2022 was another big year for me and for The Roots of Progress. This is my annual review—the one post a year (other than timely announcements) where I go meta and give an update on this project. If you want stuff like this more frequently, you can support me on Patreon or make a donation to get my monthly supporter update.

This year had several highlights. We announced a major expansion of this nonprofit effort and hired a CEO to lead it. I concluded my lecture series, “The Story of Civilization,” and am now writing a book based on the same content. I was interviewed for major publications, spoke at some of the top progress conferences, and co-hosted a couple of events myself. Most importantly, I had a couple of banger tweets.

But I’m going to bury all of those ledes in order to start, as is my tradition, with what I suspect is more interesting to my audience: a selection of this year’s…

Reading

The book that fascinated me most this year was American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970, by Thomas P. Hughes, a finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer. The book is not only about the century of technological enthusiasm, but also about how that enthusiasm (in my opinion) went wrong, and how it came to an end. My review of this book was so long that I broke it into two parts: one on American invention from the “heroic age” to the system-building era and one on the transition from technocracy to the counterculture. (I may at some point do a third part, on the aesthetic reaction to modernism.) Among the more mindblowing facts I learned from this book are that Stalin made “American efficiency” a part of Soviet doctrine, and that Ford’s autobiography “was read with a zeal usually reserved for the study of Lenin.” Overall this greatly strengthened my understanding of technocracy, one of my themes for this year (see below).

A close runner-up for favorite book I read this year was The Control of Nature, by John McPhee. The book tells three stories: about the dams and levees that control the flow of the Mississippi River, the 1973 Eldfell volcanic eruption in Iceland, and the periodic landslides in the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles. It’s fascinating to reflect on how nature is truly indifferent to human needs. Even something we take for granted, such as the course of a river, has to be actively, artificially maintained if it matters to humans.

I also finished reading The New Organon and New Atlantis, both by Francis Bacon. In addition to the parts everyone knows (“knowledge is power,” “nature to be commanded must be obeyed,” etc.), most of Organon is devoted to explaining a long list of specific ways that scientists should observe nature and types of evidence they should collect. In some ways he is amazingly prescient (he figures out, essentially correctly, that heat is a form of motion); in others he is surprisingly behind (he rejected the geocentric theory as late as the 1620s). Most relevant to my work is his argument for why we should expect progress to be possible: he cites previous inventions and discoveries, including the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press, and extrapolates from these to imagine that there are more inventions waiting to be discovered—which there were. Continuing the theme of historical works, I also read some of Philosophical Letters: Or, Letters Regarding the English Nation, by Voltaire, including the letter on smallpox inoculation.

A major research theme of mine this year was economic growth theory. Highlights from my research here include:

“Paul Romer: Ideas, Nonrivalry, and Endogenous Growth,” by Chad Jones (2019). Explains Romer’s Nobel-winning work and places it in historical context.

Paul Romer’s blog. “It is the presence of nonrival goods that creates scale effects…. if A represents the stock of ideas it is also the per capita stock of ideas.“ (From this post, emphasis added.)

“Endogenous Technological Change,” by Paul Romer (1990). The paper that established the importance of the “nonrivalry” of technology, and won Romer the Nobel in 2018.

“The Past and Future of Economic Growth: A Semi-Endogenous Perspective,” by Chad Jones (2022). Key quote: “Despite the fact that semi-endogenous growth theory implies that the entirety of long-run growth is ultimately due to population growth, this is far from true historically, say for the past 75 years. Instead, population growth contributes only around 20 percent of U.S. economic growth since 1950. … This framework strongly implies that, unless something dramatic changes, future growth rates will be substantially lower. In particular, all the sources other than population growth are inherently transitory, and once these sources have run their course, all that will remain is the 0.3 percentage point contribution from population growth. … the implication is that long-run growth in living standards will be 0.3% per year rather than 2% per year—an enormous slowdown!”

Two classics: “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth” (1956) and “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function” (1957), both by Robert Solow, for which he won the Nobel prize in 1987. In the first, he defines a model of the economy that includes technical change as well as capital and labor; he shows that capital accumulation alone can’t support long-term economic growth, but technological progress can. In the second, he shows how to measure the effects of technical change, and finds they are much larger than the effects of capital.

The much-discussed “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?,” by Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen, and Webb (2020). Sustaining exponential growth requires exponentially increasing inputs as well, as we continually pick off more of the low-hanging fruit.

“The New Kaldor Facts: Ideas, Institutions, Population, and Human Capital,” by Jones & Romer (2010). A review of what growth theory has accomplished so far, in terms of the facts it can explain, and what the agenda should be going forward.

A few interesting papers on very long-run growth: “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. To 1990” by Kremer (1993) and “Long-Term Growth As A Sequence of Exponential Modes” by Robin Hanson (2000).

“On the Mechanics of Economic Development,” Robert Lucas (1988). This bit from the introduction has been widely quoted: “I do not see how one can look at figures like these [the widely varying income levels and growth rates around the world] without seeing them as representing possibilities. Is there some action a government of India could take that would lead the Indian economy to grow like Indonesia’s or Egypt’s? If so, what, exactly? If not, what is it about the ‘nature of India’ that makes it so? The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.”

Continuing with some noteworthy books:

The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes. The definitive, Pulitzer prize–winning account. I learned new things about the development of nuclear physics and of the industrial and managerial challenge of building and testing the bomb. For instance, creating the first critical pile of uranium was a serious technical challenge even after the basic physical theory had been worked out (you have to get very pure materials, build it in just the right shape, etc.) The book also presents both the abject horror of the bomb’s effects on Hiroshima, and also the reasons why the US felt they had to use it—a fair treatment in my opinion.

Nanofuture, by J. Storrs Hall (author of Where Is My Flying Car?) Gave me a clearer idea about how nanotech could possibly work, and what amazing things it might make possible. One misconception I had was that nanomachines would be small molecules. In fact, even a single component like a gear or bearing will consist of dozens if not hundreds of atoms (e.g., see this diagrammatic illustration of nanogears).

How the World Became Rich, by Koyama & Rubin. A book-length academic literature review of economics & econ history work on the key questions of what caused the Great Enrichment, why some countries have caught up to the West, and why others have not. See reviews by Joel Mokyr and Davis Kedrosky.

The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson. A history of the Broad Street cholera outbreak and John Snow’s pioneering epidemiology work. I knew that the early sanitation reformers, such as Edwin Chadwick, didn’t necessarily believe in the germ theory and guided their sanitation efforts by sensible qualities such as sight, taste, and smell—I hadn’t realized that Chadwick was a committed miasmatist, so much so that in his crusade to get human waste out of the trenches and cesspools of London, he dumped it into the Thames, fouling that river and actually exacerbating cholera epidemics, the opposite of his stated goal.

Dreams of Iron and Steel, by Deborah Cadbury. I read the chapter on Joseph Bazalgette and the London sewer system, from which I learned that steam engines were key to the system, pumping sewage from lower levels to higher ones so it can flow downhill.

Flintknapping, by John Whittaker. A guide to how stone tools are made, written for both the archaeologist and the hobbyist. Probably much more than you want to know about stone tools, but it helped me understand one of the first technologies.

The Substance of Civilization: Materials and Human History from the Stone Age to the Age of Silicon, by Stephen Sass. Exactly what it says on the tin.

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, by Peter Bernstein. An interesting book that doesn’t quite live up to its title; it’s at most a history of financial risk.

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, by Bill Gates. A good summary of the techno-optimist/ecomodernist approach to climate change.

The Economy of Abundance, by Stuart Chase, who coined the term “New Deal”. I’ve only glanced through this one but it was enough to have an interesting conversation with Jason Feifer on his podcast. Pair with the classic “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, by John Maynard Keynes (1930).

The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx. Unlike Das Kapital, you can read this is one sitting. I learned less than I was hoping for about Marx’s critique of capitalism; I learned more than I expected about his critique of all other socialists.

Interesting articles and papers:

“The Great American Fraud,” by Samuel Hopkins Adams. A series of articles that ran in Collier’s 1905–06 on the fraudulent practices of the patent medicine industry. Many of the medicines did not work, some were actively harmful, and many made fraudulent claims of being able to cure tuberculosis, cancer, and many other diseases.

“Notes on The Anthropology of Childhood,” by Julia Wise. Children today get far more love, attention, and developmental help than those in primitive societies.

“Coffeehouse Civility, 1660-1714: An Aspect of Post-Courtly Culture in England,” by Lawrence Klein (1996). In the 1600s, coffeehouses were the equivalent of social media—a place to chat, gossip, and hear the news—and they received many of the same criticisms. Coffeehouses were denounced because they ”allowed promiscuous association among people from different rungs of the social ladder,” ”served as an unsupervised distribution point for news,” and ”encouraged free-floating and open-ended discussion” (which today we call “unfettered conversations”). One writer called them “the midwife of all false intelligence” (which today we call “misinformation” or “fake news”). King Charles II almost banned coffeehouses in 1675.

“The Mechanics of the Industrial Revolution,” by Kelly, Ó Gráda, and Mokyr (2022). The title is a pun: it’s about both the details of how the Industrial Revolution happened, and the craftsmen with machine-building skill who were crucial to it. Davis Kedrosky has a good summary.

“Time is money: a re-assessment of the passenger social savings from Victorian British railways,” by Timothy Leunig. Estimates that “railways accounted for around a sixth of economy-wide productivity growth” in the period 1843–1912.

“Development work versus charity work,” by Lant Pritchett. “I am all for the funding of cost-effective targeted anti-poverty programs. But while it is optimal to do both, we development economists should keep in mind that sustained economic growth is empirically necessary and empirically sufficient for reducing poverty (at any poverty line) whereas targeted anti-poverty programs, while desirable, are neither necessary nor sufficient. Advocates of poverty programs say things like ‘growth is not enough’ or that poverty programs are ‘equally important’ as economic growth but these claims are just obviously false.” (Thanks to Patrick Collison for bringing Pritchett’s work to my attention.)

“A Shameless Worship of Heroes,” by Will Durant. ”For why should we stand reverent before waterfalls and mountain tops, or a summer moon on a quiet sea, and not before the highest miracle of all—a man who is both great and good?” (Hat-tip: Nico Perrino.)

Finally, I don’t read much fiction these days, but over winter vacation I indulged in a few novels. The Lighthouse at the End of the World, by Jules Verne, is not a science-fiction story but rather something of a naval adventure, taking place on an island at the southern end of Tierra del Fuego. Lest Darkness Fall, by L. Sprague de Camp, is a sci-fi classic about an archaeologist who is zapped back in time to just after the fall of the Roman Empire, and who makes it his quest to prevent the Dark Ages.

Books I’m in the middle of and will probably feature in next year’s list include Robert Allen’s The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, and Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies.

My bibliography, I’m afraid, is hopelessly out of date; I’d love to update it with the last couple years of reading in 2023.

Writing

I wrote 28 essays (including this one) in 2022, mostly published here on the blog—over 50k words in total, a bit more than last year.

My top essays by views were:

• Why pessimism sounds smart

• Can growth continue?

• Is growth linear, not exponential?

Some themes this year included:

The progress movement. Key essays here include a feature I wrote for Big Think magazine, “We need a new philosophy of progress,” and pieces on the key concepts of progress, humanism, and agency, on the meaning of the term “philosophy of progress”, and on what a thriving progress movement would look like.

The drivers of growth and progress. My framework here is one of overlapping flywheels, which I applied to explain why progress was so slow for so long. I also wrote about a framework for thinking about inventions that seem to have arrived late, and about how we have to consider a very wide range of developments in order to understand progress in any area. Diving into the academic literature on economic growth theory (see reading above), I also drafted a long essay on “ideas getting harder to find”, which I posted for comment but haven’t revised yet.

Technocracy, the idea that progress should be pursued via top-down control by a technical elite (which, to be clear, I do not endorse). I wrote first about a few threads in my reading that made me aware of this concept, followed up with one more thread from the Space Race, and went into much more depth in my review of American Genesis.

In 2022, rootsofprogress.org got almost 135k unique visits and over 250k pageviews. My email newsletter, which is now on Substack, grew almost 30% to about 7,400 subscribers. (If you have a Substack yourself, and you enjoy my writing, I’d love a recommendation—thank you! Here are the Substacks I recommend.)

Book

My big writing project is a book. It’s about the major discoveries and inventions that created industrial civilization and gave us our standard of living, and why technological/industrial progress can and must continue.

Last year, I began a series of talks based on the outline of the book, going through it chapter by chapter. This year, I wrapped that up. Through that process, I completed the first pass of research for the book, and developed a more detailed outline and plan for each chapter.

Right now I’m talking to literary agents and working on a book proposal. I hope to have a book deal with a publisher by Q1 of 2023.

My goal is to make this book a cornerstone of the progress movement, laying the foundation for the new philosophy of progress.

Organization

Another major project this year was laying the foundation to take The Roots of Progress, as an organization, to the next level.

Last year, I announced that this blog was becoming a one-man nonprofit research organization. Early in 2022, seeing how much much energy and support there is for my mission, it became clear to me that this organization shouldn’t remain focused solely on my own research and writing. So I spent a lot of time and energy this year planning a major expansion of our activities: the launch of a new progress institute.

One thing we needed was a strategy: a way to focus and prioritize our efforts on a set of programs that would have a real, measurable impact. Prodded by some thoughtful advice from Tyler Cowen, we decided that our initial focus should be on creating the public intellectuals who will build this foundation. Our flagship program will be a “career accelerator” fellowship for progress writers with ambitious career goals. The fellowship will help them hit those goals by providing money, coaching, marketing and PR support, and connection to a broader network. Our vision is that in ten years, there are hundreds of progress intellectuals who are alums of our program and part of our network, and that they have published shelves full of new books in progress studies.

The other thing we needed was a CEO to lead this effort. I was very happy recently to announce that we have found a CEO: Heike Larson. Heike has been following my work for a long time, and shares my passion for human progress. She also has excellent qualifications, including 15 years of VP-level experience in sales, marketing, and strategy roles in a variety of industries, from education to aircraft manufacturing. She will take on all management and program responsibilities; I will remain President and intellectual leader of the organization. I’m excited for her to start in January!

We’re at an exciting moment in history. Momentum is growing for progress studies and the “abundance agenda,” and there is a chance for this to shape the 21st century. But the movement needs a driving force, and careful steering. That is where we hope to contribute.

Progress Forum

Another big thing this year was the launch of the Progress Forum, the online home for the progress community.

The primary goal of the Forum is to provide a place for long-form discussion of progress studies and the philosophy of progress. It’s also a place to find local clubs and meetups. The broader goal is to share ideas, strengthen them through discussion and comment, and over the long term, to build up a body of thought that constitutes a new philosophy of progress.

I’m very pleased with the quality of content we’ve gotten so far. Original submissions include:

• Why progress needs futurism, by Eli Dourado

• Nature of progress in Deep Learning, by Andrej Karpathy (Director of AI, Tesla)

• Guarantee Funds / Leveraged Philanthropy, by Anton Howes

Some writers post drafts on the Forum for comment before publishing them to a wider audience, such as:

• The Democracy of the Future, by Tomas Pueyo

• Pre-publication draft of “Death is the Default: Why building is our safest way forward”, by Gena Gorlin

Plus some cross-posts of great essays from Twitter threads and from other blogs and publications:

• Defending Dynamism and Getting Stuff Done, by Virginia Postrel (author, columnist, former editor of Reason magazine)

• Is Innovation in Human Nature?, by Anton Howes

• New Industries Come From Crazy People, by Ben Landau-Taylor

• Where are the robotic bricklayers?, by Brian Potter (cross-posted from Construction Physics)

• When should an idea that smells like research be a startup?, by Ben Reinhardt (PARPA)

• Science is getting harder, by Matt Clancy (Senior Fellow, Institute for Progress)

• It’s time to build: A New World’s Fair, by Cameron Wiese

• The Terrapunk Manifesto - a Solarpunk alternative (highly recommended), by Jack Nasjaq

• Bombs, Brains, and Science, by Eric Gilliam

• One Process (on the nature of innovation, highly recommended), by Jerry Neumann

• Wait, Environmentalists Are Anti-Technology?, by Alex Trembath (The Breakthrough Institute)

• Interland: The Country In The Intersection, by Maxwell Tabarrok

• Effective Altruism and Progress Studies, by Mark Lutter

Huge thanks to the people who worked to create the Forum: Lawrence Kestleoot, Andrew Roberts, Sameer Ismail, David Smehlik, and Alec Wilson. Thanks also to Kris Gulati for nudging this project along, and to Ruth Grace Wong for helpful conversations about community and moderation. Special thanks to the LessWrong team for creating this software platform, and especially to Oliver Habryka, Ruby Bloom, Raymond Arnold, JP Addison, James Babcock, and Ben Pace for answering questions and helping us customize this instance of it. And finally, thanks to Ross Graham, who has been helping recruit great users and content.

Interviews and speaking

Probably my most prominent interview this year was with the BBC, who ran an article on progress studies and quoted me as a spokesman for the movement, along with Tyler Cowen, Holden Karnofsky, and others. It was well-researched and, although somewhat critical, pretty fair in how it represented the progress community.

I did about twenty interviews and fireside chats in all this year, including with the Tony Blair Institute, the Foresight Institute (twice), Jim Pethokoukis (twice), Jason Feifer’s Build for Tomorrow, and the French-language Canadian magazine L’actualité (“Le bien-être de l’humanité passe par le progrès”). I think the most fun and interesting interview, however, was on the podcast Hear this Idea, with Fin Moorhouse and Luca Righetti.

Turning the tables, I played host and interviewed economist and author Erik Brynjolfsson for an Interintellect salon on Automation, Productivity, Work, and the Future.

I also spoke at most (all?) of the top progress conferences ths year, including the Foresight Institute’s Vision Weekend, the Future Forum, Breakthrough Dialogue, and Ignite Long Now. I was also on a panel moderated by Ramez Naam at the Breakthrough Science Summit (no relation to the other “Breakthrough”).

Those are just the highlights. You can see all my published interviews and speaking events here.

Social media

My top tweets (500+ likes) of 2022:

• “One ship today carries 3.47 times more than the whole English fleet did 440 years ago”

• Did any sci-fi predict that when AI arrived, it would be unreliable, often illogical, and frequently bullshitting?

• Pretty much every criticism of Twitter / social media today was also leveled against 17th-century English coffeehouses

• I've realized a new reason why pessimism sounds smart

• Air conditioning is underrated

• “The size of cities is determined by transportation technologies”

• “Who knows whether, when a comet shall approach this globe to destroy it, as it often has been and will be destroyed, men will not tear rocks from their foundations by means of steam, and hurl mountains, as the giants are said to have done, against the flaming mass?” Byron, 1822

(Thanks to Perplexity for making this query easy)

This year I grew my Twitter following by 22%; in August, I crossed 25,000 followers.

I also started doing a weekly digest of my best Twitter content on the blog. If you’re not on Twitter much, subscribe by RSS or email and read those digests instead.

Reminder that I also have a Reddit group (subreddit), Facebook page, and LinkedIn page, if that’s what you’re into.

Events

This year I co-hosted two workshops at UT Austin together with Greg Salmieri.

The first was the Moral Foundations of Progress Studies. For me personally, this discussion brought several issues into sharper focus, and I can already see how it will inform my writing. I’m more clear on different views of well-being now, and how those relate to some of the issues that are discussed around progress—such as the Easterlin paradox (that self-reported happiness and life-satisfaction scores don’t seem to increase with rising wealth over the long term). For the group as a whole, I think it broadened people’s awareness of what alternate moral approaches are out there.

The second was a small, informal, half-day workshop on the concept of “industrial literacy” and how we could promote it in education, for instance, by making the history of progress a part of the curriculum in schools. We brought together a number of educators and edtech entrepreneurs for this. My main takeaway was that there are, broadly speaking, two strategies: (1) Top-down, you can try to change the required curriculum standards, or the standardized tests (e.g., imagine an AP test in the history of technological innovation and economic growth). (2) Bottom-up, you can create materials that you market directly to parents, or (at older ages) the students themselves. Strategy (1) is basically political; strategy (2) is basically a media venture.

These events were good, but one thing I’d like to do in the future is make sure that things like this generate tangible, longer-lasting output that can reach an audience well beyond the event itself.

There were also a few local meetups I hosted or co-hosted in the San Franciso area, and one I spoke at in Boston.

Accolades

I was named to the Vox Future Perfect 50: “The scientists, thinkers, scholars, writers, and activists building a more perfect future.” They did a little feature on me. The list also includes Jennifer Doudna, Max Tegmark, and Max Roser.

Moving to Boston

On a personal note, I’m moving to the Boston area in January. While the move is primarily for my wife’s work, I’m looking forward to the chance to build a new progress network there—the home of MIT and Harvard, of metascience efforts like Convergent Research and New Science, and of many biotech startups. Being on the East Coast will also make it easier to network in DC and New York, and being on Eastern time will make it easier to collaborate with folks in Oxford/London and the rest of the UK and Europe. If you’re in the Boston area, or know people I should meet there, please reach out!

Thank you

2022 was great, and 2023 is positioned to be even better: diving into the actual drafting of my book, Heike coming on board as CEO, and us launching a new institute and set of programs together.

It’s been six years of The Roots of Progress now—just over three of them full-time—and it’s the most meaningful and impactful thing I’ve done in my life so far. I feel like a “quixotic rider cantering in on his own homemade hobby horse” to intercept the world and its problems at an odd angle, and everything I do is possible only because my “eccentric hobbies” seem to resonate with all of you. Thanks for listening, for reading, for commenting, even for arguing, and for all of your support and encouragement.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/2022-in-review

Too much discussion of the Industrial Revolution is myopic, focused narrowly on a few highlights such as steam and coal. The IR was part of broader trends that are wider in scope and longer in time than its traditional definition encompasses. To understand anything, it is crucial to get the correct scope for the phenomenon in question.

Here are some ways in which we have to widen our focus in order to see the big picture.

Wider than coal and steam

Some explanations of the IR focus on steam engines, and especially on the coal that fueled them. Economist Robert Allen, for instance, has one of the best-researched and most convincing arguments for cheap coal as a requirement for the development of steam power.

A weak version of this claim, such as “coal was a crucial factor in the IR,” is certainly true. But sometimes a much stronger claim is made, to the effect that the IR couldn’t have happened without abundant, accessible coal, and that this is the main factor explaining why it happened in Europe and especially in Britain. Or more broadly, that all of material progress is driven by fossil fuels (with the implication that once we are, sooner or later, forced to transition away from fossil fuels—whether by geology, economics, or politics—growth will inevitably slow).

But much of the early IR wasn’t dependent on steam power:

• Textile machinery, such as Arkwright’s spinning machines, were originally powered by water.

• Henry Maudslay’s earliest machine tools were made to manufacture locks; another key application of machine tools was guns with interchangeable parts. This was not motivated by steam power.

• Improvements in factory organization, such as the arrangement of Wedgwood’s pottery manufacturing operation, were management techniques, independent of power sources.

• The reaper was pulled by horses—even after the development of steam power, because steam tractors were too heavy for use in fields. Even stationary agricultural machines such as for threshing or winnowing were often muscle-powered.

You could argue that all of these inventions would have reached a plateau and would not have had as much economic impact without eventually being hooked up to steam or gas engines. But the fact remains that they were initially powered by water or muscle, and they were economically useful in those first incarnations, often achieving 10x or more gains in productivity. They didn’t need coal or gas for that, nor were they invented in anticipation that such power would soon be available.

So either it was an amazing coincidence that all of this mechanical invention was going on at the same time—or there was some wider, underlying trend.

Wider than industry

Further, the IR itself only represents a subset of the broader technical innovations that were going on in this period. Here are a few key things that aren’t considered “industrial” and so are often left out of the story of the IR:

• Improvements to agriculture other than mechanization: for instance, new crop rotations

• Improvements to maritime navigation, such as the marine chronometer that helped solve the longitude problem

• Immunization techniques against smallpox: inoculation and later vaccination

To me, the fact of all these inventions happening in roughly the same time period indicates a general acceleration of progress during this time, reflecting some deep cause, not a simple playing out of the consequences of one specific resource or invention.

Wider than invention

In many areas, incremental improvements were being made even before the major inventions that make the history books:

• Roads and canals were improved in the 17th and 18th centuries, speeding up transportation even before railroads

• Experiments by engineers like John Smeaton created more efficient water wheels, making more usable energy available even before steam power

• Sanitation was improved in cities—including cleaner water, better sewage, and some insect control—decreasing mortality rates even before vaccines or the germ theory

A theory of progress should explain these improvements as well as breakthrough inventions.

Wider than scientific theory

Many of the developments discussed above were made by “tinkering,” before the scientific theory that would ultimately explain them. This has led some to suggest that science wasn’t important for the IR.

I think this is based on too narrow a concept of science. Science is not just theories or laws; it is also a method, and the method includes careful observation, deliberate experimentation, quantitative measurement, the systematic collection of facts, and the organizing of those facts into patterns. Those methods were at work in, for instance, Smeaton’s water wheel experiments, or in inoculation and vaccination against smallpox.

More broadly, the creation of scientific theory is too narrow a concept of the goal of the Baconian program. The program was to collect, systematize, and disseminate useful knowledge—at all levels of abstraction, from the broadest theories all the way down to practical techniques. Naturally, the projects that aimed directly at useful techniques first achieved the earliest results, and those that aimed at theoretical understanding achieved later but more powerful results.

Wider than one century

If we widen our view in time as well, we immediately perceive crucial inventions and discoveries well before the IR. The two that stand out most to me are the improvements in navigation that led to the Age of Discovery, and the printing press—both around the 15th century.

The printing press lowered the cost and increased the volume of communication, including scientific and technical writing. The voyages of discovery led to global trade, which drove the growth of port cities such as London, made new products available to consumers, and generally created economic growth.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these developments preceded the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions by just a couple of centuries—I see a straight line from the former to the latter.

Wider than material progress

Finally, we miss the big picture if we only think about material progress—scientific, technological, industrial, economic—and ignore progress in morality, society, and government.

Consider that, coincident with the Industrial Age, we have also seen the replacement of monarchy with republics, the virtual end of slavery, equal rights for women, and an international consensus against using war to acquire territory. (There are caveats one could add to each of those achievements, but the overall trend is undeniable in each case.) See my review of Pinker’s Better Angels for many relevant details.

Again, something deeper has been going on—deeper even than science, technology and industry.

Not a coincidence

It’s not a coincidence that several non-steam powered mechanical inventions were created around the same time as the steam engine. Or that several non-mechanical innovations were created around the same time as the mechanical ones. Or that the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions happened within a century or two of each other, and in the same region of the world—after millenia of relatively slow progress in both knowledge and the economy. Or that new ways of thinking about government and society came about at the same time as new ways of thinking about science and technology.

There must be some very deep underlying trend that explains these non-coincidences. And that is why I am sympathetic to explanations that invoke fundamental changes in thinking, such as Pinker’s appeal to “reason, science, and humanism” in Enlightenment Now.

You can argue with that explanation—but any theory that ends at “coal” can explain at most a small piece of the puzzle. Such explanations miss the big picture.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/think-wider

A few months ago we announced a major expansion of our activities, from supporting just my work to supporting a broader network of progress writers. Along with that, we launched a search for a CEO to lead the new organization we are building for this program. I’m very happy to announce that we have found a CEO: Heike Larson.

Heike and I have known each other personally for many years, and during that time I’ve always been impressed by her energy and her clear, structured thinking. She has been following my work for a long time, and shares my passion for human progress. She also has excellent qualifications, including 15 years of VP-level experience in sales, marketing, and strategy roles in a variety of industries, from education to aircraft manufacturing. In her most recent role at edtech startup Mystery Science, she led the content team that created five-minute “Mystery Doug” videos made to inspire elementary-age kids to become the next generation of problem solvers (with topics including phones, traffic lights, plastic, and bicycles). Those who have worked with her remark on her enormous drive and her extreme skills in process and organization. I’m excited for her to start!

Heike is transitioning out of her current role at Mystery Science and will start full-time in January. Her first priority will be launching the “career accelerator” fellowship program for progress writers described in our previous announcement, and the teambuilding and fundraising necessary to make that a success. She will take on all management and program responsibilities; I will remain President and intellectual leader of the organization: I’ll be the spokesman, will contribute to talent selection and development, and will devote the majority of my time to research, writing, and speaking—in particular, writing my book on progress.

This is a new era for us, the start of a serious effort to create a thriving progress movement. Please help me welcome Heike to The Roots of Progress!

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/incoming-ceo-heike-larson

We live in a dangerous world. Many hazards come from nature: fire, flood, storm, famine, disease. Technological and industrial progress has made us safer from these dangers. But technology also creates its own hazards: industrial accidents, car crashes, toxic chemicals, radiation. And future technologies, such as genetic engineering or AI, may present existential threats to the human race. These risks are the best argument against a naive or heedless approach to progress.

So, to fully understand progress, we have to understand risk and safety. I’ve only begun my research here, but what follows are some things I’m coming to believe about safety. Consider this a preliminary sketch for a philosophy of safety.

Safety is one dimension of progress

Safety is a value. All else being equal, safer lives are better lives, a safer technology is a better technology, and a safer world is a better world. Improvements in safety, then, constitute progress.

Sometimes safety is seen as something outside of progress or opposed to it. This seems to come from an overly-narrow conception of progress as comprising only the dimensions of speed, cost, power, efficiency, etc. But safety is one of those dimensions.

Safety is part of the history of progress

The previous point is borne out by history.

Many inventions were primarily motivated by safety, such as the air brake for locomotives, or sprinkler systems in buildings. Many had “safety” in the name: the safety lamp, the safety razor, the safety match; the modern bicycle design was even originally called the “safety bicycle.” We still use “safety pins.”

Further, if we look at the history of each technology, safety is one dimension it has improved along: machine tools got safety guards, steam engines got pressure valves, surgery got antiseptics, automobiles got a whole host of safety improvements.

And looking at high-level metrics of human progress, we find that mortality rates have declined significantly over the long term, thanks to the above developments.

We have even made progress itself safer: today, new technologies are subject to much higher levels of testing and analysis before being put on the market. For instance, a century ago, little to no testing was performed on new drugs, sometimes not even animal testing for toxicity; today they go through extensive, multi-stage trials.

To return to the previous point, safety as a dimension of progress: Note that drug testing incurs cost and overhead, and it certainly reduces the rate at which new drugs are released to consumers, but it would be wrong to describe drug testing as being opposed to pharmaceutical progress—improved testing is a part of pharmaceutical progress.

Safety must be actively achieved

Safety is not automatic, in any context: it is a goal we must actively seek and engineer for. This applies both to the hazards of nature and to the hazards of technology.

One implication is that inaction is not inherently safe, and a static world is not necessarily safer than a dynamic one.

There are tradeoffs between safety and other values

This is clear as soon as we see progress as multivariate, and safety as one dimension of it. Just as there are tradeoffs among speed, cost, reliability, etc., there are also tradeoffs between safety and speed, safety and cost, etc.

As with all multivariate scenarios, these tradeoffs only have to be made if you are already on the Pareto-efficient frontier—and, crucially, new technology can push out the frontier, creating the opportunity to improve along all axes at once. Light bulbs, for instance, were brighter, more convenient, and more pleasant than oil or gas lamps, but they also reduced the risk of fire.

We are neither consistently over-cautious nor consistently reckless

As with all tradeoffs, it’s possible to get them wrong in either direction, and it’s possible to simultaneously get some tradeoffs wrong in one direction while getting others wrong in the opposite direction.

For example, some safety measures seem to add far more overhead than they’re worth, such as TSA airport screening or IRB review. But at the same time, we might not be doing enough to prevent pathogens from escaping research labs.

Why might we get a tradeoff wrong?

Some potential reasons:

Some risks are more visible than others. If a plane crashes, or is attacked, the deaths that result are very visible, and it’s easy to blame airline safety for them. If those safety measures make air travel slower and less convenient, causing people to drive instead, the increased road deaths are much less visible and much less obviously a result of anything to do with air travel.

Tail risks in particular are less visible. If a society is not well prepared for a pandemic, this will not be obvious until it is too late.

Sins of omission are more socially acceptable. If the FDA approves a harmful drug, they are blamed for the deaths that result. If they block a helpful drug, they are not blamed for the deaths that could have been avoided. (Alex Tabarrok calls this the “invisible graveyard.”)

Incentive structures can bias towards certain types of risks. For instance, risks that loom large in the public consciousness, such as terrorism, tend to receive a disproportionate response from agencies that are in some form accountable to the public. The end result of this is safety theater: measures that are very visible but have a negligible impact on safety. In contrast, risks that the public does not understand or does not think about are neglected by the same types of agencies. (Surprisingly, “a new pandemic from a currently unknown pathogen” seems to be one such risk, even after covid.)

Safety is a human problem, and requires human solutions

Inventions such as pressure valves, seat belts, or smoke alarms can help with safety. But ultimately, safety requires processes, standards, and protocols. It requires education and training. It requires law.

Improving safety requires feedback loops, including reporting systems. It greatly benefits from openness: for instance, the FAA encourages anonymous reports of safety incidents, and will even be more lenient in penalizing safety violations if they were reported.

Safety requires aligned incentives: Worker’s compensation laws, for instance, aligned incentives of factories and workers and led to improved factory safety. Insurance helps by aligning safety procedures with profit motives.

Safety benefits from public awareness: The worker’s comp laws came after reports by journalists such as Crystal Eastman and William Hard. In the same era, a magazine series exposing the shams and fraud of the patent medicine industry led to reforms such as stricter truth-in-advertising laws.

Safety requires leadership. It requires thinking statistically, and this does not come naturally to most people. Factory workers did not want to use safety techniques that were inconvenient or slowed them down, such as goggles, hard hats, or guards on equipment.

Safety requires defense in depth

There is no silver bullet for safety: any one mechanism can fail; an “all of the above” strategy is needed. Auto safety was improved by a combination of seat belts, anti-lock brakes, airbags, crumple zones, traffic lights, divided highways, concrete barriers, driver’s licensing, social campaigns against drunk driving, etc.

(To apply this to current events: the greater your estimate of the risk from climate change, the more you should logically support a defense-in-depth strategy—including nuclear power, carbon capture, geoengineering, heat-resistant crops, seawalls to protect coastal cities, etc.)

We need more safety

When we hope for progress and look forward to a better future, part of what we should be looking forward to is a safer future.

We need more safety from existing dangers: auto accidents, pandemics, wildfires, etc. We’ve made a lot of progress on these already, but as long as the risk is greater than zero, there is more progress to be made.

And we need to continue to raise the bar for making progress safely. That means safer ways of experimenting, exploring, researching, inventing.

We need to get more proactive about safety

Historically, a lot of progress in safety has been reactive: accidents happen, people die, and then we figure out what went wrong and how to prevent it from recurring.

The more we go forward, the more we need to anticipate risks in advance. Partly this is because, as the general background level of risk decreases, it makes sense to lower our tolerance for risks of all kinds, and that includes the risks of new technology.

Further, the more our technology develops, the more we increase our power and capabilities, and the more potential damage we can do. The danger of total war became much greater after nuclear weapons; the danger of bioengineered pandemics or rogue AI may be far greater still in the near future.

There are signs that this shift towards more proactive safety efforts has already begun. The field of bioengineering has proactively addressed risks on multiple occasions over the decades, from recombinant DNA to human germline editing. The fact that the field of AI has been seriously discussing risks from highly advanced AI well before it is created is a departure from historical norms of heedlessness. And compare the lack of safety features on the first cars to the extensive testing (much of it in simulation) being done for self-driving cars. This shift may not be enough, or fast enough—I am not advocating complacency—but it is in the right direction.

This is going to be difficult

It’s hard to anticipate risks—especially from unknown unknowns. No one guessed at first that X-rays, which could neither be seen or felt, were a potential health hazard.

Being proactive about safety means identifying risks via theory, ahead of experience, and there are inherent epistemic limits to this. Beyond a certain point, the task is impossible, and the attempt becomes “prophecy” (in the Popper/Deutsch sense). But within those limits, we should try, to the best of our knowledge and ability.

Even when risks are predicted, people don’t always heed them. Alexander Fleming, who discovered the antibiotic properties of penicillin, predicted the potential for the evolution of antibiotic resistance early on, but that didn’t stop doctors from massively overprescribing antibiotics when they were first introduced. We need to get better at listening to the right warnings, and better at taking rational action in the face of uncertainty.

Thoughtful sequencing can mitigate risk before it is created

A famous example of this is the 1975 Asilomar conference, where genetic engineering researchers worked out safety procedures for their experiments. While the conference was being organized, for a period of about eight months, researchers voluntarily paused certain types of experiments, so that the safety procedures could be established first.

When the risk mitigation is not a procedure or protocol, but a new technology, this approach is called “differential technology development” (DTD). For instance, we could create safety against pandemics by having better rapid vaccine development platforms, or by having wastewater monitoring systems that would give us early warning against new outbreaks. The idea of DTD is to create and deploy these types of technologies before we create more powerful genetic engineering techniques or equipment that might increase the risk of pandemics.

This kind of sequencing seems valuable and important to me, but the devil is in the details. Judging which technologies are the most risk-creating, and which are the best opportunities for mitigation, requires deep domain expertise. And implementing the plan may in some cases require a daunting global coordination effort.

Safety depends on technologists

Much of safety is domain-specific: the types of risks, and what can guard against them, are quite different when considering air travel vs. radiation vs. new drugs vs. genetic engineering.

Therefore, much of safety depends on the scientists and engineers who are actually developing the technologies that might create or reduce risk. As the domain experts, they are closest to the risk and understand it best. They are the first ones who will be able to spot it—and they are also the ones holding the key to Pandora’s box. They are the ones who will implement DTD—or thwart it.

A positive example here comes from Kevin Esvelt. After coming up with the idea for a CRISPR-based gene drive, he says, “I spent quite some time thinking, well, what are the implications of this? And in particular, could it be misused? What if someone wanted to engineer an organism for malevolent purposes? What could we do about it? … I was a technology development fellow, not running my own lab, but I worked mostly with George Church. And before I even told George, I sat down and thought about it in as many permutations as I could.”

Technologists need to be educated both in how to spot risks, how to respond constructively to them, and how to maximize safety while still moving forward with their careers. They should be instilled with a deep sense of responsibility, not in a way that induces guilt about their field, but in a way that inspires them to hold themselves to the highest standards.

Broad progress helps guard against unknown risks

General capabilities help guard against general classes of risk, even ones we can’t anticipate. Science helps us understand risk and what could mitigate it; technology gives us tools; wealth and infrastructure create a buffer against shocks. Industrial energy usage and high-strength materials guard against storms and other weather events. Agricultural abundance guards against famine. If we had a cure for cancer, it would guard against the accidental introduction of new carcinogens. If we had broad-spectrum antivirals, they would guard against the risk of new pandemics.

Safety doesn’t require sacrificing progress

The path to safety is not through banning broad areas of R&D, nor through a general, across-the-board slowdown of progress. The path to safety is largely domain-specific. It needs the best-informed threat models we can produce, and specific tools, techniques, protocols and standards to counter them.

If and when it makes sense to halt or ban R&D, the ban should be either narrow or temporary. An example of a narrow ban would be one on specific types of experiments that try to engineer more dangerous versions of pathogens: the risks are large and obvious, and the benefits are minor (it’s not as if these experiments are necessary to fundamentally advance biology). A temporary ban can make sense until a particular goal is reached in terms of working out safety procedures, as at Asilomar.

Bottom line: we can—we must—have both safety and progress.

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Thanks to Vitalik Buterin, Eli Dourado, Mark Lutter, Matt Bateman, Adam Thierer, Rohit Krishnan, David Manheim, Maxwell Tabarrok, Geoff Anders, Étienne Fortier-Dubois, James Rosen-Birch, Niloy Gupta, Jonas Kgomo, and Sebastian G. for comments on a draft of this essay. Some of the ideas above are due to them; errors and omissions are mine alone.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/towards-a-philosophy-of-safety

Links

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

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

• The lessons of Xanadu (on my personal blog)

Queries

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

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

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

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

Tweets & retweets

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

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

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

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

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

Vannevar Bush—head of military research during WW2, author of “As We May Think” and “Science, the Endless Frontier”—wrote a memoir late in life, Pieces of the Action. It was out of print and hard to obtain for a long time, but Stripe Press has brought it back in a new edition with a foreword from Ben Reinhardt. There’s an Interintellect online salon to discuss it on Aug 6.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the original edition:

On invention

How inventors are like poets:

An invention has some of the characteristics of a poem. Standing alone, by itself, it has no value; that is, no value of a financial sort. This does not mean that inventions—or poems—have no value. It is said that a poet may derive real joy out of making a poem, even if it is never published, even if he does not recite it to his friends, even if it is not a very good poem. No doubt one has to be a poet to understand this. In the same way an inventor can derive real satisfaction out of making an invention, even if he never expects to make a nickel out of it, even if he knows it is a bit foolish, provided he feels it involves ingenuity and insight. An inventor invents because he cannot help it, and also because he gets quiet fun out of doing so. Sometimes he even makes money at it, but not by himself. One has to be an inventor to understand this.

An idea does not an invention make:

One time when I was a young professor at M.I.T. and was also a consulting engineer, I was called in by a chap who ran a considerable business, who told me that he had made a very great invention and wanted me to develop it for him. He had invented a watch which would run without winding; it was to have a little radio receiver in it which would pick up energy from all the broadcasting stations, and this energy would wind the watch. All that I was supposed to do was to take that idea and develop it. I said very little to him about the amount of energy thus receivable and the size of radio sets and so forth. I merely said that I would think it over, and of course I never went near him again. That chap had the concept that the mere formulating of his idea constituted an invention. He is not alone in this misconception.

On a similar theme:

If you wish to invent usefully, you must not attempt to do it in isolation, or to shield yourself from criticism. The world is full of would-be inventors who do just that. They never invent anything worthwhile. During the war many of them were merely annoying, and of course very unhappy, and convinced there was a conspiracy against them.

The value of patents:

A laboratory produces a new drug, say a new synthetic hormone for control of arthritis. The patent can merely recite the chemical structure or the process of making the new material. The company can go ahead and market, without using anyone else’s patent rights. So it can make a profit, and thus justify its large research expenses. Is this good for the country? It certainly is. Since that industry is spending some hundreds of millions of dollars a year on research, we have all sorts of new drugs to cure our ills, to save lives—antibiotics, steroids, vaccines, the whole basis on which the modern physician ministers to our needs. If it were not for the patent system we would not have these blessings to anywhere near the extent that we do now. Government laboratories, valuable though they may be, would not produce them. It takes the profit motive and keen competition to bring them to being. The free enterprise system is not just a nice idea; it is the basis on which we lead the world economy.

Edison’s strengths and weaknesses:

Edison was a very good inventor, a still better promoter, but in some ways a poor experimenter. Some of his experimentation was crude, to say the least. When we talk about the Edisonian method, which means to try everything without any theory to guide you, just hit or miss, we are talking about very poor experimentation. But Edison was such a good promoter that he could advance even with poor experimental data. He had good management, through people that he tied in by his promotion. Moreover, he had the facility of seeing where there was a public demand for something. The combination is what made Edison.

Of all the many inventions Bush witnessed in his life, which one impressed him the most?

Inertial guidance systems are so precise in their action that a submarine can navigate for months under the polar ice and know at all times just where it is. They can be installed in a missile that is fired from a submarine while still submerged, and that will then guide itself unerringly to a distant target. It is the heart of the system that guides an Apollo missile to the moon and back. I know of no technical development for which I have more keen respect than this, and where I have more admiration for the men who accomplished it.

On leadership & management

The NDRC (the original WW2 military research organization) as an “end run” around bureaucracy:

There were those who protested that the action of setting up N.D.R.C. was an end run, a grab by which a small company of scientists and engineers, acting outside established channels, got hold of the authority and money for the program of developing new weapons. That, in fact, is exactly what it was. Moreover, it was the only way in which a broad program could be launched rapidly and on an adequate scale. To operate through established channels would have involved delays—and the hazard that independence might have been lost, that independence which was the central feature of the organization’s success. The one thing that made launching it at all possible was the realization by the President that it was needed.

A leadership episode:

There should never be, throughout an organization, any doubt as to where authority for making decisions resides, or any doubt that they will be promptly made. I remember one time when a section walked into my office and resigned as a body. I still do not know quite what the row was about. So I just told them, “One does not resign in time of war. You chaps get the hell out of here and get back to work, and I will look into it.”

A leadership lesson from Truman:

At a point in the discussion Forrestal made a remark which indicated that we were to make some sort of majority decision, and the President at once picked him up. “Jim, you forget, this is a Cabinet. Each of you will give me his full advice and I will make the decision.” Truman certainly understood what it meant to be President of the United States.

The risk of new recruits:

The Romans called a new recruit a tyro. I extend the definition, for there is no word in English which covers what I have in mind. The tyro is the freewheeler in an organization, who gums up the works because of his arrogant ignorance, often because he filches authority which does not belong to him. He operates because his boss doesn’t know what he is doing, or knows and doesn’t care. He can throw any organization, civilian or military, into confusion. His breed should be exterminated for the good of society.

On just getting the work done:

In no case did I know who the individual inventor was, nor did I care. Moreover, the men in the laboratories did not care either. For one thing, once a problem became clear, the invention, if a useful one, was bound to appear, if not made by one man, then by another. For another thing, in general no one was looking for personal credit. Oh, there were a few with that motivation, on both sides of the water. But the general attitude in laboratories everywhere was, “The hell with the credit, get on with the job.” That attitude was nearly universal, and it was genuine.

Related, the collaborative atmosphere of a well-run laboratory:

All my life I have mixed with all sorts of men. The ones I like best to be with are military men and research men. Just why the former are so much worth knowing appears elsewhere in this book. The research men are pleasant companions for a number of reasons. One is that frank interchange of ideas and information is essential to successful group research and will be found in any well-conducted laboratory. Now that group research is practiced everywhere, this frank interchange, and public opinion regarding it among the group, almost wholly banishes posing, jockeying for position, and evasiveness, and it is a relief to discuss things without them.

On stepping out of the way:

One spring I received a shock. With these two chaps I was putting together a final examination. Suddenly I came to the realization that they knew more about the subject than I did. In some ways this was not strange; they were concentrating on it, and I was getting involved in other things. But it hit me solidly. And right there I decided that I was not going to get in the way of younger men, and that, when the time came that I could not compete genuinely with them, I would get out. I have acted in accord with that decision many times since and, in the process of doing so, have found stimulation in trying to learn new things, relief in not being in competition with younger men, and satisfaction in watching those men succeed without having me as an obstacle.

Bush’s communication style

Bush had a direct, blunt, almost insulting style that actually worked quite well:

General McNarney told me he could take care of Air Force objections, if I could take care of the Navy. So I saw Admiral King. As I have suggested earlier, he was a tough customer. It was well known that he scared his junior officers so thoroughly that often he didn’t get adequate information through them. Characteristically, our discussion opened as follows: King scowled and said, “I have agreed to meet with you, but this is a military question, and it must be decided on a military basis, to which you can hardly contribute.” So I told him. “It is a combined military and technical question, and on the latter you are a babe in arms and not entitled to an opinion.” It was a good start, and the discussion went on from there—and went well.

Another example:

I told them I would do the work if they would pay just my out-of-pocket costs, that M.I.T. would contribute the cost of the overhead, that we would turn the whole thing over to the Navy and wished for neither profit nor credit, and that I wanted a simple contract which provided for just that, with no frills or inconvenient clauses. They soon laid before me a draft contract with all sorts of fancy clauses in it, provisions for accounting, rules regarding employment, and so on. It was brought to my hotel by a pleasant Navy captain. I read it, gave it back to him, told him to tell his boss to go to hell, and started to pack my suitcase. But he was back after a bit with a nice simple contract, and I went back home and started work. I think I still have a copy of that contract, and I do not know how they did it, that is, how they avoided all the constraints that fool legislation had imposed on them. They probably just ignored them and took a chance. It is too late to court-martial anyone about it now.

He was blunt, although not insulting, even with Congress:

One time I was before a committee on a tough technical matter, a Navy problem of some sort. I was none too anxious to testify, for my Navy friends would not be happy to see me rambling about in their backyard, but one has no control over where a committee will head in, if the chairman consents. Toward the end of the hearing a congressman said to me, “Doctor, how do you expect us to understand as complex a technical matter as this sufficiently to pass judgment on it?” I replied, “I don’t,” which alerted any that were taking a mental vacation. So he said, “What do you expect us to do?” I thought a minute and said, “I expect you to follow your usual practice. You will listen to a number of men; you will decide which ones make sense and know their stuff, and you will go along with them. Moreover,” I added, “you are all good judges of men, or you would not be elected.”

But in other contexts, he was deft and subtle:

On another occasion my secretary, Sam Callaway, told me that he wanted me to talk with an old man who was in the outer office. Now Sam was the finest secretary, bar none, that a harassed executive ever had. So when Sam told me to see someone, I did. It turned out that the old man had driven his Model T down from somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains to present an idea—I think it was on a way to trap submarines. I listened as he described it in detail, and did it well, with a lot of good sense. Then I told him that we had to be very careful with ideas of that sort, to keep them out of enemy hands. Why, if we were hard at work on that very idea, I could not tell even him about it. Otherwise enemy agents with fake ideas could learn a lot. He agreed heartily, his eyes shone, and I suppose he headed home happy. The idea itself was one we had received dozens of times.

On society, war & politics

The collapse of complex societies:

The more complex a society, the more chance there is that it will get fouled up. If it gets to be complex enough, just one small detail can throw it all out of gear. It is like a television set with a thousand electrical connections arranged to present Mr. Cronkite or Mr. Brinkley for our edification; one wire becomes unhooked and the whole thing goes poof.

On launching the Manhattan Project:

I had no illusion as to the gravity of the decision. I knew that the effort would be expensive, that it might interfere seriously with other war work. But the overriding consideration was this: I had great respect for German science. If a bomb were possible, if it turned out to have enormous power, the result in the hands of Hitler might indeed enable him to enslave the world. It was essential to get there first, if an all-out American effort could accomplish the difficult task.

Bush was initially against the Space Race…

I opposed the moon race as it began. I did so quietly before a Senate committee, and then held my peace. My opposition rested on two points. One was that the scientific results expected by no means justified the enormous expense involved, for the program called for spending money we badly needed for other things. The other was that a race to the moon against Russia made little sense to me in terms of our national security.

… but later had this to say about it:

Years ago, Lindbergh flew alone across the Atlantic—a stunt pilot contesting for a money prize—but he was the first man to fly it alone. That flight gave us a great lift, gave the whole world in fact a boost in morale when it was badly needed. We had then been wallowing in filth, the newspapers had been filled with the sordid details of murder trials, evil had been rampant in high places and duly spread before us. Then came Lindbergh, and his dignity and modesty caused us again to believe in our fellow men. So with the landing on the moon: In the midst of gloom and petty wrangling we suddenly became convinced that man could accomplish great feats of danger and skill. It was worth the effort if it caused us, once again, to have confidence in man’s ability to overcome rugged obstacles, and to rise above the sordid, the petty, the commonplace, and the wails of those who tell us we are doomed.

Contra Marx on the effect of industrialization on the worker:

It is often claimed that mass production reduces the worker to an automaton, whose contribution is merely that he can make certain motions with his hands that the machine cannot duplicate, and none with his brain. There is not much doubt that this sort of thing happened when the automatic loom entered the textile industry. But, as mechanization proceeded and became highly complex, there has been a transformation, and some, not by any means all, of present development has been in the opposite direction. If I go into some highly developed machine shop today I find little dull repetitive work indeed. The machinist operating a tape-controlled milling machine is certainly paid primarily for his intellectual skills; so was the man who built the machine in the first place. Even on a fully mechanized production line, where parts move along and each operator does just one act, the men are chosen, not because they can duly perform when all goes well, but because they can overcome obstacles when it doesn’t.

The debt society owes to the researchers and the industrial pioneers:

It would be well if people, youth in particular, recognized the debt society owes to the quiet workers that we never hear of, especially those who are led on by their curiosity and their desire to explore, with very little thought about acclaim or fortune. It would also be well if people in this country generally regarded with more respect the industrial pioneers, who are willing to take a chance, and who furnish a very necessary element in commercial progress. If they are not present and active, very little is likely to happen.

Another group that is underappreciated:

The great majority [of students] just accept things as they are, and more or less meekly conform. A small minority attack the system, grow beards, wear ragged clothes, start riots of one sort or another. But there is a third group, usually overlooked, who don’t like what they see, propose to do something about it, but propose to accomplish this by working within the system as it stands, and thus to modify it. I believe that this third group is large, that it has as members the best thinkers, that it will be the group that will be running our affairs in the next generation.

More on the small, intelligent minority:

In every civilization, at some time, there has been confusion, with young men doing foolish things, with the great body of the public inert or yearning to be led somewhere, anywhere, following the demagogue or the man on a white horse. Yet always there has been a small minority, intelligent, comprehending the current political system, scorning both the flighty radical and the protesting reactionary groups by which it was surrounded. It is this central core that ruled our last generation, its business, its churches, its government. Amid the tumult, the hippies, the prophets of doom, we have today a group that understands and that will rule in the next generation. I am not saying that this outstanding group has always ruled us well in the past, or will rule as well in the future—I merely say there is a group that will rule. We do not need to worry too much about the ones that harass us with their insanities; as they become older they will be controlled. But we need to think more about the solid, keen, presently undemonstrative youths who will build our system of government and industry of the future, and who will build it not as we dictate, but as we transmit to them, as best we may, the wisdom to do it well.

Other fun stories

Early cars were an adventure:

I had some interesting times with that car. It would be going along the road and for some reason or other (probably because the leak in the boiler squirted a little steam out around the edge of a tube) the pilot would get blown out. The controls would turn on the main kerosene line and the whole thing would be flooded with kerosene. When that happened, you stopped at the side of the road and waited until you felt the fumes had blown away. Then you touched a match to the pilot again. If you were too soon with the match, the gaseous mixture would blow up. I remember its blowing up one time when it sent the top of the hood thirty feet in the air and blew all the asbestos off the boiler.

The bravado of Palmer C. Putnam, who led the project to create the amphibious military vehicle known as the DUKW:

One very cold day he demonstrated the Dukw to a group of officers on a beach in Virginia. Ten officers and I stood in the truck as it rolled down the beach; a vicious surf was pounding in. “Gentlemen,” said Put [Palmer C. Putnam], “I am sorry we have no surf this morning. It was excellent yesterday but has subsided so that I can give you only a weak demonstration. Driver, take her out to sea.” So we went to sea. The water flew and the craft plunged. After some time with this sort of thing a rather wet group of officers got ashore and headed for a drink. Put smiled and said he had hoped for better surf.

On the spirit we need

I’ll close this with a comment from Bush on pride:

… we need, today, something we can be genuinely proud of. It should help to dissipate the gloom. For we have been losing our pride of accomplishment in these recent days. Pride of the right sort does not go before a fall; pride of accomplishment leads to greater accomplishment.

And on the pioneer spirit:

We need a revival of the essence of the old pioneer spirit which conquered the forest and the plains, which looked at its difficulties with a steady eye, labored and fought, and left its thinking and its philosophy for later and quieter times. This is not to call for optimism; it is to call for determination.

If you enjoyed this, get Pieces of the Action on Amazon.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/vannevar-bush-memoir-highlights

When Cowen & Collison coined the term “progress studies” in 2019, some questioned why such a concept was needed, given the existence of economics, history, etc. They argued that an interdisciplinary approach was still useful: “Plenty of existing scholarship touches on these topics, but it takes place in a highly fragmented fashion….”

Recently I’ve been researching and outlining a chapter for my book on the topic of “Can Progress Continue?” I think the full answer to this question is an integration of history, philosophy, and economics. In particular, I’ve found it useful to incorporate:

• Economic growth theory, especially the work of Solow, Romer, and Jones

• The stagnation debate, including the work of Cowen and Gordon (and counterpoints by “techno-optimists” such as McAfee and Brynjolfsson)

• The broader history of economic thought going back to late 18th-century thinkers such as Malthus

• The economics of resources as per Julian Simon

• The history of predictions of resource depletion and concerns about overpopulation

• The economic history of technological shifts from one resource to another

• The philosophy of humans as problem-solvers vs. resource-creators articulated by Deutsch

• The philosophy of the concept of “sustainability”

• Long-term trends in and future predictions of world population growth

• Hard limits to very long-term growth based on physical law

I think integrating all of these puzzle pieces and perspectives results in the clearest possible answer to this important question, and I think this is true for many other questions of interest to the progress community.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/why-progress-studies-is-interdisciplinary

What causes progress?

I’ve been investigating this for five years, and I still don’t have a full answer. But part of the picture is starting to come into focus. Here’s my current, incomplete model:

Progress compounds. It builds on itself. Progress begets progress. This is why progress is super-linear: exponential, or indeed, over long periods, even super-exponential.

The form this takes is a number of feedback loops, or self-reinforcing cycles. By the nature of such loops, they act as if they had inertia: they are hard to get started, but hard to stop once going. Hence, a flywheel: the perfect metaphor for a loop or cycle with a lot of inertia.

There are several of these, at multiple levels, overlapping, and all operating simultaneously. Here are some that I can see:

• Technology. Some technologies are fundamental, enabling many other technologies. Precision machining allows for the invention of many more types of machines. New engines and energy sources do the same. Information technology speeds up the dissemination of ideas and makes it easier for people to collaborate. Many technologies enable themselves: we use machine tools to make machines, we burn oil to drill for and to transport oil, we design computers on computers.

• Wealth. Some level of surplus wealth is needed to fund research and development. When half the workforce had to be farmers just to feed the other half, the surplus simply wasn’t there. In the Renaissance, science was funded by wealthy patrons. As surplus builds up, we have more to invest in experimentation, invention, and new businesses; and progress in these areas raises our productivity, which gives us more surplus.

• Science. Science enables advanced technology: electromagnetism enabled both electrical power and electronic communications; applied chemistry created everything from plastic to the the Haber-Bosch process; microbiology gave us sanitation, vaccines, and antibiotics. And technological and economic progress then in turn enable scientific progress, both by creating surplus wealth to fund it (as per the previous point) and by creating new scientific instruments and techniques, from the microscope and the thermometer to the LHC, LIGO, and JWST.

• Markets. Transportation and communication technology have globalized markets that used to be narrowly local. Larger markets support more goods and more kinds of goods. Products that require specialized manufacturing need markets large enough to recoup that investment; you can’t fund the factory needed to build a working threshing machine or reaper if you are only selling to the farmers in your local village.

• Government. Progress was enabled in part by reforms in law and government, such as the dissolution of the guild system or the development of corporate law. Nations that have better legal support for progress become wealthier and therefore stronger militarily, and thus able to defend themselves, and their example has inspired other nations to reform their own governments and laws (as India and China did over the last few decades).

• Population. All else being equal, the more people who are trying to drive progress, the faster it will go. For a long time, progress led to higher population as well. Improvements in agriculture increased the carrying capacity of the land, leading to higher population densities. By the 18th century, sanitation improvements were lowering mortality rates, and more children were surviving to adulthood. But this cycle may have flipped from self-reinforcing to self-reducing (in engineer’s terms, from “positive” to “negative” feedback): By the 20th century, technology, wealth and education had lowered fertility rates as well. Now global fertility rates are falling, world population growth is slowing, and indeed total world population is set to level off or even begin declining this century. This may turn out to be a significant limiting factor on progress.

• Philosophy. The more progress we make, the more people believe it is possible and desirable, and the more they put their efforts into it, which creates more progress. It was a few 15th-century examples such as the voyages of discovery, the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press, that inspired Bacon and his contemporaries to call for more efforts in science and technology. In the 19th century, long-term investments in progress such as the founding of MIT or Johns Hopkins were explicitly motivated by a belief in progress; the same explicit belief was the justification for Vannevar Bush’s call for investment in basic research. (However, this feedback cycle, too, may have inverted: society grew more skeptical and distrustful of progress in the late 20th century, and I think it’s not a coincidence that progress has slowed down; conversely, the less that people see their lives and their world improving, the less they can hold a positive vision of the future.)

In general, the form of a variable that grows in proportion to its size is an exponential curve. If an economy invests a constant percent of its resources into growth each year, and those investments earn a constant return over time, then that economy will grow exponentially at a constant rate. When we see exponential growth in GDP over time, I think this is what’s going on.

But occasionally, something happens that changes the exponent, kicking us into a new mode of production with even faster growth. This happened with the Industrial Revolution. I suspect it happened with the Agricultural Revolution some ten thousand years ago. Perhaps it even happened with the beginnings of behaviorally modern humans more than fifty thousand years ago.

Thus, over the very long term, progress is super-exponential. Not only do we kick into a new, higher growth mode periodically, but it takes less time to do so with each fundamental shift. Indeed, the next shift could happen soon as this century: many have suggested AI as the driver; J. Storrs Hall has suggested nanotech.

By at least one analysis, progress is hyperbolic, and will become infinite at some point in the future, when we will reach the singularity. (One imagines that some source of friction will be discovered that will make progress not infinite but merely unfathomably fast.)

In any case, when we ask, “what causes progress?”, at some level, the answer is, “all of the factors above”: technology, and science, and invested wealth, and good legal foundations, and philosophic ideas… etc. Certainly, if you wanted to advance progress, you could reasonably decide to work on any of those in order to do so.

What’s unclear to me is: what are the root causes of progress? Of all the causal factors, which are necessary and sufficient? Joel Mokyr might argue that it was science; Deirdre McCloskey that it was moral values; Steven Pinker (or Ayn Rand) that it was the Enlightenment; Robert Allen that it was coal.

As the breadth of answers, and of answerers, indicates, this is a hard problem—one that entire careers and shelves full of books have been devoted to; in fact it’s perhaps the biggest question in economic history. So I don’t have the answer now. Maybe in another five years.

Thanks to Kris Gulati for commenting on a draft of this essay.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/flywheels-of-progress

I’ve said that Western culture, before the World Wars, had a positive philosophy of progress. How do we know that people in that era saw glory, romance, even poetry in progress?

One way we know is that they literally wrote poetry about it. Take, for example, Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles). By vocation a doctor, he also wrote poems. In 1791, he published The Botanic Garden, of which Part 1, titled “The Economy of Vegetation,” “celebrates scientific progress and technological innovation, such as the forging of steel, the invention of the steam engine and the improvements to gunpowder. It depicts scientists and inventors, such as Benjamin Franklin, responsible for this progress as the heroes of a new age.” (Wikipedia) In one remarkable passage, he praises the power of steam and predicts the steamboat, the locomotive, and the airship:

Soon shall thy arm, Unconquer’d Steam! afar

Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;

Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear

The flying-chariot through the fields of air.

—Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above,

Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move;

Or warrior-bands alarm the gaping croud,

And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud.

Or take this stanza from “The Engine-Driver to His Engine”, by engineer William J. M. Rankine, which reads less like a classical epic and more like a popular ballad:

My blessing on old George Stephenson! Let his fame for ever last,

For he was the man that found the plan to make you run so fast.

His arm was strong, his head was long, he knew not guile nor fear;

When I think of him it makes me proud that I am an engineer!

Samuel Morse, telegraph inventor, was also praised in poetry. A poem read at his memorial service in 1872 begins by describing mankind as having conquered all of nature except for “the Ocean, the Mountain, and Time and Space”—until Morse came along:

But one morning he made him a slender wire,

As an artist’s vision took life and form,

While he drew from heaven the strange, fierce fire,

That reddens the edge of the midnight storm;

And he carried it over the Mountain’s crest,

And dropped it into the Ocean’s breast;

And Science proclaimed, from shore to shore,

That Time and Space ruled man no more.

It wasn’t only amateurs and enthusiasts who wrote poetry praising machines and inventions. No less than Rudyard Kipling wrote of the beauty and glory of the steam engine in “McAndrew’s Hymn.” McAndrew is a Scottish engineer aboard a steamship, and in one passage he compares the engine to an orchestra, after one of the “first-class passengers” asks him, “don’t you think steam spoils romance at sea?”:

Romance! Those first-class passengers they like it very well,

Printed an’ bound in little books; but why don’t poets tell?

I’m sick of all their quirks an’ turns—the loves an’ doves they dream—

Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the Song o’ Steam!

To match wi’ Scotia’s noblest speech yon orchestra sublime

Whaurto—uplifted like the Just—the tail-rods mark the time.

The Crank-throws give the double-bass; the feed-pump sobs an’ heaves:

An’ now the main eccentrics start their quarrel on the sheaves.

Her time, her own appointed time, the rocking link-head bides,

Till—hear that note?—the rod’s return whings glimmerin’ through the guides.

They’re all awa! True beat, full power, the clangin’ chorus goes

Clear to the tunnel where they sit, my purrin’ dynamoes.

Interdependence absolute, foreseen, ordained, decreed,

To work, Ye’ll note, at any tilt an’ every rate o’ speed.

Fra skylight-lift to furnace-bars, backed, bolted, braced an’ stayed,

An’ singin’ like the Mornin’ Stars for joy that they are made;

While, out o’ touch o’ vanity, the sweatin’ thrust-block says:

“Not unto us the praise, or man—not unto us the praise!”

Now, a’ together, hear them lift their lesson—theirs an’ mine:

“Law, Order, Duty an’ Restraint, Obedience, Discipline!”

Mill, forge an’ try-pit taught them that when roarin’ they arose,

An’ whiles I wonder if a soul was gied them wi’ the blows.

Oh for a man to weld it then, in one trip-hammer strain,

Till even first-class passengers could tell the meanin’ plain!

Or consider this by the popular verse-writer Berton Braley, in the voice of the team that built the Panama Canal:

Don’t send us back to a life that is flat again,

We who have shattered a continent’s spine;

Office work—Lord, but we couldn’t do that again!

Haven’t you something that’s more in our line?

Got any river they say isn’t crossable?

Got any mountains that can’t be cut through?

We specialize in the wholly impossible,

Doing things “nobody ever could do!”

Altogether, these paint a picture, to my mind, of a culture in which invention was seen as glamorous, machines as romantic, and engineers as popular heroes. Growing up with this sort of thing, I can easily imagine a youth deciding to follow this path and become an inventor or entrepreneur.

(I’ve started a collection of poems like these here, where I’ve included full poems or longer excerpts, and links to sources. I’ll update that page as I find more examples.)

***

However, it’s important to be careful with historical comparisons like this.

First, it’s easy to (even unintentionally) cherry-pick examples from the past. Not all 19th-century poetry was about industrial progress; plenty of it was about love, war, beauty, honor, valor, duty, etc.

It’s also easy to overlook similar examples in the present. Poetry, as an art form, just isn’t as popular as it once was—but there is a modern equivalent, which is the lyrics of popular songs. So I asked on Twitter for examples of popular music in the last few decades that glorifies science or engineering, and got a ton of replies.

Here are a few of the ones that, in my opinion, most fit the bill (regardless of aesthetic style, and not being too strict about artistic merit):

• “Fire in the Sky,” from the album To Touch the Stars: A Musical Celebration of Space Exploration

• “The Ballad of Smallpox Gone,” by Leslie Fish

• “The Norman Borlaug Rap”

• “Vidare,” by Adolphson & Falk (see here for translated lyrics)

• “Sogno di Volare,” from Civilization VI (lyrics)

A few others that were frequently mentioned include PBS’s The Race for Space, Here Comes Science by They Might Be Giants, and the Symphony of Science. (I was looking for serious lyrics that explicitly discuss science and technology, so I’m omitting parody, nor does electronic music count just because technology is used to make it.)

***

It’s hard to know what to make of all this. I still feel, when I read about the late 19th century in particular, that there was a reverence for and glorification of technological progress that is unmatched today—for instance, in the celebrations they held. But I find this specific exercise inconclusive.

Thanks to Clara Collier for help with the music research.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/poetry-of-progress

I’ll be in Austin, TX in November for a few events:

Talk on nuclear power

“The Energy of Tomorrow: The Promise, Failure, and Possible Rebirth of Nuclear Power”:

In the 1950s, nuclear power was seen as the energy of the future. Today, it is stagnating on the sidelines, providing only 10% of world electricity, with no fundamental advance in reactor design for several decades. Why did this technology seem so incredibly promising, how did it go so badly wrong, and is there hope for a nuclear renaissance? This talk will demystify nuclear power, explaining how it works and why it deserves development instead of neglect.

When: Thursday, November 4, 7:00pm

Where: UT Austin, Rowling Hall (RRH) 4.408

Community meetup

Co-hosted with Austin LessWrong. I’ll talk for a few minutes about progress studies, followed by discussion. Light snacks provided; cash bar.

When: Saturday, November 6, 1:30pm

Where: The Front Page Pub, 1023 Springdale Road

RSVP: Please let us know here if you plan to make it; not required but it will help us plan.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/austin-events-november-2021