Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity. Really into this whole progress thing.
elidourado
Eli Dourado AMA
Why progress needs futurism
Maybe a little bit of naïveté is good.
FAA’s safety philosophy and progress in personal aviation
State capacity eats interest rates for lunch
It’s true, the Supreme Court has ruled against vetocracy with NEPA every time, usually unanimously. I think for potential litigants, there isn’t much value in going all the way to the Supreme Court. It’s possible the court won’t hear your case, so you have to take steps to comply with the lower court’s ruling anyway. Once you’re doing that, spending more on litigation isn’t going to get you anything; you can always just fix the EIS and move forward.
In other words, taking a case to the Supreme Court for the purpose of setting a new precedent is a public good, and a lot of people don’t supply public goods all by themselves.
Great question.
I am glad the progress movement is still decentralized and organic. It’s more a community of fellow-travelers than a centralized organization setting priorities and allocating funding. I feel like I gain a lot from people in the community who are pursuing very different approaches than I am, and I don’t want that to stop.
I think being organic is better for influencing the culture in the long run. For getting specific things done, if we ever agree on what is to be done, we may need to think about some light centralization at some point.
In the short term, I am doing some geothermal projects, and then possibly writing a book.
Longer term, I have a lot I’d like to do. If I ever found myself in a position where I could seize real power, I would take it and use it to promote progressy things.
I really enjoy the part of my job where I talk to people working on promising hard tech startups; often they need a bit of advice or some introductions to people in my network. I’d like to do more to help them, as they are often brought into contact with the barriers and obstacles I spend so much time thinking about.
I do wish someone else besides me would start a cargo airship company and do it right, with iterative design and a focus on getting to 500+ tons of cargo as quickly as possible.
A very important question is how long solar prices can continue to drop.
Assuming it continues a while, I have questions about whether it makes sense to transmit electricity long distances in such a world. A lot of smart people think transmission is very important to the clean energy buildout, but I don’t know. Transmission adds a fair bit of cost, and if solar gets cheap then it might make sense to pay the rooftop premium rather than the transmission premium.
So if solar keeps dropping in price, it may make sense to have rooftop solar everywhere + off-grid solar to power industrial applications.
Gigawatt-scale nuclear I think we could do for LCOE of 2¢/kWh if the industry and regulations were not so dysfunctional. Modular reactors will always be more expensive than that (maybe 4¢ best-case scenario), but the advantage of modular is that you reach some level of scale in manufacturing and deployment, which is where gigawatt-scale has really sucked (every gigawatt plant is bespoke). Modular is also better because you don’t have to do as much transmission as in a GW-scale plant.
If we get good at drilling holes in the ground, I think 3¢/kWh almost anywhere on the planet would be a good target for advanced geothermal. Also comes with the advantage of not having to worry about spent fuels and nuclear proliferation. Geothermal is also fantastic for low-grade heat needed for certain industrial processes like paper mills.
Wind is already pretty cheap, but it relies heavily on long-distance transmission, which as I’ve noted is a headache.
For mobile applications, high-density batteries are definitely possible. Batteries that have near the energy density of liquid hydrocarbon fuels have already been made in the lab, the challenge is switching over the manufacturing system and reaching scale.
Synthesizing liquid hydrocarbons is a great solution, especially until really high-density batteries arrive. I believe I bought the first quantity of zero-carbon jet fuel in the world when I was at Boom.
As a writer: influencing other people, building consensus on what the problems are, building a network of people that are aligned.
As a researcher: coming up with highly-specific policy solutions to an important problem. Ideally, this would be a small, non-controversial provision that someone could slip into a bill unnoticed.
So for example, I have written a lot about the problems with NEPA and permitting, and I think there’s been a consensus developed among a big chunk of the political spectrum that it’s a real problem and we need to fix it. At the same time, I have been trying to push a specific fix for geothermal permitting, which is to give it the same categorical exclusion that oil and gas has.
Two different kinds of change, and I try to do both, but succeeding at the latter is rare and extremely valuable such that if you do it only a few times in your life that is a successful career.
On career switching: I would advise people to look less at creating a coherent career, where there is a logical progression from one step to the next, and to instead just find a job that interests and inspires you to do your very best work. My own career has been pretty haphazard: I was going to be a professor, then no just kidding I’m going to do nonprofit policy research, then oh no I am going to work at a startup, then back to policy research. None of this was part of a deliberate plan.
One heuristic that I think works well:
1. What do you think is the single most interesting thing going on right now?
2. How can you put yourself at the center of that thing?
Given the trade you’ve laid out, I’d take the scientific breakthroughs.
I think there is no agency to regulate nanotech, so it would be a “born free” industry, and we’d see a lot of rapid progress. Benevolent AI too. On the cancer and aging cures, yes, FDA is broken, but they’d get through approval in several years, and then we’d have them.
I do think, however, that the policy environment is worth many years of R&D breakthroughs, perhaps 10 or more. We’d get a revitalized transportation and energy industry, dirt cheap housing, better consumer health tech, and a faster rate of R&D development going forward. It wouldn’t take much unbalancing of the scales to make me flip the answer.
I think the biggest obstacle is FDA clearance for these devices.
The FDA seems to be concerned about people using consumer-grade products to make medical decisions. Let’s say Apple or Google release a smart watch with non-invasive blood glucose capability. Maybe it’s not perfectly accurate, but still useful information for non-diabetics to see how their blood glucose spikes after eating and to monitor the speed at which the body clears out the glucose.
If a diabetic customer starts giving themselves insulin shots based on the watch instead of a measurement from a medical device, that could be bad. Therefore, FDA is very restrictive about devices that report medically-relevant facts, even if there are disclaimers that they should not be used for medical purposes.
So it’s a slog to get the new non-invasive tech to be as accurate as medical-grade tech, to prove that they are equally accurate, and/or to get FDA to sign off on disclaimers that say the data shouldn’t be used to administer medication, etc.
I still think we’ll get there. There’s some info online about the Apple/Rockley Photonics partnership. You can expect a future Apple Watch to have not only its current sensor suite but also measurements for blood pressure, blood alcohol, lactate, and glucose. Blood pressure in the next 2 years, the rest maybe a couple of years later.
Why aren’t insurance companies paying for it yet? I think the current device sensor suite isn’t high enough on cost-benefit for them yet. As prices come down and the new capabilities are added, it seems like a no-brainer. Like in 2035 a device with all the capabilities I described above might be $100. Probably worth it then.
Good catch. Looks like in the district court Geertson sued federal officials as per usual but Monsanto filed a motion to intervene and join the case.
I think the kinds of tests that prove that a human is intelligent or sentient or whatever are not the same as the kinds of tests that prove a computer program is sentient.
For example, imagine a test where we timed the test-taker on how long it takes to multiply two 8-digit numbers together. For most humans, this would take several minutes. For even a dollar-store calculator, it would take under a second.
For many decades, Alan Turing’s proposal that a computer that could converse indistinguishably from humans would be a sign of human-level sentience and intelligence was widely accepted. I myself thought, “Sure, sounds good,” when I first heard of it.
But actually, it turns out that carrying out a conversation for machines is easier than we thought. There is no real cognition going on inside ChatGPT. It is spitting out answers based on a statistical function trained on encoded inputs and outputs.
I think it is quite possible that an AI will achieve a 98th percentile score on a Mensa test by 2028 (maybe earlier). What I don’t think is that that will be a sign of human-level sentience or intelligence. It’s a sign of being able to mimic a few salient aspects of human intelligence.
To get to parity with human brain experience, we need several orders of magnitude higher computational efficiency to match neurons. We don’t need to get there all the way on efficiency; we can do some by burning more energy. Even so, it will take a couple of decades in my estimation.
And even so, there is still the possibility that we don’t really understand how the neurons work and we could be way off base! Michael Levin has pointed out that a caterpillar essentially disassociates its brain to become a butterfly, and yet somehow it retains at least some memories. I think we are far from really grokking it.
1. Deregulate land use (YIMBY stuff)
2. Make transportation insanely great: eVTOL, supersonics, small airports with minimal screening, autonomous dynamic bus service
3. Lower the cost of clinical trials and expand freedom to go around the FDA through informed consent
4. Reform permitting/abolish NEPA/end vetocracy
5. Energy abundance/fix the NRC/fix the nuclear industry/expand geothermal/deploy solar
6. Make government that works and is run by grown-ups (I am a big fan of ranked choice voting for this)
7. Big increases in immigration, with concessions to the xenophobes that immigrants probably need to speak English and get deported if they commit serious crimes
8. End make-work policies that are embedded in almost every sector
9. Make sure safety rules are at least actually adding safety instead of safety theater
Agreed, Jason. I’ll add that it’s trendy among the longtermists to speak of biosecurity, but it seems obvious to me that the FDA, not the legality of admittedly dangerous research, is the biggest obstacle to genuine biosecurity. We could have had vaccines for Covid by spring 2020, and without Eroom’s Law we might have had them by January 2020. And we could have had strain updates in real time. So an agency that was designed to make us safe made us less safe, and many people focused on safety in this domain continue to miss the forest for the trees. Often arguments about safety are problematic because of these kinds of failures, not because safety isn’t a valuable form of progress (it is).
Stuart, I’m not seeing how it is a conflict per se to prescribe actions that would generate progress and also study what has worked to generate progress.
In the example you give, certain advocates of charter or public schools skew research on what creates valuable opportunities for children when they give advice. But the problem is that their true objective function isn’t aligned with their stated objective function. They claim their goal is to advance opportunities for children, but what they really want is to promote or impede charter schools. So they skew their advice in service of their real motive while couching it in terms of their stated motive.
This could happen in progress studies as well. Suppose a progress studier’s true commitment is not really to progress, but rather to libertarianism or leftism. Then they might put forward policy solutions in the language of progress studies that actually advance their other political commitment at the expense of progress. We should be wary of this.
Yet to fully separate the functions of research and advocacy will never work. It may be fine if there are at least a few people working in ivory towers who are solely studying what works to produce progress. But things immediately get muddier when you introduce any advocacy at all. Suppose I tried to be a pure advocate, and that my true goal is to advocate for policies that advance progress. Where am I supposed to find these policies? Probably I will need to read a lot of stuff on what works to drive progress. Even if there is a well-functioning pure academic progress studies community, I would at minimum need to read a lot of the papers and evaluate the literature, essentially doing my own meta-analysis. That’s basically research. Given the current state of the field, advocates probably have to go even deeper than just this minimum level of research.
I think I could accept some softer claims.
1. It would be good if there were at least a few people who as pure academics study what works to produce social progress. These people could serve as a check on advocates misconstruing research to advance some other agenda.
2. We should be attentive to the fact that as a movement becomes politically successful people might use the language of that movement to push for other goals. This matches the charter schools example, using the language of opportunities for children to drive an ideological victory for or against charter schools.Curious to know if you or anyone thinks I’m missing anything important here.
The latter, although sometimes they overlap with academia. For example, CGO and Mercatus publish a lot of academics and are situated within universities.
Yes, from what I hear, it seems very hard. I’d point you to some recent pieces:
I kind of did this analysis in 2019 on “how to move the needle on progress” and landed on health, housing, energy, and transportation as important sectors to fix.
If you think about it in productivity terms, in general equilibrium, low-productivity-growth sectors will tend to get bloated as a percent of GDP, while high-productivity-growth sectors will tend to shrink.
I still think the 2019 analysis is basically right, although I would emphasize one particular aspect of tractability, which is having a specific solution in mind. Tom Kalil talks about this as a test of policy maturity: suppose you have a 15-minute meeting with the President of the United States, and after the meeting the President is willing to call somebody and tell them what to do. Who do you have him call and what do you have him tell them to do? Until you have an answer to that question, your policy solution isn’t mature.
I think there’s a division of labor in the policy world between the more researchy and more activist groups. The researchy people should be working to discover mature policy ideas (in the Tom Kalil sense) and then the more activist groups should be working to get them implemented.
So for the research side, who are starting out without mature policy ideas and trying to generate them, tractability isn’t really a concern, it’s more about importance. The goal is to generate something tractable. The more activist people need to think more about taking the mature policy idea and running with it, and for them, tractability (political viability, etc.) is more important starting out.
Progress is so hard to come by in the policy world that I don’t think we should disqualify anything for not being neglected. Even housing/YIMBY stuff, I’m happy for more people to go into it if it gets us over the line.
So policy researchers should work on big industrial sectors like health, housing, energy, and transportation (and major cross-cutting issues like immigration and permitting), and try to come up with mature policy ideas that increase productivity. Then the more activist groups should take the tractable ideas and amplify them and try to get them over the line.
If I’m writing a priority list for another org, the first question I’d ask is whether you want to be a more researchy org or a more activist org.