheels and steering. Lots of images in this one, please read the post here: https://rootsofprogress.org/reinventing-the-wheel

Links and tweets, 2022-05-30

Trying a new experiment: a blog-post digest of my most relevant Twitter content. Let me know any feedback!

Links

• Our World in Data is looking for a Head of Product & Design

• Dan Elton is hosting a “Boston area progress studies roundtable discussion”

• “The FDA has a long, long history of just hating people testing themselves.”

• Matthew Dockrey reads the Philosophical Transactions and makes a video for each one

• Misha Chellam on “broad YIMBYism.” And: “Small-d democratic-citizen participation has led to profoundly regressive outcomes.” (via @hanlonbt)

Tweets

• A thread on the history of wheels and steering (essay version above)

• We could use more blog posts summarizing and explaining academic papers

• Why we can’t have solar-powered cargo ships

• There is a pessimist argument that basically goes: “Yes, in the past, we invented many things. But, we cannot invent those things again.”

• Bacon on defeatism vs. progress

• Before the car was a “horseless carriage,” the telephone was a “speaking telegraph”

• Telegraph-based stock tickers were the “infinite scroll” of the 19th century

• Norman Borlaug’s gift to the world

• The proper attitude for university students according to Jacob Bronowski

• Vannevar Bush: “any well-conducted laboratory” has an atmosphere that “almost wholly banishes posing, jockeying for position, and evasiveness”

• Our health organizations are not set up to deal with pandemics

Retweets

• Examples of graphs like this for other technologies? (@eric_is_weird)

• If we don’t get a New Roaring ’20s, what went wrong? (@JimPethokoukis)

• Adversarial legalism is why we can’t build things anymore in the US (@AlecStapp)

• “To don a pair of eyeglasses was to cheat old age” (@krisgulati)

• James Watt and Adam Smith met in Glasgow as young men (@dkedrosky)

• The world is a museum of passion projects (@collision)

• Let’s stop saying “there is no evidence for X” and instead say “we are still gathering evidence to know whether X is true”. (@Ayjchan) (@zeynep agrees)

• One of the motivations for Nature was speed of communication. Another was establishing early credit. Today, that sounds like preprints (@NeuroStats)

• Von Neumann had an interesting style of dealing with people (@curiouswavefn)