Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen say that we need to study how to achieve faster progress. But they seem to pre-suppose the answers.
the world would benefit from an organized effort to understand how we should identify and train brilliant young people, how the most effective small groups exchange and share ideas, which incentives should exist for all sorts of participants in innovative ecosystems (including scientists, entrepreneurs, managers, and engineers), how much different organizations differ in productivity (and the drivers of those differences), how scientists should be selected and funded, and many other related issues besides.
Implicitly, they assume that progress comes when the larger society
(1) creates opportunities for its “brilliant young people” to work in small groups to generate innovative ideas; and
(2) creates mechanisms to exploit and spread those ideas
Those might be the important factors. But other factors have occurred to students of progress: the competitive environment among states, including wars; demographics that skew toward youth (see this review of The Human Tide); cultural norms for assigning status (e.g., Deirdre McCloskey’s view that cultural support for commerce and innovation created the Industrial Revolution); key political actors, for better (Licklider at DARPA) or worse (the fifteenth-century Chinese emperors who forbid ocean exploration).
I don’t have a settled view on the sources of progress. In fact, the issue just screams “causal density,” making it difficult or impossible to rule out hypotheses or to confirm others.
But my inclination is to focus on broader cultural values. The enemies of progress are fear of novelty and envy of success. My thinking is that when those enemies hold sway, progress will be slow. When those enemies are weak, progress will be rapid.
Back to Collison-Cowen’s focus on scientists, perhaps this paper by Azoulay and others, is relevant. The policy implication is that we should enforce early retirement on eminent scientists.
Teasing out the contributions of various sources of progress will be hard, but settling on the sources of non-progress will be easy. We already know the big and important ones.
Indeed, progress probably doesn’t need that much help: there are already substantial commercial, environmental, and national-security incentives for people to push things along as far and as fast as they can in the most important areas.
But the sources of non-progress are politically popular and enjoying something of an upswing at the moment, and the implementation of those ideas and systems need to be fought tooth and nail so they don’t ruin the mechanisms generating the positive incentives above.
So, reading between the lines, I suspect the project is geared more towards the objective of producing high-status authoritative scholarship to bolster the cases necessary to win those fights – kind of like how some law schools are amicus factories for a particular point of view.
Also, the kind of people doing that work will tend to be more aligned with pro-market ideoogy, which could provide an island of opportunity for those few scholars trying to stay afloat in an academic sea of anti-market sentiment. And of course, a good focal point for pro-market donors (or those against regulation of their particular business interests) to patronize, and maybe even buy some best-in-class toadies and shills advocates.
Handle’s point is a good one. Sometimes “Winning” is simply not losing.
I see a lot of self-important politicians advocating that we adopt policies that would be “unforced errors.”
Two helpful factors are de facto openness (where regulators lag behind innovation) and relevant high-quality infrastructure.
Cowen/Collison ask:
According to Wikipedia:
Founder effects and other factors can shape “progress” in the initial stages. Teasing out repeatable yet inadequately applied patterns in the evolution of progress is a tall order as Kling points out.
A chunk of it did happen in Boston, but it was focused on hardware rather than software. Remember DEC? How about TI in Dallas?
So, the valley is not made of silicon? huh
“The enemies of progress are fear of novelty and envy of success”
Exactly! That’s the main point of Schoeck’s book Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior.
Curious to learn more about that and what Arnold had in mind.
“Implicitly, they assume that progress comes when the LARGER SOCIETY
“(1) CREATS opportunities for its “brilliant young people” to work in small groups to generate innovative ideas; and
“(2) CREATS mechanisms to exploit and spread those ideas”
[emphases added]
Does “SOCIETY” (at whatever scale) DO anything?
OR, is it the conditions within the organization of a society that foment the “creations,” “expansions” and “advancements” resulting from the inter-actions of its members.
Does experience support an optimistic view of results from attempts to MANAGE the organization of a society for the determination of “managerial” objectives?
As to item 2, above, this is on point with Carroll Quigley’s view as to how Civilizations (and there composing societies) expand – and – when they cease to do so, fragment and evolve into something different [“The Evolution of Civilizations” pp. 101-102; 1961, Liberty Fund 1979]; follow on reading for a view on how “inequality” (that hot topic today) is essential to provide resources for innovations for expansion.
Fly a kite, learn what an electron is. Once you have some control over electrons then the sky is the limit for 500 years.
Another one of those moon landing deniers, I see… 😉
The next 25 years are going to bring changes so disorienting and so massive that all we can hope for is that we manage to come out the other side with our heads still on.
We do not need to achieve faster progress.
I doubt the next 25 years will have anything as transformative as Web/Mobile/Cloud has been in the last 25. Progress is lumpy. Why focus on a hypothetical future negative disruption while ignoring the impact of the massive transformation we’ve just lived through?
I’m all for progress and I’m optimistic about the future. I’m just skeptical of Cowen’s/Collison’s ability to bend progress’ curve though I’m not against the effort/sentiment.
Do you believe that we will see less transformative change from Web/Mobile/Cloud tech over the next 25 years than we had from the last 25 years?
My guess is that group of technologies will change things far more going forward. And then there’s robotics, genetics, pervasive facial recognition, increased lifespans…
I think Cloud (Amazon AWS and its competitors) is midway in its adoption phase, but yeah, the core transformation is mostly complete for web and mobile. That doesn’t take away from these technologies and the incremental improvement will continue. Web/Mobile/Cloud will just be ubiquitous like electricity and automobiles in the next 25 years. Perhaps Cowen will complain about Web/Mobile/Cloud stagnation in 25 years instead of kitchen appliances like he does now.
Deep Learning has promise in narrow problem spaces as does Aubrey de Grey’s ideas about longevity. True Natural Language Understanding (NLU) could be transformational but I don’t confuse the recent breakthroughs in Natural Language Processing (NLP) with true NLU.
Do you think the Fortune 50 will see another fast turnover over the next 25 years like it did with the American GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) and Chinese BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent)?
I think we went just went through something close to the 2nd Industrial Revolution in impact. Another perfect storm might take some time to occur again.
Right, because of my biggest concerns these days are that, if things progress much more, I may live too long, have too much stuff, and be able to get places too quickly. I’m sure these worries keep many others up at night as well.
You could look at it that way, or you could possibly worry that societies can process only so much change over a short time before they become unstable.
Have you been to a nursing home any time recently? It might be nice to have lots and lots of people live considerably longer, or it might not.
I am curious- how old are you?