From independent AI researcher, John Wentworth, at the blog Less Wrong, here.

And John’s version of his bio with some gentle editing for salty language:

I’m an independent researcher working on AI alignment and the theory of agency. I’m 29 years old, will make about $90k this year, and set my own research agenda. I deal with basically zero academic bull&%$& – my grant applications each take about one day’s attention to write (and decisions typically come back in ~1 month), and I publish the bulk of my work right here on LessWrong/AF. Best of all, I work on some really cool technical problems which I expect are central to the future of humanity.

Many loyal readers know that I’m interested in the problem of supplying enough fixed nitrogen for our staple crops (rice, corn, wheat), none of which can fix nitrogen on their own. We are utterly dependent upon these food systems. Currently our planet is 2 billion humans over its natural carrying capacity and it is fertilizer (fixed nitrogen) that keeps us alive. The Haber Bosh Process, invented at the beginning of the 20th century, was the genius killer app of science and industrial design that has, to date, secured our food systems.

Unfortunately, there are some downsides. For one thing, agricultural runoff of fixed nitrogen pollutes our waterways and leads to toxic eutrophication. For another, the industrial process required to break the strong nitrogen-nitrogen triple bond of the abundant N2 in our atmosphere requires a lot of carbon-polluting energy and methane. Finally, one side effect of Haber Bosh was the efficient production of high explosives which the inventors deployed on the battlefields of World War One.

So it’s gratifying to see some real progress being made to clean up Haber Bosh. In this case, the big idea is to clean up the industrial chemistry. There are a lot of other potential approaches that folks are looking at–one of my favorites is the idea that our staple crops might secure a ‘deal’ with the microbes in the soil that can fix nitrogen: fertilizer in return for nourishment in the form of biochemical products that only a plant can make. We have an existence proof of this approach: legumes do this. And we know that, in the case of corn, there exists at least one distant non-domesticated ancestor that seems to have had this sort of win-win proposition in place.

Is here. Carlo is very smart and tends to think more clearly about COVID than a lot of folks. As Tyler Cowen would say, highly recommended.

• Francis Collins strikes the tent
• Harvard professor found guilty
• Pan-COVID vaccine?
• James Webb Telescope launch set

My Dad sampled quite a few universities and colleges before settling on Amherst College–among them the University of Wisconsin and St. Johns College in Annapolis. By the time he had finished his training he had added Harvard and McGill to the list. And then after that he was at UCLA, Michigan and Caltech. So quite a smorgasbord.

I’ve also been around the block including some of the same schools. For my Dad, the question of what higher education should offer was a constant question with evolving answers. As I look out at the waterfront of places these days, it seems to me that the question still is out there–as central as ever to our collective work–and still evolving, albeit not in the directions that I might have hoped several decades ago when the Internet was new and full of promise.

This week, we hear of a new place in Austin that is attempting to reframe both the question and the answer. Several folks I know are associated with the effort. I wish them good luck. We used to answer the sub-question of “what is liberal arts” with the pithy: it’s learning how to learn. But of course, learning is one of the shared experiences for many human beings from the earliest age. We mostly all know how to learn.

So I can’t even answer the sub-question on liberal arts–although (like the duck), I know it when I see it. But I do think that the big question is still important. Increasingly the job of the college president is to manage crises. So there’s less time for the big question and maybe it should be more of a focus on high.

Map to the atoms of knowledge. Link here. The idea is to take the corpus of all published papers and extract n-grams (lots of them) with pointers to the DOI or its equivalent. Interesting new approach I think.

First, I’m glad to see serious consideration for the financialization of the global response to climate disruption. I still think Kim Stanley Robinson’s idea of a Central Banks-backed Stable Coin that can be mined (as in bitcoin) by carbon sequestration is the best approach. Second, I think these conferences are useful in that they create frameworks that can offer a scaffold for a multitude of separate actions–that in spite of the “no teeth” complaints. I feel the same way about the Hague Court and the UN. Finally, it seems to me that some actors (national and others) will eventually try to geoengineer and it would be useful to think about what that will mean in terms of the scaffolding.

My economist colleagues continue to argue in terms of GDP loss. In that GDP doesn’t value ecosystem services, I think that’s a big problem.

…Had it’s kickoff Ideas Lab meeting today, the link is here. I’m a part of this effort as a mentor and I must say I’m really impressed with the group of diverse scientists that have been selected for the program after a very serious competition.

What’s always fun about these types of meetings is the unexpected–today I learned about some modeling simulations going on at NCAR that I hadn’t heard about: if I heard correctly, the involve the in silico simulation of actual NEON sensor towers from specific domain sites of the Observatory. The idea is that the simulation can be tested against the actual data product time series across the ~200 data products. Neat!

Professor Naoru Koizumi and I will be co-directing a new center at the Schar School here at George Mason University. It was officially chartered today. Stay tuned for a lot more about this new venture…

I am quite frustrated with the downward spiral in collaborative science between US and Chinese researchers. Here is a rare and productive idea for creating “safe spaces” for such science to continue under the current dismal geopolitical circumstances. Having lived through the First Cold War –barely considering the Cuban Missile Crisis and other near misses– it’s clear that a continuing bridge between scientists on both sides was instrumental in keeping a rational conversation going.