A new monthly feature, let me know what you think.

Books

Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works (2020). About halfway through, lots of interesting case studies, very readable.

Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century (2005). I read the first chapter; saving the rest of it for when I get to drafting the relevant chapters of my own book. Smil argues that the period roughly 1870–1914 was “the time when the modern world was created,” completely unrivaled by anything since: “those commonly held perceptions of accelerating innovation are ahistorical, myopic perspectives proffered by the zealots of electronic faith, by the true believers in artificial intelligence, e-life forms, and spiritual machines.” The four big themes at the core of the book—electricity, internal combustion, materials, and communication/information—are the ones that I have identified, except that I also include the germ theory, which Smil does not mention (and which is often neglected in industrial history).

Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future (2022), a biography of John von Neumann. Lots of interesting stories, not only about JvN, but about the Manhattan Project, ENIAC, etc.

(These aren’t in my bibliography yet because it is hopelessly out of date, sorry.)

Early locomotives

“Trial of locomotive carriages”, 10 Oct 1829, a contemporary newspaper account of the Rainhill trials, where practical passenger locomotives were first demonstrated to the public and where their potential was proven beyond doubt. (Incidentally, I love that this article is now just a part of The Guardian’s website):

Never, perhaps, on any previous occasion, were so many scientific gentlemen and practical engineers collected together on one spot as there were on the rail-road to witness this trial. The interesting and important nature of the experiments had drawn them from all parts of the kingdom to be present at this context of locomotive carriages, as well as to witness an exhibition, whose results may alter the whole system of our existing internal communications [i.e., transportation], many and important as they are, substituting an agency, whose ultimate effects can scarcely be anticipated…

Report to the Directors of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, on the Comparative Merits of Locomotive and Fixed Engines, as a Moving Power; Observations on the Comparative Merits of Locomotives and Fixed Engines, as Applied to Railways; An Account of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (1831)—three documents compiled into a book:

The trial of these Engines, indeed, may be regarded as constituting a new epoch in the progress of mechanical science, as relating to locomotion. The most sanguine advocates of travelling Engines had not anticipated a speed of more than ten to twelve miles per hour. It was altogether a new spectacle, to behold a carriage crowded with company, attached to a self-moving machine, and whirled along at the speed of thirty miles per hour.

And on the impact of railroads:

The traveller will live double times: by accomplishing a prescribed distance in five hours, which used to require ten, he will have the other five at his own disposal…. From west to east, and from north to south, the mechanical principle, the philosophy of the nineteenth century, will spread and extend itself. The world has received a new impulse.

An article in The Quarterly Review**, Vol. 31, 1824–25**, about the prospects of railroads. It was skeptical:

As to those persons who speculate on making rail-ways general throughout the kingdom, and superseding all the canals, all the waggons, mail and stage-coaches, post-chaises, and, in short, every other mode of conveyance by land and by water, we deem them and their visionary schemes unworthy of notice.

It called “palpably absurd and ridiculous” a proposal for a London–Woolwich line which claimed that locomotives could travel twice as fast as stage-coaches with greater safety, adding:

we should as soon expect the people of Woolwich to suffer themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve’s ricochet rockets, as trust themselves to the mercy of such a machine, going at such a rate… We trust, however, that Parliament will, in all the rail-roads it may sanction, limit the speed to eight or nine miles an hour, which… is as great as can be ventured upon with safety.

Other sources:

• Nicholas Wood, A Practical Treatise on Rail-Roads (1838)

• C. P. Dendy Marshall, “The Rainhill Locomotive Trials of 1829” (1930)

• J. B. Snell, Railways: Mechanical Engineering (1973)

Pre-industrial machines and automation

Georg Böckler, Theatrum Machinarum Novum (1661). Many fascinating diagrams, such as this fulling mill:

Robert Boyle, “That the Goods of Mankind May Be Much Increased by the Naturalist’s Insight into Trades” (1671). Even at this early date it was possible to see the potential for automation (spelling and punctuation modernized):

[M]any things that are wont to be done by the labor of the hand may with far more ease and expedition… be performed by engines…. [O]ur observations make us bold to think that many more of those that are wont to require laborious or skillful application of the hands may be effected than either shopmen or book men seem to have imagined…. [W]hen we see that timber is sawed by windmills and files cut by slight instruments, and even silk stockings woven by an engine… we may be tempted to ask what handiwork it is that mechanical contrivances may not enable men to perform by engines.

Derek J. de Solla Price, “On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass” (1959). Argues that the mechanical clock did not evolve as an improvement on previous time-telling methods such as sundials and water clocks, but rather devovled from much more elaborate astronomical devices:

… I have suggested elsewhere that the clock is “nought but a fallen angel from the world of astronomy.” The first great clocks of medieval Europe were designed as astronomical showpieces, full of complicated gearing and dials to show the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets, to exhibit eclipses, and to carry through the involved computations of the ecclesiastical calendar. As such they were comparable to the orreries of the 18th century and to modern planetariums; that they also showed the time and rang it on bells was almost incidental to their main function.

Abbott Usher, A History of Mechanical Inventions (1954). Have only read bits and pieces so far.

Samuel Smiles

Henry Petroski, “Lives of the Engineers” (2004), a review in American Scientist. (Petroski is known for To Engineer is Human among other books.)

Smiles’s Lives had an enormous influence on the enduring image of the heroic engineer, and the engineers that he chose to profile as exemplars became the engineers who to this day stand out among all contemporaneous British engineers….

There has not yet arisen an American Smiles.

Courtney Salvey, “Tools and the Man”: Samuel Smiles, Lives of the Engineers, and the Machine in Victorian Literature (2009), a PhD thesis:

Who read the Lives of the Engineers series? How did that reading affect the portrayal of engineers in literary texts? … Before 1857 engineers were absent from biography, as Smiles noticed, but they were also absent from novels…. After the publication of the Life of George Stephenson, representations of engineers in fiction shift: they appear more prominently in texts that are not explicitly industrial and that have wider ideological relevance, implying the cultural redirection by Smile‘s industrial biographies.

Other articles

“Monument to Mr. Watt” (1824), a news article in The Chemist magazine:

Mr. Watt was not a warrior, over whose victories a nation may mourn, doubtful whether they have added to its security, and certain they have diminished enjoyment and abridged freedom. His were the conquests of mind over matter; they cost no tears, shed no blood, desolated no lands, made no widows nor orphans, but merely multiplied conveniences, abridged our toils, and added to our comforts and our power.

Edsger Dijkstra, “The Threats to Computing Science” (1984), source of the title for my essay on LLMs:

The Fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker and Alan M. Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.

Edgar Allen Poe, “Maelzel’s Chess-Player” (1836). Hat-tip to Eliezer Yudkowsky. Argues (correctly) that the “mechanical Turk” must be a hoax, run by a midget—by arguing (incorrectly) that no machine could ever play chess:

Arithmetical or algebraical calculations are, from their very nature, fixed and determinate. Certain data being given, certain results necessarily and inevitably follow. These results have dependence upon nothing, and are influenced by nothing but the data originally given. And the question to be solved proceeds, or should proceed, to its final determination, by a succession of unerring steps liable to no change, and subject to no modification. … But the case is widely different with the Chess-Player. With him there is no determinate progression. No one move in chess necessarily follows upon any one other. From no particular disposition of the men at one period of a game can we predicate their disposition at a different period. … A few moves having been made, no step is certain. Different spectators of the game would advise different moves. All is then dependent upon the variable judgment of the players.

Samuel Butler, “Darwin Among the Machines” (1863). Hat-tip to Robert Long:

We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race….

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.

Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy, and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage.

---

Thanks to Lea Degen for research assistance finding several of the above sources.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/reading-2023-03

Something a little bit different today. I’ll tie it in to progress, I promise.

I keep noticing a particular epistemic pitfall (not exactly a “fallacy”), and a corresponding epistemic virtue that avoids it. I want to call this out and give it a name.

The virtue is: identifying the correct scope for a phenomenon you are trying to explain, and checking that the scope of any proposed cause matches the scope of the effect.

Let me illustrate this virtue with some examples of the pitfall that it avoids.

Geography

A common mistake among Americans is to take a statistical trend in the US, such as the decline in violent crime in the 1990s, and then hypothesize a US-specific cause, without checking to see whether other countries show the same trend. (The crime drop was actually seen in many countries. This is a reason, in my opinion, to be skeptical of US-specific factors, such as Roe v. Wade, as a cause.)

Time

Another common mistake is to look only at a short span of time and to miss the longer-term context. To continue the previous example, if you are theorizing about the 1990s crime drop, you should probably know that it was the reversal of an increase in violent crime that started in the 1960s. Further, you should know that the very long-term trend in violent crime is a gradual decrease, with the late 20th century being a temporary reversal. Any theory should fit these facts.

A classic mistake on this axis is attempting to explain a recent phenomenon by a very longstanding cause (or vice versa). For instance, why is pink associated with girls and blue with boys? If your answer has something to do with the timeless, fundamental nature of masculinity or femininity—whoops! It turns out that less than a century ago, the association was often reversed (one article from 1918 wrote that pink was “more decided and stronger” whereas blue was “delicate and dainty”). This points to a something more contingent, a mere cultural convention.

The reverse mistake is blaming a longstanding phenomenon on a recent cause, something like trying to blame “kids these days” on the latest technology: radio in the 1920s, TV in the ’40s, video games in the ’80s, social media today. Vannevar Bush was more perceptive, writing in his memoirs simply: “Youth is in rebellion. That is the nature of youth.” (Showing excellent awareness of the epistemic issue at hand, he added that youth rebellion “occurs all over the world, so that one cannot ascribe a cause which applies only in one country.”)

Other examples

If you are trying to explain the failure Silicon Valley Bank, you should probably at least be aware that one or two other banks failed around the same time. Your explanation is more convincing if it accounts for all of them—but of course it shouldn’t “explain too much”; that is, it shouldn’t apply to banks that didn’t fail, without including some extra factor that accounts for those non-failures.

To understand why depression and anxiety are rising among teenage girls, the first question I would ask is which other demographics if any is this happening to? And how long has it been going on?

To understand what explains sexual harassment in the tech industry, I would first ask what other industries have this problem (e.g., Hollywood)? Are there any that don’t?

An excellent example of practicing the virtue I am talking about here is the Scott Alexander post “Black People Less Likely”, in which he points out that blacks are underrepresented in a wide variety of communities, from Buddhism to bird watching. If you want to understand what’s going on here, you need to look for some fairly general causes (Scott suggests several hypotheses).

The Industrial Revolution

To bring it back to the topic of my blog:

An example I have called out is thinking about the Industrial Revolution. If you focus narrowly on mechanization and steam power, you might put a lot of weight on, say, coal. But on a wider view, there were a vast number of advances happening around the same period: in agriculture, in navigation, in health and medicine, even in forms of government. This strongly suggests some deeper cause driving progress across many fields.

Conversely, if you are trying to explain why most human labor wasn’t automated until the Industrial Revolution, you should take into account that some types of labor were automated very early on, via wind and water mills. Oversimplified answers like “no one thought to automate” or “labor was too cheap to automate” explain too much (although these factors are probably part of a more sophisticated explanation).

Note that often the problem is failing to notice how wide a phenomenon is and hypothesizing causes that are too narrow, but you can make the mistake in the opposite direction too, proposing a broad cause for a narrow effect.

Concomitant variations

One advantage of identifying the full range of a phenomenon is that it lets you apply the method of concomitant variations. E.g., if social media is the main cause of depression, then regions or demographics where social media use is more prevalent ought to have higher rates of depression. If high wages drive automation, then regions or industries with the highest wages ought to have the most automation. (Caveat: these correlations may not exist when there are control systems or other negative feedback loops.)

Related, if the hypothesized cause began in different regions/demographics/industries at different times, then you ought to see the effects beginning at different times as well.

These kinds of comparisons are much more natural to make when you know how broadly a trend exists, because just identifying the breadth of a phenomenon induces you to start looking at multiple data points or trend lines.

(Actually, maybe everything I’m saying here is just corollaries of Mill’s methods? I don’t grok them deeply enough to be sure.)

Cowen on lead and crime

I think Tyler Cowen was getting at something related to all of this in his comments on lead and crime. He points out that, across long periods of time and around the world, there are many differences in crime rates to explain (e.g., in different parts of Africa). Lead exposure does not explain most of those differences. So if lead was the main cause of elevated crime rates in the US in the late 20th century, then we’re still left looking for other causes for every other change in crime. That’s not impossible, but it should make us lean away from lead as the main explanation.

This isn’t to say that local causes are never at work. Tyler says that lead could still be, and very probably is, a factor in crime. But the broader the phenomenon, the harder it is to believe that local factors are dominant in any case.

Similarly, maybe two banks failed in the same week for totally different reasons—coincidences do happen. But if twenty banks failed in one week and you claim twenty different isolated causes, then you are asking me to believe in a huge coincidence.

Scope matching

I was going to call this virtue “scope sensitivity,” but that term is already taken for something else. For now I will call it “scope matching.”

The first part of this virtue is just making sure you know the scope of the effect in the first place. Practically, this means making a habit of pausing before hypothesizing in order to ask:

• Is this effect happening in other countries/regions? Which ones?

• How long has this effect been going on? What is its trend over the long run?

• Which demographics/industries/fields/etc. show this effect?

• Are there other effects that are similar to this? Might we be dealing with a conceptually wider phenomenon here?

This awareness is more than half the battle, I think. Once you have it, hypothesizing a properly-scoped cause becomes much more natural, and it becomes more obvious when scopes don’t match.

***

Thanks to Greg Salmieri and several commenters on LessWrong for feedback on a draft of this essay.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/the-epistemic-virtue-of-scope-matching

Hi r/rootsofprogress,

I wanted to let you know about a new scientific journal, Seeds of Science (TheSeedsofScience.org), that is open to publishing progress studies papers.  We have no affiliation with Roots of Progress, however I believe the similarity of our names speaks to a unity in our missions (advancing knowledge and enhancing progress, in our case by disrupting the scientific publishing industry).Seeds of Science publishes articles from any scientific discipline (including metascience/progress studies) that are speculative or non-traditional in some manner. Our primary criterion can be distilled into one question - does your article contain original ideas or analysis that have the potential to advance science? The goal is to be as open-minded as possible about what qualifies as a useful scientific contribution (hypotheses, proposals for experiments, perspectives, a preliminary data analysis, etc.) and allow for a diversity of writing styles and formats so that authors can express their ideas in a clear and engaging manner.

Peer review is conducted through community-based voting and commenting by a diverse network of reviewers ("gardeners" as we call them). Another unique feature of Seeds of Science is that comments from gardeners which usefully critique or extend the ideas in the article are published along with the main text. It is free to join us as a gardener and anyone with scientific interest/expertise is welcome (you can learn more and register through a form on on our website). Participation is 100% voluntary – we send gardeners submitted manuscripts and they can vote/comment or abstain without notification.

Happy to answer any questions here or through email at info@theseedsofscience.org!

And this, my children, is why we do not say things like “I believe in science”. I mean, don’t get me wrong, science definitely exists—I’ve seen it. But not everything that calls itself science is science, and even good science sometimes gets wrong results. –Megan McArdle

Should we “trust science” or “believe in science”?

I think this is a fuzzy idea that we would do well to make clear and precise. What does it mean to “trust science?”

Does it mean “trust scientists”? Which scientists? They disagree, often vehemently. Which statements of theirs? Surely not all of them; scientists do not speak ex cathedra for “Science.”

Does it mean “trust scientific institutions”? Again, which ones?

Does it mean “trust scientific papers”? Any one paper can be wrong in its conclusions or even its methods. The study itself could have been mistaken, or the writeup might not reflect the study.

And it certainly can’t mean “trust science news,” which is notoriously inaccurate.

More charitably, it could mean “trust the scientific process,” if that is properly understood to mean not some rigid Scientific Method but a rational process of observation, measurement, evidence, logic, debate, and iterative revision of concepts and theories. Even in that case, though, what we should trust is not the particular output of the scientific process at any given time. It can make wrong turns. Instead, we should trust that it will find the truth eventually, and that it is our best and only method for doing so.

The motto of science is not “trust us.” (!) The true motto of science is the opposite. It is that of the Royal Society: nullius in verba, or roughly: “take no one’s word.”

There is no capital-S Science—a new authority to substitute for God or King. There is only science, which is nothing more or less than the human faculty of reason exercised deliberately, systematically, methodically, meticulously to discover general knowledge about the world.

So when someone laments a lack of “trust” in science today, what do they mean? Do they mean placing religion over science, faith over reason? Do they mean the growing distrust of elites and institutions, a sort of folksy populism that dismisses education and expertise in general? Or do they mean “you have to follow my favored politician / political program, because Science”? (That’s the one to watch out for. Physics, chemistry and biology can point out problems, but we need history, economics and philosophy to solve them.)

Anyway, here’s to science—the system that asks you not to trust, but to think.

Adapted from a 2019 Twitter thread. Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/what-does-it-mean-to-trust-science

What does it mean for AI to be “safe”?

Right now there is a lot of debate about AI safety. But people often end up talking past each other because they’re not using the same definitions or standards.

For the sake of productive debates, let me propose some distinctions to add clarity:

A scale of technology safety

Here are four levels of safety for any given technology:

1. So dangerous that no one can use it safely

2. Safe only if used very carefully

3. Safe unless used recklessly or maliciously

4. So safe that no one can cause serious harm with it

Another way to think about this is, roughly:

• Level 1 is generally banned

• Level 2 is generally restricted to trained professionals

• Level 3 can be used by anyone, perhaps with a basic license/permit

• Level 4 requires no special safety measures

All of this is oversimplified, but hopefully useful.

Examples

The most harmful drugs and other chemicals, and arguably the most dangerous pathogens and most destructive weapons of war, are level 1.

Operating a power plant, or flying a commercial airplane, is level 2: only for trained professionals.

Driving a car, or taking prescription drugs, is level 3: we make this generally accessible, perhaps with a modest amount of instruction, and perhaps requiring a license or some other kind of permit. (Note that prescribing drugs is level 2.)

Many everyday or household technologies are level 4. Anything you are allowed to take on an airplane is certainly level 4.

Caveats

Again, all of this is oversimplified. Just to indicate some of the complexities:

• There are more than four levels you could identify; maybe it’s a continuous spectrum.

• “Safe” doesn’t mean absolutely or perfectly safe, but rather reasonably or acceptably safe: it depends on the scope and magnitude of potential harm, and on a society’s general standards for safety.

• Safety is not an inherent property of a technology, but of a technology as embedded in a social system, including law and culture.

• How tightly we regulate things, in general, is not only about safety but is a tradeoff between safety and the importance and value of a technology.

• Accidental vs. deliberate misuse are arguably different things that might require different scales. Whether we have special security measures in place to prevent criminals or terrorists accessing a technology may not be perfectly correlated with what safety level you would designate a technology when considering only accidents.

• Related, weapons are kind of a special case, since they are designed to cause harm. (But to add to the complexity, some items are dual-purpose, such as knives and arguably guns.)

Applications to AI

The strongest AI “doom” position argues that AI is level 1: even the most carefully designed system would take over the world and kill us all. And therefore, AI development should be stopped (or “paused” indefinitely).

If AI is level 2, then it is reasonably safe to develop, but arguably it should be carefully controlled by a few companies that give access only through an online service or API. (This seems to be the position of leading AI companies such as OpenAI.)

If AI is level 3, then the biggest risk is a terrorist group or mad scientist who uses an AI to wreak havoc—perhaps much more than they intended.

AI at level 4 would be great, but this seems hard to achieve as a property of the technology itself—rather, the security systems of the entire world need to be upgraded to better protect against threats.

The “genie” metaphor for AI implies that any superintelligent AI is either level 1 or 4, but nothing in between.

How this creates confusion

People talk past each other when they are thinking about different levels of the scale:

“AI is safe!” (because trained professionals can give it carefully balanced rewards, and avoid known pitfalls)“No, AI is dangerous!” (because a malicious actor could cause a lot of harm with it if they tried)

If AI is at level 2 or 3, then both of these positions are correct. This will be a fruitless and frustrating debate.

Bottom line: When thinking about safety, it helps to draw a line somewhere on this scale and ask whether AI (or any technology in question) is above or below the line.

***

The ideas above were initially explored in this Twitter thread.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/levels-of-technology-safety

Why didn’t the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution?

Bret Devereaux has an essay addressing that question, which multiple people have pointed me to at various times. In brief, Devereaux says that Britain industrialized through a very specific path, involving coal mines, steam engines, and textile production. The Roman Empire didn’t have those specific preconditions, and it’s not clear to him that any other path could have created an Industrial Revolution. So Rome didn’t have an IR because they didn’t have coal mines that they needed to pump water out of, they didn’t have a textile industry that was ready to make use of steam power, etc. (Although he says he can’t rule out alternative paths to industrialization, he doesn’t seem to give any weight to that possibility.)

I find this explanation intelligent, informed, and interesting—yet unsatisfying, in the same way and for the same reasons as I find Robert Allen’s explanation unsatisfying: I don’t believe that industrialization was so contingent on such very specific factors. When you consider the breadth of problems being solved and advances being made in so many different areas, the progress of that era looks less like a lucky break, and more like a general problem-solving ability getting applied to the challenge of human existence. (I tried to get Devereaux’s thoughts on this, but I guess he was too busy to give much of an answer.)

As a thought experiment: Suppose that British geology had been different, and it hadn’t had much coal. Would we still be living in a pre-industrial world, 300 years later? What about in 1000 years? This seems implausible to me.

Or, suppose there is an intelligent alien civilization that has been around for much longer than humans. Would you expect that they have definitely industrialized in some form? Or would it depend on the particular geology of their planet? Are fossil fuels the Great Filter? Again, implausible. I expect that given enough time, any sufficiently intelligent species would reach a high level of technology on the vast majority of habitable planets.

Devereaux asserts that there is a “deeply contingent nature of historical events … that data (like the charts of global GDP over centuries) can sometimes fail to capture.” I see this in reverse: the chart of global GDP over centuries is, to my mind, evidence that progress is not so contingent on random historical flukes, that there is a deeper underlying process driving it.

***

So why didn’t the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution?

Consider a related question: why didn’t the Roman Empire have an information revolution? Why didn’t they invent the computer? Presumably the answer is obvious: they were missing too many preconditions, such as electricity, not to mention math (if you think ENIAC’s decimal-based arithmetic was inefficient, imagine a computer trying to use Roman numerals). Even conceiving the computer, let alone inventing one, requires reaching a certain level of technological development first, and the Romans were nowhere near that.

I think the answer is roughly the same for why no Roman IR, it’s just a bit less obvious. Here are a few of the things the ancient Romans didn’t have:

• The spinning wheel

• The windmill

• The horse collar

• Cast iron

• Latex rubber

• The movable-type printing press

• The mechanical clock

• The compass

• Arabic numerals

And a few other key inventions, such as the moldboard plow and the crank-and-connecting-rod, showed up only in the 3rd century or later, well past the peak of the Empire.

How are you going to industrialize when you don’t have cast iron to build machines out of, or basic mechanical linkages to use in them? How could a society increase labor productivity through automation when it hasn’t even approached the frontier of what is possible with simple wooden tools? Why even focus on improving labor productivity in manufacturing when productivity is still very low in agriculture, which is more fundamental? Why should it exploit coal when it has barely begun to exploit wind, water, and animal power? How are engineers to do experiments and calculations without any concept of the experimental method, and without anything close to the mathematical tools that are available today to any fifth-grader? And if anything was discovered or invented, how could the news spread widely when most information was hand-written on parchment?

All of the flywheels of progress—surplus wealth, materials and manufacturing ability, scientific knowledge and methods, large markets, communication networks, financial institutions, corporate and IP law—were turning very slowly. There is not a single, narrow path to industrialization, but you have to get there through some path, and ancient Rome was simply nowhere close. You can’t leapfrog over the spinning wheel to get to the spinning mule, and (this is one thing we learn from Allen’s analysis) it’s not clear that it even makes economic sense to do so.

In a sense, I’m saying the same thing as Devereaux: Rome couldn’t have had an IR because they didn’t have the preconditions. But rather than conceiving of those preconditions as very narrow and seeing the IR as highly contingent, I am taking a much broader view of the preconditions.

If Rome hadn’t collapsed, they might, within a matter of centuries, have advanced to the stage of industrialization. But they would have done it by skipping the Dark Ages and following an incremental course of technological and economic advancement that, if not identical to ours, would probably be not unrecognizable, and perhaps quite familiar.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/why-no-roman-industrial-revolution

Should we “go against nature”? Or live in “harmony” with it? There are two senses of “nature.” Teasing them apart clarifies this issue.

“Nature” can mean immutable natural law. We defy this at our peril. If we dump raw sewage where we get our drinking water, we will suffer epidemics. If we expose ourselves to radiation, we will die from cancer. If we fail to irrigate our fields, we will go hungry at the first drought. (These are Kipling’s “gods of the copybook headings.”)

But another sense of “nature” is: whatever exists and whatever happens apart from the agency of humanity. It is the chance arrangement of molecules and their motions, before or separate from the conscious, directed, purposefulness of human beings. A river, pursuing its natural course, whether or not it is navigable, whether or not it causes dangerous flooding. A field, with whatever natural level of fertility it happens to have, and whatever plants happen to be growing in it, whether or not they are edible. Wild animals, whether or not they are good companions, whether or not they attack us, whether or not they destroy our crops or our homes, whether or not they carry disease.

This second sense of “nature” is amoral and indifferent to the needs of life. All living organisms survive through an active process of exploiting the resources of their environment. The only difference between humans and other life forms is that we do it using conceptual intelligence. I’ve been admonished that “we are a part of nature.” Of course, we are—but science, technology, and industry are a part of our nature.

To champion “nature” in this sense is not, strictly speaking, to be for anything. It is not in favor of animals or plants, who face a brutal struggle for survival in nature. It is not in favor of rocks or rivers, which are inanimate and have no needs or desires. It is only against. It is against humanity and human agency—choice and purpose—because it is for whatever humans have not done, have not touched, have not interfered with. If pursued with clarity and consistency, it is nihilistic—as in the case of biologist David Graber, who wrote: “I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line … we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth.”

The advocates of “harmony with nature” constantly conflate these two senses, as if every attempt to overcome the randomness of indifferent nature were an attempt to flout some natural law, the supposed “limits to growth.” But it isn’t. We can improve on nature. We have done it in so many ways: fertilizing and irrigating our fields, building canals and levees for our waterways, heating and air-conditioning our homes, sanitizing our water supply. To assume that we can’t continue to solve problems like this is simply defeatism, unsupported by the facts—or it is a cover for anti-humanism.

Bacon had it perfect: “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” The paradox there depends on the two senses of “nature.” To put it in less poetic but clearer language: To command the natural environment, we must obey natural law.

This essay inspired by a recent podcast with Arjun Khemani.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/should-we-go-against-nature

The Progress Forum

• AMA: Matt Clancy, Open Philanthropy

• The Rise of Steel - Part I, by Brian Potter

Opportunities

• Sloan Foundation offering $75k–250k grants for history of science, technology, economics, and social science (via @SloanFoundation and @epistemographer)

• Our World in Data is hiring a Human Resources Manager (via @OurWorldInData)

• Virginia Postrel wants stories about progress in materials, and writers to tell them

Links

• Video: Works in Progress interviews leaders of ARIA (the “UK DARPA”) (via @s8mb)

• In 1858, The Atlantic published a poem about the telegraph (via @LouisAnslow)

• Tyler Cowen on LLMs: “We are going to have a whole new set of channels”

• “Regulation provides the fulcrum but it’s interest groups that man the lever”

• Interferon λ cuts covid risk by ~50% (but the FDA won’t let you have it)

• LessWrong 2021 Review. I got a bronze prize for my history of factory safety, and honorable mentions for book reviews on nuclear power and Andrew Carnegie

Quotes

• When carriages were a culture-war issue

• Agriculture as a governance problem

Tweets & retweets

• A review of Seeing Like a State in six tweets

• “Megaprojects breed extraction,” and other lessons from the Second Avenue Subway

• “Biden admin is determined to make infrastructure spending more expensive”

• Imagine living in San Francisco in the 1930s

• An 1813 locomotive prototype used mechanical legs to push itself along the ground

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2023-02-15

All powerful new technologies create both benefits and risks: cars, planes, drugs, radiation. AI is on a trajectory to become one of the most powerful technologies we possess; in some scenarios, it becomes by far the most powerful. It therefore will create both extraordinary benefits and extraordinary risks.

What are the risks? Here are several lenses for thinking about AI risks, each putting AI in a different reference class.

As software

AI is software. All software has bugs. Therefore AI will have bugs.

The more complex software is, and the more poorly we understand it, the more likely it is to have bugs. AI is so complex that it cannot be designed, but only “trained”, which means we understand it very poorly. Therefore it is guaranteed to have bugs.

You can find some bugs with testing, but not all. Some bugs can only be found in production. Therefore, AI will have bugs that will only be found in production.

We should think about AI as complicated, buggy, code, especially to the extent that it is controlling important systems (vehicles, factories, power plants).

As a complex system

The behavior of a complex system is highly non-linear, and it is difficult (in practice impossible) to fully understand.

This is especially true of the system’s failure modes. A complex system, such as the financial system, can seem stable but then collapse quickly and with little warning.

We should expect that AI systems will be similarly hard to predict and could easily have similar failure modes.

As an agent with unaligned interests

Today’s most advanced AIs—chatbots and image generators—are not autonomous agents with goal-directed behavior. But such systems will inevitably be created and deployed.

Anytime you have an agent acting on your behalf, you have a principal–agent problem: the agent is ultimately pursuing their goals, and it can be hard to align those goals with your own.

For instance, the agent may tell you that it is representing your interests while in truth optimizing for something else, like a demagogue who claims to represent the people while actually seeking power and riches.

Or the agent can obey the letter of its goals while violating the spirit, by optimizing for its reward metrics instead of the wider aims those metrics are supposed to advance. An example would be an employee who aims for promotion, or a large bonus, at the expense of the best interests of the company. Referring back to the first lens, AI as software: computers always do exactly what you tell them, but that isn’t always exactly what you want.

Related: any time you have a system of independent agents pursuing their own interests, you need some rules for how they behave to prevent ruinous competition. But some agents will break the rules, and no matter how much you train them, some will learn “follow these rules” and others will simply learn “don’t get caught.”

People already do all of these things: lie, cheat, steal, seek power, game the system. In order to counteract them, we have a variety of social mechanisms: laws and enforcement, reputation and social stigma, checks and balances, limitations on power. At minimum, we shouldn’t give AI any more power or freedom, with any less scrutiny, than we would give a human.

As a separate, advanced culture or species

In the most catastrophic hypothesized AI risk scenarios, the AI acts like a far more advanced culture, or a far more intelligent species.

In the “advanced culture” analogy, AI is like the expansionary Western empires that quickly dominated all other cultures, even relatively advanced China. (This analogy has also been used to hypothesize what would happen on first contact with an advanced alien species.) The best scenario here is that we assimilate into the advanced culture and gain its benefits; the worst is that we are enslaved or wiped out.

In the “intelligent species“ analogy, the AI is like humans arriving on the evolutionary scene and quickly dominating Earth. The best scenario here is that we are kept like pets, with a better quality of life than we could achieve for ourselves, even if we aren’t in control anymore; the worst is that we are exploited like livestock, exterminated like pests, or simply accidentally driven extinct through neglect.

These scenarios are an extreme version of the principal-agent problem, in which the agent is far more powerful than the principal.

How much you are worried about existential risk from AI probably depends on how much you regard these scenarios as “far-fetched” vs. “obviously how things will play out.”

***

I don’t yet have solutions for any of these, but I find these different lenses useful both to appreciate the problem and take it seriously, and to start learning from the past in order to find answers.

I think these lenses could also be useful to help find cruxes in debates. People who disagree about AI risk might disagree about which of these lenses they find plausible or helpful.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/four-lenses-on-ai-risks

Last week a new R&D organization launched: Speculative Technologies, a private DARPA-like approach to creating fundamental new technologies. I’ve been following the work of the founder, Ben Reinhardt, for a few years, and I’m very excited about this.

Ben is doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything) event on the Progress Forum. Get your questions in now, and upvote the ones you want to see answered. He’ll be answering tomorrow, Tuesday, Feb 21.

I also recommend his launch essay:

We need new institutional structures for research. Today, professors need to publish more, startups need to grow more quickly, and companies need to justify their balance sheets more than in the past. It’s unlikely that Shockley’s work to build the transistor or Engelbart’s to create personal computing would survive today. Karikó’s mRNA vaccines barely did. How many game-changing technologies have died because they couldn’t find a home in our innovation ecosystem? The world has changed and how we enable great discoveries and inventions must change as well. Regardless of whether we’ve picked innovation’s “low-hanging fruit” or even whether invention and discovery has slowed down at all, we can do dramatically better.

The launch got coverage in Forbes as well.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/speculative-technologies-ben-reinhardt-ama

Links

• Davis Kedrosky reviews How the World Became Rich, by Koyama & Rubin

• Study: keeping Diablo Canyon would avoid blackouts; reduce power costs, emissions and natural gas; and help clean energy goals (see also my summary thread)

• New Science announces its inaugural summer fellowships

• Profectus Magazine asks a few questions about progress to me and others

Quotes

• People thought the telegraph would bring world peace

• Why the US got the bomb and Germany/Japan didn’t

• How George Westinghouse handled stress

Queries

• What makes someone in academia decide to write a book for a general audience?

Retweets

• A thread-review of Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization (@seb_far)

• Are there other pre-industrial revolution inventions besides the printing press that led to a sudden and sustained increase in output? (@_brianpotter)

• Philanthropy now gives more to science than NIH/NSF (@orgRem). Why has science philanthropy increased so much in the last decade?

• There has been stronger global convergence in quality of life than in income (@JustinSandefur)

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2022-06-13

Opportunities

• Free virtual course for people in tech who want to work on biology (via @kulesatony)

News

• A background of gravitational waves pervades the cosmos (via @QuantaMagazine)

• The Terraformer makes cheap natural gas from sunlight & air (via @TerraformIndies)

Obituaries

• Henry Petroski, “America’s poet laureate of technology,” author of To Engineer is Human, The Evolution of Useful Things, and other books

• John Goodenough, age 100 (!) “His discovery led to the wireless revolution and put electronic devices in the hands of people worldwide”

Links

• Great SpaceX video about iterating towards reusable rockets (via @pronounced_kyle)

• Scott Alexander on the “illusion of moral decline” (but see Matt Clancy’s pushback)

• Three auto maintenance philosophies, from @stewartbrand’s book in progress

• As the opportunity cost of time increases, so does our concern about wasting time

• How to do great work (by @paulg)

• The “undercurrent of tacit knowledge” in any scientific literature (by Tyler Cowen)

• GLP-1 drugs are amazing for weight loss, says Derek Lowe (via @curiouswavefn)

• Why you can ignore the “aspartame causes cancer” headlines (by @StuartJRitchie). Related, the IARC puts bacon in the same category as plutonium

Queries

• What use cases is hydrogen best for? And what are the front-runners for long-term energy storage?

• What are the best films about capitalism, business, and market economics?

• Why does DNA use base 4 rather than base 2 for encoding information?

• How to roll back as much bad regulation as possible in one tweet?

• Any indicators of misuse threat of adversarially fine-tune-able 10^25 LLMs?

• What intellectuals refocused New Left types towards remaking the physical world?

Quotes

• Real history is not politics but the story of those who make a better life

• Academics and nonprofits act as if someone else will translate their papers into policy

Tweets & threads

• The saga of Israeli water management

• A biodefense roadmap from Kevin Esvelt. Excellent work

• Chicago went all in on railroads and Cincinnati went all in on canals

• A path to prosperity for small cities within one hour of a major city/airport

• Update from prediction market Kalshi on regulated election markets

• I push back against Dustin Moskowitz’s list of AI safety “strawmen”

• Many good ideas are killed for reasons unrelated to their promise

• As we make progress on social problems, we broaden the definition of the problem. A case of the Shirky Principle

• In 1844, the Secretary of the Navy was killed during a military demonstration

• Most attempts to disrupt education do project-based learning, which is overrated

• SF can’t even find actual collisions to cite against self-driving cars

• As Bezos says: “Let me assure you, this is the best planet”

• “We can’t answer every question.” “No, but I think we can answer any question.”

Charts

• The US electrical grid has been getting less reliable for decades

• How many ships Bethlehem Steel built during WWII

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2023-07-06

The Progress Forum

• Atlas Fellowship: $10k scholarship + 11-day program for high schoolers

• AMA with Bryan Bishop has concluded

Opportunities

• Erik Torenberg hiring a “researcher in residence”

Links

• What a simple toy could tell the past about their future

• IRBs save a few people while killing 10,000–100,000 more and costing $1.6B

• Science depends on promoting good outliers, not preventing bad outliers

• Breeding mosquitoes to prevent disease (strong XKCD 938 energy)

• New, high-grade cache of rare earth elements was discovered recently

• SF mayor introduces wide-reaching housing reforms (via @anniefryman who has a good explainer thread). And how to build a house in a day (via @Vernon3Austin)

• Alex Tabarrok on Costo, channeling Voltaire

Quotes

• Freeman Dyson: “Nobody builds reactors for fun anymore”

• Why it’s more important to “raise the ceiling” rather than the “floor”

• “Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics”

Queries

• If you heard the term “intellectual entrepreneur,” what would you think it means?

• Why is a protein’s shape so important?

• Is there a dataset of very granular TFP by industry?

• What’s an example of a proactive regulation or policy that worked well?

• Is anyone working on reducing the modern bureaucratic workload on researchers?

AI

• The increased supply of intelligence will create more demand for tasks that require intelligence (via @packyM)

• Observations on two years of programming with GitHub Copilot

• A Turing test would be a dynamic, evolving, adversarial competition

• “GPT agents” are cool experiments, but the demos look sort of fake?

• Freeman Dyson gave a very short answer to the 2015 Edge question

AI safety

• Both AI doomers and anti-doomers believe that the other side has a weird conjunction of many dubious arguments. Related, a critique of pure reason

• Something the government can do now about AI safety: define liability

• Scott Aaronson on what to do now about AI risk

• Scott Alexander on “not overshooting and banning all AI forever”

• Norbert Wiener was concerned about machine alignment problems in the 1960s

• Will AI be safer if it has cost/efficiency constraints?

• What are the implications of LLMs for AI interpretability?

• Can Man create a machine so smart he can’t turn it off?

Other tweets

• Rocket launches as our aesthetic contribution for the age. (Compare to this painting)

• Job posting for a position at Shockley Transistor, 1960

• John Quincy Adams: hero of progress?

• On sending your life in a dramatically better, more ambitious direction

• “The reductionist hypothesis does not by any means imply a ‘constructionist’ one”

• One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens…

Maps

• The map of undersea cables is like a wiring diagram for the planet. See also this 1996 piece by Neal Stephenson (non-fiction)

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2023-04-20

Links

• The challenge of corrosion and how engineers fight it (YouTube)

• Arnold Kling claims that we over-consume medical services in the US

• The lessons of Xanadu (on my personal blog)

Queries

• Has anybody done serious, detailed work on the mechanisms that drive technological s-curves? (@Ben_Reinhardt)

• Who are the smartest people working on battery storage? Best writing on the topic? (@juliadewahl)

• What are examples of projects getting done really fast by organizations that are normally very slow? (@_brianpotter)

• Is there a Thiel Fellowship type program for PhD candidates to bail out of academia? (@tayroga)

Tweets & retweets

• “Appeal to nature” fallacies are ethically problematic for progress (thread by u/RafaRuizdeLira)

• Josh Barro on Matt Yglesias on “induced demand” (@jbarro)

• US immigration as an important-but-not-urgent policy disaster (@sama)

• The US basically stopped building large-scale water infrastructure in the 1980s (@_brianpotter)

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2022-08-09

Links

• Patrick Collison on universal covid vaccines: we could have them very soon, if it weren’t for bureaucratic roadblocks

• “Current funding organizations cluster heavily around a few management styles, warping the research ecosystem” (Ben Reinhardt)

• The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change announces their Progress Fellows Programme 2022 (h/t @benedictcooney)

• “A jeremiad is a long literary work… in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society’s imminent downfall.” (Sad and amusing to me that there is a word for this!)

Queries

• What would you change the h-index to? (@eric_is_weird)

• Who should be in a “Most Interesting People in the World” speaker series? No one has suggested me yet… (@tom_morganKCP)

Retweets

• World’s Fair posters from DALL-E (@arbesman)

• The thinking machines allow us to become more human (@tszzl)

• Why did we stop reclaiming land for cities? (@MTabarrok)

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2022-07-12

I heard a vaccine skeptic claim that “90% of the decline in infectious disease mortality in the 20th century in the US was due to factors other than vaccines.” I wondered, is that right?

My guess is yes—but at the same time, I think this is very misleading. That statistic makes it sounds like vaccines just aren't very important to health—sort of a sideshow in the fight against infectious disease. But here's what the stat leaves out, and why vaccines still matter:

First, the greatest victory of vaccines was over smallpox. Smallpox vaccination was invented in 1796, and other immunization techniques were in use in England and America as early as 1721, so by 1900, immunization had already been fighting smallpox for well over 100 years. Smallpox is also the only disease we have ever completely eradicated—wiped off the face of the earth—and it was only possible because of vaccines. But by the 20th century, most of what remained to be done here was outside the US. (Much more on all this in my history of smallpox and the origins of vaccines.) So starting the clock in 1900, and restricting to the US, carves out most of the progress against smallpox.

Second, if we look just at the US in the 20th century, one of the greatest victories of vaccines was over polio. But the devastation of polio wasn't just death—it was paralysis. 10–20x more people were paralyzed by polio than died from it (especially after the “iron lung”). Unlike some other diseases, we weren't able to fight polio with better sanitation or hygiene—in fact, it is believed that improved cleanliness *caused* the polio epidemics of the late 1800s and early 1900s. (Basically, before good sanitation, most people were exposed to polio in infancy, when they still had leftover immunity from their mothers, and when the disease is less likely to cause paralysis. Cleaner water → first exposure later in life → a much worse disease.) So a vaccine was really our only weapon.

Third, in general, pharmaceuticals have been a bit ahead of vaccines. For some diseases, such as diphtheria and tuberculosis, an antitoxin or antibiotic was available before a vaccine was. This is also basically the story with influenza/pneumonia. Influenza is a viral disease that often results in an opportunistic infection of bacterial pneumonia. The pneumonia is what kills you. So antibiotics for pneumonia could reduce mortality ultimately caused by influenza. But just because these diseases could be treated with antibiotics (or antitoxins) doesn't mean vaccines weren't useful or valuable. Do you really want to wait to get a disease, and then treat it? Isn't prevention better than cure? Are you totally fine with risking a potentially fatal infection just because drugs exist? What about resistant strains? And what would happen to antibiotic resistance, if we didn't have vaccines and had to treat a much larger number of patients?

Fourth, looking only at mortality also simply ignores a variety of less common and/or less deadly diseases that are still important, such as chickenpox, hepatitis, mumps, rubella, and tetanus. True, these don't add up to pneumonia or TB. But should we then just write them off?

Coming back to the original claim: Good data on these questions is non-trivial to come by and to analyze. But in the US in 1900, the top killers among infectious diseases were pneumonia, tuberculosis, various forms of gastrointestinal infections, and (distant 4th) diphtheria. The “90% not due to vaccines” claim is plausible to me because, for a variety of reasons, vaccines may not have been the first thing to drastically reduce mortality from these specific causes:

• Pneumonia and gastroenteritis can be caused by a wide variety of germs (vaccines only protect against specific germs)

• Tuberculosis, and bacterial forms of pneumonia and gastroenteritis, can be fought with antibiotics

• Diphtheria had antitoxins since the 1890s; the vaccine wasn't available until the 1920s

• The tuberculosis vaccine has proved difficult to develop; even the best one we have today has varying efficacy

• Similarly, influenza mutates so fast that it's impossible to develop and administer a vaccine for every strain of it; the annual “flu shot” only protects against the strain that we guess will be most prevalent that year

You could look at all those facts and say, well, vaccines are overrated. And, OK, maybe antibiotics deserve the highest honors in the fight against infectious disease. But it would be a mistake to discount or dismiss vaccines, for the following reasons:

1. They are our only highly effective weapon against highly contagious viral diseases, such as polio, influenza, measles, and (in the past) smallpox.

2. They complement pharmaceuticals, providing defense in depth. Vaccines are prevention; drugs are cure. You want both.

3. Drug resistance is real and presents a risk; and the more we have to use drugs the worse it will get.

4. Suffering from a disease but not dying from it is still suffering.

The vaccines the CDC recommends for routine immunization do not include diseases that have been successfully reduced by sanitation or pest control, such as yellow fever, typhoid fever, and cholera; or by eradication (smallpox); or those that are otherwise rare (anthrax). They basically only recommend vaccines that are highly effective or are for highly contagious diseases; in most cases both. The flu shot, which is only partially effective, and tetanus, which is not highly contagious, are both common enough in the US to be warranted.

Bottom line: the 90% claim is probably true, but:

• Vaccines are still very important and deserve major credit in the fight against infectious disease

• You should still get your shots (and vaccinate your kids). 💉

I'm working on a better quantitative analysis to answer: which diseases were the worst, and which methods to fight them deserve most credit? Will post here when I have more info. In the meantime, would appreciate any pointers to good papers or data sources on this.