Hey there! I’m a startup founder and software engineer who is also one of the folks from the anthropology community who was initially skeptical of Progress Studies, so I can speak to their concerns—which, to your point, largely came across as snide grumbling amongst academics. Unfortunately, as is often the case with tight-knit communities, their real concerns were understood implicitly and therefore not deemed necessary to communicate openly.
tl;dr, there’s a pattern of (some) SV tech types only respecting two areas of knowledge: STEM, and economics (but only some economics—i.e. not political economy, economic history, labour economics...), and thinking all other areas of knowledge can be dismissed, ignored, and rebuilt from “first principles” by STEM folks.
To a group of people already concerned about this trend who spent their careers studying how different forms of knowledge emerge and are transmitted across communities, they read the initial PS piece and (wrongly) assumed this was about to happen again. And as people who, for the most part, genuinely share many of the impulses and desires of PS folks, they were dismayed at the thought that all their painstaking research and advocacy for better innovation systems and policy would not only continue to be ignored, but dismissed outright.
There’s a broad understanding that PS is meant to be an applied discipline—but 90% of the concern was that it would be an applied discipline that would only draw on the same set of economic theories that have already motivated innovation policy for the past few decades, and nothing would change as a result.
Thankfully, the community is thoughtful enough to not let that happen.
Hey there! I’m a startup founder and software engineer who is also one of the folks from the anthropology community who was initially skeptical of Progress Studies, so I can speak to their concerns—which, to your point, largely came across as snide grumbling amongst academics. Unfortunately, as is often the case with tight-knit communities, their real concerns were understood implicitly and therefore not deemed necessary to communicate openly.
tl;dr, there’s a pattern of (some) SV tech types only respecting two areas of knowledge: STEM, and economics (but only some economics—i.e. not political economy, economic history, labour economics...), and thinking all other areas of knowledge can be dismissed, ignored, and rebuilt from “first principles” by STEM folks.
To a group of people already concerned about this trend who spent their careers studying how different forms of knowledge emerge and are transmitted across communities, they read the initial PS piece and (wrongly) assumed this was about to happen again. And as people who, for the most part, genuinely share many of the impulses and desires of PS folks, they were dismayed at the thought that all their painstaking research and advocacy for better innovation systems and policy would not only continue to be ignored, but dismissed outright.
There’s a broad understanding that PS is meant to be an applied discipline—but 90% of the concern was that it would be an applied discipline that would only draw on the same set of economic theories that have already motivated innovation policy for the past few decades, and nothing would change as a result.
Thankfully, the community is thoughtful enough to not let that happen.