"Around 2016, Cowen received an out-of-the-blue email from Irish billionaire Patrick Collison... A few years earlier, Collison had cofounded the online payments company Stripe... Stripe’s nearly $100bn (£83bn/€95bn) valuation puts Collison’s net worth north of $11bn (£9bn/€10.5bn)...
"During the pair's meetings, Cowen tells me, "we were both talking about the ideas, finding we had common ideas, and somehow hit upon the notion of an article". So, in 2019, they co-authored an essay in The Atlantic, which argued for "a new science of progress".
"progress studies doesn't desire a world where humans live more harmoniously with nature. As Crawford writes: "Humanism says that when improving human life requires altering the environment, humanity takes moral precedence over nature." It doesn’t necessarily want a world with less inequality and prefers to focus more on growing the pie than on how it’s divided. It also doesn't care much for societal norms that stand in the way of what it conceives of as progress – even ones shared by all cultures..."
This position sounds so self-serving on the part of the billionaire.
To reap the benefits of his wealth guilt-free, where he and people like him can exploit the world as they see fit and dominate others, it would be helpful for him to push a world view like this.
And why would Cowen, who "ranked 17th on a list of the top 100 most influential economists" give the time of day to some rando who just happened to be rich? One word: money.
So it looks like Collison bought himself an economist.
That Peter Thiel is influential in this "movement" (or PR exercise) is also telling.
"Crawford and Cowen, the two leading intellectual figures of the progress community, come from the objectivist and libertarian traditions, respectively. On a panel at AynRandCon, Crawford described progress studies as adjacent to objectivism, the philosophical system outlined in 20th Century philosopher Ayn Rand’s fiction."
Well, that just about explains it all..
This whole movement actually has strong echoes of extropianism, which has roots in HG Wells' techno-utopianism, and might be termed neo-Wellsianism, were it not for Wells making a 180 near the end of his life and becoming a dystopian (see his book "Mind at the End of Its Tether"), and for Wells' utopias being socialist, not capitalist ones.
> And why would Cowen, who "ranked 17th on a list of the top 100 most influential economists" give the time of day to some rando who just happened to be rich? One word: money.
Cowen is constantly giving the time of day to randos who are not remotely rich. He answers every non-spam email he gets. He runs a program that gives out small grants to nobodies who are just starting out their careers. He's probably the most pathologically available-for-interview economist alive today.
In the time it took you to write out this conspiracy theory, you could have done even a cursory Google search instead.
> "It also doesn't care much for societal norms that stand in the way of what it conceives of as progress – even ones shared by all cultures..."
Great. That's "we're going to chase our idea of progress, even if the rest of the entire human race doesn't see it as progress".
Real progress is not just economic. In the 19th century, there was much more of an idea that there could be moral progress - an idea echoed today by the progressives. (You don't have to agree with the direction the progressives think represents progress - I don't - but their idea of progress is much more than economic gains.)
Having an environment that isn't polluted is progress compared to having one that is polluted. It may not be worth having people starve to get there, but it's one axis of progress.
And having people not starve is progress. Having them not die of diseases is progress. Having them able to read, and to access information, is progress.
Having them not die from violence would be progress.
It totally is, everybody works towards the things that they care about. There is no objective standard for progress. You don't get to define "progress" for everybody else.
>This position sounds so self-serving on the part of the billionaire
It sounds more self-serving to the author of the article. The single sentence quoted does not necessarily imply what the author says. And rather than ask for clarification, the author goes on to make the assumption that Cowen thinks that humanism is the end-all be-all and does not care about keeping natural systems and environments intact.
I think this article does a fairly good job of presenting different sides. In particular, I found this criticism very pertinent:
> "you could tell a story where instead of things getting better, what we're seeing is that a lot of what's bad is getting concentrated into unlikely, infrequent but enormously bad events".
It's like a Martingale betting strategy[0] where you turn a system of random wins and losses (like a technological/economic steady state) into one with repeated guarantees wins... until the guarantee fails (e.g. the Singularity, or a global market crash, or nuclear war).
If we're only measuring economic growth and technological capability, and not risk (which is harder to measure, and tempting to underestimate), then we might be running at full speed towards outcomes that even hyperbolic discounting[1] can't justify.
GDP has been growing fine, but life expectancy in the US has been in historic decline for the past decade, largely driven by alcoholism, drug overdose, and suicide. Meanwhile over 2 billion people worldwide are food insecure, and that number is rising.
Technology has certainly improved the standard of living of many many people over the last couple centuries, but there is no guarantee that it will continue to do so. Perhaps instead of a blind focus on “growing the pie”, at this point in history we should be asking ourselves “what pie?” and “did everyone get a slice?”
Edit: Updated “malnourished” to “food insecure”, my mistake for using the wrong terminology. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, there were 2.37 billion food insecure people in 2020, a number which has been steadily rising since 2014 with a larger jump since the start of the pandemic: https://www.fao.org/3/cb4474en/online/cb4474en.html
I think your data is a little old. The undernourished, defined as fewer than 1800 calories per day, has steadily declined from 2000 until 2019, and then risen very slightly as a result of Covid. There's about 660 million that meet this threshold. Global malnutrition really has gotten significantly better over the past few decades. https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment
Sadly we will know in the next years how fragile is the current food production system. High centralised food system based mainly on fossil fuels gives high yields until it doesn't.
Every time I listen to Steven Pinker I think that he would learn a lot with Nassim Taleb books.
Fertilizer production uses a great deal of natural gas.
The claims of fragility are unfounded though as natural gas supply isn't going anywhere and the use of natural gas in the process could be trivially (at great expense) replaced entirely by [nuclear powered] water electrolysis.
We also grossly overproduce calories, both as a policy decision for anti-fragility and for raising meat. Both of which leave a lot of slack before starvation levels kick in. At least in the US, other countries may be closer to the limit.
Food production uses fertilizers (from fossil fuels) and pesticides (from fossil fuels) and machinery (running on fossil fuels) to grow foods which are then processed (by machines running on fossil fuels) and shipped around the world (using fossil fuels).
We are talking about long-run trends of food insecurity. Russia's invasion of Ukraine will probably be (and hopefully) a short temporary turn in the wrong direction
Your 2 billion number is incorrect. It was 500 million until 2020 and then slightly rose given the pandemic. That number has been dropping precipitously for decades.
Your 2 billion number is incorrect. It was 500 million until 2020 and then slightly rose given the pandemic. That number has been dropping precipitously for decades. At this rate (ignoring 2021), there should be almost no malnutrition by 2030.
> and why must a normal person give a damn about the misfortunes of junkies and alcoholics?
You don't have to give a damn about anyone, but I'm friends and family with junkies and alcoholics, so I care. And even if you don't know any junkies or alcoholics and never will, can you not have sympathy for a person you've never met, even if some of their problems are to some degree their own fault?
I know alcoholics who were binge-drinking at the age of 13 because their parents were alcoholics too and encouraged it. I have cousins that often threw up when they were toddlers years old because their parents gave them too much to drink. If you were in these circumstances, how sure are you that you wouldn't end up a junkie or an alcoholic yourself?
>and why must a normal person give a damn about the misfortunes of junkies and alcoholics?
for starters because they're also normal people. If you think there's no drug users or alcoholics even among all the people you know you'd be very surprised. It takes a lot of callousness to think that people who struggle with addiction or really any other thing aren't exactly what 'normal' people are like.
What I wonder about is when it became normal to put that much lack of empathy and compassion proudly on public display.
So your theory is that poor people in poor countries just keep having babies when they have less and less to feed them. And that’s it. What a genius you are.
It's simpler than that, it is all about incentives. Science can happen even in the trenches of war, or by random employees in a patent office. Engineering needs resources and conerted efford. But when the incentives have nothing to do with science itself but rather with the struggle to keep all the PhD people employed, you end up with paper-mills and grant-harvester PIs. There s also a degeneration of the science culture due to so much self-promotion. Whatever happened to humility?
Engineering projects like Apollo or Manhattan succeded by taking the theory invented by a few madmen and making the entire effort to the end product. Instead we now have projects like the Human brain project (EU) and the Brain initiative that don't seem to have a defined goal, and no clear incentives. The HBP used to be about building an artificial brain, as ambitious as it sounds. Instead, petty politics and meddling led to the project becoming a project salad with very little to show. AFAIK the Brain initiative has not done better.
The article itself is another example of weak incentives. We don't need to invent another field called "progress studies" in order to make progress. That's only making the problem worse.
But that nepotistic framework produced a lot of good results, so it is unclear if fixing it this way actually improved the output. Meritocracy isn't a good thing if the extra burden of trying to evaluate merit actually worsen the outcome of the process.
> should we stop pouring resources into philosophy and arts?
Do we exist just to eat, shit, and breed?
Hopefully our civilisation is concerned with more than just the cold necessities of life: a civilisation that lets us do with our minds what we will. Circuses and Netflix have more meaning than bread: bread is merely a low level dependency in the skill tree.
I think there is a lot of bollox to our liberal humanities: but who am I to judge what others choose to put their minds to? Edit: the small percentage of gold produced is what matters, not the large percentage of load bearing ore. There can be a lot of worthwhile waste.
As someone who values the liberal humanities, I wish "support for philosophy and the arts" were implicitly understood as support for leisure time for people in general, rather than funding special arts programming or individual institution-pleasers. If arts and philosophy are not flourishing as they should be, it is not because the Kennedy Center (or whatever) needs any more money, but because people can't afford basic needs like housing without spending all their time working, and so have no time for it.
"the organisations and writers that make up the community almost exclusively focus on material advancements, such as boosting economic growth, improving and accelerating scientific research, and increasing housing supply ("Yimby-ism") and immigration (particularly "high-skilled")."
So the high-level pitch sounds very ambitious and comprehensive, but when we get down to the nitty gritty it's just wealthy professionals cloaking lobbying for the issues that affect them personally in philosophical verbiage. including YIMBYism and high-skilled immigration to the US in a discussion of global progress is like complaining about your dry cleaner's prices during a discussion of the world economy.
> Imagine after that first nap as a typical American, you had taken a second one in 1940, waking up in the 2020s. Your fridge now has a freezer, and your new microwave lets you reheat your leftovers.
What? Fridges had freezers in the 1940's. Usually as a small compartment, wrapped by the refrigerant evaporator ducts.
Residential microwave ovens rapidly increased in popularity in the USA in the 1970's and were common by the 1980's.
If you woke up in 1950-something, your freezer might have had a timed heating coil in it: a defroster.
If you woke up a bit later, it might have a magnetic door: because children were found to be suffocating in the externally latched fridges that couldn't be opened from the inside.
The fun thing about Hacker News is that no matter the topic, there's always someone in the comments who knows more than the author about something they wrote.
Hi, I wrote this article. The thought experiment was about a typical American in 1940 and what they would have in their home, i.e. what would be so common that the median American would have it in that year. This was drawn from Robert Gordon's book.
Progress is dead! Long live the plane of immanence!
history doesn't progress in a forward arrow. just like evolution, it explodes outwards in every direction all at once, driven by desiring machines. humans, corporations, states, animals, plants, even the systems of the earth themselves have made themselves into political actors.
anybody who has described a vector and metrics to demonstrate it should be scrutinized for their politics and what goals they are trying to achieve.
economic indicators are used (by capitalist economists) to bludgeon those who dislike the status quo into accepting that "it's not as bad as you experience it" and keep chugging along towards our climate demise in the name of capital and profit.
Ah, meeting a Deleuzian in HN is like catching a rare wild Pokemon...
The main gist I got from Deleuze and Guattari (without reading the actual books, only from people who seem to just endlessly talk about them) was: system dynamics are totally cool and rad, but we can only explain its coolness in excruciatingly obtuse language. Which is helpful for writing good poetry, but doesn't seem that helpful for actually making decisions in real life. (I've got to admit they have some really good quotable sentences in there too. Including the one that basically said in order to destroy capitalism you need to accelerate it, which spawned a mysterious cult in Warwick University.)
Jokes aside, if you think progress is dead and the status quo is shit, what alternative society are you imagining? (I think this is the most important question you can ask to any leftist)
if I was really pressed to give my ideal, it would be some sort of gift economy based anarcho-syndicalism. but maybe I've been taken by the bogdanovists from KSRs mars trilogy, (or I guess Bogdanov's Red Star, though I haven't read it yet).
as for D&G, really too bad it's notoriously hard to read. luckily I found some content out there that's more approachable to help me learn. their ideas, and Deleuze in particular, are captivating and astoundingly relevant decades later.
Collison and Cowen are asking the right questions but are unserious about finding answers. We need better data, a journal, forecasting competitions, etc. Podcasts and twitter cliques aren't going to cut it. Orthodox economics isn't going to cut it. A Humanities-based approach isn't going to cut it.
Even more seriously, they've almost framed the inquiry as unanswerable from the start. What kind of answer or new discovery might they accept as an advance? What are the criteria for success?
Humans barely live to 100 years, and "each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.” I don't think we need to invent further volatility than what producing new children already does.
Every advocate of Progress I've read or spoken to sees it as managing and extracting value from other people - and not establishing a basic stability from which others can be free to actualize and thrive. Even basic income is really about putting the managers of such a scheme at the centre of it, and it's to the point where even the very word 'free' is triggering. I'd argue that belief in Progress is not a benevolent, charitable, or altruistic sentiment.
It's said that change is the only constant, and I can sympathize with the idea that people imagine by aligning themselves to change for its own sake, they percieve themselves as aligning to the most powerful force in the universe, and are therefore on the right side of history. But the archeological record shows humans have made physical structures that are several thousands of years old, and as a human value, stability has a very long track record. So much so that the artifacts of stability outlast human culture's ability to remember them through periods of constant change, which suggests to me that what progress really reduces to is just leveraging chaos in a single lifetime for ephermeral, symbolic, materialist power.
The axiom that history itself is a force of progress is a pretty big leap of faith, and I think the iterated logic of that idea is designed to unmoor people from a stabilizing belief in the existence of truth. In that sense, I would say Crawford and Cowen are just iterating the ideology of that axiom, and people who place themselves at the centre of solutions for 'all humanity' are really just expressing an infinite will to power over all of humanity. Progress isn't a thing, it's the artifact of an ideology.
When someone tells you they represent change, what they tend to mean is they're here to take your stuff, and they've already moralized it to themselves, regardless of what you might believe. We should absolutely rethink the meaning of progress, but we should start with whether it is desirable at all, how much, compared to what, at what cost, and whether to build on our inheritance of stability, or continue to destroy it for the temporary feelings of power the destruction provides. There are thoughtful ways to engage this, if only we can get past merely litigating ideas and start actually using them to navigate and locate truth.
Actually, I think the GP post is saying we don't all agree on 1. The way progress looks to economists like Cowen is very different from how it'd look if a single person asked that question to themselves.
Rather than agreeing on the framework of "progress means increasing GDP and productivity", you could say "progress means total families" or "progress means a growing number of independent, self-sufficient communities". Is it radical to think that to some, progress might mean _more countries_?
In comparison yes, but in absolute terms that's mostly true if you were born in the first world, and yet you still have to put a considerable amount of time into doing stuffs you dislike, like working (in most cases)
I agree with you that we have had progress, and it's been net good by far. But I was answering to someone who its answer to the question "What would look like progress to you?" was something that is multiple levels above of what we consider basic needs today.
The whole point of progress studies is that, in the long term, the best way to improve whatever we consider today "basic needs" is to "grow the pie" as fast as we can
When do we draw the line what is basic needs? Today’s third world lives better than first world 150 years ago. And even developing world lives better than nobility 100 years ago.
I don’t believe purely growing the pie will fix it. Human beings looove to look at relative quality of life. And feel much better if everybody is equally poorer rather than higher baseline, but even higher extremes.
For example my country in Soviet era was piss poor. But people managed to get by and find happiness. Nowadays we live much much much better in absolute terms. Even baseline. Yet many people are lost in rat race drowning in instagram envy.
> Human beings looove to look at relative quality of life. And feel much better if everybody is equally poorer rather than higher baseline, but even higher extremes.
Do you have some data to back that up? Or any study?. My hypothesis is that most of those people think the world is mostly a zero-sum game, and they think the best way to improve their lives is to redistribute wealth more uniformly.
> For example my country in Soviet era was piss poor. But people managed to get by and find happiness.
I'm sorry, but that's an euphemism for dying and suffering. And be mindful that you, or your family, have survivorship bias. There are studies that show correlations between happiness and GDP
I am from Venezuela, sadly, my memory is fresher. My dad needlessly died before hand because the government decided that a local pandemic (pre covid, 2017) didn't exist, the pandemic was in conflict to their statistic goals, so they acted as if it didn't existed and let it roll without restrains. And there were more common dramas like family and friends malnourished, and criminals rampaging the city (BTW, one time they entered into my house armed and tied me up while they robbed, and multiple times robbed my family's small businesses with guns). There are 2 main reasons why criminality exploded in the last decade, the economy shrunk more than 50%, and criminals weren't punished, in fact, some were even armed as guerrillas in favor of the ruling party. The line between police and criminal was as blurry as ever, I've never seen a police acting like thugs so shamelessly without any care, they knew there was no punishment whatsoever
Current trend is that money does not buy happiness, but lets you run away from sorrow. It's 2 separate attributes rather than 2 ends of the same one. People can easily live stress-free swimming in money yet don't be happy. Or be miserable due to crappy situation yet find happiness at the same time.
P.S. Venesuela is a truly sad case. Yet another example what leftist economical miracles lead to. Unfortunately too many people in West still wish that upon themselves :D
I can imagine money having diminishing returns on happiness, so there's a line beyond which money stops correlating strongly with happiness. Though I've read that if we redistribute equally our global wealth, we would be waaay below that hypothetical line, hence, for now, we should still be growing the pie, at least if we believe in equality.
But I think I see your point now, for the people currently beyond that line, subjective views of the world dominates their desires, so the axis where we want progress are now more diverse among individuals, and progress in one axis tend to harm progress on other axis, hence why there's more conflict
Money helps with reducing misery. But it helps little to improve happiness. When you can afford warm, dry and comfy shoes, that will take you out of damp misery. But comfy feet won't make you happy day in, day out.
People have subjective views of how they define progress too. For me, splitting the pie equally sounds like retrograde soviet nostalgia. I don't believe equally sharing the pie makes the world any better. Productive people (actually productive) should get bigger piece of the pie than slackers. On top of that, functioning market is important to find ideas that work. Otherwise it's straight to failure of central planning.
So I think our difference relies in how much our happiness is tied to relating to others
And I'm not sure how we can answer that. But I do feel my happiness rarely relies on relating to others, instead it relies more in socializing (laughing out loud or playing games with friends), and by making progress towards my moralistic goals, mostly with the point of view centered at society, our species, or all life beings
Regarding 2. I think the crux of the controversy around progressivism is not so "much what is to be done" but, "by whom?"
The separation of powers in the west has been a pretty good at being resiliant to change with a kind of meta-stability, and also facilitating growth. Dynasties provided stability for milennia, but somehow prevented humans from making any of the post-enlightenment discoveries from the last 300 years anywhere else, and over hundreds of millions of lives. Out on a limb, but I actually suspect in the 19th century as a conseqeuence of mass literacy, we figured out how to create the equivalent to internet viruses, but in language, and use them to spread variants of mental illness. Metaphorically, our current conflicts closely resemble the consequences of ideological botnets weilded by some very unsavory characters. One way to free minds from it is to inculcate them with the idea that everywhere there is life, it is evident that it was not meant just to struggle and suffer, but it was created with an intent for it to thrive. This is really meta, but I'd say logically we need to get upstream of materialism if we're going to find ways solve material problems, and if we don't, we're just going to stay in solipsistic loops that justify our will to power. The view of the world that is predicated on an identity founded on being oppressed by other people is really a perverse form of materialist worship, where it doesn't believe in creation or intent, but it does believe in its inferiorized self relative to the idealized (evil) object it sees its identity reflected in. The view has allowed itself to be defined by (and relative-to) its own peak experience, and one that was negative. This is heresy, surely, but it seems worth it given the alternatives.
Anyway, I'd say the thing to do is, make new stuff, discover new things, and if you can't, find a way align with those who are. This meta stuff is just articulating how to untangle some of the underlying morass of beliefs that I think are getting in the way of thriving life.
> Every advocate of Progress I've read or spoken to sees it as managing and extracting value from other people - and not establishing a basic stability from which others can be free to actualize and thrive. Even basic income is really about putting the managers of such a scheme at the centre of it, and it's to the point where even the very word 'free' is triggering. I'd argue that belief in Progress is not a benevolent, charitable, or altruistic sentiment.
A lot of people talk about progress in this way, but it's really just their own aggression expressed in ideological form
But I do think that progress is an actual thing: just look at what the printing press accomplished, and what the internet is in the process of accomplishing. I think that making more information accessible at a lower cost is the core of progress. Who knows where this will take us, but it's made certain things possible that were not possible before. Life expectancies are also longer than they've been. But this kind of progress isn't a moral imperative like the political kind. It's just something that happens as a result of production
Sure the internet greatly improved access to information, and definetly helped science and tech.
But at what psychological costs?
It has greatly reduced: stability, attention spans, empathy, being satisfied in what you have and probably greatly increased depression and anxiety.
All those are key to the psychology of happiness and personal growth.
And since our material well being is already good, and science and tech would still advance, it does seem that happiness and personal growth are much better indicators for progress.
You are saying "wow this tree has grown to block my favorite chair from the sun. I am a dumb bitch who doesn't understand how trees work. If only there was sun elsewhere. Let me cut down the tree because I cannot be creative and also I am an idiot."
> Even basic income is really about putting the managers of such a scheme at the centre of it.
You are probably right. But...
But if, as a side effect, it materially increases the number of people who are really able to choose what they do with their lives, and gives them more time to do it, it will be progress.
It is worth keeping in mind that all funding actions are inefficient in one way or another. Most government actions are no more than 40 percent efficient, and real policymakers are aware of this fact and make decisions in its light. In the private sector, a CFO told me many years ago that no more than one in three investments works out.
If half of the money allocated for a universal basic income is wasted on needless "management" makework, provided that there is no actual obstruction or perversion of its universality, such a scheme would be doing well as well as doing good.
It would be the most progress seen since the vacuum cleaner, the refrigerator, the washing machine, and the electric stove made choices possible for millions of people.
> if, as a side effect, it materially increases the number of people who are really able to choose what they do with their lives, and gives them more time to do it, it will be progress.
At the expense of what?
Somebody has to produce all of the things people need and want. Universal basic income holds out the illusory promise of being able to have things you need and want without paying any cost to have them produced--because you aren't paying any cost (in time and effort) to get the income. That's not progress.
Real progress would be improving technology to make the things people need and want cheaper. Imagine if food were as cheap and plentiful as air. Imagine if modern construction methods made it 10 times as easy to build a house as it is now. Imagine if cars could be cranked out on 3D printers. And so on.
But that kind of progress never happens from the top down. It always happens from the bottom up. No top-down program, whether it's UBI or anything else, will help with that kind of progress. It takes actual people doing actual work.
> There was a time you could just walk out and pick it off trees.
For some, yes. Others you had to hunt or catch.
> Food didn't change. We did.
If you mean the human population grew to a point where simple hunting and gathering could not support it, and then food changed after that, that's getting things backwards. Our ancestors invented farming, i.e., a new way of producing food, and then the population grew larger than hunting and gathering could support. So food changed first. Then we changed.
> You must always ask:
Progress towards what?
Yes, agreed. Not everyone would consider our ancestors' invention of farming to be progress, for example.
I almost totally agree with you, but have a few reservations-
1. We could have cheaper, more abundant food, but a lot of grain is dumped into the ocean to create an artificial scarcity to keep prices high.
2. We have planned obsolescence in electronic devices, to increase profits
3. Closed source technology have made it unreasonably hard for small groups with limited funding to innovate
If you want innovation and technology to thrive, you will have to notice that valuing money as highly as it is, is detrimental to progress. And if like you said, UBI reduces the value, that's precisely what can help, right?
> 1. We could have cheaper, more abundant food, but a lot of grain is dumped into the ocean to create an artificial scarcity to keep prices high.
And governments pay farmers not to grow grain in the first place. These kinds of problems are solved by removing the top-down policies that create them.
> 2. We have planned obsolescence in electronic devices, to increase profits
To the extent this is a problem (and not just in electronic devices, many products are not built to last any more), it's a problem with corporate governance and is not something that is easily solved. The corporate governance problem is that most stock in publicly traded corporations is no longer owned by individuals, it's owned by mutual funds, since that's where most people's retirement savings are now. So the corporate entities that have to meet long time horizons, which is what enables things like building products to last a long time, rather than focusing on short-term profits, are the mutual funds, not the individual corporations--but the mutual funds don't build anything, they just move money around. The actual corporations that build things have short time horizons because the mutual funds will sell their stock if they don't meet the desired short-term returns.
As I said, this problem is not easily solved; certainly UBI does not solve it. Nor will it improve it, since anyone who depends on UBI for their income is not going to be running a corporation anyway. To the extent UBI affects the incentives of the people running corporations at all, it increases their incentive to take short-term profit, since the long-term effect of something like UBI is to make human labor scarcer and more expensive, which means corporations that build things need to either automate or go out of business--so the executives that run them have more incentive to take short-term profits and then exit with their golden parachutes before the long-term problems surface.
> 3. Closed source technology have made it unreasonably hard for small groups with limited funding to innovate
This is only true to the extent that closed source technology is better and would spark innovation if it were open. I do not see this being the case.
> valuing money as highly as it is, is detrimental to progress
I'm not sure I agree. I think what is detrimental to progress is focusing on short term gain rather than long term stability, particularly of the social institutions that are required for progress to occur in the first place. I don't see "valuing money" in and of itself as much of an effect. Many people who "value money" are willing to work for years on startups in order to get rich, producing much innovation and progress.
> > These kinds of problems are solved by removing the top-down policies that create them. I agree almost wholehearedly, this makes sense.
>> To the extent this is a problem (and not just in electronic devices, many products are not built to last any more), it's a problem with corporate governance and is not something that is easily solved. The corporate governance problem is that most stock in publicly traded corporations is no longer owned by individuals, it's owned by mutual funds, since that's where most people's retirement savings are now. So the corporate entities that have to meet long time horizons, which is what enables things like building products to last a long time, rather than focusing on short-term profits, are the mutual funds, not the individual corporations--but the mutual funds don't build anything, they just move money around. The actual corporations that build things have short time horizons because the mutual funds will sell their stock if they don't meet the desired short-term returns.As I said, this problem is not easily solved;
I see where you are coming from, and it makes sense. But you have to admit that the focus of this practice is to increase profits more than increasing value for customers. And that's a consequence of money being of more importance than solving a problem. So the store of value (money) is more "important" than the value the product is supposed to create.. I haven't been really eloquent here but I hope you get where in coming from, even if I might be a bit naive
>>certainly UBI does not solve it. Ofc, it won't. It'll just serve as a buffer instead of socialised Healthcare, housing and more, right?
>> Nor will it improve it, since anyone who depends on UBI for their income is not going to be running a corporation anyway. To the extent UBI affects the incentives of the people running corporations at all, it increases their incentive to take short-term profit, since the long-term effect of something like UBI is to make human labor scarcer and more expensive, which means corporations that build things need to either automate or go out of business--so the executives that run them have more incentive to take short-term profits and then exit with their golden parachutes before the long-term problems surface.
after this short term effect dies down, we would have more efficient corpos in the long tern, right?
And its all gonna "go to the moon" until there's a looming recession and suddenly all the worthless things lose a bunch of value.. (this is my first market cycle, and I see this with NFTs)
>> This is only true to the extent that closed source technology is better and would spark innovation if it were open.
No, better or worse aside, walled gardens make it harder to try new things.
>> I'm not sure I agree. I think what is detrimental to progress is focusing on short term gain rather than long term stability, particularly of the social institutions that are required for progress to occur in the first place. I don't see "valuing money" in and of itself as much of an effect. Many people who "value money" are willing to work for years on startups in order to get rich, producing much innovation and progress.
Interesting, but I disagree. Imo startup founders who succeed in the long run often place greater importance on creating value for their customers than they value the concept of money. Ofc they still care about it, because, well, obviously
I'd like to thank you for taking the time to reply so thoroughly
> > Not as long as the governance issue I described exists, no. Things would get worse on average over time but nobody would have any way to fix that.
I don't know the reasoning behind this, would love to understand in depth, but you're probably right.
>> don't know what you mean by this. I'm taking about how when everyone had excess cash (not excess value) then they spent it on things like NFTs, while a part of the craze saw new money buying NFTs like old money buys yatchs (to get into an exclusive club), a lot of people followed the hype by putting their money into an "asset" that has lost staggering amounts recently as a recession looms ahead because it mostly solves no real problem and creates no real value.
//Real progress would be improving technology to make the things people need and want cheaper
I agree about the goal.
But technology isn't what makes housing near reasonable places to live(employment, good community, etc) expensive.
So given socialized medicine, good public transportation and affordable housing takes us quite close to basic income - when a single adult needed to needed to work less than full time to provide for a family. That is possible in some places in Europe.
> technology isn't what makes housing near reasonable places to live(employment, good community, etc) expensive.
In a free market, housing prices are determined by supply and demand. Since location is a key factor in housing, supply is usually restricted at some point, which drives up prices in places that are in high demand. (Technology that enables remote work can help with this, though, by reducing the need for high demand in particular locations.)
However, housing in current developed societies is not a free market. There are many top-down restrictions that artificially restrict supply, and there are government policies like printing money for mortgages that artificially inflate demand. This drives up the price of housing everywhere, but it's at its worst in areas that are already in high demand.
So the best way to improve housing prices, across the board but especially in high demand areas, would be to remove the artificial effects on supply and demand and let the free market work. Which is bottom-up, not top-down. Top-down is hurting, not helping.
> given socialized medicine, good public transportation and affordable housing
Which either don't exist, or only exist because people are willing to pay for them anyway and don't feel gouged by the taxes required--which means that in those societies, those things would exist even in a free market, because people would pay for them anyway. So even where top-down supposedly works, it only works because it's not needed--it's "imposing" things that people would freely choose anyway. That's not an argument for top-down; it's an argument against it.
>the paper authors found that US research productivity has declined more than 40 times since the 1930s.
>Some from the progress community point to sclerotic funding bureaucracies, which eat nearly half of researcher time and create perverse incentives.
This is 100% believable to me. I don't think people quite understand how bad it is until they actually see academia from the inside, but the game researchers are playing is not "let's have a crack at some new idea and see if it works", but "let's put a slight twist on the existing paradigm that we know won't yield anything useful, because otherwise we won't get funding".
_Everything_ has to be "rationally" justified within the context of the existing paradigms (which are generally speaking, wrong), and every single force within the academy is acting to prevent researchers from actually doing what they believe will lead to new technology.
I'm convinced that the only progress actually comes from scientists with the skills to make the the grants board think they're being a "rational researcher", while a decent chunk of their time is actually doing whatever the hell they want.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present -- and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower (Farewell Address, January 17th, 1961)
(The above is from the same speech where Eisenhower warned of the military industrial complex. The section of the speech above is much less well known but just as prescient and just as unheeded. I think it explains why science now works the way it does even though this system is detrimental to real meaningful scientific research.)
>This is 100% believable to me. I don't think people quite understand how bad it is until they actually see academia from the inside
Why don't academics start their own university? There should be enough billionaires like Cowen who could come together and fund the infrastructure for laboratories and lecture halls.
I would be surprised if there were not more than enough idealistic scientists who would join the university if you offer academics a place to do research unobstructedly. Likewise, there should be more than enough students who would love to join a no-bullshit university to join the scientists and make it a self-sustaining system.
And yet, there is no such university. What's the main obstacle?
The main obstacle to starting a university? It's expensive, has massive administrative overhead, has a cold start / reputational problem, and they are academics not business people or administrators.
The annual operating budget for the University of Toronto is $3B. Certainly you can start smaller, but the cost of starting a competitive university from scratch would be astronomical. Coursera has raised $450M in capital, just to build an online university (unaccredited I believe). Tyler Cower is not a billionaire, as far as I know (he's a college professor).
But let's say you do that, and you build lecture halls and labs. And you get whatever accreditation is needed to be a "real" degree granting program and do top tier research. Then what? You need to go get students. With your brand new university nobody has heard of. And students want to go to university that looks good on their resume, mostly. So how do you build that reputation?
Finally, what are you really doing differently? When you say you let them do research "unobstructedly", research appears to rely on grants. Student tuition covers ~65% of the University of Toronto's operating budget (this is a very well regarded university with a lot of foreign students they are able to extract exorbitant tuitions from). So you still need to fund the research. You need to pay the professors and their lab assistants and post docs or whatever. Since you can't cover it with tuition (your school is worse than existing schools cause it's new) you have to get grants, so you're back to the same problem as before. Does this university have a new business model for funding research and operations besides tuition and donations / grants?
I'm not trying to be a downer, but there's a reason all these top universities are like, 100 years old. The entrenchment is real.
If I start it then those problems exist. However, the starting point is that academics have to suffer
>funding bureaucracies, which eat nearly half of researcher time
which should motivate some academics to come up with a better system. A network of academics with published papers has already established their reputation. Parents and recruiters in companies who studied the same field can evaluate the background and can assure their children that it is solid.
Such an university doesn't have to be started in a void. The internet allows for something like a kick-starter evaluation to check for demand. Only when there is enough demand is there a need to rent or buy buildings.
For a student, it is not without risk to start with that university. However, like every startup, there is a possibility for high reward when the self-selected academic network creates an exceptionally productive scientific environment.
*edit: With a reputation for solid scientific research, is it necessary to spent time on research grants? Wouldn't companies come knocking to research their tough problems?
There's a case to be made for an UBI (Universal Basic Income) for researchers. You pick 0.1% of the population of a country (US: 330M people, 0.1% would be 330,000 researchers) and give them a generous salary for life. Some of them will retire to the Caribbean. Most, I'd guess, would feel encouraged to work on more ambitious ideas.
Who gets to choose the 0.1%? Clearly we need to establish some committees to pick those people, a board to oversee the process and admins to support the endeavour :p
Interesting idea... what about something different than ubi? What if rather than being "generous", or only being given to 0.1%, it was given to anyone with a phd, but it was lower, and they need to clock in for 8 hrs to get it? As in physically leave their home and enter a place with other researchers for 8 hrs (idea factory basically).
This might ensure that only those who are passionate would take the opportunity, and that they could still do whatever they wanted once they did.
Obviously if you wanted to run an expensive experiment it would cost money and you'd need to fight for funding, but no more fighting for spots or fighting for your life or needing to justify everything to everyone else.
In a way some of the FANGs are doing just that. Hire best talent, and get them all under one roof, and hope they would come out with breakthrough products.
I’m willing to believe that technology is an S-curve, limited by physics, and that we are now in the upper portion. No more low-hanging fruit, increments from here on out.
But I also think we are in the very lowest portion of a cultural progress S-curve where there is no shortage whatsoever of low-hanging fruit available that could enormously improve lives.
We’re a long way from just getting people to a reasonable baseline of fulfilment or even agreement on what that means (health, food, housing, family, purpose?).
I disagree. I feel we are on the cusp of close to general AI that may actually provide useful ideas to improve the world. Genetic engineering is in its infancy. Quantum computing and fusion are on the horizon. Neural brain links are a whole new paradigm. Renewable energy is just beginning to take hold.
Could it be that we do understand progress but the world is not ready for it? We are worried about inflation, when the valuation of things explodes. What would happen if the opportunities of each human being explodes? E.g. if everybody can fly a rocket into space, there soon will be so much debris that further launches are impossible.
>You have a computer, TV, and smartphone. These are impressive inventions, and some seem like magic, but over time, you realise that your living standards haven't transformed quite as much as when you woke up in 1940.
The living standard of kings hasn't quite changed since 2000 BC.
What's changing is the life of the less fortunate. Women not spending time on washing clothes is a huge difference. [1]
What's holding society back is not lack of progress but conventions. When you have microwaves, but you still build houses with kitchens as if your wife stays at home all day, then resources are stuck and cannot be used to change living standards significantly.
Similarly, Smartphones are called Smartphones and not mobile computers because people still use them as phones. Living standards will change when the general public starts engaging with computers and crunches data to e.g. automatically choose the best product to buy, or to coordinate housing projects. The housing bubble exists because buyers don't coordinate to remove bottlenecks on the supply side.
In a sense, we have the printing press, but people are still illiterate.
>There is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up.
How about China? It would be surprising if they hadn't analyzed how they can out-innovate the US.
Then again, does progress need an intellectual movement? That sounds like increasing the study of arts to create more music and literature.
Instead of letting intellectuals assemble, where could people meet who would want to make progress? I would like to say HN, but my suspicion is that the bottlenecks are not easily monetizable so that angle investors and VC are not enough.
E.g. to build a city for the future with affordable housing, does it take nation states like China and Saudi Arabia, or could that be achieved in another way?
> The living standard of kings hasn't quite changed since 2000 BC.
Not true. Ancient/medieval kings still got smallpox, peed in chamber pots, and shivered in the winter cold. They couldn't hear the music of great performers who had died, or travel to another continent for a weekend trip. Etc.
Like many fundamental technologies, the printing press and moveable type were Chinese inventions. But "oh how the mighty have fallen!" IMHO the problem here in 2022 China is the politicization of education and media which denies individual ideas and experience from the earliest years, illogically burdening children with unnavigable quantities of take-home homework and suffocating the analytical thought and independent curiosity that are so critical for research and development. It is as if no research in to pedagogy occurred since the 1920s, and individuals still belong to a numbered local production collective, except that now it is titled a "Number X Middle School". They literally give out little flags to children as young as pre-school, it's full on nationalism every day here. Meanwhile the parents, working full time, can never obtain any notion of economic or social security, thus pressure their children to conform to the system which they are told will deliver opportunity, depite torturing their own children to the point of myopia (there's an epidemic Asia-wide). Not so different from the west in many ways, just different in how they get there, and children being robbed of their childhood is a tragedy. Also, because everyone is so economically insecure and poorly educated with no access to insightful media it's rare to see genuine outward social or environmental conscience. How can someone innovate on the big issues if they don't even recognize them or have no genuine personal alignment?
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 445 ms ] thread"During the pair's meetings, Cowen tells me, "we were both talking about the ideas, finding we had common ideas, and somehow hit upon the notion of an article". So, in 2019, they co-authored an essay in The Atlantic, which argued for "a new science of progress".
"progress studies doesn't desire a world where humans live more harmoniously with nature. As Crawford writes: "Humanism says that when improving human life requires altering the environment, humanity takes moral precedence over nature." It doesn’t necessarily want a world with less inequality and prefers to focus more on growing the pie than on how it’s divided. It also doesn't care much for societal norms that stand in the way of what it conceives of as progress – even ones shared by all cultures..."
This position sounds so self-serving on the part of the billionaire.
To reap the benefits of his wealth guilt-free, where he and people like him can exploit the world as they see fit and dominate others, it would be helpful for him to push a world view like this.
And why would Cowen, who "ranked 17th on a list of the top 100 most influential economists" give the time of day to some rando who just happened to be rich? One word: money.
So it looks like Collison bought himself an economist.
That Peter Thiel is influential in this "movement" (or PR exercise) is also telling.
"Crawford and Cowen, the two leading intellectual figures of the progress community, come from the objectivist and libertarian traditions, respectively. On a panel at AynRandCon, Crawford described progress studies as adjacent to objectivism, the philosophical system outlined in 20th Century philosopher Ayn Rand’s fiction."
Well, that just about explains it all..
This whole movement actually has strong echoes of extropianism, which has roots in HG Wells' techno-utopianism, and might be termed neo-Wellsianism, were it not for Wells making a 180 near the end of his life and becoming a dystopian (see his book "Mind at the End of Its Tether"), and for Wells' utopias being socialist, not capitalist ones.
A: Because that's where the money is.
Cowen is constantly giving the time of day to randos who are not remotely rich. He answers every non-spam email he gets. He runs a program that gives out small grants to nobodies who are just starting out their careers. He's probably the most pathologically available-for-interview economist alive today.
In the time it took you to write out this conspiracy theory, you could have done even a cursory Google search instead.
Great. That's "we're going to chase our idea of progress, even if the rest of the entire human race doesn't see it as progress".
Real progress is not just economic. In the 19th century, there was much more of an idea that there could be moral progress - an idea echoed today by the progressives. (You don't have to agree with the direction the progressives think represents progress - I don't - but their idea of progress is much more than economic gains.)
Having an environment that isn't polluted is progress compared to having one that is polluted. It may not be worth having people starve to get there, but it's one axis of progress.
And having people not starve is progress. Having them not die of diseases is progress. Having them able to read, and to access information, is progress.
Having them not die from violence would be progress.
It sounds more self-serving to the author of the article. The single sentence quoted does not necessarily imply what the author says. And rather than ask for clarification, the author goes on to make the assumption that Cowen thinks that humanism is the end-all be-all and does not care about keeping natural systems and environments intact.
> "you could tell a story where instead of things getting better, what we're seeing is that a lot of what's bad is getting concentrated into unlikely, infrequent but enormously bad events".
It's like a Martingale betting strategy[0] where you turn a system of random wins and losses (like a technological/economic steady state) into one with repeated guarantees wins... until the guarantee fails (e.g. the Singularity, or a global market crash, or nuclear war).
If we're only measuring economic growth and technological capability, and not risk (which is harder to measure, and tempting to underestimate), then we might be running at full speed towards outcomes that even hyperbolic discounting[1] can't justify.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_%28betting_system%2...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting
Technology has certainly improved the standard of living of many many people over the last couple centuries, but there is no guarantee that it will continue to do so. Perhaps instead of a blind focus on “growing the pie”, at this point in history we should be asking ourselves “what pie?” and “did everyone get a slice?”
Edit: Updated “malnourished” to “food insecure”, my mistake for using the wrong terminology. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, there were 2.37 billion food insecure people in 2020, a number which has been steadily rising since 2014 with a larger jump since the start of the pandemic: https://www.fao.org/3/cb4474en/online/cb4474en.html
Every time I listen to Steven Pinker I think that he would learn a lot with Nassim Taleb books.
The claims of fragility are unfounded though as natural gas supply isn't going anywhere and the use of natural gas in the process could be trivially (at great expense) replaced entirely by [nuclear powered] water electrolysis.
We also grossly overproduce calories, both as a policy decision for anti-fragility and for raising meat. Both of which leave a lot of slack before starvation levels kick in. At least in the US, other countries may be closer to the limit.
We are talking about long-run trends of food insecurity. Russia's invasion of Ukraine will probably be (and hopefully) a short temporary turn in the wrong direction
You don't have to give a damn about anyone, but I'm friends and family with junkies and alcoholics, so I care. And even if you don't know any junkies or alcoholics and never will, can you not have sympathy for a person you've never met, even if some of their problems are to some degree their own fault?
I know alcoholics who were binge-drinking at the age of 13 because their parents were alcoholics too and encouraged it. I have cousins that often threw up when they were toddlers years old because their parents gave them too much to drink. If you were in these circumstances, how sure are you that you wouldn't end up a junkie or an alcoholic yourself?
I give a damn about living in a society suffering from a surfeit of junkies and alcoholics. That affects me.
for starters because they're also normal people. If you think there's no drug users or alcoholics even among all the people you know you'd be very surprised. It takes a lot of callousness to think that people who struggle with addiction or really any other thing aren't exactly what 'normal' people are like.
What I wonder about is when it became normal to put that much lack of empathy and compassion proudly on public display.
Try giving up your smartphone for whole one day, and then get back to us on "junkies". :)
> “did everyone get a slice?”
I don't believe so, but it makes sense: we've always been at (economic) war with Eastasia/Oceania
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/life-expectancy/life-ex...
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/mortality-trends...
I'd say we understand progress so well, we've gamified it.: http://progressquest.com/
A few centuries ago it just meant movement along a path - e.g. The Pilgrim's Progress.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=scientific+pro...
It correlates pretty cleanly with "social progress" as well
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=scientific+pro...
Afterwards they lost all doubt. What people will do for a little aspirin ...
(Marx went to town on it, paradise on earth was at hand. Scientifically, of course.)
Engineering projects like Apollo or Manhattan succeded by taking the theory invented by a few madmen and making the entire effort to the end product. Instead we now have projects like the Human brain project (EU) and the Brain initiative that don't seem to have a defined goal, and no clear incentives. The HBP used to be about building an artificial brain, as ambitious as it sounds. Instead, petty politics and meddling led to the project becoming a project salad with very little to show. AFAIK the Brain initiative has not done better.
The article itself is another example of weak incentives. We don't need to invent another field called "progress studies" in order to make progress. That's only making the problem worse.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
I like to think that progress is about maximizing global satisfaction. But then really hard questions follow
- Who are included in "global"?, every human being?, every conscious mammal?. Do we all get the same weight?
- (Assuming last answer is all human beings) How should we come to a consensus?. How do we coordinate to achieve our agreed goals?
If you think this is all too subjective, should we stop pouring resources into philosophy and arts?
I think this questions deserve at least some studying
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/
Do we exist just to eat, shit, and breed?
Hopefully our civilisation is concerned with more than just the cold necessities of life: a civilisation that lets us do with our minds what we will. Circuses and Netflix have more meaning than bread: bread is merely a low level dependency in the skill tree.
I think there is a lot of bollox to our liberal humanities: but who am I to judge what others choose to put their minds to? Edit: the small percentage of gold produced is what matters, not the large percentage of load bearing ore. There can be a lot of worthwhile waste.
Disclaimer: I am Engineer, not Word Rotator.
we exist because we eat, shit, and breed. But that will end too.
We are just an expression of processes in the unfolding universe.
As someone who values the liberal humanities, I wish "support for philosophy and the arts" were implicitly understood as support for leisure time for people in general, rather than funding special arts programming or individual institution-pleasers. If arts and philosophy are not flourishing as they should be, it is not because the Kennedy Center (or whatever) needs any more money, but because people can't afford basic needs like housing without spending all their time working, and so have no time for it.
So the high-level pitch sounds very ambitious and comprehensive, but when we get down to the nitty gritty it's just wealthy professionals cloaking lobbying for the issues that affect them personally in philosophical verbiage. including YIMBYism and high-skilled immigration to the US in a discussion of global progress is like complaining about your dry cleaner's prices during a discussion of the world economy.
What? Fridges had freezers in the 1940's. Usually as a small compartment, wrapped by the refrigerant evaporator ducts.
https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/housewife-puts-an-ice-c...
Residential microwave ovens rapidly increased in popularity in the USA in the 1970's and were common by the 1980's.
If you woke up in 1950-something, your freezer might have had a timed heating coil in it: a defroster.
If you woke up a bit later, it might have a magnetic door: because children were found to be suffocating in the externally latched fridges that couldn't be opened from the inside.
[0] https://youtu.be/OCUlE5ldPvM
history doesn't progress in a forward arrow. just like evolution, it explodes outwards in every direction all at once, driven by desiring machines. humans, corporations, states, animals, plants, even the systems of the earth themselves have made themselves into political actors.
anybody who has described a vector and metrics to demonstrate it should be scrutinized for their politics and what goals they are trying to achieve.
economic indicators are used (by capitalist economists) to bludgeon those who dislike the status quo into accepting that "it's not as bad as you experience it" and keep chugging along towards our climate demise in the name of capital and profit.
The main gist I got from Deleuze and Guattari (without reading the actual books, only from people who seem to just endlessly talk about them) was: system dynamics are totally cool and rad, but we can only explain its coolness in excruciatingly obtuse language. Which is helpful for writing good poetry, but doesn't seem that helpful for actually making decisions in real life. (I've got to admit they have some really good quotable sentences in there too. Including the one that basically said in order to destroy capitalism you need to accelerate it, which spawned a mysterious cult in Warwick University.)
Jokes aside, if you think progress is dead and the status quo is shit, what alternative society are you imagining? (I think this is the most important question you can ask to any leftist)
as for D&G, really too bad it's notoriously hard to read. luckily I found some content out there that's more approachable to help me learn. their ideas, and Deleuze in particular, are captivating and astoundingly relevant decades later.
Even more seriously, they've almost framed the inquiry as unanswerable from the start. What kind of answer or new discovery might they accept as an advance? What are the criteria for success?
Every advocate of Progress I've read or spoken to sees it as managing and extracting value from other people - and not establishing a basic stability from which others can be free to actualize and thrive. Even basic income is really about putting the managers of such a scheme at the centre of it, and it's to the point where even the very word 'free' is triggering. I'd argue that belief in Progress is not a benevolent, charitable, or altruistic sentiment.
It's said that change is the only constant, and I can sympathize with the idea that people imagine by aligning themselves to change for its own sake, they percieve themselves as aligning to the most powerful force in the universe, and are therefore on the right side of history. But the archeological record shows humans have made physical structures that are several thousands of years old, and as a human value, stability has a very long track record. So much so that the artifacts of stability outlast human culture's ability to remember them through periods of constant change, which suggests to me that what progress really reduces to is just leveraging chaos in a single lifetime for ephermeral, symbolic, materialist power.
The axiom that history itself is a force of progress is a pretty big leap of faith, and I think the iterated logic of that idea is designed to unmoor people from a stabilizing belief in the existence of truth. In that sense, I would say Crawford and Cowen are just iterating the ideology of that axiom, and people who place themselves at the centre of solutions for 'all humanity' are really just expressing an infinite will to power over all of humanity. Progress isn't a thing, it's the artifact of an ideology.
When someone tells you they represent change, what they tend to mean is they're here to take your stuff, and they've already moralized it to themselves, regardless of what you might believe. We should absolutely rethink the meaning of progress, but we should start with whether it is desirable at all, how much, compared to what, at what cost, and whether to build on our inheritance of stability, or continue to destroy it for the temporary feelings of power the destruction provides. There are thoughtful ways to engage this, if only we can get past merely litigating ideas and start actually using them to navigate and locate truth.
2. What do you think needs to be done to achieve those goals?
We will all probably agree on 1. But disagree on how to achieve those goals
Rather than agreeing on the framework of "progress means increasing GDP and productivity", you could say "progress means total families" or "progress means a growing number of independent, self-sufficient communities". Is it radical to think that to some, progress might mean _more countries_?
I find hard to believe that anyone would put that in front of more basic needs like food, safety, home.
Sure, once basic needs are satisfied, our goals start to diverge, and rely more on our subjective views of the world.
But is the world even close to that? Should we disregard basic needs as a solved problem that we don't even think about anymore?
Spring-of-nations happened because at the time many people got their basic needs covered and started looking for higher needs to fulfill.
But as with salary raises, people quickly take better conditions as the new normal.
I agree with you that we have had progress, and it's been net good by far. But I was answering to someone who its answer to the question "What would look like progress to you?" was something that is multiple levels above of what we consider basic needs today.
The whole point of progress studies is that, in the long term, the best way to improve whatever we consider today "basic needs" is to "grow the pie" as fast as we can
I don’t believe purely growing the pie will fix it. Human beings looove to look at relative quality of life. And feel much better if everybody is equally poorer rather than higher baseline, but even higher extremes.
For example my country in Soviet era was piss poor. But people managed to get by and find happiness. Nowadays we live much much much better in absolute terms. Even baseline. Yet many people are lost in rat race drowning in instagram envy.
Do you have some data to back that up? Or any study?. My hypothesis is that most of those people think the world is mostly a zero-sum game, and they think the best way to improve their lives is to redistribute wealth more uniformly.
> For example my country in Soviet era was piss poor. But people managed to get by and find happiness.
I'm sorry, but that's an euphemism for dying and suffering. And be mindful that you, or your family, have survivorship bias. There are studies that show correlations between happiness and GDP
I am from Venezuela, sadly, my memory is fresher. My dad needlessly died before hand because the government decided that a local pandemic (pre covid, 2017) didn't exist, the pandemic was in conflict to their statistic goals, so they acted as if it didn't existed and let it roll without restrains. And there were more common dramas like family and friends malnourished, and criminals rampaging the city (BTW, one time they entered into my house armed and tied me up while they robbed, and multiple times robbed my family's small businesses with guns). There are 2 main reasons why criminality exploded in the last decade, the economy shrunk more than 50%, and criminals weren't punished, in fact, some were even armed as guerrillas in favor of the ruling party. The line between police and criminal was as blurry as ever, I've never seen a police acting like thugs so shamelessly without any care, they knew there was no punishment whatsoever
P.S. Venesuela is a truly sad case. Yet another example what leftist economical miracles lead to. Unfortunately too many people in West still wish that upon themselves :D
But I think I see your point now, for the people currently beyond that line, subjective views of the world dominates their desires, so the axis where we want progress are now more diverse among individuals, and progress in one axis tend to harm progress on other axis, hence why there's more conflict
People have subjective views of how they define progress too. For me, splitting the pie equally sounds like retrograde soviet nostalgia. I don't believe equally sharing the pie makes the world any better. Productive people (actually productive) should get bigger piece of the pie than slackers. On top of that, functioning market is important to find ideas that work. Otherwise it's straight to failure of central planning.
So I think our difference relies in how much our happiness is tied to relating to others
And I'm not sure how we can answer that. But I do feel my happiness rarely relies on relating to others, instead it relies more in socializing (laughing out loud or playing games with friends), and by making progress towards my moralistic goals, mostly with the point of view centered at society, our species, or all life beings
The separation of powers in the west has been a pretty good at being resiliant to change with a kind of meta-stability, and also facilitating growth. Dynasties provided stability for milennia, but somehow prevented humans from making any of the post-enlightenment discoveries from the last 300 years anywhere else, and over hundreds of millions of lives. Out on a limb, but I actually suspect in the 19th century as a conseqeuence of mass literacy, we figured out how to create the equivalent to internet viruses, but in language, and use them to spread variants of mental illness. Metaphorically, our current conflicts closely resemble the consequences of ideological botnets weilded by some very unsavory characters. One way to free minds from it is to inculcate them with the idea that everywhere there is life, it is evident that it was not meant just to struggle and suffer, but it was created with an intent for it to thrive. This is really meta, but I'd say logically we need to get upstream of materialism if we're going to find ways solve material problems, and if we don't, we're just going to stay in solipsistic loops that justify our will to power. The view of the world that is predicated on an identity founded on being oppressed by other people is really a perverse form of materialist worship, where it doesn't believe in creation or intent, but it does believe in its inferiorized self relative to the idealized (evil) object it sees its identity reflected in. The view has allowed itself to be defined by (and relative-to) its own peak experience, and one that was negative. This is heresy, surely, but it seems worth it given the alternatives.
Anyway, I'd say the thing to do is, make new stuff, discover new things, and if you can't, find a way align with those who are. This meta stuff is just articulating how to untangle some of the underlying morass of beliefs that I think are getting in the way of thriving life.
A lot of people talk about progress in this way, but it's really just their own aggression expressed in ideological form
But I do think that progress is an actual thing: just look at what the printing press accomplished, and what the internet is in the process of accomplishing. I think that making more information accessible at a lower cost is the core of progress. Who knows where this will take us, but it's made certain things possible that were not possible before. Life expectancies are also longer than they've been. But this kind of progress isn't a moral imperative like the political kind. It's just something that happens as a result of production
Although HN is social media right? So maybe not
But at what psychological costs?
It has greatly reduced: stability, attention spans, empathy, being satisfied in what you have and probably greatly increased depression and anxiety.
All those are key to the psychology of happiness and personal growth.
And since our material well being is already good, and science and tech would still advance, it does seem that happiness and personal growth are much better indicators for progress.
Tech is never the problem.
You are saying "wow this tree has grown to block my favorite chair from the sun. I am a dumb bitch who doesn't understand how trees work. If only there was sun elsewhere. Let me cut down the tree because I cannot be creative and also I am an idiot."
That is you, in my words. :)
You are probably right. But...
But if, as a side effect, it materially increases the number of people who are really able to choose what they do with their lives, and gives them more time to do it, it will be progress.
It is worth keeping in mind that all funding actions are inefficient in one way or another. Most government actions are no more than 40 percent efficient, and real policymakers are aware of this fact and make decisions in its light. In the private sector, a CFO told me many years ago that no more than one in three investments works out.
If half of the money allocated for a universal basic income is wasted on needless "management" makework, provided that there is no actual obstruction or perversion of its universality, such a scheme would be doing well as well as doing good.
It would be the most progress seen since the vacuum cleaner, the refrigerator, the washing machine, and the electric stove made choices possible for millions of people.
At the expense of what?
Somebody has to produce all of the things people need and want. Universal basic income holds out the illusory promise of being able to have things you need and want without paying any cost to have them produced--because you aren't paying any cost (in time and effort) to get the income. That's not progress.
Real progress would be improving technology to make the things people need and want cheaper. Imagine if food were as cheap and plentiful as air. Imagine if modern construction methods made it 10 times as easy to build a house as it is now. Imagine if cars could be cranked out on 3D printers. And so on.
But that kind of progress never happens from the top down. It always happens from the bottom up. No top-down program, whether it's UBI or anything else, will help with that kind of progress. It takes actual people doing actual work.
It was. There was a time you could just walk out and pick it off trees.
Food didn't change. We did.
Progress is not a scalar. It's a vector. You must always ask:
Progress towards what?
For some, yes. Others you had to hunt or catch.
> Food didn't change. We did.
If you mean the human population grew to a point where simple hunting and gathering could not support it, and then food changed after that, that's getting things backwards. Our ancestors invented farming, i.e., a new way of producing food, and then the population grew larger than hunting and gathering could support. So food changed first. Then we changed.
> You must always ask:
Progress towards what?
Yes, agreed. Not everyone would consider our ancestors' invention of farming to be progress, for example.
The best interpretation of your comment is that of course I support progress away from blatant human rights violations and genocide.
Though I do suggest you take extra care with grammatical use of the comma (,). :)
If you want innovation and technology to thrive, you will have to notice that valuing money as highly as it is, is detrimental to progress. And if like you said, UBI reduces the value, that's precisely what can help, right?
And governments pay farmers not to grow grain in the first place. These kinds of problems are solved by removing the top-down policies that create them.
> 2. We have planned obsolescence in electronic devices, to increase profits
To the extent this is a problem (and not just in electronic devices, many products are not built to last any more), it's a problem with corporate governance and is not something that is easily solved. The corporate governance problem is that most stock in publicly traded corporations is no longer owned by individuals, it's owned by mutual funds, since that's where most people's retirement savings are now. So the corporate entities that have to meet long time horizons, which is what enables things like building products to last a long time, rather than focusing on short-term profits, are the mutual funds, not the individual corporations--but the mutual funds don't build anything, they just move money around. The actual corporations that build things have short time horizons because the mutual funds will sell their stock if they don't meet the desired short-term returns.
As I said, this problem is not easily solved; certainly UBI does not solve it. Nor will it improve it, since anyone who depends on UBI for their income is not going to be running a corporation anyway. To the extent UBI affects the incentives of the people running corporations at all, it increases their incentive to take short-term profit, since the long-term effect of something like UBI is to make human labor scarcer and more expensive, which means corporations that build things need to either automate or go out of business--so the executives that run them have more incentive to take short-term profits and then exit with their golden parachutes before the long-term problems surface.
> 3. Closed source technology have made it unreasonably hard for small groups with limited funding to innovate
This is only true to the extent that closed source technology is better and would spark innovation if it were open. I do not see this being the case.
> valuing money as highly as it is, is detrimental to progress
I'm not sure I agree. I think what is detrimental to progress is focusing on short term gain rather than long term stability, particularly of the social institutions that are required for progress to occur in the first place. I don't see "valuing money" in and of itself as much of an effect. Many people who "value money" are willing to work for years on startups in order to get rich, producing much innovation and progress.
>> To the extent this is a problem (and not just in electronic devices, many products are not built to last any more), it's a problem with corporate governance and is not something that is easily solved. The corporate governance problem is that most stock in publicly traded corporations is no longer owned by individuals, it's owned by mutual funds, since that's where most people's retirement savings are now. So the corporate entities that have to meet long time horizons, which is what enables things like building products to last a long time, rather than focusing on short-term profits, are the mutual funds, not the individual corporations--but the mutual funds don't build anything, they just move money around. The actual corporations that build things have short time horizons because the mutual funds will sell their stock if they don't meet the desired short-term returns.As I said, this problem is not easily solved; I see where you are coming from, and it makes sense. But you have to admit that the focus of this practice is to increase profits more than increasing value for customers. And that's a consequence of money being of more importance than solving a problem. So the store of value (money) is more "important" than the value the product is supposed to create.. I haven't been really eloquent here but I hope you get where in coming from, even if I might be a bit naive
>>certainly UBI does not solve it. Ofc, it won't. It'll just serve as a buffer instead of socialised Healthcare, housing and more, right?
>> Nor will it improve it, since anyone who depends on UBI for their income is not going to be running a corporation anyway. To the extent UBI affects the incentives of the people running corporations at all, it increases their incentive to take short-term profit, since the long-term effect of something like UBI is to make human labor scarcer and more expensive, which means corporations that build things need to either automate or go out of business--so the executives that run them have more incentive to take short-term profits and then exit with their golden parachutes before the long-term problems surface.
after this short term effect dies down, we would have more efficient corpos in the long tern, right?
And its all gonna "go to the moon" until there's a looming recession and suddenly all the worthless things lose a bunch of value.. (this is my first market cycle, and I see this with NFTs)
>> This is only true to the extent that closed source technology is better and would spark innovation if it were open. No, better or worse aside, walled gardens make it harder to try new things.
>> I'm not sure I agree. I think what is detrimental to progress is focusing on short term gain rather than long term stability, particularly of the social institutions that are required for progress to occur in the first place. I don't see "valuing money" in and of itself as much of an effect. Many people who "value money" are willing to work for years on startups in order to get rich, producing much innovation and progress. Interesting, but I disagree. Imo startup founders who succeed in the long run often place greater importance on creating value for their customers than they value the concept of money. Ofc they still care about it, because, well, obviously
I'd like to thank you for taking the time to reply so thoroughly
Not as long as the governance issue I described exists, no. Things would get worse on average over time but nobody would have any way to fix that.
> its all gonna "go to the moon" until there's a looming recession and suddenly all the worthless things lose a bunch of value
I don't know what you mean by this. There is nothing that guarantees that wealth creation will continue.
> I'd like to thank you for taking the time to reply so thoroughly
You're welcome! And thank you in return for taking the time to read my posts and respond thoughtfully.
I don't know the reasoning behind this, would love to understand in depth, but you're probably right.
>> don't know what you mean by this. I'm taking about how when everyone had excess cash (not excess value) then they spent it on things like NFTs, while a part of the craze saw new money buying NFTs like old money buys yatchs (to get into an exclusive club), a lot of people followed the hype by putting their money into an "asset" that has lost staggering amounts recently as a recession looms ahead because it mostly solves no real problem and creates no real value.
Nice talking to you!
I agree about the goal.
But technology isn't what makes housing near reasonable places to live(employment, good community, etc) expensive.
So given socialized medicine, good public transportation and affordable housing takes us quite close to basic income - when a single adult needed to needed to work less than full time to provide for a family. That is possible in some places in Europe.
And those are centrally managed things.
So it's a combination of bottoms-up and top-down.
In a free market, housing prices are determined by supply and demand. Since location is a key factor in housing, supply is usually restricted at some point, which drives up prices in places that are in high demand. (Technology that enables remote work can help with this, though, by reducing the need for high demand in particular locations.)
However, housing in current developed societies is not a free market. There are many top-down restrictions that artificially restrict supply, and there are government policies like printing money for mortgages that artificially inflate demand. This drives up the price of housing everywhere, but it's at its worst in areas that are already in high demand.
So the best way to improve housing prices, across the board but especially in high demand areas, would be to remove the artificial effects on supply and demand and let the free market work. Which is bottom-up, not top-down. Top-down is hurting, not helping.
> given socialized medicine, good public transportation and affordable housing
Which either don't exist, or only exist because people are willing to pay for them anyway and don't feel gouged by the taxes required--which means that in those societies, those things would exist even in a free market, because people would pay for them anyway. So even where top-down supposedly works, it only works because it's not needed--it's "imposing" things that people would freely choose anyway. That's not an argument for top-down; it's an argument against it.
I authoritarianism in vogue? Can you get the fuck off my democracy? :)
> When someone tells you they represent change, what they tend to mean is they're here to take your stuff,
You are the villain of Delicate Tendrils.
Yes we are legitimately coming to take your things. Yes, this is what we mean. How else could you interpret it?
This is the essence of the notion of progress.
It is naive to think that we cannot do better.
>Some from the progress community point to sclerotic funding bureaucracies, which eat nearly half of researcher time and create perverse incentives.
This is 100% believable to me. I don't think people quite understand how bad it is until they actually see academia from the inside, but the game researchers are playing is not "let's have a crack at some new idea and see if it works", but "let's put a slight twist on the existing paradigm that we know won't yield anything useful, because otherwise we won't get funding".
_Everything_ has to be "rationally" justified within the context of the existing paradigms (which are generally speaking, wrong), and every single force within the academy is acting to prevent researchers from actually doing what they believe will lead to new technology.
I'm convinced that the only progress actually comes from scientists with the skills to make the the grants board think they're being a "rational researcher", while a decent chunk of their time is actually doing whatever the hell they want.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower (Farewell Address, January 17th, 1961)
(The above is from the same speech where Eisenhower warned of the military industrial complex. The section of the speech above is much less well known but just as prescient and just as unheeded. I think it explains why science now works the way it does even though this system is detrimental to real meaningful scientific research.)
Why don't academics start their own university? There should be enough billionaires like Cowen who could come together and fund the infrastructure for laboratories and lecture halls.
I would be surprised if there were not more than enough idealistic scientists who would join the university if you offer academics a place to do research unobstructedly. Likewise, there should be more than enough students who would love to join a no-bullshit university to join the scientists and make it a self-sustaining system.
And yet, there is no such university. What's the main obstacle?
The annual operating budget for the University of Toronto is $3B. Certainly you can start smaller, but the cost of starting a competitive university from scratch would be astronomical. Coursera has raised $450M in capital, just to build an online university (unaccredited I believe). Tyler Cower is not a billionaire, as far as I know (he's a college professor).
But let's say you do that, and you build lecture halls and labs. And you get whatever accreditation is needed to be a "real" degree granting program and do top tier research. Then what? You need to go get students. With your brand new university nobody has heard of. And students want to go to university that looks good on their resume, mostly. So how do you build that reputation?
Finally, what are you really doing differently? When you say you let them do research "unobstructedly", research appears to rely on grants. Student tuition covers ~65% of the University of Toronto's operating budget (this is a very well regarded university with a lot of foreign students they are able to extract exorbitant tuitions from). So you still need to fund the research. You need to pay the professors and their lab assistants and post docs or whatever. Since you can't cover it with tuition (your school is worse than existing schools cause it's new) you have to get grants, so you're back to the same problem as before. Does this university have a new business model for funding research and operations besides tuition and donations / grants?
I'm not trying to be a downer, but there's a reason all these top universities are like, 100 years old. The entrenchment is real.
>funding bureaucracies, which eat nearly half of researcher time
which should motivate some academics to come up with a better system. A network of academics with published papers has already established their reputation. Parents and recruiters in companies who studied the same field can evaluate the background and can assure their children that it is solid.
Such an university doesn't have to be started in a void. The internet allows for something like a kick-starter evaluation to check for demand. Only when there is enough demand is there a need to rent or buy buildings.
For a student, it is not without risk to start with that university. However, like every startup, there is a possibility for high reward when the self-selected academic network creates an exceptionally productive scientific environment.
*edit: With a reputation for solid scientific research, is it necessary to spent time on research grants? Wouldn't companies come knocking to research their tough problems?
Lol ok. Cool and very helpful comment. You have contributed something to this world.
This might ensure that only those who are passionate would take the opportunity, and that they could still do whatever they wanted once they did.
Obviously if you wanted to run an expensive experiment it would cost money and you'd need to fight for funding, but no more fighting for spots or fighting for your life or needing to justify everything to everyone else.
But I also think we are in the very lowest portion of a cultural progress S-curve where there is no shortage whatsoever of low-hanging fruit available that could enormously improve lives.
We’re a long way from just getting people to a reasonable baseline of fulfilment or even agreement on what that means (health, food, housing, family, purpose?).
> Genetic engineering is in its infancy. Quantum computing and fusion are on the horizon. Neural brain links...
Well if anything none of those examples you gave sound like low-hanging fruit.
>You have a computer, TV, and smartphone. These are impressive inventions, and some seem like magic, but over time, you realise that your living standards haven't transformed quite as much as when you woke up in 1940.
The living standard of kings hasn't quite changed since 2000 BC.
What's changing is the life of the less fortunate. Women not spending time on washing clothes is a huge difference. [1]
What's holding society back is not lack of progress but conventions. When you have microwaves, but you still build houses with kitchens as if your wife stays at home all day, then resources are stuck and cannot be used to change living standards significantly.
Similarly, Smartphones are called Smartphones and not mobile computers because people still use them as phones. Living standards will change when the general public starts engaging with computers and crunches data to e.g. automatically choose the best product to buy, or to coordinate housing projects. The housing bubble exists because buyers don't coordinate to remove bottlenecks on the supply side.
In a sense, we have the printing press, but people are still illiterate.
>There is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up.
How about China? It would be surprising if they hadn't analyzed how they can out-innovate the US.
Then again, does progress need an intellectual movement? That sounds like increasing the study of arts to create more music and literature.
Instead of letting intellectuals assemble, where could people meet who would want to make progress? I would like to say HN, but my suspicion is that the bottlenecks are not easily monetizable so that angle investors and VC are not enough.
E.g. to build a city for the future with affordable housing, does it take nation states like China and Saudi Arabia, or could that be achieved in another way?
[1] General Electric also introduced its first top loading automatic model in 1947 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washing_machine
Not true. Ancient/medieval kings still got smallpox, peed in chamber pots, and shivered in the winter cold. They couldn't hear the music of great performers who had died, or travel to another continent for a weekend trip. Etc.
Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
How about China?
Like many fundamental technologies, the printing press and moveable type were Chinese inventions. But "oh how the mighty have fallen!" IMHO the problem here in 2022 China is the politicization of education and media which denies individual ideas and experience from the earliest years, illogically burdening children with unnavigable quantities of take-home homework and suffocating the analytical thought and independent curiosity that are so critical for research and development. It is as if no research in to pedagogy occurred since the 1920s, and individuals still belong to a numbered local production collective, except that now it is titled a "Number X Middle School". They literally give out little flags to children as young as pre-school, it's full on nationalism every day here. Meanwhile the parents, working full time, can never obtain any notion of economic or social security, thus pressure their children to conform to the system which they are told will deliver opportunity, depite torturing their own children to the point of myopia (there's an epidemic Asia-wide). Not so different from the west in many ways, just different in how they get there, and children being robbed of their childhood is a tragedy. Also, because everyone is so economically insecure and poorly educated with no access to insightful media it's rare to see genuine outward social or environmental conscience. How can someone innovate on the big issues if they don't even recognize them or have no genuine personal alignment?