The latest advances in AI reasoning come from OpenAI’s o1 and Google’s AlphaProof. In this post, I explore how these new models work, and what that tells us about the path to AGI.
Interestingly, unlike GPT-2 → GPT-3 → GPT-4, neither of these models rely on increased scale to drive capabilities. Instead, both systems rely on training data that shows, not just the solution to a problem, but the path to that solution. This opens a new frontier for progress in AI capabilities: how to create that sort of data?
In this post, I review what is known about how AlphaProof and o1 work, discuss the connection between their training data and their capabilities, and identify some problems that remain to be solved in order for capabilities to continue to progress along this path.
Hi, My name is Sean and I’m just a fan of Roots of Progress. Just wanted to introduce myself. I’m a developer, founder, and I’m am trying to get into writing about agriculture and economics. I don’t see a lot of intro posts so I might get in trouble for posting this. But hi anyway!
Relevance of Management Science to Progress Studies
Two questions for anyone here with an interest in them:
How do people in the progress studies movement view the science of management?
Who else in the group (or the movement) might also interested in this subject, and what kinds of issues or questions seem to be paramount?
By “management” I’m referring to the process of administering and controlling the affairs of the organization, irrespective of its nature, type, and size.
There’s a long-ish exploration of this in Grand Futures ch. 1 (Details box 7), focusing on long-term projects in general. I’m eliding some footnotes and not linking the citations, for writing speed reasons:
Ongoing projects Numerous examples such as cities (Jericho 9600 BCE and onwards), mathematics and science, land reclamation, irrigation networks, canals, roads, cultivated landscapes, Japanese shrines rebuilt every few decades , etc. The Gunditjmara eel traps at Budj Bim have been maintained and modified for at least 6,700 years [1531]. Waqfs, charitable perpetuities in Islamic countries providing public goods, once owned a significant fraction of land and sometimes lasted centuries [1703]. See section 5.2 for states and 5.3.2 for long-lived organisations.
Cultural practices often value continuation, shading over into gaining value by their antiquity. Numerous monuments work like this. La tombe du soldat inconnu in Paris has been guarded and with a lit eternal flame
since 1920. The Senbon Torii gates of the Fushimi Inari-taisha shrine in Kyoto have been accumulating since the 8th century. [Check this!]
The Uffington White Horse in the UK has been maintained since late prehistoric times (1740-210 BC).
Future-oriented projects These projects have value that compounds over time. Examples include animal and crop breeding. Gardening. Forest planting; of special interest is the Tokugawa era reforestation of Japan [2857] and oak planting for future naval needs (e.g. New Forest 1698- and the Visingsö forest 1830-). Seed banks (e.g. Vavilov seed collection 1921-, Millennium Seed Bank Partnership 1996-, Svalbard Global Seed Vault 2008-) and archives (e.g. Arctic World Archive) aim at preserving information across time for future use or reference. The longitudinal documentary series Up (dir. Paul Almond, Michael Apted) follows the lives of 14 children since 1964 with new episodes every 7 years.
Another compounding category are longitudinal or open-ended studies such as recording astronomical observations, Nile height measures using the Roda gauge (622-1922), the Central England temperature record (data from 1659-; compiled in 1950s), Celsius’ mean sea level mark at Lövgrund (1731-) [878], Rothamsted research station experiments and archives (1843-), the Morrow Plots at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1876-), the Beal seed burial experiment (1879-), the Queensland pitch drop experiment (1927-), the Harvard Study of Adult Development (1938-), the Framingham Heart Study (1948-), the Mori dark flies experiment (1954-) [1462], the Keeling CO₂ measurements (1958-), the Belyaev Fox Farm domestication experiment (1959-) [2878], the Cape
Grim Air Archive (1978-), the E. coli long-term evolution experiment (1988-) [2284, 1011].
Long-term endpoint These projects may be divided into accidentally long-term because they take more time than wished for, and deliberately long-term because the only way of achieving the goal is to continue long
enough.
Accidentally long-term endpoints include many projects like the British Channel Tunnel, the Panama Canal or the Olmos Irrigation project have been begun, interrupted, resumed and eventually completed (tunnel first proposed in 1802, final project 1986-1990; canal first proposed 1668, final project 1881-1914; irrigation 1924, final project 2006-2011). 2nd Avenue Subway in New York (proposed 1920, started 1942, second phase expected to open 2027–2029). Cathedral building (e.g. Notre Dame 1163-1345, Milan 1386-1965, Sagrada Familia 1882-).
Thesaurus Linguae Latinae began in 1894, expected to take 20 years: current expectation is completion around 2050. Many other dictionaries are ongoing, like Svenska Akademins Ordbok (begun 1787, as of 2019 having reached late ’V’). Deutsches Wörterbuch was completed in 1838-1961 and Oxford English Dictionary 1857-1928.
The LIGO project began in 1983 and succeeded in 2016, although it had organisational prehistory at least going back to ∼1970 [685, Table C-8, p. 111]. The ITER fusion project began in 1988 and will complete
by 2035-2040. Predator removal in New Zeeland (2015-2050).
These exemplify the intermediate kind of projects that are long-term because they are expected to be hard.
As for more deliberate long-term endpoints, many time capsules [1496] and artworks have clear endpoints.
Framtidsbiblioteket in Oslo is an art project that aims to collect an original work by a popular writer every year from 2014 to 2114, remaining unread and unpublished until 2114 when they will be printed on paper from 1000 Norwegian spruce trees planted in 2014. 100 Years is a film written by John Malkovich and directed by Robert Rodriguez in 2015. Advertised in 2015 it is due to be released on November 18, 2115. The Breakthrough Starshot project aims at launching laser-powered crafts to one or more nearby stars at speeds making them arrive within decades to a century. Benjamin Franklin set up two philanthropic trusts intended to last 200 years 1790-1990; unlike many other charities they survived, although spending was not always according to the formal intentions. Tree Mountain – A Living Time Capsule by Agnes Denes is a land art project started in 1992 and intended to last for 400 years, slowly developing into a primary forest. Play As Slow As Possible by John Cage is being played in the St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, starting in 2001 and intended to end in 2640. Longplayer by Jem Finer is a 1,000 year composition (1999-2999) being played in London. The Clock of the Long Now aims for 10,000 years of function. Like the other art projects the value lies less in something achieved at this point as the demonstration of a time-spanning project.
There should be some kind of official recognition + prize for people providing public goods on the Internet. There exist prizes for free software and open-source projects, but this does not cover even remotely the amount of intangible value people can deliver on the Internet. Examples include: https://avherald.com, but also a lot of open-source projects. and maybe people like patio11, gwern, Lilian Weng, or Bartosz Ciechanowski. Some YouTubers would also likely qualify, but I’m not very familiar with the medium.
Theory of change: just increase the rate of reminders to people that if they are highly competent and passionate about something not directly marketable, the Internet has made it so that they can easily increase the amount of beauty in the world by making their passion a public project.
Counterargument #2: AI obsoletes creation of cool stuff on the Internet.
Response: on the contrary, in many possible futures (esp. with constraints on agency), AI empowers people to deliver beauty to others, by automating all except the things they are passionate about. Motivation becomes more of a bottleneck.
Also, these types of public goods are some of the things that make me most proud of the current human civilization. I’m sure many here will agree. Even if we lose that in the future, I think it still matters, even as some sort of nod to the things we used to value in the past.
Counterargument #1: it might be better to incentivize people to run actual companies that deliver business value.
Response: there is so much value to be created that is hard to capture via current market structures. There are many people passionate about things that fall into this category.
With disintegrating 737s in the news, a lot of people are wondering how things got so bad. I’m here to rewind the clock 100+ years to reassure everyone that the aviation industry has always been beset by challenged business models, bad incentives, and shoddy aircraft.
From the first takeoff in 1903 through the late 1920s, “dual-use” aircraft were merely a promise – there was no commercial aviation market. There was, in fact, barely any U.S. market, and it was the inherent appeal of aviation that attracted both entrepreneurs and capital.1 As nascent markets for passenger transport and airmail transport emerged, so too did the first dual-use application for bombers, accelerating innovation in the early 1930s. Fighters did not lend themselves as nicely to commercial applications, and absent a procurement strategy and meaningful expenditures from either the Army or the Navy, U.S. fighters at the time of Pearl Harbor were inferior to their German and Japanese counterparts.
The mythos surrounding the Wright Brothers, Charles Lindberg, and successful mass production during WWII belies the reality of a pre-WWII aviation industry plagued by poor policies and dysfunctional relations between the government and manufacturers. The Army and Navy remained tepid – often hostile – buyers right up until the outbreak of WWII, and in partnership with Congress, they managed to inflict maximum abuse on manufacturers. During the interwar years, industry subsidized the military for both the development and production of aircraft, losing lots of money along the way. In return, manufacturers were deprived of their intellectual property rights and accused of graft and wartime profiteering. Acquisition law was so punitive towards aircraft manufacturers as late as 1939 that firms were convinced it was a conspiracy led by the automotive industry. It wasn’t.
Early on, there were some Cassandras: “In 1919 Secretary of War Baker called for a long term procurement program for military aircraft and warned Congress that “it cannot be expected that industry will long engage in an unremunerative line,” but he underestimated the aircraft manufacturers for whom the industry’s appeal defied rational calculation (The Politics of Aircraft, pg 45).”2 Indeed, the optimism-cum-masochism of early aviation entrepreneurs (e.g., Douglas, Grumman, Martin, etc.) enabled bad policy to persist.
The military-industrial complex as we know it did not exist prior to WWII, yet this period serves as a reflecting pool for the best and worst attributes of our modern defense industry.
Pre-WWI and WWI
During the first decade of the twentieth century, the U.S. led the world in heavier-than-air aircraft. We ceded this early lead to Europe in part because of patent disputes between the Wrights and Curtiss and in part because of late entry into WWI. However, even before the outbreak of war, Europe showed a much greater interest in the military utility of aviation. From 1909-1911, the U.S. Army owned one military aircraft. In comparison, France owned over 250 planes by 1912. By the time the U.S. entered the war, its domestic aircraft industry was so far behind that of its peers that the U.S. almost exclusively used foreign combat aircraft of French or British design, with the American Expeditionary Force flying the French SPAD. (The U.S. Combat Aircraft Industry, 1909-2000).
The first true test of U.S. industry-government relations was an abject failure. In 1917, Congress passed a Hail Mary, $640 million “Aero Bill,” which at the time was the largest congressional appropriation ever.3 Industry was meant to fulfill the government’s vision of mass production of aircraft, but aircraft of the era were truly “crafts” made of wood and fabric and not ready for the assembly line. This problem was exacerbated by the decision to have industry manufacture foreign designs, as there were no cutting-edge American combat designs ready for mass production.
Building a foreign fighter and retooling a factory around it proved too challenging. The U.S. licensed the SPAD design from France and contracted Curtiss Aeroplane to manufacture it, but the firm was wholly unequipped to produce the thousands of fighters expected and nearly went bankrupt trying to do so. Its early units of SPADs were immediately declared “worse than useless,” and the Army Signal Corp told Curtiss to produce the British Bristol instead. But when Curtiss failed to produce a light enough version of the Bristol, it was back to the SPAD – this time, a new variant (The Politics of Aircraft, pgs 33-36).
Glenn L. Martin refused to commit to unreasonable production expectations, explaining it was only possible for his firm to manufacture three planes a day. He was blacklisted from the war effort until summer 1918 when the Army had him build prototypes of his excellent MB-1 bomber.
At the end of the war, the government did not receive anywhere near the value of aircraft for the money spent. Rather than consider that high technology aircraft were incompatible with mass production under the conditions, President Wilson, Congress, the media, and much of the War Department concluded the failed effort was a big business conspiracy to raid the wartime coffers of the government. It was the last time the industry operated largely unregulated.
The Interwar Years: The Myth of the Fungible Engineer
After WWI, the government decided it would no longer license foreign designs, but it did not learn any lessons about the difficulty of having one firm produce a different firm’s plane. In the interwar years, the root cause of industry’s struggles was the government’s decision to separate design contracts from production contracts.4 Ostensibly, this was to ensure there was competition at every phase of the acquisition, ensuring the best deal for Uncle Sam. In reality, the attempts to cleave R&D from production were disastrous for all parties. Here is how the process worked:
Firms would respond to government specifications with their paper designs and the estimated cost to build the prototype. The government would select two to four firms to build a prototype and have a fly-off. The government then acquired the design rights to the winning firm’s prototype. Firms consistently lost money on prototyping in the hope of making a profit on the production contract – provided they could win it, that is.
The government then held a separate competition to determine which firm(s) would produce the winner’s prototype. Production competitions were almost solely based on price. This meant the firm who had the winning prototype was at a huge disadvantage because it needed to amortize its design costs, so its production bid inevitably came in higher. The firm that won the contract for production received just the winner’s prototype and had to reverse engineer the blueprints; although as we will see, having the blueprints would have been of little use.
The government treated aircraft as standardized goods to be manufactured, but aircraft were not widgets. This decision to hold pure-price manufacturing competitions resulted in manufacturing failures that make Boeing’s recent plane window blowout look positively quaint (emphasis mine):
1) Martin sold his aforementioned excellent MB-1 prototype bomber to the Army at a loss. “In 1919 [he] was underbid by three contractors on the bomber’s production. Martin was given twenty to build anyway but lost money on the reduced volume, suspended the bomber’s development, and in disgust, declined to deal with the army until 1931. L.W.F. Engineering built fifty, Aeromarine built twenty-five, and Curtiss built fifty. The bombers in the field proved to be completely different airplanes of widely varying quality (The Politics of Aircraft, pg 59).”
2) “In 1923 Curtiss lost $182,000 on a $175,000 development contract for the successful navy Curtiss Scout …In the competition to build 40 Scouts, Curtiss submitted a bid of $32,000 per plane, but Glenn Martin won the contract at $23,000 apiece. Martin complained that the plane came with no blueprints but admitted that they would have been useless in his shop anyway. His staff drew up new blueprints and in the process produced anentirely new plane inferior in performanceto the Curtiss design(The Politics of Aircraft, pg 62).”
3) In 1919, the Ordnance Engineering Company developed Orenco-D, “the best pursuit in that day,” but Curtiss won production for 50 of the planes. “Ordnance Engineering liquidated; and the fifty planes built by Curtisshad to be destroyed as unsafe(The Politics of Aircraft, pg 59).”
4) “The demise of Thomas-Morse, the designer of a reasonably successful indigenous fighter design (based on the French SPAD), can be directly traced to the award of the production contract in 1921 to Boeing, which had little ability to design an advanced fighter but which underbid Morse on the production contract.”
And so the myth of the fungible engineer was born.
The myth holds that any worker is the same as any worker, and any production line is the same as any other production line. It’s a fundamentally un-American concept and reveals a captured, collectivist mindset. The belief that the sum total of innovation could be captured in a prototype or blueprint rather than in a network of humans doing exceptional things was demonstrably false. It didn’t matter that the government owned the most innovative aircraft designs – absent the designers, the prototypes were unlikely to be faithfully manufactured at scale.
It’s hard to overstate how damaging the myth of the fungible engineer is in a dynamic industry undergoing rapid technological change. With aircraft, a prototype was almost immediately rendered obsolete upon selection. Had the firm with the winning design been the one to manufacture it, it would have been able to incorporate new innovations during the manufacturing process. But the firm most able to manufacture the winning prototype was the least likely to win. The implications for innovation are clear: Firms were incentivized to keep a bare-bones design staff to minimize R&D expense, since there was no money to be made in designing the most innovative airplane.
To quoteFreedom’s Forge author Arthur Herman, “it’s through making things that we learn what can be made better, which is why the most productive companies also tend to be the most innovative.” In what appears to be an oxymoron, aircraft manufacturers were deprived of the opportunity to manufacture their aircraft. And because aviation is a relatively low volume industry, missing out on the limited military production orders of the interwar years had a high opportunity cost. As
If you’ve produced 1,000,000 of something, whether you make another 500 or 5,000 will make almost no difference in learning curve terms. But if you’ve only made 50 of something, making another 500 makes a huge difference in the level of cost reduction that can be achieved. Thus, if you only plan to sell a few hundred of something, a relatively small number of sales will have a large impact on how efficiently you’re producing and how profitable you are.
Separately competing design from production was a short-sighted acquisition strategy, although the taxpayer temporarily got a great deal. The government was paying less than the full cost for a prototype, and then it paid less than the full cost for production. Industry was subsidizing the government! But it was unsustainable for industry to operate unprofitably, and more importantly, it resulted in the warfighter getting a bad product. Note how the health of industry and national security share an intimate relationship.
Not everyone had blinders on. The legendary U.S. Navy Admiral Moffett, then director of the Bureau of Aeronautics and credited with introducing the aircraft carrier, believed “the distinction between design and production was meaningless and an obstacle to procurement” and “procurement laws dishonored the government.” Although price competition on manufacturing orders was the default, there were some loopholes that allowed for “negotiated contracts,” where a contracting officer (CO) could award the manufacturing contract to the firm with the winning prototype without a full competition. Moffett pushed for the use of negotiated contracts whenever possible, but extreme risk aversion from COs prevented them from being used with any regularity (The Politics of Aircraft, pg 86).
This piece is supposed to be focused on the origin story of the myth of the fungible engineer, but I can’t help but do a quick diversion on the origin story of the CYA, risk-averse, CO. Many will read the above manufacturing failures and ask how it’s possible that the COs – faced with such incontrovertible proof – would still pursue price competition over negotiated contracts. Were they simply useful idiots?
A closer examination of incentive structure reveals they were just acting rationally. Congressional scrutiny, allegations of wartime fraud, charges of favoritism or collusion, and an extra-long contract review process loomed large for the CO who went with the negotiated contract. It was much easier to pick the firm that could do it the cheapest – actually receiving the plane purchased was of secondary concern.
Things haven’t changed much, and we continue to encourage COs to adhere to process at the expense of outcome. As Pete Modigliani and Matt MacGregorwrite in their recent summary of the DoD Inspector General’s Audit of Cost-Plus-Award-Fee Contracts:
To conclude, in reviewing $32B of contracts, COs regularly did not follow policies, but still effectively managed the contracts for most of them, with a 0.015% of improper payments not fully justified in the contract files. As a result, DoD IG recommends increased oversight and controls. And people wonder why many COs are risk averse.
The Fungible Engineer is Alive and [Un]Well
I wish we could say we learned from this chapter in history, but the myth of the fungible engineer is the central tenet in acquisition today. We see it manifested in two ways. First, the government largely acquires software with a labor-based, butts-in-seats model that does not account for individual exceptionalism. From Trae Stephens still-relevant 2016 piece“Innovation Deficit: Why DC is Losing Silicon Valley”
The average Request for Proposal (RFP) involving software development services requires estimates on count of full-time equivalents (FTEs) who will be engaged in the effort, a “basis of estimate” (BOE) modeling FTEs, their labor categories, and the FTE blend deployed against RFP requirements and delivery dates (e.g. requirement “x” needs 2.5 engineers for 6 months to complete). This process massively disadvantages efficient and more talented teams. Because the talent gap between average and excellent is so large, it would generally be better to have one Lebron-level coder than to have 100 average ones.
Second, the government continues to equate ownership of source code, diagrams, and prototypes with innovation – once again, not realizing it is the networked people surrounding these artifacts that breathe life into them. While it is no longer an option for Boeing to bid on the production of Lockheed’s fighter, the pre-WWII mindset around the value of owning atoms has extended to owning bits. A recent report from the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) enumerates in meticulous detail different solicitations from the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) effectively boxing out commercial software by requiring aggressive ownership of IP – and these examples are just from a single government agency.5
Running and maintaining a software system is much closer to producing an aircraft at scale than it is to designing and delivering a prototype for a fly-off. Despite its proliferation of software factories, the government still has not internalized this point. For a thought experiment: if the government acquired the code base of OpenAI and turned it over to [insert favorite Systems Integrator], do you think said Systems Integrator would continue on OpenAI’s trajectory of building a next generation AI company? Relatedly, as any entrepreneur raising venture capital money for his/her startup will tell you, leading your pitch with a list of patents is not a winning strategy.
One final point. Right after WWII, there was a race by the Allies to seize as much knowledge from the Germans as possible. America’s “acquisition” of one Werner von Braun via Operation Paperclip was by far the most successful of these technology transfers. But America and the UK also pursued an expensive strategy of microfilming and translating millions of documents, which was not successful. France, who didn’t have the resources or political capital to pursue this strategy, instead embedded trainees into German research centers, maintaining the intangible value of a scientist’s network. This people-centric strategy was very successful for the French at a fraction of the cost.6
America has a deep bench of Founding Fathers and entrepreneurs we celebrate. China only has Mao, maybe Xi. They had to disappear Jack Ma because the CCP does not accommodate outliers. Our acquisition system should reject the myth of the fungible engineer and instead reflect the time-honored American tradition of elevating the individual over the collective.
Does anyone have a good essay about federalism—particularly the history of the US and how we have divided power between the federal governments and the states?
“Land value taxes are generally favored by economists as they do not cause economic inefficiency, and reduce inequality.[2] A land value tax is a progressive tax, in that the tax burden falls on land owners, because land ownership is correlated with wealth and income.[3][4] The land value tax has been referred to as “the perfect tax” and the economic efficiency of a land value tax has been accepted since the eighteenth century.[1][5][6] Economists since Adam Smith and David Ricardo have advocated this tax because it does not hurt economic activity, and encourages development without subsidies.”
Despite this rather glowing summary, and support by economists from Milton Friedman to Paul Krugman, land taxes are rare. The Economist explains:
“The bigger barrier is political. LVTs would impose concentrated costs on landowners [a politically powerful constituency], who face a new tax bill and reduced sale price. The benefit, by contrast, is spread equally over today’s population and future generations. The problem is unlikely to be overcome. Economists will continue to advocate LVTs, and politicians will continue to ignore them.”
Some jurisdictions have managed to implement land value taxes. Denmark and Estonia have a form of the tax, and a handful of municipalities in Pennsylvania (Allentown, Harrisburg, Altoona from 2009-2018ish and Pittsburgh from 1911-2000) have experimented with it or its cousin split-rate taxation. Split-rate taxation taxes both land and structures like a traditional property tax, though it taxes land at a higher rate (often 5:1) than structures.
I’m still researching various income streams for governments and I’m wondering: will income tax be the best way to tax in the future? (I’m thinking about remote work and how we might be taxed in one location but living in another one). Or are there governments who are pulling tax revenue from other unique places? Are there any good books or essays about unique tax structures that have worked well/make sense?
Experimental results from getting a 3yo interested in technology:
1. I bought her a little broom, which she liked, and then showed her that our robot vacuum could do the same work automatically, After a year she’s still not totally comfortable with the sound, and gets scared when it’s going towards her. Best decision we made was getting a model that did /not/ have a mobile app, instead using a remote control (I believe it was this model: https://us.eufy.com/products/t2108124?ref=navimenu_2_2_4_1_img). She has learned to walk over to the shelf, find the button which makes it return home, and carefully watch it until it docks. I stress that, even when it feels scary to her, she’s always in control because she can find the remote.
2. Assembled a LEGO-like robot dog after she got excited seeing one on YouTube, but again it was too loud for her, and she gets very skittish when a device is moving towards her.
3. She enjoys asking questions to Bing Chat. I hold up my phone and turn on Siri dication, which she’s learned to recognize. She asks her question and I use the keyboard to clean up the text, then submit. I read her the output. She mostly asks under-specified questions about plot points in her favorite books, but doesn’t mind that the answers are basically a re-hash of a given character’s Wikipedia page. She’s never gotten interested in image generation, contra my expectations, mostly DALL-E can’t do specific characters (I haven’t tried the others).
This book is “for babies” but it’s probably just about right for a 3yo. It is the best “STEM for babies” book I have ever seen, maybe the only one I really like: https://computerengineeringforbabies.com/
For anyone who’s interested: I’ll be teaching the next cohorts of The Foundations of New York soon! It’s an accelerated introduction into NYC government/law that also touches on dependencies at the state and federal levels. Class begins in mid-April and goes through May.
Some thoughts on Meaning & Modern Job Satisfaction
Jason recently shared a thread on the tension between the objective criteria that make work meaningful increasing while the subjective experience of perceived meaning of work seems to be decreasing. As with most things related to progress, much of this likely stems from a combination of rising expectations and the current emotional climate of pessimism. However, with the help of several conversations, I believe that I’ve identified two elements that may help further explain the gap between objective and subjective experiences.
I was talking about this with a friend — Ashley — who is an upper middle manager at Nike. She’s worked at Nike for 10+ years, with numerous promotions and “career success” by most standards, she enjoys her work, loves the people she works with and has a fairly high degree of autonomy. She’s also an athlete, mostly a runner, who engages in the running community and does Nike sponsored events every year.
Based on all of this — the mastery, autonomy, recognition, human connection and the intersection of her work with her personal life — Ashley should experience a high degree of meaning in her work, but she shared that she experiences almost no meaning. That said, she has no plans to leave and her job has lots of emotional upside including being supportive of her family life.
In digging into why, it largely came down to two things (that she did not enunciate exactly, but I summarize as):
Feeling 100% replaceable — Ashley explained how many people she’s seen come & go over the years and how professionally, its meant very little to Nike. They may be missed personally and there may be some short term pain from a transition, but that, in her words, ‘the whole point of the corporation is so that no individual matters. We are all replaceable — and that’s a feature.’
I can imagine a past where, even a low meaning job by today’s standard, would not have felt so replaceable. Growing up in a (very) small town, I can tell you with confidence that when the pizza place closed, no one starved, but it was MISSED in a way that even the most popular pizza place in a city never could be.
Genuine uncertainty of causing harm vs benefit — While Ashley can repeat the marketing premises (and, yes, Nike has an entire team whose sole purpose is to market internally, to employees), she is genuinely uncertain of whether Nike produces a net benefit on the world. She conceptually embraces the ideals of Nike, but does not trust that Nike acts in a manner that expresses those ideals consistently nor that it is even possible for Nike, within a capitalistic system, to act as a net-positive for society.
Anecdotally, I had a very different conversation with a friend who works at OpenAI that lead to a similar conclusion (s/he wishes to remain anonymous) . While he does not feel replaceable, he is very concerned about how his job has shifted to become significantly less meaningful and more challenging to be fully engaged with as his ethical concerns about the company and general concern about the future have increased in the last 8 months.
To beat a horse dead with anecdotes, my father, who mines garnet, finds enduring and genuine meaning from unlocking resources from their raw state into one that is usable. He feels little uncertainty about the net benefit of his work. Meanwhile many people that I meet in my day-to-day (highly educated / not ever going to be miners) are honestly appalled by the idea of mining, let alone that the mine is within the boundaries of a protected wilderness and generally view his work as detrimental, rather than beneficial (and thus not meaningful).
While both of these are highly subjective criteria, so is an individual’s assessment of meaning. Framing matters. I think that people, and especially younger generations, are weighed down by their genuinely uncertain about how to positively impact the world — and a huge chunk of that is what progress studies is looking to address! It’s also why, in my opinion, the clarity and confidence of the EA worldview was able to spread so rapidly.
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Here’s some research that dances around supporting the ideas, although I wasn’t able to find anything that nailed it in a cursory search:
You’re probably well aware of studies that indicate decreasing trust, which in turn leads to a dearth of confidence in the actions that will lead to their desired result. EG: the well supported idea that there is declining trust in institutions, scientists, and how greenwashing has / is significantly diminishing trust in corporate ethics (as well as scandals like ENRON, near disasters like the 2008 banking crisis, etc)
Interesting thread, but I draw a somewhat different conclusion: in the long run, we need a heat-management system for the Earth (and eventually, other planets). Managing CO2 is good but insufficient.
This is a linkpost for https://amistrongeryet.substack.com/p/alphaproof-and-openai-o1
The latest advances in AI reasoning come from OpenAI’s o1 and Google’s AlphaProof. In this post, I explore how these new models work, and what that tells us about the path to AGI.
Interestingly, unlike GPT-2 → GPT-3 → GPT-4, neither of these models rely on increased scale to drive capabilities. Instead, both systems rely on training data that shows, not just the solution to a problem, but the path to that solution. This opens a new frontier for progress in AI capabilities: how to create that sort of data?
In this post, I review what is known about how AlphaProof and o1 work, discuss the connection between their training data and their capabilities, and identify some problems that remain to be solved in order for capabilities to continue to progress along this path.
—Evgeny Sedukhin—“Symphony of the sixth blast furnace” (1979)
Hi,
My name is Sean and I’m just a fan of Roots of Progress. Just wanted to introduce myself. I’m a developer, founder, and I’m am trying to get into writing about agriculture and economics. I don’t see a lot of intro posts so I might get in trouble for posting this. But hi anyway!
Thanks Sean, and welcome!
Relevance of Management Science to Progress Studies
Two questions for anyone here with an interest in them:
How do people in the progress studies movement view the science of management?
Who else in the group (or the movement) might also interested in this subject, and what kinds of issues or questions seem to be paramount?
By “management” I’m referring to the process of administering and controlling the affairs of the organization, irrespective of its nature, type, and size.
Michael Webb
Chaotic Progress
A book review in essay format I wrote to help nuance what I see as the unrealistic rhetoric on both sides of the political spectrum right now.
https://www.symmetrybroken.com/chaotic-progress/
What have been the longest scientific experiments? What would be worthwhile 25-year experiments?
I want someone to write an actual post on this but would also be happy to hear some initial, short answers.
I remember reading something on this or hearing these points made in a podcast but can’t recall the source!
There’s a long-ish exploration of this in Grand Futures ch. 1 (Details box 7), focusing on long-term projects in general. I’m eliding some footnotes and not linking the citations, for writing speed reasons:
I would add the (finished) ig-nobel price-worthy knuckle-cracking experiment by Donald Unger.
LINKDUMP
https://latecomermag.com/article/what-happened-to-molecular-manufacturing/
https://www.leversforprogress.com/
forum.quantifiedself.com
SOME RANDOM LINKS:
https://logancollinsblog.com/2023/08/31/logans-catalog-of-useful-resources-for-creating-the-future/
https://curius.app/alex-k-chen
https://nanoscale.blogspot.com/
https://blog.spec.tech/p/speculative-technologies-2023-year
SOME interesting people:
orthogonal to the popular ML/DL/AI people [or orthogonal to “scaling is all you need” people]
https://hillelwayne.com/post/ [he’s also in the jkoppel/predrag circuit]
[also I listed some on LW]
https://github.com/VictorTaelin
https://gist.github.com/VictorTaelin/9061306220929f04e7e6980f23ade615
https://higherorderco.com/
more in the PC of popular ML/DL/AI/”scaling is all you need” people
https://www.yitay.net/blog/2022-best-nlp-papers
https://bzolang.blog/p/the-lattice-topology-correspondence?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web
impt progress studies links
https://twitter.com/nc_znc/status/1768332511073980474
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2024/03/14/ai-55-keep-clauding-along/#more-23740
https://worldmodels.github.io/
https://titotal.substack.com/p/bandgaps-brains-and-bioweapons-the
important links (this is really the best place for me to post/update them rn)
https://perlara.substack.com/p/low-dose-statin-as-a-potential-treatment
https://ucatapp.notion.site/uCat-Transcend-the-Limits-of-Body-Time-and-Space-e8fc2d280f844692b957214f22663721#a31a28f53dec437393335748bc60a721
https://taylorpearson.me/ergodicity/
https://cen.acs.org/materials/2-d-materials/Mighty-MXenes-ready-launch/102/i9?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR24Mz0Da5pN1JvMS-D4yrdAzs33HxsHorqOUqGiPZwTYCvdGSuYTfNFJ78_aem_ASNMecqGLtqIPvtZ-rz2mDb9TEFa-MwAOCmTs5naQ2icnni88hXJR5yAOZlN_gqSn8evHiU6QWH8hJrNt7GsU-8W
https://www.wired.com/story/fast-forward-chatgpt-hunger-energy-gpu-revolution/
sid mani
Tunadorable
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26234870-200-the-man-reinventing-economics-with-chaos-theory-and-complexity-science/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0Qp9R1Wn7iMwnvguVYLVrXfQesEdm4_gi8VZjU56xQwElVjKSQ9lmhx9s_aem_ASNm3CMqD9owMvrbpo2zQM4nxlGrfH2mFE1OQxO6ldXUc9UOxtM-pue91H3Qtl5BaxalsNP8sFnX82dRnEzWi_Ap
Adam Green of markov.bio
LLM content
https://api.together.xyz/playground/chat/meta-llama/Llama-2-70b-chat-hf
310.ai
https://cen.acs.org/materials/2-d-materials/Mighty-MXenes-ready-launch/102/i9
Novelties
websim.ai
There should be some kind of official recognition + prize for people providing public goods on the Internet. There exist prizes for free software and open-source projects, but this does not cover even remotely the amount of intangible value people can deliver on the Internet.
Examples include: https://avherald.com, but also a lot of open-source projects. and maybe people like patio11, gwern, Lilian Weng, or Bartosz Ciechanowski. Some YouTubers would also likely qualify, but I’m not very familiar with the medium.
Theory of change: just increase the rate of reminders to people that if they are highly competent and passionate about something not directly marketable, the Internet has made it so that they can easily increase the amount of beauty in the world by making their passion a public project.
Counterargument #2: AI obsoletes creation of cool stuff on the Internet.
Response: on the contrary, in many possible futures (esp. with constraints on agency), AI empowers people to deliver beauty to others, by automating all except the things they are passionate about. Motivation becomes more of a bottleneck.
Also, these types of public goods are some of the things that make me most proud of the current human civilization. I’m sure many here will agree. Even if we lose that in the future, I think it still matters, even as some sort of nod to the things we used to value in the past.
Tyler Cowen did something like this for covid: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/03/1-million-plus-in-emergent-ventures-prizes-for-coronavirus-work.html
Counterargument #1: it might be better to incentivize people to run actual companies that deliver business value.
Response: there is so much value to be created that is hard to capture via current market structures. There are many people passionate about things that fall into this category.
America’s First Dual-Use Technology
This is a linkpost for https://kinetic.reviews/p/americas-first-dual-use-technology
With disintegrating 737s in the news, a lot of people are wondering how things got so bad. I’m here to rewind the clock 100+ years to reassure everyone that the aviation industry has always been beset by challenged business models, bad incentives, and shoddy aircraft.
From the first takeoff in 1903 through the late 1920s, “dual-use” aircraft were merely a promise – there was no commercial aviation market. There was, in fact, barely any U.S. market, and it was the inherent appeal of aviation that attracted both entrepreneurs and capital.1 As nascent markets for passenger transport and airmail transport emerged, so too did the first dual-use application for bombers, accelerating innovation in the early 1930s. Fighters did not lend themselves as nicely to commercial applications, and absent a procurement strategy and meaningful expenditures from either the Army or the Navy, U.S. fighters at the time of Pearl Harbor were inferior to their German and Japanese counterparts.
The mythos surrounding the Wright Brothers, Charles Lindberg, and successful mass production during WWII belies the reality of a pre-WWII aviation industry plagued by poor policies and dysfunctional relations between the government and manufacturers. The Army and Navy remained tepid – often hostile – buyers right up until the outbreak of WWII, and in partnership with Congress, they managed to inflict maximum abuse on manufacturers. During the interwar years, industry subsidized the military for both the development and production of aircraft, losing lots of money along the way. In return, manufacturers were deprived of their intellectual property rights and accused of graft and wartime profiteering. Acquisition law was so punitive towards aircraft manufacturers as late as 1939 that firms were convinced it was a conspiracy led by the automotive industry. It wasn’t.
Early on, there were some Cassandras: “In 1919 Secretary of War Baker called for a long term procurement program for military aircraft and warned Congress that “it cannot be expected that industry will long engage in an unremunerative line,” but he underestimated the aircraft manufacturers for whom the industry’s appeal defied rational calculation (The Politics of Aircraft, pg 45).”2 Indeed, the optimism-cum-masochism of early aviation entrepreneurs (e.g., Douglas, Grumman, Martin, etc.) enabled bad policy to persist.
The military-industrial complex as we know it did not exist prior to WWII, yet this period serves as a reflecting pool for the best and worst attributes of our modern defense industry.
Pre-WWI and WWI
During the first decade of the twentieth century, the U.S. led the world in heavier-than-air aircraft. We ceded this early lead to Europe in part because of patent disputes between the Wrights and Curtiss and in part because of late entry into WWI. However, even before the outbreak of war, Europe showed a much greater interest in the military utility of aviation. From 1909-1911, the U.S. Army owned one military aircraft. In comparison, France owned over 250 planes by 1912. By the time the U.S. entered the war, its domestic aircraft industry was so far behind that of its peers that the U.S. almost exclusively used foreign combat aircraft of French or British design, with the American Expeditionary Force flying the French SPAD. (The U.S. Combat Aircraft Industry, 1909-2000).
The first true test of U.S. industry-government relations was an abject failure. In 1917, Congress passed a Hail Mary, $640 million “Aero Bill,” which at the time was the largest congressional appropriation ever.3 Industry was meant to fulfill the government’s vision of mass production of aircraft, but aircraft of the era were truly “crafts” made of wood and fabric and not ready for the assembly line. This problem was exacerbated by the decision to have industry manufacture foreign designs, as there were no cutting-edge American combat designs ready for mass production.
Building a foreign fighter and retooling a factory around it proved too challenging. The U.S. licensed the SPAD design from France and contracted Curtiss Aeroplane to manufacture it, but the firm was wholly unequipped to produce the thousands of fighters expected and nearly went bankrupt trying to do so. Its early units of SPADs were immediately declared “worse than useless,” and the Army Signal Corp told Curtiss to produce the British Bristol instead. But when Curtiss failed to produce a light enough version of the Bristol, it was back to the SPAD – this time, a new variant (The Politics of Aircraft, pgs 33-36).
Glenn L. Martin refused to commit to unreasonable production expectations, explaining it was only possible for his firm to manufacture three planes a day. He was blacklisted from the war effort until summer 1918 when the Army had him build prototypes of his excellent MB-1 bomber.
At the end of the war, the government did not receive anywhere near the value of aircraft for the money spent. Rather than consider that high technology aircraft were incompatible with mass production under the conditions, President Wilson, Congress, the media, and much of the War Department concluded the failed effort was a big business conspiracy to raid the wartime coffers of the government. It was the last time the industry operated largely unregulated.
The Interwar Years: The Myth of the Fungible Engineer
After WWI, the government decided it would no longer license foreign designs, but it did not learn any lessons about the difficulty of having one firm produce a different firm’s plane. In the interwar years, the root cause of industry’s struggles was the government’s decision to separate design contracts from production contracts.4 Ostensibly, this was to ensure there was competition at every phase of the acquisition, ensuring the best deal for Uncle Sam. In reality, the attempts to cleave R&D from production were disastrous for all parties. Here is how the process worked:
Firms would respond to government specifications with their paper designs and the estimated cost to build the prototype. The government would select two to four firms to build a prototype and have a fly-off. The government then acquired the design rights to the winning firm’s prototype. Firms consistently lost money on prototyping in the hope of making a profit on the production contract – provided they could win it, that is.
The government then held a separate competition to determine which firm(s) would produce the winner’s prototype. Production competitions were almost solely based on price. This meant the firm who had the winning prototype was at a huge disadvantage because it needed to amortize its design costs, so its production bid inevitably came in higher. The firm that won the contract for production received just the winner’s prototype and had to reverse engineer the blueprints; although as we will see, having the blueprints would have been of little use.
The government treated aircraft as standardized goods to be manufactured, but aircraft were not widgets. This decision to hold pure-price manufacturing competitions resulted in manufacturing failures that make Boeing’s recent plane window blowout look positively quaint (emphasis mine):
1) Martin sold his aforementioned excellent MB-1 prototype bomber to the Army at a loss. “In 1919 [he] was underbid by three contractors on the bomber’s production. Martin was given twenty to build anyway but lost money on the reduced volume, suspended the bomber’s development, and in disgust, declined to deal with the army until 1931. L.W.F. Engineering built fifty, Aeromarine built twenty-five, and Curtiss built fifty. The bombers in the field proved to be completely different airplanes of widely varying quality (The Politics of Aircraft, pg 59).”
2) “In 1923 Curtiss lost $182,000 on a $175,000 development contract for the successful navy Curtiss Scout …In the competition to build 40 Scouts, Curtiss submitted a bid of $32,000 per plane, but Glenn Martin won the contract at $23,000 apiece. Martin complained that the plane came with no blueprints but admitted that they would have been useless in his shop anyway. His staff drew up new blueprints and in the process produced an entirely new plane inferior in performance to the Curtiss design (The Politics of Aircraft, pg 62).”
3) In 1919, the Ordnance Engineering Company developed Orenco-D, “the best pursuit in that day,” but Curtiss won production for 50 of the planes. “Ordnance Engineering liquidated; and the fifty planes built by Curtiss had to be destroyed as unsafe (The Politics of Aircraft, pg 59).”
4) “The demise of Thomas-Morse, the designer of a reasonably successful indigenous fighter design (based on the French SPAD), can be directly traced to the award of the production contract in 1921 to Boeing, which had little ability to design an advanced fighter but which underbid Morse on the production contract.”
And so the myth of the fungible engineer was born.
The myth holds that any worker is the same as any worker, and any production line is the same as any other production line. It’s a fundamentally un-American concept and reveals a captured, collectivist mindset. The belief that the sum total of innovation could be captured in a prototype or blueprint rather than in a network of humans doing exceptional things was demonstrably false. It didn’t matter that the government owned the most innovative aircraft designs – absent the designers, the prototypes were unlikely to be faithfully manufactured at scale.
It’s hard to overstate how damaging the myth of the fungible engineer is in a dynamic industry undergoing rapid technological change. With aircraft, a prototype was almost immediately rendered obsolete upon selection. Had the firm with the winning design been the one to manufacture it, it would have been able to incorporate new innovations during the manufacturing process. But the firm most able to manufacture the winning prototype was the least likely to win. The implications for innovation are clear: Firms were incentivized to keep a bare-bones design staff to minimize R&D expense, since there was no money to be made in designing the most innovative airplane.
To quote Freedom’s Forge author Arthur Herman, “it’s through making things that we learn what can be made better, which is why the most productive companies also tend to be the most innovative.” In what appears to be an oxymoron, aircraft manufacturers were deprived of the opportunity to manufacture their aircraft. And because aviation is a relatively low volume industry, missing out on the limited military production orders of the interwar years had a high opportunity cost. As
Brian Potter writes on production learning curves:
Separately competing design from production was a short-sighted acquisition strategy, although the taxpayer temporarily got a great deal. The government was paying less than the full cost for a prototype, and then it paid less than the full cost for production. Industry was subsidizing the government! But it was unsustainable for industry to operate unprofitably, and more importantly, it resulted in the warfighter getting a bad product. Note how the health of industry and national security share an intimate relationship.
Not everyone had blinders on. The legendary U.S. Navy Admiral Moffett, then director of the Bureau of Aeronautics and credited with introducing the aircraft carrier, believed “the distinction between design and production was meaningless and an obstacle to procurement” and “procurement laws dishonored the government.” Although price competition on manufacturing orders was the default, there were some loopholes that allowed for “negotiated contracts,” where a contracting officer (CO) could award the manufacturing contract to the firm with the winning prototype without a full competition. Moffett pushed for the use of negotiated contracts whenever possible, but extreme risk aversion from COs prevented them from being used with any regularity (The Politics of Aircraft, pg 86).
This piece is supposed to be focused on the origin story of the myth of the fungible engineer, but I can’t help but do a quick diversion on the origin story of the CYA, risk-averse, CO. Many will read the above manufacturing failures and ask how it’s possible that the COs – faced with such incontrovertible proof – would still pursue price competition over negotiated contracts. Were they simply useful idiots?
A closer examination of incentive structure reveals they were just acting rationally. Congressional scrutiny, allegations of wartime fraud, charges of favoritism or collusion, and an extra-long contract review process loomed large for the CO who went with the negotiated contract. It was much easier to pick the firm that could do it the cheapest – actually receiving the plane purchased was of secondary concern.
Things haven’t changed much, and we continue to encourage COs to adhere to process at the expense of outcome. As Pete Modigliani and Matt MacGregor write in their recent summary of the DoD Inspector General’s Audit of Cost-Plus-Award-Fee Contracts:
The Fungible Engineer is Alive and [Un]Well
I wish we could say we learned from this chapter in history, but the myth of the fungible engineer is the central tenet in acquisition today. We see it manifested in two ways. First, the government largely acquires software with a labor-based, butts-in-seats model that does not account for individual exceptionalism. From Trae Stephens still-relevant 2016 piece “Innovation Deficit: Why DC is Losing Silicon Valley”
Second, the government continues to equate ownership of source code, diagrams, and prototypes with innovation – once again, not realizing it is the networked people surrounding these artifacts that breathe life into them. While it is no longer an option for Boeing to bid on the production of Lockheed’s fighter, the pre-WWII mindset around the value of owning atoms has extended to owning bits. A recent report from the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) enumerates in meticulous detail different solicitations from the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) effectively boxing out commercial software by requiring aggressive ownership of IP – and these examples are just from a single government agency.5
Running and maintaining a software system is much closer to producing an aircraft at scale than it is to designing and delivering a prototype for a fly-off. Despite its proliferation of software factories, the government still has not internalized this point. For a thought experiment: if the government acquired the code base of OpenAI and turned it over to [insert favorite Systems Integrator], do you think said Systems Integrator would continue on OpenAI’s trajectory of building a next generation AI company? Relatedly, as any entrepreneur raising venture capital money for his/her startup will tell you, leading your pitch with a list of patents is not a winning strategy.
One final point. Right after WWII, there was a race by the Allies to seize as much knowledge from the Germans as possible. America’s “acquisition” of one Werner von Braun via Operation Paperclip was by far the most successful of these technology transfers. But America and the UK also pursued an expensive strategy of microfilming and translating millions of documents, which was not successful. France, who didn’t have the resources or political capital to pursue this strategy, instead embedded trainees into German research centers, maintaining the intangible value of a scientist’s network. This people-centric strategy was very successful for the French at a fraction of the cost.6
America has a deep bench of Founding Fathers and entrepreneurs we celebrate. China only has Mao, maybe Xi. They had to disappear Jack Ma because the CCP does not accommodate outliers. Our acquisition system should reject the myth of the fungible engineer and instead reflect the time-honored American tradition of elevating the individual over the collective.
How do you optimize your life for serendipity?
Ken Stanley has a new social network and I asked the question here: https://app.heymaven.com/discover/25623
But progress studies forum should have more people who can answer this (esp b/c serendipity and progress are both close allies)
I’m working on an essay on patents and progress. Does anyone want to give it a read and give me some feedback?
Does anyone have a good essay about federalism—particularly the history of the US and how we have divided power between the federal governments and the states?
Despite this rather glowing summary, and support by economists from Milton Friedman to Paul Krugman, land taxes are rare. The Economist explains:
Some jurisdictions have managed to implement land value taxes. Denmark and Estonia have a form of the tax, and a handful of municipalities in Pennsylvania (Allentown, Harrisburg, Altoona from 2009-2018ish and Pittsburgh from 1911-2000) have experimented with it or its cousin split-rate taxation. Split-rate taxation taxes both land and structures like a traditional property tax, though it taxes land at a higher rate (often 5:1) than structures.
Thank you so much, this is very helpful!
I’m still researching various income streams for governments and I’m wondering: will income tax be the best way to tax in the future? (I’m thinking about remote work and how we might be taxed in one location but living in another one). Or are there governments who are pulling tax revenue from other unique places? Are there any good books or essays about unique tax structures that have worked well/make sense?
You will hear a lot about Georgism which advocates a tax on the (unimproved) value of land. This might be a starting point: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty
Thank you!
Experimental results from getting a 3yo interested in technology:
1. I bought her a little broom, which she liked, and then showed her that our robot vacuum could do the same work automatically, After a year she’s still not totally comfortable with the sound, and gets scared when it’s going towards her. Best decision we made was getting a model that did /not/ have a mobile app, instead using a remote control (I believe it was this model: https://us.eufy.com/products/t2108124?ref=navimenu_2_2_4_1_img). She has learned to walk over to the shelf, find the button which makes it return home, and carefully watch it until it docks. I stress that, even when it feels scary to her, she’s always in control because she can find the remote.
2. Assembled a LEGO-like robot dog after she got excited seeing one on YouTube, but again it was too loud for her, and she gets very skittish when a device is moving towards her.
3. She enjoys asking questions to Bing Chat. I hold up my phone and turn on Siri dication, which she’s learned to recognize. She asks her question and I use the keyboard to clean up the text, then submit. I read her the output. She mostly asks under-specified questions about plot points in her favorite books, but doesn’t mind that the answers are basically a re-hash of a given character’s Wikipedia page. She’s never gotten interested in image generation, contra my expectations, mostly DALL-E can’t do specific characters (I haven’t tried the others).
This book is “for babies” but it’s probably just about right for a 3yo. It is the best “STEM for babies” book I have ever seen, maybe the only one I really like: https://computerengineeringforbabies.com/
Please let me know how to delete my account and all comments and posts related to it. Much appreciated
For anyone who’s interested: I’ll be teaching the next cohorts of The Foundations of New York soon! It’s an accelerated introduction into NYC government/law that also touches on dependencies at the state and federal levels. Class begins in mid-April and goes through May.
https://maximumnewyork.substack.com/p/the-foundations-of-new-york-applications
Some thoughts on Meaning & Modern Job Satisfaction
Jason recently shared a thread on the tension between the objective criteria that make work meaningful increasing while the subjective experience of perceived meaning of work seems to be decreasing. As with most things related to progress, much of this likely stems from a combination of rising expectations and the current emotional climate of pessimism. However, with the help of several conversations, I believe that I’ve identified two elements that may help further explain the gap between objective and subjective experiences.
I was talking about this with a friend — Ashley — who is an upper middle manager at Nike. She’s worked at Nike for 10+ years, with numerous promotions and “career success” by most standards, she enjoys her work, loves the people she works with and has a fairly high degree of autonomy. She’s also an athlete, mostly a runner, who engages in the running community and does Nike sponsored events every year.
Based on all of this — the mastery, autonomy, recognition, human connection and the intersection of her work with her personal life — Ashley should experience a high degree of meaning in her work, but she shared that she experiences almost no meaning. That said, she has no plans to leave and her job has lots of emotional upside including being supportive of her family life.
In digging into why, it largely came down to two things (that she did not enunciate exactly, but I summarize as):
Feeling 100% replaceable — Ashley explained how many people she’s seen come & go over the years and how professionally, its meant very little to Nike. They may be missed personally and there may be some short term pain from a transition, but that, in her words, ‘the whole point of the corporation is so that no individual matters. We are all replaceable — and that’s a feature.’
I can imagine a past where, even a low meaning job by today’s standard, would not have felt so replaceable. Growing up in a (very) small town, I can tell you with confidence that when the pizza place closed, no one starved, but it was MISSED in a way that even the most popular pizza place in a city never could be.
Genuine uncertainty of causing harm vs benefit — While Ashley can repeat the marketing premises (and, yes, Nike has an entire team whose sole purpose is to market internally, to employees), she is genuinely uncertain of whether Nike produces a net benefit on the world. She conceptually embraces the ideals of Nike, but does not trust that Nike acts in a manner that expresses those ideals consistently nor that it is even possible for Nike, within a capitalistic system, to act as a net-positive for society.
Anecdotally, I had a very different conversation with a friend who works at OpenAI that lead to a similar conclusion (s/he wishes to remain anonymous) . While he does not feel replaceable, he is very concerned about how his job has shifted to become significantly less meaningful and more challenging to be fully engaged with as his ethical concerns about the company and general concern about the future have increased in the last 8 months.
To beat a horse dead with anecdotes, my father, who mines garnet, finds enduring and genuine meaning from unlocking resources from their raw state into one that is usable. He feels little uncertainty about the net benefit of his work. Meanwhile many people that I meet in my day-to-day (highly educated / not ever going to be miners) are honestly appalled by the idea of mining, let alone that the mine is within the boundaries of a protected wilderness and generally view his work as detrimental, rather than beneficial (and thus not meaningful).
While both of these are highly subjective criteria, so is an individual’s assessment of meaning. Framing matters. I think that people, and especially younger generations, are weighed down by their genuinely uncertain about how to positively impact the world — and a huge chunk of that is what progress studies is looking to address! It’s also why, in my opinion, the clarity and confidence of the EA worldview was able to spread so rapidly.
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Here’s some research that dances around supporting the ideas, although I wasn’t able to find anything that nailed it in a cursory search:
You’re probably well aware of studies that indicate decreasing trust, which in turn leads to a dearth of confidence in the actions that will lead to their desired result. EG: the well supported idea that there is declining trust in institutions, scientists, and how greenwashing has / is significantly diminishing trust in corporate ethics (as well as scandals like ENRON, near disasters like the 2008 banking crisis, etc)
Here is an HBR thought piece about potential relationships between talent & corporations that is relevant Plus a Quora thread on “Are employees really replaceable?” that I think highlights normal people’s thoughts on it (clue — YES!)
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As one further, bonus anecdote, Ryan Holiday just wrote a piece about completely changing his marketing strategy to align with building a more meaningful life.
This hackernews thread about working at the DoE national labs gives a positive impression of them although with some caveats
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34414527
Really interesting twitter thread on the thermodynamics of thermal energy sources(like coal and nuclear). The tldr is that at reasonably large scales (like 10x current energy) thermal energy sources would lead to ~0.3 deg C warming, which implies potential thermodynamic limits to energy growth (and the importance of renewable energy which is non-thermal e.g. solar, wind)
Interesting thread, but I draw a somewhat different conclusion: in the long run, we need a heat-management system for the Earth (and eventually, other planets). Managing CO2 is good but insufficient.
There are also some replies contesting the original claims, e.g.: https://twitter.com/EnergyJvd/status/1608898973313699840