(Epistemic status: Possible) Nat Friedman asked twitter for technology (or achievements enabled by future tech, or broadly "cool stuff") people are excited about, and quite a few replied. Here's a compiled list by theme with some comments. Some of these may not make sense as stated, if so have a look at the thread. In bold are things that I thought of not included in the original list. The ones that I see as most interesting are the ones related to medicine. One, because a better understanding of …

Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting. Tech The Ocean Cleanup foundation proposes technology to clean 50%of the world's ocean plastic in 5 years. Electric airplanes! Electric airliners! Big beautiful flying rockets Bio David Gobel, from the Methuselah Foundation, believes thatby 2030, technology will add more than 1 life of year expectancy per year, effectively achieving "Longevity Escape Velocity", meaning that everyone alive …

[Epistemic status: Possible] What is public and private these days? These words, Public and Private, historically have been used to refer to things associated with the State -at some level - and things that are not, with a gradient in between (i.e. Public-Private Partnerships). At least there is one relevant subdivision of public and private: ownership versus orientation. A for-profit corporation is a private entity that pursues private ends, a charity is a private entity that pursues public ends, a local g…

Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting. Pychology Cynicism (i.e. thinking that people are ultimately selfish, being less trusting of others' intentios, etc) is not correlated with cognitive ability (under diverse measurements), despire lay beliefs to the contrary. I have to admit that I think the popularity of many anticommonse beliefs (I have in mind some of The Elephant in the Brain's claims), or rather, the easiness with which they are acc…

Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting. Philosophy Sabine Hossenfelder wrote two years ago that "Free will is dead, let's bury it" Now she has written that physics actually does not necessarily rule it out She has even writen about a hypothetical "free will function" that would be neither deterministic nor random. (HTF can something be neither!) Here is an example: Consider an algorithm that computes some transcende…

Physics is beatiful. Are you sure? Sabine Hossenfelder, theoretical physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies just published a book about the relation between beauty and physics. The common idea -common for the standards of this side of the internet - is that physics is beautiful, in particular the laws of physics have a beauty to them. Books that aim to popularise physics among the public also tend to reflect this idea. The book claims that this idea not only is wrong, but that the idea of …