Links For the Week

The Witness, Ancient Fertility, and Progress Studies Skepticism

2024 Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive

Now accepting applications!

I participated in last year’s inaugural program and highly recommend it! It pushed me to start writing weekly and I’ve gained over a thousand subscribers and written my best posts since. You should apply!

We have another fantastic lineup of advisors this year, including Max Roser (Our World in Data), Tyler Cowen (Mercatus Center), Andrej Karpathy (ex-Tesla, OpenAI), and Blake Scholl (Boom Supersonic).

Is Progress Real? - Rogers Bacon

I don’t endorse everything in this essay but the excerpted essay is interesting and Bacon’s acerbic contrarianism feels like a good balance to the progress studies bubble this blog is in.

Look, no one talked about how we can engineer miracle years when miracle years were actually still happening. This modern obsession with progress is just a sign of our decadence, of our creative exhaustion and inability to innovate in any meaningful way. Einstein wasn’t reading fucking blog posts about geniuses and he definitely wasn’t writing them. He was thinking. 

Ancient Fertility Transition? And History of Bachelor Taxes

These links are background research for claims made in Robin Hanson’s recent piece on fertility and cultural drift and related conversations with Brink Lindsey

Casey Handmer on Steve Hsu’s Podcast Manifold

Casey has lots of good interviews talking about his solar powered natural gas manufacturing firm Terraform Industries, this one has a bit more on Casey’s early life and education which I enjoyed and also a great section on solar powered de-salination. All of the externality problems with aquifers and water rights disputes can be solved with cheap solar power!

The Witness Documentary

This is a documentary about the development of Johnathan Blow’s most recent video game The Witness. If you don’t play video games much or haven’t played the Witness this might not be that interesting. But if that describes you, you should be playing The Witness instead of reading this blog post. It’s the best example of video games as art rather than pure entertainment (although it is also fun to play) and is one of the best video games of all time. Johnathan gives deep insights into his design process in this documentary.