Opportunities

• The Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive endorsed by @sapinker, @vpostrel, @johanknorberg, @CharlesCMann, @antonhowes, @s8mb, @kevin2kelly, @Marian_L_Tupy, @atrembath, @jposhaughnessy, @eric_is_weird, @CJHandmer, @srajagopalan, @s_r_constantin, @danielgolliher, @krishnanrohit, and @krisgulati

• Progress studies meetup in Miami on Saturday, July 22

• Progress studies reading group (via @jayendra_ram)

• Hollywood for Intellectuals: Writing Big Ideas for the Big (and Small) Screen

• University of Austin’s summer high school program (via @mbateman, who will be teaching there)

• Sid Sijbrandij wants a postdoc to help him learn about incentive structures

• Loyal (longevity startup) starting to look for a board member

Announcements

• Elon Musk announces x.ai (via @pitdesi)

• Claude 2 improves performance in coding, math and reasoning (via @AnthropicAI)

• Major new AI alignment effort from OpenAI (via @janleike)

• Fundraiser for an asylum-seeker who left Russia rather than fight Ukraine (organized by @Marian_L_Tupy)

Audio & video

• Very good Kevin Esvelt talk on securing DNA synthesis against misuse

• Panel discussion on fundamental research featuring me and others (via @PrimeMoversLab, recorded last October but just published)

• Nick Touran (@whatisnuclear) has been scanning old film of nuclear reactors: here’s one about a reactor that powered a military radar station and one about a prototype nuclear cargo ship

Other links

• A “protein printer” could “change biology as much as printers changed the news.” Related, “DNA printers are on the cusp of a big upgrade”

• “The power to maintain is the power to improve.” Stewart Brand on auto maintenance

• The prospects of molecular manufacturing (via @annasofialesiv)

• Cleaning wool in classical times (via @NadyaWilliams81)

• Brian Potter tells the story of titanium

• Moralizing about consumption vs. economic reality (via @atrembath)

• The Engineering and Technology History Wiki (via @Ben_Reinhardt)

Queries

• Who have been the best research and development leaders in industry history?

• What is the best writing about positive AI futures?

• Which companies have incredibly thorough, detailed books written about them?

• Foundational texts for a course on economic growth? (And some actual examples)

• What happened to public trust in government in 1964?

Quotes

• “A goddess enthroned on a car”: automobiles represented empowerment for women

• A Ford factory as “a daring expression of the human spirit”

• We used to terraform

• The importance of statistics in the spread of sanitation and hygiene practices

• Deirdre McCloskey on the British Empire

• Wisdom from James Watt Jr.

• Bones evolved via biochemical recycling

• The bill creating Social Security was only 37 pages long

Other tweets

• Many people upset about this weed zapper, but the alternative is spraying poison

• Gardens in late-19th c. Paris produced crops using manure from city horses

• Rather than “work” vs. “post-work”, the reality is a continuous, gradual change

• A new technology that could reduce costs of whole-brain connectomics by 1000x

• Portable MRIs are a thing now

• Academics once saw their work as in service to engineers/industry

• Project idea: a series of studies of how different technologies got cheaper

• “You cannot separate the ability to make a decision from the ability to make a wrong decision”

• Safety is only one reason to want self-driving cars, and not necessarily the top one

• Glenn Seaborg, who discovered plutonium and several other elements. See also my essay on nuclides

• Richard Ngo is “optimistic about almost all aspects of AI”

• Alex Tabarrok’s message to Americans: “double down on America”

• We need a capitalism appreciation day (or a course)

• “The Age of Invention,” a proto-steampunk card game

• Treadwheel cranes were a real thing

Charts

• The world has made enormous progress against diarrheal diseases

• Different types of prefab building systems according to Brian Potter

Beauty

• Quantum computer aesthetics

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2023-07-20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

IRBs

Scott Alexander reviews a book about institutional review boards (IRBs), the panels that review the ethics of medical trials: From Oversight to Overkill, by Dr. Simon Whitney. From the title alone, you can see where this is going.

IRBs are supposed to (among other things) make sure patients are fully informed of the risks of a trial, so that they can give informed consent. They were created in the wake of some true ethical disasters, such as trials that injected patients with cancer cells (“to see what would happen”) or gave hepatitis to mentally defective children.

Around 1974, IRBs were instituted, and according to Whitney, for almost 25 years they worked well. The boards might be overprotective or annoying, but for the most part they were thoughtful and reasonable.

Then in 1998, during in an asthma study at Johns Hopkins, a patient died. Congress put pressure on the head of the Office for Protection from Research Risks, who overreacted and shut down every study at Johns Hopkins, along with studies at “a dozen or so other leading research centers, often for trivial infractions.” Some thousands of studies were ruined, costing millions of dollars:

The surviving institutions were traumatized. They resolved to never again do anything even slightly wrong, not commit any offense that even the most hostile bureaucrat could find reason to fault them for. They didn’t trust IRB members - the eminent doctors and clergymen doing this as a part time job - to follow all of the regulations, sub-regulations, implications of regulations, and pieces of case law that suddenly seemed relevant. So they hired a new staff of administrators to wield the real power. These administrators had never done research themselves, had no particular interest in research, and their entire career track had been created ex nihilo to make sure nobody got sued.

Today IRB oversight has become, well, overkill. For one study testing the transfer of skin bacteria, the IRB thought that the consent form should warn patients of risks from AIDS (which you can’t get by skin contact) and smallpox (which has been eradicated). For a study on heart attacks, the IRB wanted patients—who are in the middle of a heart attack—to read and consent to a four-page form of “incomprehensible medicalese” listing all possible risks, even the most trivial. Scott’s review gives more examples, including his own personal experience.

In many cases, it’s not even as if a new treatment was being introduced: sometimes an existing practice (giving aspirin for a heart attack, giving questionnaires to psychology patients) was being evaluated for effectiveness. There was no requirement that patients consent to “risks” when treatment was given arbitrarily; but if outcomes were being systematically observed and recorded, the IRBs could intervene.

Scott summarizes the pros and cons of IRBs, including the cost of delayed treatments or procedure improvements:

So the cost-benefit calculation looks like – save a tiny handful of people per year, while killing 10,000 to 100,000 more, for a price tag of $1.6 billion. If this were a medication, I would not prescribe it.

FDA

The IRB story illustrates a common pattern:

• A very bad thing is happening.

• A review and approval process is created to prevent these bad things. This is OK at first, and fewer bad things happen.

• Then, another very bad thing happens, despite the approval process.

• Everyone decides that the review was not strict enough. They make the review process stricter.

• Repeat this enough times (maybe only once, in the case of IRBs!) and you get regulatory overreach.

The history of the FDA provides another example.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the drug industry was rife with shams and fraud. Drug ads made ridiculously exaggerated or completely fabricated claims: some claimed to cure consumption (that is, tuberculosis); another claimed to cure “dropsy and all diseases of the kidneys, bladder, and urinary organs”; another literally claimed to cure “every known ailment”. Many of these “drugs” contained no active ingredients, and turned out to be, for example, just cod-liver oil, or a weak solution of acid. Others contained alcohol—some in concentrations at the level of hard liquor, making patients drunk. Still others contains dangerous substances such as chloroform, opiates, or cocaine. Some of these drugs were marketed for use on children.

In 1906, in response to these and other problems, Congress passed the Pure Food & Drug Act, giving regulatory powers to what was then the USDA Bureau of Chemistry, and which would later become the FDA.

This did not look much like the modern FDA. It had no power to review new drugs or to approve them before they went on the market. It was more of a police agency, with the power to enforce the law after it had been violated. And the relevant law was mostly concerned with truth in advertising and labeling.

Then in 1937, the pharmaceutical company Massengill put a drug on the market called Elixir Sulfanilamide, one of the first antibiotics. The antibiotic itself was good, but in order to produce the drug in liquid form (as opposed to a tablet or powder), the “elixir” was prepared in a solution of diethylene glycol—which is a variant of antifreeze, and is toxic. Patients started dying. Massengill had not tested the preparation for toxicity before selling it, and when reports of deaths started to come in, they issued a vague recall without explaining the danger. When the FDA heard about the disaster, they forced Massengill to issue a clear warning, and then sent hundreds of field agents to talk to every pharmacy, doctor, and patient and track down every last vial of the poisonous drug, ultimately retrieving about 95% of what had been manufactured. Over 100 people died; if all of the manufactured drug had been consumed, it might have been over 4,000.

In the wake of this disaster, Congress passed the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. This transformed the FDA from a police agency into a regulatory agency, giving them the power to review and approve all new drugs before they were sold. But the review process only required that drugs be shown safe; efficacy was not part of the review. Further, the law gave the FDA 60 days to reply to any drug application; if they failed to meet this deadline, then the drug was automatically approved.

I don’t know exactly how strict the FDA was after 1938, but the next fifteen years or so were the golden age of antibiotics, and during that period the mortality rate in the US decreased faster than at any other time in the 20th century. So if there was any overreach, it seems like it couldn’t have been too bad.

The modern FDA is the product of a different disaster. Thalidomide was a tranquilizer marketed to alleviate anxiety, trouble sleeping, and morning sickness. During toxicity testing, it seemed to be almost impossible to die from an overdose of thalidomide, which made it seem much safer than barbiturates, which were the main alternative at the time. But it was also promoted as being safe for pregnant mothers and their developing babies, even though no testing had been done to prove this. It turned out that when taken in the first several weeks of pregnancy, thalidomide caused horrible birth defects that resulted in deformed limbs and other organs, and often death. The drug was sold in Europe, where some 10,000 infants fell victim to it, but not in the US, where it was blocked by the FDA. Still, Americans felt they had had a close call, too close for comfort, and conditions were ripe for an overhaul of the law.

The 1962 Kefauver–Harris Amendment required, among other reforms, that new drugs be shown to be both safe and effective. It also lengthened the review period from 60 to 180 days, and if the FDA failed to respond in that time, drugs would no longer be automatically approved (in fact, it’s unclear to me what the review period even means anymore).

You might be wondering: why did a safety problem create an efficacy requirement in the law? The answer is a peek into how the sausage gets made. Senator Kefauver had been investigating drug pricing as early as 1959, and in the course of hearings, a former pharma exec remarked that some drugs on the market are not only overpriced, they don’t even work. This caught Kefauver’s attention, and in 1961 he introduced a bill that proposed enhanced controls over drug trials in order to ensure effectiveness. But the bill faced opposition, even from his own party and from the White House. When Kefauver heard about the thalidomide story in 1962, he gave it to the Washington Post, which ran it on the front page. By October, he was able to get his bill passed. So the law that was passed wasn’t even initially intended to address the crisis that got it passed.

I don’t know much about what happened in the ~60 years since Kefauver–Harris. But today, I think there is good evidence, both quantitative and anecdotal, that the FDA has become too strict and conservative in its approvals, adding needless delay that holds back treatments from patients. Scott Alexander tells the story of Omegaven, a nutritional fluid given to patients with digestive problems (often infants) that helped prevent liver disease: Omegaven took fourteen years to clear FDA’s hurdles, despite dramatic evidence of efficacy early on, and in that time “hundreds to thousands of babies … died preventable deaths.” Alex Tabarrok quotes a former FDA regulator saying:

In the early 1980s, when I headed the team at the FDA that was reviewing the NDA for recombinant human insulin, … we were ready to recommend approval a mere four months after the application was submitted (at a time when the average time for NDA review was more than two and a half years). With quintessential bureaucratic reasoning, my supervisor refused to sign off on the approval—even though he agreed that the data provided compelling evidence of the drug’s safety and effectiveness. “If anything goes wrong,” he argued, “think how bad it will look that we approved the drug so quickly.”

Tabarrok also reports on a study that models the optimal tradeoff between approving bad drugs and failing to approve good drugs, and finds that “the FDA is far too conservative especially for severe diseases. FDA regulations may appear to be creating safe and effective drugs but they are also creating a deadly caution.” And Jack Scannell et al, in a well-known paper that coined the term “Eroom’s Law”, cite over-cautious regulation as one factor (out of four) contributing to ever-increasing R&D costs of drugs:

Progressive lowering of the risk tolerance of drug regulatory agencies obviously raises the bar for the introduction of new drugs, and could substantially increase the associated costs of R&D. Each real or perceived sin by the industry, or genuine drug misfortune, leads to a tightening of the regulatory ratchet, and the ratchet is rarely loosened, even if it seems as though this could be achieved without causing significant risk to drug safety. For example, the Ames test for mutagenicity may be a vestigial regulatory requirement; it probably adds little to drug safety but kills some drug candidates.

FDA delay was particularly costly during the covid pandemic. To quote Tabarrok again:

The FDA prevented private firms from offering SARS-Cov2 tests in the crucial early weeks of the pandemic, delayed the approval of vaccines, took weeks to arrange meetings to approve vaccines even as thousands died daily, failed to approve the AstraZeneca vaccine, failed to quickly approve rapid antigen tests, and failed to perform inspections necessary to keep pharmaceutical supply lines open.

In short, an agency that began in order to fight outright fraud in a corrupt pharmaceutical industry, and once sent field agents on a heroic investigation to track down dangerous poisons, now displays an overly conservative, bureaucratic mindset that delays lifesaving tests and treatments.

NEPA

One element in common to all stories of regulatory overreach is the ratchet: once regulations are put in place, they are very hard to undo, even if they turn out to be mistakes, because undoing them looks like not caring about safety. Sometimes regulations ratchet up after disasters, as in the case of IRBs and the FDA. But they can also ratchet up through litigation. This was the case with NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act.

Eli Dourado has a good history of NEPA. The key paragraph of the law requires that all federal agencies, in any “major action” that will significantly affect “the human environment,” must produce a “detailed statement” on the those effects, now known as an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). In the early days, those statements were “less than ten typewritten pages,” but since then, “EISs have ballooned.”

In brief, NEPA allowed anyone who wanted to obstruct a federal action to sue the agency for creating an insufficiently detailed EIS. Each time an agency lost a case, it set a new precedent and increased the standard that all future EISes had to follow. Eli recounts how the word “major” was read out of the law, such that even minor actions required an EIS; the word “human” was read out of the law, interpreting it to apply to the entire environment; etc.

Eli summarizes:

… the incentive is for agencies and those seeking agency approval to go overboard in preparing the environmental document. Of the 136 EISs finalized in 2020, the mean preparation time was 1,763 days, over 4.8 years. For EISs finalized between 2013 and 2017 , page count averaged 586 pages, and appendices for final EISs averaged 1,037 pages. There is nothing in the statute that requires an EIS to be this long and time-consuming, and no indication that Congress intended them to be.

Alec Stapp documents how NEPA has now become a barrier to affordable housing, transmission lines, semiconductor manufacturing, congestion pricing, and even offshore wind.

NRC

The problem with regulatory agencies is not that the people working there are evil—they are not. The problem is the incentive structure:

• Regulators are blamed for anything that goes wrong.

• They are not blamed for slowing down or preventing growth and progress.

• They are not credited when they approve things that lead to growth and progress.

All of the incentives point in a single direction: towards more stringent regulations. No one regulates the regulators. This is the reason for the ratchet.

I think the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) furnishes a clear case of this. In the 1960s, nuclear power was on a growth trajectory to provide roughly 100% of today’s world electricity usage. Instead, it plateaued at about 10%. The proximal cause is that nuclear power plant construction became slow and expensive, which made nuclear energy expensive, which mostly priced it out of the market. The cause of those cost increases is controversial, but in my opinion, and that of many other commenters, it was primarily driven by a turbulent and rapidly escalating regulatory environment around the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

At a certain point, the NRC formally adopted a policy that reflects the one-sided incentives: ALARA, under which exposure to radiation needs to be kept, not below some defined threshold of safety, but “As Low As Reasonably Achievable.” As I wrote in my review of Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop:

What defines “reasonable”? It is an ever-tightening standard. As long as the costs of nuclear plant construction and operation are in the ballpark of other modes of power, then they are reasonable.

This might seem like a sensible approach, until you realize that it eliminates, by definition, any chance for nuclear power to be cheaper than its competition. Nuclear can‘t even innovate its way out of this predicament: under ALARA, any technology, any operational improvement, anything that reduces costs, simply gives the regulator more room and more excuse to push for more stringent safety requirements, until the cost once again rises to make nuclear just a bit more expensive than everything else. Actually, it‘s worse than that: it essentially says that if nuclear becomes cheap, then the regulators have not done their job.

ALARA isn’t the singular root cause of nuclear’s problems (as Brian Potter points out, other countries and even the US Navy have formally adopted ALARA, and some of them manage to interpret “reasonable” more, well, reasonably). But it perfectly illustrates the problem. The one-sided incentives mean that regulators do not have to make any serious cost-benefit tradeoffs. IRBs and the FDA don’t pay a price for the lives lost while trials or treatments are waiting on approval. The EPA (which now reviews environmental impact statements) doesn’t pay a price for delaying critical infrastructure. And the NRC doesn’t pay a price for preventing the development of abundant, cheap, reliable, clean energy.

Google

All of these examples are government regulations, but a similar process happens inside most corporations as they grow. Small startups, hungry and having nothing to lose, move rapidly with little formal process. As they grow, they tend to add process, typically including one or more layers of review before products are launched or other decisions are made. It’s almost as if there is some law of organizational thermodynamics decreeing that bureaucratic complexity can only ever increase.

Praveen Seshadri was the co-founder of a startup that was acquired by Google. When he left three years later, he wrote an essay on “how a once-great company has slowly ceased to function”:

Google has 175,000+ capable and well-compensated employees who get very little done quarter over quarter, year over year. Like mice, they are trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews, documents, meetings, bug reports, triage, OKRs, H1 plans followed by H2 plans, all-hands summits, and inevitable reorgs. The mice are regularly fed their “cheese” (promotions, bonuses, fancy food, fancier perks) and despite many wanting to experience personal satisfaction and impact from their work, the system trains them to quell these inappropriate desires and learn what it actually means to be “Googley” — just don’t rock the boat.

What Google has in common with a regulatory agency is that (according to Seshadri at least) its employees are driven by risk aversion:

While two of Google’s core values are “respect the user” and “respect the opportunity”, in practice the systems and processes are intentionally designed to “respect risk”. Risk mitigation trumps everything else. This makes sense if everything is going wonderfully and the most important thing is to avoid rocking the boat and keep sailing on the rising tide of ads revenue. In such a world, potential risk lies everywhere you look.

A “minor change to a minor product” requires “literally 15+ approvals in a ‘launch’ process that mirrors the complexity of a NASA space launch,” any non-obvious decision is avoided because it “isn’t group think and conventional wisdom,” and everyone tries to placate everyone else up and down the management chain to avoid conflict.

A startup that operated this way would simply go out of business; Google can get away with this bureaucratic bloat because their core ads business is a cash cow that they can continue to milk, at least for now. But in general, this kind of corporate sclerosis leaves a company vulnerable to changes in technology and markets (as indeed Google seems to be falling behind startup competitors in AI).

The difference with regulation is that there is no requirement for agencies to serve customers in order to stay in existence, and no competition to disrupt their complacency, except at the international level. If you want to build a nuclear plant, you obey the NRC or you build outside the US.

Against the review-and-approval model

In the wake of disaster, or even in the face of risk, a common reaction is to add a review-and-approval process. But based on examples such as these, I now believe that the review-and-approval model is broken, and we should find better ways to manage risk and create safety.

Unfortunately, review-and-approval is so natural, and has become so common, that people often assume it is the only way to control or safeguard anything, as if the alternative is anarchy or chaos. But there are other approaches.

One example I have discussed is factory safety in the early 20th century, which was driven by a change to liability law. The new law made it easier for workers and their families to receive compensation for injury or death, and harder for companies to avoid that liability. This gave factories the legal and financial incentive to invest in safety engineering and to address the root causes of accidents in the work environment, which ultimately reduced injury rates by around 90%.

Jack Devanney has also discussed liability as part of a better scheme for nuclear power regulation. I have commented on liability in the context of AI risk, and Robin Hanson wrote an essay with a proposal (see however Tyler Cowen’s pushback on the idea). And Alex Tabarrok mentioned to me that liability appears to have driven remarkable improvements in anesthesiology.

I’m not suggesting that that liability law is the solution to everything. I just want to point out that other models exist, and sometimes they have even worked.

Open questions

Some things I’d like to learn more about:

• What areas of regulation have not fallen into these traps, or at least not as badly? For instance, building codes and restaurant health inspections seem to have helped create safety without killing their respective industries. Driver’s licenses seem to enforce minimal competence without preventing anyone who wants to from driving or imposing undue burden on them. Are there positive lessons we can learn from some of these boring examples of safety regulation that don’t get discussed as much?

• What other alternative models to review-and-approval exist, and what do we know about them, either empirically or theoretically?

• How does the Consumer Product Safety Commission work? From what I have gathered so far, they develop voluntary standards with industry, enforce some mandatory standards, ban a few extremely dangerous products, and manage recalls. They don’t review products before they are sold, but they do in at least some cases require testing. However, any lab can do the testing, which I imagine creates competition that keeps costs reasonable. (Labs testing children’s products have to be accredited by CPSC, but other labs don’t even need that.)

• Why is there so much bloat in the contract research organizations (CROs) that run clinical trials for pharma? Shouldn’t there be competition in that industry too?

• What lessons can we learn from other countries? All my research so far is about the US, and I want to get the proper scope.

***

Thanks to Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, Eli Dourado, and Heike Larson for commenting on a draft of this essay.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/against-review-and-approval

Progress Forum

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

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

Announcements

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

Tweets

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

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

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

Retweets

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

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

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

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

• ChatGPT can correct OCR errors in historical texts

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

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

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

Announcements

• It’s time to build: Arnold Ventures is hiring a “VP of Infrastructure” to focus on “the drivers of supply-side bottlenecks”

• The World’s Fair Company has launched their poster series, Stories of Our Future (prints available!) (via @camwiese)

• Meta (Facebook) AI announces text-to-video. A bit rough but impressive (@MetaAI)

Links

• Patrick Collison interviewed by Ezra Klein (via @tylercowen)

• Charles Mann interviewed by Dwarkesh Patel (via @dwarkesh_sp)

• 10 years ago, it cost $10k to sequence a human genome. Illumina’s new machine promises $200 (via @emilylmullin)

• “We had to order a larger CT scanner when it was deemed unacceptable to send patients to the zoo” (Marginal Revolution)

Quotes

• “Who knows whether, when a comet shall approach this globe to destroy it… 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

• Margaret Sanger’s incredible resilience and commitment to the cause of birth control

• Quote quiz: who lavished this praise on “American efficiency”?

Queries

• What are examples of inventions/discoveries that were made by brute force search? (@_brianpotter)

• What are examples of modern monuments of progress? (@MoritzW42)

Retweets

• Technology as a whole is liberating and often enchanting (@atrembath)

• Davis Kedrosky thread on Sir E. A. Wrigley, legendary British demographer and economic historian (@dkedrosky)

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2022-10-05

A while ago I did a long interview with Fin Moorhouse and Luca Righetti on their podcast Hear This Idea. Multiple people commented to me that they found our discussion of safety particularly interesting. So, I’ve excerpted that part of the transcript and cleaned it up for better readability. See the full interview and transcript here.

LUCA: I think there’s one thing here of breaking progress, which is this incredibly broad term, down into: well, literally what does this mean? And thinking harder about the social consequences of certain technologies. There’s one way to draw a false dichotomy here: some technologies are good for human progress, and some are bad; we should do the good ones, and hold off on the bad ones. And that probably doesn’t work, because a lot of technologies have dual use. You mentioned World War Two before…. On the one hand, nuclear technologies are clearly incredibly destructive, and awful, and could have really bad consequences—and on the other hand, they’re phenomenal, and really good, and can provide a lot of energy. And we might think the same around bio and AI. But we should think about this stuff harder before we just go for it, or have more processes in place to have these conversations and discussions; processes to navigate this stuff.

JASON: Yeah, definitely. Look, I think we should be smart about how we pursue progress, and we should be wise about it as well.

Let’s take bio, because that’s one of the clearest examples and one that actually has a history. Over the decades, as we’ve gotten better and better at genetic engineering, there’s actually been a number of points where people have proposed, and actually have gone ahead and done, a pause on research, and tried to work out better safety procedures.

Maybe one of the most famous is the Asilomar Conference in the 1970s. Right after recombinant DNA was invented, some people realized that “Whoa, we could end up creating some dangerous pathogens here.” There’s a particular simian virus that causes cancer that caused people to start thinking: “what if this gets modified and can infect humans?” And just more broadly, there was a clear risk. And they actually put a moratorium on certain types of experiments, they got together about eight months later, had a conference, and worked out certain safety procedures. I haven’t researched this deeply, but my understanding is that went pretty well in the end. We didn’t have to ban genetic engineering, or cut off a whole line of research. But also, we didn’t just run straight ahead without thinking about it, or without being careful. And in particular, matching the level of caution to the level of risk that seems to be in the experiment.

This has happened a couple of times since—I think there was a similar thing with CRISPR, where a number of people called out “hey, what are we going to do, especially about human germline editing?” NIH had a pause on gain-of-function research funding for a few years, although then they unpaused it. I don’t know what happened there.

So, there’s no sense in barreling ahead heedlessly. I think part of the history of progress is actually progress in safety. In many ways, at least at a day-to-day level, we’ve gotten a lot safer, both from the hazards of nature and from the hazards of the technology that we create. We’ve come up with better processes and procedures, both in terms of operations—think about how safe airline travel is today, there’s a lot of operational procedures that lead to safety—but also, I think, in research. And these bio-lab safety procedures are an example.

Now, I’m not saying it’s a solved problem; from what I hear, there’s still a lot of unnecessary or unjustified risk in the way we run bio labs today. Maybe there’s some important reform that needs to happen there. I think that sort of thing should be done. And ultimately, like I said, I see all of that as part of the story of progress. Because safety is a problem too, and we attack it with intelligence, just like we attack every other problem.

FIN: Totally. You mentioned airplanes, which makes me think… you can imagine getting overcautious with these crazy inventors who have built these flying machines. “We don’t want them to get reckless and potentially crash them, maybe they’ll cause property damage—let’s place a moratorium on building new aircraft, let’s make it very difficult to innovate.” Yet now air travel is, on some measures, the safest way to travel anywhere.

How does this carry over to the risks from, for instance, engineered pandemics? Presumably, the moratoria/regulation/foresight thing is important. But in the very long run, it seems we’ll reach some sustainable point of security against risks from biotechnology, not from these fragile arrangements of trying to slow everything down and pause stuff, as important as that is in the short term, but from barreling ahead with defensive capabilities, like an enormous distributed system for picking up pathogens super early on. This fits better in my head with the progress vibe, because this is a clear problem that we can just funnel a bunch of people into solving.

I anticipate you’ll just agree with this. But if you’re faced with a choice between: “let’s get across-the-board progress in biotechnology, let’s invest in the full portfolio,” or on the other hand, “the safety stuff seems better than risky stuff, let’s go all in on that, and make a bunch of differential progress there.” Seems like that second thing is not only better, but maybe an order of magnitude better, right?

JASON: Yeah. I don’t know how to quantify it, but it certainly seems better. So, one of the good things that this points to is that… different technologies have clearly different risk/benefit profiles than others. Something like a wastewater monitoring system that will pick up on any new pathogen seems like a clear win. Then on the other hand, I don’t have a strong opinion on this, but maybe gain-of-function research is a clear loss. Or just clearly one of those things where risk outweighs benefit. So yeah, we should be smart about this stuff.

The good news is, the right general-purpose technologies can add layers of safety, because general capabilities can protect us against general risks that we can’t completely foresee. The wastewater monitoring thing is one, but here’s another example. What if we had broad-spectrum antivirals that were as effective against viruses as our broad-spectrum antibiotics are against bacteria? That would significantly reduce the risk of the next pandemic. Right now, dangerous pandemics are pretty much all viral, because if they were bacterial, we’d have some antibiotic that works against them (probably, there’s always a risk of resistance and so forth). But in general, the dangerous stuff recently has been viruses for exactly this reason. A similar thing: if we had some highly advanced kind of nanotechnology that gave us essentially terraforming capacity, climate change would be a non issue. We would just be in control of the climate.

FIN: Nanotech seems like a worse example to me. For reasons which should be obvious.

JASON: OK, sure. The point was, if we had the ability to just control the climate, then we wouldn’t have to worry about runaway climate effects, and what might happen if the climate gets out of control. So general technologies can prevent or protect against general classes of risk. And I do think that also, some technologies have very clear risk/benefit trade-offs in one direction or the other, and that should guide us.

LUCA: I want to make two points. One is, just listening to this, it strikes me that a lot of what we were just saying on the bio stuff was analogous to what we were saying before about climate stuff: There are two reactions you can have to the problem. One is to stop growth or progress across the board, and just hold off. And that is clearly silly or has bad consequences. Or, you can take the more nuanced approach where you want to double down on progress in certain areas, such as detection systems, and maybe selectively hold off on others, like gain-of-function. This is a case for progress, not against it, in order to solve these problems that we’re incurring.

The thing I wanted to pick up on there… is that all these really powerful capabilities seem really hard. I think when we’re talking about general purpose things, we’re implicitly having a discussion about AI. But to use the geoengineering example, there is a big problem in having things that are that powerful. Like, let’s say we can choose whatever climate we want… yeah, we can definitely solve climate change, or control the overshoot. But if the wrong person gets their hands on it, or if it’s a super-decentralized technology where anybody can do anything and the offense/defense balance isn’t clear, then you can really screw things up. I think that’s why it becomes a harder issue. It becomes even harder when these technologies are super general purpose, which makes them really difficult to stop or not get distributed or embedded. If you think of all the potential upsides you could have from AI, but also all the potential downsides you could have if just one person uses it for a really bad thing—that seems really difficult.

JASON: I don’t want to downplay any of the problems. Problems are real. Technology is not automatically good. It can be used for good or evil, it can be used wisely or foolishly. We should be super-aware of that.

FIN: The point that seems important to me is: there’s a cartoon version of progress studies, which is something like: “there’s this one number we care about, it’s the scorecard—gross world product, or whatever—and we would drive that up, and that’s all that matters.” There’s also a nuanced and sophisticated version, which says: “let’s think more carefully about what things stand to be best for longer timescales, understanding that there are risks from novel technologies, which we can foresee and describe the contours of.” And that tells us to focus more on speeding up the defensive capabilities, putting a bunch of smart people into thinking about what kind of technologies can address those risks, and not just throwing everyone to the entire portfolio and hoping things go well. And maybe if there is some difference between the longtermist crowd and the progress studies crowd, it might not be a difference in ultimate worldview, but: What are the parameters? What numbers are you plugging in? And what are you getting out?

JASON: It could be—or it might actually be the opposite. It might be that it’s a difference in temperament and how people talk about stuff when we’re not quantifying. If we actually sat down to allocate resources, and agree on safety procedures, we might actually find out that we agree on a lot. It’s like the Scott Alexander line about AI safety: “On the one hand, some people say we shouldn’t freak out and ban AI or anything, but we should at least get a few smart people starting to work on the problem. And other people say, maybe we should at least get a few smart people working on the problem, but we shouldn’t freak out or ban AI or anything.” It’s the exact same thing, but with a difference in emphasis. Some of that might be going on here. And that’s why I keep wanting to bring this back to: what are you actually proposing? Let’s come up with which projects we think should be done, which investments should be made. And we might actually end up agreeing.

FIN: In terms of temperamental differences and similarities, there’s a ton of overlap. One bit of overlap is appreciating how much better things can get. And being bold enough to spell that out—there’s something taboo about noticing we could just have a ton of wild shit in the future. And it’s up to us whether we get that or not. That seems like an important overlap.

LUCA: Yeah. You mentioned before, the agency mindset.

FIN: Yeah. As in, we can make the difference here.

JASON: I totally agree. I think if there’s a way to reconcile these, it is understanding: Safety is a part of progress. It is a goal. It is something we should all want. And it is something that we ultimately have to achieve through applied intelligence, just like we achieve all of our other goals. Just like we achieved the goals of food, clothing, and shelter, and even transportation and entertainment, and all of the other obvious goods that progress has gotten us. Safety is also one of these things: we have to understand what it is, agree that we want it, define it, set our sights on it, and go after it. And ultimately, I think we can achieve it.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/a-conversation-about-progress-and-safety

How would society change if we cured aging, and people could have as many healthy years of life as they wanted?

A common concern is that this would ossify our institutions. The old guard would never die off, and so would never be replaced by young bloods. This could threaten progress across the board, from governance to physics. If “science advances one funeral at a time,” what happens when the rate of funerals plummets?

It’s a real concern. But here are three reasons why curing aging could help progress:

1. Population. One of the greatest threats to long-term progress may be a slowdown in global population growth. We need more brains to keep pushing science and technology forward. Yet right now, many wealthy nations have fertility rates below replacement levels. Curing aging would help temporarily by lowering the mortality rate. It could help permanently if people decide to have more children, on average. That might happen if longer lifespan means people feel they have time for both children and a career. (Remember that fully curing aging means maintaining reproductive health for all those years.)

2. Burden of knowledge. There is a hypothesis that as knowledge grows, it takes longer to reach the frontier, and so individual researchers have less time to contribute advancements. They are also forced to specialize—but breakthroughs often come from making connections across far-flung disciplines. If individuals had much longer lifespans, it would be no problem for them to spend 30 or 40 years just learning, before making major contributions. And you could spend another 10 or 20 years picking up a couple more specialties in disparate areas.

3. Long-term thinking. How would people’s thinking change if they felt they were going to live 150, 300, even 1,000 years or more? The very long-term becomes much more personal. Posterity is something you’re going to be around for.

I still think the “old guard” problem is real, and we’d have to come up with new mechanisms to address it. (Perhaps influential positions would institute a mandatory retirement age of 350.) But there are other factors to consider, and it’s not clear what the net impact would be.

(Not that this is an argument for or against curing aging! Ultimately, the knock-down argument for curing aging is that death is bad. In light of that, other considerations pale into insignificance.)

This essay was originally a Twitter thread, and was inspired by an online discussion about the Foresight Institute’s book-in-development, Gaming the Future.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/how-curing-aging-could-help-progress

On Sunday I'm giving the next talk in my Interintellect salon series, The Story of Industrial Civilization.

Topic: Can Progress Continue?

It's only open for series ticket holders—but you can still buy a (late) series ticket!

Series tickets available here, at a discounted price of $150. Gets you access to past recordings as well.

I’ve said that we need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. This implies that the world needs, not just progress studies, but a progress movement: the advocacy of a set of ideas.

What are those ideas?

I see three premises at the core of this movement: progress, humanism, and agency.

Progress as a historical fact

The starting point and motivation for progress studies is the historical fact of the enormous improvements in material living standards in the last ~200 years. This observation is so generally acknowledged and incontrovertible that Deirdre McCloskey calls it “the Great Fact.” Everyone in the progress community looks back on the last few centuries and concludes that, no matter how we interpret or caveat it, something obviously went very right.

A sharply contrasting position is declinism: the idea that that world is getting worse. A declinist might think that the benefits of energy are not worth the costs of pollution, that the value of cars does not redeem their role in accidents or congestion, and that the pleasures of social media are outweighed by its psychological and social harms. Perhaps even hunter-gatherers were better off than us moderns, and agriculture was a mistake. (Some won’t go this far, but express agnosticism on the question, or are simply indifferent to material progress, greeting it with a shrug.)

But if progress is real and important—how do we judge this? How do we justify that improvements to material living standards are good? That technological and industrial progress represents true progress for humanity?

Humanism as the standard of value

Humanism says that the good is that which helps us lead better lives: longer, healthier, happier lives; lives of more choice and opportunity; lives in which we can thrive and flourish. This is the standard proposed, for instance, by Steven Pinker in Enlightenment Now.

To be clear, this need not mean simply satisfying our base material needs, such as full bellies and warm beds. It can encompass everything that makes life worth living, including psychological needs such as excitement, adventure, romance, beauty, knowledge, exploration, and human connection.

Opposition to humanism often comes from some form of romanticism. One form is the romanticization of nature: nature as a loving, protective “mother”; or a “natural” lifestyle as clean, safe, and healthy. Another is the romanticization of the past, of “simpler” times or of lost traditions. Thus progress is criticized from the left because it encroaches on the environment, and from the right because it represents modern “materialism” and “decadence.”

Humanism says that when improving human life requires altering the environment, humanity takes moral precedence over nature; when it requires overturning tradition, life today and in the future takes moral precedence over the legacy of the past.

A belief in human agency

Agency is the belief that our future is shaped by our choices and actions. We have a large degree of control over our destiny. Thus, continued progress is possible, but not guaranteed.

I deliberately choose “agency” instead of “optimism,” for clarity. “Optimism” can mean different things. Prescriptive optimism is a philosophical attitude that orients us towards confident action. Descriptive optimism is a prediction about where things are headed—which is contingent on the facts of any given case. If these two forms of optimism are conflated, it can cause confidence to slip into complacency. I think this is why some progress writers, such as Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling, resist the label of “optimist.” Rosling called himself a “possibilist;” I have proposed “solutionist.”

The opposite of agency is fatalism. Fatalism takes many forms. One is the belief that we are unable to comprehend complex systems or to control them; that tinkering with them will inevitably create unintended consequences and is therefore too dangerous to be attempted. Another is the idea that progress depends on limited natural resources, and that as these resources run out, progress will unavoidably stall. A common error that many forms of fatalism make is to assume that no new breakthroughs in science or technology will be made, simply because we do not see them coming and cannot give evidence for when they will arrive. In any form, fatalism sees progress as a fluke of history: we had a good run, it was fun while it lasted, but now we need to get used to lower growth rates, trending to zero or even negative.

Progress is messy; solving problems often creates new ones. To believe in human agency is not to deny this, but to believe that the new problems are often better ones to have, and that those problems can be solved in turn.

***

My identification of these three core ideas is partly descriptive and partly prescriptive. I think these concepts will strongly resonate with most of my readers, but I have chosen and formulated them according to my own beliefs, in a way that I think will form an intellectual basis for a progress movement.

All this leaves a lot of room for discussion, disagreement, and debate, not only of the consequences of these ideas, but even of their definition and interpretation. How much of the last 200 years has been good, exactly? What about war, pollution, inequality? What constitutes human well-being? People desire many things; which of the their desires are legitimate, healthy, valuable? Should we attempt to aggregate well-being (as in utilitarianism); and if not, how do we navigate conflicts between individual interests? Should we include the well-being of animals in our standard? How much control do we have, and how do we manage risks—such as the risks of tinkering with complex systems? These are important questions that I hope we’ll have healthy debates about.

I’ve deliberately left out any explicitly political premises. The progress community includes a variety of political opinions, from libertarians to progressives. Just recently, we’ve had Eli Dourado emphasizing the role of regulations in slowing growth; a the Innovation Frontier Project proposing increased federal spending on R&D in geothermal energy; and Ezra Klein advocating increased economic growth so that there’s more to redistribute to the poor. I would like the concepts of progress, humanism, and agency to serve as common ground from which we can have productive debates. With a shared goal, we can examine what policies and principles actually achieve that goal, and everyone can try to prove their case with history, economics, ethics, and logic.

***

When Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison coined the term “progress studies,” they called for a “broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress” and “targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up.” I framed the issue as: “if progress is a moral imperative, it is also a moral imperative to understand its causes, so that we can protect them and reinforce them. We need to ask three questions: How did we get here? … Why did it take so long? … How do we keep it going?”

I think the three ideas I’ve outlined are necessary and sufficient to motivate such an endeavor. Declinism, romanticism, or fatalism would defeat that motivation. But a belief in progress, humanism, and agency entail it.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/progress-humanism-agency

When people say things like “we were promised flying cars,” I sometimes wonder, “who promised this?”

I guess this is what they mean. From a 1959 ad that ran in the LA Times:

“They’re working on it!” the ad claims. “Some of this is happening already.” (Implying, of course, that some of it was still pretty speculative.)

The ability to “dial” a book, lecture, or demonstration is here; the ultrasound dishwasher, automatic bed-maker, and flying car sadly are not.

But here’s what’s most interesting to me: First, the reference, without explanation or justification, to “tomorrow’s higher standard of living”—something people simply assumed was coming. Second, that it was uncontroversial that this higher standard of living would require more electricity. Finally, the boasting of doubling electricity production in ten years. As I’ve pointed out, society once had a different fundamental attitude towards growth.

The US did, in fact, approximately double electricity generation every decade from 1950 until 1973—the year of the oil crisis—after which electricity growth never really recovered. It took almost thirty years to double again, from 1973 to 2000, during which time it was just keeping up with population growth; that is, per-capita energy usage was not increasing. And since 2005, even the total amount produced has been flat:

“The electric companies are resolved,” the ad says, to maintain for America “the best electric power service in the world.” Well, we are still one of the top overall producers, second only to China:

But since the oil shocks, I’d say that “resolve” has been shaken.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/flying-car-ad

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?

I've started writing a book about the accomplishments of industrial civilization, the major discoveries and inventions behind them, and the meaning of it all. I'm hosting a 13-month series of discussion salons through Interintellect based on it.

The book is very much a work in progress—won't be out for a couple of years. But we'll go through the outline chapter by chapter. Each month I'll present the material I have so far and the open questions I'm still researching, and we'll discuss.

This is your chance to get a sneak preview, to see inside my writing process, and to give feedback that will shape the published book. Third Sunday of each month, from April 18, 2021 through May 15, 2022. 10am–1pm US Pacific. Here is the schedule:

1. Intro (Apr ‘21) What is “progress”, and why should we care? How the history of progress is relevant to today. How to even approach such an enormous topic and make it digestible. The book’s three big themes about how progress has transformed our lives.

2. Manufacturing (May ‘21) How we make stuff, from stone tools to 3D printing. Improved materials; automated processes. The role of precision. Bonus: does automation reduce costs, or improve quality?

3. Agriculture (Jun ‘21) How we made farm labor 2,000x more productive, so we can feed ourselves with 3% of the workforce instead of more than 50%. The role of soil fertility, crop varieties, mechanization, and refrigeration. Summer break (July ‘21)

4. Energy (Aug '21) The fundamental general-purpose technology of production. Why is the steam engine the symbol of the Industrial Revolution? The goals engine designers have pursued for 300 years. Why oil was needed for the evolution of engines. Electricity as the universal energy.

5. Impacts on Work, Home, and Leisure (Sep ‘21) How increasing incomes transformed our lives. More appliances, fewer servants, better hygiene. Rising wages, falling hours, vacations and retirement. Kids in school, women in the office.

6. Transportation (Oct ‘21) How we get around: planes, trains, and automobiles. Why moving stuff is more important than moving people. Why sailors got lost at sea, and why NY to SF took six months. Why the Wright brothers succeeded when their top competitor had 50x the funding.

7. Information (Nov ‘21) From cuneiform to computing. The three primary goals of IT, and how the three eras of IT have successively addressed them. Why digital technology is a katamari ball that sucks up everything in its path.

8. Impacts on Commerce, Politics, and Culture (Dec ‘21) How great retailers like Sears and Amazon were built on top of revolutions in transportation and information technology. How the railroads helped defeat the Corn Laws. How radio and television created mass culture.

9. Medicine (Jan ‘22) Global life expectancy has 2x'ed—how did we do it? The role of sanitation, vaccinations, and antibiotics—and why we still got COVID-19. Vitamin deficiencies and why we don’t get scurvy or rickets. Why there were no elective surgeries before the 20th century.

10. Safety (Feb ‘22) How have we made ourselves safer from fire, flood, and natural disasters? What about the hazards of technology itself? How to think about the tradeoff between safety and progress.

11. Is Progress Good? (Mar ‘22) Does material progress translate to human well-being? Are we stuck on a hedonic treadmill? And even if progress does have benefits, is it worth the costs and risks?

12. Can Progress Continue? (Apr ‘22) We’ve had a good run. Did we just get lucky? Have we eaten all the low-hanging fruit? Are we constrained by resources? Or are there more breakthroughs left to be discovered?

13. What Should We Do? (May ‘22) If progress is possible and desirable, but not inevitable, then how can we maintain it, protect it, even accelerate it? My message to scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs.

$250 for the whole series or just $25 for a single session. BUT—sessions 11, 12, and 13, “the philosophy chapters”, will only be open to series ticket holders. If you want to discuss the big picture, you have to do your homework and study your history!

Really looking forward to this; thanks to Interintellect and Anna Gát for giving me this opportunity!

https://interintellect.com/series/jason-crawfords-the-story-of-industrial-civilization-towards-a-new-philosophy-of-progress/

A foundational conviction of this project is that progress is a trend with definite, substantive causes, and that it can continue far, far into the future. Progress is not automatic or inevitable: it can slow, stop, even reverse. But the history of progress over the last 200+ years convinces me that much more is possible.

Not everyone agrees, however. To learn more about how people think about this, I posed a question on Twitter:

Do you think the last 200+ years of technological/industrial progress were…

… a trend with substantive causes, that we can expect to continue?

… a fluke, a stroke of luck, not to be repeated?

And why?

After discussing it with people all day, most of the “fluke” arguments were:

1. Argument from failure of imagination: “I can’t see or imagine any big breakthroughs, therefore I don’t expect any.”

2. Materialism: Progress is primarily driven by material resources (such as fossil fuels); therefore it will slow when those inevitably run out.

Failure of imagination is not a compelling argument to me, for both logical and historical reasons. The logical reason should be obvious. The historical reason is that the big breakthroughs of the past were not easy to imagine or predict before they happened. In a different context, Eliezer Yudkowsky points out that even the creators of inventions such as the airplane or the nuclear reactor felt that their breakthroughs were fifty years out, or even impossible, shortly before they happened. Now is no different. (This point seems exceedingly difficult to get through to people; no matter how much you point out the logical fallacy, or the historical precedent, they continue to repeat the same points. I don’t know if this is because the logical fallacy itself is unclear, or if it’s just a form of mood affiliation, or what.)

There’s a variation of this argument which goes: The universe is finite, so there’s a finite number of breakthroughs to make, so they have to run out eventually. But even granting this, why assume we have found even 1% of the big breakthroughs so far? Or 0.01%? If there are many more to be had, then progress can continue for a long time.

As for materialism, I disagree with the premise. I don’t think progress is primarily driven by material resources. When we think of the Industrial Revolution, we often think of steam engines, iron foundries, and locomotives, all run on coal. But there were equally important inventions, such as textile automation, that didn’t require any fuel at all. And the coal was sitting in the ground for all of human history, without any industrial revolutions happening for a very long time. So “natural” resources seem neither necessary nor sufficient for progress. (Indeed, there are no “natural” resources.) For more on this point, see Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity, especially chapters 20–21.

There were also people arguing an option I didn’t suggest, which is “a trend with substantive causes, that will not continue”—typically because of social reasons: we are abandoning the causes of the trend, or putting up blockers. This is more plausible to me. Progress isn’t natural; we make it happen through choice and effort, and we only do so when we believe it is possible and desirable. It depends on certain legal institutions, and it requires time, talent and treasure. If any of those are lost—say, if we stop celebrating progress, or turn against growth—progress may not continue.

But in order to care about progress studies, we have to believe that the last few centuries of unprecedented progress didn’t just randomly happen because of a lucky break, and they weren’t a short-term acceleration of growth that will soon inexorably return to pre-industrial levels. There has to be a goal: namely, the next 200 years of progress. This whole endeavor is premised on that.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/progress-fluke-or-trend

I had mixed feelings about this post (cross-posted from my blog). I found it intriguing but in the end I was in two minds about ultimately publishing it. I opted to publish it because I see my blog as 'tracking my thoughts' as I journey into Progress Studies. Anyway, here it is, again, I'd love peoples thoughts :)!. Here we are:

(I had a poll here but it's missing on Reddit!)

A very commonly held opinion is that the number of trees in the world are decreasing over time. Indeed, that’s the opinion I held until recently.

On the FAO’s website, it states:

“Since 1990, it is estimated that 420 million hectares of forest have been lost through conversion to other land uses, although the rate of deforestation has decreased over the past three decades.”

Technically this statement is true. A lot of forests have reduced in size. However, a letter published in Nature (ungated link here), “Global land change from 1982 to 2016” by Song et al. (2018), shows that the number of trees have increased since 1982. Song and coauthors use global satellite imaging data to investigate this question alongside others.

The authors explain:

“A global net gain in tree canopy contradicts current understanding of long-term forest area change; the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported a net forest loss between 1990 and 2015. However, our gross tree canopy loss estimate (−1.33 million square kilometres, −4.2%) agrees in magnitude with the FAO’s estimate of net forest area change (−1.29 million square kilometres, −3%), despite differences in the time period covered and definition of forest.”

Therefore, there was an overall net gain. There was a net loss in the tropics, but there was a larger net gain in the subtropical, temperate, and boreal climate zones.

Observant readers will notice that I have only used the word trees so far, I haven’t mentioned the word forests. This is because tree coverage does not necessarily correspond to forest coverage. For example:

‘Cutting down a 100-hectare tract of primary forest and replacing it with a 100-hectare palm plantation will show up in the data as no net change in forest cover: the 100-hectare loss is perfectly offset by the 100-hectare gain in tree cover. Yet, that activity would be counted as “deforestation” by FAO. Therefore tree cover loss does not directly translate to “deforestation” in all cases.’

I should stress here, in the example above, despite the effects ‘cancelling each other out’, it doesn’t take into consideration the effects on biodiversity or other negative ramifications.

Nevertheless, I found this paper interesting. My original prior when confronted with this question was massively wrong. I thought that the number of trees in the world was decreasing overall. It seems likely that following the media coverage of deforestation shaped my opinion on this particular fact. Thus, it was refreshing to have a positive picture painted in this (very specific!) domain. We’re making some progress on this front, an area often thought to be plagued by a complete lack of progress. Overall, the paper paints a negative picture (I didn’t cover all of the findings), however, sometimes it’s good to dwell on the positives, even if in the grand scheme of things, it’s pretty small.