4 ms·

Decades of research that was catalogued, indexed, and shared via the internet. We're talking about drastically cutting down on time people the world over would

Decades of research that was catalogued, indexed, and shared via the internet. We're talking about drastically cutting down on time people the world over would be collectively spending rediscovering the same things. Because of peer review, we can cut down on time wasted pursing things that are flawed. HN just recently followed the peer review process of LK-99 in basically real-time across the world. The results might seem trivial in hindsight, but it took leading experts the world over a bit of time to pin down and explain what was really being obversed. It probably saved the original authors years of work trying to refine and chase LK-99. History has shown the time and again, every advancement in communication has been a boon to human progress. Printing press, telegraph, transalantic//transcontinental telegraph cables, telephone, internet... There's plenty of papers posted here, and a lot of the break through papers are usually made on the shoulders of giants - connecting break throughs in seemingly disconnected disciplines/sub disciplines. HN sees this most frequently in maths papers, and the story is made easily digest able in breakdowns from quanta magazine. The internet has drastically accelerated the rate of human progress, and now we're on the cusp of removing the language barrier with automatic machine transmission.

RandomLensman 3y ago
I don't doubt the usefulness of the internet but where is the evidence of the "drastically accelerated rate of human progress"? Or rather what data is that translating into? Productivity growth it isn't. Life expectancy it isn't. Real wages it isn't necessarily. GDP growth it isn't really, either.
- DistractionRect 3y ago
  It'll certainly depend on your yardstick, I agree. Scientically, technologically, we've seen more progress in under a century than we've seen in millennia. It's maybe easy to hand wave that off on advances in machine computation (computers), but computers are a globally coordinated effort. Foundaries, manufacturing techniques, CS research, etc are coordinated and advanced globally because of the internet. M-RNA vaccines are the cummulation of a decades of advances. Genetic sequencing was a major advancement, but actually being able to make sense of it and do something with that information, and then to go encode your own M-RNA and trick the body into producing parts of the virus in order to teach it about a virus it's never actually seen is soo far removed vaccines of old, which was basically repeated exposure to a similar, weaker virus. Could we have gotten here without the internet? Maybe? It's hard to tell, because the road to M-RNA vaccines was paved by decades of global coordination in the fields of CSE, virology, material science, chemistry, physics, etc etc. And this ignores everything that goes into manufacturing this at scale, coordinating availability/priority, etc. It's probably easier to look backwards and see what was lost and rediscovered. Feats of architectural engineering, Roman concrete, etc history is full of major advances being independently discovered and lost due to the inability to share, search, and archive information at scale
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    My problem is that it seems to largely feature on the level of anecdata, but not make it beyond that. It is more a hypothesis like: the rather moderate aggregate progress wouldn't have happened without the internet - but how to show that? People managed huge coordination efforts before the internet (just take the US in WWII with half the GDP dedicated to war efforts). So claims about the effect of the internet from better coordination there need a lot to substantiate them.

RandomLensman 3y ago

I don't doubt the usefulness of the internet but where is the evidence of the "drastically accelerated rate of human progress"? Or rather what data is that translating into? Productivity growth it isn't. Life expectancy it isn't. Real wages it isn't necessarily. GDP growth it isn't really, either.

DistractionRect 3y ago
It'll certainly depend on your yardstick, I agree. Scientically, technologically, we've seen more progress in under a century than we've seen in millennia. It's maybe easy to hand wave that off on advances in machine computation (computers), but computers are a globally coordinated effort. Foundaries, manufacturing techniques, CS research, etc are coordinated and advanced globally because of the internet. M-RNA vaccines are the cummulation of a decades of advances. Genetic sequencing was a major advancement, but actually being able to make sense of it and do something with that information, and then to go encode your own M-RNA and trick the body into producing parts of the virus in order to teach it about a virus it's never actually seen is soo far removed vaccines of old, which was basically repeated exposure to a similar, weaker virus. Could we have gotten here without the internet? Maybe? It's hard to tell, because the road to M-RNA vaccines was paved by decades of global coordination in the fields of CSE, virology, material science, chemistry, physics, etc etc. And this ignores everything that goes into manufacturing this at scale, coordinating availability/priority, etc. It's probably easier to look backwards and see what was lost and rediscovered. Feats of architectural engineering, Roman concrete, etc history is full of major advances being independently discovered and lost due to the inability to share, search, and archive information at scale
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  My problem is that it seems to largely feature on the level of anecdata, but not make it beyond that. It is more a hypothesis like: the rather moderate aggregate progress wouldn't have happened without the internet - but how to show that? People managed huge coordination efforts before the internet (just take the US in WWII with half the GDP dedicated to war efforts). So claims about the effect of the internet from better coordination there need a lot to substantiate them.