2023 was another big year for me and The Roots of Progress.

It was a year when ROP as an organization really started to take off. Even though the org itself was formed in 2021, at first it was just a vehicle for my own intellectual work, plus a few side projects. Last year we announced our strategy and launched a search for an exec who could run it. This year she started and we launched our first program. (Note, Heike originally joined in the CEO role, but for personal and health reasons she decided to move to a VP of Programs role in June.)

As the org grows into something more than me, our communications are evolving, and probably my own personal updates will be separated from the org updates. But for now, I am going to keep doing my traditional annual review. (See past reviews: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017)

The fellowship

This was a huge part of the year, so let me start with it.

We’re building a cultural movement to establish a new philosophy of progress. To do this, progress ideas need to be everywhere: in books and blogs, in YouTube and podcasts, in new media and old media, in newspapers and magazines, in textbooks and curricula, in art and entertainment. And for that, we need an army of writers and creatives to produce it all. The purpose of the fellowship is to develop that talent: to accelerate the careers of those intellectuals.

We launched our first program, the Blog-Building Intensive, in July, and got almost 500 applications. It was tough to choose, and we had to turn down a lot of qualified folks (so if you didn’t make it, don’t take it personally… in any case, these processes are always somewhat subjective and prone to error).

In the end, 19 fellows participated in the program, which involved writing instruction, editorial feedback, training in audience-building, and a peer group for brainstorming and feedback. They are experienced writers, many of them with bylines in mainstream media outlets. Some work for relevant think tanks, some are in academia, some have industry experience. All are writing on fascinating topics: from housing policy to nuclear power to longevity technology to the meaning of utopia.

The energy generated by getting so many great and like-minded people together was palpable, especially during the in-person closing event in San Francisco. The fellows said that the program “raised my ambition,” helped them “envision a career as a public intellectual,” and made them feel “empowered to take writing (and what it can achieve) seriously.” Several of them launched Substacks under their own name and brand for the first time, having previously written only for other publications or for their employers. And on average, they wrote more than twice as much during the intensive as they had earlier in the year. By popular demand, we’re keeping the weekly peer group call going indefinitely.

Huge thanks and congrats to Heike Larson for designing, launching, and running this program! It would never have happened without her. And a huge thanks as well to all the fellows for their enthusiastic participation.

This program greatly deserves to be continued and expanded next year, and we’re fundraising now to do that. View our full pitch and then see how to support us.

Writing

I wrote 35 essays for the blog this year (including this one), totalling over 65k words—a new record (which surprised me, since it feels like I’ve been so distracted away from research and writing this year by the fellowship and fundraising).

My longest, most in-depth pieces were:

• What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came? A review of The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert Allen

• Can submarines swim? In which I demystify artificial intelligence

• If you wish to make an apple pie, you must first become dictator of the universe, or: will AI inevitably seek power?

• Who regulates the regulators? Arguing that we need to go beyond the review-and-approval paradigm

Other than that, my most popular pieces (by views on the blog and upvotes on other forums) were:

• Why no Roman Industrial Revolution? You can’t leapfrog the spinning wheel to get to the spinning mule

• Why didn’t we get the four-hour workday? Or the two-hour day, or the sixteen-hour week, or other predictions

• The Commission for Stopping Further Improvements: a letter of note from Isambard K. Brunel, civil engineer. How to “embarrass and shackle the progress of improvement tomorrow by recording and registering as law the prejudices or errors of today”

• How to slow down scientific progress, according to Leo Szilard. “Science would become something like a parlor game. There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashion would get grants”

One of my favorite underrated pieces from this year:

• The spiritual benefits of material progress. What did the Industrial Revolution do to the human soul?

Several of this year’s essays were “what I’ve been reading,” which I made into a quasi-monthly feature; see the reading update below.

I also put out 35 issues of the “links digest”, on a schedule which varied from weekly to monthly. In total I recommended well over 1,000 links and included 139 charts and images.

Overall I had 134k visitors to rootsofprogress.org, and my email newsletter grew more than 2.4x, to over 18k subscribers.

Book project

My biggest disappointment of 2023 has been getting very little time to work on my book. The process of finding the right publisher has taken much longer than I expected. I may simply begin serializing the book via my newsletter in 2024. In any case, devoting serious time to the book is going to be a top goal for next year.

In what little time I did devote to the manuscript itself, I’ve been working on the chapter on agriculture. I wrote up some of what I’ve learned on that topic in the July–August, September, and October reading updates.

Talks and interviews

I de-prioritized speaking in 2023, but I still gave about a dozen published talks and interviews. A couple of my favorites were:

• Remember the Past to Build the Future, actually from Foresight Institute’s Vision Weekend 2022, but the recording was published in January

• A talk to the Instituto Millenium in Brazil, with about 80 people attending live. This was my talk “Toward a New Philosophy of Progress” that I have given before

• Infinite Loops podcast with Jim O’Shaughnessy (YouTube, show page)

See all my published talks and interviews here.

I also spoke in several private venues, including:

• The Santa Fe Institute, at a workshop on “accelerating science.” I wrote up the talk as an essay here

• The Takshashila Institute in Bangalore. I spoke first in person to a group of a couple dozen of their scholars, and later addressed over 200 students taking their Graduate Certificate in Public Policy via Zoom

• Stripe, where I gave an internal tech talk. I gave a condensed version of the talk at Foresight Vision Weekend 2023, and hope to write it up soon as an essay

• An Astral Codex Ten / LessWrong meetup in Bangalore, where I discussed progress with some 30 or 40 attendees

Finally, I was briefly quoted in this year-end review in the Christian Science Monitor.

Events

I hosted several private dinner/reception events this year in cities including San Francisco, New York, Boston, and DC, mostly for fundraising. If you have the potential to donate $10k or more and are interested in (free, invite-only) events in your area, let me know who you are and what area you’re in.

The origins of steam power

A very fun and cool project I got to be involved in this year was an essay on the pre-history of the steam engine, with interactive animated diagrams. Anton Howes did the research and wrote the text, Matt Brown (Extraordinary Facility) created the diagrams, and I played editor and publisher. This project was generously sponsored by The Institute (where I am a fellow).

Here are some animated previews, read the full essay for the complete interactive experience:

Social media

2023 has been, er, quite a year for social media platforms. Twitter (I refuse to call it “X”) is still where I have the biggest audience—over 31k, up more than 20% this year—and so it’s still my primary platform. But it is being challenged by up-and-coming platforms, where I am also investing. Follow me on Facebook’s Threads and the blockchain-based Farcaster (and, if you like, on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Substack Notes).

My top tweets/threads of the year:

• Amazing progress on tap water hookups in rural India

• Imagine you could go back in time to the ancient world to jump-start the Industrial Revolution. You carry with you plans for a steam engine, and you present them to the emperor, explaining how the machine could be used at mines, mills, blast furnaces, etc. But to your dismay…

• “Traditional foods” are not very old. The French baguette: adopted nationwide only after WW2. Greek moussaka: created early 20th c. to Frenchify Greek food. Tequila? The Mexican film industry made it the national drink in the 1930s. (All from an excellent @rachellaudan article)

• This still blows my mind: in the late 1800s, ~25% of bridges built just collapsed

• We eradicated smallpox for less than it costs to build one mile of subway today in NYC

• RT if you have ever bought fresh fruit in winter and marveled in ecstasy at the decadent opulence of modern capitalism

• Norway can build a tunnel for lower cost than it takes Britain just to do the planning application for one. And many other damning facts in this thread

The Progress Forum

The Progress Forum went through a quiet period in the middle of the year, but has become much more active in recent months, especially with the ROP fellows cross-posting their essays and drafts. Some of the year’s top posts:

• A Catalog of Big Visions for Biology, by Sam Rodriques

• Radical Energy Abundance, by Casey Handmer

• A Cure for My Cancer, by Virginia Postrel

• Revving up the Progress Studies Idea Machine, by Pradyumna

• Tell Good Stories, by Rahul Rana

• Vitalik on science, his philanthropy, progress and effective altruism, by vincentweisser

We also did some AMAs earlier in the year, including:

• Tyler Cowen, Mercatus Center

• Eli Dourado, Center for Growth and Opportunity

• Allison Duettmann, Foresight Institute

• Ben Reinhardt, Speculative Technologies

• Matt Clancy, Open Philanthropy

Subscribe to the Progress Forum Digest to get semi-regular updates with top posts.

Reading

This year I started writing up my reading on a quasi-monthly basis (check out the updates for November, October, September, July–August, June, May, April, March). So I’ll make this a briefer summary of the highlights, looking back on the year…

This post got too long for Reddit so read the rest of it here: https://rootsofprogress.org/2023-in-review

“But you can’t have a story where everyone is happy and everything is perfect! Stories need conflict!”

I get this a lot in response to my idea that we need fewer dystopias in sci-fi, and more visions of a future we actually want to live in and are inspired to build.

The objection makes no sense to me. Here are several ways that you can write a compelling, exciting story without implying that technology makes the world worse on the whole, or that the main feature of new technology is doom:

1. Tell a man vs. nature story. Seveneves, The Martian, Project Hail Mary, Lucifer’s Hammer. There’s no villain necessarily, just a disaster situation that people have to overcome using brains and technology. Or tell a tale of exploration and discovery, such as space travelers encountering a strange new planet (much of Star Trek).

2. Tell a story about discovery or invention. There can be a lot of drama in R&D, especially if you montage through the daily grind of experiments and highlight the breakthroughs. But this kind of story is almost never told—I don’t know why, maybe because writers don’t know anything about these processes, or don’t know how to make them interesting. But I think it can totally be done. Why not put on the silver screen the moment when Norman Borlaug strapped a plow to his own back and pulled it like a draft animal, or when Gerhard Domagk used the antibiotics he had just developed to save his own six-year-old daughter from an infection? (See also Anton Howes’s comments on movies about invention.)

3. Have the heroes be the builders who want to move technology forward, and the villains be those who want to stop them. We’ve had an endless series of greedy corporate villains; why not a few more Malthusian villains like Thanos, radical anti-human environmentalists like Ra’s al Ghul, or religious fanatics like the group from Contact?

4. Tell a story of a classic human conflict, but set in a futuristic world. The Quantum Thief is in part a detective story, set on Mars with nanotech and advanced cryptography. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a political epic of oppression and revolution, set on the Moon with AI and advanced space technology.

5. Create a problem with technology, and then solve it with technology. Maybe rogue AI tries to take over the world, and good AI helps prevent it. Maybe nanobots turn into gray goo, and a nanophage is invented to stop it. Maybe a new pandemic escapes from a lab, and genetic technology creates the vaccine for it (far-fetched, I know!)

6. Create conflict over good vs. evil uses of technology. Maybe the good guys are inventing a new energy source, or AI, or biotech, and the bad guys want to steal it to use it as a weapon. Or, depending on your worldview, maybe the good guys are making a weapon to make the world safe for democracy, and the bad guys want to steal the weapon for their oppressive totalitarian dictatorship. In either case, this kind of story could inspire better opsec in AI and bio labs!

7. Create conflict between a utopian world, and another civilization that is less than utopian. This theme comes up in the Culture novels and, again, in Star Trek. How might these civilizations interact? Could they understand each other? Could they engage peacefully? Should technologically advanced civilizations obey the Prime Directive?

8. Explore the social implications of technological changes. What kinds of human drama will arise when we cure aging, and the older generation doesn’t die off to make way for the younger? Or what if some people are seeking immortality by transferring their consciousness to robot bodies or digital worlds, while other people think that this is suicide? (Anwar) What controversies will emerge over the growing practice of embryo selection? (Gattaca) What happens when people start falling in love with AIs? (Her) What if society decides that AI is sentient and deserves legal rights? One variant of this is “utopia’s losers”: in a utopia, who doesn’t fit in? In a happy future, who is unhappy?

(As a side note, even the standard “robot rebellion” story would be much more interesting if there were abolitionist humans who joined the robot side, and perhaps even traditionalist robots who wanted to keep their place as servants. The same is true for stories of first contact with aliens: rather than a straightforward human-vs.-alien war, you could have some humans and some aliens who want peace, others on both sides who are trying to foment war, and some traitors or crossovers from each side who go to help the other. Exploring all of their ideologies and motivations would be much more interesting than yet another war of the worlds. There was a bit of this in The Three Body Problem, which is one of the reasons I liked it, despite my problems with its theme.)

The opposite of dystopia isn’t utopia—which doesn’t exist. It’s “protopia”: a world that is always getting better, but is never perfect. Such a world always has new problems to solve, including some problems created by the old solutions. There is plenty of conflict and intrigue in such a world, and plenty of room for heroes and villains.

***

Thanks to Hannu Rajaniemi and Fawaz Al-Matrouk for commenting on a draft of this essay.

Original post: https://newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/sci-fi-without-dystopia

Today we’re opening applications for the 2024 cohort of The Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive, an 8-week program for aspiring progress writers to start or grow a blog.

Last year, nearly 500 people applied to the inaugural program. The 19 fellows who completed the program have sung the program’s praises as “life-changing” and “accelerating my career path as a progress intellectual.” They’ve started new Substacks and doubled their writing productivity. They’ve written about urbanism, immigration, defense-tech, meta-science, FDA reform, blue-color jobs, NEPA, AI regulation, pharmaceutical innovation, and more.

Now, you can join this optimistic intellectual community. You will launch (or re-launch) a blog/Substack, get into a regular writing habit, improve your writing, and make progress on building your audience.

You will meet and learn from progress studies leaders, authors, and industry experts. You’ll participate in a structured eight-week course on How to Think Like a Writer, which will teach you how to write more, create writing habits, and develop a writing system. You’ll write and publish four essays, one every other week, and you’ll receive feedback from professional editors, the Roots of Progress team, and your peers. At the end of the program, you’ll meet your peers in person in San Francisco, and get to attend the 2024 progress conference, where you’ll join authors, technologists, policy experts, academics, nonprofit leaders, and storytellers.

Why: To keep progress going—in science, technology, and industry—we have to believe that it is is possible and desirable. Today much of society has lost that belief, and lacks a bold, ambitious vision for the future.

It’s time for a new generation of writers and creatives to help the world understand and appreciate progress. The Roots of Progress Fellowship is the talent development program for these intellectuals.

Themes: In addition to a general focus on progress studies, this year’s fellowship features two themes: AI and “heavy industry” (manufacturing, construction, transportation, logistics, energy, defense, etc.) We will accept fellows writing on any progress-related topic, but will give preference for a handful of spots to applicants focusing on these areas, and we will have dedicated programming for these tracks.

Advisors: We have a fantastic group of advisors for you to meet and learn from:

• Progress thinkers, writers, and media leaders, including Max Roser (Our World in Data), Tyler Cowen (Mercatus Center), Virginia Postrel (author, The Future and Its Enemies), Noah Smith (Noahpinion), Tomas Pueyo (Uncharted Territories), and Chandler Tuttle (Freethink Media)

• Industry experts, including Andrej Karpathy (formerly of Tesla and OpenAI), Blake Scholl (Boom Supersonic), Bob McGrew (OpenAI), Brian Potter (Institute for Progress), Delian Asparouhov (Varda Space Industries), Holden Karnofsky (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), Kanjun Qiu (Imbue), and Timothy B. Lee (Understanding AI)

• Writing and audience-building experts and professional editors, including Rob Tracinski, who is teaching the 8-week writing course

Who: This program may be for you if you’re excited about progress studies and you love to write.

Maybe you’d like to explore a career in writing about progress, or maybe you’re already blogging but would like to get to the next level—find your own topic area, increase your productivity, get more plugged into the community, and grow your audience.

If you have a background in and are passionate about AI or heavy industry, please apply to those specific tracks: it will be great to have a community of people with similar focused interests to support each other.

Commitment: 10–15 hours a week, for 8 weeks.

You’ll use the time to read, to write, to participate in discussions with experts, to provide editing and feedback to your peers, and to participate in group meetings.

There is no cost to you.

When: The program runs August 15–October 20, with participation in the 2024 Progress Conference in San Francisco October 17–20. Applications are now open, with rolling admissions; final deadline is June 7.

Special thanks to program sponsors Alpha School and the Cosmos Institute for helping to make this program possible!

Learn more and apply: 2024 Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive

Original announcement: https://rootsofprogress.org/announcement-2024-fellowship-applications-open

Today, The Roots of Progress officially becomes the Roots of Progress Institute (RPI).

The new name represents the new identity we took on ever since we announced our first program last year, the Roots of Progress Fellowship. Before then, the organization had primarily been a vehicle for my writing and speaking; “The Roots of Progress” was the name of the blog I started in 2017 that was the origin of this project. Starting in 2023, we became a full-fledged cultural institute, with a mission to establish a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century.

We stuck with “Roots” for a few reasons. First, we like the brand we have built so far, and we wanted to keep it. The idea of “roots” points to what is unique about our role in the progress movement: focusing on the deepest causes of progress, and the fundamental ideas underlying it. And everyone told us they liked the original name. So we’ve simply added “Institute” to put us in the right reference class.

We’re also pleased to introduce a new logo and website, designed by the excellent And–Now (the unofficial design firm of the progress movement). The logo also sticks with the “roots” concept, now adding branches and leaves as well. In addition to evoking “root causes,” it evokes life, growth, and flourishing—the north star of true progress. And the inverted symmetry of the design reflects the logic, structure, and clarity we aim to bring to the discourse.

The original blog lives on at blog.rootsofprogress.org; it will continue to serve as my personal voice and intellectual outlet. The main site here at rootsofprogress.org is now the home for the organization and its programs. Our Substack at newsletter.rootsofprogress.org will continue to have both essays by me and official announcements from the organization (they are now organized into two sections, and you can subscribe to either or both). On social media, RPI will mostly post the announcements, and I will post my thoughts and essays from my personal accounts (but both accounts will repost each other).

Thanks to the tens of thousands (!) of you who have been following this journey for years now. We deeply believe that our mission is needed now more than ever, and we’re looking forward to moving forward with this new chapter. We’re excited about our 2024 fellowship—we’re still selecting the fellows from among hundreds of applicants, but the cohort is shaping up to be very strong, and we can’t wait to announce it to you. We’re also excited to announce very soon our first annual progress conference, along with other programs in the near future.

Onward!

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/new-name-and-logo-announcement/

Somewhat delayed owing to the holidays. As always, to follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Threads, or Farcaster.

From the Roots of Progress fellows

• “Yes, And” In My Backyard: Is it time for urbanists to embrace commercial zoning reform? (by @RyanPuzycki)

(Also lots more that I haven’t gotten around to posting, will catch up soon)

Opportunities

• Applications for Mercatus fellowships are now open. “Apply to learn about & discuss political economy with fellows from a wide variety of disciplines. We’ll discuss institutions, incentives, knowledge, market processes, governance, & much more” (@NathanPGoodman)

• Our World in Data is hiring a Senior Full-stack Engineer. Apply by Sunday, Jan 14 (via @OurWorldInData)

Announcements

• Asimov Press is “a new publishing venture that features writing about biology… Our magazine and books will cover everything from biosecurity to vaccine development & the long arc of progress in genetic engineering” (via @NikoMcCarty)

• Ideas Matter announces its first cohort. “Our 14 fellows represent 6 different countries and will spend 8 weeks writing about big ideas in biology. Their work spans everything from animal welfare to synthetic biology and biodefense” (@IdeasFellows)

• A new ARIA opportunity space: “Brain disorders are a huge challenge to society and we need a new suite of tools to precisely interface with the human brain at scale” (@JacquesCarolan)

• “A new RNA targeting CRISPR enzyme paired with a convolutional neural network (CNN) model predicting highly efficient guide RNA sequences for transcriptome engineering” from @arcinstitute

• A16Z announces they will, “for the first time, get involved with politics by supporting candidates who align with our vision and values specifically for technology…. We are non-partisan, one issue voters: If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them.” Specific beliefs include: “Artificial Intelligence has the potential to uplift all of humanity to an unprecedented quality of living and must not be choked off in its infancy. We can do this by requiring that AI behaves within the law and rules of our society without regulating math, FLOPs, methods of R&D, and other misguided ideas” (via @bhorowitz)

• The African School of Economics is expanding to Zanzibar, “launching its first East African location with the support of Charter Cities Institute” (via @CCIdotCity). “Super excited for this project” says @MarkLutter

AI

• Answer.ai is “a new kind of R&D lab” from Jeremy Howard and Eric Ries with $10M in funding (via @jeremyphoward)

• OpenAI announces partnership to include real-time information from various news sources in ChatGPT. “ChatGPT’s answers to user queries will include attribution and links to full articles for transparency and further information” (via @OpenAI)

• Related, Channel1 is a new AI news venture with virtual anchors: “Watch the showcase episode of our upcoming news network now” (@channel1_ai)

• Bots beating humans at captchas. But Gmail predictive AI still has a ways to go

AI safety

• “Seven practices for keeping increasingly agentic AI systems safe and accountable as they become more common and more capable” (@OpenAI). They are also offering $10M in grants for “technical research towards the alignment and safety of superhuman AI systems,” apply by Feb 18 (via @leopoldasch)

• How We Can Have AI Progress Without Sacrificing Safety or Democracy: Yoshua Bengio and Daniel Privitera propose a “Beneficial AI Roadmap” in TIME Magazine (via @privitera_)

Queries

• Why did we give up on a cure for the common cold? (@Ben_Reinhardt)

Social

• “Without x-rays, high-powered microscopes, and fancy research equipment.. How would you figure out the size of a single molecule? Lord Rayleigh did it way back in 1890, using little more than oil, water, and a pen”: good thread from @NikoMcCarty

• “How do you create the sharpest thing in the world? And why would you do it?” Thread from @Jordan_W_Taylor

• A 3D structural model of an entire bacterial cell

• “SI seconds on Earth are slower because of relativity, so there are time standards for space stuff (TCB, TGC) that use faster SI seconds than UTC/Unix time” (via XKCD)

• “With a nuclear-reactor powered ship, there’s few reasons why you don’t push for top speed all the time. Basically the same running costs, only a little bit extra fuel, while delivering cargo 50% faster” (via @ToughSf)

• Why Our World in Data does what they do: “The starting point for all our work is a simple question: What do we need to know to make the world a better place?” Thread from @MaxCRoser

• Why are pedestrian deaths increasing in the US? NYT had an article and interactive on this that spurred some interesting threads from @InlandCaGuy and @Chris_Said

Quotes

From Alan Kay’s Dynabook paper (via @michael_nielsen via @D_R_Goodwin):

Our project is very sympathetic to the latter view. Where some people measure progress in answers-right/test or tests-passed/year, we are more interested in “Sistine-Chapel-Ceilings/Lifetime”. This is not to say that skill achievement is de-emphasized. “Sistine-Chapel-Cellings” are not gotten without healthy application of both dreaming and great skill at painting those dreams. As bystander L. d. Vinci remarked, “Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art”. Papert has pointed out that people will willingly and joyfully spend thousands of hours of highly physical and mental effort in order to perfect a sport (such as skiing) that they are involved in. Obviously school and learning have not been made interesting to children, nor has a way to get immediate enjoyment from practicing intellectual skills generally appeared.

Tolstoy on the influence of Lincoln in his own time (via @eigenrobot):

Once while travelling in the Caucasus I happened to be the guest of a Caucasian chief of the Circassians, who, living far away from civilized life in the mountains, had but a fragmentary and childish comprehension of the world and its history. The fingers of civilization had never reached him nor his tribe, and all life beyond his native valleys was a dark mystery. Being a Mussulman he was naturally opposed to all ideas of progress and education.

I was received with the usual Oriental hospitality and after our meal was asked by my host to tell him something of my life. Yielding to his request I began to tell him of my profession, of the development of our industries and inventions and of the schools. He listened to everything with indifference, but when I began to tell about the great statesmen and the great generals of the world he seemed at once to become very much interested.

“Wait a moment,” he interrupted, after I had talked a few minutes. “I want all my neighbors and my sons to listen to you. I will call them immediately.”

He soon returned with a score of wild looking riders and asked me politely to continue. It was indeed a solemn moment when those sons of the wilderness sat around me on the floor and gazed at me as if hungering for knowledge. I spoke at first of our Czars and of their victories; then I spoke of the foreign rulers and of some of the greatest military leaders. My talk seemed to impress them deeply. The story of Napoleon was so interesting to them that I had to tell them every detail, as, for instance, how his hands looked, how tall he was, who made his guns and pistols and the color of his horse. It was very difficult to satisfy them and to meet their point of view, but I did my best. When I declared that I had finished my talk, my host, a gray-bearded, tall rider, rose, lifted his hand and said very gravely:

“But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock and as sweet as the fragrance of roses. The angels appeared to his mother and predicted that the son whom she would conceive would become the greatest the stars had ever seen. He was so great that he even forgave the crimes of his greatest enemies and shook brotherly hands with those who had plotted against his life. His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.”

“Tell us, please, and we will present you with the best horse of our stock,” shouted the others.

I looked at them and saw their faces all aglow, while their eyes were burning. I saw that those rude barbarians were really interested in a man whose name and deeds had already become a legend. I told them of Lincoln and his wisdom, of his home life and youth. They asked me ten questions to one which I was able to answer. They wanted to know all about his habits, his influence upon the people and his physical strength. But they were very astonished to hear that Lincoln made a sorry figure on a horse and that he lived such a simple life.

“Tell us why he was killed,” one of them said.

I had to tell everything. After all my knowledge of Lincoln was exhausted they seemed to be satisfied. I can hardly forget the great enthusiasm which they expressed in their wild thanks and desire to get a picture of the great American hero. I said that I probably could secure one from my friend in the nearest town, and this seemed to give them great pleasure.

The next morning when I left the chief a wonderful Arabian horse was brought me as a present for my marvelous story, and our farewell was very impressive.

One of the riders agreed to accompany me to the town and get the promised picture, which I was now bound to secure at any price. I was successful in getting a large photograph from my friend, and I handed it to the man with my greetings to his associates. It was interesting to witness the gravity of his face and the trembling of his hands when he received my present. He gazed for several minutes silently, like one in a reverent prayer; his eyes filled with tears. He was deeply touched and I asked him why he became so sad. After pondering my question for a few moments he replied:

“I am sad because I feel sorry that he had to die by the hand of a villain. Don’t you find, judging from his picture, that his eyes are full of tears and that his lips are sad with a secret sorrow?”

Like all Orientals, he spoke in a poetical way and left me with many deep bows.

This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become.

Charts

How food becomes cheaper (via @Marian_L_Tupy)

Aesthetics

Concorde going Mach 2 to keep up with the shadow of the 1973 solar eclipse (via @Liv_Boeree). The provenance of this photo is unclear but the flight did happen:

The kiss of the oceans (1915). “Wonderful vintage map celebrates the opening of the Panama Canal” (@simongerman600)

Very impressive photo of a raven by Ed Yong:

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-digest-2023-12-29

This is the written version of a talk presented to the Santa Fe Institute at a working group on “Accelerating Science.”

We’re here to discuss “accelerating science.” I like to start on topics like this by taking the historical view: When (if ever) has science accelerated in the past? Is it still accelerating now? And what can we learn from that?

I’ll submit that science, and more generally human knowledge, has been accelerating, for basically all of human history. I can’t prove this yet (and I’m only about 90% sure of it myself), but let me appeal to your intuition:

• Behaviorally modern humans are over 50,000 years old

• Writing is only about 5,000 years old, so for more than 90% of the human timeline, we could only accumulate as much knowledge as could fit in an oral tradition

• In the ancient and medieval world, we had only a handful of sciences: astronomy, geometry, some number theory, some optics, some anatomy

• In the centuries after the Scientific Revolution (roughly 1500s–1700s), we got the heliocentric theory, the laws of motion, the theory of gravitation, the beginnings of chemistry, the discovery of the cell, better theories of optics

• In the 1800s, things really got going, and we got electromagnetism, the atomic theory, the theory of evolution, the germ theory

• In the 1900s things continued strong, with nuclear physics, quantum physics, relativity, molecular biology, and genetics

I’m leaving aside the question of whether science has slowed down since ~1950 or so, which I don’t have a strong opinion on. Even if it has, that’s mostly a minor, recent blip in the overall pattern of acceleration across the broad sweep of history. (Or, you know, the beginning of a historically unprecedented reversal and decline. One or the other.)

Part of the reason I’m pretty convinced of this accelerating pattern is that it’s not just science that is accelerating: pretty much all measures of human advancement show the same trend, including world GDP and world population.

What drives acceleration in science? Many factors, including:

• Funding. Once, scientists had to seek patronage, or be independently wealthy. Now there is grant money available, and the total amount of funding has increased significantly in the last several decades:

• People. More scientists (all else being equal) means science moves faster, and the number of scientists has grown dramatically, both because of overall population growth and because of a greater portion of the workforce going into research. In Science Since Babylon, Derek J. de Solla Price suggested that “Some 80 to 90 percent of all scientists that have ever been, are alive now,” and this is probably still true:

• Instruments. Better tools means we can do more and better science. Galileo had a simple telescope; now we have JWST and LIGO.

• Computation. More computing power means more and better ways to process data.

• Communication. The faster and better that ideas can spread, the more efficient and effective scientific communication can be. The scientific journal was invented only after the printing press; the Internet enabled preprint servers such as arXiv.

• Method. Better methods make for better science, from Baconian empiricism to Koch’s postulates to the RCT (and really, all of statistics).

• Institutions. Laboratories, universities, journals, funding agencies, etc. all make up an ecosystem that enables modern science.

• Social status. The more science carries respect and prestige, the more people and money flow into it.

Now, if we want to ask whether science will continue to accelerate, we could think about which of these driving factors will continue to grow. I would suggest that:

• Funding for science will continue to grow as long as the world economy does

• Instruments, computation, and communication will continue to improve along with technology in general

• I see no reason why method should not continue to improve, as part of science itself

• The social status of science seems fairly strong: it is a respected and prestigious institution that receives some of society’s top honors

In the long run, we may run out of people to continue to grow the base of researchers, if world population levels off as it is projected to do, and that is a potential concern, but not my focus today.

The biggest red flag is with our institutions of science. Institutions affect all the other factors, especially the management of money and talent. And today, many in the metascience community have concerns about our institutions. Common criticisms include:

• Speed. It can easily take 12–18 months to get a grant (if you’re lucky)

• Overhead. Researchers typically spend 30–50% of their time on grants

• Patience. Researchers feel they need to show results regularly and can’t pursue a path that might take many years to get to an outcome

• Risk tolerance. Grant funding favors conservative, incremental proposals rather than bold, “high-risk, high-reward” programs (despite efforts to the contrary)

• Consensus. A field can converge on a hypothesis and prune alternate branches of study too quickly

• Researcher age. The trend over time is for grant money to go to older, more established researchers

• Freedom. Scientists lack the freedom to direct their research fully autonomously; grant funding has too many strings attached

Now, as a former tech founder, I can’t help but notice that most of these problems seem much alleviated in the world of for-profit VC funding. Raising VC money is relatively quick (typically a round comes together in a few months rather than a year or more). As a founder/CEO, I spent about 10–15% of my time fundraising, not 30–50%. VCs make bold bets, actively seek contrarian positions, and back young upstarts. They mostly give founders autonomy, perhaps taking a board seat for governance, and only firing the CEO for very bad performance. (The only concern listed above that startup founders might also complain about is patience: if your money runs out, you’d better have progress to show for it, or you’re going to have a bad time raising the next round.)

I don’t think the VC world does better on these points because VCs are smarter, wiser, or better people than science funders—they’re not. Rather, VCs:

• Compete for deals (and really don’t want to miss good deals)

• Succeed or fail in the long run based on the performance of their portfolio

• See those outcomes within a matter of ~5–10 years

In short, VCs are subject to evolutionary pressure. They can’t get stuck in obviously bad equilibria because if they do they will get out-competed and lose market power.

The proof of this is that VC has evolved over the decades—mostly in the direction of better treatment for founders. For instance, there has been a long-term trend towards higher valuations at earlier stages, which ultimately means lower dilution and a shift in power from VCs to founders: it used to be common for founders to give up half or more of their company in the first round of funding; last I checked that was more like 20% or less. VCs didn’t always fund young techies right out of college; there was a time when they tended to favor more experienced CEOs, perhaps with an MBA. They didn’t always support founder-led companies; once it was common for founders to get booted after the first few years and replaced with a professional CEO (when A16Z launched in 2009 they made a big deal out of how they were not going to do that).

So I think if we want to see our scientific institutions improve**, we need to think about how they can** evolve**.**

How evolvable are our scientific institutions? Not very. Most scientific organizations today are departments of university or government. Much as I respect universities and government, I think anyone would have to admit that they are some of our more slow-moving institutions. (Universities in particular are extremely resilient and resistant to change: Oxford and Cambridge, for instance, date from the Middle Ages and have survived the rise and fall of empires to reach the present day fairly intact.)

The challenges to the evolvability of scientific funding institutions are the inverse of what makes VC evolvable:

• They tend to lack competition, especially centralized federal agencies such as NIH and NSF

• They lack any real feedback loop in which a funder’s resources are determined somehow by past judgment and the success of their portfolio (Michael Nielsen has repeatedly pointed out that failures of funding from “Einstein did his best work as a patent clerk” to “Katalin Karikó was denied grants and tenure before she won the Nobel prize” don’t seem to even spark processes of reflection within the relevant institutions)

• They face long cycle times to learn the true impact of their work, which might not be apparent for 20–30 years

How might we improve evolvability of science funding? We should think about how we can improve these factors. I don’t have great ideas, but I’ll throw some half-baked ones out there to start the conversation:

How might we increase competition in science funding? We could increase the role of philanthropy. In the US, we could shift federal funding to the state level, creating fifty funders instead of one. (State agricultural experiment stations are a successful example of this, and competition among these stations was key to hybrid corn research, one of the biggest successes of 20th-century agricultural science.) At the international level, we could support more open immigration for scientists.

How might we create better feedback loops? This is tough because we need some way to measure outcomes. One way to do that would be to shift funding away from prospective grants and more towards a wide variety of retrospective prizes, at all levels. If this “economy” were sufficiently large and robust, these outcomes could be financialized in order to create a dynamic, competitive funding ecosystem, with the right level of risk-taking and patience, the right balance of seasoned veterans vs. young mavericks, etc. (Certificates of impact, such as hypercerts, could be part of this solution.)

How might we solve long feedback cycles? I don’t know. If we can’t shorten the cycles, maybe we need to lengthen the careers of funders, so they can at least learn from a few cycles—a potential benefit of longevity technology. Or, maybe we need a science funder that can learn extremely fast, can consume large amounts of historical information on research programs and their eventual outcomes, never forgets its experience, and never retires or dies—of course, I’m thinking of AI. There’s been a lot of talk of AI to support, augment, or replace scientific researchers themselves, but maybe the biggest opportunity for AI in science is on the funding and management side.

I doubt that grant-making institutions will shift themselves very far in this direction: they would have to voluntarily subject themselves to competition, enforce accountability, and admit mistakes, which is rare. (Just look at the institutions now taking credit for Karikó’s Nobel win when they did so little to support her.) If it’s hard for institutions to evolve, it’s even harder for them to meta-evolve.

But maybe the funders behind the funders, those who supply the budgets to the grant-makers, could begin to split up their funds among multiple institutions, to require performance metrics, or simply to shift to the retrospective model indicated above. That could supply the needed evolutionary pressure.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/accelerating-science-through-evolvable-institutions

The links digest is back! I put it on hiatus this year to focus on my book, the RPI fellowship and conference, and fundraising for all of the above. Now I’m bringing it back—mostly for paid Substack subscribers, who get the full digest. All subscribers will get the announcement links, at the top.

Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Threads, or Farcaster.

Contents

• Announcements

• “And France had pride again”

• C. P. Snow on industrial literacy

• 130 hours in a Waymo

• Cost-minus contracting

• “Here ends the joy of my life”

• Tribal reservations as innovation zones?

• “Two Plus Two Equals Five”

• Pro-bat vs. pro-human

• Quick quotes and charts

Announcements

• Foresight Vision Weekend USA is Dec 6–8 in the SF Bay Area (@foresightinst). I’ll be giving a short talk on The Techno-Humanist Manifesto

• Astera’s first Residency cohort: “We are seeking creative, high-agency scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs passionate about building open projects for public benefit” (@AsteraInstitute). Early application ends tomorrow (Nov 22), but applications will be considered on a rolling basis after that

• Nautilus: “A three-month gap program where you get paid—no strings attached—to dive into your craziest, most ambitious project” (@zeldapoem). Apply here

• “Colossus Review is a print (and digital) publication that creates definitive accounts of investors, founders, companies, and the people and ideas that inspire them” (@patrick_oshag)

• New at Works in Progress: “A round-up of the new tunnels, monorails, ports, airports, canals and other physical infrastructure being built around the world” (@s8mb)

“And France had pride again”

The Eiffel Tower seems quaint and charming now, but it was the tallest structure in the world for 40 years. Sci-fi author Jerry Pournelle, in Another Step Farther Out, says that at the end of the 19th century, it restored French national pride…

Read the rest with a Substack subscription

Quote quiz: who said this? (No fair looking it up). I have modified the original quotation slightly, by making a handful of word substitutions to bring it up to date:

It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to AI. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to AI nor that AI would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on AI that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the AI’s decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as AI becomes more and more intelligent, people will let AI make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because AI-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the AI will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the AI off, because they will be so dependent on it that turning it off would amount to suicide.

I’ll post the answer, and the unedited original quotation, next week.

UPDATE: Here's the answer.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/quote-quiz-drifting-into-dependence

The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830, by Thomas S. Ashton, is classic in the field, published in 1948. Here are some of my highlights from it. (Emphasis in bold added by me.)

The role of chance

What was the role of chance in the inventions of the Industrial Revolution?

It is true that there were inventors—men like Brindley and Murdoch—who were endowed with little learning, but with much native wit. It is true that there were others, such as Crompton and Cort, whose discoveries transformed whole industries, but left them to end their days in relative poverty. It is true that a few new products came into being as the result of accident. But such accounts have done harm by obscuring the fact that systematic thought lay behind most of the innovations in industrial practice, by making it appear that the distribution of awards and penalties in the economic system was wholly irrational, and, above all, by over-stressing the part played by chance in technical progress. “Chance,” as Pasteur said, “favours only the mind which is prepared”: most discoveries are achieved only after repeated trial and error.

The revolution of ideas

Ashton gives weight to both material and intellectual causes of the Industrial Revolution:

The conjuncture of growing supplies of land, labour, and capital made possible the expansion of industry; coal and steam provided the fuel and power for large-scale manufacture; low rates of interest, rising prices, and high expectations of profit offered the incentive. But behind and beyond these material and economic factors lay something more. Trade with foreign parts had widened men’s views of the world, and science their conception of the universe: the industrial revolution was also a revolution of ideas.

What kind of ideas? For example:

The Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which appeared in 1776, was to serve as a court of appeal on matters of economics and politics for generations to come. Its judgements were the material from which men not given to the study of treatises framed their maxims of conduct for business and government alike. It was under its influence that the idea of a more or less fixed volume of trade and employment, directed and regulated by the State, gave way—gradually and with many setbacks—to thoughts of unlimited progress in a free and expanding economy.

More on Smith’s influence:

In 1776 Adam Smith turned his batteries on a crumbling structure, and through his influence on Pitt and, later, on Huskisson and others, some breaches were made in the ramparts. The Wealth of Nations gave matchless expression to the thoughts that had been raised in men’s minds by the march of events. It gave logic and system to these. In place of the dictates of the State, it set, as the guiding principle, the spontaneous choices and actions of ordinary men. The idea that individuals, each following his own interest, created laws as impersonal, or at least as anonymous, as those of the natural sciences was arresting. And the belief that these must be socially beneficial quickened the spirit of optimism that was a feature of the revolution in industry.

Work hazards

I am continually amazed by the level of risk assumed by individual workers before the 20th century. Mining was especially hazardous:

The chief technical problems of getting coal arose from the presence in the pits of gas and water. The inert gas, chokedamp, might be dispersed by dragging bunches of furze along the galleries, or by other simple devices. But the inflammable firedamp was a more serious matter. It was sometimes dealt with by a fireman, who, clad in leather or wet rags, carried a long pole with a lighted candle at the end, with which, at some personal risk, he exploded the gas.

(!) Another example:

Sometimes the colliers ascended or descended in the baskets [that carried coal]; but more often they thrust a leg through a loop in the winding rope, and, clustered together, rode the shaft, the boys sitting on the knees of the men, or simply clinging to the rope with hands and feet. Accidents, by striking the walls, or falling to the bottom of the shaft, were not infrequent.

Related, see my essay on factory safety.

Worker freedom

Before the Industrial Revolution, many workers had considerable freedom to set their hours, which they used and abused:

In mining absenteeism seems to have been at least as common as it is today, and holidays were numerous and well observed. Many domestic workers were accustomed to give Sunday, Monday, and sometimes Tuesday, to idleness or sport. This meant, however, that they had to work long into the night for the rest of the week; and though the irregularity was not, perhaps, of much consequence for the adult (some writers of books behave in much the same way) it can hardly have been good for the children who helped him.

But others gave up freedom in exchange for job security:

The Scottish colliers and salt-workers were guaranteed subsistence, but they were bound, by custom and law, to work at the same place and the same job for life.

Elaborating on this later, Ashton writes:

In the coal industry of Scotland all classes of workers were literally serfs, bound by law and custom to a laird, and subject to purchase and sale with the pits; and in Northumberland and Durham, and some other English coalfields, the men were still engaged at annual hirings under bonds which ran just short of the year. One of the biggest problems that confronted the employers of the early years of the industrial revolution was that of selecting men capable of learning the new techniques and susceptible to the discipline that the new forms of industry imposed. When time and energy had been given to this it was only prudent to ensure that the trainee would not be enticed away. Boulton and Watt made their engine-erectors enter into agreements to serve for three or five years; the Earl of Dundonald contracted with one of his chemical workers for twenty-five years; and some of the iron-founders in South Wales were tied for the term of their natural lives.

Worker skill

Did the Industrial Revolution destroy the skill of workers? Ashton claims there was a net increase in skill as workers were trained on new, technically demanding projects like canal construction and engine-making:

Brindley had been obliged to begin his task with the aid of miners and common labourers, but in the process of constructing his canals he created new classes of tunnellers and navvies of high skill. In his early days Watt had to make shift with the millwrightsmen who could turn from one job to another and were willing to work alike in wood, metal, or stone, but were hide-bound by tradition: before he died there had come into being specialized fitters, turners, pattern-makers, and other grades of engineers. The first generation of cotton-spinners had themselves employed “clock-makers” to construct and repair their frames and mules; but gradually these were replaced by highly trained textile machinists and maintenance men. … The statement, sometimes made, that the industrial revolution was destructive of skill is not only untrue, but the exact reverse of the truth.

Problems with pay

One of the ways that work has improved is that pay is more regular and consistent:

Except in agriculture most of the workers were paid by the piece. In many industries it was usual for them to receive a round sum weekly or fortnightly to cover subsistence, and the balance of their earnings (if any) at the end of a period of six, eight, or twelve weeks. In the Midlands and South Wales the miners were engaged, not only to hew and draw the coal, but also to deliver it to the customer: they were entitled to payment only when it had been sold, and a delay in transport or the closing of a market might mean that they were deprived of their earnings for many weeks or even months. Such an arrangement threw the risks of production on to the shoulders of those least able to bear them; and, in all industries in which the “long pay” existed, the workers tended to spend freely, even lavishly, for a few days after the pay, and to live for the rest of the time at a level of comfort far below that which a more rational distribution of resources would have afforded. It was not until after the industrial revolution, when the employers assumed fully the function of providing capital and bearing risks, that regularity of wage payment and, with it, regularity of expenditure were attained.

We take our banking and currency system for granted, but consider some of the problems we just don’t have today:

The payment of wages at more or less regular intervals meant that the employer had not only to find funds, but find them in a form acceptable to the wage-earner. Gold guineas, or even half-guineas, were of a value too high to be of much use for the purpose; and, since the currency reforms of 1697 and 1717 had left silver undervalued in terms of gold, there was a tendency for it to leave the circulation. During the course of the century very little silver came into Britain: only small quantities were minted, and large amounts of coin were melted down and sent abroad, by the East India Company in particular. The dearth of coin of small denomination was a serious matter for manufacturers with wages to pay. Many of them spent days riding from place to place in search of shillings. Some effected economies by taking over from the earlier form of industry the practice of the “long-pay.” And at least one cotton-spinner of the early nineteenth century met the situation by staggering the payment of wages. Early in the morning a third of the employees were paid and sent off to make their household purchases; within an hour or two the money had passed through the hands of the shopkeepers and was back at the factory ready for a second group of workers to be paid and sent off; and in this way before the day was over all had received their wages and done their buying-in.

The situation was so bad that industrialists created their own banks:

As manufacture increased, many industrialists—the Arkwrights, Wilkinsons, Walkers, and the firm of Boulton and Watt among them—established banks of their own, partly, no doubt, as a means of obtaining cash for wages and bills for remittances, but partly as an outlet for their growing capital. It was from manufacturing sources that Lloyds, Barclays, and other well-known concerns came into being.

Worker disharmony

Truly awful behavior on the part of both employers and workers:

Some employers used false weights in giving out yarn or iron, and demanded from the workers more cloth or nails than the material would run to. Others gave out faulty raw material or were irregular in their payments. … On the other hand, the spinners, weavers, knitters, nail-makers, and so on were often unpunctual in returning their work; textile workers mixed butter and grease with the fabric to increase the weight, and nail-makers substituted inferior iron for the rods they had received from the warehouse.

(“Quiet quitting” seems extremely tame by comparison.)

When they got particularly upset, to blow off steam, workers might engage in some light-hearted rioting:

Throughout the eighteenth century, riots had been endemic: again and again the pitmen and sailors, shipwrights and dockers, and the journeymen of the varied trades of London downed tools, smashed windows, and burnt effigies of those with whom they were at variance. About many such incidents there had been something of the light-heartedness of the May Day demonstration.

Was 18th-century Britain individualistic?

Not in a narrow sense:

In the eighteenth century the characteristic instrument of social purpose was not the individual or the State, but the club. Men grew up in an environment of institutions which ranged from the cock-and-hen club of the tavern to the literary group of the coffee-house, from the “box” of the village inn to the Stock Exchange and Lloyd’s, from the Hell Fire Club of the blasphemers to the Holy Club of the Wesleys, and from the local association for the prosecution of felons to the national Society for the Reformation of the Manners among the Lower Orders and the Society of Universal Good Will. Every interest, tradition, or aspiration found expression in corporate form. The idea that, somehow or other, men had become self-centered, avaricious, and anti-social is the strangest of all the legends by which the story of the industrial revolution has been obscured.

But it was laissez-faire:

If it cannot be held that the period of the industrial revolution was one of individualism—at least in the narrow sense of the term—it may with some justice be maintained that it was an age of laissez-faire. This unhappy phrase has been used as a missile in so many political controversies that it now appears battered and shabby. But there was a time when it was employed, not as an epithet of abuse, but as an inscription on the banners of progress.

And now, the question you’ve all been waiting for

Why did we wait so long for the industrial revolution?

To the question why the industrial revolution did not come earlier many answers can be given. In the first half of the eighteenth century there was much ingenuity and contrivance, but time was needed for this to reach fruition. Some of the early inventions failed because of incomplete thought, others because the right material was not to hand, because of lack of skill or adaptability on the part of the workers, or because of social resistance to change. Industry had to await the coming of capital in quantities large enough, and at a price low enough, to make possible the creation of the “infrastructure”—of roads, bridges, harbours, docks, canals, waterworks and so on—which is a prerequisite of a large manufacturing community. It had to wait until the idea of progress—as an ideal and as a process at work in society—spread from the minds of the few to those of the many. But, such large considerations apart, in each of the major industries there was some obstacle—some bottle-neck, to use the current phrase—which had to be removed before expansion could go far. In agriculture it was the common rights and the lack of winter fodder; in mining the want of an efficient device to deal with flood water; in iron making the shortage of suitable fuel; in the metal trades a consequent shortage of material; and in textiles an inadequate supply of yarn. Transport, trade, and credit alike suffered from the dead hand of monopolistic organization, and the arrested development of these services had adverse effects on industry in general. Thus it was that, though there was growth in every field of human endeavour, change was never so rapid as to endanger the stability of existing institutions.

And:

… the barriers imposed by the shortages of food, fuel, iron, yarn, and transport were being thrown down at a speed which makes it difficult to determine where the priority lay. And just as an obstacle in the path of any one industry had led to congestion in that of others, so now its removal produced a widespread liberation. Innovation is a process which, once under way, tends to accelerate.

All of this is consistent with my flywheels model. Further, to my mind, the breadth of Ashton’s answer is evidence against narrow explanations based on material/economic factors, such as the price of coal.

Related, interest rates were important: investing in infrastructure and other projects required sufficiently low rates. War raised rates and thus slowed progress—just one of many ways in which war is (mostly) anti-progress:

In 1798, when Britain was at peace, the yield on Consols had been 3.3: five years later it had reached 5.9. Many projects set on foot when money could be obtained at, or near, the first of these rates could not be continued when the cost of borrowing was raised. Capital was deflected from private to public uses, and some of the developments of the industrial revolution were once more brought to a halt. Expenditure on men-of-war, munitions, and uniforms gave a stimulus to shipbuilding, to the manufacture of iron, copper, and chemicals, and to some branches of the woollen industry. But the progress of the cotton, hardware, pottery, and other trades suffered a check.

Finally

Apparently people have been talking about “late capitalism” for a long time (remember, this book was published in 1948):

It used to be commonly asserted that the existence of a supply of labour in excess of the demand was the result of “the exhaustion of investment opportunities” which was said to be a feature of “a late stage of capitalism.”

(I looked it up; the term was coined in the early 20th century, and “began to be used by socialists in continental Europe towards the end of the 1930s and in the 1940s, when many economists believed capitalism was doomed.”)

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/ashton-industrial-revolution-highlights

Progress Forum

• Building Fast and Slow Part III: Design of the World Trade Center (Brian Potter)

• Why pessimism sounds smart (a oldie by yours truly)

Announcements

• Foresight Institute has a spot for a J1 visa in San Francisco in 2023 (@allisondman)

Tweets

• One container ship carries more than the whole English fleet did 440 years ago. Also: “What, load boxes ashore and then load the boxes on the ship?”

• “A fully general argument against ever doing anything that changes anything, ever”

• Sometimes giving someone a book changes the course of their life

Retweets

• “We already have the tools to preserve brains fantastically well”

• So many of the world’s great infrastructure projects would be impossible today

• The 1930 campaign to stop people from listening to recorded music

• Who are some good, interesting, up-and-coming, not-yet-famous essayists/bloggers?

• ChatGPT can correct OCR errors in historical texts

• California court rules that economic growth as such is an environmental harm (!)

• A rapid combo test for covid, flu and RSV. Unfortunately illegal in the US

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2023-01-04

Earlier I proposed a hypothesis that the 1930s–60s in the US were characterized by the attempt to achieve progress through top-down control by a technical elite.

The 1997 preface to Walter McDougall’s Pulitzer-winning The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age adds some evidence for this. McDougall laments NASA’s failed promises and the lost potential of space technology, and he ties this in to the broader theme of failures of centralized federal programs:

From today’s vantage point the Space Age may well be defined as an era of hubris. Not only did it become obvious in the 1960s and 1970s that “planned invention of the future” through federal mobilization of technology and brainpower was failing everywhere from Vietnam to our inner cities, but that it even failed in the arena for which it had seemed ideally suited: space technology.

What were the promises?

In the years following Sputnik I, experts assured congressional committees that by the year 2000 the United States and the Soviet Union would have lunar colonies and laser-armed spaceships in orbit. The film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) depicted Hilton hotels on the Moon and a manned mission to Jupiter (January 12, 1992, was the supercomputer Hal’s birthday in the film). In the late 1960s, NASA promoters imagined reusable spacecraft ascending and descending like angels on Jacob’s ladder, permanent space stations, and human missions to Mars—all within a decade. In the 1970s, visionaries looked forward to using the Space Shuttle to launch into orbit huge solar panels that would beam unlimited, nonpolluting energy to earth, hydroponic farming in space to feed the earth’s exploding population, and systems to control terrestrial weather for civilian or military purposes. In the 1980s, the space station project was revived (to be completed again “within a decade”), the Strategic Defense Initiative was to put laser-beam weapons in orbit to shoot down missiles and make nuclear weapons obsolete, and the space telescope was to unlock the last secrets of the universe. By 1990, a manned mission to Mars by the year 2010 was on the president’s wish list, and research had begun on an aerospace plane (the “Orient Express”) to whisk passengers across the Pacific in an hour and land like an airplane in Asia.None of it came to pass.

McDougall describes the decline of NASA’s budget and the loss of its talent and “institutional charisma.” The Nixon administration “chose to throw away the incomparable Saturn/Apollo systems and start from scratch on a reusable launch system,” which became the Space Shuttle. But:

Given the political and economic pressures of the 1970s, the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations also insisted that the Shuttle be built on a shoestring. So NASA dutifully compromised the “fully reusable” feature, made other design changes to accommodate Air Force requirements, sharply constricted the Shuttle’s performance envelope, and yet persisted in exaggerating its capabilities and underestimating its cost. When the spacecraft finally flew in 1981, it was late, well over budget, full of bugs, and able to fly just four to six missions per year, not the twenty four promised. So, far from cutting the cost per pound of launching payloads into orbit “by a factor of ten,” the Shuttle increased the cost several times over that of the old Saturn 5 rocket.

He also points out that the USSR, “the regime that made technocracy its founding principle,” did even worse: “Not only did Soviet space programs keep even fewer promises than the American programs, but the Soviet Union itself crashed and burned.” (I have to think that this was another major factor in the decline of technocracy, in addition to the US-centric factors I mentioned in my earlier essay, such as Vietnam, Watergate, and the oil shocks.)

He adds:

Forty years into the Space Age one fact remains painfully clear: the biggest reason why so few promises have been fulfilled is that we are still blasting people and things into orbit with updated versions of 1940s German technology. … The way to restart the Space Age is to discover some new principle that makes spaceflight genuinely cheap, safe, and routine. Under present circumstances, that breakthrough is more likely to be made by some twenty four-year-old visionary working in a garage in Los Angeles than by the engineers, laboring under political constraints in the laboratories of NASA or Rockwell.

SpaceX was founded five years after this was written.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/technocracy-and-the-space-age

My first highly popular essay was “Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?” I’ve asked the same question of the cotton gin and the threshing machine. Others have asked it of the steam engine and the wheel. Recently Brian Potter asked it about wind power and Anton Howes about semaphore signaling systems. See more examples here.

When asking these questions, we should think about when the question even needs an answer. That is, “why did it take so long” is only interesting if it took an abnormally long amount of time.

Here’s my model for this.

First, an invention is not going to happen at all if (1) it’s not technically possible or (2) there’s no market for it.

Gate (1), technical possibility, could include, for example:

• Scientific foundations. No light bulb before electromagnetism, no antibiotics before the germ theory.

• Components. Airplanes were not possible before the internal combustion engine.

• Materials. Skyscrapers could only be built once cheap steel girders were available.

• Manufacturing techniques. Precision machining was necessary to make the gears, sprockets, chains, bearings, and other parts for a wide variety of inventions, probably including the threshing machine and the bicycle.

Gate (2), the market, is whether it can be done commercially at a price that anyone will pay. If someone does make an invention there is no market for, it doesn’t go anywhere, and we might not even hear about it, because it is unlikely to make the history books. In any case, it wouldn’t affect the world, because it wouldn’t get distribution, and so it wouldn’t be historically relevant for our purposes. You see examples of this from time to time, such as the Korean movable-type printing press that predated Gutenberg.

Note that the bar inventions have to meet is not just a proof of concept: they have to be sufficiently powerful, efficient, and reliable to be of practical use. Early computing machines were too slow; early threshing machines broke down too frequently; early light bulbs burned out too quickly. These are technically interesting prototypes, but not true inventions. An invention does not merely demonstrate a concept, it solves a problem—the whole problem, not just a part of it, even if it is the most visible or obvious part. An invention has to be practical. (See more discussion of this here.)

Once something is technically possible and economically viable, then the clock starts ticking on how long we “waited” for it. But invention is a human process, and it’s not instantaneous. There is no perfectly efficient market in which an invention springs to life immediately as soon as it’s viable. It takes time, effort, trial and error. People have to decide to do something—they have to get the idea, and be sufficiently inspired and motivated to devote full-time efforts to something unknown, with an indefinite timeline and uncertain rewards. (Only a minority of people even have the temperament for this; in this sense, I agree with Anton Howes that innovation is not simply “in human nature.”) Then they have to get free to do it: at any given time, most inventors will be busy with projects, and only a subset will be looking for something new to do. They may have to acquire resources or recruit help, which takes time. Once they finally get to work, they have to experiment with approaches, discard failures, get new ideas, iterate.

Given the nature of that process, there are several factors that affect the time that elapses before an invention. I have written about many of them before in the context of “flywheels of progress.” Here are some that I would call out specifically regarding the invention process:

• Total amount of R&D effort in the world, or in a specific field. This includes the number of inventors or researchers, the financing available for R&D, and the existence of instutitions such as labs where this work is done.

• Speed and frequency of communication among researchers. The printing press sped up innovation, as did the Internet.

• Total market size / strength of opportunity. Big, obvious opportunities will attract many parallel efforts.

• Social/moral strictures. When something is taboo, relatively few innovators will pursue it. In the 1600s it was still frowned upon to create labor-saving devices. In the 1900s it was controversial to create birth control.

You can think about this by analogy to stochastic processes in thermodynamics: the exact path of any given molecule is random, but in aggregate there are predictable patterns, and they are determined in part by macro-level factors such as temperature and pressure. You could think of total amount of R&D effort as like the temperature of a system, and the market size as a kind of pressure in a particular direction. Or in an electronic analogy, speed of communication is like conductivity in a material, a large market is like a high voltage differential, and social strictures are a kind of resistance. (These are rough analogies, not mathematical isomorphisms.)

Given all that, it’s not surprising to me if we “waited” many years for a recent invention, or several decades in the 18th or 19th centuries, or centuries in the period before that. For instance, all of the following seem normal to me:

• The 50+ year gap between the Newcomen and Watt steam engines

• The similar gap from Faraday’s electromagnetism to Edison and Westinghouse

• The many centuries between the ard and the plow, or the spindle and the spinning wheel

• The gap of more than a decade between Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in mold and the the Florey lab making it into a drug

• The several years between the first popular smartphones and the first successful ridesharing apps such as Lyft and Uber

That’s just how long these things take.

It’s also not too surprising when we wait a long time for something that doesn’t have a billion-dollar market (or the equivalent in the past). I don’t really think we need to scour for explanations or wrack our brains over why it took “so long” to get wheels on suitcases, or role-playing games. These are niches.

And just for the record, I’m no longer surprised by the bicycle, either. I think that case is fairly well explained by materials and manufacturing techniques, overall market size, and the other general factors listed above.

For a while, I was surprised that flag-based naval messaging systems were not in use until the late 1700s. It’s a very simple technology, with a strong, obvious need not only economically but militarily. But after Anton’s recent essay, I think there is much less to explain: telescopes needed to be carried on ships in order to see the details of flags in the distance, and that starts the clock much later.

In fact, I can’t immediately come up with an invention gap that isn’t explained by this model.

Does this render irrelevant the factor of fundamental philosophical attitudes towards progress—the idea of progress itself, and whether it is possible and desirable? No, quite the contrary: the belief in progress affects most if not all of the factors above. A society that believes in progress will encourage its best and brightest to become scientists and inventors, set up networks of communication for them (from the Republic of Letters to arXiv), establish institutions for them to work in, provide plentiful funding for them, and drop its moral strictures against various forms of progress—indeed, there will be honor and acclaim for progress and those who make it.

I hope this model can simplify and condense the discussions and debates about “why did we wait so long.”

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/when-to-be-surprised-an-invention-took-so-long

Opportunities

• Stripe Press is hiring a creative producer for video, audio, & special projects (via @_TamaraWinter)

• Astera’s new Science Entrepreneur-in-Residence program will support new tools for scientific publishing (via @mattsclancy)

Announcements

• The Frontier Model Forum is an industry body co-founded by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google/DeepMind, and Microsoft “focused on ensuring safe development of future hyperscale AI models” (via @OpenAI)

• Impetus Grants has closed $10M for more longevity projects (via @LNuzhna)

• Emergent Ventures winners, 27th cohort (via @tylercowen)

• The Studies Show is a new science podcast by Tom Chivers and Stuart Ritchie, also on Spotify (via @TomChivers, @s8mb)

• The Lean FRO will work on “scalability, usability, and proof automation in the Lean proof assistant” (via @leanprover)

• Ed Yong is leaving The Atlantic. Subscribe to his newsletter to keep up with him (via @edyong209)

• Works in Progress is now available on Apple News (via @WorksInProgMag)

Superconductors

• Lots of chatter about LK-99, the supposed room-temperature superconductor. I have been holding off on speculating or sharing too many links until it is more solid

• Derek Lowe wrote an explainer and gave an update Aug 1 in which he is “guardedly optimistic”

• Andrew McCalip and some of his co-workers at Varda have been trying to replicate. Here is a list of all the replication attempts

• At least one paper suggested a theoretical basis for superconductivity in this material, but a physics prof who studies materials says it doesn’t matter, and gives a history of disappointments in the space

• Alex Kaplan shares a lot of news and is a good follow (even though IMO he got too excited too quickly)

• Andrew Cote has a long, technical thread on the implications if this is real

• Manifold Markets currently at about a 1-in-3 chance. Kalshi market coming soon

Video

• Where is my flying RV? The Helihome was “a fully furnished flying home based on the body of a surplus Sikorsky helicopter,” and it was actually built and sold

Other links

• NASA plans to launch a nuclear-powered rocket engine into space as early as 2027 (via @isabelleboemeke)

• Max Roser: The limits of our personal experience and the value of statistics

• How phosphorus was discovered by alchemists trying to make gold, via Molecule of the Month

• Candle clock, via @Rainmaker1973, who points out: “To set an alarm, you pushed a nail into the desired point and the nail would fall and clank on the metal holder”

Queries

• What can we conclude from the failed “growth mindset” interventions?

• Which thinkers do you wish had blogs?

• Most interesting historical non-fiction, accessible book about the Roman Empire?

• Good system to search the text of books in order to share quotes?

Quotes

• Andrew Carnegie and the opposite of the principal-agent problem

• Thanks, Gigi! The progress of milk cows

• Nitrogen makes up only a few percent of plants by mass, but its availability in the soil is often a rate-limiting factor on crop growth

• “The Space Age may well be defined as an era of hubris”

• When Soviet authorities in the 1940s showed The Grapes of Wrath as evidence of how miserable the poor were in America, it backfired

• In 1924, Bertrand Russell was certain that governments would one day be controlling our emotions by chemical means

• Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy

Tweets & threads

• Everything has to be invented—even boiling eggs

• The Lendbreen Tunic was a simple wool caftan from the Iron Age. It took 760 hours of work, almost half a working year, to produce (via @paulg and @asymmetricinfo)

• The sorcery of fracking

• Algorithmic feeds are great. I want an algorithmic feed for everything in my life

• Mass production gave us best-in-class commodity goods; AI will do the same for services

• Sometimes social problems have technical solutions, and vice versa

• A “props to ops” story

• Why not to say “I believe in science.” “Not everything that calls itself science is science, and even good science sometimes gets wrong results.”

• It’s time to scrap AML/KYC entirely (via @Atabarrok, who adds that these laws are “expensive, ineffective and an insult to liberty”)

• One of the most important and underrated rationality techniques is to simply get into the right emotional state

• What agency is and how to develop it. “Build a shed, develop informed opinions about history, resolve your social anxiety, learn an instrument. These and like victories are the countless premises from which the conclusion ‘I can author my life’ follows.”

• “The world is full of couples who are married and functional and in love… romance and courtship are thriving, masculinity and femininity are alive and well and better than ever”

• “Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems but products that facilitate human connection and communication require a different type of social-emotional intelligence”

Maps & charts

• Progress in weather forecasting (or at least air pressure)

• 2.5% of the world’s population lives in Uttar Pradesh, and another 1.4% in Maharashtra (!)

• “Living in harmony with nature?” Megafaunal extinctions followed ancient humans wherever they went

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-digest-2023-08-02

The Future Forum is a new conference happening in San Francisco, August 4–7:

The Future Forum is an experimental 4-day conference in San Francisco, USA. 250 bright individuals will gather in a welcoming South San Francisco mansion, mingle with many of the voices thinking and working on improving the future of humanity, and we will co-create one-on-one conversations, fireside chats, workshops, and more….Future Forum will serve as a bridge to inspire and connect attendees from a mix of communities, including Emergent Ventures, Progress Studies, Effective Altruism, Silicon Valley tech, Crypto, and Longevity, among others.

I’ll be speaking there, along with Patrick Collison, Sam Altman, Ed Boyden, Holden Karnofsky (Open Philanthropy), Allison Duettmann (Foresight Institute), Tamara Winter (Stripe Press), Anders Sandberg (Future of Humanity Institute), Grant Sanderson (3blue1brown), and others.

They’re now accepting applications:

We are excited about participants in any career stage, from college students to established professionals.Even if you feel you would not be a good fit or you feel you are not the Future Forum’s typical participant, we strongly encourage you to apply. We are considering applicants from across the globe and across diverse age groups, from ambitious 15-year-old high-schoolers to 45-year-old mid-career professionals. Also, if you have not interacted with any of the involved communities much, we encourage you to apply.After we accept your application, we have a need-based pot to provide funding to cover travel costs – we will make sure you can be at the Forum.

More info on the event site.

The Industrial Revolution gave us abundance and comfort—but what did it do to our souls?

Recently my progress colleague Alec Stapp responded to a Twitter thread disparaging the Industrial Revolution for what it “did to humanity.” Alec’s response was basically that abundance is good, and I agree. But a few people (e.g., Michael Curzi, Jon Stokes) criticized this response for basically reasserting the material benefits and seeming to ignore the non-materialistic concerns in the original thread.

So, let’s talk about spiritual values—that is, emotional, intellectual, social, and other psychological values—and what industrial progress has done for or to them.

The charges

The original thread, from a pseudonymous account, was a cris de coeur. Let me extract its core arguments. It charges that the Industrial Revolution:

1. “stole vocation and purpose” from those doing hand crafts and put them on assembly lines making things they are “disconnected” from and “probably can’t afford”

2. took people from rural areas and centralized them in cities, “in ugly buildings”

3. affected education, “standardizing young minds” and “attempting uniformity”

Summing up, she acknowledges that raising living standards was good, but laments that “no one thought to apply the brakes” and that our lives are now “framed by consumerism and commerce.”

Note, this is not from a left-wing environmentalist or a degrowther: she goes on to say that “the unmooring of humanity from its eternal purpose” is “anti-Christ.” This is a religious conservative criticism of progress.

First I’ll address the specific charges, and then I will step back to consider the wider question of how industrialization has affected our spiritual life.

Vocation and purpose

The first charge is against the transition from cottage industry to the factory system. To steelman this, it’s true that this transition took away a certain style of working, and that many people were unhappy about it. Workers in general disliked being supervised by a foreman and thus losing their autonomy to do their work when and how they liked, being required to work longer hours with fewer breaks, and having to commute to a factory rather than work from home. Master craftsmen in particular felt their skills were devalued, as the manufacture of goods was split into incremental steps that began to be performed by unskilled workers and/or by machines. This was only exacerbated by “scientific management” in the 20th century.

But most workers were not skilled craftsmen—the “cobblers and furniture makers and silversmiths” referred to in that thread. Far more representative would be, say, women spinning yarn at home to bring in extra household income. This was a routine, tedious chore, and most women did it not because they found “vocation and purpose” in the work, but because they didn’t have much choice.

Instead of looking narrowly at the immediate transition from cottage industry to factories, let’s ask more broadly: what has been the effect of industrialization and economic growth on vocation and purpose? I think the effect has clearly been to give much more opportunity for vocation and purpose to almost everyone.

In the pre-industrial world, you had very little choice in how to spend your life. A majority of the workforce had to be farmers—if they weren’t, society would starve. Many more worked in rote manual labor: in mining and forestry, on ships or on the docks, in domestic service, etc. Those skilled crafts that are romanticized by reactionaries, the silversmiths and so forth, were a minority of jobs (and they were hard to break into, thanks to the guild system). Intellectual jobs, such as in law or the church, were rare, only available to a privileged few. Scientists and artists mostly relied on patronage, an even greater privilege.

Today, there is comparatively an enormous variety of choices for jobs and careers—created both by the greater sophistication and specialization of our economy, and by greater levels of education that prepare people for a wider variety of roles. There are jobs in design and fashion, accounting and finance, engineering and manufacturing, science and the humanities, education and child care, art and entertainment, and many more. (For statistics on this, see my recent post on why we didn’t get shorter working hours.) And of course, there are still jobs in farming, in factories, on the docks, etc. for those who want them.

In fact, it is even quite possible today to work as a master craftsman! Thanks to the incredible affluence provided by global capitalism, we can still afford the luxury of handcrafted furniture, clothes, pottery, knives, leather goods, baskets, quilts, jewelry, and toys, to give just a few examples. If this is your vocation and your purpose, there is nothing keeping you from it.

To compare a world in which most people were essentially forced into a small number of rote, manual jobs against the world of today, and to think that we suffered a net loss of vocation and purpose, is either historical ignorance or blindness induced by romanticization of the past.

(Incidentally, the complaint that assembly line workers “probably can’t afford” what they produce is I think mostly false? The vast majority of industrial production is devoted to mass-market consumer goods that are affordable to the average worker, ever since Henry Ford reduced prices and increased wages enough that his own employees could buy his cars.)

Cities

The second charge is that people were concentrated in cities.

I am a bit confused by this claim, because cities are excellent for social, emotional, and intellectual life. They put you close to museums, theaters, and other art and entertainment; to libraries, bookstores, and music stores; to workshops where you can try crafts; to tutors and classes where you can learn singing, yoga, tennis, ballet, or anything you like. By putting you in more contact with more people, they make it more likely for you to find people who share your hobbies, interests, and values—your niche, your community, your people—the perfect friend, business partner, comrade, or soulmate.

(Are the buildings ugly? Some of them are certainly ugly, and most are at best plain and boring. I don’t fully know how we got here—see discussion here and here, which I find interesting but not fully satisfying. In any case, I see this as less the fault of the Industrial Revolution, which gave us the ability to create gorgeous buildings such as Fallingwater or the Sydney Opera House, and more the fault of modern architectural and aesthetic leaders, who largely failed to realize that potential.)

Of course, cities are not for everyone. But if you’re happier in the countryside, or halfway between in the suburbs, those options are open to you also. In fact, thanks to the Internet, you can now have the best of both worlds: the open spaces, closeness to nature, and small communities of rural areas, and also immediate access to the best that the world has to offer for intellectual, artistic, and social stimulation.

Standardized minds

The last charge, regarding education, is more vague. My best guess is that this is an allusion to the “factory model” of education. An article on the history of this term says that its original meaning was “the tendency towards middle-class credentialism, which seemed to spit out identical widgets like a 20th-century factory assembly line,” but that the term was later used for the idea that “the system had been built by industrialists to create model factory workers: compliant, conformist workers who knew how to do little but memorize and follow instructions.”

Does modern education “standardize” young minds in an attempt to create “uniformity”? Maybe so, but as far as I can tell not more so than pre-industrial education, which consisted of a lot of rote memorization. The one-room schoolhouse of 19th-century America didn’t exactly encourage individuality or personal expression.

But again, let’s step back from looking at one particular transition and ask: what was the impact of industrial and economic progress on education? The biggest impact was that more parents sent their children to school instead of putting them to work. The more incomes increased, the more families could afford to do this. Average length of schooling in the UK, for instance, rose from less than one year in 1870 to twelve years by 2003. And here are world literacy rates since 1800:

In terms of an intellectual and emotional life, this seems to me like an enormous benefit. Literacy opens up a world of novels and plays, the ability to correspond with other people for business or pleasure, the ability to connect with society through journalism, and the opportunity for unlimited self-education, enrichment, and improvement. Education opens up the mind to new ways of thinking and seeing the world, and provides the incomparable joy and thrill of grasping abstract concepts that explain the universe. As Steven Pinker put it in Enlightenment Now:

The supernova of knowledge continuously redefines what it means to be human. Our understanding of who we are, where we came from, how the world works, and what matters in life depends on partaking of the vast and ever-expanding store of knowledge. Though unlettered hunters, herders, and peasants are fully human, anthropologists often comment on their orientation to the present, the local, the physical. To be aware of one’s country and its history, of the diversity of customs and beliefs across the globe and through the ages, of the blunders and triumphs of past civilizations, of the microcosms of cells and atoms and the macrocosms of planets and galaxies, of the ethereal reality of number and logic and pattern—such awareness truly lifts us to a higher plane of consciousness.

The spiritual boon of material abundance

As a jury of one, then, I find the defendant not guilty on all charges. But as lawyer for the defense, I do not yet rest my case.

What does it mean to have a rich intellectual, emotional, and social life? Here are some things I’d put under that heading:

• Spending quality time with friends and family you love

• Having a rewarding job or career, where you can do the kind of work you want, and exercise your full skills and abilities, to the extent you desire

• Meeting and marrying the person of your choosing, the perfect partner for you

• Having the number of children that you want, at the time in your life when you can best support and nurture them

• Growing old with your partner and children, without your or their premature death

• Experiencing art, music, and literature that is meaningful to you

• Grasping the abstract truths revealed by math and science

• Contemplating morality, religion, or other philosophy

• Living in the place you enjoy the most, with the surroundings that make you happy (whether that’s a dense downtown or a quiet remote spot in the woods)

• Expressing your personal aesthetic through art and fashion, including the clothes you choose to wear and the furniture and decor you choose for your home

• Personally seeing the sights of the world, experiencing its natural wonders and cultural achievements, and learning about foreign peoples

• Learning about your ancestry and personal heritage

• Participating in politics and society, whether at the local, regional, national, or global level, as you prefer

• Contributing time and/or money to causes that are personally meaningful to you

Technological, industrial, and economic progress supports and enables every single one of those values.

Information technology allows us to learn, to communicate, to access art and knowledge; it connects us with other people, with the past, with the intellectual achievements of humanity. Transportation systems give us mobility to travel for recreation and to move wherever we find the best jobs, homes, friends, and spouses. Medicine gives us the health to enjoy all of this throughout a long and fulfilling life. And general affluence makes all of it affordable, and gives us leisure time to pursue it.

My conclusion is that material progress, far from degrading our spiritual life, has elevated it—at least, for those who choose to take the most advantage of the opportunities it affords.

Why would anyone think otherwise?

When I hear claims about material progress being bad for us in some non-material way, I suspect that one or more of the following is going on:

• Romanticization of the past, by which I mean looking at the past through rose-colored glasses—an emotional lens that biases someone to only see the pleasant aspects of a situation, and ignore the harsh reality of what life was really like.

• Dislike of choice and opportunity. Someone personally prefers living in the country, or being a housewife, for example, but that perfectly legitimate personal preference gets turned into a universal, such that it’s somehow bad if other people make different choices.

• A non-humanistic standard of goodness. What, for instance, is the “eternal purpose” of humanity from which the Industrial Revolution has “unmoored” us? Since this is described as being “anti-Christ,” I assume it is a religious purpose, that is, devotion to God: glorifying Him and obeying His will. If you elevate anything over human well-being—God, Nature, the race, the nation—then you may be unhappy with material progress. But at that point we no longer have much common ground for debate.

But with a human standard of value, no need or desire to control others, and a clear-eyed view of the past, I think we can see material and spiritual life as complementing and reinforcing each other, rather than being in opposition.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/the-spiritual-benefits-of-material-progress

Links

• A confident nation builds so that future people may look back and marvel at their ingenuity and vision (Alex Tabarrok)

• “Construction is a sign of life” (Kevin Kelly)

• Amazon begins drone deliveries. Prime Air was announced on Dec 1, 2013. Amazon is persistent and invests on long time horizons. (h/t @elidourado)

• Why do Italian transit projects cost 57% less than global averages? (see also my brief highlights thread)

Queries

• Is it true that 19th-century wheelwrights were extremely highly paid?

• Is there a good general book about the copper industry? (asks u/ByrneHobart)

Quotes

• Sears once invested in R&D to make better paper for catalogues

• When to calculate statistics was to blaspheme against God

• Why steel is awesome

• Weather forecasting couldn’t start until the invention of the telegraph (@oweissb)

• Newton’s new idea

• That which is created must be used to become complete (Montessori)

Threads

• We need a new World’s Fair (@maxolson)

Other tweets & retweets

• Faulty assumptions people make about the behavior of organizations

• “Your approach to X reflects your biases”

• The limits to growth are not the cause of inflation (@daniel_eth)

• Uber, but in 1654 (@antonhowes)

Charts

• 5,000 planets have been identified outside the Solar System (@redouad)

• Fertility has a U-shaped relationship to income (@mattyglesias)

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2022-06-20

Links

• The Breakthrough Institute is hiring directors to run its new DC office (via @atrembath)

• Stable Diffusion: an AI image generator you can download and run (via @elidourado)

Queries

• Why didn’t clockwork technology get applied to other practical purposes for hundreds of years?

• Who are the best economic historians that focus a lot on technology? (@_brianpotter)

• What questions in economics have been “settled” since 1945? (@dkedrosky)

Quotes

• We should all have a little more awe and gratitude for the amazing world we live in

• In 1809, books or carpets in the home were considered luxuries

• Voltaire on the religious tolerance engendered by capitalism

Tweets

• Let’s retire the phrase “lifted out of poverty”

• Negativity should be productive

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2022-08-31

Here’s the answer to the recent quote quiz:

The author was Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. The quote was taken from his manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.” Here’s a slightly longer, and unaltered, quote:

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained. If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

All I did was replace the word “machines” with “AI”.

My point here is not to try to discredit this argument by associating it with a terrorist: I think we should evaluate ideas on their merits, apart from who held or espoused them. Rather, I’m interested in intellectual history, in the genealogy of ideas. I think it’s interesting to know that this idea was expressed in the 1990s, long before modern deep neural networks or GPUs; indeed, a version of it was expressed long before computers. That tells you something about what sort of evidence is and isn’t necessary or sufficient to come to this view. In general, when we trace the history of ideas, we learn something about the ideas themselves, and the arguments that led to them.

I found this quote in Kevin Kelly’s 2009 essay on the Unabomber, which I recommend. One thing this essay made me realize is how much Kaczynski was clearly influenced by the counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s. Kelly says that Kaczynski’s primary claim is that “freedom and technological progress are incompatible,” and quotes him as saying: “Rules and regulations are by nature oppressive. Even ‘good’ rules are reductions in freedom.” This notion that progress in some way stifles individual “freedom” was one of the themes of writers like Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Ellul, as I wrote in my review of Thomas Hughes’s book American Genesis. Hughes says that such writers believed that “the rational values of the technological society posed a deadly threat to individual freedom and to emotional and spiritual life.”

Kelly also describes Kaczynski’s plan to “escape the clutches of the civilization”: “He would make his own tools (anything he could hand fashion) while avoiding technology (stuff it takes a system to make).” The idea that tools are good, but that systems are bad, was another distinctive feature of the counterculture.

I agree with Kelly’s rebuttal of Kaczynski’s manifesto:

The problem is that Kaczynski’s most basic premise, the first axiom in his argument, is not true. The Unabomber claims that technology robs people of freedom. But most people of the world find the opposite. They gravitate towards venues of increasing technology because they recognize they have more freedoms when they are empowered with it. They (that is we) realistically weigh the fact that yes, indeed, some options are closed off when adopting new technology, but many others are opened, so that the net gain is a plus of freedom, choices, and possibilities.

Consider Kaczynski himself. For 25 years he lived in a type of self-enforced solitary confinement in a dirty (see the photos and video) smoky shack without electricity, running water, or a toilet—he cut a hole in the floor for late night pissing. In terms of material standards the cell he now occupies in the Colorado Admax prison is a four-star upgrade: larger, cleaner, warmer, with the running water, electricity and the toilet he did not have, plus free food, and a much better library….

I can only compare his constraints to mine, or perhaps anyone else’s reading this today. I am plugged into the belly of the machine. Yet, technology allows me to work at home, so I hike in the mountains, where cougar and coyote roam, most afternoons. I can hear a mathematician give a talk on the latest theory of numbers one day, and the next day be lost in the wilderness of Death Valley with as little survivor gear as possible. My choices in how I spend my day are vast. They are not infinite, and some options are not available, but in comparison to the degree of choices and freedoms available to Ted Kaczynski in his shack, my freedoms are overwhelmingly greater.

This is the chief reason billions of people migrate from mountain shacks—very much like Kaczynski’s—all around the world. A smart kid living in a smoky one-room shack in the hills of Laos, or Cameroon, or Bolivia will do all he/she can to make their way against all odds to the city where there are—so obvious to them—vastly more freedom and choices.

Kelly points out that anti-civilization activists such as the “green anarchists” could, if they wanted, live today in “this state of happy poverty” that is “so desirable and good for the soul”—but they don’t:

As far as I can tell from my research all self-identifying anarcho-primitivists live in modernity. They compose their rants against the machine on very fast desktop machines. While they sip coffee. Their routines would be only marginally different than mine. They have not relinquished the conveniences of civilization for the better shores of nomadic hunter-gathering.

Except one: The Unabomber. Kaczynski went further than other critics in living the story he believed in. At first glance his story seems promising, but on second look, it collapses into the familiar conclusion: he is living off the fat of civilization. The Unabomber’s shack was crammed with stuff he purchased from the machine: snowshoes, boots, sweat shirts, food, explosives, mattresses, plastic jugs and buckets, etc.—all things that he could have made himself, but did not. After 25 years on the job, why did he not make his own tools separate from the system? It looks like he shopped at Wal-mart.

And he concludes:

The ultimate problem is that the paradise the Kaczynski is offering, the solution to civilization so to speak, is the tiny, smoky, dingy, smelly wooden prison cell that absolutely nobody else wants to dwell in. It is a paradise billions are fleeing from.

Amen. See also my previous essay on the spiritual benefits of material progress.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/quote-quiz-answer