jasoncrawford.org - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Did not realize that we have greatly improved tornado mortality.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Save the date: Progress Conference 2025 will be October 16–19 in Berkeley, CA Hosted by Roots of Progress together with Abundance Institute, Foresight Institute, Foundation for American Innovation, Human Progress, Institute for Humane Studies, and Works in Progress rootsofprogress.org/conference

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

SCOOP: WaPo Opinion editor David Shipley is out. Jeff Bezos emails staff about a change to Post Opinions: "We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets."

submitted 3 days ago • 779 comments

After a long wait, the working paper for the Many-Economists Project: The Sources of Researcher Variation in Economics. We had 146 teams perform the same research three times, each time with less freedom. What source of freedom leads to different choices and results? papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

submitted 4 days ago • 11 comments

In India, selective breeding and better husbandry increased the milk yield per cow significantly from 2013 to 2022. Cattle in poor countries remain far behind their rich-world peers, which means the opportunity for catch-up growth is enormous. Subscribe to Chartbook: tinyurl.com/bdesb9ye.

submitted 5 days ago • 3 comments

I gave a talk to high schoolers: The Future of Humanity—And How You Can Help In which I argue that we can create a future that is better than the world has ever seen, and point towards some of the most important problems and opportunities to work on. youtu.be/3Sm7qHd_Qy0

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

I go away for three weeks and everyone announces everything: Boom first supersonic flight OpenAI Deep Research and GPT-5 roadmap Derek Thompson & Ezra Klein's Abundance Charles Mann's “How the System Works” And much more in my latest links digest: newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/links-and-...

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

The final videos from Progress Conference 2024 are now on the RPI YouTube channel. The last few added were Chandler Tuttle, Jason Carman, Kanjun Qiu, and Niko McCarty. Enjoy! www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

Totally randomly, I watched this Orson Welles interview on the Dick Cavett show. Just amazing: www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_PU...

submitted 27 days ago • 4 comments

The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, Chapter 5: Solutionism (part 1) Optimism vs. pessimism can be a false dichotomy. We need to fully acknowledge problems, while vigorously pursuing solutions. Call it “solutionism” newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/solutionis...

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments

On the incremental path to the future, a major trend will be that humans step up a level, into management. Here I start to lay out a vision for human agency in the AI future, and also offer a rebuttal to a recent post about AI and human wages: newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/the-future...

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments

Was in Mojave today for the first Boom supersonic flight test! Amazing accomplishment, after over a decade of work. Congrats to the entire team!

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

Atlas Shrugged and the irreplaceable founder, pumping stations and civic pride, thoughts on the eve of AGI, skyways for the suburbs, and more: newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/links-and-...

submitted 33 days ago • 0 comments

On the risks of politician coins:

submitted 36 days ago • 24 comments

New magazines and podcasts, the printing press and the Internet, the ultimate form of travel, grand plans for San Francisco, an AI tutor for Nigeria, and more: newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/links-and-...

submitted 39 days ago • 0 comments

People watching SpaceX (but also everybody).

submitted 43 days ago • 4 comments

“But you can’t have a story where everyone is happy and everything is perfect! Stories need conflict!” Well, here are several ways that you can write a compelling, exciting science fiction story without making it a dystopia: newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/sci-fi-wit...

submitted 43 days ago • 0 comments

Comments on the wildfires, why kissing a nuclear waste cask is fine, one weird trick to fight NIMBYs, the case of the missing statues, Eli Dourado's model of policy change, plastic in foods, and more Links and short notes, 2025-01-13: newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/links-and-...

submitted 47 days ago • 0 comments

2024 was a big year for me, and an even bigger year for the Roots of Progress Institute. Here's what the org and I were up to this year, including my annual “highlights from what I read this year”: newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/2024-in-re...

submitted 59 days ago • 0 comments

Your regular reminder that it wasn’t until the mid 1990s that Africa caught up with Europe’s population. Relatively speaking, there used to be a lot of Europeans.

submitted 69 days ago • 3 comments

Come for me trying to convince you that stainless steel, injection molding, and their ilk are more important for humanity than the smallpox vaccine. Stay for brilliant talks from brilliant people who know much more than I do! (Or the other way around :-P)

submitted 64 days ago • 0 comments

Clinical trial abundance, an AI course assistant, grid-scale fusion, “Live Gloriously,” off-grid solar for data centers, permitting vs. compliance, crossword mania, democratizing art-making, and more newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/links-and-...

submitted 63 days ago • 0 comments

First batch of recorded talks from Progress Conference 2024 are available now for your holiday viewing pleasure! Special thanks to @freethinkmedia.bsky.social for their excellent work producing these. A few final videos to come after the holidays! www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

submitted 68 days ago • 1 comment

Ed Conway goes looking for materials we have run out of—and retires the series after one post, because he can't find any. Never underestimate elasticity of supply! edconway.substack.com/p/hang-on-ar...

submitted 68 days ago • 1 comment

Elon says that soon, builders “will be free to build” in America. If that promise is to be fulfilled, we have work to do. My wishlist of policy goals to advance scientific, technological, and economic progress: newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/a-progress...

submitted 72 days ago • 2 comments

FutureHouse is launching an independent postdoctoral fellowship program for exceptional researchers who want to apply our automated science tools to specific problems in biology and biochemistry, in collaboration with world-leading academic labs. 1/

submitted 72 days ago • 1 comment

We've had many applications to be the Roots of Progress Event Manager. Looking to close the role soon If you're interested, apply this week, before the holidays! You'll get to run the smash-hit Progress Conference and work with the fabulous Heike Larson rootsofprogress.notion.site/Event-Manage...

submitted 75 days ago • 0 comments

Progress links and short notes: Brain mapping, walkable cities, progress on the curriculum, and much more newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/links-and-...

submitted 75 days ago • 0 comments

A new article in Science voices concern about a line of research which, if successful long-term, could create a grave threat to humanity and to most life on Earth. Fortunately, the threat is distant, and avoidable—if we have common knowledge of it: newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/biological...

submitted 79 days ago • 2 comments

The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, Chapter 4: The Life Well-Lived (part 2) Techno-humanism embraces the need for meaning, but rejects the idea that meaning is eroded by material progress: newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/the-life-w...

submitted 80 days ago • 0 comments

Are we living more meaningful lives than our ancestors — or less? Work, love, knowledge, and beauty are radically different today. Opportunities for meaning have exploded, but something is missing. ↓

submitted 80 days ago • 1 comment

Roots of Progress is hiring a full-time, in-house event manager to run our annual Progress Conference and other events: rootsofprogress.notion.site/Event-Manage...

submitted 87 days ago • 0 comments

We need an Abundance Agenda for India. The "reform" libertarian agenda from 1991 has limits. There are still plenty of bad regulations, but they need to be sensibly combined with state capacity building to scale up and grow the pie.

submitted 88 days ago • 1 comment

1901: • federal budget $0.35B • national debt ~$1B • largest US co market cap: $1.4B Today: • federal budget $6.75T • national debt $36T • largest US co market cap: $3.7T (not adjusted for inflation, the point is the ratios)

submitted 88 days ago • 1 comment

Now I've come across several instances of people writing, essentially: 'Let me provide a very rough estimate. Don't take this number literally, because it has several flaws.' And then their number becomes cited as the canonical figure on the topic.

submitted 95 days ago • 28 comments

Progress Conference really was my favorite event of the past few years, and I expect it to have even more momentum in 2025

submitted 95 days ago • 0 comments

My trick is to paste into / copy out of a @notion.com scratch doc. Notion always does the right thing with copying/pasting rich text and/or Markdown

submitted 96 days ago • 0 comments

The first progress conference was a huge success. Progress Conference 2025 will happen next October. More info early next year! Also, we’re hiring an Event Manager to help us make this an annual event and to run other in-person events: newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/progress-c...

submitted 96 days ago • 0 comments

The links digest is back! Announcements from Astera, Foresight, Works in Progress, and more; plus other links, quotes and little notes for paid subscribers: newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/links-and-...

submitted 100 days ago • 0 comments

Same. How is everyone? Where is everyone?

submitted 101 days ago • 3 comments

The steam engine was invented in 1712. An observer at the time might said: “The engine will power everything: factories, ships, carriages. Horses will be obsolete!” They would have been right—but 200 years later, we were still using horses to plow fields: blog.rootsofprogress.org/big-tech-tra...

submitted 128 days ago • 0 comments

Very much agree with Jason: if subjective wellbeing doesn’t go up with improving physical quality of life, it isn’t a good measure of everything we should care about. (I think that’s probably true of ‘how happy are you’ questions, maybe a little less true about ‘how satisfied with life are you).

submitted 155 days ago • 0 comments

The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, Chapter 4: The Life Well-Lived (part 1) Counterintuitively, happiness is not a good metric of human well-being. A better guide to human progress is whether people can achieve their goals and fulfill their values: blog.rootsofprogress.org/thm-ch4-the-...

submitted 155 days ago • 0 comments

So you want to advance human progress. And you’re wondering, what should you, personally, do? Say you have talent, ambition, and drive—how do you choose a project or career? blog.rootsofprogress.org/how-to-choos...

submitted 163 days ago • 0 comments