18 ms·

We Need a New Science of Progress

61 points by telotortium 7y ago

thedudeabides5 7y ago
I dunno, sounds like a lot of words to describe a rebranding of classical economics. Before economics became all dynamic stochastic general equilibrium matters and strategic games of imperfect information, it was about 'how does the machine work.' Not sure why we need a New Field to study that.
- devons 7y ago
  There's a Twitter thread critiquing Progress Studies from a similar angle. This reply in particular caught my eye: https://twitter.com/WordsByBennett/status/1156301614975770635 https://twitter.com/WordsByBennett/status/115630161497577063... It compares the proposed approach to WW2 Abraham Wald airplane bullet pattern analysis [1] and Survivor Bias. [1] https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-be-wrong-by-jordan-ellenberg-664e708cfc3d https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-...
- jkingsbery 7y ago
  That's what I was thinking while reading: the author is just describing economics while ignoring the fact that > The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account (FA Hayek, The Fatal Conceit) I agree that we don't need a new field, but it seems also that the idea of designing progress is a fool's errand.
  - antepodius 7y ago
    I like to think of it as a matter of scale. At a very low scale, a human mind designing a process can be efficient (a specific part of an assembly line, a function, etc.) As you scale, you quickly reach a point where one mind is worse than many, even if those minds are communicating mostly through such apparently low-bandwidth measures as observing the flow of money.
CptFribble 7y ago
We don't need a field of study, just a new definition of the word. Right now progress is More Jobs and More GDP. A lot of people wind up getting left out in the cold because progress jobs and GDP growth don't require helping everyone who needs it. Maybe progress should mean ensuring every human is healthy, fed, housed, and has access to education and the global network.
- dgzl 7y ago
  > Maybe progress should mean ensuring every human is healthy, fed, housed, and has access to education and the global network. I don't think that's an attainable goal, or at the very least it's not a realistic short or long term goal. There are so many other things we have to fix before that goal makes sense.
  - DrOctagon 7y ago
    I'm curious, what do you think those 'things we have to fix' first are? Why they are a higher priority?
    - dgzl 7y ago
      These are contentious so please don't downvote for an idea... To start, I think a severe underlying problem America is facing is just that there isn't much community here, compared to other first world countries. How long have our families been living in the same place? Not long for most of us. I think this is causing some turmoil in the trust department. Also, we really need to work on our regulations. We have a bad habit of legislating from the heart, but end up producing side effects that hurt us. For instance, laws preventing giving food to the homeless. Over-regulating also drives cost up for business, causing them to raise prices. Another is minimum wage. Americans have a hard time admitting that increasing minimum wage has negative side effects, especially on small business. We can address the homeless problem pretty easily if we could decrease the minimum wage for them. And before you get angry at this one, what kind of smartphone are you using? There's a reason our jobs go over seas. Jobs that would pay very low wage wouldn't be difficult jobs, but they also wouldn't care if the person is only half mentally there. Small pay, small work, you can be promoted and given raise. A factory for instance could even build a campground with facilities. How many homeless folks would love to have that opportunity? How many more potential employers does that produce? We should also consider decreasing the federal budget and start paying off our debt, no? I would think that's a pretty important thing to keep in mind also. These things are needed in order to achieve a more universal happiness.
mbay 7y ago
an extremely Software Dude take: "This hasn't been systematized the way I'm imagining it so it doesn't exist yet."
julienreszka 7y ago
Progress is an illusion. No such thing as progress. According to the second law of thermodynamics things can only get worse we can only conserve what is good already before its inevitable decay. Progress is snake oil, eternal yough, perpetual machines, ideal cities and so on : Utopias, scams, wishful thinking at best. All this has the fear of death as a root cause.
- coldtea 7y ago
  You're not allowed to say these things in tech circles or imply that a person from an older era might prefer it over ours (or god forbid that a modern person might prefer to live an older or less tech-ey lifestyle), or limits to growth...
  - wsy 7y ago
    Of course you are allowed: you just did it here, and nobody prohibited it. What you seem to request is that nobody is criticizing your stance. But why would you be entitled to that?
    - coldtea 7y ago
      >Of course you are allowed: you just did it here, and nobody prohibited it. Yeah, it was a turn of phrase, didn't mean its literally banned. You're not banned, you're just not welcome to say it, you will be treated as pariah for saying it, you will get downvoted to death, and if a discussion happens to grow around such a viewpoint, it will be in all probability marked "dead". >What you seem to request is that nobody is criticizing your stance. No, what I request is that people give thought to such propositions and argue with counter-arguments as opposed to facile dismissals and outrage...
      - wsy 7y ago
        Already the parent didn't make a big effort to argue, it was more like literature ("progress is an illusion"), paired with a very far-fetched conclusion from the second law of thermodynamics. On the latter, a proper counter argument was given. You didn't argue at all yet, so it is not really a surprise that nobody gives counter-arguments.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
killjoywashere 7y ago
This stuff exists. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (broker), DARPA (demand), every company (demand) and every company's R&D division (supply). The problem is there's 7 billion people, and fully half of them are above average. The demand signalers are constantly hunting for supply, while the suppliers are constantly hunting for buyers. It takes radical amounts of cross-training to have any hope of comprehending the available possibilities.
carapace 7y ago
This is the program of the Bavarian Illuminati.
- dang 7y ago
  Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
  - carapace 7y ago
    Sorry. While partially meant as an in-joke for Robert Anton Wilson fans, I'm actually serious: the is no mention of religion or spirituality in the program outlined. To me it seems relevant (or at least interesting) both that this is a purely secular or materialist concept of progress; and that it's hardly "New".
libraryofbabel 7y ago
> Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston? Why was early-20th-century science in Germany and Central Europe so strong? In which the authors conveniently ignore the existence of a number of disciplines, like the history of science and technology, addressing precisely the questions that they're asking.
- bobcostas55 7y ago
  They don't ignore them at all, they explain why having this stuff spread over a large number of non-communicating disciplines is bad.
- buboard 7y ago
  My guess is they are looking for the actual answers, not just endless discussions.
spacegod 7y ago
Isn't this just economic geography?
aylmao 7y ago
Isn't this what philosophy in government and economics are? I took a Critical Theory course in college. We read Kant, Hagel, Marx, Marcuse and Adorno, and that's what their writing is all about— what all this we call "progress" is even progressing towards and what that means for the world, for individuals, etc. I feel like the United States has just forsaken philosophy, especially as it relates to economics, in favour of their Chicago School theories of free markets. Now that the markets have been let to run free, and they're running towards nothing good in particular, perhaps it's time to just look back at all the literature written elsewhere on these matters.
- jkingsbery 7y ago
  Many free-market oriented people would disagree that we've let the free market run amok, as measured by the percentage of the economy that the government spends directly or controls through price controls. I would agree that a stress on philosophy in economics would be helpful, but people like Hayek wrote in a philosophical way having seen the societies that adopted ideas of Marx and found even further dysfunction.
  - aylmao 7y ago
    Glad to see someone actually comment and not just downvote haha. > Many free-market oriented people would disagree that we've let the free market run amok, as measured by the percentage of the economy that the government spends directly or controls through price controls. I agree with this actually. The federal government does move the pieces quite a bit and there's definitely people who think it could be even more free. Though to be fair, I'm thinking about this in relation to other countries like some in Europe, for example. In that context, I get the sense the US is more scared of regulation and in general prefers letting the market decide. For example, plastic bags. The UK has introduced a charge on them, and is going to enforce a ban soon. In the US you see less action in this direction, and the general trend I see to fight the issue is "lets educate the population so they crate demand for alternative options". IMO, what the UK is doing is progress— they've identified the moral obligation to take better care of the environment and through policy they're altering the market to work towards it. The US seems to prefer to "progress" according to market demand. If this idea is to be made policy, first it has to be demanded by the market. I could be wrong though ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ This is of course at a Federal level, because at a state and municipal level I do hear of more independent action taken in the US. > I would agree that a stress on philosophy in economics would be helpful, but people like Hayek wrote in a philosophical way having seen the societies that adopted ideas of Marx and found even further dysfunction. That's true. I'm not arguing for the adoption of societies modeled after the ideas of Marx, which are notoriously vague. I'm more just making the case that there's previous literature reflecting on what "progress" is, and arguing that perhaps it's not just increasing GDP without bounds.
superqwert 7y ago
Without defining what "Progress" and "Good" are, the whole concept that there is some sort of "Progress" is meaningless. If you can define those terms, you can maybe start to study such a topic - but the definition of such terms belongs to philosophy, not science. Technological advancement could certainly studied, but what we do or don't do with it can only be "Good" or "Progressing" to some idealistic goal if we have identified those.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. Given in TFA's third paragraph.
  - hacknat 7y ago
    Well I can definitely tear down this definition. “Advancement” doesn’t mean anything. What does it mean to advance culturally or organizationally without already having morality defined? Also raising standards of living? Is that all we’re after? Slaves in slave societies had rising standards of living, did that make slavery okay? The scary thing about an article like this is the sheer ignorance and hubris behind it. No credible philosopher will tell you that we can objectify morality, it is a provable logical fallacy. That doesn’t seem to stop people form thinking they can do it. The folks in history who thought they could do it are some of the most reprehensible people in all of human history.
    - ziddoap 7y ago
      >Slaves in slave societies had rising standards of living, did that make slavery okay? I doubt anyone is making the argument slavery is okay. At least try to argue in good faith. This is a ridiculous example.
      - anongraddebt 7y ago
        One unclear example doesn't negate his/her argument. Even one bad example doesn't do this. And neither does arguing in bad faith (if for some reason they are doing so). The argument still stands. You can't coherently make demands about 'progress' (whatever that could even mean) without having some rational and already worked out framework for what determines 'progress' in the first place. And the commenter is right that failing this, such talk can be dangerous because by a sleight of hand you can substitute - without argument - what is supposedly rational with whatever you simply desire at that moment in time.
marcus_holmes 7y ago
I'm about 2/3 of the way through AntiFragile, and so scoffing at the whole idea that academic institutions or scholarly study produce or contribute to progress at all. What we need is not more academics, but the reinstatement of the apprenticeship system.
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  I guess that depends on your idea of progress. To be honest, reinstating the apprenticeship system sounds a little circular and also quite difficult to achieve, now that companies have got used to not bearing the cost of education in a lot of areas. You'd either have to regulate business massively, or shut down a lot of public education. I'd be more inclined to try something novel, like an international federated organisation dedicated to free education and open research, or something.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  > Two characteristics of a city are systematically associated with the appearance of significant figures who grow up there: whether the city is a political or financial center, regardless of its population, and whether the city is the location of an elite university. The effect of these latter two variables is quite large. As the last column indicates, being a political or financial center increased the expected number of significant figures by 64 percent, holding everything else constant, while having an elite university increased that expected number by 184 percent. Human Accomplishment: Charles Murray, page 369 More generally this critique ignores the second industrial revolution altogether. The U.K. shows progress outside universities is possible, as does the preceding industrious revolution, where water and wind power and the beginnings of steam happened with minimal involvement from universities but progress in chemistry and electricity generation and electrical engineering was absolutely a product of the technical university system. That’s why Germany was at the forefront of this era of rapid progress and the U.K. wasn’t despite its huge initial advantage in capital.
- mattkrause 7y ago
  You know how academia works, right? It and the trades are the only apprentice systems going…
bumbledraven 7y ago
The physicist David Deutsch wrote a superb book about the kinds of ideas that lead to progress and those that lead to regress. It's called The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (2011). https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005DXR5ZC https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005DXR5ZC
onion2k 7y ago
Progress itself is understudied. Every historian in the world would dispute that.
- ksdale 7y ago
  I suspect many historians also believe that people don't pay nearly enough attention to history.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Economists especially.
ArtWomb 7y ago
This perfectly captures the zeitgeist and my current thinking. Globally, we need a 10x basic research expenditure increase, with specific allocation to long-term (life) grants for breakthrough investigations. Establishment of geographic concentrations or hubs of interest (eg. WallStreet proximity to fintech knowledge, DC corridor for cybersecurity experience, Boston biotech, etc). As well as radical change in nurture and support for key talent. And re-calibration of end focus on improving everyday lives and alleviating hardship. The one feather in our cap is the distribution of new discovery. As the original research mission behind the invention of the internet, it has surpassed expectation. The black hole image at the center of the Milky Way galaxy was captured, processed and released (via twitter) in under a news cycle.
- buboard 7y ago
  Thats the VC fallacy of believing that filling the tank with money will make the car go faster. If anything , progress in recent decades is anticorrelated with increase in funding
buboard 7y ago
> When anthropologists look at scientists, they’re trying to understand the species. But when viewed through the lens of Progress Studies, the implicit question is how scientists (or funders or evaluators of scientists) should be acting. I have had a few recent exchanges with anthropologists and it doesn't seem they are interested in moralistic claims apart from defending the current academic framework. For example they were highly skeptical of science when it doesn't support the "nurture" side on the nature vs nurture debate, discarding scientific evidence as invalid using weak arguments. It was surprising to me how prevalent and an orthodoxy this is, and it seems they have contracted the relativistic disease that is prevalent in the social sciences for decades. I suppose most agree that progress is not an implied good (Plenty of comments here express that view). Pity because anthropology is IMO the most interesting social science. As for measuring progress in science, the problem is that the vast majority of scientists are content with the current system of small unambitious steps, low risks and easy content-free papers, so you won't easily find many supporters there.
zemo 7y ago
It's literally only the tech community that thinks that "Progress itself is understudied". People who work in the humanities have been studying these topics since antiquity, and they have been desperately trying to get people in the STEM fields to listen, only to be ignored. read the responses to The Atlantic tweeting this out. https://twitter.com/TheAtlantic/status/1156260396317253632 https://twitter.com/TheAtlantic/status/1156260396317253632 > there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress The major difference between what they're saying and existing fields (history, sociology, STS, economics, urbanism) is that the authors are only talking about looking at successes, not failures. That is juvenile at best, catastrophic at worst. Studying progress without studying failure is incredibly ill-defined, because you have to start by defining progress, and you can't actually guarantee progress without studying failure and studying how to avoid failure. I'm sure we can all come together and agree on a single definition of progress, right? Seems so straightforward. This article is embarrassingly dismissive of other fields.
- lvoudour 7y ago
  The major difference between what they're saying and existing fields (history, sociology, STS, economics, urbanism) is that the authors are only talking about looking at successes, not failures. That is juvenile at best, catastrophic at worst. Studying progress without studying failure is incredibly ill-defined, because you have to start by defining progress, and you can't actually guarantee progress without studying failure and studying how to avoid failure. You perfectly articulated what I wanted to write but couldn't find the right words. Reinventing the wheel is one thing, but reinventing it and adding corners to it is just embarrassing.
skmurphy 7y ago
I have seen a lot of push back in various forums and whenever this link is tweeted but a lot of it seems to conflate "materials science" and "civil engineering" or "mechanical engineering." There is a very big difference between understanding historical trends--which is very important--and designing viable positive sum technology ecosystems. That being said, here are six technology historians I have found very insightful: Donald Cardwell in "Turning Points in Western Technology" Joel Mokyr in "Lever of Riches" and "Gifts of Athena" Edward Hutchinson in "Cognition in the Wild" James Utterback "Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation" David A. Mindell "Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics" Stephen B. Johnson "The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs"
telotortium 7y ago
Authors: Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

61 points by telotortium 7y ago

I dunno, sounds like a lot of words to describe a rebranding of classical economics. Before economics became all dynamic stochastic general equilibrium matters and strategic games of imperfect information, it was about 'how does the machine work.' Not sure why we need a New Field to study that.

devons 7y ago
There's a Twitter thread critiquing Progress Studies from a similar angle. This reply in particular caught my eye: https://twitter.com/WordsByBennett/status/1156301614975770635 https://twitter.com/WordsByBennett/status/115630161497577063... It compares the proposed approach to WW2 Abraham Wald airplane bullet pattern analysis [1] and Survivor Bias. [1] https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-be-wrong-by-jordan-ellenberg-664e708cfc3d https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-...
jkingsbery 7y ago
That's what I was thinking while reading: the author is just describing economics while ignoring the fact that > The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account (FA Hayek, The Fatal Conceit) I agree that we don't need a new field, but it seems also that the idea of designing progress is a fool's errand.
- antepodius 7y ago
  I like to think of it as a matter of scale. At a very low scale, a human mind designing a process can be efficient (a specific part of an assembly line, a function, etc.) As you scale, you quickly reach a point where one mind is worse than many, even if those minds are communicating mostly through such apparently low-bandwidth measures as observing the flow of money.

CptFribble 7y ago

We don't need a field of study, just a new definition of the word. Right now progress is More Jobs and More GDP. A lot of people wind up getting left out in the cold because progress jobs and GDP growth don't require helping everyone who needs it. Maybe progress should mean ensuring every human is healthy, fed, housed, and has access to education and the global network.

dgzl 7y ago
> Maybe progress should mean ensuring every human is healthy, fed, housed, and has access to education and the global network. I don't think that's an attainable goal, or at the very least it's not a realistic short or long term goal. There are so many other things we have to fix before that goal makes sense.
- DrOctagon 7y ago
  I'm curious, what do you think those 'things we have to fix' first are? Why they are a higher priority?
  - dgzl 7y ago
    These are contentious so please don't downvote for an idea... To start, I think a severe underlying problem America is facing is just that there isn't much community here, compared to other first world countries. How long have our families been living in the same place? Not long for most of us. I think this is causing some turmoil in the trust department. Also, we really need to work on our regulations. We have a bad habit of legislating from the heart, but end up producing side effects that hurt us. For instance, laws preventing giving food to the homeless. Over-regulating also drives cost up for business, causing them to raise prices. Another is minimum wage. Americans have a hard time admitting that increasing minimum wage has negative side effects, especially on small business. We can address the homeless problem pretty easily if we could decrease the minimum wage for them. And before you get angry at this one, what kind of smartphone are you using? There's a reason our jobs go over seas. Jobs that would pay very low wage wouldn't be difficult jobs, but they also wouldn't care if the person is only half mentally there. Small pay, small work, you can be promoted and given raise. A factory for instance could even build a campground with facilities. How many homeless folks would love to have that opportunity? How many more potential employers does that produce? We should also consider decreasing the federal budget and start paying off our debt, no? I would think that's a pretty important thing to keep in mind also. These things are needed in order to achieve a more universal happiness.

mbay 7y ago

an extremely Software Dude take: "This hasn't been systematized the way I'm imagining it so it doesn't exist yet."

julienreszka 7y ago

Progress is an illusion. No such thing as progress. According to the second law of thermodynamics things can only get worse we can only conserve what is good already before its inevitable decay. Progress is snake oil, eternal yough, perpetual machines, ideal cities and so on : Utopias, scams, wishful thinking at best. All this has the fear of death as a root cause.

coldtea 7y ago
You're not allowed to say these things in tech circles or imply that a person from an older era might prefer it over ours (or god forbid that a modern person might prefer to live an older or less tech-ey lifestyle), or limits to growth...
- wsy 7y ago
  Of course you are allowed: you just did it here, and nobody prohibited it. What you seem to request is that nobody is criticizing your stance. But why would you be entitled to that?
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >Of course you are allowed: you just did it here, and nobody prohibited it. Yeah, it was a turn of phrase, didn't mean its literally banned. You're not banned, you're just not welcome to say it, you will be treated as pariah for saying it, you will get downvoted to death, and if a discussion happens to grow around such a viewpoint, it will be in all probability marked "dead". >What you seem to request is that nobody is criticizing your stance. No, what I request is that people give thought to such propositions and argue with counter-arguments as opposed to facile dismissals and outrage...
    - wsy 7y ago
      Already the parent didn't make a big effort to argue, it was more like literature ("progress is an illusion"), paired with a very far-fetched conclusion from the second law of thermodynamics. On the latter, a proper counter argument was given. You didn't argue at all yet, so it is not really a surprise that nobody gives counter-arguments.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

killjoywashere 7y ago

This stuff exists. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (broker), DARPA (demand), every company (demand) and every company's R&D division (supply). The problem is there's 7 billion people, and fully half of them are above average. The demand signalers are constantly hunting for supply, while the suppliers are constantly hunting for buyers. It takes radical amounts of cross-training to have any hope of comprehending the available possibilities.

carapace 7y ago

This is the program of the Bavarian Illuminati.

dang 7y ago
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
- carapace 7y ago
  Sorry. While partially meant as an in-joke for Robert Anton Wilson fans, I'm actually serious: the is no mention of religion or spirituality in the program outlined. To me it seems relevant (or at least interesting) both that this is a purely secular or materialist concept of progress; and that it's hardly "New".

libraryofbabel 7y ago

> Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston? Why was early-20th-century science in Germany and Central Europe so strong? In which the authors conveniently ignore the existence of a number of disciplines, like the history of science and technology, addressing precisely the questions that they're asking.

bobcostas55 7y ago
They don't ignore them at all, they explain why having this stuff spread over a large number of non-communicating disciplines is bad.
buboard 7y ago
My guess is they are looking for the actual answers, not just endless discussions.

spacegod 7y ago

Isn't this just economic geography?

aylmao 7y ago

Isn't this what philosophy in government and economics are? I took a Critical Theory course in college. We read Kant, Hagel, Marx, Marcuse and Adorno, and that's what their writing is all about— what all this we call "progress" is even progressing towards and what that means for the world, for individuals, etc. I feel like the United States has just forsaken philosophy, especially as it relates to economics, in favour of their Chicago School theories of free markets. Now that the markets have been let to run free, and they're running towards nothing good in particular, perhaps it's time to just look back at all the literature written elsewhere on these matters.

jkingsbery 7y ago
Many free-market oriented people would disagree that we've let the free market run amok, as measured by the percentage of the economy that the government spends directly or controls through price controls. I would agree that a stress on philosophy in economics would be helpful, but people like Hayek wrote in a philosophical way having seen the societies that adopted ideas of Marx and found even further dysfunction.
- aylmao 7y ago
  Glad to see someone actually comment and not just downvote haha. > Many free-market oriented people would disagree that we've let the free market run amok, as measured by the percentage of the economy that the government spends directly or controls through price controls. I agree with this actually. The federal government does move the pieces quite a bit and there's definitely people who think it could be even more free. Though to be fair, I'm thinking about this in relation to other countries like some in Europe, for example. In that context, I get the sense the US is more scared of regulation and in general prefers letting the market decide. For example, plastic bags. The UK has introduced a charge on them, and is going to enforce a ban soon. In the US you see less action in this direction, and the general trend I see to fight the issue is "lets educate the population so they crate demand for alternative options". IMO, what the UK is doing is progress— they've identified the moral obligation to take better care of the environment and through policy they're altering the market to work towards it. The US seems to prefer to "progress" according to market demand. If this idea is to be made policy, first it has to be demanded by the market. I could be wrong though ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ This is of course at a Federal level, because at a state and municipal level I do hear of more independent action taken in the US. > I would agree that a stress on philosophy in economics would be helpful, but people like Hayek wrote in a philosophical way having seen the societies that adopted ideas of Marx and found even further dysfunction. That's true. I'm not arguing for the adoption of societies modeled after the ideas of Marx, which are notoriously vague. I'm more just making the case that there's previous literature reflecting on what "progress" is, and arguing that perhaps it's not just increasing GDP without bounds.

superqwert 7y ago

Without defining what "Progress" and "Good" are, the whole concept that there is some sort of "Progress" is meaningless. If you can define those terms, you can maybe start to study such a topic - but the definition of such terms belongs to philosophy, not science. Technological advancement could certainly studied, but what we do or don't do with it can only be "Good" or "Progressing" to some idealistic goal if we have identified those.

dredmorbius 7y ago
By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. Given in TFA's third paragraph.
- hacknat 7y ago
  Well I can definitely tear down this definition. “Advancement” doesn’t mean anything. What does it mean to advance culturally or organizationally without already having morality defined? Also raising standards of living? Is that all we’re after? Slaves in slave societies had rising standards of living, did that make slavery okay? The scary thing about an article like this is the sheer ignorance and hubris behind it. No credible philosopher will tell you that we can objectify morality, it is a provable logical fallacy. That doesn’t seem to stop people form thinking they can do it. The folks in history who thought they could do it are some of the most reprehensible people in all of human history.
  - ziddoap 7y ago
    >Slaves in slave societies had rising standards of living, did that make slavery okay? I doubt anyone is making the argument slavery is okay. At least try to argue in good faith. This is a ridiculous example.
    - anongraddebt 7y ago
      One unclear example doesn't negate his/her argument. Even one bad example doesn't do this. And neither does arguing in bad faith (if for some reason they are doing so). The argument still stands. You can't coherently make demands about 'progress' (whatever that could even mean) without having some rational and already worked out framework for what determines 'progress' in the first place. And the commenter is right that failing this, such talk can be dangerous because by a sleight of hand you can substitute - without argument - what is supposedly rational with whatever you simply desire at that moment in time.

marcus_holmes 7y ago

I'm about 2/3 of the way through AntiFragile, and so scoffing at the whole idea that academic institutions or scholarly study produce or contribute to progress at all. What we need is not more academics, but the reinstatement of the apprenticeship system.

inflatableDodo 7y ago
I guess that depends on your idea of progress. To be honest, reinstating the apprenticeship system sounds a little circular and also quite difficult to achieve, now that companies have got used to not bearing the cost of education in a lot of areas. You'd either have to regulate business massively, or shut down a lot of public education. I'd be more inclined to try something novel, like an international federated organisation dedicated to free education and open research, or something.
barry-cotter 7y ago
> Two characteristics of a city are systematically associated with the appearance of significant figures who grow up there: whether the city is a political or financial center, regardless of its population, and whether the city is the location of an elite university. The effect of these latter two variables is quite large. As the last column indicates, being a political or financial center increased the expected number of significant figures by 64 percent, holding everything else constant, while having an elite university increased that expected number by 184 percent. Human Accomplishment: Charles Murray, page 369 More generally this critique ignores the second industrial revolution altogether. The U.K. shows progress outside universities is possible, as does the preceding industrious revolution, where water and wind power and the beginnings of steam happened with minimal involvement from universities but progress in chemistry and electricity generation and electrical engineering was absolutely a product of the technical university system. That’s why Germany was at the forefront of this era of rapid progress and the U.K. wasn’t despite its huge initial advantage in capital.
mattkrause 7y ago
You know how academia works, right? It and the trades are the only apprentice systems going…

bumbledraven 7y ago

The physicist David Deutsch wrote a superb book about the kinds of ideas that lead to progress and those that lead to regress. It's called The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (2011). https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005DXR5ZC https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005DXR5ZC

onion2k 7y ago

Progress itself is understudied. Every historian in the world would dispute that.

ksdale 7y ago
I suspect many historians also believe that people don't pay nearly enough attention to history.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Economists especially.

ArtWomb 7y ago

This perfectly captures the zeitgeist and my current thinking. Globally, we need a 10x basic research expenditure increase, with specific allocation to long-term (life) grants for breakthrough investigations. Establishment of geographic concentrations or hubs of interest (eg. WallStreet proximity to fintech knowledge, DC corridor for cybersecurity experience, Boston biotech, etc). As well as radical change in nurture and support for key talent. And re-calibration of end focus on improving everyday lives and alleviating hardship. The one feather in our cap is the distribution of new discovery. As the original research mission behind the invention of the internet, it has surpassed expectation. The black hole image at the center of the Milky Way galaxy was captured, processed and released (via twitter) in under a news cycle.

buboard 7y ago
Thats the VC fallacy of believing that filling the tank with money will make the car go faster. If anything , progress in recent decades is anticorrelated with increase in funding

buboard 7y ago

> When anthropologists look at scientists, they’re trying to understand the species. But when viewed through the lens of Progress Studies, the implicit question is how scientists (or funders or evaluators of scientists) should be acting. I have had a few recent exchanges with anthropologists and it doesn't seem they are interested in moralistic claims apart from defending the current academic framework. For example they were highly skeptical of science when it doesn't support the "nurture" side on the nature vs nurture debate, discarding scientific evidence as invalid using weak arguments. It was surprising to me how prevalent and an orthodoxy this is, and it seems they have contracted the relativistic disease that is prevalent in the social sciences for decades. I suppose most agree that progress is not an implied good (Plenty of comments here express that view). Pity because anthropology is IMO the most interesting social science. As for measuring progress in science, the problem is that the vast majority of scientists are content with the current system of small unambitious steps, low risks and easy content-free papers, so you won't easily find many supporters there.

zemo 7y ago

It's literally only the tech community that thinks that "Progress itself is understudied". People who work in the humanities have been studying these topics since antiquity, and they have been desperately trying to get people in the STEM fields to listen, only to be ignored. read the responses to The Atlantic tweeting this out. https://twitter.com/TheAtlantic/status/1156260396317253632 https://twitter.com/TheAtlantic/status/1156260396317253632 > there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress The major difference between what they're saying and existing fields (history, sociology, STS, economics, urbanism) is that the authors are only talking about looking at successes, not failures. That is juvenile at best, catastrophic at worst. Studying progress without studying failure is incredibly ill-defined, because you have to start by defining progress, and you can't actually guarantee progress without studying failure and studying how to avoid failure. I'm sure we can all come together and agree on a single definition of progress, right? Seems so straightforward. This article is embarrassingly dismissive of other fields.

lvoudour 7y ago
The major difference between what they're saying and existing fields (history, sociology, STS, economics, urbanism) is that the authors are only talking about looking at successes, not failures. That is juvenile at best, catastrophic at worst. Studying progress without studying failure is incredibly ill-defined, because you have to start by defining progress, and you can't actually guarantee progress without studying failure and studying how to avoid failure. You perfectly articulated what I wanted to write but couldn't find the right words. Reinventing the wheel is one thing, but reinventing it and adding corners to it is just embarrassing.

skmurphy 7y ago

I have seen a lot of push back in various forums and whenever this link is tweeted but a lot of it seems to conflate "materials science" and "civil engineering" or "mechanical engineering." There is a very big difference between understanding historical trends--which is very important--and designing viable positive sum technology ecosystems. That being said, here are six technology historians I have found very insightful: Donald Cardwell in "Turning Points in Western Technology" Joel Mokyr in "Lever of Riches" and "Gifts of Athena" Edward Hutchinson in "Cognition in the Wild" James Utterback "Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation" David A. Mindell "Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics" Stephen B. Johnson "The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs"

telotortium 7y ago

Authors: Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen