Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress

Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Jason Crawford. He's a former tech startup founder, and now he writes at the Roots of Progress.
He has these posts that are very well-researched and insightful about the history of technology and industry. And he's filled the gap, at least in my education, and I suspect many others, of the history of progress and its consequences and the lessons we can learn from it.
So, Jason, it's very nice to talk to you. Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Of course. And can you just tell us before we get into the weeds, what you're doing at The Roots of Progress? Yeah, sure.
I write about the history of technology and the philosophy of progress. So The Roots of Progress looks at how did over the last couple of hundred years, How did we create this amazing world around us and this really wonderful, incredible standard of living that we now enjoy? That is, you know, so much.
But life is just so much better in so many ways and almost every way that it was about 200, 250 years ago or so. Really, even then, if you compare to 100 years ago or 50 years ago, things just keep getting better.
And this phenomenon is unprecedented in history. For thousands, tens of thousands of years, as far as back as you want to go, really, there was very little improvement in the standard of living, the way people lived, in life expectancy, in health, in our ability to get around.
I mean, for so many years, we were limited to the speed of horses and sail, the wind. And then the last couple of years, all of that changed.
And it was just absolutely unprecedented. So how did that happen? What were the steps? What were the major inventions and discoveries? And then what can we learn from this? Like, why did it take so long? What were the root causes that suddenly, you know, caused things to take off and for life to improve? And, you know, how do we keep it going? And how do we make sure that it doesn't sort of accidentally slow down or stop or even reverse? Those are the questions I'm concerned with.
So let me offer a different interpretation of what you might be up to, because you say you're studying why progress has been so overwhelming. But maybe a different way to look at it

is why you're studying progress at this moment

and why people like Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

are worried about it.

It's not because progress has been so overwhelming recently,

but in the last 50 years, it's actually been underwhelming.

You mentioned the speed of travel,

but we're still flying at the speed of the 747,

which was invented in the 1970s.

It's true.

That was not my original motivation.

And I think if you step back, you know, if you, I think that's, it's a, it's an important question, an important thing to look at. It's something that honestly, I was a little skeptical about when I first heard it and have since, you know, warmed up to it.
I mean, I think the numbers are there and I, I, I see the, you know, where this stagnation hypothesis comes from. I do think it's an important thing to look into.
But it wasn't the original motivation for me. I really got into it looking at the last 200 or so years and contrasting those with the thousands of years before.
And that was what I wanted to understand and figure out. But I think they're really the same thing.
or I mean, they're just very much along the same lines, right? They're both wanting to understand what are the root causes of progress, how do we keep it going? The stagnation hypothesis is just, I would say, just gives it a little bit of extra urgency, because it says, hey, we might not, you know, hey, look, this thing is, this progress thing is not automatic, it's not inevitable. It doesn't just keep going with its own momentum.
It can slow down. Maybe it's running into friction.
Let's take a look at that. But in my mind, whether or not it has slowed down in the past is actually even less important than whether or not it could be sped up in the future.
And sort of what are the range of possible futures? How much might it slow down? How much might, could it be sped up? And how much control do we have over this and what are the control knobs or levers, right? Those are the most important things. If it was a natural slowdown in the last 50 years, or if it was caused by something we did or failed to do in the last 50 years, like that's good to know, but only so that we can, you know, so that we can shape the future.
That's really what it's all about. I'm curious what you mean by a natural slowdown, but before we get to that, one of the main insights for many of your blog posts is that progress begets progress.
But if that's true, how can era of great progress, which has been with us, forgetting the last 50 years before that for the last 200 years, how can that progress lead to less progress? Yeah. I mean, one thing to keep in mind is even if progress has slowed down the last 50 years, let's just say it has, it's still a lot faster than the thousands of years before the industrial age, right? So progress has not stopped by any means, right? It's not, but maybe it is, as you say, sort of underwhelming compared to what we had before.

So you ask, how can this happen? Well, again, it gets back to like progress is not automatic.

It requires, I mean, every, you know, every new major discovery gives us a certain boost and then the gains from that discovery level off over time. I wrote a recent post about this at the Roots of Progress, where I was talking about the different S-curves.
So every sort of individual technology starts off in a period where it's relatively, progress is relatively slow, where just the basic inventions are sort of getting figured out. Then it hits maybe an inflection point where it starts really accelerating and taking off.
Progress is very fast for a while, and then eventually it kind of gets saturated. We've sort of done everything we can do with it.
It's transformed the entire economy. Think about something like electricity, right? For a long time, people were experimenting with electricity, tinkering with it, weren't sure what to do with it.
Maybe it was affecting a few things like the telegraph. So telegraph is sort of like mid 1800s, 1830s, 40s.
Things really take off in the 1880s or so when we get the electric light bulbs and we start building out the grid and we have got power generators and everything. And then by the 1920s, 30s, 40s, things are starting to level off.
It's like, what is there left to do with electricity?

Well, we can keep expanding it out to rural areas where it doesn't exist yet.

But like, you know, and today electricity is not like a growth industry, right?

It's sort of, it's a utility.

It's a thing that's there.

It's already totally integrated.

Okay.

So that's the S curve, right?

Starts off slow, has a faster amp up, then levels off.

You get, I mean, maybe the technical term is more like a sigmoid, right? But it kind of looks like an S, stretched out S. OK.
So every individual technology or even broad technological areas go through something like that, right? How then do we get exponentially increasing progress over a very long period of time? Well, we do it by overlapping the S-curves, right? As one area starts to kind of level off and get saturated and mature, we hopefully are finding some other area. In fact, hopefully we've already been tinkering in some other area and some other area is like ready to take off.
And so, you know, that could be chemistry, it could be computing and information, it could be biotech, you know, whatever, right? So I think a question to look at is, so if you want to ask, well, why has progress maybe been a bit underwhelming the last 50 years? Why was it not as amazing as the previous 50? You could look at, well, how many of these different S-curves do we have going on at once? And how fast were we finding new ones? And when one starts to level off, how ready are we to jump to the next? That is one place where I suspect you'll find some of the answers to this. But there are a lot of other things as well.
You can just look at, and these are all just hypotheses. Now, I don't have the answer by any means, but some hypotheses to look at.
Where has the talent been going? Has there been as much talent energized and motivated to go into technological fields and to make progress on various fronts? Or, Or, you know, I can certainly imagine with the, for instance, the, there's a number of, okay, so there's a number of factors in the decades following World War II that I think started to increase a certain strain of anti-technology and anti-progress kind of sentiment in the culture, certainly in the US, I think probably more broadly. Seeing the, I mean, really just the, you know, the horror of the atomic bomb and as a really negative thing that could come out of progress, right? The fears around nuclear power that kind of went along with that, the rise in general of the environmentalist movement, um, in the sixties and into the seventies.

Um, and just, uh, you know, things like the oil shocks of the seventies. I think there were a number of things that sort of, um, came together.

Uh, and I just have to wonder, now this is a pure hypothesis. This is a speculation.
I don't have data behind this. But did this change the motivation of young people around that time to even go into science, technology, and industry? If people started to think that these were not forces for good in the world, what did that do to the kind of long-term talent motivation and the recruiting of talent into those fields.
That is a hypothesis that I would like to explore. Some other things are, well, what did all of this do to the regulatory layer, right? Have we, and again, this is more of a hypothesis with just a little bit of data behind it.
This isn't a theory I'm putting forward, but I think it's something to look into is how, you know, have we had sort of creeping regulation or sort of creeping bureaucracy at the legal level, but actually not only at the legal level, also at sort of the level of the way corporate bureaucracies work and the way university bureaucracy works and so forth. Have all of our institutions kind of evolved and accumulated a set of bureaucratic rules that have the effect of essentially adding overhead and friction to the creative and innovative process? Has all of that been slowed down? And is that a good thing? I mean, these rules were added for a reason.
Many of them were added for safety reasons. Disasters happen, shocks happen, we see bad things happen, and then we say, well, we should have had a rule in place that would prevent this.
That is fundamentally a good and rational response. It's good to do root cause analysis when things go wrong.
It's good to improve systems, to make them more robust, to put safety mechanisms in place. But have we, you know, did we actually evaluate the cost of each one of those? Were we even able to evaluate the cost? And, you know, what is the sort of the cost benefit of each one individually? And what's the cost benefit when we add all of them up together, right? Have we sort of unwittingly traded, say, a progress away to get safety? And was that a good trade? Did we go a little too far? I think that's kind of another thing to look at.
Yeah, one of my favorite posts you wrote was the progress studies is a civic duty, where you pointed out that we're in a bad place to even make that determination because so few of us are actually educated on the history of progress and the huge consequence it's had. So when you're trying to ingratiate progress studies into our institutions, our academic institutions, are there lessons to take from previous intellectual movements? Like how well critical theory, which was kind of like a novel thing in the 60s, how it dominates academic life now, or at least many disciplines of academic life.
Have you taken lessons from how other movements have started in academia to see

how progress studies might evolve? I think there are many lessons from previous movements. I am

not an expert in them. I have not studied those movements as much as I would like.
But at a high level, I think we can say a couple of things. One is that deep philosophical ideas do over the very

long term, have very powerful effects on intellectual life and ultimately on culture, on the broader world, on government, on our other institutions like media and so forth. I think those philosophic effects are very long term.
It seems to take decades for ideas to go from their originators, often in academia or some other intellectual form, people writing books and manifestos, for that to get out into the world and have a big effect seems to take decades. and so i think if you are working on that kind of a thing you should expect to be playing a very long game uh but i think the you know but i think we should take it very seriously that like ideas on this level do affect uh things there's a great quote i think it's from keens about um you know people i'm to be able to rattle it off, but it's something about how, you know, people are enthralled to dead philosophers or defunct economists.
I forget the term that he used, right? And that people think that they are quite unaffected by all of this stuff that goes on in the intellectual sphere. But in fact, the world is moved by little else.
And I think that's true. So, you know, that doesn't say much about tactics or strategy exactly, but it does say that these movements are worth studying.
And, you know, whether you believe they have had good or bad effects overall, whether you believe the ideas are right or wrong, I think it is worth studying how these movements are created and grow,

because I do think they are powerful in the long term. One of the reasons I think critical theory might have been successful is because it was very analogous to Marxism, which was prevalent at the time in academia.
And so you could just pick up on top of that and expand that paradigm. Is there an existing movement or an existing paradigm in academia that progress studies could pick up on and reinvigorate?

I don't know.

Not to my knowledge. movement or an existing paradigm in academia that progress studies could pick up on and reinvigorate?

I don't know. Not to my knowledge.
I'm not in academia, and I never have been, so that's not my area of expertise. I think it will need to be something new.
Not that there aren't already there there's already, and there has been plenty of

good work in academia that I think can form the basis of some new movement. And certainly, I mean,

as I have gone and investigated, I've found very interesting work that's been done by

economic historians like Joel McKeer. I've enjoyed some of the work of dierge mccluskey um uh some uh you know newer um you know writers and and academics uh such as uh at mit sloan there's uh uh pierre azalay um andrew lowe um at duke there's ashisha Arora wrote this really interesting paper last year about the changing structure of American growth or economic growth, something like that.
And so there's a lot of people doing good work. You know, Matt Clancy writes a substack about the economics of innovation, he calls it.
And so, you know, just some of these names, there's a lot of people investigating things already that I think are very related to progress studies. It just hasn't, you know, sort of gelled or unified around this theme yet.
And that's what I think could be interesting. I mean, to my mind, and again, I mean, I'm not an academic myself, but to my mind, progress studies is not really a new field per se.
It's not supposed to be something separate from or that will replace or supplant history or economics or economic history or etc. but it is kind of a you know progress studies in my mind is more like a school of thought

it's a set of premises and values it's a set of basic ideas about what is important

what matters and what's worthy of study. It's basically the conviction that progress is real and important, that it has, you know, or can have tremendously good effects and impact on life, on humanity, on the world.
And that therefore, and also, as I said, that it's not automatic or inevitable. And so that therefore, we should study it, we should pay attention to it, we should look at its root causes, we need to kind of protect and nurture it, really, and ultimately accelerate it.
So that set of ideas conditions what history and economics you think is interesting and useful. It kind of conditions what questions you ask, what phenomena you find intriguing, what data you're going to look at, and then ultimately what conclusions you're going to draw in terms of what implications you're going to draw for action from whatever you find about, you know, about the world, there is going to be some sort of implication for action or policy or whatever.
And I think all of those things are kind of conditioned by those basic premises about the value of progress. So that, to my mind, that's what progress studies is.
And I think there are already people in academia who have that, who have those basic set of ideas and that's why they're looking into the things they're looking into. And so, you know, maybe it just needs a little bit more, I don't know, it needs to just sort of gel as a school of thought or as a movement.
There needs to be more of kind of identifying this, the set of, the set of ideas, you know, maybe rallying people around it, getting them all to talk to each other, and so forth. And forgetting about academia for a second, you've also been educating another group of students.
You've been working with a group of high schoolers and developing curriculum for them and interviews for them about progress. Can you talk about what you're doing there? And why are you focused on high schoolers? Yeah, certainly.
So this summer I created an online learning program in the history of technology. It's called Progress Studies for Young Scholars.
And we ran it as a summer program and it was successful enough that we're going to be continuing the program now into the fall. It'll run as sort of an afterschool program or homeschooling program.
I did this as a kind of a joint venture with a school, private school, called Higher Ground Education. They're the largest operator of Montessori schools in the United States, and they also have a Montessori-inspired high school brand called the Academy of Thought and Industry, or ATI, and it's ATI that is now running this course as part of their online or virtual offerings.
They reached out to me, actually, to do it. It's run by some folks I've known for a very long time and have deep respect for.
Really, we'd been looking for an excuse to work together ever since I went full-time on Progress about nine months ago. And when they suggested that we do this over the summer, I just jumped at a chance.
I thought it was a great idea. I think that, you know, this, the history of Progress is a neglected topic in education, it is underrepresented in, in history class.
And it's really something where I think we're graduating students from, from high school and from, and from university, who just kind of take progress for granted and take the modern world for granted, take industrial civilization, and, you know, don't have a vivid

appreciation of how far we've really come in recent decades and in the last couple of centuries, and how important that is to the world. And I think that's something that every citizen, you know, kind of needs, especially when you when you see how many of our debates today are about industrial policy, how much issues surrounding industrial civilization and the way it works are hot topics in ideological topics, political topics.
I think that anybody to be a really informed and responsible citizen kind of needs to know the basics of how our world works. How is it that your standard of living is delivered to you? What makes your refrigerator run? What makes it so that you can have fresh fruit and milk available in there every day? What is it that allows you to get to work in a car or on a train or a bus or however you get there? What is it that powers the elevator that takes you up to the, you know, 37th floor? And where did those plate glass windows come from that you're looking out of all day, etc.? You know, I just, people take all these things for granted and they really need to know at least the basics of where does this come from? So that when they're talking about policy, you know, they're not inadvertently proposing things that would, you know, that would seriously degrade quality of living for really people around the world.
Yeah, I'm 19. So I'm close to the ideal audience for that kind of stuff.
But when you talk about how understudied innovation is and not just understudied, it's not just that people don't know about it, but it's just that like nobody's nobody's actually or maybe I'm wrong here but like people have described it as progress as something that we haven't explored as much as we should have um how is it possible that one of the most basic facts about our life and our civilization has just been kind of ignored or put under curtains is it is it some sort of bias is it some sort of incentive in our institutions there must be something something going wrong here, right? Yeah. I mean, so I returned to my point that progress is not automatic or inevitable.
And that includes, you know, progress and understanding progress. So, you know, creating a field of study is not automatic or inevitable.
It requires choice and effort. It requires people to decide that it's worth doing.
And where does that come from? Again, it's not as if nobody has been asking these questions. Plenty of work has been done in the history of technology.
There's lots of great stuff out there. People have been asking interesting questions about progress for a long time.
I just think that it's, it just needs even more. It needs more attention and more care.
It needs to be more of a focus for more people. I think that's what, so, you know, about a year ago, Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison coined the term progress studies in an article they published in The Atlantic that ran under the headline, something like, we need a new science of progress.
And this is essentially what they said. You know, it's not that no work is being done in this field, but more should be done and more attention should be paid to the work that is being done.
But in order to widely publicize this knowledge, there must already exist or it's necessary to create an explanation of why it has been so closely held for so long, right? Is there such an explanation?

I mean, I think that goes along with some of my hypotheses about why, you know, why stagnation, why has progress slowed in the last number of years, right? Like some of it is going to, you know, how much do we appreciate progress? If people stopped appreciating progress so much or started to feel that it was maybe an ambivalent thing, you know, started to feel ambivalent about it, right, or started to feel that it wasn't such a good, you know, that as people thought it was for a long time, then, you know, not only would you get people, would you get fewer people going into fields that would push the frontier forward, but you'd also get fewer people in the humanities studying it and, you know, asking questions about it. And you get more people, you know, maybe focusing on the negatives and the downsides.
And so, you know, I mean, that's my hunch about what happened. Again, I just, I don't have the full answer for you.
You split progress up into three different areas, scientific, technological, and moral, roughly speaking. I want to talk about how science and tech relate.
But before that, does moral progress increase technological progress? Does technological progress increase moral progress? What's the relationship between them? Yeah, I think all three are intertwined and cannot, in the end, be fully separated. And when I say moral, I think a lot in there sort of about society and government.
I think absolutely the evolution of, I mean, I think it's not a coincidence that we kind of had three revolutions that all happened around the same time, roughly speaking, in history. We had the Scientific Revolution, we had the Industrial Revolution, and then we had something that there actually isn't a good name for, but kind of the revolution of democratic republics.
right, of in 1700s, you know, pretty much the entire world was under monarchy. And by today, you know, a large part of the world is under sort of constitutional republics with democratically elected representatives.
The monarchy is mostly a thing of the past. And so I think it's not a coincidence that those three things happen together.
Now, I haven't traced all of the patterns of the interconnections between them. But, you know, both Joel McKeer and Deirdre McCluskey point to, for instance, the dissolving of the guild system as something that was, you know, very important for new businesses to be able to be created, new technologies to be able to be adopted, and so forth.

So yeah, I do think there are absolutely linkages and interconnections between all three of

those in pretty much all directions.

Do you see progress in our political institutions in the US?

It's given the same level of technology.

I'm not sure that the 1950s government would have been worse at handling coronavirus than we are today. Yeah.
I think that progress in morality, society and government is the like, that's the area where it is most difficult to clearly see progress and where I think the story is the most mixed. I do think there has certainly been progress in some dimensions and some areas.
You know, I mean, sir, I mean, just, you know, if you want to go back to the 1950s, just look at the civil rights movement, right. Which has happened in between.
So there's, but I don't think that there's been progress in every dimension or, you know, everything at or measure. It's much murkier.
It's much messier. It feels more like two steps forward, one step back, and sometimes two steps or three steps back.
So it's harder to tell. Let's talk about science and tech.
So do you subscribe to the linear model of innovation?

Which is like science, basic research and science leads to technological innovation.

I think the linear model has some truth to it and is also oversimplified.

That is probably not a controversial statement at all.

I think most people would sort of agree with that.

Like the linear model is broadly used for analytical purposes, but pretty much everybody agrees that it doesn't really exactly work that way. So here is the caricature of the linear model that stresses the way that it is oversimplified, right? It goes like this.
We have science. Science is pure basic research that is done by scientists, you know, driven by the pure curiosity of the intellect, completely with complete intellectual freedom to just follow their curiosity wherever it goes.
All they care about is discovering basic principles of nature, laws of nature, and they have no thought of practical applications whatsoever. They pursue this in complete freedom and discover laws of nature.
Then those laws are, you know, taught to the engineers and the inventors who apply them to create new inventions, which are the inventions are direct deductive applications of, you know, new scientific laws that have been discovered. And then these inventions can get turned into businesses, which then distribute, you know, the benefits broadly.
This is, you know, so I mean, that was, again, the sort of deliberate caricature and oversimplification of kind of what the linear model is, right? So like, what is some truth in that? Well, there is a deep truth that science absolutely provides a foundation for technology. It is impossible to imagine anything close to modern technology without a lot of, if not all of, modern science, right? There's no way we would have electrical, you know, the entire electrical and electronics industry without an understanding of the physics of electromagnetism on some basic level, right? There's no way we would even have semiconductors without some degree of quantum physics.
There's no way that we would have modern medicine and antibiotics and diagnostics and so forth without an understanding of microbiology and biochemistry. There's no way

that we would have modern metallurgy without chemistry, etc. So there's a clear technological foundation for all of these things.
And I think it is also true, so another grain of truth in the linear model is that it is impossible to see all of the ramifications and technical applications of science when we're doing it.

And for that reason, direct and immediate applications should not, cannot be the kind of the gate or the absolute justification for new science. Like we should be doing new science motivated and justified by nothing more than understanding the world and discovering more about how it works.
Like that alone is a sufficient justification for science, understanding that in the long term through perhaps torturous connections that we cannot see now and can never predict in advance, it will be good for the world. Where I think the linear model can be oversimplified or that caricature is wrong is in a number of places.
Most tellingly is that new inventions often occur, they are often the result of of tinkering and exploration at the frontiers of science, such that when the invention is created, nobody actually even fully understands why it works. Science, so let's get concrete.
So an example of this that I also wrote an essay about recently at Roots of Progress is the transistor. So the transistor was invented at Bell Labs by the Semiconductor Research Group.
Now, science absolutely provided a foundation for that research in the sense that it had identified the class of materials known as semiconductors. It had identified certain electrical properties about them.
It had certain theories about what they were and why they worked. But it didn't have all of the theory that they actually needed to create the transistor.
When they started with some of the initial attempts at the transistor, they found that it was not operating according to what theory would predict. And they had to go back to the drawing board and actually refine the theory.
They had to come up with new theory in semiconductor physics to explain what they were seeing in their attempts at invention. And with new theory, they were able to go back and do new experiments.
And the new experiments provided still more unexpected results. And then they went back to the theory again and refined the theory some more.
And that allowed them to create even better versions of the transistor and so forth. So they actually shuttled back and forth know, between science and invention, between discovery and engineering.
And, uh, you know, this is not something that is at all elucidated by the linear model, right? The linear model doesn't tell you that this kind of thing happens, but it does happen. It happens all the time.
Uh, if you look at, um, the steam engine, the classic, you know, central foundational, uh, invention of the industrial revolution, right? It's been said that the steam engine, the classic, you know, central foundational invention of the Industrial Revolution, right? It's been said that the steam engine owes more to thermodynamics. Sorry, thermodynamics, the science of thermodynamics owes more to the steam engine than vice versa than the steam engine does to thermodynamics.
This is because the steam engine was invented in the 1700s. Newcomen came up with his initial steam engine in 1712.
James Watt famously created a much improved version, a much more efficient version, patented

in 1769.

Thermodynamics doesn't really begin until like the early 1800s, right?

Sadie Carnot in 1824 kind of kicks it off.

So what was going on there?

Well, the steam engine did depend on previous science.

It depended on the science of air pressure and the properties of the vacuum, which had been worked out in the 1600s. And then the tinkerers were able to tinker and engineer.
James Watt actually rediscovered some principles of latent heat that Black had discovered in his science. And so, you know, sort of tinkering at the frontier of science, he was able to come up with something that then science then could sort of come back and later, you know, fully explain what is this doing? Why does it have certain efficiency? How can we make it more efficient? So this is another pattern that you see, by the way, is that the initial invention comes before the science explains it.
But then the science comes along actually motivated in part by the invention. That's another thing the linear model doesn't tell you about.
Science can be motivated by, well, we have this invention. Why does it work? And why does it have the efficiency or effectiveness that it does? And how can we make it more powerful and more efficient? And that's often what the science then comes along and does.
It gives you, it actually quantifies, it gives new laws, maybe mathematical laws and equations that then allow us to optimize the invention for power, for efficiency, you know, for reliability or safety or whatever. And so there's this interplay between science and technology.
I haven't even gotten into things like, of course, science is sometimes gated on technology, especially technology of measuring instruments and, you know, an observation, right? So we need to invent the microscope, invent better microscopes. We need to invent the thermometer and better thermometers.
We need to invent, you know, all sorts of instruments and, you know, ways of, I mean, pressure chambers and, you know, all the instruments we use in chemistry and so on and so forth. All of this is technology that enables science.
So there's a lot of back and forth in terms of the instruments, in terms of the motivation, in terms of, you know, there's just a lot of it that is very cyclical rather than linear, in other words. So then what's the utility of splitting up scientific and technological progress as you do? Because if science proceeds from the problem situation that the technology illuminates, and it also requires the tools that innovation give science.
Aren't we talking about the same thing there? What's the use of demarcating those two? Well, I think that, I mean, science and technology are distinct, if inseparable. They are different things, and they can be identified as such.
And I think it's worth splitting them up just for the purposes of study, right? I mean, there's all sorts of things. I mean, this is in any area of study, there are things that are, you know, can't be completely separated, but they can be distinguished and we split them up for the purposes of specialized study.
I think that's just, you know, always, I mean, you know, physics and chemistry and biology, right? These things are not inseparable and there are linkages between them, but we split them up and we specialize. I think that's very natural.
So, you know, but we need to recognize the connections between them and recognize that those connections are not simple and they're certainly not linear. Okay.
Now let me ask a question about what a possible rebuttal to the sort of benefits of progress, progress and innovation increase interdependence because people have to specialize that, that, you know, increases how well you can have technological innovation. And as a result, not only is no place self-sufficient, but in fact, nobody has all the knowledge necessary to make a pencil or a smartphone.
And so it makes you more susceptible to black swan events like coronavirus. And in fact, that's one of the downsides of progress is that it makes your civilization more vulnerable to bad events.
How do you respond? Yeah, I think that is absolutely a risk. So, okay.
So let me answer the specific point and then let me step back and make a broader question about how we frame this. That specific point.
So first off, there has never been a time in history and maybe there never will be when we are not susceptible to unforeseen, you know, catastrophic events. There's also never been a time when we were not interdependent, really.
I mean, humans, to my knowledge, have always lived in tribes. They've always been dependent on, you know, have always been dependent on each other.
That's just how we live. There are no lone wolf, you know, humans, or very, you know, few and rare.
So we've always been interdependent. You're right that we can set up systems that are set up for large shocks.
And that is a risk, and it is a risk that we should become aware of. It is also a risk that we can tackle through the very same fundamental mechanisms that we made the progress that created the risk in the first place.
Through science, through technology, through mathematics, through, in this case, an understanding of statistics, ultimately through applied intelligence, we can analyze systems in terms of their vulnerability to shock. And we can figure out how to create slack, how to create buffers, how to, we can, we can, through statistics, we can analyze what do these shocks look like? What is the distribution? How often do they occur? We can analyze complex systems and, you know, and start to discover how they might be susceptible to this sort of thing.
And then we can devise safety mechanisms. We can build resilience into the system.
And I think that's fundamentally what we should do. We can do this through all sorts of ways, right? We can do it through avoiding single points of failure.
We can do it through building, like I said, sort of buffers and slack into the system so that one little thing doesn't ripple you know, instantly and send shocks through the entire system. There needs to be padding and buffers to absorb some of those shocks.
You know, the discipline of engineering has figured out many ways to make such systems more resilient. And I think we probably need to apply more of that, you know, to the economy as a whole, certainly to the financial system, and so forth.
Stepping back and looking at the way that we frame this, I think it is, it's a mistake to think about, quote unquote, progress as kind of this short sighted, single minded thing that only pursues, you know, kind of the undisciplined pursuit of just like more bigger,

faster, you know, kind of in a very greedy way. Safety and resilience and protection against shocks and, you know, solidity and robustness of the system.
Those are goals that we can pursue just as we can pursue more food, more material goods, more medicines, faster planes and cars, etc. Right? All of these are just goals that we pursue through applied intelligence, through science and technology.
What we need to do is we need to be smart and wise about which goals we decide to pursue and about how we allocate our efforts and our resources among these different goals. We need to make sure that we have the right percentage of our effort and resources going against things like safety, going against things like resilience, right? And we don't just devote all of it to, well, let's just do more, bigger, faster, better, right? But we want to have that.
That's not because more, bigger, faster, better is wrong or bad, right? And I guess ultimately the key point is, I think people see progress as just more, bigger, faster, And, and they see that, oh, this can have some downsides. And the answers that they come up with is essentially to compromise, to temper, to, oh, let's, let's slow down.
Let's put on the brakes. Right.
I think that's a mistake. I think the answer is not to just sort of slow down or to say that, oh, we're ambivalent about progress.
It's to take a wider view of what progress means and can be. And it's to say, ah, the problem is an unwise portfolio allocation of what type of progress we are making.
Let's reallocate so that we are making an appropriate amount of safety and resilience progress while we also make more bigger, faster, it's a so it's a reallocation rather than a sort of slowing down or a compromise. But what if when Tyler Cowen was on the podcast, he said he doesn't expect human civilization to last longer than 800 years.
And he said this because he thinks that the risk of demolition and destruction and those kinds of capacities, that kind of innovation happens faster than our capacity or the increase in our capacity to deal with that kind of shock potential. And so there's just like an asymmetry there in which thing is easier to do and innovate faster.
Because, you know, we've had nuclear weapons for more than 100, close to 100 years now. But, you know, we have no way of like making sure that one can't be detonated in a populated area.
And, you know, when a nuclear weapon costs $50,000 through further innovation, or engineering a pandemic costs that much money, how much innovation can you really do to deter that kind of risk? I don't know, but I don't think we should give up. I think that is a real risk.
but I think that is exactly the kind of prophecy that should shock us into action to make sure that it does not come true. I don't think we're doomed.
And I think that is a, I don't know, it's just unproductive attitude to take. I don't know what the risk is.
I don't want to make a prediction of about 800 years out. Nobody can actually predict 800 years out.
And I don't think there is much value in such predictions, except to the extent that they guide our action and our resource allocation now. So another essay I wrote recently was on two types of optimism, and I call them descriptive versus prescriptive optimism.
So descriptive optimism is your prediction for what's going to happen in the future and kind of what track are we on? Prescriptive optimism is your determination to, and your commitment to act, to create a better future. So, you know, I am not always a descriptive optimist.
I don't always think the world

is definitely gonna get better.

I think it's on a good path in certain dimensions

and it's on a bad path in other dimensions.

And I absolutely think that really bad scenarios

like Tyler's 800 years are entirely possible.

I don't wanna be a Panglossian or a Pollyanna or whatever metaphor you want to pick about that. But I am always and ever a prescriptive optimist.
Like no matter how bad the odds are we are facing, I think there's a chance, certainly from where we stand, to not have that outcome come true. But it'll only happen if we face up to the reality and then ask ourselves, what do we need to do to, you know, to prevent this? Yeah, I completely agree with you.
I don't know. I think you just kind of pulled that number out of the air.
And I don't know how it's meaningful to assign probabilities to events that depend on human action and future human knowledge, which, you know, as David, it's not really meaningful 800 years out. Yeah.
Yeah. And I love that blog post about perspective optimism.
Tell me if this interpretation of that blog post is correct. It's a way to like synthesize sort of the infinite optimism of somebody like David Deutsch with like the tragic vision of Thomas Sowell, you know, who says like systems go towards chaos unless we intrude on them or improve them and reform them and that there's more ways to mess things up and there to make them better, that human nature is flawed, but that, you know, things can get better.
Is it just like a way to unite these different visions? Yeah, I think so. It's a way to, I mean, I struggled with this for a while before I came to this kind of division between the two types of optimism, because I, you know, myself feel very optimistic in general, but at the same time, I could not, I also, you know, when I heard some very grim possibilities for the future, I could not prove that they were impossible.
And I think it's important to take risks seriously.

So, you know, the progress studies community,

I would say overlaps or is pretty adjacent

to the rationalist and effective altruist communities,

and there's a lot of people in those communities

who think a lot about existential risk,

and they're very smart, and they are, you know,

and they think through issues very carefully,

and so I think, like, you take what they, you know, what they say and what they're worried about seriously. And so, you know, I don't, I, a couple of months ago, I wrote an article about sort of coronavirus and what's the, you know, what is kind of the, if you're a, if you're a pro progress, if you have a pro progress attitude,progress attitude, like what is the attitude to take towards the COVID epidemic?

And I started in on the article thinking that I would be writing something about how to, like what is an optimistic take or how to stay optimistic. And I realized through the course of writing it that optimism was not exactly the right concept because we should be really facing the, you know, some of the worst realistic possibilities, you know, outcomes and for the future.
But at the same time, what I realized that I wanted to say was not, hey, everyone, it's going to be all right, which maybe it won't be. What I wanted to say was, don't give up.
Keep fighting. There's always a chance.
And no matter what, like there's nothing to do except to use our best efforts to create a better future. And so I think it's that fighting spirit that I want to communicate, right? I think in times, so when, you know, in times when things are going well, you know, so if you combine descriptive optimism with prescriptive optimism, then I think the, you know, the attitude that comes out of that is bold, ambitious, expansive plans for the future, right? Let's go colonize the, you know, the solar system and eventually the galaxy.
Let's solve aging and, you know, create a mortality.

Let's create, you know, a material abundance for everybody and give everybody in the world

the standard of living of that the richest people have today. And, you know, all these, these kinds of things, let's, right.
When you combine prescriptive optimism with descriptive pessimism, which is sometimes completely rational and appropriate, I think what you get is this fighting spirit, this like, no matter how bad the odds are, we're never going to give up. We are, we're going to keep moving forward and we're going to give our best efforts to, to solving this.
And so I think, you know, whether you have descriptive or prescriptive optimism, sorry, whether you have a descriptive optimism or pessimism, whether you think that things are on a good track or a bad track, whether you, no matter how seriously, you know, you take the risks or how worried you are about them. And some of that honestly comes down to a personal, you know, personality and temperament difference.
I think we should always have prescriptive optimism. We should always just be trying to work as hard as we can towards the best possible future, no matter what that is.
Well, I think that's an excellent note to leave it on,

the first group of optimism.

And thank you so much for being on.

This was very fun.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I learned a lot.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, good questions. Yeah.