jasoncrawford

I disagree; this article makes a good case for the term “Dark Ages”: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages

This Scott Alexander essay says that the FDA is too strict on some things and not strict enough on others, which is probably right: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducan...

I think regulations can work when they enforce very well-supported, long-established best practices, such that if you don't do them it amounts to negligence.

They might also work better if they say “you can't do it that way, which is known to be unsafe,” as opposed to “you must do it this way, which is the only safe thing.”

Note also that regulatory standards are not the only mechanism in the law to create safety. Liability law can be very effective at creating safety, by giving the right incentives to the right parties, but liability law doesn't tell anyone what to do—only what will happen to you if you cause harm.

> The living standard of kings hasn't quite changed since 2000 BC.

Not true. Ancient/medieval kings still got smallpox, peed in chamber pots, and shivered in the winter cold. They couldn't hear the music of great performers who had died, or travel to another continent for a weekend trip. Etc.

Arthur C. Clarke's First Law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right. When they state that something is impossible, they are very probably wrong.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

Unless we also had progress in energy technology that could overcome this, which unfortunately we haven't.

It's not always assumed to be exponential. It was assumed exponential by Paul Romer because long-term economic growth is pretty exponential. Much subsequent work has followed that model, but not all of it.

Good point.

The paper does cross-validate the models, and I am told that cross-validation properly penalizes overfitting with too many parameters… but I don't understand the statistics well enough here.

Yes, but if your data is actually exponential, the linear segments are not going to be better approximations than an exponential curve. That's what's going on here

Breeder reactors, as others have pointed out. Oklo is a modern design based on the concept: https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/aurora-oklo.ht...

Also see “Problem free nuclear power and global change”: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/614877

And “Nuclear fission power for 21st century needs”: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01491...

You can see the table here: https://people.physics.anu.edu.au/~ecs103/chart/?ShowStable=...

When I click on the lead-208 box, it credits data from:

NUBASE2020: https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-1137/abddae AME2020: https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-1137/abddb0

It also only says that alpha decay is “possible”, not that it happens with any frequency—in fact, it lists Pb-208 as stable.

My understanding was that it was also about the long tail. With millions of titles in print, and a minimum selection of thousands to make a decent bookstore, you can't print a decent catalog and mail it. Before Amazon, the biggest mail-order books business was the Book-of-the-Month Club. Perfect case for an online catalog.

I heard the same story (I joined in 2004). The version I heard was that Jeff was driving cross-country NY -> Seattle and was on the phone with his lawyer about incorporation papers, and the lawyer misheard “Cadabra” as “Cadaver”. That's when Jeff knew he needed a better name.

Well, there's genetic engineering. We might want to create new proteins—enzymes for chemical reactions, for instance.

(1) Simplistic because it isn't binary, solved vs. not solved. There's still improvement to do in the solution. And we won't really know if it's “solved” until we start trying to use these structures for practical purposes. Don't mean to detract from the accomplishment overall though, it seems tremendous.

(2) There is a certain amount of computing needed for each new protein---quite significant, I think, but not prohibitively expensive. And I'm sure this can be improved over time

Well, there are. Actually, misfolded proteins are implicated in some diseases.

I'm not sure if every possible sequence of amino acids has a unique dominant folding. But ones that don't, wouldn't be nearly as useful biologically, because you couldn't rely on them to do their jobs. So they would not be selected for. The ones that actually get coded for by genes fold up more consistently.

No, that is the exact opposite of what I'm suggesting! We should appreciate the progress we've made so far, and we should absolutely seek further progress.

Thanks Simon, any good articles on this point about jet engines? I'm collecting analyses of specific inventions.

Why “extraordinarily suspect”?

Thanks for the reading suggestions. And of course I am already thinking about the questions you mentioned and have been for a long time.

I agree that politics, ideology, and mass opinion matter a lot, and never meant to imply otherwise. Indeed in some of my posts I touch on how those factors might have affected technological developments. (See e.g. my analysis toward the end of my smallpox post: https://rootsofprogress.org/smallpox-and-vaccines)

Agree also about the importance of models & priors.

If there's any place where you think my specific factual conclusions are in error (whether from bad models or any other error), I always appreciate specific rejoinders.

Thanks. Part of the goal of my project is to get underneath assumptions and ideology. That is, I try to justify my conclusions based on evidence and research—at least the harder claims (as opposed to my somewhat more speculative comments about bigger-picture themes and deep causes).

I invite critiques of my factual conclusions, and I'm always happy to be taught something!

“Whose narrative?” Uh, mine I guess. I'm an independent researcher. Used to be a tech founder. This blog was my hobby until I quit my last job. Now I do it almost full-time. I'm funded by grants from Emergent Ventures among others. But I've been doing what I do since long before I met them.

So there is something odd going on with measles. I haven't dug into the data, but from a couple of data points I've seen, it seems that measles mortality was declining for a long time even while measles cases were not. That is, there was a decline in the case-fatality rate, without a decline in cases. The disease was still around but getting less deadly. Then the vaccine actually reduced the number of cases.

So what was reducing the case-fatality rate? I don't know, but it might have been nutrition. There's evidence at least that Vitamin A makes measles less severe/deadly.

The HTML title is deliberately different from the header. The header is a catchy/literary title; the HTML title is more descriptive of what you'll get if you click through. So, all is as intended. Thanks.

Counterpoint: Why do we need or even want anything to last a thousand years? In a hundred years we'll probably have much better technologies than today, and hopefully we'll be much richer. Why not rebuild stuff?

(I don't 100% buy this myself, just challenging the premise)

Such as?

Why not?

How does engineered wood do on strength and fire resistance? Would appreciate any unbiased comparisons vs. steel and concrete on those points

Both. See the followup here: https://rootsofprogress.org/cement-redux

The fact that they were using volcanic ash is nothing new. I mean, Vitruvius basically wrote down that it was volcanic ash.

The specific chemistry of how the specific silicates interact with seawater and how that forms new compounds is a new discovery.