Where's my winter robot chauffeur?
What we've been reading: science, metascience, tech, housing, fertility and more ...
We released Issue 18 of Works in Progress last week. Before you read the rest of our links, read out articles on the failure of the British land value tax; how to extend women’s fertility into their 40s; why the Hanseatic league rose and fell; prehistoric psychopaths; the technologies that made pineapples one of the world’s top fruits; why America builds 5-over-1s while China builds towers in parks; and the century-old steam network that heats and powers Manhattan.
Science
Are seed oils actually bad for you?
Edward Cohn was a protein chemist who discovered and quickly scaled a new way of providing soldiers with blood-derived treatments during World War Two.
A man survives 100 days with an artificial heart. (Not as long as the 10 years a person can survive with a donor heart, but longer than anyone has survived with a pig heart.)
Evolutionary psychology is often criticized for telling ‘just-so’ stories. Adam Hunt and Adrian Jaeggi published a new paper outlining their framework for analysing evolutionary hypotheses, using autism as a case study. If academic papers aren’t your thing you can read Adam’s blog post.
Metascience
The Tony Blair Institute has published a report on how to accelerate scientific discovery in the UK in an age of AI .
People expect universities to serve lots of roles in society – scientific research, training and credentialing people for the work force, inventing technology, creating informed citizens. Ben Reinhart argues that universities would be better if we unbundled them.
Tech
Are better AI models actually better?
Faculty AI have made a new font based on old street signs in London.
Why don’t you have a robot butler?
We have autonomous vehicles in San Francisco and Phoenix but not New York and London? Why is it harder to make robotaxis in cold weather?
How to use AI in your writing.
Reflections on Palantir – its culture, morality, and how it works – from someone who worked there for eight years.
Will MacAskill, one of the founding fathers of Effective Altruism, returns to the 80,000 Hours podcast to discuss what a world with superintelligence is going to look like.
Traditionally biotech innovations came from startups that were then bought by Big Pharma. Now AI-aided drug discovery could shift innovation to different organizations, maybe to Big Pharma which may benefit from better data sets, increased process power, and vertical integration.
China is far ahead of the west on robots – installing more, building them cheaper with a mostly localized supply chain, and with a clear plan to replace human labor.
Housing
The Irish Department of Housing is considering proposals to allow people to build cabins and modular homes in their back gardens without planning permission.
Research shows that four to six story apartments with a single set of fire stairs are no more risky than two stair apartment blocks.
Hundreds of roofs in Gujarat, India have been painted white to keep residents cooler in the hottest months.
‘Affordable housing’ is a misleading moniker. We should call it what it is – subsidized – and deal with the tradeoffs that implies.
Fertility
People usually use total fertility rate as a way of gauging how many children are being born. But it doesn’t tell you everything.
A team are trying to create a new sport: sperm racing. They’re building a microscopic race-track and they’re going to be taking bets. Hopefully the data they gather will help us understand more about male fertility.
Despite having the highest birth rate in Europe, there were more people born in France in 1946 than 2024.
The child penalty is a measure of how much, on average, a woman’s earnings decrease when she has a child. In the rich world, countries with higher child penalties have lower birth rates.
Misc
We live like royalty and we don’t even know it.
How fantasies about future technology can stymy progress in the present.
Japan gets a lot wrong – per capita incomes have barely increased since 1990. But it’s still a nice place to live. What are they getting right?
Matthew Yglesias argues that propaganda is overrated and misinformation mostly confuses your own side
People often say that Europe is less innovative than America because of cultural reasons. Alex Chalmers argues that these ‘cultural differences’ are downstream of other, primarily economic, factors.
An OECD report finds that small energy price shocks can be good for the economy (probably because it hastens the death of unproductive firms) but that severe shocks are not.
Why regulators should have red teams to argue, internally, against bad regulations.
How postcodes work in different countries.
Too cheap to meter is a film that makes the case for abundant energy and explains why nuclear energy – fission and fusion – is our path to get there.
Books
Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back is a new book from Marc J Dunkelman. He talks about the contradiction between the left’s ‘Hamiltonian’ impulse to give the state more power to enact good works and their ‘Jeffersonian’ impulse to protect citizens from whims of people in power. He argues that these contradictory impulses lead to a system of vetocracy in which it is difficult to get anything done like build infrastructure, fight climate change, or have a working welfare system. If a book is too long for you, you can listen to Marc summarize his thesis on Matthew Yglesias’s podcast.
South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world with a total fertility rate of only 0.7 babies per woman. There are probably a number of reasons why this is the case but one notable reason is poor gender relations – young men in South Korea are increasingly right wing and women are increasingly left wing (Paywall, The FT).
Flowers of Fire by Hawon Jung describes the culture of sexism in South Korea today. Alice Evans has written a comprehensive review on her Substack.