6 ms·

Progress Studies School

50 points by DarkContinent 6y ago

dmazin 6y ago
"What problems, challenges and hardships in life and work were faced by people in earlier generations and centuries? And how did we solve those problems through science, technology, and invention?" I respect Patrick Collison, but this curriculum worries me. Our understanding of progress already de-emphasizes the nasty parts (eg slavery) by hyper-focusing on innovation. I think this curriculum, which seemingly leaves out critical analysis of labor practices, etc., will worsen our understanding of technological progress. For example, the improvement of infant mortality is one of the major accomplishments of the last couple centuries. We could focus on the role innovation in the improvement of women's health. But I believe that expressly leaving out the exploitation along the way (eg experimentation on enslaved women[1]), leads to understanding history worse, not better. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/17/603163394/-father-of-gynecology-who-experimented-on-slaves-no-longer-on-pedestal-in-nyc https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/17/603163394...
- apsec112 6y ago
  A lot of labor practices improved because exponential productivity growth made that a practical decision. You can't have an eight-hour day and a two-day weekend when it takes hundreds of hours of labor to make a single shirt. Factories became safer when people were rich enough that they could afford to pay for safety equipment to prevent even rare accidents. A lot of dangerous and exhausting jobs are now done by machine - no one picks cotton anymore because the process has been automated. And so on.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > A lot of labor practices improved because exponential productivity growth made that a practical decision. No, they didn't. In some cases productivity gains may have been a necessary prerequisite, but it was never the proximate cause—labor action to wrest better conditions from capital was always the proximate factor.
    - chrisco255 6y ago
      First you had to have the productivity gains before you could have the labor movement. Look, there's no easy way to farm with a mule. Most people were subsistence farmers for most of human civilization's history. They grew just enough to get by with not much more. That is back- breaking, life-shortening labor. Technology changed that. Industrialization let modern society soar past the relatively high living standards of ancient Rome, which were lost in the dark ages.
      - adamsea 6y ago
        > First you had to have the productivity gains before you could have the labor movement. That's, just, like, your opinion, man. If the labor movement is considered one way of fighting for human rights, then, it's been around a long time, my friend. Think: serfdom, indentured service, slavery.
        monkeycantype 6y ago
        It's interesting to argue the opposite, that the power past empires had over people and their labour devalued productivity improvements, that Industrialisation required a social context in which the expense of labour justified the capital investment and risk of mechanisation.
        adamsea 6y ago
        I'm not sure I understand. And tbh I'm not sure I originally expressed myself well. But I think we all agree that laws against child labor are good, that laws requiring a weekend are good, and that basic safety laws in dangerous environments like meatpacking plants are good. And we'd all agree that those things fall somewhere on the spectrum of "human rights". And, if someone doesn't agree then that's an entirely conversation that needs to be had. But for those of us that do, well, all those things came from organized labor. So --- organized labor, imperfect as it is, like all human institutions, has been and is one of the ways in which people have fought for their rights over time. Period.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Absolutely not. Fair and safe labour practices were possible from the get-go, and were simply ignored for profit. Just like a lot of things today. What pushed this social progress was collective labour action in the form of unions and socialist parties engaging in direct action.
    - ghufran_syed 6y ago
      So we would expect to see much more ‘fair and safe Labour practices’ in socialist countries where the profit motive did not exist, such as the Soviet Union, the other countries of the Warsaw Pact, North Korea, Cuba etc. Do we have any evidence that that was the case? Strangely, all those countries appear to have been poorer than their peers (North vs South Korea and East vs West Germany probably being the best to compare to minimize confounders).
      - claudiawerner 6y ago
        >So we would expect to see much more ‘fair and safe Labour practices’ in socialist countries where the profit motive did not exist No, and that's not GP's claim either. It's entirely reasonable (and historically accurate) to say that socialists have consistently pushed for improved labour rights in capitalist countries. That doesn't make any comment as to their achievements (or lack of) in "socialist" countries.
  - dnissley 6y ago
    I don't know why people are so opposed to this explanation. You didn't say all labor practices improved because of productivity gains. And no doubt collective action played some role in the current state of things, but so did a lot of other factors. To claim otherwise without a very good argument smacks of ideological possession. The vehemence with which such an explanation is insisted upon is revealing.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  It's a summer program, not a comprehensive lifetime education. It would make no more sense for you to object to a history class that doesn't talk about slavery than it would for me to object to your comment because you didn't mention the relationship between resource extraction and colonialism.
  - dmazin 6y ago
    For sure. Let me clarify a bit -- I used this specific course as an example, but I am talking about the novel field of Progress Studies in general. The entire _field of study_ that this course introduces suffers from the problem I described above.
    - whatshisface 6y ago
      I think a totally whole human being should know something about art, literature and mathematics. Does that mean that any field of study that doesn't include mathematics is deficient? No, it means that any person who doesn't cover more than one field of study, even cursorily, is deficient. Any piece of human knowledge can only be understood in the context of every other piece of human knowledge... but it's fine for a field of study to have a limited context, if for no other purpose than to make it easier for librarians to organize books associated with it.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        I mean, this is like a CS program that doesn't teach you about algorithms. Studying progress and not taking into account social movements such as the labour movement that were the necessary driving force is really underwhelming.
        randomchars 6y ago
        But this is not a program, this is a single course. Not all CS classes are about algorithms either.
- api 6y ago
  Those things are not mutually exclusive. That's like saying farming should not be studied because slaves historically have been used in agriculture.
- rayiner 6y ago
  > I respect Patrick Collison, but this curriculum worries me. Our understanding of progress already de-emphasizes the nasty parts (eg slavery) by hyper-focusing on innovation. I think this curriculum, which seemingly leaves out critical analysis of labor practices, etc., will worsen our understanding of technological progress I don’t see what you think connects these threads together.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Before industrialization nearly everyone was doomed to serfdom.
  - austhrow743 6y ago
    For a brief period of time. For substantially longer we just hung out with our buddies, banged, and picked up food right from the ground when we were hungry.
    - conanbatt 6y ago
      And had 20 children to have 3 survive?
      - GuiA 6y ago
        > we see that on average 57 percent, 64 percent, and 67 percent of children born survive to age 15 years among hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers. https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expectancy-in-hunter-gatherers-and-other-groups/amp/ https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expec... Still bad, but much better than 3 in 20.
- tylermenezes 6y ago
  > I respect Patrick Collison What connects pc to this, other than that he's a speaker?
- fouc 6y ago
  Also realistically the majority of the trend for the last 200 years was all backed by fossil fuels. Which has some serious ramifications whether we're gonna make it through this global warming or not.
- mbateman 6y ago
  This is very much a “yes and”. I think I can speak for all of us working on the course when I sat that we don’t think that industrial innovation is the only or even the most important part of history. Why does developing a course on one aspect somehow reduce the importance of another?
737maxtw 6y ago
Oh good. For a minute I was worried Telerik was launching a bootcamp.
iron0013 6y ago
It’s weird how there are so many publications, programs, think tanks, etc devoted to pushing the idea that neo-liberalism is “progress”. And whenever you trace the funding upstream you inevitably find a billionaire with an agenda.
- apsec112 6y ago
  The described curriculum has very little to do with tax policy. It's mainly the history of applied science and engineering: "This program will explore: what problems, challenges and hardships in life and work were faced by people in earlier generations and centuries? And how did we solve those problems through science, technology, and invention? Learn about manufacturing from blacksmiths to assembly lines; about power from water wheels to combustion to electricity; about food from famine to industrial agriculture and genetically modified crops; about disease from basic sanitation to scientific medicine—and the struggles and circumstances of the men and women who worked to bend the arc of humanity upward."
  - claudiawerner 6y ago
    >Learn about manufacturing from blacksmiths to assembly lines; about power from water wheels to combustion to electricity; The problem with this presentation is that it will almost invariably fall upon an implicitly political angle, using thought experiments made to further political points; for example, blacksmiths to assembly lines could well be explained with the Pin Factory analogy borrowing from Smith, but neglecting his role as a political economist, and likely the more abstract and philosophical criticisms from political economists after him (such as Ricardo, Marx, Sraffa, etc.). The course will likely not delve into these points, upon which the whole theory stands or falls, because objections to it are viewed as 'political' rather than 'objective', despite the original view and its assumptions already being political - just part of dominant political positions which persist. Further, how does a course like this avoid the sense of teleological technological determinism which Marx was accused of? I would hope that it includes a section on the philosophy of progress, history, and technology (of which there is a lot written), but I'm skeptical that it will be included. The quote from Steven Pinker at the bottom of the page leaves me doubly skeptical - there are several key criticisms of Pinker's work (and indeed the sort of graphs displayed at the top of the page) - a comprehensive overview is available in "Pinker and Progress" by Ronald Aronson (History and Theory Vol. 2, 2013) and Liberalism, Capitalism, and the Conditions of Social Peace: A Critique of Steven Pinker’s One-Sided Humanism by Noonan (2019).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

50 points by DarkContinent 6y ago

"What problems, challenges and hardships in life and work were faced by people in earlier generations and centuries? And how did we solve those problems through science, technology, and invention?" I respect Patrick Collison, but this curriculum worries me. Our understanding of progress already de-emphasizes the nasty parts (eg slavery) by hyper-focusing on innovation. I think this curriculum, which seemingly leaves out critical analysis of labor practices, etc., will worsen our understanding of technological progress. For example, the improvement of infant mortality is one of the major accomplishments of the last couple centuries. We could focus on the role innovation in the improvement of women's health. But I believe that expressly leaving out the exploitation along the way (eg experimentation on enslaved women[1]), leads to understanding history worse, not better. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/17/603163394/-father-of-gynecology-who-experimented-on-slaves-no-longer-on-pedestal-in-nyc https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/17/603163394...

apsec112 6y ago
A lot of labor practices improved because exponential productivity growth made that a practical decision. You can't have an eight-hour day and a two-day weekend when it takes hundreds of hours of labor to make a single shirt. Factories became safer when people were rich enough that they could afford to pay for safety equipment to prevent even rare accidents. A lot of dangerous and exhausting jobs are now done by machine - no one picks cotton anymore because the process has been automated. And so on.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > A lot of labor practices improved because exponential productivity growth made that a practical decision. No, they didn't. In some cases productivity gains may have been a necessary prerequisite, but it was never the proximate cause—labor action to wrest better conditions from capital was always the proximate factor.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    First you had to have the productivity gains before you could have the labor movement. Look, there's no easy way to farm with a mule. Most people were subsistence farmers for most of human civilization's history. They grew just enough to get by with not much more. That is back- breaking, life-shortening labor. Technology changed that. Industrialization let modern society soar past the relatively high living standards of ancient Rome, which were lost in the dark ages.
    - adamsea 6y ago
      > First you had to have the productivity gains before you could have the labor movement. That's, just, like, your opinion, man. If the labor movement is considered one way of fighting for human rights, then, it's been around a long time, my friend. Think: serfdom, indentured service, slavery.
      - monkeycantype 6y ago
        It's interesting to argue the opposite, that the power past empires had over people and their labour devalued productivity improvements, that Industrialisation required a social context in which the expense of labour justified the capital investment and risk of mechanisation.
        adamsea 6y ago
        I'm not sure I understand. And tbh I'm not sure I originally expressed myself well. But I think we all agree that laws against child labor are good, that laws requiring a weekend are good, and that basic safety laws in dangerous environments like meatpacking plants are good. And we'd all agree that those things fall somewhere on the spectrum of "human rights". And, if someone doesn't agree then that's an entirely conversation that needs to be had. But for those of us that do, well, all those things came from organized labor. So --- organized labor, imperfect as it is, like all human institutions, has been and is one of the ways in which people have fought for their rights over time. Period.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Absolutely not. Fair and safe labour practices were possible from the get-go, and were simply ignored for profit. Just like a lot of things today. What pushed this social progress was collective labour action in the form of unions and socialist parties engaging in direct action.
  - ghufran_syed 6y ago
    So we would expect to see much more ‘fair and safe Labour practices’ in socialist countries where the profit motive did not exist, such as the Soviet Union, the other countries of the Warsaw Pact, North Korea, Cuba etc. Do we have any evidence that that was the case? Strangely, all those countries appear to have been poorer than their peers (North vs South Korea and East vs West Germany probably being the best to compare to minimize confounders).
    - claudiawerner 6y ago
      >So we would expect to see much more ‘fair and safe Labour practices’ in socialist countries where the profit motive did not exist No, and that's not GP's claim either. It's entirely reasonable (and historically accurate) to say that socialists have consistently pushed for improved labour rights in capitalist countries. That doesn't make any comment as to their achievements (or lack of) in "socialist" countries.
- dnissley 6y ago
  I don't know why people are so opposed to this explanation. You didn't say all labor practices improved because of productivity gains. And no doubt collective action played some role in the current state of things, but so did a lot of other factors. To claim otherwise without a very good argument smacks of ideological possession. The vehemence with which such an explanation is insisted upon is revealing.
whatshisface 6y ago
It's a summer program, not a comprehensive lifetime education. It would make no more sense for you to object to a history class that doesn't talk about slavery than it would for me to object to your comment because you didn't mention the relationship between resource extraction and colonialism.
- dmazin 6y ago
  For sure. Let me clarify a bit -- I used this specific course as an example, but I am talking about the novel field of Progress Studies in general. The entire _field of study_ that this course introduces suffers from the problem I described above.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    I think a totally whole human being should know something about art, literature and mathematics. Does that mean that any field of study that doesn't include mathematics is deficient? No, it means that any person who doesn't cover more than one field of study, even cursorily, is deficient. Any piece of human knowledge can only be understood in the context of every other piece of human knowledge... but it's fine for a field of study to have a limited context, if for no other purpose than to make it easier for librarians to organize books associated with it.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      I mean, this is like a CS program that doesn't teach you about algorithms. Studying progress and not taking into account social movements such as the labour movement that were the necessary driving force is really underwhelming.
      - randomchars 6y ago
        But this is not a program, this is a single course. Not all CS classes are about algorithms either.
api 6y ago
Those things are not mutually exclusive. That's like saying farming should not be studied because slaves historically have been used in agriculture.
rayiner 6y ago
> I respect Patrick Collison, but this curriculum worries me. Our understanding of progress already de-emphasizes the nasty parts (eg slavery) by hyper-focusing on innovation. I think this curriculum, which seemingly leaves out critical analysis of labor practices, etc., will worsen our understanding of technological progress I don’t see what you think connects these threads together.
chrisco255 6y ago
Before industrialization nearly everyone was doomed to serfdom.
- austhrow743 6y ago
  For a brief period of time. For substantially longer we just hung out with our buddies, banged, and picked up food right from the ground when we were hungry.
  - conanbatt 6y ago
    And had 20 children to have 3 survive?
    - GuiA 6y ago
      > we see that on average 57 percent, 64 percent, and 67 percent of children born survive to age 15 years among hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers. https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expectancy-in-hunter-gatherers-and-other-groups/amp/ https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expec... Still bad, but much better than 3 in 20.
tylermenezes 6y ago
> I respect Patrick Collison What connects pc to this, other than that he's a speaker?
fouc 6y ago
Also realistically the majority of the trend for the last 200 years was all backed by fossil fuels. Which has some serious ramifications whether we're gonna make it through this global warming or not.
mbateman 6y ago
This is very much a “yes and”. I think I can speak for all of us working on the course when I sat that we don’t think that industrial innovation is the only or even the most important part of history. Why does developing a course on one aspect somehow reduce the importance of another?

737maxtw 6y ago

Oh good. For a minute I was worried Telerik was launching a bootcamp.

iron0013 6y ago

It’s weird how there are so many publications, programs, think tanks, etc devoted to pushing the idea that neo-liberalism is “progress”. And whenever you trace the funding upstream you inevitably find a billionaire with an agenda.

apsec112 6y ago
The described curriculum has very little to do with tax policy. It's mainly the history of applied science and engineering: "This program will explore: what problems, challenges and hardships in life and work were faced by people in earlier generations and centuries? And how did we solve those problems through science, technology, and invention? Learn about manufacturing from blacksmiths to assembly lines; about power from water wheels to combustion to electricity; about food from famine to industrial agriculture and genetically modified crops; about disease from basic sanitation to scientific medicine—and the struggles and circumstances of the men and women who worked to bend the arc of humanity upward."
- claudiawerner 6y ago
  >Learn about manufacturing from blacksmiths to assembly lines; about power from water wheels to combustion to electricity; The problem with this presentation is that it will almost invariably fall upon an implicitly political angle, using thought experiments made to further political points; for example, blacksmiths to assembly lines could well be explained with the Pin Factory analogy borrowing from Smith, but neglecting his role as a political economist, and likely the more abstract and philosophical criticisms from political economists after him (such as Ricardo, Marx, Sraffa, etc.). The course will likely not delve into these points, upon which the whole theory stands or falls, because objections to it are viewed as 'political' rather than 'objective', despite the original view and its assumptions already being political - just part of dominant political positions which persist. Further, how does a course like this avoid the sense of teleological technological determinism which Marx was accused of? I would hope that it includes a section on the philosophy of progress, history, and technology (of which there is a lot written), but I'm skeptical that it will be included. The quote from Steven Pinker at the bottom of the page leaves me doubly skeptical - there are several key criticisms of Pinker's work (and indeed the sort of graphs displayed at the top of the page) - a comprehensive overview is available in "Pinker and Progress" by Ronald Aronson (History and Theory Vol. 2, 2013) and Liberalism, Capitalism, and the Conditions of Social Peace: A Critique of Steven Pinker’s One-Sided Humanism by Noonan (2019).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]