In this update:

• Announcing the Progress Forum

• Ask Me Anything on the Progress Forum

• Links and tweets

This email digest is now on Substack. If you have a Substack yourself, and you enjoy my writing, I’d love a recommendation—thank you!

Announcing the Progress Forum

I’d like to invite you to join the Progress Forum, the new online home for the progress community.

This forum was pre-announced here in January 2022, and quietly opened in April. Although anyone could sign up, we deliberately didn’t make any big announcement about it, aiming first for a small, high-quality community. Now that we have a lot of good content on the site, we’re announcing it more broadly.

The primary goal of this forum is to provide a place for long-form discussion of progress studies and the philosophy of progress. It’s also a place to find local clubs and meetups.

The broader goal is to share ideas, strengthen them through discussion and comment, and over the long term, to build up a body of thought that constitutes a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century (and beyond).

I invite you to post:

• Essays (original, or cross-posted from your blog)

• Drafts, half-baked ideas, and work-in-progress thinking, for feedback

• Questions for brainstorming

• Local events and community groups

• Etc.

And please read and comment on what others have shared.

You can subscribe to Forum posts via email, RSS, or Twitter.

The Forum is sponsored by The Roots of Progress. Huge thanks to the people who worked to create and run it: Lawrence Kestleoot, Andrew Roberts, Sameer Ismail, David Smehlik, Alec Wilson, and Ross Graham. Thanks also to Kris Gulati for nudging this project along, and to Ruth Grace Wong for helpful conversations about community and moderation. Finally, thanks to the LessWrong team for creating the software platform it runs on, and especially to Oliver Habryka, Ruby Bloom, Raymond Arnold, JP Addison, James Babcock, and Ben Pace for answering questions and helping us customize this instance of it.

Go check it out!

Ask Me Anything on the Progress Forum

I’m doing a Reddit-style AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) on the Progress Forum now. Sign up for an account, use the comments to add questions, and upvote any questions you’d like to see me answer. I’ll try to keep answering at least until Thanksgiving.

Links and tweets

From the Progress Forum

• How fear of the ‘Mega-Machine’ helped end America’s postwar Golden Age

• Anton Howes on why we waited so long for the optical telegraph

• The curse of plenty (by @mattsclancy)

• How Karl Compton believed a research department should be run

Announcements

• Andy Matuschak launches a research fellowship for “transformative tools for thought” (via @andy_matuschak)

• Britain Remade, a new campaign focused on British economic growth (@samrichardswebb)

• Waymo and Cruise are now both operating robotaxis in SF (@kfury)

• The American Dynamism 50, from A16Z: “companies tackling our nation’s most pressing problems” (via @rmcentush)

• The Progress Dashboard, a collection of progress links and resources

• Facebook AI launched Galactica, a large language model for science (via @paperswithcode). Looked cool but did not actually work super-well and got pulled quickly

• We hit 8 billion people (@yishan)

Links

• For Thanksgiving, why we should be grateful for modern textiles (Virginia Postrel)

• Planes are still decades away from displacing most bird jobs (by @alexeyguzey)

Queries

• Intuition for why you can knock off a piece of a rock by hitting it with a piece of wood/bone?

• If you know Bret Victor’s “Inventing on Principle,” what’s your principle? (@Prigoose). (If you don’t know it, see here)

• A good writeup of the Gates Foundation’s role in covid response? (@benlandautaylor)

Quotes

• Incandescent light is “so wasteful… as to render its practical application impossible” -Nature, 1878 (via @_brianpotter). I added some context

• “Toys with as much power as the great IBM computers” (@arbesman)

• Von Neumann on existential risk (@IvanVendrov)

Tweets & retweets

• My meta-level take on “why did everything take so long?” (thread version of this previous post)

• AGI will get built sooner than most people think, but take longer to “change everything” (@sama)

• 10 things underrated about America (@zachtratar)

• Patterns across bubbles

• RIP Fred Brooks, who wrote the classic book on software engineering, The Mythical Man-Month

• A misheard word caused a $500M nuclear cleanup (@curiouswavefn)