Check out my guest post for the ChinaTalk Substack on recent innovation in the sport of jiu-jitsu and how it can help us think about OpenAI’s future.

From a historical perspective, the burden of knowledge hypothesis is flimsy. For those who don’t know, I’m referring to the hypothesis that scientific ideas get significantly more difficult to find as knowledge continually progresses. My lack of faith in the hypothesis does not stem from some knee-jerk reaction against hypotheses that imply human progress will slow down. In fact, I used to assume that the burden of knowledge hypothesis was true.

Works in Progress released a piece from me diving into Thomas Edison’s Herculean contributions as a technical entrepreneur. He was not often the first to invent the technologies which his name has become synonymous with, but he did not even see himself as an ‘inventor.’ We have a word for people like him now: technical entrepreneur And he was the best ever.

(Spotify link here if you prefer) To accompany my piece in the coming issue of Works in Progress on Thomas Edison, I’ve put together the first-ever podcast episode for this Substack. It mostly dives into stories that didn’t make it into the Works in Progress piece, so please check that out in a few weeks!

This was initially a section of my larger Bell Labs post. It would have come between the “Freedom comes in many forms” and “The mobile phone system” sections. I am publishing the section in a separate post because it would have been needless detail to ~85% of the readers.

Many new science orgs are looking to pursue research that has the positive aspects of both “applied” research and “basic” research. To me, this is a very reasonable approach. After all, the “applied vs. basic research” distinction has always been a rather arbitrary one. Some research projects feel like they are squarely in one bucket or the other, but it’s not always that clear.

This piece is noticeably longer (twice the length) than the others on this Substack.

Hey Team! As you know, a lot of what I do is outline the details of how scientific systems and research institutes of the past worked. Tomorrow, I’ll be taking my first step in doing this kind of profile with one of the present, well-known, new science orgs! I’ll be spending a week on the ground (as well as more time in the coming months) at the lab interviewing, observing, etc. I already have a list of things I plan on looking into.

Subscribe now I’ve finally updated the “About” section of this Substack. For months and months, I put it off because I was so busy working a job and writing at night. Then, I began writing full-time and concerned myself wholly with making sure I kept up producing novel pieces as a “professional.” Today, I finally got to it. And I realized this was the perfect opportunity to do something I’ve never done: a subscriber push.

I just finished Warren Weaver’s ludicrously underrated autobiography, Scene of Change: A Lifetime in American Science (It’s so out of print that the only copies I could even find were $80+ and they were few and far between) . I’m working on a long-form post about some major takeaways from the book, but, in the meantime, I couldn’t resist releasing a Short covering a few other interesting pieces of the book.

Erik Hoel, who writes The Intrinsic Perspective, has just announced that he is leaving his position at Tufts to pursue Substack writing. If that name does not ring a bell, readers of this Substack may know him as the “guy who wrote the Why we stopped making Einsteins piece” on aristocratic tutoring. Hoel is a great thinker who integrates fields seamlessly, and that’s part of the reason he chose to leave academia.