All of SebastianG's Comments + Replies

Style suggestion. You could put the penultimate paragraph before the preceding one and delete the final paragraph. That will decrease the preachiness factor at the end and the repetition of ideas in the last and third to last paragraph. Plus going straight from we need serious people to the paragraph about those people is what your structure is asking for.

Consumers, in the "consumerism" worldview exist only to receive goods. It's a primarily self-centered orientation to the world, and that's why people sneer the word with such a moralizing tone.

Imagine the opposite of consumerism is producerism. Producing time-saving conveniences, building stuff, retaining walls and, heck, even trivial trinkets. Producing is a "nice thing to do." An active life working and valuing the things you wished you valued while helping others in the small, tedious ways that the economy rewards a person for.

But a "consumerist" is a d... (read more)

How much pressure is currently being applied to Congress to break some of the bottlenecks on energy abundance? How much more is needed?

What's your theory of management going in to Speculative Technologies?

What advances in material science would have to occur for it to be as exciting to investors and average people as software? i.e. is the world of bits going to remain the dominant arena of novel creations for the next century?

I resonate with this. The issue is that culture is particular, but the type of progress the progress studies is generally committed to is civilizational (tech and institutions) not cultural (art and meaning). A community dedicated to progress would instantly become significantly more narrow if it committed to some particular vision of what is valuable and meaningful. While I am fairly committed to a particular vision of how to integrate civilization and culture to create a meaningful life, I wouldn't want the Progress Forum to commit to a particular view o... (read more)

Hi Jason, Matt is certainly one the substackers I sometimes most regret not having a sub to!

What is the relationship between public policy and the imagination?

What formative things between the ages of 14 and 24 made you who you are today?

One reason I hear for pessimism is not merely Clive Thompson's point that dystopian scenarios are easy to imagine, but that we've already created dystopias. It's NOT merely imagination. We've already dropped atomic weapons, created murderous totalitarian governments, and starved millions of people to death through blithe mismanagement. As proof of concept such things have already happened, they could be scaled, and if they happen again, they will be bigger and badder. It's hard for most people to imagine unknown future good things that outweigh "knowable" ... (read more)

Are current US rates of growth and disruption enough to keep protectionist interest groups from outpacing innovation (#MancurOlson)? Comparing your 2003 work and present work, it seems, at least to me, that your sense of how culture works has changed, namely the extent to which culture and individuals are elastic. What's your current view here?

This is great. I'm all for it. To reveal my enthusiasm I am going to throw out some timelines, ideas, and numbers here to keep your creative juices flowing. Feel free to disagree and quibble.

1. Creating a core team of 3-6 people. Putting in place a methodology and data collection plan. 500 hours.
2. Visiting all 10 locations with team plus tech crew and equipment. 1 week of work at each location. Cost: $80,000 - 120,000
3. Editing and post-production: 500 hours.
4. additional costs: various salaries contracts. Total: $100,000???
5. Do it twice.

I think I'd definitely ... (read more)

Interesting thought about the market here. It seems though that the Atlantic and Vox have a pretty good bead on that. Between Derek Thompson etc. and Kelsey Piper etc. I think one thing we can do is augment their efforts and contribute to those already established and successful platforms, as well as Works in Progress.

I am not aware of the financial situation of any of these outlets, but I don't see a market hole for another one. This might be good advice though for other current operations like Warp News.

I think that's a little too reductionist. CACE: CHANGE ANYTHING CHANGE EVERYTHING. It is certainly true, but trivially true. The question is more like how much does a change in literacy result in a change in technology, rather than are the two related. Basically everything is related within the topics of science, innovation, and the intellectual life.

I take Gary's point to be relative. Were communication advancements necessary, while obviously not sufficient, prerequisites for the energy revolutions which followed? Can we make a causal diagram which flows ... (read more)

Sebastian I am. An entrepreneur, pedagogue, and two-time poetaster. I started a hybrid school which meets in person three days per week. My original training was in liberal arts, specifically classical languages and philosophy, which give me a rich repository of historical examples and uses of the subjunctive should the need arise. I moved into education after college, going to Finland to study and compare educational systems. I discovered game theory and economics and the history of math and science in 2016. I became Cowen-pilled in 2018.

I have written ... (read more)

I appreciate this. Let me provide a thought on how to respond to a certain type of critique: the small market of young people who can get engaged in this. I think some people, especially young people, who are not naturally tech people have an aversion to thinking they can or should do anything tech related. Part of the issue is that what motivates them is not the underlying tech but aesthetically great consumer products. Art, music, shows, video games, sports, outdoors, religion, and most importantly friends and people. So how do we motivate these natural ... (read more)

One possible story is wider-spread literacy, (cheap paper, cheap printing) followed by obsessive note-taking, letter writing, and proto-bureaucratic thinking. I'm reading the history of the Jesuits right now, and it is clear that the entire endeavor is printing press + cheap paper = new social movement. Could we think of "science" and "practical tinkering" as two of these new social movements which yielded a lot of return?

I think there is a couple of ways perhaps to get at studying the size of medical school problem, supposing it exists.

We could measure the opportunity cost of careers with similar matriculating student profiles to med school students.

We could also study the careers of accepted students who don't wind up going.

Using Germany vs US as comparison groups maybe a little bit tricky given the differences in education systems. But I'm sure there's already some decent solutions to that problem worked out in other papers.

I work on secondary school startups, college an... (read more)

I have been thinking about this claim as of late: does medical school steal lock up too much top talent in the US? Your evidence for the case in Germany is interesting. One thing about the medical profession is that it is always clear what the next step to take is. While becoming a founder or even an electrical engineer the number of options remains open for a very long time. So it is possible that the medical field is also dulling our wits. I think your test score data is good. I wish you also had data about what fields A* students matriculate into. Is ... (read more)

I'd say the donation legibility is a concern here. The best progress-related institutions aren't set up in a way where low dollar denominated donations make obvious helpful marginally valuable improvements. When I donate five hundred dollars to vaccines acquisition and distribution in Angola, that's believably a marginal difference that matters.

Under what models of progress does a marginal $500 provide a lot of value? I think in the context of microgrants to young people and young ideas, it is great! But I'm having trouble for something like New Science.

Ma... (read more)

Great essay! And clearly you put your elbow grease in to make it flow and feel right rhetorically. Mwah. That catalogue of hurdles was very well thought out.

I have one comment on the following:

"If it were, say, a millwright, he would have to learn enough about machines to go beyond the kinds that he had been taught to make through apprenticeship, and invent something entirely new. Where would this knowledge have come from?"

I was just listening to Esther Duflo talk about mathematics ability and difference between street kids who sell produce and students in... (read more)

Hi Jason,

A few comments. I like the basic idea, but he article seems too fawning and just does not provide enough of a Scylla and Charybdis of where "safety" goes right and where it can go wrong. The hidden context, I believe, is the high-profile catalyzing exposure of x-risk and longtermist ideas to the broader public.

Here are less than a few thoughts on some of your statements.

"Safety is properly a goal of progress."

Certainly safety is not properly a goal of progress, any more than seatbelt is a goal of fast transportation. Safety is one method of achie... (read more)

Thanks for sharing your story. Although there are a lot of disability advocacy groups, progress studies is in a unique position in that it can detail technologies that enable people to live rich lives who otherwise would not be able to.

I would love a follow up article on the technologies that are most essential for your wife's life and how they work both in the technical and socio-cultural sense. 

I would like to understand what the biggest advantages of the h-index are. It seems to me the advantages are that it balances quantity and quality. Let's try the opposite for a decade or two. A measurement strategy that gives high weight to quantity or quality.

Here are some ideas, likely bizarre for reasons others will eagerly point out.

S-index = |N-log(C)|^log(C)

N = number of topics written on as measured by Milojević 2015 or more simply the unique keywords used by the journals to describe the article. C = total citations.

That formula is a response to Ma... (read more)

This is largely a response to footnote 2.

In The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth Benjamin Friedman deploys a lot of case studies of social progress and economic growth going hand in hand. Similarly, in Stubborn Attachments, Tyler makes a compelling case the GDP is greatly linked with human-wellbeing, but he also allows that there is more to well-being than the basket of goods that can be currently be purchased. He calls the total basket of goods Wealth Plus. So far so good.

I appreciate that what you do here is look for a way for economic growth t... (read more)

"Things like shared culture/values are important because that can be what empowers people to take a leap together, and it's especially magical when that culture (say of science) is shared among people who, in other aspects of their lives, do not share culture."

I've been thinking a lot about this recently. See for example the recent discussion on creating demand for innovation. https://progressforum.org/posts/RhYhhfQ3KTvKhEKF3/to-increase-progress-increase-desire

One dichotomy that might be useful is the distinction between invention and innovation.

Invention... (read more)

I think it worthwhile to take a moment to theorize about demand. I think we are all supply-siders in some way.

Aren't you trying to manufacture demand to consider the supply side? What's the theory of demand that increases the supply-side?

Having thought it about this some more, I think my point actually buttresses your thesis.

Lets imagine that humans are adaptable to the living standards of current circumstances and have finite competition points. Along the dimension of current circumstances there is zero-sum competition for status and relative power. Demand for status, relative power, and group belonging can swamp demand for a brighter, more efficient future.

So under this theory climate change action is an example where demand moved from the scientific community who identified a negative e... (read more)

I agree that the article is kind of hard to follow because the concept of state capacity doesn't feel natural in the article, (this is more a stylistic issue than a conceptual one) when what is meant is something more like regulatory cost-multipliers.

If your audience is a little more left-coded, then 'state capacity' is a term more likely to generate agreement than talking about regulatory costs to efficiency, which sounds more libertarian.

I think I would have started the article with an arresting breakdown of how much of a project's cost were caused by fi... (read more)

The selfishness motive for increasing demand is actually weaker than you might think. In the three examples you chose, climate change, Tesla, and Apple, I'd make the case that all three, even Apple(?) pulled demand because they are socially desirable at the same time as personally beneficial.

Read the Silmarillion and study the elves. In Tolkien's world the immortality of elves makes them discount local pains immensely, they don't care about making happy people, and their mistakes are very hard to correct and consequently they are especially risk adverse compared to mankind.

But the elves are musical, rarefied, intelligent, and take the arts seriously, including the art of crafting. They make things which a from a human perspective are magical.

I thought the feature was pretty solid on research. And certainly was deep and explanatory! I wish, however, you were able to pull off a bit more gesturing at the breadth of voices in this space.

Matt Clancy, Brian Potter, who both run top quality substacks in addition to working for the Institute for Progress. Alexey Guzey at New Science. These are good examplars of the kind of gritty in the weeds work we are interested in. Such work reveals why it's hard to extrapolate out a crisp 'ideology.'

Towards the end I felt like Jason was given "philosopher of the movement" status, but I'd say it's more that Tyler Cowen is Darwin and Jason is the Thomas Huxley. :)

The internet doesn't quite hit that visceral sense of the happeningness of it all that a fair does.

What the post left me with, in some ways despite itself, was a sense of hope in the possible. Like, I want to go to the idea machine fair... Even more than the new world's fair.

I don't think it is fair to act like Jason is doubting something so knockdown clear. Yes, to you and I AGI seems obviously possible and within this century seems even seems likely, but Jason said he doesn't know much about the AI stuff. And his default view is agnosticism, not deference to the LW community. Don't forget that not everyone has spent the past decade reading about AGI! ;)

It's remarkable that someone used the word 'synergy' to describe his relationship with Claude Shannon. Clearly the word choice indicates someone obsessed with his work. The main contributor to that page is a "Dr. K." I have only figured out that he is a retired professor living on or near Corfu. I sent him a message. 

Confidence level: 30%

Strongly agree this info is mostly about what tutoring was, but I have been struck recently by how far-reaching this idea of 'rhetoric' is. I have found it very easy throughout my life to think about this classic notion of rhetoric as mere speaking well and persuading. But the way it is talked about and the way the curricula of Cicero, Quintilian and Renaissance thinkers seem to think of it, as you say, as the master skill of the elite. Is it not true anymore?

It depends on how we define this master skill. What exactly was this skill, i... (read more)