Founder, The Roots of Progress (rootsofprogress.org)
jasoncrawford
Karma: 509
Thanks.
Yes, one of my problems with compatibilism is, if determinism is true, then in some sense none of this matters? Like, why bother talking about progress when the entire trajectory of the future is already predetermined and literally nothing will change it?
Thanks!
I just updated https://rootsofprogress.org/manifesto with links to everything that’s been published so far, and will try to keep it up to date.
By agency, I mean two closely related things.
It is the belief that we can make choices and that those choices matter and can be effective, that we can to some significant degree control our lives and shape our future, both as individuals and as a society. The opposite of this is fatalism, the belief that we’re being carried along by forces outside our control and that we don’t have any choices or that they don’t matter.
It is also an ideal or a value, in the sense of believing that it is good for people to have choices and to make them, and that the expansion of choice (again, both for individuals and for society) is a good thing.
I do believe in free will (although I’m less clear on it and less certain about it than I used to be) but I’m not sure that a strong belief in free will is necessary to align with my concept of agency—maybe you could also agree with it under a compatibilist notion of volition.
Thanks Sean, and welcome!
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
I liked Vitalik’s post and generally agree
OK, sorry!
Good point, I agree! Something important to creating the right research lab team and culture.
Hmm, I don’t agree with how you are characterizing my assumptions about human nature. I’m not assuming that scientists are after money or prestige. I assume most of them, or at least the best of them, are motivated by curiosity, the desire to discover and to know, and the value of scientific knowledge for humanity.
Re accountability, I frankly think we could do with a bit less of it. Accountability is always in tension with research freedom.
Re people performing for their superiors: I actually think scientists performing for their managers would be a much healthier model than what we have today, which is scientists performing for their grant committees. I have another piece on this that I plan to publish soon.
Curiosity is already a very strong motivator, we just need to enable it and get out of the way. Give scientists funding without making them narrowly constrain their goals, dial down their ambition, or spend half their time writing grants. Then give them the research freedom to pursue that curiosity wherever it leads. It’s not easy but it is pretty simple.
Good question, I don’t know. People have been talking about “progress studies” or the “progress movement” or “progress community”, and others have talked about the “abundance agenda”, but none of those lend themselves to personal labels/identities…
I have never particularly liked the term “techno-optimism” anyway. “Optimism” on its own is confusing enough. “Techno-optimism” implies that not only do you think we can solve all problems, but that technology will be the solution to all of them, which is not really true.
Thanks, good point about the flow here.
Thanks Robert. I think progress studies needs a more well-defined value system. I have gestured at “humanism” as the basis for this, but it needs much more.
I agree that Rand’s ideas are important here, particularly her view of creative/productive work as a noble activity and of scientists, inventors and business leaders as heroic figures.
I wonder if there is also a psychological factor at work. Something along the lines of: a major world crisis, especially one that causes a lot of deaths, makes you think about the ephemeral nature of life and what’s really important, and you either decide to have kids or to stop putting it off. Imagine someone reading about deaths among the elderly and thinking, “I really want Mom and Dad to meet their grandkids—better get on it.”
Curious if Claudia Goldin’s work is relevant here?
The Shirky Principle: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
Thanks. What I see is that this paper specifies “a non-naive precautionary principle” or “an intelligent application of the precautionary principle,” which implies something about what the precautionary principle might end up being in practice without those qualifiers…
FWIW, this Jones & Romer paper names “accelerating growth” as one of the key stylized facts that growth models should explain. See pp. 13–16.
One example of accelerating progress they give is from Nordhaus’s famous “price of light” paper:
Between 38,000 B.C. and 1750 B.C., the real price of light fell by a total of about 17%, based on the transition from animal or vegetable fat to sesame oil as a fuel. The use of candles and whale oil reduced the price by a further 87% by the early 1800s, an average annual rate of decline of 0.06% per year. Between 1800 and 1900, the price of light fell at an annual rate that was 38 times faster, 2.3%, with the introduction of the carbon filament lamp. And then in the 20th century, the price of light has fallen at the truly remarkable pace of 6.3% per year with the use of tungsten filaments and fluorescent lighting.
That said, I agree that it’s possible that the future could hold something different, and the demographic transition is a good reason why. Chad Jones has drawn attention to this. We need more people and more brains to continue growth. I tend to think we will solve this by (1) solving the fertility crisis and getting back to high rates of population growth, and/or (2) using AI to substitute for human researchers.
No, you’re looking at too short a timescale [edit: to be clear, this is referring to your specific point about constant growth rates over the last 200 years]. Zoom out to the last few thousand, or few tens of thousand years.
See this from Paul Romer: https://paulromer.net/speeding-up-and-missed-opportunities-evidence/
Key excerpt:
My conviction that the rate of growth in GDP per capita at the technological frontier had to be increasing over time sprang from a simple calculation. Suppose the modern rate of growth of real GDP per capita (that is the growth rate after taking out the effects of inflation) is equal to 2% per year and that income per capita in year 2000 is $40,000. If this rate had prevailed for the last 1000 years, then in the year 1000, income per capita measured in the purchasing power of dollars today would have been $0.0001, or 0.01 cents. This is way too small to sustain life. If the growth rate had been falling over time instead of remaining constant, then the implied measure of GDP per capita in the year 1000 would have been even lower. …
Reasonable people can differ about what the future holds, but the simple calculation that first got me thinking about this (and which no doubt influenced how Maddison did the backward projections to come up with his estimates) leaves no room for doubt about what happened in the past. The rate of growth of GDP per capita has increased over time. The rate of progress in standards of living has increased even more.
[Further edit for clarity:] I think your contention is: there are basically two growth regimes. There is a low-growth regime, which most countries were in for most of history. Then there is a high-growth regime, which countries enter once they industrialize. This is an acceleration but it’s a one-time thing. Any seeming longer-term, more-spread-out acceleration is just a compositional effect.
That is a reasonable hypothesis, but I think it’s wrong. It may be true that there are discrete growth regimes, but I think there are more than two of them, historically. Progress was extremely slow in stone age. It sped up somewhat in the early agricultural age. It sped up more in the modern era after Gutenberg, Bacon, etc. It sped up more after industrialization. And I think it will speed up still more in the future—possibly after we cross some next threshold, whatever that is exactly.
The antibodies argument always made the most sense to me. But note that this is an argument for some breast milk, not an all-breast-milk diet—that is, it’s not an argument against formula, just an argument against an all-formula diet. I mention this because when we were in the hospital with our kid, they were pushing against formula very hard.
Also, it’s not an argument for literal feeding at the breast, as opposed to pumping and then bottle-feeding with the breast milk, which is easier for some people.
Emily Oster covers breastfeeding in Chapter 4 of Cribsheet, more extensively than in the 538 article you linked to. IIRC, she notes that there is evidence of benefit for the mother in terms of reduced breast cancer risk (no idea why that would be, though).
(But in general, I agree that Oster is too quick to say “it doesn’t matter” about things that we don’t have rigorous evidence for, rather than trying to make an informed decision about the best course of action based on what data and theories we do have. Other than that minor criticism, though, I am a big fan of her work.)