Tech won't save us. We will. | How to think for yourself | Explaining Autism | Tech Leaps | Divestment Paper
Friends, thanks for all the birthday wishes this week, I am 17 in scrabble points. Thoughts this week:
➳Technology won’t save us. We will. Innovations this year.
➳Billionaire VC (Paul Graham, Y-combinator) on what to look for in YC interviews
➳Distribution vs Innovation (or how Teams caught up to Slack)
➳How to think for yourself (Graham again)
➳Ezra Klein’s most important book of year (Ministry for the Future)
➳Leap in protein folding understanding
➳For/Against fossil fuel divestment paper (Quigley et al. Cambridge University Focus, H/T Dominic Burke)
➳Explain Autism to JP (redux)
➳On being 97 years old (archive)
Technology won’t save us. We will. Technological progress will lower the cost of environmental (and health/other) saving choices that will allow social and cultural change to happen. I’m going to briefly discuss this idea.
At many moments of cultural change, it is rare - if even unheard of - to gain 100% consensus on an issue. Ending slavery. Gaining women’s votes. There was considerable challenge to those movements.
There are now choices both systems level and individual that can benefit our environment. Green energy, electric cars, electrification in general, vegetable burgers, the list goes on and we know the areas we need to work on: land use, buildings, transport, energy, industrials.
Many of these items are now in the region of being cost competitive - even before pricing for the pollution, and more so if we price for pollution (and a reason why policy maker debate wider carbon taxes) but as our technology improves these choices become easier to make... it enables culture change. But we still need to make the change. It’s not quite in the techno-optimist camp but it does argue we can solve these challenges.
We’ve seen some technology jumps this year,eg:
➳fast vaccine development (and the mRNA tech behind it)
➳electric planes (albeit currently small)
➳no-kill, lab grown “chicken” approved in Singapore. (The land use saving from a scale up of this and other meat substitutes could be meaningful)
➳protein folding, jump in computational understanding
➳cost of solar energy falling,
➳battery technology continuing to improve
➳possible confirmation of viability of quantum computing
I would speculate that the end chapters of the COVID experience has vaccines and technology as major characters in the story whereas in many geographies there are mixed views on the public health responses.
On climate, we’ve seen the impact that such drops in economic activity on carbon emissions but in the scheme of impacting the store of carbon in our “budget” - it’s been modest to none. The reason for this explained here.
To some this also highlights that technology and innovation have to be a major part of the story on fighting the climate crisis. But we've seen this year that we have those capabilities. Humans have responded to crisis by invention.
This has echoed in history. I was reading a re-telling of how the fertiliser industry (via learning the importance of nitrogen to plants, and ammonia based chemicals) was born through the work of Justus von Liebig. But Liebig only did this research in response to how badly the world was hit by the 1816 famine (caused by the 1815 volcanic explosion of Mt Tambora) because he and his family were starving in that famine.
But, it’s not technology per se that will save us, but our choices to do so and what we do in response to crisis.
Links:
Billionaire VC (Paul Graham, Y-combinator) on what to look for in YC interviews
Distribution vs Innovation (or how Teams caught up to Slack)
How to think for yourself (Graham again)
Ezra Klein’s most important book of year (Ministry for the Future)
Leap in protein folding understanding
Billionaire VC (Paul Graham, Y-combinator) on what to look for in YC interviews.
-Founders who understand their users and a product/service that people really want.
-Don’t BS. Answer the question honestly.
-Know your competition. Strength and weaknesses.
-Know in detail what could go wrong.
-Show and be: resilient, good at building things, strength of relationship between founders
-Genuinely interested in what you are building
In sum, be authentic and as a side effect become a billionaire.
Distribution vs Innovation (or how Teams caught up to Slack)
An older article on how incumbants have distribution but insurgents have innovation. The question here is: has Microsoft Teams (incumbent distribution) caught up enough with Slack (innovation, better features)?
How to think for yourself (Graham again). An essay on the importance of independent thinking and how it can be trained.
Ezra Klein’s most important book of year (Ministry for the Future).
“...If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.
Best known for the Mars trilogy, Robinson is one of the greatest living science fiction writers. And in recent years, he’s become the greatest writer of what people now call cli-fi — climate fiction. The name is a bit of a misnomer: Climate fiction is less fictitious speculation than an attempt to envision a near future that we are likely to inhabit. It’s an attempt to take our present — and thus the future we’re ensuring — more seriously than we do. Robinson’s new book does exactly that...” Vox article here.
Google’s deep-learning program for determining the 3D shapes of proteins stands to transform biology
The media headlines were overstated but nonetheless this is a significant advance in computational biology which (although the trend has been in this direction) should allow better drug discovery over the next 20 years.
For/Against fossil fuel divestment paper (Quigley et al. Cambridge University Focus, H/T Dominic Burke)
Most specialists will know many of the details here. The acknowledgement that most primary financing is debt or via loans is helpful, as well as critiques on the limited success of engagement (it makes the point that limited impact of divestment too) and the paper is mostly well balanced. I thought the section on moral arguments had some nuances and the explanation of social and political arguments via theory of change (and the differing theory of change view points from both camps) although brief is important to the theory. Interesting that Quigly doesn’t seem to note her own work here (which I am still exploring) no mention of policy wonks idea of moving the “Overton Window” although it’s alluded to. That said, it’s probably outside the scope of the University's purview.
Link to Paper. (Divestment: Advantages and Disadvantages for the University of Cambridge)
I chat with Rebecca Giggs on her new book looking at humanity through the lens of the whale. There is video and a transcript. Self-recommending.
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Archive and repeat words below. Stay well, Stay safe, Ben