4 ms·

I think the author confuses what the past and future look like. I think progress, at slow-mo pace of living through it, always feels slow and stagnant. We like

I think the author confuses what the past and future look like. I think progress, at slow-mo pace of living through it, always feels slow and stagnant. We like to put placemarkers on "progress" - Columbus lands in America, Constantinople falls, etc. but in reality these are just the big event of a very slow transition. When you read about history of science, chains of developments are usually separated by decades, and only seem like a tight chain because (a) they are long time ago, and (b) they are conveniently filtered from the stuff that ends up being dead ends. In reality, life expectancy rocketed over the past 60 years, especially so in poorer countries, progress in quantum mechanics, uses of space, democracy, access to education, have developed tremendously. It just feels like boring improvism, but isn't so different from the past. A total aside, but I find it sooo funny when the author starts off with "the world is stagnating", and then swiftly moves on to "America is great again", completely ignoring the remaining 95% of the world by population. EDIT: also meant to say, the author writes about exciting developments just around the corner. I think his list would be equally long at any time in the last 20 years. Exciting uses of internet, hydrogen, nuclear fusion of course almost there, rise of dotcoms. Above I describe what the past looks like, this is what the future looks like, always.

mymythisisthis 6y ago
I'd like to somewhat disagree. We've never seen such great urbanization. In almost a generation we've moved from rural to urban. We moved from collecting firewood, by hand, and growing our own food. To being completely dependent on electricity, and the electrical grid. I've been luckily enough to meet many elderly people. People who grow up on farms, and moved to cities. Now in their 90s. The 20th century was such a great leap into the future. I've heard countless times, of a person growing up on a small farm with 8 siblings. Seeing electricity come to their village, the first phones. Them seeing planes for the first time. Being able to afford to make an international phone call. I live in Canada.
- purple-again 6y ago
  Reminders like this send a shiver down my spine. Reality works on such a grander timescale than humans that it’s easy for us to convince ourselves that something is working when in reality it’s only worked so far. My family relies on the trucks to keep rolling. As much as I love post apocalyptically stories like zombies and what not, I firmly understand that I can’t feed my family and would likely be forced to watch them starve if the current world order broke down. Here’s to hoping that great leap into the future wasn’t into a really deep hole with a long fall before we hit solid ground.
  - mymythisisthis 6y ago
    The lose of being self-sufficient is one moral of the story. But, their is another that we've forgotten. The absolute joy of modernity. People abandoned those farms as quickly as they could. It was no fun working 7 days a week, 18 hours a day. A cow needs to be milked, or its utter bursts. Animals needs food and care. Wood needs to be chopped, or you get cold. Factories were clean (compared to the farm), well lighted. You got Sunday off. You could save some money from your paycheck, take a vacation. The workday ended a 6, you'd be home and and have dinner at 6:30.
    - yostrovs 6y ago
      Exactly, something that few are willing to recognize these days. Same people who will pay for any tiny convenience also tend to glamorize the past. None of them would put up with a day of an average person from 150 years ago.
    - voisin 6y ago
      > The absolute joy of modernity. Oh my god, No. This is not an absolute. Are some things better? Yes. Are some things worse, Yes. The relative mix of the two depends on who you are and what you have access to. People abandoned those farms on the basis of optimism that certain things would improve, which you’ve pointed out, but how many of them had a crystal ball that foretold of environmental collapse, community collapse, loneliness, mental health issues, and massive and growing inequality? Absolute joy? Check your privilege my friend. For vast portions of the population, staying on the farm would be a massive step up from the living hell of their life in modernity.
- rich_sasha 6y ago
  20th century has certainly been revolutionary, no doubt about that. It is a bit of a apples-to-oranges comparison though. We can't resolve solved problems. The starting point for, dunno, 1970, is a world where people don't have to plough fields by hand / oxen, at least in the developed world. This is the shoulders of giants we are standing on. The information revolution that happened since is enormous. The societal changes, where expectations on women went from make-babies-and-stay-at-home to forge-your-own-destiny is massive (WIP sadly, but going in a good direction). Access to education and real access to democracy have hugely improved in the last decades. Internet revolutionised information access. How crazy it is that any aspiring teenager, in US, India or Tonga, can buy a Raspberry Pi for a few dollars, download state-of-the-art programming language frameworks, follow free tutorials on-line, do courses on Coursera... that is, to me, as liberating as the farmland-to-downtown transition, just in a different sphere of life, and, well for people who live "far away" - doesn't make it any less impressive...
md_ 6y ago
The "stagnation" argument is probably specifically about productivity growth, which is best documented by Robert Gordon: https://www.nber.org/papers/w18315 https://www.nber.org/papers/w18315 https://www.nber.org/papers/w24554 https://www.nber.org/papers/w24554 https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691175805/the-rise-and-fall-of-american-growth https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691175805/th... The above are strictly American phenomena, though similar trends exist elsewhere in the world. Gordon also claims that these trends are most visible in the US, since the US is in many ways at the vanguard of technology-driven productivity growth; other economists have well documented that GDP growth is highest among economies playing "catch up" (which is why, in bull markets, developing markets often have far greater growth than developed markets). I don't have them on hand, but there are some interesting papers on the "cost of innovation", some of which have recently been on HN. The estimated ROI (measured by cost-per-patent or cost-per-new-pharmaceutical development, for example) is claimed to be declining. (See https://hbr.org/2019/11/why-the-u-s-innovation-ecosystem-is-slowing-down https://hbr.org/2019/11/why-the-u-s-innovation-ecosystem-is-... for a summary.) To your specific examples: * Life expectancy increased primarily due to widespread vaccination and better public health (e.g. clean drinking water, pasteurization). These are "one time" gains; the efficacy and returns (in terms of QUALYs) on investment in new health technologies have been much lower in the last few decades, which leads one to wonder if the low-hanging fruit have been plucked. * Use of space has had some meaningful productivity gains (like GPS, mass wireless communications, or cheaper areal surveillance), but, again, these seem to be declining returns; it's not clear that we possess the technical means to make interplanetary travel economically viable, so this seems analogous to an observation of Gordon's that I love: that in 1960 you could get between NYC and San Francisco in about 6 hours, and today, you can do so in about 6 hours. Interestingly, I disagree with the authors of this essay in exactly the opposite direction you do: I think the "Great Stagnation" is real, and I think their "innovations" are underwhelming. (So I can wear a screen on my face instead of holding it in my hands? Big deal!) Ray Kurzweil somewhat famously suffers from a severe recency bias when he claims increasing rates of innovation: to him, the change from (say) iron to steel is kind of minor, but the change from analog to digital TV—that's a big deal! I feel these authors make a similar error. In 100 years, I don't think many people are going to care deeply about when we came up with the Oculus.
- 6y ago

mymythisisthis 6y ago

I'd like to somewhat disagree. We've never seen such great urbanization. In almost a generation we've moved from rural to urban. We moved from collecting firewood, by hand, and growing our own food. To being completely dependent on electricity, and the electrical grid. I've been luckily enough to meet many elderly people. People who grow up on farms, and moved to cities. Now in their 90s. The 20th century was such a great leap into the future. I've heard countless times, of a person growing up on a small farm with 8 siblings. Seeing electricity come to their village, the first phones. Them seeing planes for the first time. Being able to afford to make an international phone call. I live in Canada.

purple-again 6y ago
Reminders like this send a shiver down my spine. Reality works on such a grander timescale than humans that it’s easy for us to convince ourselves that something is working when in reality it’s only worked so far. My family relies on the trucks to keep rolling. As much as I love post apocalyptically stories like zombies and what not, I firmly understand that I can’t feed my family and would likely be forced to watch them starve if the current world order broke down. Here’s to hoping that great leap into the future wasn’t into a really deep hole with a long fall before we hit solid ground.
- mymythisisthis 6y ago
  The lose of being self-sufficient is one moral of the story. But, their is another that we've forgotten. The absolute joy of modernity. People abandoned those farms as quickly as they could. It was no fun working 7 days a week, 18 hours a day. A cow needs to be milked, or its utter bursts. Animals needs food and care. Wood needs to be chopped, or you get cold. Factories were clean (compared to the farm), well lighted. You got Sunday off. You could save some money from your paycheck, take a vacation. The workday ended a 6, you'd be home and and have dinner at 6:30.
  - yostrovs 6y ago
    Exactly, something that few are willing to recognize these days. Same people who will pay for any tiny convenience also tend to glamorize the past. None of them would put up with a day of an average person from 150 years ago.
  - voisin 6y ago
    > The absolute joy of modernity. Oh my god, No. This is not an absolute. Are some things better? Yes. Are some things worse, Yes. The relative mix of the two depends on who you are and what you have access to. People abandoned those farms on the basis of optimism that certain things would improve, which you’ve pointed out, but how many of them had a crystal ball that foretold of environmental collapse, community collapse, loneliness, mental health issues, and massive and growing inequality? Absolute joy? Check your privilege my friend. For vast portions of the population, staying on the farm would be a massive step up from the living hell of their life in modernity.
rich_sasha 6y ago
20th century has certainly been revolutionary, no doubt about that. It is a bit of a apples-to-oranges comparison though. We can't resolve solved problems. The starting point for, dunno, 1970, is a world where people don't have to plough fields by hand / oxen, at least in the developed world. This is the shoulders of giants we are standing on. The information revolution that happened since is enormous. The societal changes, where expectations on women went from make-babies-and-stay-at-home to forge-your-own-destiny is massive (WIP sadly, but going in a good direction). Access to education and real access to democracy have hugely improved in the last decades. Internet revolutionised information access. How crazy it is that any aspiring teenager, in US, India or Tonga, can buy a Raspberry Pi for a few dollars, download state-of-the-art programming language frameworks, follow free tutorials on-line, do courses on Coursera... that is, to me, as liberating as the farmland-to-downtown transition, just in a different sphere of life, and, well for people who live "far away" - doesn't make it any less impressive...

md_ 6y ago

The "stagnation" argument is probably specifically about productivity growth, which is best documented by Robert Gordon: https://www.nber.org/papers/w18315 https://www.nber.org/papers/w18315 https://www.nber.org/papers/w24554 https://www.nber.org/papers/w24554 https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691175805/the-rise-and-fall-of-american-growth https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691175805/th... The above are strictly American phenomena, though similar trends exist elsewhere in the world. Gordon also claims that these trends are most visible in the US, since the US is in many ways at the vanguard of technology-driven productivity growth; other economists have well documented that GDP growth is highest among economies playing "catch up" (which is why, in bull markets, developing markets often have far greater growth than developed markets). I don't have them on hand, but there are some interesting papers on the "cost of innovation", some of which have recently been on HN. The estimated ROI (measured by cost-per-patent or cost-per-new-pharmaceutical development, for example) is claimed to be declining. (See https://hbr.org/2019/11/why-the-u-s-innovation-ecosystem-is-slowing-down https://hbr.org/2019/11/why-the-u-s-innovation-ecosystem-is-... for a summary.) To your specific examples: * Life expectancy increased primarily due to widespread vaccination and better public health (e.g. clean drinking water, pasteurization). These are "one time" gains; the efficacy and returns (in terms of QUALYs) on investment in new health technologies have been much lower in the last few decades, which leads one to wonder if the low-hanging fruit have been plucked. * Use of space has had some meaningful productivity gains (like GPS, mass wireless communications, or cheaper areal surveillance), but, again, these seem to be declining returns; it's not clear that we possess the technical means to make interplanetary travel economically viable, so this seems analogous to an observation of Gordon's that I love: that in 1960 you could get between NYC and San Francisco in about 6 hours, and today, you can do so in about 6 hours. Interestingly, I disagree with the authors of this essay in exactly the opposite direction you do: I think the "Great Stagnation" is real, and I think their "innovations" are underwhelming. (So I can wear a screen on my face instead of holding it in my hands? Big deal!) Ray Kurzweil somewhat famously suffers from a severe recency bias when he claims increasing rates of innovation: to him, the change from (say) iron to steel is kind of minor, but the change from analog to digital TV—that's a big deal! I feel these authors make a similar error. In 100 years, I don't think many people are going to care deeply about when we came up with the Oculus.

6y ago