🎙️🧪🚀 new macroscience podcast!

this episode: a terrific conversation with Matt Clancy on adaptation, improvement, markets, and metascience

listen now open.spotify.com/episode/6sHXWl…

This month, we ran 4 interviews investigating 4 Congressional support agencies. Together, I think they're a great primer to the back end of the legislative branch.

Today's installment looks at how the GAO investigates waste, fraud, and abuse (1/4)

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Eradicated diseases are an amazing type of civilizational monument we can construct

Something beautiful about thinking of the James Webb Space Telescope as a $10 billion machine for producing paintings of the universe.

Back from a great Paris conference last week after 4 visits to France in the last year - it's a very economically interesting country at the moment, with the caveat that it's not clear how much of this is Macron vs. long-run change. A short thread.

Overjoyed to welcome Theodore James Watney into this strange, beautiful world

Fascinating Institute for Progress article on the (metascience) lessons to be learned from the development of mRNA vaccines during the COVID pandemic ifp.org/progress-defer…

Matt Clancy is one of my favorite people in the entire world and you should be delighted that you get the chance to listen to his brain for 2.5 hours

🍷🎞️🤖 artificial intelligence deserves a better class of critic

The safety measures used on Waymo vehicles are an interesting case study of deploying meatspace-affecting ML products while accounting for the current limitations of ML

This one took a while to write, but I couldn't resist. It's time. blog.jacobtrefethen.com/strep/

High-skilled immigrants, like Bill Knudsen, are a national security asset

During WW2, the US built more airplanes than have been built for commercial transport in the entire history of aviation. This week on Construction Physics, I look at how that happened.

construction-physics.com/p/how-to-build…

One of the biggest puzzles with housing affordability is why construction productivity growth is so low.

This paper by an all-star team suggests an answer: housing regulation lowers scale of builders, limiting incentives to invest in innovative technologies.

Do you want to write about progress and bottlenecks in heavy industry—manufacturing, construction, transportation, logistics, aerospace, energy, defense, etc.?

The The Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive fellowship wants you!

Congress once had a dedicated office to provide technical analysis of new technologies. The idea was to make Congress better at legislating under uncertainty.

New Statecraft, on the Office of Technology Assessment and why it died: statecraft.pub/p/how-to-asses…

nature If you're interested in learning more about the ARPA model, we've compiled a list of resources here: ifp.org/the-arpa-model…

🛸 new today on macroscience:

metaparascience, and why studying the 'science of science' should oblige us to learn a lot more about how pseudosciences emerge, rise, and fall

macroscience.org/p/negative-met…

Excited to announce the Bottlenecks Summit September 6 in San Francisco, in partnership with @ifp Foundation for American Innovation 🇺🇸🚀 Abundance Institute brooke bowman Mark Lutter Patrick Blumenthal Nadia Asparouhova Caleb Watney Eli Dourado Alec Stapp Tim Hwang