Founder, The Roots of Progress (rootsofprogress.org)
jasoncrawford
Karma: 498
Think wider about the root causes of progress
Announcing the incoming CEO for The Roots of Progress
Welcome to the Progress Forum!
The spiritual benefits of material progress
Introductions thread (please introduce yourself)
The Commission for Stopping Further Improvements: A letter of note from Isambard K. Brunel
AMA: Jason Crawford, The Roots of Progress
Why pessimism sounds smart
Wizards and prophets of AI [draft for comment]
Beyond the moment of invention
What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came?
The epistemic virtue of scope matching
Why you, personally, should want a larger human population
Where I have landed on “ideas getting harder to find”, in a nutshell
Progress studies as an (incomplete) “idea machine”
Jason’s links digest, 2023-09-08: The Conservative Futurist, cargo airships, and more
Announcing The Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive
Reinventing the wheel
This resonates with me a lot—thanks, Jack. I particularly appreciate the idea that we could not only “stop climate change” but even improve the climate.
A while ago I articulated what I call the Principle of Control: “Anything that matters to human life should be under our control.” (thread)
The climate matters to us; therefore, the climate should be under our control. In the future, we should be able to control the outdoor climate just as easily as, today, we control the indoor climate. We should have a thermostat for the Earth and set the temperature to whatever we want. We should be able to control the composition of the atmosphere with the same precision that, today, we control the composition of metal alloys in a foundry.
Great question, what form could this take? I can think of a few themes for funds, based on the three drivers of progress I laid out in this post:
Metascience: improving the way research is managed and funded, or just directly funding good research that can’t easily be funded through traditional channels. Orgs in this theme include PARPA, Convergent Research, New Science, Arcadia Science, and Arc Institute.
Policy: regulatory reform to remove roadblocks and improve incentives for progress. The Institute for Progress and the Center for Growth and Opportunity do good work here.
Culture: studying and communicating the idea that progress is possible and desirable. This is what The Roots of Progress is doing. Our World in Data plays a similar role, in a more neutral and fact-based way.
I could imagine a fund on any of these themes, making grants to orgs like the ones mentioned, or smaller grants directly to individual projects on these themes. I could also imagine a fund covering two or all three of them.
The Roots of Progress does take donations from the public, as does Our World in Data; I’m not sure about the others.
PS: One challenge is that there isn’t a single “QALYs/$” metric that you can quantify and stack-rank all opportunities on. So grant decisions need to rely on vision, strategy, and judgment. This probably means that it makes more sense for there to be multiple funding organizations, rather than just one. (Fitting with a general theme I have noticed that progress studies is more pluralistic, federated, and bottom-up; vs. EA which is more centralized, technocratic, and top-down.)