Recent Discussion

Tyler Cowen, one of the intellectual forefathers of the Progress Studies community, believes that we should do nearly everything within society's capacity to increase GDP, erm, I mean progress. This is supported by Tyler's moral framework, where he applies no discount rate to future human lives and, as such, believes nearly all moral value lies in the far future. To the extent that progress today can make many more lives in the future better off, as long as we don’t get in our own way (i.e., existential risk, societal collapse), maximizing progress for long-term gain should be the priority.
 

While I strongly disagree with Tyler, I at least respect the view because it comes from a bona fide belief derived from a different moral framework than the one...

Everyone knows the industrial revolution occurred centuries ago and involved steam engines. That was just the warm up. We are now a decade into the ~sixth and final industrial revolution. We are in the midst of a fundamental transformation in our economic civilization-scale industrial energy metabolism. 

While aspects of this post are necessarily speculative, its predictions are inferences falsifiably derived from easily verifiable axioms and public information. That the inevitability of this outcome is not yet more widely accepted is a side effect of anchoring bias and decades of industrial stagnation. 

Extremely cheap solar power

The key unlock for the radical energy transformation is cheap solar power. Solar electricity is now in its fifth decade of steadily declining cost. Per doubling of production, costs have fallen a consistent 30-40% since...

Relevant - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/13/climate/electric-power-climate-change.html

When Galileo wanted to study the heavens through his telescope, he got money from those legendary patrons of the Renaissance, the Medici. To win their favor, when he discovered the moons of Jupiter, he named them the Medicean Stars. Other scientists and inventors offered flashy gifts, such as Cornelis Drebbel’s perpetuum mobile (a sort of astronomical clock) given to King James, who made Drebbel court engineer in return. The other way to do research in those days was to be independently wealthy: the Victorian model of the gentleman scientist.

Galileo demonstrating law of gravity in presence of Giovanni de' Medici, 1839 fresco by Giuseppe Bezzuoli Meisterdrucke

Eventually we decided that requiring researchers to seek wealthy patrons or have independent means was not the best way to do science. Today,...

Important to mention the HHMI funding model, which puts "trust" in PIs/evaluates them as PIs rather than as research proposals.

Also

"The MacArthur grant is a template for what this looks like on a personal level, with a shift in focus from creativity to integrity, and a bump in compensation – $625,000 is a lot of money, but that money is designed to be seed money for an activity rather than financial security. Those getting a MacArthur grant still face the specter of future financial needs. One needs an order of magnitude more than that over a lifetime to be secure while not compromising one’s interactions with society. "

Ever since ChatGPT released to the public I have used LLMs every day. GPT-4 was essential in getting me up and running at my job where I had to read and edit pieces of Python, SQL, Unix, and Stata code with little to no prior experience. Beyond coding I’ve had some success using GPT to collect links and sources. For writing, GPT’s only use is translating terse bullet points into polite emails and producing blog post drafts so terrible that I forget my writer’s block and rush to correct it.

The worst part about GPT is its personality. It is a lazy, lying, moralist midwit. Everything it writes is full of nauseating cliche and it frequently refuses to do something you know it can do. Most of these...

NATO is a pact between countries that if one is attacked, all will defend. 

As a stipulation for being part of it, NATO countries are expected to contribute 2 percent of their GDP to building out their own militaries. The idea is that by combining forces we can protect each other and the world from threats if needed. 

Made up of North America and most of Europe, NATO was founded at the tail end of World War II when 12 countries agreed to support one another against future threats. Now there are 30 member countries and growing—North Macedonia, Finland, and Sweden have all joined since 2020. 

It’s not easy to get in, countries have to be willing to uphold democratic values and a market economy and must be voted in...

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, charitab

... (read more)
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1Alex K. Chen (InquilineKea)9dhttps://bzolang.blog/p/the-lattice-topology-correspondence?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web [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://twitter.com/nc_znc/status/1768332511073980474] https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2024/03/14/ai-55-keep-clauding-along/#more-23740 [https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2024/03/14/ai-55-keep-clauding-along/#more-23740] https://worldmodels.github.io/ [https://worldmodels.github.io/]

In one sense, the concept of progress is simple, straightforward, and uncontroversial. In another sense, it contains an entire worldview.

The most basic meaning of “progress” is simply advancement along a path, or more generally from one state to another that is considered more advanced by some standard. (In this sense, progress can be good, neutral, or even bad—e.g., the progress of a disease.) The question is always: advancement along what path, in what direction, by what standard?

Types of progress

“Scientific progress,” “technological progress,” and “economic progress” are relatively straightforward. They are hard to measure, they are multi-dimensional, and we might argue about specific examples—but in general, scientific progress consists of more knowledge, better theories and explanations, a deeper understanding of the universe; technological progress consists of more inventions...

In a fiery, though somewhat stilted speech with long pauses for translation, Javier Milei delivered this final message to a cheering crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week:

Don't let socialism advance. Don't endorse regulations. Don't endorse the idea of market failure. Don't allow the advance of the murderous agenda. And don't let the siren calls of social justice woo you.

The reactions on econ twitter were unsurprisingly less positive than the CPAC crowd about calls to boycott market failure, one of the most well established facts in economics. James Medlock, for example, begs libertarians to get a step past econ 101.

The people cheering in the crowd and self-righteously quote tweeting on X are cheering for the wrong reasons. Medlock is correct that these credulous fans need...