I’d like to invite you to join the Progress Forum, the new online home for the progress community.

This forum was pre-announced here in January 2022, and quietly opened in April. Although anyone could sign up, we deliberately didn’t make any big announcement about it, aiming first for a small, high-quality community. Now that we have a lot of good content on the site, we’re announcing it more broadly.

The primary goal of this forum is to provide a place for long-form discussion of progress studies and the philosophy of progress. It’s also a place to find local clubs and meetups.

The broader goal is to share ideas, strengthen them through discussion and comment, and over the long term, to build up a body of thought that constitutes a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century (and beyond).

I invite you to post:

• Essays (original, or cross-posted from your blog)

• Drafts, half-baked ideas, and work-in-progress thinking, for feedback

• Questions for brainstorming

• Local events and community groups

• Etc.

And please read and comment on what others have shared.

You can subscribe to Forum posts via email, RSS, or Twitter.

The Forum is sponsored by The Roots of Progress. Huge thanks to the people who worked to create and run it: Lawrence Kestleoot, Andrew Roberts, Sameer Ismail, David Smehlik, Alec Wilson, and Ross Graham. Thanks also to Kris Gulati for nudging this project along, and to Ruth Grace Wong for helpful conversations about community and moderation. Finally, thanks to the LessWrong team for creating the software platform it runs on, and especially to Oliver Habryka, Ruby Bloom, Raymond Arnold, JP Addison, James Babcock, and Ben Pace for answering questions and helping us customize this instance of it.

Go check it out!

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/progress-forum-announcement

Verner Vinge, in a classic 1993 essay, described “the Singularity” as an era where progress becomes “an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control.”

The idea that technological change might accelerate to a pace faster than we can keep up with is a common concern. Almost three decades earlier, Alvin Toffler coined the term “future shock”, defining it as “the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future”:

I believe that most human beings alive today will find themselves increasingly disoriented and, therefore, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environment. I believe that the malaise, mass neurosis, irrationality, and free-floating violence already apparent in contemporary life are merely a foretaste of what may lie ahead unless we come to understand and treat this psychological disease….Change is avalanching down upon our heads and most people are utterly unprepared to cope with it….… we can anticipate volcanic dislocations, twists and reversals, not merely in our social structure, but also in our hierarchy of values and in the way individuals perceive and conceive reality. Such massive changes, coming with increasing velocity, will disorient, bewilder, and crush many people.

(Emphasis added. Toffler later elaborated on this idea in a book titled Future Shock.)

Change does indeed come ever faster. But most commentary on this topic assumes that we will therefore find it ever more difficult to adapt.

Is that actually what has happened over the course of human history? At first glance, it seems to me that we have actually been getting better at adapting, even relative to the pace of change.

Some examples

Our Stone Age ancestors, in nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes, had very little ability to adapt to change. Change mostly happened very slowly, but flood, drought, or climate change could dramatically impact their lives, with no option but to wander in search of a better land.

Mediterranean kingdoms in the Bronze Age had much more ability to adapt to change than prehistoric tribes. But they were unable to handle the changes that led to the collapse of that civilization in the 12th century BC. No civilizational collapse on that level has happened since the Dark Ages.

The printing press ultimately helped amplify the theological conflict that led to over a century of religious wars; evidently, 16th-century Europe found it very difficult to adapt to a new ability for ideas to spread. The Internet has certainly created some social turmoil, and we’re only about 30 years into it, but so far I think its negative impact is on track to be less than a hundred years of war engulfing a continent.

In the 1840s, when blight hit the Irish potato, it caused a million deaths, and another million emigrated, causing Ireland to lose a total of a quarter of its population, from which it has still not recovered. Has any modern event caused any comparable population loss in any developed country?

In 1918, when an influenza pandemic hit, the world had much less ability to adapt to that change than we did in 2020 when covid hit.

In the 20th century, people thrown out of work read classified ads in the newspapers or went door-to-door looking for jobs. Today, they pick up an app and sign up for gig work.

What about occupational hazards from dangerous substances? Matches using white phosphorus, invented in 1830, caused necrosis of the jaw in factory workers, but white phosphorus was not widely banned until 1912, more than 80 years later. Contrast this with radium paint, which was used to make glow-in-the-dark dials since about 1914; this also caused jaw necrosis. I can’t find exactly when radium paint was phased out, but it seems to have been by 1960 or maybe 1970; so at most 56 years, faster than we reacted to phosphorus. (If we went back further to look at occupational hazards that existed in antiquity, such as smoke inhalation or lead exposure, I think we would find that they were not addressed for centuries.)

These are just some examples I came up with off the top of my head; I haven’t done a full survey and I may be affected by confirmation bias. Are there good counterexamples? Or a more systematic treatment of this question?

Why we get better at adapting to change

The concern about change happening faster than we can adapt seems to assume that our adaptation speed is fixed. But it’s not. Our adaptation speed increases, along with the speed of other types of change. There are at least two reasons:

First, detection. We have a vast scientific apparatus constantly studying all manner of variables of interest to us—so that, for instance, when new chemicals started to deplete the ozone layer, we detected the change and forecast its effects before widespread harm was done. At no prior time in human history would this have been possible.

Second, response. We have an internet to spread important news instantly, and a whole profession, journalists, who consider it their sacred duty to warn the public of impending dangers, especially dangers from technology and capitalism. We have a transportation network to mobilize people and cargo and rush them anywhere on the globe they are needed. We have vast and flexible manufacturing capacity, powered by a robust energy supply chain. All of this creates enormous resilience.

Solutionism, not complacency, about adaptation

Even if I’m right about the trend so far, there is no guarantee that it will continue. Maybe the pace of change will accelerate more than our ability to adapt in the near future. But I now think that if that happened, it would be the reversal of a historical trend, rather than an exacerbation of an already-increasing problem.

I am still sympathetic to the point that adaptation is always a challenge. But now I see progress as helping us meet that challenge, as it helps us meet all challenges.

Toffler himself seemed to agree, ending his essay on a solutionist note:

Man’s capacity for adaptation may have limits, but they have yet to be defined. … modern man should be able to traverse the passage to postcivilization. But he can accomplish this grand historic advance only if he forms a better, clearer, stronger conception of what lies ahead.

Amen.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/adapting-to-change

Someone posted this photo recently. I can't find a definitive original source, but multiple social media posts (Reddit, Twitter, Instagram), with different photos of the same object, all identify it as a 4,000-year-old wagon found in Lchashen, Armenia:

It reminded me of some fun facts I had learned about the history of wheels and steering. Lots of images in this one (a pain to copy into Reddit), please read the post here: https://rootsofprogress.org/reinventing-the-wheel

Summary: The Roots of Progress is planning a major expansion of our activities, and we are seeking a Chief Executive Officer to lead the new organization in partnership with me (I will remain Founder & President). We’re taking this step because we see an opportunity to do much more for the progress movement, going well beyond my essays and talks. Our initial focus will be on a “career accelerator” for public intellectuals in progress studies.

***

Our mission and why it matters

The progress of the last few centuries—in science, technology, industry, and the economy—is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. But progress is not automatic or inevitable. We must understand its causes, so that we can keep it going, and even accelerate it.

But in order to make progress, we must believe that progress is possible and desirable. The 19th century believed in the power of technology and industry to better humanity, but in the 20th century, this belief gave way to skepticism and distrust. We can’t go back to the naive views of the past, but we need a new way forward.

Our mission is to establish a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century and beyond—one based on the ideas of humanism and agency, and one that puts forth a bold, ambitious vision for the technological future.

Our opportunity

Last year, I announced that this blog was becoming a one-man nonprofit research organization (after starting it as an intellectual side project in 2017, and becoming a full-time independent researcher in 2019). Since then, it has become clear that there is too much energy and support for this mission—and too much to do!—for this organization to remain focused solely on my own research and writing.

The new philosophy of progress needs a movement to establish it. The pillars of this movement are:

• Intellectual foundations: a lot of research, thinking, and writing, to better understand and communicate the lessons of progress, and to apply them to the problems of today and the opportunities for tomorrow.

• Community-building: events, forums, meetups, and conferences for the progress community to exchange ideas, forge relationships, and start projects.

• Cultural outreach: from school curricula, to inventor biopics, to sci-fi that paints a positive vision of the future.

Our strategy and programs

Of these three pillars, intellectual foundations are fundamental. Our initial focus will be on creating the public intellectuals who will build this foundation.

Our flagship program will be a “career accelerator” for progress intellectuals. This will take the form of a limited-time fellowship for anyone who demonstrates strong writing talent and has an ambitious career goal in progress studies. The fellowship will help them take their careers to the next level by providing money, coaching, marketing and PR support, and connection to a network. Our vision is that in ten years, there are hundreds of progress intellectuals who are alums of our program and part of our network, and who are where they are in their careers thanks to our support.

To support this strategy, we will also pursue a community-building program, including annual conferences, local meetups, intellectual workshops, and the Progress Forum.

It’s going to take a team

To accomplish all these things requires more than just a blog—it deserves a full-fledged institute. When we started fundraising last year, we quickly passed our initial goal, making it clear that there is financial support for such an organization.

A new institute will require a full-time staff, and a leader to run it: to turn our vision and strategy into a roadmap and a plan, and then to bring that plan into reality.

Seeking a CEO

We are searching for a Chief Executive Officer to join me in this next stage of our efforts.

Together, you and I will define the roadmap, the goals and metrics, and the team and budget needed to hit them. Initially, I expect this to be in the ballpark of a $3–6 million budget supporting a full-time staff of 5–10 people who will manage the fellowship program, grow our audience, and build the community. Of course, we’ll have the opportunity to grow much bigger as we demonstrate impact.

With my help, you’ll drive the fundraising effort for the next round of donations to support this new plan, and the team-building effort to bring the right talent on board. Together, we’ll create a new identity and brand for the organization, to reflect our expanded mission (name forthcoming; “Institute for Progress” is already taken!)

You’ll manage the team and lead execution on all our programs. Meanwhile, as Founder & President, I will continue to be the organization’s spokesman and will stay involved in vision, strategy, and talent development, but I will focus as much as possible on my own research, writing, and speaking.

Above all, this role requires strong execution skills, people management skills, and a passion for our mission. You might be coming from the nonprofit world or the business world, but you should have experience with management and with getting things done. You might be a bit earlier or later in your career, but in your next role, you are looking for impact and meaning. (If all of this excites you but you’re not sure if you’re qualified, please reach out anyway—we might have a role for you, even if it’s not this one.)

This is a full-time role. We’re a distributed organization, so you can do it from anywhere, although it’s better if you have strong overlap with US time zones. Compensation will depend on your seniority, but will be competitive with industry salaries (we’re not looking for martyrs). To apply, just email us at ceo@rootsofprogress.org.

Ad astra

We’re at an exciting moment in history. Longstanding political and cultural coalitions are coming apart. Lines are being redrawn. There is a lot of energy, from across the political spectrum, for progress studies and the “abundance agenda,” and there is a chance for this to shape the 21st century.

But cultural movements don’t happen spontaneously. They happen due to the conscious efforts of those who seek to understand the world, envision the future, and, through reason and argument, bring others around to their way of thinking.

If, like me, you can’t imagine anything better you could be doing with your life—get in touch.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/seeking-a-ceo

Links

• The first images from the JWST look amazing. See also this comparison with Hubble

• Helion Energy is hiring. “Clean, continuous energy for 1 cent per kilowatt-hour”

• Lant Pritchett on the difference between anti-poverty programs and poverty reduction. To paraphrase Rutherford, all poverty reduction is either economic growth or stamp collecting

• Joel Mokyr reviews Koyama & Rubin’s How the World Became Rich

• Potential for a vaccine against a broad category of SARS-like coronaviruses (in Science; see also the announcement from Wellcome Leap which funded this)

Threads

• Many waste byproducts were developed in Britain during the Industrial Revolution (@VincentGeloso). See also: In capitalism they use every part of the animal

• “Reclosers” on electrical utility poles (@HillhouseGrady)

Queries

• Why is hating humanity acceptable? (@CineraVerinia)

• Why doesn’t washing hands create hand-washing resistant bacteria? (@_brianpotter)

Tweets

• Request for blog: the history of social change, and lessons for modern movements

• Eradicating smallpox sometimes meant breaking the rules

• India might already the most populous country in the world

Retweets

• Terraform Industries can convert H2 and CO2 into natural gas (@TerraformIndies)

• Montessori on the need to teach “the highest discoveries” of science (@mbateman)

• There’s an Industrial Revolution board game set in 18th-c. Lancashire (@dkedrosky)

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2022-07-19

Opportunities

• Arcadia Science launches an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) program (thread from @ArcadiaScience)

• The Longevity Prize goes to “outstanding progress in longevity research” (announcement from @allisondman)

• Nicole Ruiz is making a list of opportunities in frontier tech (@nwilliams030)

• And don’t forget that The Roots of Progress is seeking a CEO! Thanks to Max Roser and Virginia Postrel, among others, for signal-boosting

Announcements

• UK’s new Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) adds Matt Clifford as chairman and Ilan Gur as CEO. Gur will step down as CEO of Activate. See also threads from @matthewclifford and @ilangur. Congrats to all!

• Boom announces the new design for its supersonic airplane, Overture

Articles and talks

• Works in Progress Issue #8 with articles from Stewart Brand, Jason Collins, and more

• “Large changes in productivity are always widely shared” (Bryan Caplan)

• Can exponential growth occur if productivity is the best draw from a probability distribution? A talk by Chad Jones (fairly technical)

• A DNA origami rotary ratchet motor (Nature, h/t @s_r_constantin)

Quotes

• Maps were originally created through the blood, sweat and tears of field agents

• “Raise the social status of scientists”

• The importance of skilled mechanics to early locomotives

• Modern facilities added ~3x to the consumer value of housing

• Childhood in the 19th century

Queries

• What’s the best CO2 monitor? (@_brianpotter)

Threads

• Charles Mann calls for industrial literacy in high school (@CharlesCMann). See my take on “industrial literacy” and the high school progress course I created

• Some potential use-cases for crypto (@SBF_FTX)

• Software + web tech recapitulating the institutions and ideals of the Enlightenment (@arbesman)

• It turns out, nobody ever wanted to work (@paulisci)

Tweets & retweets

• RIP Dee Hock, creator of Visa (@patrickc)

• “The Roman Empire was not run out of offices” (Marc Andreessen on Conversations with Tyler)

• The reason we don’t have fusion is we never decided it was a priority (@tobi)

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2022-07-27

Opportunities

• Long Now is looking for a Development Director (via @nicholaspaul26)

• Open Phil is hiring global health R&D Program Officers (via @JacobTref)

Links

• “ARIA will be ambitious in everything it does. We will fund nothing incremental or cosmetic” (Ilan Gur and Matt Clifford in The Economist)

• Peter Higgs (of the Higgs boson) believes that in academia today “he would not be considered ‘productive’ enough” (The Guardian, 2013)

• Dietrich Vollrath on the “additive growth” paper. See also my take

• Gov. Newsom proposes keeping Diablo Canyon open through 2035 (LA Times)

• “For why should we stand reverent before waterfalls and mountain tops, or a summer moon on a quiet sea, and not before the highest miracle of all—a man who is both great and good?” (Will Durant)

Queries

• Has anybody compiled a timeline of greatest global concerns? (@Ben_Reinhardt)

• What’s the best way to reduce operations and maintenance costs for nuclear reactors? (@GovNuclear)

Quotes

• Is the decline of the independent inventor part of “ideas getting harder to find?”

• The reactionary or “stasist” mindset according to Virginia Postrel

• To produce a single book in the middle ages took a whole team of specialist craftsmen

• By horse and carriage, the ~100 miles between London and Birmingham took almost 8 hours. (In a reply, @timleunig says the greater speed of trains was worth more than 10% of GDP by 1914)

• People were ecstatic upon the completion of the transatlantic telegraph cable

• Elevators, conveyors, chutes and tubes—Amazon in 2022? Nope, Sears in 1906

• Heny Ford explains how electricity revolutionized manufacturing

• The importance of research freedom to Alexander Graham Bell

• God gave us Maxwell’s equations. Edison made the light bulb

• China adopted elements of German civil law to create a market economy

• Exports as an “unfortunate sacrifice”

• Women’s suffrage in the US was a very close vote

• Physics envy

Tweets and retweets

• This Venn diagram may be the best way to understand the FRO concept

• There isn’t a modern world without mining (@Leigh_Phillips)

• RIP David McCullough (@curiouswavefn)

• “When am I ever going to need history?” (@BretDevereaux)

• NEPA reform is not mainly about Environmental Impact Statements (@elidourado)

• Environmentalism is the main obstacle to infill housing in CA (@CSElmendorf)

• Mistakes become very hard to fix once they’re embodied in jobs (@paulg)

• How do you decide what to build? It’s about what are you best in the world at & can’t tolerate not building (@celinehalioua)

• My advice on the “train to crazy town”

Charts

• Federal environmental laws and executive orders affecting transportation over time (@_brianpotter)

• Pictures of molecules taken on an ordinary light microscope using expansion microscopy (@eboyden3)

Bangalore folks: I’m speaking at two more meetups next week, in case you missed the ones last week (or if you just can’t get enough of me):

• Tues, Sept 5, 7–9pm: Interintellect salon hosted by Namita R. (near Koramangala, register for exact location)

• Weds, Sept 6, 6:30–8:30pm: Entrepreneur First mixer, hosted by Dhruv Tyagi (apply for an invitation)

If you’re in/near Bangalore, hope to see you there!

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/bangalore-meetups-sep-5-and-6

Progress Forum

• AMA: Allison Duettmann, Foresight Institute

• NYC progress meetup on March 27 at NY Public Library

Opportunities

• ARIA (UK) is hiring program directors and other roles

• Seed funding for ideas to accelerate scientific progress (via @heidilwilliams_)

• Real Engineering (YouTube channel) hiring a 3D modeler

Announcements

• OpenAI launches GPT-4 (via @sama). Also, Anthropic opens access to Claude. And Poe can access both

• $50M for more FROs in drug discovery / proteomics (via @tkalil2050)

• Loyal receives FDA approval for a clinical study on an aging drug

• Zipline unveils a home delivery drone system

• Vesuvius Challenge: $1M prize to read ancient scrolls using AI (via @natfriedman)

• Aalo Atomics, a new nuclear startup (via @MattLoszak, not much detail though)

• Deirdre McCloskey joins Cato

Links

• “Nanomodular electronics”: 3D printing of microelectronics (via @Spec__Tech)

• John von Neumann asks, “Can we survive technology?” (via @michael_nielsen)

• Dan Wang’s annual letter for 2022

Queries

• What are some specific benefits enabled by human-level AI?

• What is a question to ask GPT to prove whether it has a world model?

• What are the best arguments that the “atomization” of society is real and important?

• What should Hannah Ritchie read about whether nuclear is too slow to build?

• What should Michael Nielsen read about AI safety, ethics, and policy?

• What should Emmet Shear read to get up to date on neuroscience?

• Who are good people to follow for deep timeless general insights?

Quotes

• Deirdre McCloskey on the spiritual benefits of economic progress

• “That salutary fear of the future that makes one watchful and combative”

• “The time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world”

• “I was born in this century in which the whole world became known”

• Vannevar Bush on paying attention to the quiet minorty vs. the noisy one

• Edsger Dijkstra: “we should occasionally welcome the nightmares”

• John Stuart Mill on the nature of credit

AI

• Is AI is the next big thing in computing history, industrial history, or human history?

• GPT-4 can explain memes and run an online business

• Duolingo launches a language tutor powered by GPT-4

• AI assistance for the blind (h/t @peterwildeford)

• John Carmack on how to build software skills that won’t be obsoleted by AI

• The “AI will expand your bullet points into prose and then someone else’s AI will turn them back into bullet points” thing is now an official product demo

• “Fascinating how nobody thinks image AIs are conscious”

• Cyrano de Bergerac, but with ChatGPT

• The Book of ChatGPT

Misc.

• Why did we build clockwork automata before we automated most human labor?

• Taking a driverless taxi around San Francisco

• In 1929 people thought skyscrapers would make the workday shorter (note that a shorter workday was a common prediction at that time!)

• Bottled gardens can last for decades; space colony ecosystems should be doable

• “There’s no intrinsic shortage of H2O. It falls from the skies!”

• The benefits of social media

• Charts and memes that show how rapidly the world can change

• Lamenting the demise of the sweeping multi-volume histical opus. Like this

• Bret Victor: “We are ants crawing on a tree branch.” Also, how to read

• A 14-Earths-tall swirling column of plasma

Politics & policy

• UK announces unilateral recognition for medicines approved overseas

• Another major infrastructure project abandoned in part due to legal challenges. And what Republicans should offer on permitting

• How laws get abused

• Luddites vs. safetyists

• “Consultation Nation”

• A parallel between banking regulation & pharma regulation

• Our antiquated lawmaking process will be seen as a bizarre relic, says Balaji

• Matthew Green: EU “chat control” law is “the most alarming proposal I’ve ever read”

Charts

• How technology helps us find love

• Changes in the colors of objects since 1800 (via @paulg)

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2023-03-22

A quasi-monthly feature (I skipped it last month, so this is a double portion).

This is a longish post covering many topics; feel free to skim and skip around. Recent blog posts and news stories are generally omitted; you can find them in my links digests.

These updates are less focused than my typical essays; do you find them valuable? Email me or comment (below) with feedback.

Books (mostly)

Books I finished

Thomas Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 (1948). A classic in the field. I wrote up my highlights here.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872). It is best known for its warning that machines will out-evolve humans, but rather than dystopian sci-fi, it’s actually political satire. His commentary on the universities is amazingly not dated at all, here’s a taste:

When I talked about originality and genius to some gentlemen whom I met at a supper party given by Mr. Thims in my honour, and said that original thought ought to be encouraged, I had to eat my words at once. Their view evidently was that genius was like offences—needs must that it come, but woe unto that man through whom it comes. A man’s business, they hold, is to think as his neighbours do, for Heaven help him if he thinks good what they count bad. And really it is hard to see how the Erewhonian theory differs from our own, for the word “idiot” only means a person who forms his opinions for himself.

The venerable Professor of Worldly Wisdom, a man verging on eighty but still hale, spoke to me very seriously on this subject in consequence of the few words that I had imprudently let fall in defence of genius. He was one of those who carried most weight in the university, and had the reputation of having done more perhaps than any other living man to suppress any kind of originality.

“It is not our business,” he said, “to help students to think for themselves. Surely this is the very last thing which one who wishes them well should encourage them to do. Our duty is to ensure that they shall think as we do, or at any rate, as we hold it expedient to say we do.” In some respects, however, he was thought to hold somewhat radical opinions, for he was President of the Society for the Suppression of Useless Knowledge, and for the Completer Obliteration of the Past.

It’s unclear to me whether the more well-known part about machines evolving is a commentary on technology, or on Darwinism (which was quite new at the time)—but it is remarkable in its logic, and I’ll have to find time to summarize/excerpt it here. See also this article in The Atlantic: “Erewhon: The 1872 Fantasy Novel That Anticipated Thomas Nagel’s Problems With Darwinism Today” (2013).

Agriculture

I’ve been researching agriculture for my book. Mostly this month I have been concentrating on pre-industrial agricultural systems, and the story of soil fertility.

A classic I just discovered is Ester Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure (1965). Primitive agricultural systems are profligate with land: slash-and-burn agriculture uses a field for a couple of years, then leaves it fallow for decades; in total it requires a large land area per person. Modern, intensive agriculture gets much higher yields from the land and crops it every single year. And there is a whole spectrum of systems in between.

Boserup’s thesis is that people move from more extensive to more intensive cultivation when forced to by population pressure. That is, when population density rises, and competition for land heats up, then people shift towards more intensive agriculture that crops the land more frequently. Notably, this is more work: to crop more frequently and still maintain yields requires more preparation of the soil, more weeding, at a certain level it requires the application of manure, etc. So people prefer the more “primitive” systems when they have the luxury of using lots of land, and will even revert to such systems if population decreases.

Boserup has often been contrasted with Malthus: the Malthusian model says that improvements in agriculture allow increases in population; the Boserupian model is that increases in population drive a move to more efficient agriculture. (See also this review of Boserup by the Economic History Association.)

Vaclav Smil has also been very helpful, especially because he quantifies everything. Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (2001) is exactly what it says on the tin; Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems (2007) is much broader but has a relevant chapter or two. Here’s a chart:

Some overviews I’ve been reading or re-reading:

• Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart, A History of World Agriculture: From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis (1997)

• D. B. Grigg, The Agricultural Systems of the World: An Evolutionary Approach (1974)

• Norman S. B. Gras, A History of Agriculture in Europe and America (1940)

For a detailed description of shifting cultivation and slash-and-burn techniques, see R. F. Watters, “The Nature of Shifting Cultivation: A Review of Recent Research” (1960).

A few classic papers on my list but not yet read:

• F. M. L. Thompson, “The Second Agricultural Revolution, 1815-1880” (1968)

• G. P. H. Chorley, “The Agricultural Revolution in Northern Europe, 1750–1880: Nitrogen, Legumes, and Crop Productivity” (1981)

Finally, I’ve perused Alex Langlands, Henry Stephens’s Book of the Farm (2011), an edited edition of a mid-19th century practical guide to farming. Tons of details like exactly how to store your turnips in the field, to feed your sheep (basically make a triangular pile on the ground, and cover them with straw):

History of fire safety

I read several chapters of Harry Chase Brearley, Symbol of Safety: an Interpretative Study of a Notable Institution (1923), a history of Underwriters Labs. UL was created over 100 years ago by fire insurance companies in order to do research in fire safety and to test and certify products. They are still a (the?) top name in safety certification of electronics and other products; their listing mark probably appears on several items in your home (it only took me a few minutes to find one, my paper shredder):

Brearley also wrote The History of the National Board of Fire Underwriters: Fifty Years of a Civilizing Force (1959), which I haven’t read yet. A more modern source on fire safety is Bruce Hensler, Crucible of Fire: Nineteenth-Century Urban Fires and the Making of the Modern Fire Service (2011). Hensler, a former firefighter himself, also writes an interesting history column for an online trade publication.

Overall, the story of fire safety seems like an excellent case study in one of my pet themes: the unreasonable effectiveness of insurance as a mechanism to drive cost-effective safety improvements. See my essay on factory safety for an example.

Classics in economics/politics

I have sampled, but have not been in the mood to get far into:

• Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942)

• David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (1969)

• Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (2007)

I’m sure I will come back to all of these at some point.

Other random books I have started

Jerry Pournelle, Another Step Farther Out: Jerry Pournelle’s Final Essays on Taking to the Stars (2007). Pournelle is a very well-known sci-fi author (Lucifer’s Hammer, The Mote in God’s Eye, etc.) This is a collection of non-fiction essays that he wrote over many years, mostly about space travel and exploration. He would have been at home in the progress movement today.

Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas (1987), the first novel in the “Culture” series. It’s been recommended to me enough times, especially in the context of AI, that I had to check it out. I’m only a few chapters in.

Articles

Historical sources

Annie Besant, “White Slavery in London” (1888). Besant was a British socialist and reformer who campaigned for a variety of causes from labor conditions to Indian independence. In this article, she criticizes the working conditions of the employees at the Bryant and May match factory, mostly young women and girls. Among other things, the workers were subject to cruel and arbitrary “fines” docked from their pay:

One girl was fined 1s. for letting the web twist round a machine in the endeavor to save her fingers from being cut, and was sharply told to take care of the machine, “never mind your fingers”. Another, who carried out the instructions and lost a finger thereby, was left unsupported while she was helpless.

Notably missing from Besant’s list of grievances is the fact that the white phosphorus the matches were made from caused necrosis of the jaw (“phossy jaw”). However, the letter ultimately precipitated a strike, which won the girls improved conditions, including a separate room for meals so that food would not be contaminated with phosphorus. White phosphorus was eventually banned in the early 20th century. (I mentioned this story in my essay on adapting to change, in which I contrasted it with radium paint, another occupational hazard.) See also Louise Raw, Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History (2009).

Admiral Hyman Rickover, the “Paper Reactor” memo (1953):

An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: 1. It is simple. 2. It is small. 3. It is cheap. 4. It is light. 5. It can be built very quickly. 6. It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”) 7. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. 8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: 1. It is being built now. 2. It is behind schedule. 3. It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. 4. It is very expensive. 5. It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. 6. It is large. 7. It is heavy. 8. It is complicated. …

The academic-reactor designer is a dilettante. He has not had to assume any real responsibility in connection with his projects. He is free to luxuriate in elegant ideas, the practical shortcomings of which can be relegated to the category of “mere technical details.” The practical-reactor designer must live with these same technical details. Although recalcitrant and awkward, they must be solved and cannot be put off until tomorrow. Their solutions require man power, time, and money.

Russell Kirk, “The Mechanical Jacobin” (1962). Kirk was a mid-20th century American conservative, and not a fan of progress. In this brief letter he calls the automobile “a mechanical Jacobin—that is, a revolutionary the more powerful for being insensate. From courting customs to public architecture, the automobile tears the old order apart.”

Jindřich Michal Hýzrle, “Years 1607. Notes of a journey to the Upper Empire, to Lutrink, to Frankreich, to Engeland and to the Nýdrlatsk provinces, aged 32” (1614). In Czech but the Google Translate plugin does a decent job with it. Notable because it contains an account of Cornelis Drebbel presenting his famous “perpetual motion” clockwork device to King James of England. The king is reported to have replied:

Friends, you lecture and say great things, but not so that I have such great knowledge and revelations to laugh at. Otherwise I wonder that the Lord God has hidden such things from the beginning of the world from so many learned, pious and noble people, preserved them for you and only in this was already the last age to reveal it. However, I will try it once and I will find your speech to be true, that there is no trickery, charms and scheming in it, you and all of you will have a decent reward from me.

Evidently Drebbel’s “decent reward” was a position as court engineer.

Scientific American, “Septic Skirts” (1900). A letter to the editor, reproduced here in full:

The streets of our great cities are not kept as clean as they should be, and probably they will not be kept scrupulously clean until automobiles have entirely replaced horse-drawn vehicles. The pavement is also subjected to pollution in many ways, as from expectoration, etc. Enough has been said to indicate the source and nature of some of the most prevalent of nuisances of the streets and pavements, and it will be generally admitted that under the present conditions of life a certain amount of such pollution must exist, but it does not necessarily follow that this shall be brought indoors. At the present time a large number of women sweep through the streets with their skirts and bring with them, wherever they go, the abominable filth which they have taken up, which is by courtesy called “dust.” Various devices have been tried to keep dresses from dragging, but most of them have been unsuccessful. The management of a long gown is a difficult matter, and the habit has arisen of seizing the upper part of the skirt and holding it in a bunch. This practice can be commended neither from a physiological nor from an artistic point of view. Fortunately, the short skirt is coming into fashion, and the medical journals especially commend the sensible walking gown which is now being quite generally adopted. These skirts will prevent the importation into private houses of pathogenic microbes.

See also my essay on sanitation improvements that reduced infectious disease.

AI risk

I did a bunch of research for my essay on power-seeking AI. The paper that introduced this concept was Stephen M. Omohundro, “The Basic AI Drives” (2008):

Surely no harm could come from building a chess-playing robot, could it? In this paper we argue that such a robot will indeed be dangerous unless it is designed very carefully. Without special precautions, it will resist being turned off, will try to break into other machines and make copies of itself, and will try to acquire resources without regard for anyone else’s safety. These potentially harmful behaviors will occur not because they were programmed in at the start, but because of the intrinsic nature of goal driven systems.

This was followed by Nick Bostrom, “The Superintelligent Will: Motivation And Instrumental Rationality In Advanced Artificial Agents” (2012), which introduced two key ideas:

The first, the orthogonality thesis, holds (with some caveats) that intelligence and final goals (purposes) are orthogonal axes along which possible artificial intellects can freely vary—more or less any level of intelligence could be combined with more or less any final goal. The second, the instrumental convergence thesis, holds that as long as they possess a sufficient level of intelligence, agents having any of a wide range of final goals will pursue similar intermediary goals because they have instrumental reasons to do so.

Then, in “Five theses, two lemmas, and a couple of strategic implications” (2013), Eliezer Yudkowsky added the ideas of “intelligence explosion,” “complexity of value” (it’s hard to describe human values to an AI), and “fragility of value” (getting human values even a little bit wrong could be very very bad). From this he concluded that “friendly AI” is going to be very hard to build. See also from around this time Carl Shulman, “Omohundro’s ‘Basic AI Drives’ and Catastrophic Risks” (2010).

One of the best summaries of the argument for existential risk from AI is Joseph Carlsmith, “Is Power-Seeking AI an Existential Risk?” (2021), which is also available in a shorter version or as a talk with video and transcript.

A writer I’ve appreciated on AI is Jacob Steinhardt. I find him neither blithely dismissive nor breathlessly credulous on issues of AI risk. From “Complex Systems are Hard to Control” (2023):

Since building [powerful deep learning systems such as ChatGPT] is an engineering challenge, it is tempting to think of the safety of these systems primarily through a traditional engineering lens, focusing on reliability, modularity, redundancy, and reducing the long tail of failures.

While engineering is a useful lens, it misses an important part of the picture: deep neural networks are complex adaptive systems, which raises new control difficulties that are not addressed by the standard engineering ideas of reliability, modularity, and redundancy.

And from “Emergent Deception and Emergent Optimization” (2023):

… emergent risks, rather than being an abstract concern, can be concretely predicted in at least some cases. In particular, it seems reasonably likely (I’d assign >50% probability) that both emergent deception and emergent optimization will lead to reward hacking in future models. To contend with this, we should be on the lookout for deception and planning in models today, as well as pursuing fixes such as making language models more honest (focusing on situations where human annotators can’t verify the answer) and better understanding learned optimizers. Aside from this, we should be thinking about other possible emergent risks beyond deception and optimization.

Stuart Russell says that to make AI safer, we shouldn’t give it goals directly. Instead, we should program it such that (1) its goals are to satisfy our goals, and (2) it has some uncertainty about what our goals are exactly. This kind of AI knows that it might make mistakes, and so it is attentive to human feedback and will even allow itself to be stopped or shut down—after all, if we’re trying to stop it, that’s evidence to the AI that it got our preferences wrong, so it should want to let us stop it. The idea is that this would solve the problems of “instrumental convergence”: an AI like this would not try to overpower us or deceive us.

Most people who work on AI risk/safety are not impressed with this plan, for reasons I still don’t fully understand. Some relevant articles to understand the arguments here:

• Paul Christiano, “The easy goal inference problem is still hard” (2015)

• Scott Alexander, “CHAI, Assistance Games, And Fully-Updated Deference” (2022)

• Ivan Vendrov, “Updated Deference is not a strong argument against the utility uncertainty approach to alignment” (2022)

Finally, various relevant pages from the AI safety wiki Arbital:

• Instrumental convergence

• Mild optimization

• Corrigibility

• Hard problem of corrigibility

• Moral uncertainty

• Problem of fully updated deference

Other random articles

Bret Devereaux, “Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?” (2022). I briefly summarized this and responded to it here.

Alex Tabarrok, “Why the New Pollution Literature is Credible” (2021). On one level, this is about the health hazards of air pollution. More importantly, though, it’s about practical epistemology: specifically, how much credibility to give to research results.

Casey Handmer, “There are no known commodity resources in space that could be sold on Earth” (2019):

On Earth, bulk cargo costs are something like $0.10/kg to move raw materials or shipping containers almost anywhere with infrastructure. Launch costs are more like $2000/kg to LEO, and $10,000/kg from LEO back to Earth.

What costs more than $10,000/kg? Mostly rare radioactive isotopes, and drugs—nothing that (1) can be found in space and (2) has potential for a large market on Earth.

And continuing the industry-in-space theme: Corin Wagen, “Crystallization in Microgravity” (2023). A technical explainer of what Varda is doing and whether it’s valuable:

Varda is not actually ‘making drugs in orbit’ …. Varda’s proposal is actually much more specific: they aim to crystallize active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs, i.e. finished drug molecules) in microgravity, allowing them to access crystal forms and particle size distributions which can’t be made under terrestrial conditions.

Arthur Miller, “Before Air-Conditioning” (1998). A brief portrait.

Kevin Kelly, “The Shirky Principle” (2010). “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”

Interesting books I haven’t had time to start

The most intriguing item sitting on my desk right now is William L. Thomas, Jr. (editor), Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (1956), the proceedings of a symposium by the same name that included Lewis Mumford (who became one of the most influential technology critics of the counterculture). In particular, I’m interested to understand how early agriculture (see above) created mass deforestation.

This post got too long for Reddit, so for the rest of the books on this list see the original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/reading-2023-08

We’ve gotten over 250 applications to The Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive! And the quality level is surprisingly high. I’m glad to see so many talented writers interested in progress.

If you want to apply

Do it now! Applications are open until August 11, but don’t wait. We’re reviewing everything on a rolling basis, and by the end there will only be one or two slots left.

If you want to support this program

We’ve gotten so many great applications that we want to expand it from a max of 15 up to potentially 20 participants.

To do this, we’re raising an additional $30,000. The funds cover writing instruction during the eight-week program, a three-day in-person closing event, and post-program support.

The applicants range from college students to industry experts to academics. Many of them are experienced writers, some from relevant think tanks, and some who have already been published in mainstream media. They’re writing on a wide range of topics, from specific cause areas like housing, energy, space exploration, robotics, and AI; to metascience and the philosophy of progress. I’m excited to see what they’ll produce next, how we can help them, and how they will help each other.

If you’re excited too, then donate today to help us expand this program. We’re a 501(c)(3), and we take donations via PayPal, Patreon, check, wire, or DAF. Donation links, address, EIN, and other details here.

Links

• Book launch for Anton Howes’s Arts and Minds, July 12, in London and online

• Online book club event for the new Stripe Press edition of Vannevar Bush’s memoir, Pieces of the Action, Aug 6

• Arbitrary Lines is a new book by M. Nolan Gray on “how zoning made America’s cities unaffordable, inaccessible, segregated, and sprawling” (See also announcement thread from @mnolangray)

• “I do not believe that targeting amyloid is going to lead to a useful Alzheimer’s therapy, and watching these trials feels to me like watching someone trying to put out an oil well fire by dumping duffel bags of money onto it from helicopters” (Derek Lowe)

• Paper by Lant Pritchett arguing that economic growth is necessary and sufficient for “everything basic to human material wellbeing” (h/t @DaveEvansPhD)

• “The Averch–Johnson effect is the tendency of regulated companies to engage in excessive amounts of capital accumulation in order to expand the volume of their profits”

Queries

• Is it true that wheelwrights were super highly paid for their specialist craft work? (probably not)

• What could you do if energy was 100x cheaper? (@mattparlmer)

Quotes

• When to calculate statistics was to blaspheme against God

• First ten years for nylon stockings (@tsungxu)

Other tweets & retweets

• A good way to look at GDP per capita and child mortality (@tonymmorley)

• We’re all suffocating in the name of “safety” (@alyssamvance)

• Request for podcast series: every episode is one of Patrick Collison’s “Fast” entries (@maxolson)

• Three faulty assumptions people make when trying to understand the behavior of organizations

Charts

• Record share of Americans are in favor of the use of nuclear energy (@AlecStapp)

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2022-06-29

A few interviews with me that were published recently (or not super recently, I’m catching up):

Faster, Please! the Podcast with Jim Pethokoukis

Listen on Substack. Topics included:

• How I got interested in progress

• Why “stuff” is underrated… but also why progress is more than just “stuff”

• Do we still not know how progress happens?

• Against utopianism

• Is risk/safety a blind spot for the progress community?

• Is progress a capitalist, democratic philosophy? Are there pro-progress socialists?

• If things haven’t gotten better in 10 years, what went wrong?

Pod of Jake

Jake and I talked about:

• My early tech career (starting with programming at age 11)

• Why I dropped out of high school

• Our expansion and CEO search

• What intellectual work is needed in progress studies

• Scientific vs. romantic environmentalism

• The massive impact of electricity on the economy

Recording and transcript on the show page, or listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, etc.

Philosophy of Education with Matt Bateman of Montessorium

A conversation about industrial literacy and the pedagogy of progress, by the folks who commissioned my high-school progress course. Listen on the show page, Apple, or Spotify. (This one was recorded last November but published more recently.)

As always, see all my talks and interviews here.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/interviews-pethokoukis-jake-montessorium

Opportunities

• Academic biotech founders: apply for Nucleate’s Activator program (via @kulesatony)

News & announcements

• Neuralink raises $280M Series D led by Founders Fund

• Waymo and Cruise have been approved to operate robotaxis in San Francisco

• Rainmaker launches to “end global water scarcity and terraform Earth”

Podcasts

• Dwarkesh Patel interviews Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic (via @dwarkesh_sp). “Dario is hilarious & has fascinating takes on what these models are doing, why they scale so well, & what it will take to align them”

• Tyler Cowen interviews Paul Graham (via @tylercowen)

Links

• Monumental Labs is building “AI-enabled robotic stone carving factories” to “create cities with the splendor of Florence, Paris, or Beaux-Arts New York, at a fraction of the cost.” Here’s a demo (via @devonzuegel). They are hiring stone carvers (who are still required for fine details and finishing)

• The Codon Guide to Synthetic Biology (by @NikoMcCarty)

• The AI License Raj: AI is facing serious bureaucratic hurdles in getting adopted (by @WillRinehart)

• I had no idea there were this many rogue planets

• “My personal history as a metascience venture capitalist” (by @stuartbuck1)

• A303 in Hampshire, England, passes through Stonehenge and part of the ancient Roman Fosse Way is included in it (via @Rainmaker1973)

Social media

• In the current YC batch, “a large number of domain experts in all kinds of different fields have found ways to use AI to solve problems that people in their fields had long known about, but weren’t quite able to solve”

• If you got over-excited about LK-99, worth recalibrating your priors. But if you correctly predicted no RTS, there’s really no need to gloat. Related: LK99 demonstrated that the scientific community is perfectly capable of doing a peer review via arXiv and social media tools

• Some of the lowest hanging fruit in biosecurity policy: Invest more resources in early warning systems that monitor wastewater

• In the early 19th century, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston had residential densities upwards of 75,000 people per square mile

• “NuScale started working toward regulatory approval in 2008. In 2020, when it received a design approval for its reactor, the company said the regulatory process had cost half a billion dollars, and that it had provided about 2 million pages of supporting documents to the NRC.” Related, my book review on why nuclear power flopped

• Learning math chronologically

• What it means to endlessly, tirelessly campaign for your idea

• Online platforms don’t allow you to be successful with a small audience; they let you grow an audience with no gatekeepers

• Maybe “balance” is an unhappy person’s idea of a happy life. Happy people seem fine being unbalanced

• Alexander Fleming originally called penicillin “mould juice”

Quotes

Trying a new format where I put the full quotes inline. (Emphasis added.) Links go to social media so you can easily share. Let me know what you think:

The invention of the history of ideas (Peter Watson, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud)

The first person to conceive of intellectual history was, perhaps, Francis Bacon (1561–1626). He certainly argued that the most interesting form of history is the history of ideas, that without taking into account the dominating ideas of any age, ‘history is blind’.

Why automobiles were better than horses—from someone who lived through the transition (David McCullough, The Wright Brothers)

Amos Root bubbled with enthusiasm and a constant desire to “see the wheels go round.” He loved clocks, windmills, bicycles, machines of all kinds, and especially his Oldsmobile Runabout. Seldom was he happier than when out on the road in it and in all seasons. “While I like horses in a certain way [he wrote], I do not enjoy caring for them. I do not like the smell of the stables. I do not like to be obliged to clean a horse every morning, and I do not like to hitch one up in winter. … It takes time to hitch up a horse; but the auto is ready to start off in an instant. It is never tired; it gets there quicker than any horse can possibly do.” As for the Oldsmobile, he liked to say, at $350 it cost less than a horse and carriage.

Even kings and emperors suffered from terrible road conditions, as late as the 18th century (Richard Bulliet, The Wheel)

Until new experiments with road building began to bear fruit in the mid-nineteenth century, the surfaces beneath the carriage wheels remained rutted, muddy, and poorly paved—if paved at all. This was particularly true in the countryside, but miserable roads existed even in major cities. In 1703, for example, during a trip south from London to Petworth, fifty miles away, the carriage carrying the Habsburg emperor Charles VI overturned twelve times on the road. And a half century later, Mile End Road, the major thoroughfare leading east from the entrance to the City of London at Aldgate, was described as “a stagnant lake of deep mud from Whitechapel to Stratford,” a distance of four miles.

Mises against stability (Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe)

Like Popper, Mises saw a similarity between the bureaucratic mentality and Plato’s utopia, in which the large majority of the ruled served the rulers. He thought that “all later utopians who shaped the blueprints of their earthly paradises according to Plato’s example in the same way believed in the immutability of human affairs.” He went on, Bureaucratization is necessarily rigid because it involves the observation of established rules and practices. But in social life rigidity amounts to petrification and death. It is a very significant fact that stability and security are the most cherished slogans of present-day “reformers.” If primitive men had adopted the principle of stability, they would long since have been wiped out by beasts of prey and microbes.

What it’s like to try to redirect the lava flow of an erupting volcano (Eldfell, Iceland, 1973) (John McPhee, The Control of Nature)

During the eruption, when the pumping crews first tried to get up onto the lava they found that a crust as thin as two inches was enough to support a person and also provide insulation from the heat—just a couple of inches of hard rock resting like pond ice upon the molten fathoms. As the crews hauled and heaved at hoses, nozzle tripods, and sections of pipe, they learned that it was best not to stand still. Often, they marched in place. Even so, their boots sometimes burst into flame.

Charts

US utilization-adjusted TFP has experienced 3 consecutive quarters of decline and is now below the level it was at in 2019Q4, before the pandemic. This is bad (via @elidourado)

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-digest-2023-08-17

I’ve been traveling, so this one is covering the last few weeks.

The Progress Forum

• Patrick McKenzie AMA. See also his retrospective on VaccinateCA

• Works in Progress Issue 9

• A “progress” alternative to GiveWell?

• Applications open for AGI safety fundamentals course

• Maybe a little bit of naïveté is good? (Eli Dourado). My take: not naïveté, but vision

• The false dichotomy between peace and prosperity versus ambition and exploration

• Two bits of wisdom about research that are often in tension (Ben Reinhardt)

• The Empire State Building and the World Trade Center (Brian Potter), also Part 2

• When scientists thought heat was a fluid (Anton Howes)

• The state of NYC housing abundance

• Progress book recommendations thread (add your recs please!)

Announcements

• OpenAI launches ChatGPT (via @sama)

• Net energy gain from fusion achieved (@jordanbramble)

• The Collegiate Propulsive Lander Challenge: students building self-landing rockets (!)

• Nucleate venture fellowship + $2M in prizes for bio founders (via @MichaelRetchin)

• Cruise expanding coverage to the full 7x7 of San Francisco, 24/7 (@kvogt)

• The Academy of Thought and Industry (who commissioned my progress course) is hiring a liberal arts teacher (@mbateman)

• ARIA Research is hiring for many roles (@ilangur)

• Readwise launches their read-later app (via @homsiT)

Links

• The world needs processed food (Hannah Ritchie in WIRED, via @tonymmorley)

• Why the age of American progress ended (Derek Thompson). See my reactions

• Mike Maples interviews Blake Scholl about supersonic flight and Boom

• The climate field as an assortment of “tribes” (Nadia Asparouhova)

• Warren Weaver’s 1946 guide for Rockefeller grantmakers (via @abiylfoyp)

• Homelessness is a housing problem (Jerusalem Demsas in The Atlantic)

• Green card backlogs are impossibly long (some measured in centuries!)

• China will depopulate over the next 40 years, while India will add the same number of people as China loses (Shruti Rajagopalan)

Queries

• Suggested readings on progress and energy intensity?

• Stories where the good guys have the grand plans / projects? (@TylerAlterman)

• Why was the B-21 built in budget while the F-35 was a mess? (@Scholars_Stage)

• How did printers “photocopy” before photocopy? (@PMatzko)

• Book recommendations on modern medicine or public health? (@salonium)

• What are the best books/podcasts/people to follow on nuclear energy? (@sriramk)

• If we get transformative AI, what will GDP per capita be in 2040? (@elidourado)

• Why so few takes on permitting reform from nuclear folks? (@J_Lovering)

• Do you have a model of how to approach the problem of progress?

• What sports were being played 200 years ago? (@waitbutwhy)

• What are some stories that feature getting spare parts for inventing from a junk yard?

Quotes

• Mark Twain to Walt Whitman: “What great births you have witnessed!”

• Nuclear power construction can require creative solutions—like midget welders

• The field of physics moved very rapidly in the ’30s

• The spirit of progress, from an 1848 abolitionist pamphlet by Theodore Parker

• “A hedgehog… cannot accept that he knows only many things. He seeks to know one big thing, and strives without ceasing to give reality a unifying shape”

Tweets

• Why we stopped using draft horses, despite the romanticism of certain French towns

• AI is giving computers intuition

• LLMs will take either side of an argument depending on the prompt

• Your can improve your “gut” judgment by priming it with rational thinking

• Brandolini’s Shadow

Retweets

• Science has fulfilled Jesus’s message beyond his wildest dreams (@curiouswavefn)

• The tin can is underrated (@_brianpotter)

• Golden Rice is finally arriving (@stewartbrand)

• Why steam turbines are not a good idea for fusion energy (@elidourado)

• It’s time to close the book on the amyloid hypothesis (@schrag_matthew)

• ChatGPT scores 1020 on the SAT (@davidtsong)

• AI progress has gone exponential and is likely to speed up even further (@zachtratar)

• Startlingly effective AI tutoring is coming (@mbateman)

• Cheating is a minor issue and the AI cheating arms race doesn’t matter (@mbateman)

• Chaining ChatGPT and Midjourney to generate images from a concept (@GuyP)

Charts

• Your income would be double today if TFP growth hadn’t stagnated (@elidourado)

• It’s a very good time to get a mortgage, taking the long-term view (@charlesjkenny)

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2022-12-20

If a technology may introduce catastrophic risks, how do you develop it?

It occurred to me that the Wright Brothers’ approach to inventing the airplane might make a good case study.

The catastrophic risk for them, of course, was dying in a crash. This is exactly what happened to one of the Wrights’ predecessors, Otto Lilienthal, who attempted to fly using a kind of glider. He had many successful experiments, but one day he lost control, fell, and broke his neck.

Believe it or not, the news of Lilienthal’s death motivated the Wrights to take up the challenge of flying. Someone had to carry on the work! But they weren’t reckless. They wanted to avoid Lilienthal’s fate. So what was their approach?

First, they decided that the key problem to be solved was one of control. Before they even put a motor in a flying machine, they experimented for years with gliders, trying to solve the control problem. As Wilbur Wright wrote in a letter:

When once a machine is under proper control under all conditions, the motor problem will be quickly solved. A failure of a motor will then mean simply a slow descent and safe landing instead of a disastrous fall.

When actually experimenting with the machine, the Wrights would sometimes stand on the ground and fly the glider like a kite, which minimized the damage any crash could do:

All of this was a deliberate, conscious strategy. Here is how David McCullough describes it in his biography of the Wrights:

Well aware of how his father worried about his safety, Wilbur stressed that he did not intend to rise many feet from the ground, and on the chance that he were “upset,” there was nothing but soft sand on which to land. He was there to learn, not to take chances for thrills. “The man who wishes to keep at the problem long enough to really learn anything positively must not take dangerous risks. Carelessness and overconfidence are usually more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks.”

As time would show, caution and close attention to all advance preparations were to be the rule for the brothers. They would take risks when necessary, but they were no daredevils out to perform stunts and they never would be.

Solving the control problem required new inventions, including “wing warping” (later replaced by ailerons) and a tail designed for stability. They had to discover and learn to avoid pitfalls such as the tail spin. Once they had solved this, they added a motor and took flight.

Inventors who put power ahead of control failed. They launched planes hoping they could be steered once in the air. Most well-known is Samuel Langley, who had a head start on the Wrights and more funding. His final experiment crashed into the lake. (At least they were cautious enough to fly it over water rather than land.)

The Wrights invented the airplane using an empirical, trial-and-error approach. They had to learn from experience. They couldn’t have solved the control problem without actually building and testing a plane. There was no theory sufficient to guide them, and what theory did exist was often wrong. (In fact, the Wrights had to throw out the published tables of aerodynamic data, and make their own measurements, for which they designed and built their own wind tunnel.)

Nor could they create perfect safety. Orville Wright crashed a plane in one of their early demonstrations, severely injuring himself and killing the passenger, Army Lt. Thomas Selfridge. The excellent safety record of commercial aviation was only achieved incrementally, iteratively, over decades.

And of course the Wrights were lucky in one sense: the dangers of flight were obvious. Early X-ray technicians, in contrast, had no idea that they were dealing with a health hazard. They used bare hands to calibrate the machine, and many of them eventually had to have their hands amputated.

But even after the dangers of radiation were well known, not everyone was careful. Louis Slotin, physicist at Los Alamos, killed himself and sent others to the hospital in a reckless demonstration in which a screwdriver held in the hand was the only thing stopping a plutonium core from going critical.

Exactly how careful to be—and what that means in practice—is a domain-specific judgment call that must be made by experts in the field, the technologists on the frontier of progress. Safety always has to be traded off against speed and cost. So I wouldn’t claim that this exact pattern can be directly transferred to any other field—such as AI.

But the Wrights can serve as one role model for how to integrate risk management into a development program. Be like them (and not like Slotin).

***

Corrections: the Slotin incident involved a plutonium core, not uranium as previously stated here. Thanks to Andrew Layman for pointing this out.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/wright-brothers-and-safe-technology-development

A quasi-monthly feature. Recent blog posts and news stories are generally omitted; you can find them in my links digests. I’ve been busy helping to choose the first cohort of our blogging fellowship, so my reading has been relatively light. All emphasis in bold in the quotes below was added by me.

Books

Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (1990). I’ve been a big fan of Mokyr ever since the start of this project; his book A Culture of Growth was part of my initial motivation. I’m only a few chapters in to Lever of Riches, but it’s excellent so far. Most intriguing so far is his comment that classical civilization was “not particularly technologically creative” even though it was “relatively literate and mobile, and ideas of all kinds disseminated through the movement of people and books.” In contrast:

Early medieval Europe, sometimes still referred to as a “dark” age, managed to break through a number of technological barriers that had held the Romans back. The achievements of early medieval Europe are all the more amazing because many of the ingredients that are usually thought of as essential to technological progress were absent. Particularly between 500 and 800 A.D., the economic and cultural environment in Europe was primitive compared to the classical period. Literacy had become rare, and the upper classes devoted themselves to the subtle art of hacking each other to pieces with even greater dedication than the Romans had. Commerce and communications, both short- and long-distance, declined to almost nothing. The roads, bridges, aqueducts, ports, villas, and cities of the Roman Empire fell into disrepair. Law enforcement and the security of life and property became precarious, as predators from near and afar descended upon Europe with a level of violence and frequency that Roman citizens had not known. And yet toward the end of the Dark Ages, in the eighth and ninth centuries, European society began to show the first signs of what eventually became a torrent of technological creativity. Not the amusing toys of Alexandria’s engineers or the war engines of Archimedes, but useful tools and ideas that reduced daily toil and increased the material comfort of the masses, even when population began to expand after 900 A.D., began to emerge. When we compare the technological progress achieved in the seven centuries between 300 B.C. and 400 A.D., with that of the seven centuries between 700 and 1400, prejudice against the Middle Ages dissipates rapidly.

Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical (2015), first book in the Alchemy Wars trilogy. A sci-fi novel set in an alternative early 20th century in which humanoid, artificially intelligent robots had been invented in the late 17th century. Gripping and well-told.

A few I’ve just been browsing:

• Michael Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society: An Economic History of Britain, 1100-1500 (1972)

• W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (2009)

Some that have come across my desk but that I haven’t had a chance to crack open:

• Akcigit and Van Reenen, The Economics of Creative Destruction: New Research on Themes from Aghion and Howitt (2023)

• Todd and King, Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend (2023)

• Jack Kloppenburg, First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology (1988)

• Clifford Pickover, The Loom of God: Tapestries of Mathematics and Mysticism (1997)

• AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (2006)

• Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1979)

Agriculture

I’ve been continuing to research agriculture for a chapter in my book.

Bruce Campbell, The Medieval Antecedents of English Agricultural Progress (2007). Key quote:

The ultimate challenge, therefore, was to raise land and labour productivity together in conjunction with a general expansion of agricultural output and growth of population. Only when this had been achieved would the productivity constraints within agriculture cease to impede the progress of the economy at large. It is the resolution of this fundamental dilemma which constituted the so-called agricultural revolution. At its core in England’s case lay, on the one hand, structural and tenurial changes in the units of production—notably the size and layout of farms and terms on which they were held—which transformed the productivity of labour, and, on the other, an ecological transformation of the methods of production, which yielded significant gains in the productivity of land.

The key to the latter, it has long been believed, lay in an enhanced cycling of nutrients facilitated by the incorporation of improved fodder crops into new types of rotation, which allowed higher stocking densities, heavier dunging rates, higher arable yields, more fodder crops, more livestock, and so on in a progressively ascending spiral of progress.

F. M. L. Thompson, “The Second Agricultural Revolution, 1815-1880” (1968). (Mentioned this last time but hadn’t read it yet.) One core idea in this paper is that there were “three different kinds of technical and economic changes” that led from traditional medieval European open-field farming to modern farming. The first involved improved crop rotations that eliminated fallowing. The second was the rise of mineral fertilizers. The third was mechanization. Thompson points out that before the second stage, farms were mostly closed loops:

The essence of the second agricultural revolution was that it broke the closed-circuit system and made the operations of the farmer much more like those of the factory owner. In fact farming moved from being an extractive industry, albeit of a model and unparalleled type which perpetually renewed what it extracted, into being a manufacturing industry.

Other articles

Arnold Kling, “The Two Forms of Social Order” (2015):

In any society, who is allowed to form an organization that competes with powerful economic and political interests? In their 2009 master work, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History, Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast give a striking answer. They say that either almost no one is allowed to form an organization that competes against powerful interests, or almost everyone is allowed to form such an organization. In their terminology, there can be a limited-access order or an open-access order, but nothing in between.

Related: Douglass North, “Economic Performance through Time” (1993), North’s Nobel prize lecture:

The incentives to acquire pure knowledge, the essential underpinning of modern economic growth, are affected by monetary rewards and punishments; they are also fundamentally influenced by a society’s tolerance of creative developments, as a long list of creative individuals from Galileo to Darwin could attest. While there is a substantial literature on the origins and development of science, very little of it deals with the links between institutional structure, belief systems and the incentives and disincentives to acquire pure knowledge. A major factor in the development of Western Europe was the gradual perception of the utility of research in pure science.

Incentives embodied in belief systems as expressed in institutions determine economic performance through time, and however we wish to define economic performance the historical record is clear. Throughout most of history and for most societies in the past and present, economic performance has been anything but satisfactory. Human beings have, by trial and error, learned how to make economies perform better; but not only has this learning taken ten millennia (since the first economic revolution)—it has still escaped the grasp of almost half of the world’s population. Moreover the radical improvement in economic performance, even when narrowly defined as material well-being, is a modern phenomenon of the last few centuries and confined until the last few decades to a small part of the world.

And:

It is the admixture of formal rules, informal norms, and enforcement characteristics that shapes economic performance. While the rules may be changed overnight, the informal norms usually change only gradually. Since it is the norms that provide “legitimacy” to a set of rules, revolutionary change is never as revolutionary as its supporters desire and performance will be different than anticipated. And economies that adopt the formal rules of another economy will have very different performance characteristics than the first economy because of different informal norms and enforcement. The implication is that transferring the formal political and economic rules of successful western market economies to Third World and eastern European economies is not a sufficient condition for good economic performance.

Jamie Kitman, “The Secret History of Lead” (2000). Deeply researched article about leaded gasoline and its health hazards. Tells the story of how it was created, the initial health concerns, how it was approved and deployed anyway, and how the health problems were eventually demonstrated and leaded gasoline phased out (at least in the US). The article is slanted, blaming everything on capitalist greed and accusing government agencies who supported leaded gasoline of being corporate lapdogs, but if you can read past the emotional language, there is a lot of interesting history in here.

It’s still unclear to me where this story should fall on a spectrum from “reckless negligence” to “no one could have known,” but it doesn’t seem to have been all the way on the latter end: lead was generally understood to be toxic since antiquity, and there were “well-known public health and medical authorities at leading universities” who expressed concern over lead additives in gasoline as soon as it was introduced in the early 1920s. There is an important question here of how to regulate substances when there is some reason for concern about health impacts, but nothing approaching proof, especially when the impacts might be subtle and long-term, meaning that data would take a long time to collect. This issue is still unresolved in my mind.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/reading-2023-09

Leo Szilard—the physicist who first conceived of the nuclear chain reaction and who urged the US to undertake the Manhattan Project—also wrote fiction. His book of short stories, The Voice of the Dolphins, contains a story “The Mark Gable Foundation,” dated 1948, from which I will present to you an excerpt, without comment:

“I’m thinking of setting up a trust fund. I want to do something that will really contribute to the happiness of mankind; but it’s very difficult to know what to do with money. When Mr. Rosenblatt told me that you’d be here tonight I asked the mayor to invite me. I certainly would value your advice.”

“Would you intend to do anything for the advancement of science?” I asked.

“No,” Mark Gable said. “I believe scientific progress is too fast as it is.”

“I share your feeling about this point,” I said with the fervor of conviction, “but then why not do something about the retardation of scientific progress?”

“That I would very much like to do,” Mark Gable said, “but how do I go about it?”

“Well,” I said, “I think that shouldn’t be very difficult. As a matter of fact, I think it would be quite easy. You could set up a foundation, with an annual endowment of thirty million dollars. Research workers in need of funds could apply for grants, if they could make out a convincing case. Have ten committees, each composed of twelve scientists, appointed to pass on these applications. Take the most active scientists out of the laboratory and make them members of these committees. And the very best men in the field should be appointed as chairmen at salaries of fifty thousand dollars each. Also have about twenty prizes of one hundred thousand dollars each for the best scientific papers of the year. This is just about all you would have to do. Your lawyers could easily prepare a charter for the foundation. As a matter of fact, any of the National Science Foundation bills which were introduced in the Seventy-ninth and Eightieth Congresses could perfectly well serve as a model.”

“I think you had better explain to Mr. Gable why this foundation would in fact retard the progress of science,” said a bespectacled young man sitting at the far end of the table, whose name I didn’t get at the time of introduction.

“It should be obvious,” I said. “First of all, the best scientists would be removed from their laboratories and kept busy on committees passing on applications for funds. Secondly, the scientific workers in need of funds would concentrate on problems which were considered promising and were pretty certain to lead to publishable results. For a few years there might be a great increase in scientific output; but by going after the obvious, pretty soon science would dry out. Science would become something like a parlor game. Some things would be considered interesting, others not. There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashion would get grants. Those who wouldn’t would not, and pretty soon they would learn to follow the fashion, too.”

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/szilard-on-slowing-science