5 ms·

A Conversation with Bertrand Russell (1952) [video]

162 points by _zhqs 6y ago

goolulusaurs 6y ago
For some time I have been thinking about why it seems like scientific progress has slowed down compared to a century ago, and then one day I came across a clip of an interview with Professor Russell where he was saying that if technological progress continued at the current rate, then very soon humanity would drive itself extinct from the creation and use of weapons that were too powerful and too easily produced. I wonder if the slowing of scientific progress might be in some ways a saving grace, where if too advanced of technology was developed too quickly, then society would be unable to evolve in time to handle it responsibly without major potential for calamity.
- sooheon 6y ago
  You've probably seen this, but for those who haven't, Bostrom's written an interesting formalization of this hunch: https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
  - dr_dshiv 6y ago
    It seems to me the balance is between massive state power and massive individual power. I'm pretty sure about which one I fear more. That said, I think Nick's suggestions are pretty sound. That said, I think about the call from Freeman Dyson to teach children to develop genetic engineering skills to create warm blooded plants to bring life to the asteroid belt.... Well, maybe at some point
    - dTal 6y ago
      > I'm pretty sure about which one I fear more Which?
      - amanaplanacanal 6y ago
        Not the OP, but they can both be pretty bad. Nazi Germany or the USSR on one side, or Somalian warlords on the other side. Perhaps the warlords are better, but that's not obvious to me.
- aksss 6y ago
  Would just like to point out that Vaclov Smil says the time period between about 1870-1910 is unmatched by any other time period before or since, excepting a sliver of the Han dynasty, as measured by the rapid surge in invention, innovation, and the rapidity with which those new ideas were employed in the broader society (rate of adoption). He goes on to say that even in today’s seemingly endless cycle of new products and legitimate advancement, we’re making only point solutions in comparison. For instance, the whole-house AC power system would be easily recognizable by Edison today. Improved, yes, but compared to going from nothing to the direct-to-home and whole-home solution set, it’s illustrative of relative stagnation. To be clear though, he said that it’s unrealistic to expect society to perpetuate those periods, as they are flukes - again, only twice in recorded history. I’m not doing the depth of his reasoning justice by any means, but I think his would bring another interesting angle to the idea that you relate from Russell.
  - rapind 6y ago
    I wonder what Edison would think of the internet, self driving cars, speech recognition, image recognition, social manipulation at scale, VR, modern medicine, etc.
    - growlist 6y ago
      It would probably involve personal enrichment and lawsuits, judging by his record.
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      Self-driving cars in his age were called horsses. Those (and donleys and mules) still remain the preferred mode of autonomous all-terrain mobility in some regions. The US Army was actively considering resurrecting pack mules fpr use in Afghanistan as of 2011, though I don't believe that actually occurred. Otherwise, E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909) envisions much of what you describe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461514 (PDF) Something of an HN perennial. https://hn.algolia.com/?q="The%20Machine%20Stops" https://hn.algolia.com/?q="The%20Machine%20Stops" Several notable postings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10490198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10490198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9544256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9544256
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cambrianentropy 6y ago
  Not sure if you follow Chamath Palihapitiya but his company's annual letter had a really interesting take on this: https://www.socialcapital.com/annual-letters/2019 https://www.socialcapital.com/annual-letters/2019 A new space race A common theme amongst optimists is how much technological advance we have seen and how these advances seem to be accelerating. I am of the opposite camp and believe, roughly, that the rate of progress has been steadily declining since we landed on the moon in 1969. While I can’t explain the 1970s and 1980s, the modern Gilded Age’s lack of technological progress is easier to understand. The intellectual lobotomization of smart, young STEM talent has been an explicit strategy by Big Tech fueled by unseemly profitability and hi flying stock prices. If you can’t innovate but are wildly profitable, wouldn’t you also just pay the incremental talented engineer to work for you on anything versus working for a competitor or, worse still, work for themselves and invent something disruptive that could impact your monopoly? Of course you would...and they have. If you were a bright, ambitious engineer graduating in STEM in the early 1960s this wasn’t the case. You went to work on something meaningful. The momentum towards spaceflight was a call to arms for the smartest and hardest working amongst us. These bright men and women worked to invent new capabilities and entire ecosystems in fuel cells, gas storage systems, thermodynamic materials, engines, mechanical timers and clocks and control systems to name a few. The cost of the entire Apollo program was $25 Billion or $150 Billion in today’s dollars. Big Tech spent $75B on R&D in 2018 alone. Put another way, this means that in two 2018 equivalents of R&D spending, Big Tech could have sent people to the moon and back. It's fair to say, however, that what we have witnessed instead can graciously be described as something less ambitious and impactful than that. This misallocation of capital won’t end until we demand it - every government, regulator and individual now has a role to play whether you know it or not.
ak39 6y ago
Thanks, always enjoyed BR commentaries on history and modern perspectives. Particularly enjoyed this one with CC on. "Don't upset the apple tart" for "grown ups had the apple tart" and some other Monty Python-esque machine gaffes.
interestica 6y ago
If you're interested, and happen to be in Hamilton, Ontario, he donated his archives to McMaster University. They have thousands of documents and things like his Nobel Peace prize. It looks like a lot has been digitized now. https://www.mcmaster.ca/russdocs/russell.htm https://www.mcmaster.ca/russdocs/russell.htm
- anaphor 6y ago
  I've been to the archives (used to be a philosophy student there) and got to go through some of his letters. I remember reading a bunch of letters he wrote back and forth with Muhammad Ali during the vietnam war. They actually have some of his furniture and a portrait, IIRC too. They recently moved it all from the university archives into a dedicated house as well! The university has a special visiting professorship related to it as well https://philos.humanities.mcmaster.ca/visiting-bertrand-russell-professors/ https://philos.humanities.mcmaster.ca/visiting-bertrand-russ... It's a really interesting story of how they even acquired the archives https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/celebrating-50-years-the-bertrand-russell-archives/ https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/celebrating-50-ye...
- seesawtron 6y ago
  *Nobel prize in Literature. (Had to look up wondering why he would get a peace prize in that era)
  - interestica 6y ago
    Yes! Thanks for the correction. >> The Nobel Prize in Literature 1950 was awarded to Earl (Bertrand Arthur William) Russell "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought." https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1950/summary/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1950/summary/
sndean 6y ago
Early on this interview [0] he says that his grandfather visited Napoleon in Elba (in 1814). It's always sort of mind-blowing how few generations, albeit long-lived ones, are required to reach to a very different era, where there existed this weird short-lived French empire. In this case just 3 or 4 generations are needed? Another instance is President John Tyler's grand children still being alive [1]. John Tyler was born in 1790 when George Washington was still around, although I doubt he had any contact with Washington. [0] https://youtu.be/fb3k6tB-Or8?t=129 https://youtu.be/fb3k6tB-Or8?t=129 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyler#Family_and_personal_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyler#Family_and_personal...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- anaphor 6y ago
  I think this is one of the most fascinating things about him to me, because he was born in 1872 and lived to 1970, so he went from living in a society where it was still common to travel by horse and buggy to one where we had nuclear energy and easy air travel, etc, and he never lost his sharp mind, so you get to hear the perspective of someone who went through all of that. I highly recommend giving his autobiography a read to anyone interested in his life.
  - netcan 6y ago
    You don't need to have been very long lived to see that. My grandfather was born in 1914. Cars existed, but most people hadn't seen one yet. The Wright brothers' maiden flight was 10 years prior. He went to med school before WW2. Penicillin did not exist yet, not even in labs! In the 50s (his 40s), he traveled commercially on a 747... 1950s futurism predicting flying cars and moon cities by 2000... they weren't being as silly as we tend to think. They saw planes go from nonexistent sputnik within half a lifetime. The projection was linear.
    - ianai 6y ago
      The futurism probably could have stayed true if the political impetus had stayed toward space development instead of Cold War and oil concerns. But planting the US flag on the moon and probably other factors I don’t realize made the Soviets being on the moon less of a reality. Edit-really wish we had O'Neill cylinders though.
Angostura 6y ago
I rather prefer the Face to Face interview with Russell talking to John Freeman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZv3pSaLtY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZv3pSaLtY
bori5 6y ago
For those interested in Bertie you may find Logicomix (https://www.logicomix.com/en/index.html https://www.logicomix.com/en/index.html) an entertaining read
lihaciudaniel 6y ago
If you are curious his grand-father knew another great mind John Stuart Mill, also Bertrand Russell wrote this thing called principia mathematica and wrote 30 pages on proving 1+1=2 using formal logic. This man has achieved so much for one person, most notably writing history of Western Philosophy [1] 1.https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243685.A_History_of_Western_Philosophy https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243685.A_History_of_West...
JetBen 6y ago
From the video: "If a philosophy is to bring happiness, it should be inspired by kindly feeling. Marx is NOT inspired by kindly feeling. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat, but what he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeoisie. It was because of that negative element, that hate element, that his philosophy produced disaster. A philosophy which is to do good must be one inspired by kindly feeling and not by unkindly feeling." Absolute genius.
jmiskovic 6y ago
> Well I think there are three things that are needed if the world is to adapt itself to the Industrial Revolution. The troubles we are suffering now are essentially troubles due to adapting ourselves to a new phase of human life, namely the industrial phase. And I think three things are necessary if people are to live happily in the industrial phase. One of these is world government, the second is an approximate economic equality between different parts of the world, and the third is a nearly stationary population. There's a full transcript here: https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2019/02/02/a-conversation-with-bertrand-russell-1952/ https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2019/02/02/a-conversation-with...

162 points by _zhqs 6y ago

For some time I have been thinking about why it seems like scientific progress has slowed down compared to a century ago, and then one day I came across a clip of an interview with Professor Russell where he was saying that if technological progress continued at the current rate, then very soon humanity would drive itself extinct from the creation and use of weapons that were too powerful and too easily produced. I wonder if the slowing of scientific progress might be in some ways a saving grace, where if too advanced of technology was developed too quickly, then society would be unable to evolve in time to handle it responsibly without major potential for calamity.

sooheon 6y ago
You've probably seen this, but for those who haven't, Bostrom's written an interesting formalization of this hunch: https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
- dr_dshiv 6y ago
  It seems to me the balance is between massive state power and massive individual power. I'm pretty sure about which one I fear more. That said, I think Nick's suggestions are pretty sound. That said, I think about the call from Freeman Dyson to teach children to develop genetic engineering skills to create warm blooded plants to bring life to the asteroid belt.... Well, maybe at some point
  - dTal 6y ago
    > I'm pretty sure about which one I fear more Which?
    - amanaplanacanal 6y ago
      Not the OP, but they can both be pretty bad. Nazi Germany or the USSR on one side, or Somalian warlords on the other side. Perhaps the warlords are better, but that's not obvious to me.
aksss 6y ago
Would just like to point out that Vaclov Smil says the time period between about 1870-1910 is unmatched by any other time period before or since, excepting a sliver of the Han dynasty, as measured by the rapid surge in invention, innovation, and the rapidity with which those new ideas were employed in the broader society (rate of adoption). He goes on to say that even in today’s seemingly endless cycle of new products and legitimate advancement, we’re making only point solutions in comparison. For instance, the whole-house AC power system would be easily recognizable by Edison today. Improved, yes, but compared to going from nothing to the direct-to-home and whole-home solution set, it’s illustrative of relative stagnation. To be clear though, he said that it’s unrealistic to expect society to perpetuate those periods, as they are flukes - again, only twice in recorded history. I’m not doing the depth of his reasoning justice by any means, but I think his would bring another interesting angle to the idea that you relate from Russell.
- rapind 6y ago
  I wonder what Edison would think of the internet, self driving cars, speech recognition, image recognition, social manipulation at scale, VR, modern medicine, etc.
  - growlist 6y ago
    It would probably involve personal enrichment and lawsuits, judging by his record.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Self-driving cars in his age were called horsses. Those (and donleys and mules) still remain the preferred mode of autonomous all-terrain mobility in some regions. The US Army was actively considering resurrecting pack mules fpr use in Afghanistan as of 2011, though I don't believe that actually occurred. Otherwise, E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909) envisions much of what you describe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461514 (PDF) Something of an HN perennial. https://hn.algolia.com/?q="The%20Machine%20Stops" https://hn.algolia.com/?q="The%20Machine%20Stops" Several notable postings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10490198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10490198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9544256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9544256
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cambrianentropy 6y ago
Not sure if you follow Chamath Palihapitiya but his company's annual letter had a really interesting take on this: https://www.socialcapital.com/annual-letters/2019 https://www.socialcapital.com/annual-letters/2019 A new space race A common theme amongst optimists is how much technological advance we have seen and how these advances seem to be accelerating. I am of the opposite camp and believe, roughly, that the rate of progress has been steadily declining since we landed on the moon in 1969. While I can’t explain the 1970s and 1980s, the modern Gilded Age’s lack of technological progress is easier to understand. The intellectual lobotomization of smart, young STEM talent has been an explicit strategy by Big Tech fueled by unseemly profitability and hi flying stock prices. If you can’t innovate but are wildly profitable, wouldn’t you also just pay the incremental talented engineer to work for you on anything versus working for a competitor or, worse still, work for themselves and invent something disruptive that could impact your monopoly? Of course you would...and they have. If you were a bright, ambitious engineer graduating in STEM in the early 1960s this wasn’t the case. You went to work on something meaningful. The momentum towards spaceflight was a call to arms for the smartest and hardest working amongst us. These bright men and women worked to invent new capabilities and entire ecosystems in fuel cells, gas storage systems, thermodynamic materials, engines, mechanical timers and clocks and control systems to name a few. The cost of the entire Apollo program was $25 Billion or $150 Billion in today’s dollars. Big Tech spent $75B on R&D in 2018 alone. Put another way, this means that in two 2018 equivalents of R&D spending, Big Tech could have sent people to the moon and back. It's fair to say, however, that what we have witnessed instead can graciously be described as something less ambitious and impactful than that. This misallocation of capital won’t end until we demand it - every government, regulator and individual now has a role to play whether you know it or not.

ak39 6y ago

Thanks, always enjoyed BR commentaries on history and modern perspectives. Particularly enjoyed this one with CC on. "Don't upset the apple tart" for "grown ups had the apple tart" and some other Monty Python-esque machine gaffes.

interestica 6y ago

If you're interested, and happen to be in Hamilton, Ontario, he donated his archives to McMaster University. They have thousands of documents and things like his Nobel Peace prize. It looks like a lot has been digitized now. https://www.mcmaster.ca/russdocs/russell.htm https://www.mcmaster.ca/russdocs/russell.htm

anaphor 6y ago
I've been to the archives (used to be a philosophy student there) and got to go through some of his letters. I remember reading a bunch of letters he wrote back and forth with Muhammad Ali during the vietnam war. They actually have some of his furniture and a portrait, IIRC too. They recently moved it all from the university archives into a dedicated house as well! The university has a special visiting professorship related to it as well https://philos.humanities.mcmaster.ca/visiting-bertrand-russell-professors/ https://philos.humanities.mcmaster.ca/visiting-bertrand-russ... It's a really interesting story of how they even acquired the archives https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/celebrating-50-years-the-bertrand-russell-archives/ https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/celebrating-50-ye...
seesawtron 6y ago
*Nobel prize in Literature. (Had to look up wondering why he would get a peace prize in that era)
- interestica 6y ago
  Yes! Thanks for the correction. >> The Nobel Prize in Literature 1950 was awarded to Earl (Bertrand Arthur William) Russell "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought." https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1950/summary/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1950/summary/

sndean 6y ago

Early on this interview [0] he says that his grandfather visited Napoleon in Elba (in 1814). It's always sort of mind-blowing how few generations, albeit long-lived ones, are required to reach to a very different era, where there existed this weird short-lived French empire. In this case just 3 or 4 generations are needed? Another instance is President John Tyler's grand children still being alive [1]. John Tyler was born in 1790 when George Washington was still around, although I doubt he had any contact with Washington. [0] https://youtu.be/fb3k6tB-Or8?t=129 https://youtu.be/fb3k6tB-Or8?t=129 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyler#Family_and_personal_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyler#Family_and_personal...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
anaphor 6y ago
I think this is one of the most fascinating things about him to me, because he was born in 1872 and lived to 1970, so he went from living in a society where it was still common to travel by horse and buggy to one where we had nuclear energy and easy air travel, etc, and he never lost his sharp mind, so you get to hear the perspective of someone who went through all of that. I highly recommend giving his autobiography a read to anyone interested in his life.
- netcan 6y ago
  You don't need to have been very long lived to see that. My grandfather was born in 1914. Cars existed, but most people hadn't seen one yet. The Wright brothers' maiden flight was 10 years prior. He went to med school before WW2. Penicillin did not exist yet, not even in labs! In the 50s (his 40s), he traveled commercially on a 747... 1950s futurism predicting flying cars and moon cities by 2000... they weren't being as silly as we tend to think. They saw planes go from nonexistent sputnik within half a lifetime. The projection was linear.
  - ianai 6y ago
    The futurism probably could have stayed true if the political impetus had stayed toward space development instead of Cold War and oil concerns. But planting the US flag on the moon and probably other factors I don’t realize made the Soviets being on the moon less of a reality. Edit-really wish we had O'Neill cylinders though.

Angostura 6y ago

I rather prefer the Face to Face interview with Russell talking to John Freeman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZv3pSaLtY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZv3pSaLtY

bori5 6y ago

For those interested in Bertie you may find Logicomix (https://www.logicomix.com/en/index.html https://www.logicomix.com/en/index.html) an entertaining read

lihaciudaniel 6y ago

If you are curious his grand-father knew another great mind John Stuart Mill, also Bertrand Russell wrote this thing called principia mathematica and wrote 30 pages on proving 1+1=2 using formal logic. This man has achieved so much for one person, most notably writing history of Western Philosophy [1] 1.https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243685.A_History_of_Western_Philosophy https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243685.A_History_of_West...

JetBen 6y ago

From the video: "If a philosophy is to bring happiness, it should be inspired by kindly feeling. Marx is NOT inspired by kindly feeling. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat, but what he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeoisie. It was because of that negative element, that hate element, that his philosophy produced disaster. A philosophy which is to do good must be one inspired by kindly feeling and not by unkindly feeling." Absolute genius.

jmiskovic 6y ago

> Well I think there are three things that are needed if the world is to adapt itself to the Industrial Revolution. The troubles we are suffering now are essentially troubles due to adapting ourselves to a new phase of human life, namely the industrial phase. And I think three things are necessary if people are to live happily in the industrial phase. One of these is world government, the second is an approximate economic equality between different parts of the world, and the third is a nearly stationary population. There's a full transcript here: https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2019/02/02/a-conversation-with-bertrand-russell-1952/ https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2019/02/02/a-conversation-with...