All of jasoncrawford's Comments + Replies

Thanks Kent, can you say something about this book?

Amazing story, and fantastic post, thanks!

Thanks for the detailed thoughts!

Yes, we did start fighting infectious disease long before the germ theory. Most notably, the first immunization techniques, against smallpox, long predated the theory. Also there were sanitation reforms that helped significantly. But these methods were limited: e.g., no vaccines for any disease other than smallpox were created, and water sanitation did not include chlorination. Indeed, sometimes sanitation efforts backfired, as when Edwin Chadwick tried to clean up the stench of London by building sewers to drain all cesspo... (read more)

Thanks Sam! Your comment about biologists thinking the cure for cancer doesn't exist spurred these thoughts: Can we “cure” cancer?

Welcome, Heike! Very excited to be working with you.

I meant more on the question of financial incentives for metrics. Basically, charging healthy people less / charging more for risk factors. Are you allowed to do this? I think some amount of this is allowed in some jurisdictions, but are there crucial limitations on it?

Are there any restrictions on what insurance companies are allowed to do with this kind of info? Health insurance is highly regulated too.

Policy barriers aside, speaking strictly from considerations of technology and economics, what is the ideal near-term future for energy? Nuclear, geothermal, solar? Maybe even solar-powered fuel synthesis like Terraform Industries is doing? Or what combination of the above?

So many of the regulatory/policy barriers to progress seem so daunting. Using the “Important, Tractable, Neglected” heuristic, what are the top opportunities to unblock progress? Put another way perhaps, if you were writing a priority list for an organization like the Institute for Progress or Balsa Research, what would you go after?

There are two magic buttons, as follows, but you can only press one. Which would be better for progress and why?

1. We instantly get the ideal legal/regulatory/policy environment for progress, across the board (this button does not affect science or R&D)
2. We instantly get huge scientific/R&D breakthroughs: cure for cancer and aging, nanotech that works, fusion that works, benevolent AI (this button does not affect anything social, so all these things would face today's regulatory environment)

If you were to draft a set of cause areas for the progress studies movement, what would be high on the list?

I agree that “one technology plowing ahead much further than the rest” is unlikely, but I don't think that's the issue.

To return to your seat belt example: seat belts were invented and widely deployed only after cars had been around for decades. Car technology got way ahead of car safety technology. That's the sort of pattern I think we should reduce in the future.

I like the Deutsch quote and agree.

I think “slow” vs. “fast” is just the wrong way to conceptualize the decision/tradeoff. We should be thinking about how to steer progress and how to sequence it. “Pedal to the metal” or “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” is not safe, but merely slowing down doesn't really help. We should, for example:

• take whatever time is necessary (but no more than that) to do appropriate, useful safety testing on new technologies
• invest in inventing safety measures, ideally in the first version of new technologies
• think about what types of technologies are more likely

I think these are good ideas and I too would like to see more of the kinds of things you list above.

I'd love for this Forum to serve as the first draft of a lot of this stuff. For instance, if people want to write up specific cause areas, or lists of cause areas, so we can all start discussing them, that would be great. We could create a new tag “Cause Areas” so that they are organized in one place and easy to find.

Interesting exercise: what would Our World in Data look like as a column in that chart?

Don't know anything about Seaborg in particular. Floating nuclear is an interesting idea. I don't know enough about the technical issues to know whether it's practical; I've been told that the motion of the waves creates engineering problems. I also think the legal issues may be problematic. If you're offshore, you might avoid the US NRC, but now you're probably under the jurisdiction of the UN or something, which is probably worse. There's really no way to escape regulation if you're doing nuclear—you just have to find reasonable regulators.

In academia, you've said that “The incentive is to build a brick … not to build a building.” If the balance is off here, how could we reform academic incentives to get more buildings?

Are you more of a hedgehog or a fox? (In Isaiah Berlin / Archilochus terminology: “A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.”)

Are you more of a bird or a frog? (In Freeman Dyson terminology: “Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas … out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one a... (read more)

Some ~12 years after the book, what are your thoughts on the Great Stagnation? (Asking more about the phenomenon of stagnation and less for thoughts on the book itself.) How has this played out? Have your predictions held up? What will stagnation look like going forward?

Very interesting topic. How widespread is the “pull” idea? When I first read about it in an essay from you a while ago, I thought it was kind of a niche view, but I've been reading Robert Allen's The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective and he seems to have the same view, so maybe not so niche?

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 

A lot of (most?) progress studies work is being done outside academia, or on the border of academia, not in proper journals and peer-reviewed publications. My own work is for a general audience. Anton Howes left academia to write for a general audience. Eli Dourado is at a think tank that is affiliated with a university, but he writes for a general audience. Brian Potter came from industry and writes for a general audience. Etc.

See this answer in my AMA about how people can contribute: https://progressforum.org/posts/ew6LJbcoLm8PjJLbX/ama-jason-crawford-th... (read more)

Yes, any major improvement in a fundamental area—not only in communication, or more broadly in information technology, but also in energy, manufacturing, materials, or transportation—will have ripple effects throughout the entire economy.

Efficiency is a dimension of progress, but it is only one dimension. Sometimes we make progress by improving the power, speed, or throughput of our machines or processes. Not all improvements are efficiency improvements. But over time, higher efficiency is one of the big trends of industrial progress.

I agree that anything that leads us off a cliff, that is, leads us to some disaster for humanity, is not progress.

But the problem with the concept of “sustainability” is: what are you trying to sustain? Our goal should be sustained progress, sustained economic... (read more)

I think the main statement of Allen's argument is his book The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. Here's a summary article he wrote: “Why was the Industrial Revolution British?” You could also check out Scott Alexander's review of his book Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction.

In the first book mentioned above, Allen states: “I do not ignore supply-side developments like the growth of scientific knowledge or the spread of scientific culture. However, I emphasize other factors increasing the supply of technology that have not ... (read more)

I think the Earth–Mars communication problem is definitely solvable, and it makes sense that the solution would be built on top of existing web standards. But I think new solutions and new standards/protocols would need to be developed, and it would be less than straightforward—it will require real engineering. And no matter what the solution, the overall user experience will be different.

Cross-post that essay here as a linkpost!

I agree with the gist of this but would formulate it differently. It's not about naivete, foolishness, or emotion. It's about vision.

Bezos once said he would keep funding a project as long as it had one high-judgment champion. Of course, that leaves open the meta-judgment of who is high-judgment, and then it allows them to be a champion without having a solid “rational” case for the project.

Any thoughts or meta-level lessons after VaccinateCA about how to improve competence in our institutions, particularly in government? So many problems (not just in the US) come down to corruption in government, or institutionalized incompetence, or a cultural expectation of slowness and low productivity, etc. How do we get underneath these problems to structural issues of organization and incentives, and fix the root causes?

Deaths per worker hour would be one way to normalize?

I'm Jason Crawford, author of The Roots of Progress, where I write about the history of technology and the philosophy of progress. I've written about everything from iron & steel to Haber-Bosch to smallpox to nuclear power to the bicycle. I've also written why progress studies is a moral imperative, why we need a new philosophy of progress, and why our society needs industrial literacy.

I've been interviewed as a spokesman for the progress movement in Vox and BBC, and I've done lots of podcast interviews as well.

I'm turning The Roots of Progress into a ... (read more)

Any comments on worker safety? Whenever the topic of building speed comes up, some people assume that faster construction must be less safe, and more workers were injured or died. Wondering what the data says

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 d

American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970, by Thomas P. Hughes.

A history of the creation of large technological systems of production and distribution, and the social response to those systems. It’s not only about the century of technological enthusiasm, but also about how that enthusiasm went wrong (in my opinion), and how it came to an end.

I reviewed it in two parts: 1) American invention from the “heroic age” to the system-building era, 2) From technocracy to the counterculture.

Louis Pasteur: Free Lance of Science, by René Dubos.

A biography of Louis Pasteur, covering his major achievements and placing them in the context of the origins of microbiology and the germ theory of disease.

I enjoyed this book very much. First, the career of Pasteur is an amazing one, well deserving of a biography. Pasteur demonstrated the role of microbes in fermentation processes, disproved contemporary claims of the spontaneous generation of life, played a major role (along with Robert Koch) in establishing the germ theory of disease, and invented the ... (read more)

The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler, by Thomas Hager.

The story of the Haber-Bosch process for creating synthetic ammonia, which is crucial for producing the fertilizer needed to feed the seven billion or so people on Earth today. In Hager’s phrase, it turns air into bread. It’s also the story of the lives of the men who created it, and its consequences for world agriculture and for Germany during the World Wars.

This was a very well-told story, and I’d recommend ... (read more)

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm, by Lewis Dartnell.

A summary of the technologies that the modern industrial world depends on, the basic principles of their operation, and how one might re-establish them if the world were to suffer some global shock that led to the breakdown of civilization. A good survey of the key technologies of industrial civilization.

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, by Joel Mokyr.

This book was pivotal in the launch of The Roots of Progress. It is about how the Enlightenment, between about 1500 and 1700, set the stage for the Industrial Revolution. Special attention is given to Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton.

I had to skim many chapters of this book, especially in the beginning. However, I found its key ideas absolutely fascinating. For a summary, see Mokyr’s article in The Atlantic, “Progress Isn’t Natural”.

Where Is My Flying Car? A Memoir of Future Past, by J. Storrs Hall.

A work combining historical analysis and bold futurism, looking for the causes of the Great Stagnation (including and especially our lack of flying cars) and painting a picture of what a technological future could look like.

I enjoyed this book a lot, and learned a lot from it. Hall’s vision of the future includes not only flying cars, but nanotechnology-powered manufacturing, nuclear-powered everything, and artificial intelligence. My biggest single takeaway from the book is the potential f... (read more)

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, by David Deutsch. 

A work of philosophy, mostly epistemology, with a bit of quantum physics thrown in. The theme is that all problems are solvable—“anything not forbidden by the laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge”—but that there is no end of problems or solutions, just as there is no end to knowledge or to mistakes. In contrast to both skepticism and “inductionism”, Deutsch promotes “fallibilism”.

I found this book fascinating and agree with much of it, although I dis... (read more)

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, by Steven Pinker.

The message of this book is that reason, science and humanism—which Pinker identifies as the key themes of the Enlightenment—have, historically, led to massive progress in almost every area of life, and that they are our best means of continuing this progress into the future. But these ideals are not consistently upheld, and are often under attack. Therefore, we need to fortify and defend them.

My book review.

Not sure exactly, but there are some popular books I dislike. I read the first chapter of Dawn of Everything and was unimpressed. See Holden Karnofsky's “book non-review”. Also, I tried to read Sapiens and I could not get through two chapters of it. C. R. Hallpike's review captures my feelings about it.

Re methods of analysis, I am highly skeptical of cyclical theories of history (Turchin/cliodynamics).

But generally as long as you're looking at data and other evidence, and applying logic, you should be able to discover some nugget of truth.

“Needs” might be too strong, but I think more people would be a good thing. More people means more ideas, more art, more science, more inventions, more innovations, more pushing the boundaries of knowledge and practice. If you define “genius” as 99.9999th percentile intelligence, then for every million people born, we get one new genius.

Indeed, there is an argument that we need continued population growth in order to keep up economic growth. The intuition for this, in brief, is that the more we advance, the broader and more challenging the technological fr... (read more)

I dunno… years is too short and centuries maybe too long, so I guess I'd say decades? That is a very wide spread though.

And if you really mean all, I place non-zero probability on “never” or “not for a very long time.” After all, we don't even do all economically important manual tasks using machines yet, and we've had powered machinery for 300 years.

I have seen this kind of analysis before (e.g., this ACX post). There is something to it, but I think in most contexts, the absolute/total “impact” of an idea (using your terminology here) is more important/relevant than the counterfactual/incremental “value.”

There are a few contexts in which the counterfactual/incremental analysis is what you want, but I’m not sure what you learn from that beyond “it’s more valuable to work in neglected areas, rather than crowded ones, all else being equal.” That is a true and important lesson, but not one for which we ne... (read more)

It would be interesting to break down R&D models into attributes, like:

• Average team size?
• How are problems selected?
• How is funding allocated?
• Average amount of funding controlled by a single manager?
• How is talent selected?
• How is talent developed?
• Etc.

And then fill out a table of those attributes for all the major models (university lab, corporate lab, DARPA, etc.)

I think more people have a relevant background than may be obvious at first:

• Scientists, inventors, and founders can directly make material progress
• Historians, economists, and philosophers can study progress and incorporate it into their work
• Educators and journalists can communicate about progress to their audiences
• Writers and artists can inspire people with an ambitious vision of the future
• Policy makers can remove obstructions and roadblocks to progress
• Parents can educate their children about progress

What everyone can do: educate yourself, spread the world... (read more)