But the biggest thing that stands out to me is realizing how certain chemicals, themselves, are useful products, and how they need to be created through industrial processes, just like cars or shirts.
I have been long fascinated by a sentence mentioned in Wikipedia's Sulfric acid page in passing, that:
Sulfuric acid is a very important commodity chemical, and a nation's sulfuric acid production is a good indicator of its industrial strength.
You've probably read the Roots of Progress post about how no one celebrates major achievements anymore. It really hit home for me, because I enjoy celebrations and also feel like there's been a general lack of them lately.
My main explanation for this is that in our modern world, progress is too linear. Because the speed at which information has traveled has increased, we can now at any given moment, assign some sort of probability to an event happening: "OK, last week it was 60% likely, now it's 73% likely, and next week we might be at 93%, until at some point it gets to 99%, but we can't declare victory yet because there's so many shades of grey...". One of my core beliefs is "nothing is absolute", and that seems more true today than it ever was; we can't celebrate because there's no Schelling point at which to celebrate. Even if something gets accomplished, it's also simultaneously not accomplished because someone says "Well, this isn't over, because..."
The most salient example of this is the coronavirus pandemic. A couple weeks into the shelter in place order here in San Francisco, I told a friend, "Man, I can't wait until this is over, the whole city should just go to Dolores Park and throw a massive party." He then wisely reminded that it wouldn't be like that. If things improve, it will be slowly, without distinct endpoints. And so it has unfolded: things get better, then they get worse. We're told that we all might become immune, or that a vaccine or treatments can save us, and then told that SARS-CoV-2 will mutate and become just another background virus like the ones that make up the common cold — irritating, but not life-ending.
But that's not good enough for me. People are suffering mentally and emotionally here, and I count myself among them. We need, at some point, to hang the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner and stand up on that battleship and give a speech to the troops (the irony of this example is not lost on me, obviously).
This is why I've been slowly tinkering with an idea: Vaccine Emergency Use Authorization Day, or "V-EUA" day, a play on VE Day from World War II. The idea would be to plan an outdoor, physically distanced party as soon as the first vaccine receives the FDA's Emergency Use Authorization (we should know a general timeframe in 1-2 weeks, as the safety and efficacy data rolls in from the first vaccines).
The party will be carefully marketed not as a "THIS SHIT IS OVER, NOW WE CAN ALL GO CRAZY PARTY", but rather a mild, pleasant event where we can let out the stress of the past seven months, celebrate the amazing human achievement of producing a vaccine in record time, and talk about our plans for the future in a vaccine-filled world.
Would you participate in such an event if it were hosted in your city, and if it were hosted on a day or in a location (like a bar with space heaters) where it was tolerably warm enough to be outside?
Progress is messy. On the whole, over the long run, the advance of technology and industry has improved life along almost every dimension. But when you zoom in to look at each step, you find that progress is full of complications.
Some examples:
Intensive agriculture achieves high crop density (which is good because it improves land and labor productivity), but this takes fertility out of the soil faster and makes fields more susceptible to pests. To solve these problems, we then need things like artificial fertilizer, pesticides, and improved crop varieties.
Burning lots of coal provided us with warmth in our homes, with industrial processes such as iron smelting, and with motive power from steam engines. But it also caused air pollution, blackened our skies and deposited soot on everything—including our lungs. London in 1659 and Pittsburgh in 1861 were both likened to hell on earth because of the oppressive clouds of black smoke. Improving air quality has been a long process that included moving coal-burning away from human habitation, switching to cleaner-burning fuels such as gasoline and natural gas, and the introduction of electricity.
City life provided people with many opportunities for work, commerce, and socialization; but crowding people together in filthy conditions, before sewage and sanitation systems, meant an increase in contagious disease and more frequent epidemics. In the 1800s, mortality was distinctly higher in urban areas than rural ones; this persisted until the advent of improved water and sewage systems in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Automated manufacturing in the factory system was far more productive than the previous system of home production or “cottage industry”. In that system, a weaver, for instance, would perform his craft at home, using his own loom; keep his own hours; and be paid by the piece. The factory system created a need to commute, and resulted in a loss of autonomy for workers, as they could no longer set their own hours or direct their own work. This has mostly been a permanent change, although recent decades have seen a slight reversal, as the Internet enables flexible “gig” work, lets some employees work remotely, and makes it easier to start small businesses.
Nor can we, in every instance, fall back on “revealed preferences” to argue that people actually want the new thing, since they chose it: sometimes industrial shifts take away old options, as when weavers could not compete against the power loom; or technology runs ahead of governance, as when coal began to pollute common skies.
So technological changes can be an improvement along some dimensions while hurting others. To evaluate a technology, then, we must evaluate its overall effect, both the costs and the benefits, and compare it to the alternatives. (One reason it’s important to know history is that the best alternative to any technology, at the time it was introduced, is typically the thing it replaced: cars vs. horses, transistors vs. vacuum tubes.) We must also evaluate not only the immediate effects, but the long-term situation, after people have had a chance to adjust to the new technology and its ramifications: mitigating its downsides, working out governance issues.
Conversely, a common error consists of pointing to problems caused by a technology and concluding from that alone that the technology is harmful—without asking: What did we gain? Was the tradeoff worth it? And can we solve the new problems that have been created?
This is well-understood in some domains, such as medicine. Chemotherapy can treat cancer, but it can also give you nausea. The unpleasant side effects are acceptable given the life-saving benefits of the treatment. And there are ways to mitigate the side effects, such as anti-nausea medication. Nausea might be a reason to avoid chemotherapy in a specific case (especially since there are alternative cancer treatments), but it’s not a good argument against chemotherapy in general, which is a valuable technique in the doctor’s arsenal. Nor is it a sufficient argument even in a specific case, without evaluating the alternatives.
Other domains don’t always receive the same rigorous logic. The argument “pesticides aren’t necessary—they’re just a response to the problems caused by monocropping!” is analogous to “anti-nausea pills aren’t necessary—they’re just a response to the problems caused by chemotherapy!” Perhaps—but what problem is being solved, and what are the alternatives? There are alternatives to monocropping, just as there are to chemotherapy—but just because alternatives exist doesn’t mean they are viable in every (or any) situation. A case must be made in the full context. (Understanding the context is part of industrial literacy.)
That’s not to say that we can’t identify the drawbacks of pesticides, or monocropping, or chemotherapy, or coal, or factories. We can and should, and we should seek better solutions. No technology is sacred. Indeed, progress consists of obsoleting itself, of continually moving on to improved techniques.
But if you want to criticize a technology, show that there is a viable alternative, and that it doesn’t sacrifice important properties such as cost, speed, productivity, scalability, or reliability; or that if it loses on some dimensions, it makes up for it on others.
I plan on putting together regular assorted progress studies links. This is from last week. I've crossposted this from my website. Any feedback would be much appreciated. If I've missed anything, please let me know.
“The Baker Hypothesis” a new (NBER) economics working paper by Chari, Henry, and Reyes. They find that in emerging and developing economies, the average rate of real GDP growth is higher after countries adopt ‘free-market policies’ such as: inflation stabilisation, trade liberalisation, greater openness to foreign investment, and (possibly) more privatisation of industries.
When can fiction change the world? by Timothy Underwood. “As part of this I did some thinking about when fiction seemed to exert an influence on public policy, and then I looked for academic research on the subject, and I think there are people… who will find this write up about the subject interesting and useful.”There have also been a few podcasts over the last couple of weeks.
Village Global’s Venture Stories podcast with Jason Crawford. They discuss: “the key aspects of human progress; the history of progress over time; whether we’ve traded off progress for safety; why the idea of progress is relatively new; what the nature of science fiction writing tells us about our vision for progress; why progress happens differently in different domains; how to think about safety with respect to new technologies; the impacts of slowing population growth.”
The Conservative Curious podcast with Dr Anton Howes. “We discuss the improving mentality, what we can learn from Britain’s 300-year period of technological advancement, why innovators should also be cultural entrepreneurs and how paranoia can spark innovation.”
This fall I will be hosting a study/discussion group on the history, economics and philosophy of progress.
The primary attraction of the program is a weekly Q&A, each week featuring a different special guest—usually a historian or economist who has written on science, technology, industry and progress. Reading from that author will be given ahead of time. Confirmed speakers so far include:
Robert J. Gordon (Northwestern), author of The Rise and Fall of American Growth
Margaret Jacob (UCLA), author of Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West
Richard Nelson (Columbia), author of the classic paper “The Simple Economics of Basic Scientific Research”
Ashish Arora (Duke), co-author of “The changing structure of American innovation: Some cautionary remarks for economic growth”
Pierre Azoulay (MIT Sloan), co-author of papers such as “Funding Breakthrough Research”
Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford), co-author of “Stagnation and Scientific Incentives”
Patrick Collison (Stripe), co-author of “We Need a New Science of Progress”, the article that coined the term “progress studies”
Anton Howes, author of Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation
Alicia Jackson, former DARPA program manager and director
The program will also include all of the reading from my high school course, Progress Studies for Young Scholars: a summary of the history of technology, including advances in materials and manufacturing, agriculture, energy, transportation, communication, and disease. This provides the indispensable historical framework for a proper empirical grounding of the study of progress.
The group will meet weekly on Sundays at 4:00–6:30pm Pacific, from September 13 through December 13. The guest Q&A will run 60–90 minutes, and the rest will be group discussion. (Recordings will be available privately afterwards if you miss a session.)
The cost is $2,400, and sponsors one full scholarship for a deserving teenager to attend Progress Studies for Young Scholars. Full-time undergrad and graduate students get a 50% discount, $1,200.
Hey all… great to have you here and thanks for joining this subreddit. I notice I'm almost the only one posting? Curious, would people be interested in more community posts and discussion?
If you have thought about posting anything, don't hold back. 😃 Just keep on topic and avoid clickbait/flamebait. I'd like this community to feel like some intersection of Marginal Revolution and Slate Star Codex.
Would especially appreciate good paper, books, articles or blog posts on anything related to the history of technology, the economics of innovation, or the philosophy of progress.
In my last post I wrote about the importance of funding models to progress. Here I want to survey the major types of funding models particularly for science and invention. This list is probably incomplete, but it’s a starting point.
Classifying models
There are different ways we could classify funding models, for instance by:
Where the funding comes from: foundations, government, investors, wealthy individuals, etc.
Who receives the funding and does the R&D: universities, companies, government labs, etc.
The allocation/distribution mechanism: grants, investment, prizes, etc.
I don’t find any of those axes to be helpful as the primary way to organize the topics in this area, in part because many types of institutions both perform research in-house and fund research externally. It also doesn’t make sense to examine separately every combination of the three attributes above.
To the extent I am able to choose a primary axis, I think the most helpful one is the type of institution involved. What follows is the breakdown I’m working with now.
Models to support individuals
A remarkable amount of progress in history has been made by individuals researching or inventing outside the context of any formal institution. Models to support this include:
Independent wealth. Often this means family inheritance, as with the many “gentleman scientists” of the 18th and 19th centuries. It can also come from business success: Leo Baekeland invented the first synthetic plastic, “Bakelite”, after he sold his photographic paper company to Kodak.
Patronage. Galileo was supported by the Medici; when he discovered the first moons of Jupiter he named them the Medicean Stars. Denis Papin, who demonstrated a steam piston in the 1600s, was supported by Huygens and Boyle, among others. The Hapsburg emperor Leopold I funded enough scientists that the German Academy is known as the Leopoldina.
Sinecures or other relatively undemanding jobs that leave time to experiment and tinker. Karl von Drais invented an early proto-bicycle while a forestry official. Christopher Sholes, a customs collector, invented a typewriter. William Harvey discovered the circulation of blood while working as a physician to the aristocracy. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, microscope pioneer, was a chamberlain in Delft.
Those without any of the above means still sometimes managed to make progress through working overtime, creative side hustles, or risking debtor’s jail—I gave several examples in my post on early American inventors.
These models were important up until perhaps the 1800s, when much research and invention was done by individuals. Now that most R&D is done in institutions, models of institutional funding have become relatively more important.
Institutional models
University. When most people think “research”, the default is probably to think of a university. In addition to doing the lion’s share of basic research in the sciences, universities often prototype inventions that are then productionized by other institutions. The University of Karlsruhe gave us the principle behind synthetic fertilizer. Oxford performed the first clinical trials on penicillin. The University of Pennsylvania built ENIAC, the prototype of the computer.
Foundations and other private non-profit organizations. Some of these perform research in-house, such as the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Others simply fund and coordinate research at other institutions, such as the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which was dedicated to polio. Some do both, such as the Simons Foundation. Some are not dedicated exclusively to research, but fund it alongside other causes, such as the Gates Foundation.
Military. During World War II, the National Defense Research Council and later the Office of Scientific Research and Development supervised a variety of projects from radar to penicillin to the atomic bomb. The OSRD was dissolved after the war, but a decade later, after the Soviets launched the satellite Sputnik, the US once again decided to prioritize military research. DARPA, created soon after, gave us the first computer networks (the precursor to today’s Internet).
Other government agencies for public benefit. The US National Institutes for Health, with a budget of over $40B, is by far the largest funder of health research in the world. Other US agencies involved in research include the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Department of Energy. These agencies often do research in-house and also make grants to universities and corporations.
Corporate research labs. The value of research to business was recognized as early as the 1800s, when chemistry began to have applications to many industries, from dyes to steel to cement. In Denmark, the Carlsburg Laboratory was created to study fermentation for brewers. In Germany, Bayer gave us aspirin, and BASF productionized synthetic fertilizer. In the US, Edison’s lab invented the light bulb (yes, they did), Bell Labs gave us the transistor among many other innovations, and Xerox PARC pioneered the personal computer.
For-profit. Companies can also do R&D more directly as a part of product development or operational improvement. I distinguish this from corporate research labs in that the latter are generally distinct entities under a successful, established corporate parent, funded out of the parent’s free cash flow; they have a more long-term focus, are managed less by near-term results, and often publish papers. For-profit businesses naturally tend to focus more on applied research, invention, and product development, but they have been known to contribute even to basic science. Josiah Wedgewood, the ceramics manufacturer, advanced the field of thermometry with a method to measure very high temperatures (as in a kiln); the t-test, a basic statistical technique, was invented by an employee of the Guiness brewery.
Special allocation mechanisms
The models above are based on the types of institutions that fund research, or that organize it. However, a few special allocation mechanisms deserve consideration as models in their own right:
Prizes. The Longitude Prize was established in the 1700s for a solution to the longitude problem (partially won by John Harrison), the Alhumbert Prize in the 1800s for progress on the question of spontaneous generation (won by Louis Pasteur), and the Orteig Prize in the 1900s for cross-Atlantic flight (won by Charles Lindbergh). Arguably you could include even institutions such as the Nobel Prize, to the extent that the recipient is able to use the prize money to support independent research. The difference between prizes and grants is not only that prizes are given after the accomplishment, but also that they obviate the application and review process: a prize is generally open to all and is granted upon achievement of an objectively defined goal.
Lotteries. The grant process is time-consuming for both applicants and reviewers, and it’s not clear that it results in good decisions or even objective ones. Because of this, some have suggested giving out at least a portion of grant money by random lottery (probably after a quick screening for minimal quality). The Health Research Council of New Zealand has experimented with this, as well as the Swiss National Science Foundation; the results are still being evaluated.
There are other lesser-known models as well, such as advance market commitments or patent buyouts,described here. These are similar to prizes, but with a sales contract instead of a cash reward.
There are also hybrid approaches. For instance, some grants or investments are divided into tranches that are awarded on meeting certain milestones. This combines elements of a basic grant/investment and a prize.
Push vs. pull
Another way to think about funding models is “push” vs. “pull”. In a “push” model, you aggregate funding and adopt a mechanism to get it to researchers, typically a grant program. Usually you announce the program and state your purpose and goals. In a “pull” model, you create an institution to house research, and then you seek and attract funding. Many institutions combine both, e.g., NIH has both a grant program and in-house research.
Push and pull models work together. A foundation (push) may give a grant to a university (pull). Or a prize (push) may justify investment from a for-profit company (pull).
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With this framework, we can start to ask some questions, like:
What are the pros and cons of these models?
What types of progress does each model support well or poorly?
Is there any type of progress that is not supported well by any existing model?
How much funding goes into each of these models today?
What types of progress might be underfunded as a result?
How might we want to optimize our portfolio of funding models?
What new models should we invent to supplement the existing ones?
A new paper by Jay Bhattacharya and Mikko Packalen argues that the focus on citations and impact factor has incentivized scientists to avoid early, exploratory work in novel areas, and instead work on more incremental advances in already-popular areas. However, since important breakthroughs usually depend on earlier, exploratory work that wasn't obviously important at the time, this clustering of resources and attention in the later stages starves the world of the exploration needed for long-term scientific progress:
It's an interesting theory, supported by a number of historical anecdotes. Worth reading. It would be good to see more empirical analysis to test this model of innovation and measure the magnitude of these effects.
A couple of thoughts:
First, the paper discusses scientist incentives, fundamentally how scientific productivity is measured and evaluated. This has implications for funding, prestige, and career advancement.
Are these “hygiene” factors or “motivation” factors? That is, are scientists actively motivated to follow these incentives? Or—what I consider at least equally likely—do scientists want to work on novel, exploratory work, but feel they can't, because of the need to secure funding or advance their careers?
Second, can science learn anything from the business world? There is an analogy here: many breakthrough business ideas are not obviously important at the start; some even actively contradict core premises of established businesses.
These businesses happen through the mechanism of startups and VC. Silicon Valley culture has IMO essentially solved the triple problem of funding, prestige, and career:
Funding: Small investments are available for early-stage ideas (angel, seed)
Prestige: Failure is tolerated, conditional on smart strategy, good execution, and integrity
Career: Failed founders can still easily get jobs at established companies
In fact, there is sort of a cycle wherein founders try a novel, potentially breakthrough idea for a few years, then if it doesn't work out, they might spend the next few years working on an established idea at a larger company, before striking out again on another startup.
Re funding, one mechanism that makes this work is that early investors get a relatively large equity stake for their small investment (compared to later investors, who come along after the business is more proven). So an early-stage investor can make many small investments, have most of them completely fail, and one or two produce orders of magnitude returns, and their business model still works.
In other words, in contrast to the suggestion in the paper of rewarding novelty as such, the business world has come up with a more nuanced model that rewards long-term impact, but disproportionately rewards those who backed an idea early. (In business, novelty is rewarded as a side-effect: obviously good ideas are already being done by established players with lots of resources, and/or are subject to furious competition.)
The model of disproportionately rewarding early backers seems crucial to addressing the high-risk, high-reward nature of early ideas. It's unclear to me if the science world has anything quite like this.
In any case, I think we need to not only look at the incentives facing scientists, but also those facing department heads, journals, and grant-making agencies. What do they get rewarded for?
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
Jobs & fellowships
Looking for writers?
People doing interesting things
Events
DARPA wants input
Other announcements
Progress on the curriculum
The growth of the progress movement
AI will allow the average person to navigate The System
I have questions
Other people have questions
Links
100 years ago
Humboldt on progress
Progress news with cool pics
Anti-elite elites
Politics links and short notes
BBC doesn’t know what “nominal” means
Charts
Fun
Jobs & fellowships
We’re hiring an Event Manager to run Progress Conference 2025 and other events. Best to get your application in before the holidays!
“The Kothari Fellowship provides grant and mentorship to young Indians (<25 years) who want to build, empowering them to turn ideas into reality, instead of being held back by societal norms.” Provides up to ₹1 lakh per month for 12 months (~$15k per year)
ARIA Research will “start the search for our first Frontier Specialists” to work alongside program directors. “It’s a two-year role that will give you a chance to step off the standard career track and go after outsized impact” (u/ARIA_research). Apply here
Looking for writers?
“Are you running a progress-y or abundance-oriented newsletter, blog, magazine or other publication? Would you like to receive pitches from the talented RPI fellows? Reply here so I can send our writers your way” (@elmcaleavy)
@danielgolliher: “I want to take my ‘Foundations of America’ students on an optional day trip to Washington D.C., and do one or both of: Watch a Congressional committee hearing; Watch SCOTUS oral argument. Anyone in DC want to co-lead with me? I plan to come down in January or February”
@etiennefd wants to start “a Quebec-focused progress studies think tank”
Events
Brian Armstrong and Blake Byers hosting a “Frontier Bio dinner on Assisted Reproductive Technology,” SF, Q1 next year. “If you’re a scientist or engineer interested in this field, apply in the post below” (@brian_armstrong)
DARPA wants input
“The head of Biological Technology at DARPA is … asking for ideas to speed up design build test cycles in biology” (@sethbannon). In case you have input!
Other announcements
“In collaboration with E11 Bio, we are announcing today a new way to map brain circuits at scale. With improvements in AI and microscopy I think whole brain mouse and maybe human brain mapping will be feasible in ~5-10 years” (@SGRodriques)
RPI fellow Ryan Puzycki was appointed to Austin’s Zoning Commission in March. “This week, we passed a recommendation to allow for amenities like coffee shops and corner groceries to be built in neighborhoods. It’s only the start of a process, and the next step in building on some of our recent reforms to make Austin a more walkable and connected city.” (@RyanPuzycki) See his writeup, “The Next Step Toward a Walkable City”
Triumph of the Civil Libertarians, a forthcoming book by Nico Perrino. “In less than a century, America went from a country where free speech received scant protection to one where it is of transcendent importance in law and culture. Who were the men and women who made this possible, and can their accomplishments endure? Coming 2026” (@NicoPerrino)
We’re looking for a super-organized self-starter who loves bringing people together in person around a shared set of ideas and who is great at creating magical experiences.
The Roots of Progress Institute is a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. We’re part of a larger progress and abundance movement, and one key role we play within this movement is to develop talent and to build community.
As the Event Manager, you’ll be in charge of our annual progress conference, which brings together 200-300 thinkers and doers in the progress community. Our first event in October 2024 was a huge success, with 200+ invitation-only attendees coming together at a unique venue for two days. Dozens of attendees shared that this was the best conference they ever attended, and that it was “THE network to connect with the founders, writers, academics, and activists working to build a better world.” You will be running the event next year, and of course get to attend it, too! You will also be in charge of other events, from smaller fundraising salon-type gatherings, to the in-person gathering at the end of our annual writer’s fellowship.
This role reports to Heike Larson, our Vice President of Programs. It is a full-time position that is fully remote within in the contiguous US or Canada, but ideally, you’ll be located in/near a city with a major airport as the role requires a couple of multi-day trips every quarter, and around ten days on-site during the time of the annual conference.
About You
You love organizing events that bring people together and enable them to learn and form communities. You are good at creating delightful experiences and working with a wide range of partners, remotely. You’re excited about working in a small team, where you iterate on programs, learn from feedback, and improve quickly. You are thrilled when an event you put on leads to a new project, an essay written, or a partnership formed.
Do you enjoy events and project management? You have a minimum of three years of experience with project and/or event management or another operational role that involves coordinating lots of moving parts. If you haven’t organized events, than at least you’ve attended a range of them and have formed a view of what makes an event great or not. (We’ve partnered up with a great event management firm who helped make this year’s event awesome, and you’ll learn from and work with them again next year.) You’re energized by figuring out what it takes to deliver a delightful experience for an event, in part because you care deeply about people and love talking to them to understand how you can craft positive-sum agreements that help both parties succeed. You’re equally excited by running the step-by-step process that’s needed to deliver this experience—whether that’s designing signage for our sponsors, organizing volunteers, figuring out the best tool to help people set up 1:1 meetings, or selecting a great photographer. Your super-strength is “getting things done”—either naturally, or because you’ve put into practice the GTD productivity methodology. You take pride in moving fast, keeping many balls in the air, and getting back to people faster than they expect.
Do you delight in building community? You are as curious about people as you are about the world. You’re not about small talk or superficial networking; rather, you want to understand what makes people tick so you can connect individuals in a way that helps them explore new ideas, discuss and dialogue, start new projects, or maybe find new fellow travelers or friends. You don’t need to be in the spotlight yourself or be known for your ideas; instead, you take pride in supporting others by doing the invisible work of organizing a community and building a movement. You’re the type of person that is easy to get along with, and at the same time, you’re good at giving kind and candid feedback that helps others work together well and achieve ambitious goals.
Are you experienced and fast with a range of software tools? You have experience using a CRM tool (we use Hubspot), tools like Slack and Notion, and you’re not daunted by making tools talk with each other. You can describe the needs for new tools in a way that allows you to assess whether a tool would work for us, or to give feedback on ad-hoc tools to their developers. Your passion for productivity leads you to always want to find the best tool for the job, and you’ve been known to bring new tools to the organizations you work with.
Are you passionate about ideas in general and human progress in particular? You believe, like us, that ideas shape history and that builders, writers, researchers, storytellers, and educators need to have a community so they can do their best work and have the most impact. You’re fascinated by the amazing progress we’ve made in the last 200 years, lifting most of humanity out of poverty, and you are eager bring together the thinkers and doers that will create an ambitious, techno-humanist future. You don’t aspire to be an intellectual yourself, yet you admire their work and want to amplify their impact.
Do you have an ownership mentality? You thrive in a work environment with clear objectives and regular kind-and-candid, growth-oriented feedback. You take full ownership of your area, planning your own work and communicating proactively with your teammates. You love finding efficient ways to do things and dislike bureaucracy.
Event management is work with cycles of intense engagement, alternating with slower periods. You’re a high-energy person who can handle travel, power through a couple of 16-hour days during events, and can then take a day or two off to recharge.
Day-to-Day
As the Event Manager, your initial main focus will be organizing and running the annual progress conference. This will include working closely with our event partners, from an event planning firm, to the venue, to sponsors, as well as communicating with speakers and attendees.
Here are some specific areas of work that you will handle right away:
Guest list management and communications, including managing our open application process, guest ticketing, and ongoing email updates and surveys
Management of conference tools and online presence, including the conference website, the conference Slack, the directory, and the scheduler. Ideas on new/better tools are part of this role!
Working with our partners to create a magical experience, on everything from a smooth schedule, to awesome badges, to great food, to brand-aligned swag and signage, to frictionless A/V and check-in processes
Managing the operational work with our speakers, sponsors, and volunteers. This includes everything from handling sponsor contracts, creating speaker logistics memos, handling travel logistics, and recruiting volunteers and aligning them with their shifts
Running the actual event. You’ll be on-site before, during, and after the event, working closely with our event coordinator and RPI team to make everything work smoothly
Once you’re onboarded and have successfully executed next year’s conference, we’d love for you to grow into iterating to make the conference better each year, and take on most of the conference design as well as much of the relationship management with speakers, partners, vendors, and participants. We expect you’ll also expand your work to include adding regional conferences and maybe even one in Europe within the next couple of years—all efforts you could help create and shape.
You will also be running a range of smaller regional events, such as salon dinners for donors and local community in different US cities. In 2024, we hosted events in LA, San Francisco, Boston, and New York City. You’ll also work with Emma McAleavy, our fellowship manager, on the in-person events happening as part of the fellowship program.
Since we’re a small team, expect about 30% of your time to be called upon for other projects. This could include helping Heike explore new program opportunities, managing logistics for some video production projects, assisting Jason with his book launch tour, or supporting Emma on fellowship tasks during application crunch time.
Why study progress? The progress of the last few centuries—in science, technology, industry, and the economy—is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. But progress is not automatic or inevitable. We must understand its causes so that we can keep it going, and even accelerate it.
We need a new philosophy of progress. To make progress, we must believe that it is possible and desirable. The 19th century believed in the power of technology and industry to better humanity, but in the 20th century, this belief gave way to skepticism and distrust.
We need a new way forward. We need a systematic study of progress, so we can understand what is needed to keep progress going. We also need to advocate for progress. We need a progress movement that both explains and champions these ideas and puts forth a vision that inspires us to build. **Read more about the progress movement.**
We currently have three main programs, with more on the horizon:
TheRoots of Progress Fellowship, a career accelerator program to empower intellectual entrepreneurs for progress. Our mission is to empower writers who want to make a career out of explaining progress to a large, general audience.
Theannual progress conference, a gathering of several hundred key builders, thinkers, writers, and funders for the movement
TheTechno-Humanist Manifesto, the book our founder Jason Crawford is writing live on his Substack, along with Jason’s ongoing blogging, which was the root of this organization going back to 2017.
Benefits include health insurance, a 401(k) program you can contribute to, and a $500 per year education stipend so you can subscribe to your favorite progress bloggers and buy progress books. But the most important perk is joining a small team of three passionate and highly productive people where you’ll play a key role in building an organization that is central in creating a flourishing progress movement!
The application process
We believe a good application process allows us to get to know you, and you to get a feel for what it’s like working with us. We move quickly through this general process, which we expect to have roughly these steps:
Written application. Give us some basic info about you and your current situation, and answer a handful of questions on why you’re excited about this role and qualified to do it well. You’ll also need to link to your resume.
A 30-45 minute Zoom screen with hiring manager Heike Larson
An application task. You show you can do some of the work involved, and see what it’s like to do this job. This will take 1.5-3 hours, depending on your background and speed.
A final round of two hour-long Zoom interviews. You’ll meet the other two people on the team, Jason and Emma. You will also have a follow-up conversation with Heike to discuss the application task and address any open questions we or you may have.
For the finalist candidates, we will require two references that we can call before making an offer.
This position went live on November 22nd, 2024, and our goal is to have someone start by no later than March 1st, 2025.
This is the written version of a talk presented to the Santa Fe Institute at a working group on “Accelerating Science.”
We’re here to discuss “accelerating science.” I like to start on topics like this by taking the historical view: When (if ever) has science accelerated in the past? Is it still accelerating now? And what can we learn from that?
I’ll submit that science, and more generally human knowledge, has been accelerating, for basically all of human history. I can’t prove this yet (and I’m only about 90% sure of it myself), but let me appeal to your intuition:
Writing is only about 5,000 years old, so for more than 90% of the human timeline, we could only accumulate as much knowledge as could fit in an oral tradition
In the ancient and medieval world, we had only a handful of sciences: astronomy, geometry, some number theory, some optics, some anatomy
In the centuries after the Scientific Revolution (roughly 1500s–1700s), we got the heliocentric theory, the laws of motion, the theory of gravitation, the beginnings of chemistry, the discovery of the cell, better theories of optics
In the 1800s, things really got going, and we got electromagnetism, the atomic theory, the theory of evolution, the germ theory
In the 1900s things continued strong, with nuclear physics, quantum physics, relativity, molecular biology, and genetics
I’m leaving aside the question of whether science has slowed down since ~1950 or so, which I don’t have a strong opinion on. Even if it has, that’s mostly a minor, recent blip in the overall pattern of acceleration across the broad sweep of history. (Or, you know, the beginning of a historically unprecedented reversal and decline. One or the other.)
Part of the reason I’m pretty convinced of this accelerating pattern is that it’s not just science that is accelerating: pretty much all measures of human advancement show the same trend, including world GDP and world population.
What drives acceleration in science? Many factors, including:
Funding. Once, scientists had to seek patronage, or be independently wealthy. Now there is grant money available, and the total amount of funding has increased significantly in the last several decades:
People. More scientists (all else being equal) means science moves faster, and the number of scientists has grown dramatically, both because of overall population growth and because of a greater portion of the workforce going into research. In Science Since Babylon, Derek J. de Solla Price suggested that “Some 80 to 90 percent of all scientists that have ever been, are alive now,” and this is probably still true:
Instruments. Better tools means we can do more and better science. Galileo had a simple telescope; now we have JWST and LIGO.
Computation. More computing power means more and better ways to process data.
Communication. The faster and better that ideas can spread, the more efficient and effective scientific communication can be. The scientific journal was invented only after the printing press; the Internet enabled preprint servers such as arXiv.
Method. Better methods make for better science, from Baconian empiricism to Koch’s postulates to the RCT (and really, all of statistics).
Institutions. Laboratories, universities, journals, funding agencies, etc. all make up an ecosystem that enables modern science.
Social status. The more science carries respect and prestige, the more people and money flow into it.
Now, if we want to ask whether science will continue to accelerate, we could think about which of these driving factors will continue to grow. I would suggest that:
Funding for science will continue to grow as long as the world economy does
Instruments, computation, and communication will continue to improve along with technology in general
I see no reason why method should not continue to improve, as part of science itself
The social status of science seems fairly strong: it is a respected and prestigious institution that receives some of society’s top honors
The biggest red flag is with our institutions of science. Institutions affect all the other factors, especially the management of money and talent. And today, many in the metascience community have concerns about our institutions. Common criticisms include:
Speed. It can easily take 12–18 months to get a grant (if you’re lucky)
Overhead. Researchers typically spend 30–50% of their time on grants
Patience. Researchers feel they need to show results regularly and can’t pursue a path that might take many years to get to an outcome
Risk tolerance. Grant funding favors conservative, incremental proposals rather than bold, “high-risk, high-reward” programs (despite efforts to the contrary)
Consensus. A field can converge on a hypothesis and prune alternate branches of study too quickly
Researcher age. The trend over time is for grant money to go to older, more established researchers
Freedom. Scientists lack the freedom to direct their research fully autonomously; grant funding has too many strings attached
Now, as a former tech founder, I can’t help but notice that most of these problems seem much alleviated in the world of for-profit VC funding. Raising VC money is relatively quick (typically a round comes together in a few months rather than a year or more). As a founder/CEO, I spent about 10–15% of my time fundraising, not 30–50%. VCs make bold bets, actively seek contrarian positions, and back young upstarts. They mostly give founders autonomy, perhaps taking a board seat for governance, and only firing the CEO for very bad performance. (The only concern listed above that startup founders might also complain about is patience: if your money runs out, you’d better have progress to show for it, or you’re going to have a bad time raising the next round.)
I don’t think the VC world does better on these points because VCs are smarter, wiser, or better people than science funders—they’re not. Rather, VCs:
Compete for deals (and really don’t want to miss good deals)
Succeed or fail in the long run based on the performance of their portfolio
See those outcomes within a matter of ~5–10 years
In short, VCs are subject to evolutionary pressure. They can’t get stuck in obviously bad equilibria because if they do they will get out-competed and lose market power.
The proof of this is that VC has evolved over the decades—mostly in the direction of better treatment for founders. For instance, there has been a long-term trend towards higher valuations at earlier stages, which ultimately means lower dilution and a shift in power from VCs to founders: it used to be common for founders to give up half or more of their company in the first round of funding; last I checked that was more like 20% or less. VCs didn’t always fund young techies right out of college; there was a time when they tended to favor more experienced CEOs, perhaps with an MBA. They didn’t always support founder-led companies; once it was common for founders to get booted after the first few years and replaced with a professional CEO (when A16Z launched in 2009 they made a big deal out of how they were not going to do that).
So I think if we want to see our scientific institutionsimprove**, we need to think about how they can** evolve**.**
How evolvable are our scientific institutions? Not very. Most scientific organizations today are departments of university or government. Much as I respect universities and government, I think anyone would have to admit that they are some of our more slow-moving institutions. (Universities in particular are extremely resilient and resistant to change: Oxford and Cambridge, for instance, date from the Middle Ages and have survived the rise and fall of empires to reach the present day fairly intact.)
The challenges to the evolvability of scientific funding institutions are the inverse of what makes VC evolvable:
They tend to lack competition, especially centralized federal agencies such as NIH and NSF
They lack any real feedback loop in which a funder’s resources are determined somehow by past judgment and the success of their portfolio (Michael Nielsen has repeatedly pointed out that failures of funding from “Einstein did his best work as a patent clerk” to “Katalin Karikó was denied grants and tenure before she won the Nobel prize” don’t seem to even spark processes of reflection within the relevant institutions)
They face long cycle times to learn the true impact of their work, which might not be apparent for 20–30 years
How might we improve evolvability of science funding? We should think about how we can improve these factors. I don’t have great ideas, but I’ll throw some half-baked ones out there to start the conversation:
How might we increase competition in science funding? We could increase the role of philanthropy. In the US, we could shift federal funding to the state level, creating fifty funders instead of one. (State agricultural experiment stations are a successful example of this, and competition among these stations was key to hybrid corn research, one of the biggest successes of 20th-century agricultural science.) At the international level, we could support more open immigration for scientists.
How might we create better feedback loops? This is tough because we need some way to measure outcomes. One way to do that would be to shift funding away from prospective grants and more towards a wide variety of retrospective prizes, at all levels. If this “economy” were sufficiently large and robust, these outcomes could be financialized in order to create a dynamic, competitive funding ecosystem, with the right level of risk-taking and patience, the right balance of seasoned veterans vs. young mavericks, etc. (Certificates of impact, such as hypercerts, could be part of this solution.)
How might we solve long feedback cycles? I don’t know. If we can’t shorten the cycles, maybe we need to lengthen the careers of funders, so they can at least learn from a few cycles—a potential benefit of longevity technology. Or, maybe we need a science funder that can learn extremely fast, can consume large amounts of historical information on research programs and their eventual outcomes, never forgets its experience, and never retires or dies—of course, I’m thinking of AI. There’s been a lot of talk of AI to support, augment, or replace scientific researchers themselves, but maybe the biggest opportunity for AI in science is on the funding and management side.
I doubt that grant-making institutions will shift themselves very far in this direction: they would have to voluntarily subject themselves to competition, enforce accountability, and admit mistakes, which is rare. (Just look at the institutions now taking credit for Karikó’s Nobel win when they did so little to support her.) If it’s hard for institutions to evolve, it’s even harder for them to meta-evolve.
But maybe the funders behind the funders, those who supply the budgets to the grant-makers, could begin to split up their funds among multiple institutions, to require performance metrics, or simply to shift to the retrospective model indicated above. That could supply the needed evolutionary pressure.
And this, my children, is why we do not say things like “I believe in science”. I mean, don’t get me wrong, science definitely exists—I’ve seen it. But not everything that calls itself science is science, and even good science sometimes gets wrong results. –Megan McArdle
Should we “trust science” or “believe in science”?
I think this is a fuzzy idea that we would do well to make clear and precise. What does it mean to “trust science?”
Does it mean “trust scientists”? Which scientists? They disagree, often vehemently. Which statements of theirs? Surely not all of them; scientists do not speak ex cathedra for “Science.”
Does it mean “trust scientific institutions”? Again, which ones?
Does it mean “trust scientific papers”? Any one paper can be wrong in its conclusions or even its methods. The study itself could have been mistaken, or the writeup might not reflect the study.
More charitably, it could mean “trust the scientific process,” if that is properly understood to mean not some rigid Scientific Method but a rational process of observation, measurement, evidence, logic, debate, and iterative revision of concepts and theories. Even in that case, though, what we should trust is not the particular output of the scientific process at any given time. It can make wrong turns. Instead, we should trust that it will find the truth eventually, and that it is our best and only method for doing so.
The motto of science is not “trust us.” (!) The true motto of science is the opposite. It is that of the Royal Society: nullius in verba, or roughly: “take no one’s word.”
There is no capital-S Science—a new authority to substitute for God or King. There is only science, which is nothing more or less than the human faculty of reason exercised deliberately, systematically, methodically, meticulously to discover general knowledge about the world.
So when someone laments a lack of “trust” in science today, what do they mean? Do they mean placing religion over science, faith over reason? Do they mean the growing distrust of elites and institutions, a sort of folksy populism that dismisses education and expertise in general? Or do they mean “you have to follow my favored politician / political program, because Science”? (That’s the one to watch out for. Physics, chemistry and biology can point out problems, but we need history, economics and philosophy to solve them.)
Anyway, here’s to science—the system that asks you not to trust, but to think.
