A reader asked for my thoughts on the issues raised in the econtalk episode featuring Patrick Collison. Here are a few:
1. The important question is whether there is anything that citizens or government officials can do about the pace of scientific progress. How can one stimulate progress? How can one remove barriers to progress?
2. I think that there are major unanswered questions about the nature of scientific and technical progress. Is it mostly inevitable, or do chance, individual genius, and sudden changes in the regulatory or cultural environment play a big role? Is the process smooth or are there sudden leaps? Are “general purpose technologies” a key element?
3. One of my biases is that I believe that when the technological preconditions exist, progress is inevitable. Often, the preconditions involve the development of instruments that make it possible to observe and measure phenomena that we could not observe and measure before. I would like to believe that if you had limited Newton and Gallileo to the instruments available 150 years before they were born, they would not have come close to doing the work that they did. I would like to believe that the Chinese did not sail west before Columbus sailed east more because they lacked certain instruments (what they are, I cannot say) than because of the Emperor. That is, I would like to believe that if they had the right instruments, they would have gotten around the Emperor.’
More prosaically, Jimi Hendrix could not have made his debut album in 1967 with the guitar technology that existed in 1963, and perhaps not even with the technology that existed in 1965. Steve Jobs could not have spurred Apple to develop a successful smart phone with the technology that existed in 2004.
4. Another one of my biases is that I believe that genius is synergistic, not individualistic. It was John Lennon *and* Paul McCartney *and* Bob Dylan *and* Atco *and* Motown *and* . . .that made 1964 – 1967 such a spectacular musical era. No single musician was responsible for it. It was Xerox Parc *and* DARPA *and* the Homebrew Computer Club *and* Bell Labs *and* NCSA *and* . . .that got us out of the mainframe era and into the modern era of computing. No single individual was responsible.
If you believe my biases, then you want to think in terms of supporting people who are developing new and better instruments to observe and measure. In health care, that might mean supporting researchers working on nanobots that can provide new observations about the life cycle of cells and of whole organs. In energy and materials science, it might mean supporting researchers working on new instruments to measure chemical processes.
If you believe my baises, then you want to think in terms of supporting individuals who are good at copying others and competing with others at the same time. It is this copying/competing dynamic that seems to be at work in synergistic progress.
Speaking of copying/competing, I believe that blogging is seriously under-rated by people who claim to be researchers. Done properly, blogging is fantastically synergistic. Imagine how much faster progress could be if folks were weaned away from academic journals and onto blogs.
My own point of view is that what you’re calling “technology” is mostly the increasing use of fossil fuels*. From that perspective, the idea that it will increase exponentially forever is absurd.
For some context, I’d suggest the energy flowcharts available from Lawrence Livermore National Labs. Over 3/4 of the energy we use comes from fossil fuels, and most of the rest is not all that sustainable. After decades of subsidy, solar is about 0.8 percent. It is worth noting that our food supply is overwhelmingly dependent of fossil fuels.
*We are obviously also becoming much more sophisticated in our ways of using fossil fuels, for what that’s worth.
Scientific progress is just one part of question.
There also must be institutions in place to get scientific knowledge to the masses. Jobs made the iPhone because he could sell it.
To point 1 — you can start, or work for, a company or organization that speeds progress or removes barriers to it. I work at such a group (https://codeocean.com/) and there are a lot of others — the Jupyter project, Rstudio, DNANexus, Pachyderm, Overleaf, Anaconda, etc., and those are just those in the comparatively narrow field of scientific computing that I know. A group called Digital Science invests here.
To point 3 — containers, Docker in particular, have enabled a ton of innovation the past 3 or 4 years. It’s exciting to be a part of.
Another question is whether we can even agree on what is progress…
If you prefer X to Y and you used to have Y and now have X, that’s progress. If you have gone from X to Y instead, that’s regress.
Sure, but the usual case is that we prefer A,B,C,D, and E to V,W,X,Y, and Z, and we go from A,V,D,Y,Z to W,B,D,C,E. But with way more letters and confused preferences.
The question is which you prefer “warts and all”. Of course, you won’t get everything you want. Hopefully, you learn that before you are ten.
Measuring preferences is a bit fraught.
I prefer addictive drugs and leisure, but I’m not sure I should go down that road very far.
Next generation sequencing in biomedicine is an example of having new instruments. It has allowed unprecedented discovery of genetic variation and methods for analyzing biological processes. It is only beginning to make itself felt in public health and medicine, with future impacts that will be huge.
Re #3, aren’t you forgetting that the point about the Chinese failure to discover the other continents is precisely that they had reached a technological level from which that such things could have been made feasible, but chose not to further develop their capabilities? Meanwhile, the Europeans, who had not long before been technologically behind the Chinese, moved past them, circumnavigated the globe, and started modern science and the industrial revolution.
You seem to find it distressing (“I would like to believe . . .”) that culture (including institutions) influence a society’s technological and economic progress. I find your distress rather weird.
Are “general purpose technologies” a key element?
Yes, the electron. Modern day technology is almost always correlated with our ability to manipulate electron.
1. The important question is whether there is anything that citizens or government officials can do about the pace of scientific progress. How can one stimulate progress? How can one remove barriers to progress?
I tend to think the early stages of technology/scientific growth is done by large company/university/government entities. They have funding, time and ability to fail for extended periods. However as you get closer to discovery and roll out, it far better to have private companies citizens beating their brains out to stay alive.
So the Ma Bell technology centers were great in the 1950s – 1960s where a lot new phone technology was rolling out but it took the deregulation of Ma Bell to more effectively sell to citizens in the 1980s and afterwards. (Most modern phone technology, not all, was designed by 1969 but a monopoly will be slow to rollout until the 1980s.)
In a lot of ways, this one reason I dislike the Green New Deal. Wind and solar are already there in the marketplace today (it is price competitive in California for solar) so let the companies compete for business. Don’t need large government making clunky decisions where as the power companies are able to define the mix of power supplied. Notes:
1) If government wants to influence, I would recommend battery storage technology. That is a decade plus away today.
2) We should simply drop tariffs on Chinese solar panels.
Well, one thing citizens or governments might do to make scientific or technological progress is to fund it. Think about what you want and spend money deliberately.
It’s nice to daydream about wonderful pollution-free energy sources, for example, and to daydream about some backyard genius who whips up a fusion power generator in his garage over a couple weekends. But while we Americans are sitting around expecting some John Galt type to do this all for free — or at least just with the hope of future income to motivate him, the Europeans are spending their taxpayers’ money on government research programs right now, with bureaucrats in conference rooms batting out ideas for future power distribution systems, consumer costs per kilowatt hour, possible pollution issues, etc.
I understand I’m revealing to all what a vile human being I am, but I gotta say, I think the Europeans will probably get fusion power working before our John Galt appears.
What else? Well, there’s Eric Drexler’s notions about nanotechnology. Build tiny tiny little robots and develop technologies that make it possible to manipulate material at the level of individual atoms and molecules. It might even have commercial possibilities, do you think? But those are thirty five year old notions, that no respectable venture capitalist wants to deal with. China will get to them I suspect — after Drexler’s dead. And all of us.
How about oceanography? Water’s on 3/4th of the earth’s surface. You’d think it’d be of interest to someone besides fishermen, but it isn’t. The CIA played around with the idea of sea bed mining fifty years ago, to cover up a scheme for retrieving a sunked Russian submarine. We got a UN Law of the Sea Treaty out of that, which was supposed to regularize real sea bed mining — and beyond that, just about every government in the world and every corporation has decided to ignore oceans. Isn’t that great!
Another daft possibility — You know, you get away from Earth, you can travel in space 13 billion light years in any direction. Imagine that. The moon and Mars and the moons of Mars and asteroids and Jupiter and …. all the way to the ends of the universe. Maybe in the next century or the one after, people might actually go to those places, and even live there, something like people from Europe once upon a time moved to the Americas. Chinese people, Nigerian people, Brazilian people … people from nations that don’t exist yet. Something to look forward to!
Maybe not American people. I’ve got my fingers crossed for Elon Musk, but I don’t really think his dreams are achievable without a lot of money, and I don’t think the people running the US government want to spend that money. And I don’t think the economists giving advice to those people want to see them spending it on foolish long run R&D schemes either.
We’re all practical people here. We’re sitting on our hands waiting for John Galt.
Oh, please.
If you have followed fusion power, you know that there are international programs of research and development–which involve the US government and American institutions. You also know what people have been saying for decades, “Fusion power is twenty years away–and always will be.”
And, seriously dude, the energy required to escape earth’s gravity is very, very large. Very, very few people will ever move to “The moon and Mars and the moons of Mars and asteroids and Jupiter and ….” Not to mention that living in any of those places is more difficult and less pleasant than living in Antarctica.
Removing the obvious regulatory barriers to progress seems like a simple first step, but every bad regulation requires its own little fight. For example, remove the speed limit on passenger flight and instead establish a decibel limit.
What role do you think the ongoing dysgenic fertility of humanity has had? The Flynn Effect has counteracted the Woodley Effect thus far, but the Flynn Effect does not extend to all parts of intelligence (e.g., working memory has not improved at all and perhaps declined). The Woodley Effect is well summarized in this book review: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZaEY0UjluV1djOG8/view. As you know, small changes in the mean can cause big changes in the tails.
#2 Scientific & technical progress is sort of inevitable — relativity was going to be discovered. Geniuses are first with the discoveries. Note that Newton OR Leibniz would have gotten there about the same time if the other hadn’t. Morse, Edison, Bell, most inventor’s inventions would have happened, or something very similar — because it’s the engineering applications of physical laws. Given the current tech.
The current tech is heavily underrated, as you mention in #3.
This applies to Europe, not China. China sent ships to Madagascar. Then decided to stop technical advancement. Islam stopped tech advancement. Catholics tried to stop some tech advancement, but the nationalist wars pushed for more military tech.
New tech is disruptive. There might well be a “paradise” time where all needs of all people are met, and new tech is “not needed”, and thus not allowed. The dystopian version just allows the elite in power to decide when that paradise has been reached.
N. Korea, Cuba, and now Venezuela clearly show progress is not always permanent.
Creative genius, like Shakespeare, are not inevitable — there will be music & art. Yet while the Beatles’ songs are often still played, most of the top hip-hop songs from 5 years ago or more are not played on the most popular radio shows.
If you haven’t read it, I recommend
Richard Hamming: You and Your Research
Talk at Bellcore, 7 March 1986
http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html
It’s been a while since I read it, but I believe it supports most of your points.
I like his point that trying working conditions often result in the best work
“What most people think are the best working conditions, are not. Very clearly they are not because people are often most productive when working conditions are bad. One of the better times of the Cambridge Physical Laboratories was when they had practically shacks — they did some of the best physics ever.”
In regards to point 1, government, and citizens, can destroy scientific progress, just as they can damage the economy. Little direct action by them helps progress or the economy as advancements come from expanding liberties.
“All mankind’s progress has been achieved as a result of the initiative of a small minority that began to deviate from the ideas and customs of the majority until their example finally moved the others to accept the innovation themselves. To give the majority the right to dictate to the minority what it is to think, to read, and to do is to put a stop to progress once and for all.”
Mises, Ludwig von (1927). Liberalism (p. 54)
Among my problems is a paranoia. I think a real intelligence is hidden beneath the laws of physics, and we are the artificial intelligence, evolved with efficiency by the original universal intelligence. So, these little odd events, like Ben flying a kite, or a portrait painter doing dots and dashes, these were biased probability, the underlying intelligence having a bit more control over the laws than we imagine. Why? I have a theory, the real intelligence wants to build huge telescopes and signal each other across the universe. But they need an artificial, bipedal being with opposable thumb, and those bots are a pain to evolve.
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One of my biases is that I believe that when the technological preconditions exist, progress is inevitable
Culture constrains what sorts of technologies we can choose to develop. If it’s real (and if it isn’t it probably soon will be), the Chinese CRISPRed babies represent an extremely promising potential technology. For a variety of cultural reasons, it would be pretty much impossible to develop that technology in the West; we will be dragged kicking and screaming into the future in this respect.
What does it mean to put a * on either side of a word?
Emphasis. Read those sentences aloud and stress the “ands”s. Arnold’s arguing that it’s not ONE factor or ONE person who singlehandedly changes the world but a slew of people/things.
Short answer about the Chinese – it wasn’t the emperor, per se. It was intractable social conflicts that erupted through the eunuch vs monk conflicts and expressed themselves at the highest level of government which doomed the navy and expeditionary seafaring. It certainly wasn’t technological limitations.