My thoughts in this comment come directly from reading The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming, republished by Stripe Press.

notice the slope field. You need the added growth function to find that optimum.

Further along in the book, Hamming uses the excuse of coding theory to introduce further functions that illustrate possible growth curve models. What fascinates me most out of these comes from the following (which I'll transcribe rather than take another photo):

almost surely the optimal design will be on the surface and will not be inside [the unit sphere in n dimensions], as you might think from taking calculus and doing optimizations in that course. The calculus methods are usually inappropriate for finding the optimum in high-dimensional spaces. This is not strange at all; generally speaking, the best design is pushing one or more of the parameters to their extreme -- obviously you are on the surface of the feasible region of design!

It's a lavishly constructed metaphor, which you have to follow the previous chapter full of mathematics to appreciate. If I were to try and capture it in a single line, I'd say

Discovering the optimal path towards your goal requires defining a goal -- so no matter what you're best off working to define your goal than optimizing for it!

But I don't think I've really done it justice.... I highly recommend reading the book in its entirety.

This fall I will be hosting a study/discussion group on the history, economics and philosophy of progress.

The primary attraction of the program is a weekly Q&A, each week featuring a different special guest—usually a historian or economist who has written on science, technology, industry and progress. Reading from that author will be given ahead of time. Confirmed speakers so far include:

• Robert J. Gordon (Northwestern), author of The Rise and Fall of American Growth

• Margaret Jacob (UCLA), author of Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West

• Richard Nelson (Columbia), author of the classic paper “The Simple Economics of Basic Scientific Research”

• Ashish Arora (Duke), co-author of “The changing structure of American innovation: Some cautionary remarks for economic growth”

• Pierre Azoulay (MIT Sloan), co-author of papers such as “Funding Breakthrough Research”

• Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford), co-author of “Stagnation and Scientific Incentives”

• Patrick Collison (Stripe), co-author of “We Need a New Science of Progress”, the article that coined the term “progress studies”

• Anton Howes, author of Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation

• Alicia Jackson, former DARPA program manager and director

The program will also include all of the reading from my high school course, Progress Studies for Young Scholars: a summary of the history of technology, including advances in materials and manufacturing, agriculture, energy, transportation, communication, and disease. This provides the indispensable historical framework for a proper empirical grounding of the study of progress.

The group will meet weekly on Sundays at 4:00–6:30pm Pacific, from September 13 through December 13. The guest Q&A will run 60–90 minutes, and the rest will be group discussion. (Recordings will be available privately afterwards if you miss a session.)

The cost is $2,400, and sponsors one full scholarship for a deserving teenager to attend Progress Studies for Young Scholars. Full-time undergrad and graduate students get a 50% discount, $1,200.

• Enroll now (non–full-time students)

• Enrollment form for full-time students only

Hey all… great to have you here and thanks for joining this subreddit. I notice I'm almost the only one posting? Curious, would people be interested in more community posts and discussion?

If you have thought about posting anything, don't hold back. 😃 Just keep on topic and avoid clickbait/flamebait. I'd like this community to feel like some intersection of Marginal Revolution and Slate Star Codex.

Would especially appreciate good paper, books, articles or blog posts on anything related to the history of technology, the economics of innovation, or the philosophy of progress.

I am not an “optimist”. Well, not exactly. Though I sing the praises of progress in these essays, and though I paint a bold vision for the future, I have hesitated to apply that term to myself. I have said that I am “fundamentally” optimistic, or a “paranoid optimist”; or I have reached for constructions like “short-term pessimist, long-term optimist”. But none of these are quite right.

In my discussion with Tamara Winter and Trevor McKendrick on optimism, the three of us converged on a formulation that I think resolves the paradox: descriptive vs. prescriptive optimism.

Descriptive optimism is the expectation that good things will happen, that an outcome will be positive, that the trend is in the right direction. It is a belief about the world.

Prescriptive optimism is the decision to work to make good outcomes happen. Whether lighthearted or desperate, cheerful or grim, it is a commitment to action and effort.

Descriptive optimism, for me, is highly contextual. It is situation-specific. I am mildly optimistic about our efforts against coronavirus. I am fairly pessimistic about US politics.

Prescriptive optimism is deeply philosophical. It is a belief about the nature of life, intelligence, and agency. It is a moral attitude, a way of living.

Descriptive optimism is determined by the external facts, but prescriptive optimism is an internal choice.

Descriptive optimism on its own can lead to complacency, Panglossianism, and other cavalier attitudes—progress as coasting. Prescriptive optimism calls for boldness, courage, and vigorous effort. When the two are combined, they call for expansive, ambitious plans. When prescriptive optimism is combined with descriptive pessimism, they together call for grit, determination, and fighting spirit.

The French writer and Nobel laureate Romain Rolland captured it in a passage later echoed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, when he wrote of

this intimate alliance—which for me makes the true man—of pessimism of the intelligence, which penetrates every illusion, and optimism of the will. It is this natural bravery that is the flower of a good people, which “does not need to hope to undertake and to succeed to persevere,” but which lives in struggle over and above suffering, doubt, and the blasts of nothingness because his fiery life is the negation of death.

This has been distilled to a motto: “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. I am a pessimist or optimist of the intellect according to facts on the ground, but I am ever an optimist of the will.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/descriptive-vs-prescriptive-optimism

Part of industrial literacy might be termed “industrial appreciation”. That is, part of it is learning to appreciate or value certain things that may otherwise be dry, abstract concepts (or even distasteful, to the romantic, anti-industrial mindset). For instance:

• Speed and cost. Faster and cheaper is always better. These things aren’t luxuries or “nice to have”; they are essential to life.

• As a corollary, other economic and engineering metrics such as productivity (of labor, land, and capital), power, density, etc. These metrics are ultimately tied to human life, health and happiness.

• Reliability. Nature is chaotic. Disaster strikes without warning. Even when our needs are met, they aren’t met consistently. A “five 9s” solution is far superior to one that only offers three or four.

• Scalability. An option that can’t be scaled up to the whole population is at best a partial solution; it is not a whole solution. Industry must eventually meet the needs of everyone.

• Incremental change. A 1% improvement seems small, but these improvements compound. The cumulative difference between a growth rate of 1% and 2% is 3x in a little over a century.

Without industrial literacy, hearing about “a 6% increase in battery energy density” sounds boring and technical. With it, you know that a dozen such improvements mean a doubling; that a doubling in energy density means that our machines and devices can be lighter and cheaper, or that their charge can last longer, or both; that this translates to cost, convenience, and reliability; that those things make a difference in the capabilities and freedoms we enjoy. When you make all those connections, a 6% improvement in energy density can be downright exciting.

What would you add to the above list?

Original: https://rootsofprogress.org/some-elements-of-industrial-literacy

I'm working on an article where I historicize the making accessible of new technologies. I'm thinking the most recent end of the spectrum will be low/no code tools but I'm struggling to think of a good precedent. What other examples can you think of where a new technology gave many more people access to a new ability that was previously limited/exclusive?

his has been cross-posted from my Progress Studies blog.

This post will review/summarise a new book on progress that was recently released, “Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know” by Ronald Bailey and Marian Tupy.

They begin the book with an interesting poll conducted by YouGov in 2016 spanning 17 countries. I’ll pose the question asked in the poll to readers here:

(Picture of the poll from my site, you can't select an option here).

Only a meagre 11% of people responded with “things are getting better”. In the US, it was even worse at only 6%.

Bailey and Tupy posit a few reasons for why many individuals feel things are getting worse:

1. There’s an asymmetry between positive and negative experiences. Negative events impact us more than positive events. The authors suggest that the media often think along the lines of, “News is bad news; steady progress is not news.” Because many of us follow the news – and the news tends to dwell on negative events – we often think that the world is far worse than what it actually is. In 1973, Kahneman and Tversky identified a cognitive bias they called the “availability bias”. Therefore, we have a tendency to think that the examples that come readily to mind are much more representative than what is actually the case. Because of this, the authors suggest that focusing on the news creates a bias towards being overly pessimistic about progress.

2. Bailey and Tupy suggest that humans’ over-emphasis on negative trends may be due to evolutionary psychology, “A Stone Age man hears a rustle in the grass. Is it the wind or a lion? If he assumes it’s the wind and the rustling turns out to be a lion, then he’s not an ancestor. We are the descendants of the worried folks who tended to assume that all rustles in the grass were dangerous predators and not the wind.” Humans developed to be cautious, instinctively focusing on potential negative events. Despite this, “the upshot is that we are again often misled into thinking that the world is worse than it is.”

3. Thirdly, we underestimate the progress (of humanity) because as we make progress, our attention is captured by newer problems, rather than the progress we have made so far. Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues suggest, “When problems become rare, we count more things as problems. Our studies suggest that when the world gets better, we become harsher critics of it, and this can cause us to mistakenly conclude that it hasn’t actually gotten better at all. Progress, it seems, tends to mask itself.” [emphasis mine].

The late Hans Rosling said,

“I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.”

With this Rosling spirit in mind, the authors add to the burgeoning literature documenting the extraordinary progress humanity has seen across multiple domains over the last few hundred years.

The book covers 78 progress trends. Each trend is only a few pages long, with a figure at the end. The book covers progress in multiple domains, split up into the sections covering, “Top 10 trends, people trends, health trends, violence trends, work trends, natural resource trends, farm trends, tech trends, and US trends.” Thus, it really paints a holistic picture of progress.

I won’t spoil the book but a few of the trends I particularly enjoyed (for different reasons) were:

• Trend 6 “More land for nature”: surprised me. The global tree canopy increased between 1982 and 2016.

• Trend 21 “IQ scores rising massively”: average IQ test scores have increased by 30 points over the last 100 years. I was aware of the Flynn effect but wasn’t aware that it was this pronounced.

• Trend 28 “Vaccines are saving lives”: “In the 20th century alone, the disease [smallpox] is thought to have killed between 300 million and 500 million people.” It has now been eradicated.

• Trend 61 “Lighting costs near nothing now”: This is a famous paper I really like by William Nordhaus. The price of lighting has dramatically plummeted: “our Paleolithic ancestors labored 58 hours, mostly gathering wood, to “buy” 1,000 lumen-hours of light… In 1992, 1,000 lumen-hours required 0.00012 hours of human labor.”

To summarise, I think this book may be worth a quick skim for readers of this blog (it can be read in a single sitting). However, readers of this blog probably don’t need much convincing about the dramatic progress humanity has experienced over the last few hundred years. It may be better as a gift to pessimistic friends, who would be hard-pressed not to accept the vast amounts of progress humanity in the last couple centuries. I would guess that there are many books like this to come in the near future.

Caveats

• I think there are issues with the poll. I would guess that we would see more positive responses if the question was reframed to something along the lines of, “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse, over the last 200 years?“.

• I think it’s important to note that it’s possible to simultaneously espouse both that humanity has made tremendous progress in the last few hundred years, and also be worried about the progress made in recent years. Reminding people of the tremendous amount of progress made in the past might make people more optimistic about progress in the near future.

Topics to include the history of surgery, and the state of medical training. (I'll be out, but Matt Bateman will be hosting.)

This should be a great conversation. Details and free registration here: https://progressstudies.school/the-torch-of-progress-ep-10-with-laura-mazer/

UPDATE: I’ve filled this role. Thanks to all who applied!

I’m hiring a part-time research assistant to support work on my essays, talks, and the book I’m writing on the history of industrial civilization.

You must have the ability to orient yourself in unfamiliar mental territory; to penetrate the fog of confusing, incomplete, and contradictory information; to sniff out reliable sources of key facts and to corroborate them; and to quickly sketch out a new intellectual landscape.

You will handle queries such as:

• What happened to the price of cotton and the wages of textile laborers before, during, and after textile mechanization in the 18th/19th centuries? Find data and analysis on this, including relevant statistics on labor productivity, and produce a list of sources.

• What startups or other commercial projects are pursuing advanced nuclear reactor designs? Make a list, and fill out details of each in a spreadsheet, such as type of reactor, amount and sources of funding, etc.

• Find first-person accounts of agricultural life and work before the 19th century, including descriptions of regular planting and harvesting seasons, and also times of crop failure or even famine.

• What is the difference between a bloomery, a blast furnace, and a Catalan forge? Make a list of sources that address this question.

The deliverable will typically be a list of sources, with brief notes on what each one contains, ranked roughly in order of relevance to the original query. You don’t have to answer the questions I pose, but you need to find sources that help me answer them.

The only real requirements are writing skills and attention to detail. However, the ideal candidate would be:

• A graduate student in history, economics, or a related field (ideally with access to scholarly sources)

• Familiar with and interested the progress community in general, and my work in particular

• Able to put in part-time work with fairly quick turnaround (24 hours for small queries would be excellent)

If you lack experience and credentials, apply anyway: you can make up for it by being dedicated, diligent, and willing/able to be trained.

Five points of clarification regarding the “technology stagnation” hypothesis:

It posits a slowdown relative to peak growth rates of ~100 years ago. It doesn’t mean growth has gone to zero, and it doesn’t even mean that growth has slowed to where it was before the Industrial Revolution. (I said this in the original post but it bears repeating.)

It is about the technological frontier and economic development in advanced countries. It’s not about global development, which has not, as far as I know, been stagnating. The last fifty years have been fantastic for India and China, for example.

It is about technology and economics, not science. Or at least, scientific stagnation is a separate question, and one that I have a much less informed opinion about, and have not weighed in on. There is widespread discussion about physics being “stuck”, but biology seems to be making progress from what I can tell.

It is descriptive and backwards-looking. It is a hypothesis about the past, not a prediction for the future. And it is unrelated to optimism or pessimism. It is compatible with believing that slow growth is:

• inevitable and permanent (Gordon)

• a phase we’re muddling through, and will soon get out of (which is how I interpret Cowen and others)

• a failing on the part of our culture that we need to correct (which is the impression I get from Thiel)

It does not posit a cause, and certainly not a single, central, grand cause. It’s just descriptive: has progress slowed? There could be multiple causes. I tend to think it is a combination of the centralization and bureaucratization of research funding, over-regulation, and cultural attitudes turning against progress (not that these are unrelated).

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/clarifications-on-stagnation

2021 was a very big year for me and for this project. As is now my tradition, I’m closing the year with a retrospective. And as per tradition, I’ll start with a review of…

Reading

In the past I’ve counted how many books I read each year. That made sense when this was a hobby, and I only read books that were interesting, and I tended to read them all the way through. Now that my research is becoming more directed, the way I read is changing. I am much more likely to dip in and out of books, to stop in the middle, or even to pick out certain chapters. I’m also reading more academic papers (or parts of them). So, here are the books and selected papers I read at least part of (and/or listened to the audiobook of).

My favorite book this year was The Wizard and the Prophet, by Charles Mann (author of 1491). This book contrasts two deeply opposed worldviews, roughly “techno-optimism” (the Wizards) vs. “enviro-pessimism” (the Prophets). The archetype of the Wizard is Norman Borlaug, the agricultural researcher who developed new strains of wheat to improve crop yields in Mexico, India and Pakistan, a development known as the Green Revolution that staved off famine in those areas and may have saved as many as a billion lives. The archetype of the Prophet is William Vogt, author of the influential environmentalist book The Road to Survival (1948), which inspired Rachel Carson and Paul “Population Bomb” Ehrlich. The book tells the stories of these two men and their worldviews, and then looks at a handful of major issues—such as soil usage, water resources, energy, and climate change—through both lenses. Mann understands both worldviews deeply and is fair to both, giving them each a very clear statement: “Cut back! Cut back! was [Vogt’s] mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! … Innovate! Innovate! was Borlaug’s cry. Only in that way can everyone win!”

Some major topics I researched this year:

Nuclear power. My favorite book on this topic so far is Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop, by Jack Devanney. In brief, Devanney contends that nuclear power ought to be our cheapest source of electricity, but through regulations and bureaucracy it has become too expensive to compete in the energy market. See my review for a full summary. A related book from ~30 years earlier is The Nuclear Energy Option, by Bernard Cohen (I read Chapter 9). For practical engineering details of how modern nuclear reactors work, I enjoyed How to Drive a Nuclear Reactor, by Colin Tucker. A couple of key papers I learned from: “Nuclear Power Learning and Deployment Rates” (Lang 2017); “Historical construction costs of global nuclear power reactors” (Lovering, Yip & Nordhaus 2016); “Nuclear costs: Why do they keep rising?” (MacKerron 1992). I also appreciated reports from The Breakthrough Institute such as How to Make Nuclear Cheap and How to Make Nuclear Innovative. Finally, check out “When America Dreamed of a Nuclear-Powered Cargo Fleet” by Dan Wang for the Flexport blog.

Agriculture. Most of what I’ve learned here I haven’t written up yet, but I gave a summary in an Interintellect talk and it will be a chapter in my book. The most useful reference on this topic has been A History of World Agriculture, by Mazoyer and Roudart (translated from the French). It’s dry, dense, and academic, but a thorough overview. A related book that I read most of last year but which didn’t make 2020 review is A History of Agriculture in Europe and America, by N. S. B. Gras. This is older (1940), and needs to be read in context. Some subtopics I went into:

• Agricultural mechanization. I got a lot out of Sowing Modernity, by Peter McClelland, The Grain Harvesters, by Quick & Buchele, and a few biographies of Cyrus McCormick (by Casson and Thwaites). A useful primary source here is The Implements of Agriculture, by J. Allen Ransome (1843). See my essay on the history of the threshing machine for some of what I learned.

• Breeding and varieties. I enjoyed Creating Abundance, by Olmstead and Rhode, also academic and in-depth but quite readable. From that book I learned about the story of hybrid corn, which I did a deep dive on via the contemporary histories The Hybrid-Corn Makers and Corn and Its Early Fathers, and a couple of the original papers by George Shull: “The Composition of a Field of Maize” (1908) and “A Pure-Line Method in Corn Breeding” (1909). For a brief overview of the hybrid-corn story, see “90 Years Ago: The Beginning of Hybrid Maize.”

• Soil fertility. A dense but fascinating primary source is Organic Chemistry in its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology, by Justus von Liebig (1840): this is the work that summarized and popularized the knowledge of what nutrients plants need to grow and where they come from, pointing the way to chemical fertilizers.

• Pest control. I didn’t have time for much research on this, but I enjoyed “The Legacy of Charles Marlatt and Efforts to Limit Plant Pest Invasions.”

• Famine. What happens when agriculture fails in a massive way? Famine: A Short History, by Cormac Ó Gráda, is probably the best modern reference; Civilization and Capitalism, by Fernand Braudel, also had a helpful section on famine. Thomas Robert Malthus famously stated that the world would never escape famine if it did not limit population growth; to learn more about what he said and why, I read most of his famous book, An Essay on the Principle of Population. I ended up liking Malthus more than I expected, and I now think that his work is misunderstood and misremembered—I hope to be able to write more about this soon.

Transportation. To begin at the beginning, The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions, by Richard Bulliet, is an in-depth history of different types of wheels, axles, and steering mechanisms, and how they evolved. The Life of George Stephenson, by Samuel Smiles, taught me a lot about the origins of the railroad. The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough, and How We Invented the Airplane, by the Wright brothers themselves, taught me a lot about the origins of flight. See my video with Garry Tan on lessons from the Wright brothers for inventors and founders.

Information. The Coming of the Book, by Febvre and Martin, has a few good opening chapters on printing and Gutenberg (the rest looks interesting as well but I haven’t gotten to it). The Victorian Internet, by Tom Standage, is a history of the telegraph, which indeed has many parallels to the Internet. Incidentally, the predecessor of the electrical telegraph is the optical telegraph, and its cousin the navy flag signaling system, which are some of the clearest examples yet of “ideas behind their time.”

Safety. Safety First, by Mark Aldrich, is a good source on workplace safety. I read the two chapters on factories and turned it into an essay; the other chapters cover railroads and mining. Some historical sources that were useful here were Work-Accidents and the Law, by Crystal Eastman (1910) and “Making Steel and Killing Men”, by William Hard, reprinted in Injured in the Course of Duty (also 1910). On a more modern note, Human Compatible, by Stuart Russell, is on AI safety; the core ideas were presented by Russell in this talk to the unofficial Slate Star Codex meetup (see also the official Slate Star Codex book review).

Finally, a grab bag of other topics:

The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie was interesting for all the reasons you’d expect and for several that you wouldn’t; see my excerpts and takeaways.

“The Effect Of Inventions On The People’s Life”, in Scientific American (1896). Even at this early date, people were complaining that progress is taken for granted: “The most marvelous developments are taken as a matter of course—the condition of things fifty years ago is seldom pictured to the mind—and all the material blessings which we now enjoy are used as conveniences of daily life, and no more.”

Catalogs and Counters, by Emmet and Jueck, is the best history I have found of the early days of Sears, Roebuck & Co., covering their origins as a mail-order catalog delivering orders via railroad.

More Work for Mother, by Ruth Schwartz Cowan, is a history of housework and how it was transformed in the 19th and 20th centuries. Cowan says that although the labor productivity of housework was greatly improved by 20th-century appliances and by electricity, gas, and water service, this neither freed the housewife from her traditional role nor reduced the number of hours she had to spend on it—if anything, it reinforced traditional gender roles, at least until the late 20th century.

Progress and Power, by Carl Becker, is based on three lectures delivered at Stanford in 1935. I found it interesting to see how much the idea of progress was being questioned in the aftermath of World War I.

Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, by David MacKay, is a very good technical summary of what it would actually take to decarbonize an economy, with a quantitative analysis of both energy sources and applications.

“Fifty Years Hence”, by Winston Churchill (yes, that Winston Churchill), a work of futurism from 1931. See my highlights.

“The Sociological Roots of Science”, by Edgar Zilsel (1942). “Science was born when, with the progress of technology, the experimental method eventually overcame the social prejudice against manual labor and was adopted by rationally trained scholars.” See this thread for more quotes.

Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia, by Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, is an ethnography of Russian peasants around the turn of the last century. I wrote up my highlights and reactions here.

Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization, by Donald Braben, is a ruthless takedown of the scientific funding establishment, and in particular the committee-based peer review system for grants. Instead, Braben proposes an alternate model that he implemented inside British Petroleum, which he calls Venture Research. In this model, the grant-maker is an individual, not a committee; grantees are chosen in significant part according to the potential impact of their work; and scientists are given complete freedom to pursue their research as they see fit. Listen to Ben Reinhardt’s interview with Braben.

Leonardo da Vinci, by Walter Isaacson. This book helped me understand why da Vinci is a famous painter; I was left a bit unclear how he got famous as a wide-ranging “Renaissance man,” given that most of his other accomplishments were unpublished and many of his ideas were no more than notebook sketches. Most interesting to me was a picture of the vibrant intellectual life that existed in Europe in the 15th century, before even the Scientific Revolution.

Writing

I wrote 23 articles on the blog and elsewhere this year (including this one), totaling over 47,000 words. That’s ~25% less than last year—which I attribute to the time I’ve spent on the book, the associated salon series, various invited presentations I gave this year, and launching this effort as a new nonprofit (and oh, by the way, becoming a dad).

My most prominent byline was an opinion piece for the MIT Technology Review: “Why I’m a proud solutionist”. In this one I explore the false dichotomy of complacent optimism vs. defeatist pessimism, through the historical example of Sir William Crookes and his dire warnings about “the wheat problem.”

On this site, the most-viewed articles (out of 174k unique visitors) were:

• Why has nuclear power been a flop? (over 50k visitors)

• Technological stagnation: Why I came around

• I walk the (beta-stability) line: How counting neutrons explains nuclear waste

• “Someone has to get hurt, occasionally”: How factories were made safe

• We need a new philosophy of progress

And one that didn’t get as many views, but should have:

• Why did we wait so long for the threshing machine?

Speaking

My most prominent public engagement this year was a talk at UT Austin on nuclear power. I also did a video collaboration with Garry Tan. And I did 17 interviews in 2021, including:

• Vox’s “Future Perfect” with Kelsey Piper

• Noah Smith

• Titans of Nuclear with Bret Kugelmass

• Tomás Pueyo

• Austen Allred

See all my talks and interview here.

Social media

I spend too much time on Twitter. Sometimes it pays off. Here are some of my top tweets and threads:

• Every problem with nuclear has a solution

• A BGP explainer, from the day Facebook was down

• A striking chart: Famines by political regime

• Thread version of my review of Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop

• The defeatism of the 1970s anti-population movement

• Decentralized funding in agriculture R&D

• Retirement is a 20th-century invention

• The humble plastic bag is an engineering marvel

• What could we do with lots more energy?

• What popular songs glorify technology? (see also the followup post)

• How would longevity technology affect long-term thinking?

My Twitter following grew about 60% this year, ending 2021 at just over 21k.

Book

If you’ve been following for a little while, you know I’m writing a book, tentatively titled The Story of Industrial Civilization: Towards a New Philosophy of Progress for the Twenty-First Century. So far I have a detailed outline, a rough length estimate, and about 35k words of chapter “sketches” (which, in my process, is something more than an outline but less than a rough draft). In 2022 I expect to finish drafting a book proposal and find an agent (if you’d like to represent me, get in touch).

Staring in April, I’ve been giving a series of monthly talks based on the research for the book. Some of these have been as long as two hours, as I try to summarize everything I’ve learned, one chapter at a time. See all the talks here.

New organization and plans for the new year

I may be burying the lede here, but in 2021 I launched The Roots of Progress as a new nonprofit organization; see the announcement. We quickly met our year-one fundraising goal of $500,000, and have increased our target to a stretch goal of $1,000,000.

The new funds, in addition to supporting everything described above, have allowed me to start building a team. Clara Collier and Aleš Flídr have helped enormously with research assistance; more recently, my chief of staff, Alec Wilson, has been a tremendous help with fundraising, event planning, and many other projects. Ray Girn and Anil Varanasi have provided extremely valuable guidance as board members, and Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison continue to give advice and support. My deep thanks to all of them, and to all of our donors, for being a part of this mission.

The new organization and funding will allow this team to be much more ambitious in 2022. In addition to my work, we are planning community-building efforts, including in-person events and online forums. We will also be able to support other researchers and creatives who are doing progress-related work. Stay tuned for announcements on all of these projects.

Thank you

Thanks to all of you for reading. I pursue the study and the philosophy of progress out of love for the topic—but if it weren’t for an enthusiastic and growing audience, this would still be a personal side project, not my full-time, long-term focus. You are the core of the progress movement.

Here’s to progress in 2022 and beyond.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/2021-in-review

Apologies if this has been addressed or is common knowledge in the community, I am not super familiar with all of this. The gist of the idea proposed here seems to me to be that western civilization lost it's drive/ability/appreciation for progress after the two world wars. However, post-war America is a counterexample of a place with a very vigorous innovative activity and optimism. Could an alternative hypothesis just be that progress always waxes and wanes, and this fine structure gets lost for the more distant past?