For some this might be too fine a distinction, but for me understanding ontology has always been important, and I find compatabilism useful for its pragmatic distinction between ontology and any prescriptivist philosophy (like positivism). A compatibilist can accept that we don't have free will and yet endorse the instrumental value of rhetoric that promotes freedom — what does it matter that under the hood it's just thermodynamics? One can't escape the illusion of free will even if and when you believe it is an illusion and try hard to do so. But pragamatism is a common thread running through compatabilist ontology and prescriptivism, and my aesthetic preference (? prejudice? precommitment) is to believing in things that work even when I don't understand how or why.

So there might very well be a point in talking about progress even if we're not sure whether or how it would have happened had we never existed.

I'm still mulling this over, but I have come around to the view that you're right about what you're calling "agency" not being something that could be removed without disservice to the promotion of progress, and that you've got the best way of framing it. If I take your suggestion of viewing "agency" from a more compatibilist point of view -- and thanks for this nudge -- I find it all far more tractable. I'm a big fan of W.V.O. Quine, and I believe he would have supported your pointing to "agency" as useful in this context. Even if "agency" means not freedom in some metaphysical sense, we have to grant that the removal of constraints on human actions is going to be better rather than worse for human progress.

And I think you have the right rhetorical approach to the question. Talking about freedom as we have for millennia, in the metaphysical sense, is more comprehensible because of how we're wired.

...but I can't resist observing that if, in the background, what's going on is something determined then the actual mechanism for the promotion of progress does seem to collapse into something more like far from equilibrium free energy maximizations, of the sort popular among techno-optimists at the moment. Not for no reason it's called "compatibilism" I suppose!

This is a huge undertaking, and I admire and respect both your industry and your courage in it.

Two questions/comments: 

Is there a page I can bookmark that will have links to everything that has been published up to that date? I haven't found it if one exists.

I love the core value of human life first made explicit in what's been published to date, but I'm struggling with the concept of agency. I feel like the word agency gets thrown around a lot these days, and I'm afraid that may have muddied the waters for me at least in understanding the ultimate point.

But is agency even necessary? What if it was just techno-humanism without this additional concept of agency? That's what I find myself wondering at this stage. I found some earlier work by the author here: https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/progress-humanism-agency and I'm guessing the same or similar use of "agency" is intended. I'll keep reading to see how this plays out, but at least for now I'm not seeing the case for agency clearly — meaning both that I don't quite understand what agency means and that whatever it means it's not clear how it's a necessary moral imperative to human progress.

This may be a semantic argument in the sense that if what is meant by agency boils down to something like attention to pragmatic fitting of means to ends, then this argument for agency would be much clearer. And I may be idiosyncratic in how distracted I get worrying that "agency" in the sense the author is using the term here requires an appeal to "free will," which I believe both ambiguous and unnecessary.

I'll keep reading to see what it plays out.

Chaotic Progress

A book review in essay format I wrote to help nuance what I see as the unrealistic rhetoric on both sides of the political spectrum right now.
 

https://www.symmetrybroken.com/chaotic-progress/

This is a brilliant article. My father used to work at IBM ARC back in the 1990s, and you're describing how things worked there, during a period in which numerous Nobels were earned working within a corporation.
 

The jack-of-all-trades approach to being a PI was also part of what drove me personally out of a Ph.D. program and into industry. I didn't want to be a solo entrepreneur constantly writing grants for peanuts. The most attractive jobs to me back then (early 2000s) seemed to be the government lab jobs that had no teaching responsibilities, and relatively less pressure to raise grant funding constantly.

We need to encourage more divisions of labor in the practice of scientific research.  This is a great diagnosis of some of the fundamental problems of our current system. Kudos, Jason!

I don't fault you for not mentioning it because it's definitely more speculative. But as a voiceover I would add to this pitch for block funding the observation that in many cases, getting a large enough group together seems to lead to a critical mass, whereby new ideas start to fission off of each other. I think we're seeing something like that now at the Flatiron institute, and probably because they're doing many of things you've prescribed.

Just found this tidbit in the biography of the first patent commissioner Henry Ellsworth:

"Acting as Patent Commissioner, Ellsworth made a decision that profoundly affected the future of Hartford and Connecticut. The young Samuel Colt was struggling to establish a firm to manufacture his new revolver. Ellsworth became interested in Colt's invention, and in 1836 made the decision to issue Colt U.S. Patent No. 138. On the basis of Ellsworth's decision, Colt was able to raise some $200,000 from investors to incorporate the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company of Paterson, New Jersey, the forerunner of the mighty Colt arms manufacturing empire."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Leavitt_Ellsworth

+1 for the primacy of the role of patents as an institution for attracting capital that would otherwise be impossible to attract

We may have a legit disagreement about the role of patents in supporting the funding of at least certain types of R&D. The Bayh-Dole Act appears to have created a comparative advantage for universities and government labs in funding R&D. Is that the best model? There are reasonable arguments that it is not. But so long as universities and government labs have tech transfer offices, I'm dubious about curiosity driven R&D getting funded by for-profit corporations. Anyway the US market doesn't appear to support it the way it did before the 1980s. But if you believe startups are doing curiosity driven research, then we're talking about different things. For me, curiosity driven research is literally curiosity driven with no obvious expectation of commercial use. I don't believe patents are either necessary or sufficient to funding this kind of research, which is sometimes called basic science.

I was exaggerating the weight of the evidence of multiple inventions a little in arguing against the need for patents to support scientific discoveries, but not much. I note that even in responding to this point, you reach for the desire to "help[] companies attract financing or just providing more capital" as beneficial. But that's where we agree patents and licensing are socially beneficial. The question is whether they're necessary or beneficial to get to the point where attracting capital makes sense. I'm arguing no because the history of science and engineering demonstrates that fundamental breakthroughs are not predictable enough to be funded commercially. AT&T and IBM were able to do it because they were monopolies at a scale that hasn't been replicated since then.

So we agree that inventors invent because that's who they are. We both want to ensure we have inventors, and that they get compensated well enough to ensure we get the benefit of their work.

But who are these inventors? Are they scientists who we also want to teach and publish their discoveries? Are they engineers building the next great platform for human society to grow? If the former, why wouldn't government grants be sufficient? If the latter, why not venture capital? That seems like the right way to frame the potential disagreement here.

In the end, there just aren't many actual people who fit anywhere between these two archetypes. I actually have met a few of them, but they are exceptionally rare. And I don't know that we need to modify the institutions we have today to encourage more to follow in their footsteps. Maybe. But from where I sit today, I feel safer saying patents are best for society when used only as a mechanism for attracting capital to a venture capital startup or other for-profit corporation.

Wonderful summary of the history and analysis of the economic advantages and disadvantages to a patent system. I'm a patent lawyer who has been worrying about the question of whether patents promote progress for a couple of decades. https://www.symmetrybroken.com/whats-wrong-with-the-patent-system/

Lately, I've been partial to the model of progress articulated by North, Wallis, and Weingast (NWW) in Violence and Social Orders. https://www.symmetrybroken.com/what-the-patent-system-can-learn-from-violence-and-the-social-order/

Their observation is that a combination of free entry into political and economic competition has enabled adaptive efficiency, and hence promoted progress, in what they call open access societies.

Patents and corporations both began as royal prérogatives. The Venetian Patent Act is a historical anachronism, representing one of the first (if not the first) open access orders in human history. But it was circumscribed in geography (but not necessarily temporally!). NWW might say that Venetian patents opened access to Venetian markets for foreigners and non-elites who had improvements to the state of the art.

But more generally in view of NWW, I believe the question to ask is whether a given patent is necessary to formation of a corporation or not. Patents as a system of insurance (think third party debt collection for investors) is less appealing, although probably not as socially costly as critics of NPEs would have it. And note that some would distinguish between NPEs and PAEs (patent assertion entites) because universities, government labs, and others never intend to practice what they patent but also don't rely upon litigation and licensing as their primary source of revenue.

"As Simon Rifkind, the Co-Chairman of the 1967 United States President’s Commission on the Patent put it, 'the patent system is more essential to getting together the risk capital which it required to exploit and to develop and to apply the contributions of the genius inventor than to provide a stimulus for the actual mental contribution'"

Nothing has changed in over 50 years in this regard. The best reason to file a patent is because without one nobody reasonable is going to feel comfortable investing. But what fields remain in which this is true except for those in which regulatory approval is required before revenue?

"The question, then, is whether patents are associated (1) with more inventing activity overall, and (2) with more productive uses of the inventions once they are invented. In economic terms, we are more looking for evidence that patents facilitate capital formation and technology diffusion, both of which are well-studied and associated with economic growth."

The evidence for multiple inventions is devastating to the case that patents are required for (1).

NWW have the right framework for analyzing (2), which is directly relevant to the first part of the economic terms you identify. The second part (diffusion) is more subtle, but best understood (I believe) through comparisons to alternative institutions of open source licensing and trade secret torts. Patents look favorable relative to trade secrets in many cases, but not to open source licensing in most.

The overarching theme seems to be what do we need the get people to work together toward bringing some technical dream to market after it has been demonstrated as possible by scientists? In the case of drugs or medical therapy, there's no question that exclusive rights are required to attract capital. In the case of software, it's less clear, and the dead weight costs of the system look more dubious.

Thanks again for the wonderful summary of a complex and nuanced question.

I agree with that. But having seen IBM ARC up close in person in the 1990s, my gut is that there is some critical mass of curiosity -- a threshold number of curious researchers all working in the same place -- that leads to a kind of magic you don't see when the same people are more distributed geographically.

Hadn't seen that. Too bad he's misrepresenting facts.

But that hints at what might be worth reevaluating in EA. Jung had this notion of individuation, in which we have to incorporate into our personality conflicting aspects of ourselves in order to fully realize our capabilities. EA seems very academic or analytical in its approach to promoting progress whereas e/acc is more political or emotional. I believe it will take both to realize a future in which progress is accelerated in a way that benefits even the most vulnerable members of society.