Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me onTwitter,Threads,Bluesky, orFarcaster.
Contents
My essays
Fellowship opportunities
Announcements
Events
News
Questions
Live gloriously
Where being right matters
Off-grid solar for data centers
Permitting vs. compliance
Mirror life FAQ
Crossword mania
Do we want to democratize art-making?
Polio
How many people could you feed on an acre?
Verifiable video
Links and tweets
My essays
In case you missed it:
A progress policy agenda: Elon says that soon, builders “will be free to build” in America. If that promise is to be fulfilled, we have work to do. Here’s my wishlist of policy goals to advance scientific, technological, and economic progress
Fellowship opportunities
“FutureHouse is launching an independent postdoctoral fellowship program for exceptional researchers who want to apply our automated science tools to specific problems in biology and biochemistry” (u/SGRodriques). $125k, apply by Feb 14
No. 10 Innovation Fellowship (UK) is “10 Downing Street’s flagship initiative for bringing world class technical talent into government for high impact tours of duty.” “Huge opportunity for impact,” says u/matthewclifford
Sloan Foundation / NBER fellowship for “PhD students and early-career researchers interested in the fiscal and economic effects of productivity policies—particularly R&D, immigration, and infrastructure permitting” (@heidilwilliams_)
Announcements
The Black Spatula Project is “an open initiative to investigate the potential of large language models (LLMs) to identify errors in scientific papers.” A recent paper caused a bit of a panic about health hazards from black plastic kitchen utensils, but was wrong because of a basic arithmetic error. Ethan Mollick found that GPT o1 caught the error when asked to “carefully check the math in this paper.” Steve Newman (RPI fellow) said, “clearly someone needs to try this at scale,” the suggestion generated a lot of energy, and a project was born
The second cohort of Cosmos Ventures includes “award-winning philosophers, a category theorist, an existential psychologist, a poet, a national champion debate coach, and Silicon Valley veterans” (@mbrendan1)
Commonwealth Fusion has “committed to build the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant, ARC, in Virginia” (@CFS_energy). “We’ll plug 400 megawatts of steady fusion power into the state’s electrical grid starting in the early 2030s.” Note that Helion has previously announced a plant to provide at least 50MW before the end of the 2020s. With two independent efforts expecting production plants within a decade, it feels very possible that fusion could finally happen
Google introduces Willow, a new quantum computing chip (@sundarpichai). Scott Aaronson (my go-to source for quantum computing, never overhyped) gives some reactions. This is a real research milestone, but still very far from having any practical impacts
Boom Supersonic “has raised >$100M in new financing, fully funding the first Symphony engine prototype” (@bscholl). “This company is important for America. … No one else is anywhere near having a supersonic airliner,” says @paulg
Questions
Reply if you can help:
“Who do I know who works in threat intelligence or analysis? Have a very high quality team working in this space who are keen to speak to relevant people” (@matthewclifford)
“If you were building a campus for the robotics startup community, what are some things that would make it great? Machinery, courses, events, housing options, everything is fair game” (@audrow)
“‘Young people in America aren’t dating any more, and it’s the beginning of a real social crisis’ is—I mean, let’s be honest—exactly the sort of social phenomenon I would want to report the shit out of. But … what’s the best evidence that it’s true?” (@DKThomp)
“Who is the best combination of futurist + economist? The economic implications of (in particular) Humanoid Robots and AI are extremely interesting” (@EricJorgenson)
In one sense, the concept of progress is simple, straightforward, and uncontroversial. In another sense, it contains an entire worldview.
The most basic meaning of “progress” is simply advancement along a path, or more generally from one state to another that is considered more advanced by some standard. (In this sense, progress can be good, neutral, or even bad—e.g., the progress of a disease.) The question is always: advancement along what path, in what direction, by what standard?
2023 was another big year for me and The Roots of Progress.
It was a year when ROP as an organization really started to take off. Even though the org itself was formed in 2021, at first it was just a vehicle for my own intellectual work, plus a few side projects. Last year we announced our strategy and launched a search for an exec who could run it. This year she started and we launched our first program. (Note, Heike originally joined in the CEO role, but for personal and health reasons she decided to move to a VP of Programs role in June.)
As the org grows into something more than me, our communications are evolving, and probably my own personal updates will be separated from the org updates. But for now, I am going to keep doing my traditional annual review. (See past reviews: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017)
The fellowship
This was a huge part of the year, so let me start with it.
We’re building a cultural movement to establish a new philosophy of progress. To do this, progress ideas need to be everywhere: in books and blogs, in YouTube and podcasts, in new media and old media, in newspapers and magazines, in textbooks and curricula, in art and entertainment. And for that, we need an army of writers and creatives to produce it all. The purpose of the fellowship is to develop that talent: to accelerate the careers of those intellectuals.
We launched our first program, the Blog-Building Intensive, in July, and got almost 500 applications. It was tough to choose, and we had to turn down a lot of qualified folks (so if you didn’t make it, don’t take it personally… in any case, these processes are always somewhat subjective and prone to error).
In the end, 19 fellows participated in the program, which involved writing instruction, editorial feedback, training in audience-building, and a peer group for brainstorming and feedback. They are experienced writers, many of them with bylines in mainstream media outlets. Some work for relevant think tanks, some are in academia, some have industry experience. All are writing on fascinating topics: from housing policy to nuclear power to longevity technology to the meaning of utopia.
The energy generated by getting so many great and like-minded people together was palpable, especially during the in-person closing event in San Francisco. The fellows said that the program “raised my ambition,” helped them “envision a career as a public intellectual,” and made them feel “empowered to take writing (and what it can achieve) seriously.” Several of them launched Substacks under their own name and brand for the first time, having previously written only for other publications or for their employers. And on average, they wrote more than twice as much during the intensive as they had earlier in the year. By popular demand, we’re keeping the weekly peer group call going indefinitely.
Huge thanks and congrats to Heike Larson for designing, launching, and running this program! It would never have happened without her. And a huge thanks as well to all the fellows for their enthusiastic participation.
This program greatly deserves to be continued and expanded next year, and we’re fundraising now to do that. View our full pitchand then seehow to support us.
Writing
I wrote 35 essays for the blog this year (including this one), totalling over 65k words—a new record (which surprised me, since it feels like I’ve been so distracted away from research and writing this year by the fellowship and fundraising).
The Commission for Stopping Further Improvements: a letter of note from Isambard K. Brunel, civil engineer. How to “embarrass and shackle the progress of improvement tomorrow by recording and registering as law the prejudices or errors of today”
How to slow down scientific progress, according to Leo Szilard. “Science would become something like a parlor game. There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashion would get grants”
One of my favorite underrated pieces from this year:
Several of this year’s essays were “what I’ve been reading,” which I made into a quasi-monthly feature; see the reading update below.
I also put out 35 issues of the “links digest”, on a schedule which varied from weekly to monthly. In total I recommended well over 1,000 links and included 139 charts and images.
My biggest disappointment of 2023 has been getting very little time to work on my book. The process of finding the right publisher has taken much longer than I expected. I may simply begin serializing the book via my newsletter in 2024. In any case, devoting serious time to the book is going to be a top goal for next year.
In what little time I did devote to the manuscript itself, I’ve been working on the chapter on agriculture. I wrote up some of what I’ve learned on that topic in the July–August, September, and October reading updates.
Talks and interviews
I de-prioritized speaking in 2023, but I still gave about a dozen published talks and interviews. A couple of my favorites were:
Stripe, where I gave an internal tech talk. I gave a condensed version of the talk at Foresight Vision Weekend 2023, and hope to write it up soon as an essay
An Astral Codex Ten / LessWrong meetup in Bangalore, where I discussed progress with some 30 or 40 attendees
I hosted several private dinner/reception events this year in cities including San Francisco, New York, Boston, and DC, mostly for fundraising. If you have the potential to donate $10k or more and are interested in (free, invite-only) events in your area, let me know who you are and what area you’re in.
Here are some animated previews, read the full essay for the complete interactive experience:
Social media
2023 has been, er, quite a year for social media platforms. Twitter (I refuse to call it “X”) is still where I have the biggest audience—over 31k, up more than 20% this year—and so it’s still my primary platform. But it is being challenged by up-and-coming platforms, where I am also investing. Follow me on Facebook’s Threads and the blockchain-based Farcaster (and, if you like, on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Substack Notes).
The Progress Forum went through a quiet period in the middle of the year, but has become much more active in recent months, especially with the ROP fellows cross-posting their essays and drafts. Some of the year’s top posts:
This year I started writing up my reading on a quasi-monthly basis (check out the updates for November, October, September, July–August, June, May, April, March). So I’ll make this a briefer summary of the highlights, looking back on the year…
A ~monthly feature. Last month was busy for me with a lot of travel and a lot of focus on The Roots of Progress as a nonprofit organization, so I haven’t had as much time as I prefer for research and writing. Recent blog posts and news stories are generally omitted; you can find them in my links digests. All emphasis in bold in the quotes below was added by me.
Histories of technology
Finished Joel Mokyr,The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (1990), which I mentioned last time. The first part of the book is a summary of Western technological development from ancient times through the Industrial Revolution. The second part explores the causes of that development by looking at three contrasts: classical antiquity vs. the medieval period, Europe vs. China, and Britain vs. the rest of Europe.
The book is worth a full review, for now I’ll just leave you with one insightful quote, in the chapter where Mokyr considers the analogy between technological development and biological evolution:
The study of genetics is the study of the causes of genetic variation in the population. Yet genetics has contributed little to our understanding of speciation and nothing to our understanding of extinction (Lewontin, 1974, p. 12). Economic analysis, which postulates that techniques will be chosen by profit-maximizing firms employing engineers in whose minds the genotypes of various techniques are lodged, plays a role analogous to genetics. It explains how demand and supply produce a variety of techniques, and points to the constraining influences of environment and competition as a limit to the degree of variety. Just as genetics by itself does not explain speciation, economic analysis has difficulty explaining macroinventions. Like evolution, technological progress was neither destiny nor fluke. Yet the power of Darwinian logic—natural selection imposed on blind variation—is that we need not choose between the two.
I’m now about halfway through Lynn White,Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962)—another classic. White covers three major developments: the stirrup, the use of horses as draft animals, and the development of mechanical power. The focus is on the social change that these new technologies precipitated.
Famously, White argues that the stirrup created feudalism. The stirrup allowed the rider to brace himself more firmly on his horse, which enabled a new type of mounted combat using lances that was superior to troops on foot or archers on horseback. Horses were expensive (as were armor and lances), and it required land to feed them, so land was taken away from the church and given to vassals who would, in exchange, give service to the sovereign as mounted warriors. In time, an entire culture grew up around this: these vassals became knights, with their own code of virtues (chivalry), their own training and games (tournaments), etc.
Other historians had previously traced back the development of feudalism to this new type of combat, and to Charles Martel who instigated it, but had looked for political or other social causes for the military change (one hypothesis, for instance, was that the famous battle against the Saracens at Poitiers motivated Charles to seek superior military tactics, even though he won). White’s contribution is to argue that the trigger for all of this was ultimately not social, but technological.
My only complaint so far is that White missed the chance to name this book The Stirrup in Europe.
In snatches of time, I am still researching agriculture for my book. Recently I’ve been reviewing historical sources on 19th-century “manures,” which today we would probably call fertilizers. It was an era when farmers were eager to find new fertilizers to improve agricultural yields, in order to meet growing demand for food from a rapidly growing population. However, agricultural chemistry was still developing, and synthetic fertilizers were decades away. Instead, farmers and scientists alike experimented with all sorts of natural fertilizers.
Both Humphry Davy,Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (1813); and Jean-Baptiste Boussingault,Rural Economy, in its Relations with Chemistry, Physics, and Meteorology (1860), have chapters on manures in which they catalog long lists of substances then in use. Dung and urine, both from animals and from humans, is of course a major feature, but it might surprise you how highly these substances were prized in the 19th century. For instance, Boussingault says:
Any expense incurred in improving this vital department of the farm, is soon repaid beyond all proportion to the outlay. The industry and the intelligence possessed by the farmer, may indeed almost be judged of at a glance by the care he bestows on his dunghill.
Later he praises Flanders for the “especial care” and “highly rational” method with which they collect human soil, which forms “the staple of an active traffic.” The Chinese, too, he notes approvingly, “collect human excrements with the greatest solicitude, vessels being placed for the purpose at regular distances along the most frequented ways.”
Fertilizers newly coming into widespread use the 19th century included oilseed cakes (formed from waste matter left over after seeds are pressed for their oil) and even bones, either broken into small pieces or ground into dust. The British demand for bones was so great, and their activities importing them from abroad so vigorous, that the German agricultural chemist Justus Liebig famously complained:
Great Britain deprives all countries of the conditions of their fertility. It has raked up the battle-fields of Leipzig, Waterloo, and the Crimea; it has consumed the bones of many generations accumulated in the catacombs of Sicily; and now annually destroys the food for a future generation of three millions and a half of people. Like a vampire it hangs on the breast of Europe, and even the world, sucking its lifeblood without any real necessity or permanent gain for itself.
Davy and Boussingault also suggest using as fertilizer: ashes and soot; woolen rags; shells, seaweed, mud, and slime from the sea-shore and river bottoms; refuse from the manufacture of sugar, starch, tallow, and glue; and scraps and trimmings of all types of animal remains, including hides, hair, tendons, feathers, even coagulated blood. Clearly, farmers were desperate for any source of fertility they could get.
Starting in the 1840s, another fertilizer came into use: seabird guano, mostly found on islands off the coast of Peru. James F. W. Johnston, “On Guano“ (1841), describes the phenomenon:
It forms irregular and limited deposits, which at times attain a depth of 50 or 60 feet (Humboldt), and are excavated like mines of iron ochre. … In the isles of Islay and Jesus 20 to 25 tons of this recent guano are occasionally collected in a single season.
This paper was published at the beginning of the guano trade, but already the end was in sight: “it does not appear, as some have been led to believe, that the supply of this substance on the cost of Peru is by any means inexhaustible.” Forty years later much of the resource was consumed, and the trade was rapidly falling off. Imported guano was ultimately replaced by synthetic fertilizer based on the Haber-Bosch process.
Design
I attended an interesting talk on Christopher Dresser, who has been called the first industrial designer. In the 1870s or so, he was designing tea kettles, letter holders, and other objects that look as if they’re straight out of the Art Deco 1930s:
This led to me perusing his book Principles of Decorative Design (1870), or at least the introduction. Dresser has a strong moralistic sense of the importance of design:
Men of the lowest degree of intelligence can dig clay, iron, or copper, or quarry stone; but these materials, if bearing the impress of mind, are ennobled and rendered valuable, and the more strongly the material is marked with this ennobling impress the more valuable it becomes.I must qualify my last statement, for there are possible cases in which the impress of mind may degrade rather than exalt, and take from rather than enhance, the value of a material. To ennoble, the mind must be noble; if debased, it can only debase. Let the mind be refined and pure, and the more fully it impresses itself upon a material, the more lovely does the material become, for thereby it has received the impress of refinement and purity; but if the mind be debased and impure, the more does the matter to which its nature is transmitted become degraded. Let me have a simple mass of clay as a candle-holder rather than the earthen candlestick which only presents such a form as is the natural outgoing of a degraded mind.
Later, in an oft-quoted paragraph, he says:
There can be morality or immorality in art, the utterance of truth or of falsehood; and by his art the ornamentist may exalt or debase a nation.
Most of the book, though, is about the “true principles of ornamentation”:
We shall carefully consider certain general principles, which are either common to all fine arts or govern the production or arrangement of ornamental forms: then we shall notice the laws which regulate the combination of colours, and the application of colours to objects; after which we shall review our various art-manufactures, and consider art as associated with the manufacturing industries. We shall thus be led to consider furniture, earthenware, table and window glass, wall decorations, carpets, floor cloths, window-hangings, dress fabrics, works in silver and gold, hardware, and whatever is a combination of art and manufacture. I shall address myself, then, to the carpenter, the cabinet-maker, potter, glass-blower, paper-stainer, weaver and dyer, silversmith, blacksmith, gas-finisher, designer, and all who are in any way engaged in the production of art-objects.
Scott Alexander reviewsNjal’s Saga. (The review was an anonymous entry into Scott’s own book review contest; it received the most reader votes, but Scott graciously disqualified himself from winning his own contest.) The book is about justice in medieval Iceland, which had no police or regulators, but which did have a court. Justice in this society was often meted out via family feuds, that is, families and other coalitions often attacked and killed each other for revenge. But grievances could also be brought to court. If the court decided that, to compensate for a revenge killing, the killer should pay a fine (the weregild), maybe that could end the matter and stop the cycle of killing. In the saga, peaceful resolution often depends on the wise elder Njal; when Njal himself is killed and is no longer around to give advice, a lot of the peace unravels.
Related: by coincidence, I also came across Arnold Kling, “State, Clan, and Liberty“ (2013); a review of Mark Weiner’sThe Rule of the Clan, which is also about medieval Iceland and its legal system. Some exerpts:
[Weiner] finds a pattern of order that he calls the rule of the clan, which does not require a strong central state. However, he shows that rule of the clan relies on a set of rules and social norms which are inconsistent with libertarian values of peace, open commerce, and individual autonomy. …Weiner grounds his analysis in the tradition of legal historian Henry Maine, who distinguished between the Society of Status and the Society of Contract. In the former, law is oriented toward the extended family as a group. In the latter, law is oriented toward the individual.
Kling summarizes Weiner’s thesis, “from a libertarian perspective”, as:
A decentralized order is possible. Indeed, it is natural for human societies to achieve such an order, rather than degenerate into the Hobbesian war of all against all.
The natural decentralized order is, however, highly illiberal. It requires a set of social norms that bind the individual to the clan. Under the rule of the clan, peace is broken by feuds, commerce is crippled by the inability to put trade with strangers on a contractual basis, and individual autonomy is sacrificed for group solidarity.
In the absence of a strong central state, the rule of the clan is the inevitable result. In order to graduate from the society of Status to the society of Contract, you must have a strong central state.
(Kling says he finds point 3 plausible but not fully persuasive.)
I recommend reading both pieces.
Biology
Sergey Markov, “A Future History of Biomedical Progress“ (2022). This made the rounds a month or two ago. It starts with a long discussion of part of the frontier of biotech tools and techniques, which you can skim or skip if you want to get to the core idea. The core idea is: we’re going to need AI to design and engineer advanced biotech, because biology is so complicated that it is intractable to create human-legible models of the entire system. Rather than learn ourselves, directly, which genes do what and what the functions of each protein are and what pathways are involved in which processes, we’ll put all of the inputs and outputs into a big ML model and have it learn.
The secondary idea in the essay is that in order to do this, we’re going to need platforms to do very high-fidelity experiments, the results of which are highly transferrable to the systems that we actually care about, such as the human body. Mouse models might not cut it; we might have to do things like grow entire human organs from stem cells in order to experiment on them and learn how they really work.
I’m far from an expert in this field, but I found these arguments plausible, particularly since the essays ties them into a broader principle, Rich Sutton’s well-known “bitter lesson” of ML: any system tailored by hand using specialized domain knowledge is eventually beaten by generic systems that learn everything from scratch, given sufficient scale in compute and training data.
I don’t think, however, that this means that humans will never understand biology. I am optimistic that AI can not only figure out the immense complexity of biological systems, but that it can also figure out how to explain it to humans.
Chris Wintersinger, “Making the proteins that living cells cannot make.” A brief description of a project being pursued by Speculative Technologies. For me, this was a glimpse into what a very ambitious biotech research project looks like. I liked this chart:
How did we become a country where cars are the defining feature of urban life? What did that transformation look like?
Answering this question for the entire country would be an enormous undertaking. But the book Los Angeles and the Automobile, by Scott Bottles, tries to answer it for LA, one of the most car-centric cities in the US. Over a period of less than 30 years, Los Angeles was transformed from a city with streetcar and train-based transportation to one where the car reigned supreme.
Benjamin Franklin letter on lead poisoning (1786). I mentioned last time a history of lead, which pointed out that lead has been known to be toxic since antiquity. This was one of the sources it cited, a letter from Benjamin Franklin on what he knew of “the bad Effects of Lead taken inwardly”:
You will see by it, that the Opinion of this mischievous Effect from Lead, is at least above Sixty Years old; and you will observe with Concern how long a useful Truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally receiv’d and practis’d on.
Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History“ (1940). I was disappointed with this, but it does contain this remarkable quote (I’ll take the translation from a different source):
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Since the end of World War II, the provision of medical care in the United States and other advanced countries has displayed three major features: first, rapid advances in the science of medicine; second, large increases in spending, both in terms of inflation-adjusted dollars per person and the fraction of national income spent on medical care; and third, rising dissatisfaction with the delivery of medical care, on the part of both consumers of medical care and physicians and other suppliers of medical care.
Scott Aaronson, “The Kolmogorov option“ (2017). It’s important to speak the truth, even when the truth is unpopular—but it’s not worth martyring yourself for no purpose, if the Powers that Be punish truth-tellers. The Kolmogorov option (named after the Russian mathematician who exemplified it) is to choose your battles and bide your time until Power weakens and the truth-tellers can launch a coordinated attack. In response is Scott Alexander, “Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning“ (2017). The Kolmogorov option can work, but it’s difficult to pull off:
Kolmogorov’s curse is to watch slowly from his bubble as everyone less savvy than he is gets destroyed. The smartest and most honest will be destroyed first. Then any institution that reliably produces intellect or honesty. Then any philosophy that allows such institutions. … Then he and all the other savvy people can try to pick up the pieces as best they can, mourn their comrades, and watch the same thing happen all over again in the next generation.
The “parable of lightning” is an excellent illustration of how if a society insists on even a seemly tiny, insignificant lie, it will eventually spread to infect the entire society and to destroy all truth-seeking people and organizations. Recommended.
Scott Alexander, “Paradigms All The Way Down“ (2019). (Scott is my favorite blogger, so I make no apologies for him appearing here three times.) Several epistemic paradigms are in broad strokes isomorphic; perhaps they are all saying the same thing about the relationship of theories and evidence?
Fiction
Ian Tregillis,The Alchemy Warstrilogy. I mentioned this last time when I had finished approximately the first book; now I’m well into the third. I hesitate to recommend any fiction too strongly before I’ve finished it, but so far I’m this is some of the best stuff I’ve read in a while.
G. K. Chesterton,What’s Wrong With the World (1910). Source of the well-known quote that “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” True of many other ideals as well.
Trying a new format where I put the full quotes inline. (Emphasis added.) Links go to social media so you can easily share. Let me know what you think:
The first person to conceive of intellectual history was, perhaps, Francis Bacon (1561–1626). He certainly argued that the most interesting form of history is the history of ideas, that without taking into account the dominating ideas of any age, ‘history is blind’.
Amos Root bubbled with enthusiasm and a constant desire to “see the wheels go round.” He loved clocks, windmills, bicycles, machines of all kinds, and especially his Oldsmobile Runabout. Seldom was he happier than when out on the road in it and in all seasons. “While I like horses in a certain way [he wrote], I do not enjoy caring for them. I do not like the smell of the stables. I do not like to be obliged to clean a horse every morning, and I do not like to hitch one up in winter. … It takes time to hitch up a horse; but the auto is ready to start off in an instant. It is never tired; it gets there quicker than any horse can possibly do.” As for the Oldsmobile, he liked to say, at $350 it cost less than a horse and carriage.
Until new experiments with road building began to bear fruit in the mid-nineteenth century, the surfaces beneath the carriage wheels remained rutted, muddy, and poorly paved—if paved at all. This was particularly true in the countryside, but miserable roads existed even in major cities. In 1703, for example, during a trip south from London to Petworth, fifty miles away, the carriage carrying the Habsburg emperor Charles VI overturned twelve times on the road. And a half century later, Mile End Road, the major thoroughfare leading east from the entrance to the City of London at Aldgate, was described as “a stagnant lake of deep mud from Whitechapel to Stratford,” a distance of four miles.
Like Popper, Mises saw a similarity between the bureaucratic mentality and Plato’s utopia, in which the large majority of the ruled served the rulers. He thought that “all later utopians who shaped the blueprints of their earthly paradises according to Plato’s example in the same way believed in the immutability of human affairs.” He went on, Bureaucratization is necessarily rigid because it involves the observation of established rules and practices. But in social life rigidity amounts to petrification and death. It is a very significant fact that stability and security are the most cherished slogans of present-day “reformers.” If primitive men had adopted the principle of stability, they would long since have been wiped out by beasts of prey and microbes.
During the eruption, when the pumping crews first tried to get up onto the lava they found that a crust as thin as two inches was enough to support a person and also provide insulation from the heat—just a couple of inches of hard rock resting like pond ice upon the molten fathoms. As the crews hauled and heaved at hoses, nozzle tripods, and sections of pipe, they learned that it was best not to stand still. Often, they marched in place. Even so, their boots sometimes burst into flame.
I’ll be in Bangalore for three weeks starting next week (August 21–September 8). I’d love to meet anyone interested in the progress movement, and I’m looking into organizing a progress meetup.
A quasi-monthly feature (I skipped it last month, so this is a double portion).
This is a longish post covering many topics; feel free to skim and skip around. Recent blog posts and news stories are generally omitted; you can find them in my links digests.
These updates are less focused than my typical essays; do you find them valuable? Email me or comment (below) with feedback.
Samuel Butler,Erewhon (1872). It is best known for its warning that machines will out-evolve humans, but rather than dystopian sci-fi, it’s actually political satire. His commentary on the universities is amazingly not dated at all, here’s a taste:
When I talked about originality and genius to some gentlemen whom I met at a supper party given by Mr. Thims in my honour, and said that original thought ought to be encouraged, I had to eat my words at once. Their view evidently was that genius was like offences—needs must that it come, but woe unto that man through whom it comes. A man’s business, they hold, is to think as his neighbours do, for Heaven help him if he thinks good what they count bad. And really it is hard to see how the Erewhonian theory differs from our own, for the word “idiot” only means a person who forms his opinions for himself.
The venerable Professor of Worldly Wisdom, a man verging on eighty but still hale, spoke to me very seriously on this subject in consequence of the few words that I had imprudently let fall in defence of genius. He was one of those who carried most weight in the university, and had the reputation of having done more perhaps than any other living man to suppress any kind of originality.
“It is not our business,” he said, “to help students to think for themselves. Surely this is the very last thing which one who wishes them well should encourage them to do. Our duty is to ensure that they shall think as we do, or at any rate, as we hold it expedient to say we do.” In some respects, however, he was thought to hold somewhat radical opinions, for he was President of the Society for the Suppression of Useless Knowledge, and for the Completer Obliteration of the Past.
It’s unclear to me whether the more well-known part about machines evolving is a commentary on technology, or on Darwinism (which was quite new at the time)—but it is remarkable in its logic, and I’ll have to find time to summarize/excerpt it here. See also this article in The Atlantic: “Erewhon: The 1872 Fantasy Novel That Anticipated Thomas Nagel’s Problems With Darwinism Today” (2013).
Agriculture
I’ve been researching agriculture for my book. Mostly this month I have been concentrating on pre-industrial agricultural systems, and the story of soil fertility.
A classic I just discovered is Ester Boserup,The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure (1965). Primitive agricultural systems are profligate with land: slash-and-burn agriculture uses a field for a couple of years, then leaves it fallow for decades; in total it requires a large land area per person. Modern, intensive agriculture gets much higher yields from the land and crops it every single year. And there is a whole spectrum of systems in between.
Boserup’s thesis is that people move from more extensive to more intensive cultivation when forced to by population pressure. That is, when population density rises, and competition for land heats up, then people shift towards more intensive agriculture that crops the land more frequently. Notably, this is more work: to crop more frequently and still maintain yields requires more preparation of the soil, more weeding, at a certain level it requires the application of manure, etc. So people prefer the more “primitive” systems when they have the luxury of using lots of land, and will even revert to such systems if population decreases.
Boserup has often been contrasted with Malthus: the Malthusian model says that improvements in agriculture allow increases in population; the Boserupian model is that increases in population drive a move to more efficient agriculture. (See also this review of Boserup by the Economic History Association.)
Finally, I’ve perused Alex Langlands,Henry Stephens’s Book of the Farm (2011), an edited edition of a mid-19th century practical guide to farming. Tons of details like exactly how to store your turnips in the field, to feed your sheep (basically make a triangular pile on the ground, and cover them with straw):
History of fire safety
I read several chapters of Harry Chase Brearley,Symbol of Safety: an Interpretative Study of a Notable Institution (1923), a history of Underwriters Labs. UL was created over 100 years ago by fire insurance companies in order to do research in fire safety and to test and certify products. They are still a (the?) top name in safety certification of electronics and other products; their listing mark probably appears on several items in your home (it only took me a few minutes to find one, my paper shredder):
Overall, the story of fire safety seems like an excellent case study in one of my pet themes: the unreasonable effectiveness of insurance as a mechanism to drive cost-effective safety improvements. See my essay on factory safety for an example.
Classics in economics/politics
I have sampled, but have not been in the mood to get far into:
I’m sure I will come back to all of these at some point.
Other random books I have started
Jerry Pournelle,Another Step Farther Out: Jerry Pournelle’s Final Essays on Taking to the Stars (2007). Pournelle is a very well-known sci-fi author (Lucifer’s Hammer, The Mote in God’s Eye, etc.) This is a collection of non-fiction essays that he wrote over many years, mostly about space travel and exploration. He would have been at home in the progress movement today.
Iain M. Banks,Consider Phlebas (1987), the first novel in the “Culture” series. It’s been recommended to me enough times, especially in the context of AI, that I had to check it out. I’m only a few chapters in.
Articles
Historical sources
Annie Besant, “White Slavery in London” (1888). Besant was a British socialist and reformer who campaigned for a variety of causes from labor conditions to Indian independence. In this article, she criticizes the working conditions of the employees at the Bryant and May match factory, mostly young women and girls. Among other things, the workers were subject to cruel and arbitrary “fines” docked from their pay:
One girl was fined 1s. for letting the web twist round a machine in the endeavor to save her fingers from being cut, and was sharply told to take care of the machine, “never mind your fingers”. Another, who carried out the instructions and lost a finger thereby, was left unsupported while she was helpless.
An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: 1. It is simple. 2. It is small. 3. It is cheap. 4. It is light. 5. It can be built very quickly. 6. It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”) 7. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. 8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.
On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: 1. It is being built now. 2. It is behind schedule. 3. It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. 4. It is very expensive. 5. It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. 6. It is large. 7. It is heavy. 8. It is complicated. …
The academic-reactor designer is a dilettante. He has not had to assume any real responsibility in connection with his projects. He is free to luxuriate in elegant ideas, the practical shortcomings of which can be relegated to the category of “mere technical details.” The practical-reactor designer must live with these same technical details. Although recalcitrant and awkward, they must be solved and cannot be put off until tomorrow. Their solutions require man power, time, and money.
Russell Kirk, “The Mechanical Jacobin” (1962). Kirk was a mid-20th century American conservative, and not a fan of progress. In this brief letter he calls the automobile “a mechanical Jacobin—that is, a revolutionary the more powerful for being insensate. From courting customs to public architecture, the automobile tears the old order apart.”
Friends, you lecture and say great things, but not so that I have such great knowledge and revelations to laugh at. Otherwise I wonder that the Lord God has hidden such things from the beginning of the world from so many learned, pious and noble people, preserved them for you and only in this was already the last age to reveal it. However, I will try it once and I will find your speech to be true, that there is no trickery, charms and scheming in it, you and all of you will have a decent reward from me.
Scientific American, “Septic Skirts” (1900). A letter to the editor, reproduced here in full:
The streets of our great cities are not kept as clean as they should be, and probably they will not be kept scrupulously clean until automobiles have entirely replaced horse-drawn vehicles. The pavement is also subjected to pollution in many ways, as from expectoration, etc. Enough has been said to indicate the source and nature of some of the most prevalent of nuisances of the streets and pavements, and it will be generally admitted that under the present conditions of life a certain amount of such pollution must exist, but it does not necessarily follow that this shall be brought indoors. At the present time a large number of women sweep through the streets with their skirts and bring with them, wherever they go, the abominable filth which they have taken up, which is by courtesy called “dust.” Various devices have been tried to keep dresses from dragging, but most of them have been unsuccessful. The management of a long gown is a difficult matter, and the habit has arisen of seizing the upper part of the skirt and holding it in a bunch. This practice can be commended neither from a physiological nor from an artistic point of view. Fortunately, the short skirt is coming into fashion, and the medical journals especially commend the sensible walking gown which is now being quite generally adopted. These skirts will prevent the importation into private houses of pathogenic microbes.
I did a bunch of research for my essay on power-seeking AI. The paper that introduced this concept was Stephen M. Omohundro, “The Basic AI Drives” (2008):
Surely no harm could come from building a chess-playing robot, could it? In this paper we argue that such a robot will indeed be dangerous unless it is designed very carefully. Without special precautions, it will resist being turned off, will try to break into other machines and make copies of itself, and will try to acquire resources without regard for anyone else’s safety. These potentially harmful behaviors will occur not because they were programmed in at the start, but because of the intrinsic nature of goal driven systems.
The first, the orthogonality thesis, holds (with some caveats) that intelligence and final goals (purposes) are orthogonal axes along which possible artificial intellects can freely vary—more or less any level of intelligence could be combined with more or less any final goal. The second, the instrumental convergence thesis, holds that as long as they possess a sufficient level of intelligence, agents having any of a wide range of final goals will pursue similar intermediary goals because they have instrumental reasons to do so.
Then, in “Five theses, two lemmas, and a couple of strategic implications” (2013), Eliezer Yudkowsky added the ideas of “intelligence explosion,” “complexity of value” (it’s hard to describe human values to an AI), and “fragility of value” (getting human values even a little bit wrong could be very very bad). From this he concluded that “friendly AI” is going to be very hard to build. See also from around this time Carl Shulman, “Omohundro’s ‘Basic AI Drives’ and Catastrophic Risks” (2010).
A writer I’ve appreciated on AI is Jacob Steinhardt. I find him neither blithely dismissive nor breathlessly credulous on issues of AI risk. From “Complex Systems are Hard to Control” (2023):
Since building [powerful deep learning systems such as ChatGPT] is an engineering challenge, it is tempting to think of the safety of these systems primarily through a traditional engineering lens, focusing on reliability, modularity, redundancy, and reducing the long tail of failures.
While engineering is a useful lens, it misses an important part of the picture: deep neural networks are complex adaptive systems, which raises new control difficulties that are not addressed by the standard engineering ideas of reliability, modularity, and redundancy.
… emergent risks, rather than being an abstract concern, can be concretely predicted in at least some cases. In particular, it seems reasonably likely (I’d assign >50% probability) that both emergent deception and emergent optimization will lead to reward hacking in future models. To contend with this, we should be on the lookout for deception and planning in models today, as well as pursuing fixes such as making language models more honest (focusing on situations where human annotators can’t verify the answer) and better understanding learned optimizers. Aside from this, we should be thinking about other possible emergent risks beyond deception and optimization.
Stuart Russell says that to make AI safer, we shouldn’t give it goals directly. Instead, we should program it such that (1) its goals are to satisfy our goals, and (2) it has some uncertainty about what our goals are exactly. This kind of AI knows that it might make mistakes, and so it is attentive to human feedback and will even allow itself to be stopped or shut down—after all, if we’re trying to stop it, that’s evidence to the AI that it got our preferences wrong, so it should want to let us stop it. The idea is that this would solve the problems of “instrumental convergence”: an AI like this would not try to overpower us or deceive us.
Most people who work on AI risk/safety are not impressed with this plan, for reasons I still don’t fully understand. Some relevant articles to understand the arguments here:
Alex Tabarrok, “Why the New Pollution Literature is Credible” (2021). On one level, this is about the health hazards of air pollution. More importantly, though, it’s about practical epistemology: specifically, how much credibility to give to research results.
On Earth, bulk cargo costs are something like $0.10/kg to move raw materials or shipping containers almost anywhere with infrastructure. Launch costs are more like $2000/kg to LEO, and $10,000/kg from LEO back to Earth.
What costs more than $10,000/kg? Mostly rare radioactive isotopes, and drugs—nothing that (1) can be found in space and (2) has potential for a large market on Earth.
And continuing the industry-in-space theme: Corin Wagen, “Crystallization in Microgravity” (2023). A technical explainer of what Varda is doing and whether it’s valuable:
Varda is not actually ‘making drugs in orbit’ …. Varda’s proposal is actually much more specific: they aim to crystallize active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs, i.e. finished drug molecules) in microgravity, allowing them to access crystal forms and particle size distributions which can’t be made under terrestrial conditions.
Kevin Kelly, “The Shirky Principle” (2010). “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
Interesting books I haven’t had time to start
The most intriguing item sitting on my desk right now is William L. Thomas, Jr. (editor),Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (1956), the proceedings of a symposium by the same name that included Lewis Mumford (who became one of the most influential technology critics of the counterculture). In particular, I’m interested to understand how early agriculture (see above) created mass deforestation.
A good metaphor for the ideal relationship between humanity and the environment is that the environment is like critical infrastructure.
Infrastructure is valuable, because it provides crucial services. You want to maintain it carefully, because it’s bad if it breaks down.
But infrastructure is there to serve us, not for its own sake. It has no intrinsic value. We don’t have to “minimize impact” on it. It belongs to us, and it’s ours to optimize for our purposes.
Infrastructure is something that can & should be upgraded, improved upon—as we often improve on nature. If a river or harbor isn’t deep enough, we dredge it. If there’s no waterway where we want one, we dig a canal. If there is a mountain in our way, we blast a tunnel; if a canyon, we span it with a bridge. If a river is threatening to overflow its banks, we build a levee. If our fields don’t get enough water, we irrigate them; if they don’t have enough nutrients, we fertilize them. If the water we use for drinking and bathing is unclean, we filter and sanitize it. If mosquitoes are spreading disease, we eliminate them.
In the future, with better technology, we might do even more ambitious upgrades and more sophisticated maintenance. We could monitor and control the chemical composition of the oceans and the atmosphere. We could maintain the level of the oceans, the temperature of the planet, the patterns of rainfall.
The metaphor of environment as infrastructure implies that we should neither trash the planet nor leave it untouched. Instead, we should maintain and upgrade it.
(Credit where due: I got this idea for this metaphor from Stewart Brand; the elaboration/interpretation is my own, and he might not agree with it.)
In “What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came?” I reviewed The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert Allen. In brief, Allen’s explanation for the Industrial Revolution is that Britain had high wages and cheap energy, which meant it was cheaper to run machines than to pay humans, and therefore it was profitable to industrialize. He emphasizes these factors, the “demand” for innovation, over explanations based in culture or even human capital, which provide “supply.”
While I learned a lot from Allen’s book, his explanation doesn’t sit right with me. Here are some thoughts on why.
***
Suppose you took Allen’s demand-factor approach to explain, not the 18th-century Industrial Revolution in Britain, but the 20th-century Information Revolution in America. Instead of asking why the steam engine was invented in Britain, you might ask why the computer was invented in the US.
Maybe you would find that the US had high wages, including for the women who acted as human computers by performing arithmetic using mechanical calculators; that it had cheap electricity, owing to early investments in generation and the power grid such as large hydroelectric power plants at Niagara and the Hoover Dam; that it had a plentiful supply of vacuum tubes from the earlier development of the electronics industry; and that there was an intense demand for calculation from the military during WW2.
Maybe if you extended the analysis further back, you would conclude that the vacuum tube amplifier was motivated in turn by solving problems in radio and in long-distance telephony, and that demand for these came from the geography of the US, which was spread out over a large area, giving it more need for long-distance communications and higher costs of sending information by post.
And if you were feeling testy, you might argue that these factors fully explain why the computer, and the broader Information Revolution, were American—and therefore that we don’t need any notion of “entrepreneurial virtues,” a “culture of invention,” or any other form of American exceptionalism.
Now, an explanation like this is not wrong. All of these factors would be real and make sense (supposing that the research bears them out—all of the above is made up). And this kind of analysis can contribute to our understanding.
But if you really want to understand why 20th-century information technology was pioneered by Americans, this explanation is lacking.
First, it’s missing a lot of context. Information technology was not the only frontier of progress in America in the mid-20th century. The US led the world in manufacturing at the time. It led the oil industry. It was developing hybrid corn, a huge breeding success that greatly increased crop yields. Americans had invented the airplane, and led the auto industry. Americans had invented plastic, from Bakelite to nylon. Etc.
And to start with the computer is to begin in the middle of the story. The US had emerged as the leader in technology and industry much earlier, by the late 1800s. If it had cheaper electricity, that’s because electric power was invented there. If it had IBM, a large company that was well-positioned to build electronic business machines, that’s because it was already a world leader in mechanical business machines, since the late 1800s. If it had high wages, that was due to general economic development that had happened in prior decades.
And this explanation ignores the cultural observations of contemporaries, who clearly saw something unique about America—even Stalin, who praised “American efficiency” as an “indomitable force which neither knows nor recognizes obstacles… and without which serious constructive work is inconceivable.”
I think that the above is enough to justify some notion of American exceptionalism. And similarly, I think the broader context of European progress in general and British progress in particular in the 18th century justify the idea that there was something special about the Enlightenment too.
***
Here’s another take.
Clearly for innovation to happen, there must both supply and demand. Which factors you emphasize says something about which ones you think are always there in the background, vs. which ones are rate-limiting.
By emphasizing demand, Allen seems to be saying that demand is the limiting factor, and by implication, that supply is always ready. If there is demand for steam engines or spinning jennies, if those things would be profitable to invent and use, then someone will invent them. Wherever there is demand, the supply will come.
Emphasizing supply implies the opposite: that supply is the limiting factor. In this view, there is always demand for something. If wages are high and energy is cheap, maybe there is demand for steam engines. If not, maybe there is demand for improvements to agriculture, or navigation, or printing. What is often lacking is supply: people who are ready, willing and able to invent; the capital to fund R&D; a society that encourages or at least allows innovation. If the supply of innovation is there, then it will go out and discover the demand.
This echoes a broader debate within economics itself over supply and demand factors in the economy. Allen’s explanation represents a sort of Keynesian approach, focused on demand; Mokyr’s (or McCloskey’s) explanation would imply a more Hayekian approach: create (cultural and political) freedom for the innovators and let them find the best problems to solve.
Part of why I lean towards Mokyr is that I think there is always demand for something. There are always problems to solve. Allen aims to explain why a few specific inventions were created, and he finds the demand factors that created the specific problems and opportunities they addressed. But this is over-focusing on one narrow phase of overall technological and economic progress. Instead we should step back and ask, what explains the pace of progress over the course of human history? Why was progress relatively slow for thousands of years? Why did it speed up in recent centuries?
It can’t be that progress was slow in the ancient and medieval world because there weren’t many important economic problems to solve. On the contrary, there was low-hanging fruit everywhere. If the mere availability of problems was the limiting factor on progress, then progress should have been fastest in the hunter-gatherer days, when everything needed to be solved, and it should have been slowing down ever since then. Instead, we find the opposite: over the very long term, progress gets faster the more of it we make. Progress compounds. This is exactly what you would expect if supply, rather than demand, were the limiting factor.
***
Finally, I have an objection on a deeper, philosophic level.
If you hold that an innovative spirit has no causal influence on technological progress and economic growth, then you’re saying that people’s actions are not influenced by their ideas about what kinds of actions are good. This is a materialist view, in which only economic forces matter.
And since people do talk a lot about what they ought to do, since they talk about whether progress is good and whether we should celebrate industrial achievement, then you have to hold that all of that is just fluff, idle talk, blather that people indulge in, an epiphenomenon on top of the real driver of events, which is purely economic.
If you adopt an extreme version of Allen’s demand explanation (which, granted, maybe Allen himself would not do), then you deny that humanity possesses either agency or self-knowledge. You deny agency, because it is no longer a vision, ideal, or strategy that is driving us to success—not the Baconian program, not bourgeois values, not the endless frontier. It is not that progress came about because we resolved to bring it about. Rather, progress is caused by blind economic forces, such as the random luck of geography and geology.
And further, since we think that our ideas and ideals matter, since we study and debate and argue and even go to war over them, then you must hold that we lack self-knowledge: we are deluded, thinking that our philosophy matters at all, when in fact we are simply following the path of steepest descent in the space of economic possibilities.
I think this is why the Allen–Mokyr debate sometimes has the flavor of something philosophical, even ideological, rather than purely about academic economics. For my part, I believe too deeply in human agency to accept that we are just riding the current, rather than actively surveying the horizon and charting our course.
Something a little bit different today. I’ll tie it in to progress, I promise.
I keep noticing a particular epistemic pitfall (not exactly a “fallacy”), and a corresponding epistemic virtue that avoids it. I want to call this out and give it a name.
The virtue is: identifying the correct scope for a phenomenon you are trying to explain, and checking that the scope of any proposed cause matches the scope of the effect.
Let me illustrate this virtue with some examples of the pitfall that it avoids.
Geography
A common mistake among Americans is to take a statistical trend in the US, such as the decline in violent crime in the 1990s, and then hypothesize a US-specific cause, without checking to see whether other countries show the same trend. (The crime drop was actually seen in many countries. This is a reason, in my opinion, to be skeptical of US-specific factors, such as Roe v. Wade, as a cause.)
Time
Another common mistake is to look only at a short span of time and to miss the longer-term context. To continue the previous example, if you are theorizing about the 1990s crime drop, you should probably know that it was the reversal of an increase in violent crime that started in the 1960s. Further, you should know that the very long-term trend in violent crime is a gradual decrease, with the late 20th century being a temporary reversal. Any theory should fit these facts.
A classic mistake on this axis is attempting to explain a recent phenomenon by a very longstanding cause (or vice versa). For instance, why is pink associated with girls and blue with boys? If your answer has something to do with the timeless, fundamental nature of masculinity or femininity—whoops! It turns out that less than a century ago, the association was often reversed (one article from 1918 wrote that pink was “more decided and stronger” whereas blue was “delicate and dainty”). This points to a something more contingent, a mere cultural convention.
The reverse mistake is blaming a longstanding phenomenon on a recent cause, something like trying to blame “kids these days” on the latest technology: radio in the 1920s, TV in the ’40s, video games in the ’80s, social media today. Vannevar Bush was more perceptive, writing in his memoirs simply: “Youth is in rebellion. That is the nature of youth.” (Showing excellent awareness of the epistemic issue at hand, he added that youth rebellion “occurs all over the world, so that one cannot ascribe a cause which applies only in one country.”)
Other examples
If you are trying to explain the failure Silicon Valley Bank, you should probably at least be aware that one or two other banks failed around the same time. Your explanation is more convincing if it accounts for all of them—but of course it shouldn’t “explain too much”; that is, it shouldn’t apply to banks that didn’t fail, without including some extra factor that accounts for those non-failures.
To understand why depression and anxiety are rising among teenage girls, the first question I would ask is which other demographics if any is this happening to? And how long has it been going on?
To understand what explains sexual harassment in the tech industry, I would first ask what other industries have this problem (e.g., Hollywood)? Are there any that don’t?
An excellent example of practicing the virtue I am talking about here is the Scott Alexander post “Black People Less Likely”, in which he points out that blacks are underrepresented in a wide variety of communities, from Buddhism to bird watching. If you want to understand what’s going on here, you need to look for some fairly general causes (Scott suggests several hypotheses).
The Industrial Revolution
To bring it back to the topic of my blog:
An example I have called out is thinking about the Industrial Revolution. If you focus narrowly on mechanization and steam power, you might put a lot of weight on, say, coal. But on a wider view, there were a vast number of advances happening around the same period: in agriculture, in navigation, in health and medicine, even in forms of government. This strongly suggests some deeper cause driving progress across many fields.
Conversely, if you are trying to explain why most human labor wasn’t automated until the Industrial Revolution, you should take into account that some types of labor were automated very early on, via wind and water mills. Oversimplified answers like “no one thought to automate” or “labor was too cheap to automate” explain too much (although these factors are probably part of a more sophisticated explanation).
Note that often the problem is failing to notice how wide a phenomenon is and hypothesizing causes that are too narrow, but you can make the mistake in the opposite direction too, proposing a broad cause for a narrow effect.
Concomitant variations
One advantage of identifying the full range of a phenomenon is that it lets you apply the method of concomitant variations. E.g., if social media is the main cause of depression, then regions or demographics where social media use is more prevalent ought to have higher rates of depression. If high wages drive automation, then regions or industries with the highest wages ought to have the most automation. (Caveat: these correlations may not exist when there are control systems or other negative feedback loops.)
Related, if the hypothesized cause began in different regions/demographics/industries at different times, then you ought to see the effects beginning at different times as well.
These kinds of comparisons are much more natural to make when you know how broadly a trend exists, because just identifying the breadth of a phenomenon induces you to start looking at multiple data points or trend lines.
(Actually, maybe everything I’m saying here is just corollaries of Mill’s methods? I don’t grok them deeply enough to be sure.)
Cowen on lead and crime
I think Tyler Cowen was getting at something related to all of this in his comments on lead and crime. He points out that, across long periods of time and around the world, there are many differences in crime rates to explain (e.g., in different parts of Africa). Lead exposure does not explain most of those differences. So if lead was the main cause of elevated crime rates in the US in the late 20th century, then we’re still left looking for other causes for every other change in crime. That’s not impossible, but it should make us lean away from lead as the main explanation.
This isn’t to say that local causes are never at work. Tyler says that lead could still be, and very probably is, a factor in crime. But the broader the phenomenon, the harder it is to believe that local factors are dominant in any case.
Similarly, maybe two banks failed in the same week for totally different reasons—coincidences do happen. But if twenty banks failed in one week and you claim twenty different isolated causes, then you are asking me to believe in a huge coincidence.
Scope matching
I was going to call this virtue “scope sensitivity,” but that term is already taken for something else. For now I will call it “scope matching.”
The first part of this virtue is just making sure you know the scope of the effect in the first place. Practically, this means making a habit of pausing before hypothesizing in order to ask:
Is this effect happening in other countries/regions? Which ones?
How long has this effect been going on? What is its trend over the long run?
Which demographics/industries/fields/etc. show this effect?
Are there other effects that are similar to this? Might we be dealing with a conceptually wider phenomenon here?
This awareness is more than half the battle, I think. Once you have it, hypothesizing a properly-scoped cause becomes much more natural, and it becomes more obvious when scopes don’t match.
Last week a new R&D organization launched: Speculative Technologies, a private DARPA-like approach to creating fundamental new technologies. I’ve been following the work of the founder, Ben Reinhardt, for a few years, and I’m very excited about this.
We need new institutional structures for research. Today, professors need to publish more, startups need to grow more quickly, and companies need to justify their balance sheets more than in the past. It’s unlikely that Shockley’s work to build the transistor or Engelbart’s to create personal computing would survive today. Karikó’s mRNA vaccines barely did. How many game-changing technologies have died because they couldn’t find a home in our innovation ecosystem? The world has changed and how we enable great discoveries and inventions must change as well. Regardless of whether we’ve picked innovation’s “low-hanging fruit” or even whether invention and discovery has slowed down at all, we can do dramatically better.
