okay today i have the pleasure of speaking with jason crawford uh he's a former text um startup founder and now he writes at the roots of progress he has these posts that are very well researched and insightful about the history of technology and industry um and he's filled the gap at least in my education and i suspect many others of um the history of progress and its
consequences and the lessons we can learn from it so uh jason it's very nice to talk to you yeah thanks so much for having me of course and uh can you just tell us before we get into the weeds what you're doing at the roots of progress yeah sure uh i write about the history of technology and the philosophy of progress so the roots of progress looks at how did over the last
you know couple of hundred years how did we create this amazing uh world around us and this really wonderful incredible standard of living that we now enjoy that is uh you know so much but life is just so much better in so many ways in almost every way than it was about uh 200 250 years ago or so really even then if you compared to 100 years ago or 50 years ago
um things just keep getting better and this phenomenon is unprecedented in history for thousands tens of thousands of years as far as back as you want to go really there was uh there was very little uh improvement in the standard of living the way people lived in life expectancy and health in uh you know our ability to get around i mean for so many years we were limited to
the speed of horses and and sail uh the wind and uh and then the last couple hundred years all of that changed and it was just it was just absolutely unprecedented so how did that happen what were the steps what were the major inventions and discoveries and then what can we learn from this like why did it take so long what were the root causes that suddenly
you know caused things to take off and for life to improve and you know how do we keep it going um and how do we make sure that it doesn't sort of accidentally slow down or stop or even reverse those are the questions i'm concerned with so let me offer a different interpretation of what you might be up to because you say you're studying why progress has been so overwhelming
but maybe a different way to look at it is why you're setting progress at this moment and why people like patrick hollis and tyler cowan are worried about it it's not because progress has been so overwhelming recently but in the last 50 years it's actually been underwhelming uh you mentioned the speed of travel but we're still flying at the speed of the 747 which was invented in the 1970s
it's true that was not my original motivation um and i think if you step back you know if you i think that's a it's a it's an important question an important thing to look at uh it's something that honestly i was a little skeptical about when i first heard it and have since you know warmed up to it i mean i think the numbers are there and i i i see the uh you know where this
stagnation hypothesis comes from i do think it's an important thing to look into uh but i also think but but it wasn't the original motivation for me i really uh got into it looking at the last 200 or so years and and and contrasting those with the thousands of years before and uh that was what i wanted to understand and figure out and but i think they're really the same thing
um or i mean the you know they're they're just very much along the same lines right they're they're both wanting to understand what are the root causes of progress how do we keep it going the stagnation hypothesis is just i would say just gives it a little bit of extra urgency because it says hey we might not you know hey look this thing is this this
progress thing is not automatic it's not inevitable it doesn't just keep going with its own momentum it can slow down maybe it's running into friction let's take a look at that but in my mind whether or not it has slowed down in the past is actually even less important than uh whether or not it could be sped up in the future and sort of what are the range of
possible futures how much might it slow down how much might could it be sped up um and how much control do we have over this and what are the control knobs or levers right those are the most important things if it was a natural slowdown in the last 50 years or if it was a if it was caused by something we did or failed to do in the last 50 years like that's good to know but only so that we can
uh cry you know so that we can shape the future that's really what it's all about i'm curious what you mean by a natural slowdown but before we get to that uh one of the main insights for many of our blog posts is that progress begets progress but if that's true how can uh era of great progress which has been with us uh forgetting the last 50 years before that for the last 200 years
how can that progress lead to less progress yeah um i mean one thing to keep in mind is even if progress has slowed down the last 50 years let's just say it has uh it's still a lot faster than you know the thousands of years before the industrial age right so progress has not stopped by any means right it's not but um but maybe it is as you say sort of underwhelming compared to what we had
uh before so you ask how can this happen well again it gets back to like progress is not automatic it requires i mean every uh you know every new major discovery gives us a certain boost and then the gains from that discovery level off over time i wrote a recent post about this at the roots of progress uh where i was talking about the different s-curves so every sort of
individual technology um starts off in a period where it's relatively uh progress is relatively slow uh where just the basic inventions are sort of getting figured out then it hits uh maybe an inflection point where it starts really accelerating and taking off progress is very fast for a while and then eventually kind of gets saturated we've sort of done everything we can do
with it it's transformed the entire economy think about something like electricity right um for a long time people were experimenting with electricity tinkering with it weren't sure what to do with it maybe it was affecting a few things like the telegraph um you know so telegraph is sort of like mid 1800s right 1830s 40s things really take off in the 1880s or so when we get
the electric light bulbs and we start building out the grid and we have got power generators and and everything right and then you know by the 1920s 30s 40s things are starting to level off it's like what is there left to do with electricity well we can keep expanding it out to rural areas where it's where it doesn't exist yet but like you know and today electricity is not
like a growth industry right it's sort of it's a utility it's a thing that's there it's already totally integrated okay so that's the that's the s curve right starts off slow um has a faster ramp up then levels off uh you get i mean maybe technical terms more like a sigmoid right but it kind of looks like an s stretched out s okay so every individual technology or even broad technological
areas go through something like that right um how then do we get exponentially increasing progress over a very long period of time well we do it by overlapping the s curves right as one area starts to kind of level off and get saturated and mature we hopefully are finding some other air area in fact hopefully we've already been tinkering in some other area and
and some other area is like ready to take off um and so you know that could be chemistry it could be uh computing and information it could be biotech you know whatever right so um i think a question to to look at is uh as we so if you want to ask well why uh has progress maybe been a bit underwhelming the last 50 years why was it not as amazing as the previous 50
um you could look at well how many of these different s curves do we have going on at once and how fast were we finding new ones and when one starts to level off like how ready are we to jump to the next that is that is one place where i suspect you'll find you know some of the answers to this um but there are a lot of other things as well you can just look at um and these are all just hypotheses now
i don't have the answer by any means um but you know some hypotheses to look at um where has the talent been going uh has there been as much talent uh you know energized and motivated to go into uh technological fields and to to make progress on various fronts um or you know i can certainly imagine with the uh for instance the uh there's a number of okay so there's a number of factors in
the decades following world war ii that um i think started to increase a certain strain of anti-technology and anti-progress kind of sentiment in the culture certainly in the u.s i think i think probably more broadly um seeing the i mean really just the you know the horror of the atomic bomb um and at as as a really negative thing that could come out of progress
right um the fears around nuclear power that kind of went along with that the rise in general of the environmentalist movement um in the 60s and into the 70s um and just uh you know things like the oil shocks of the 70s i think there were a number of things that sort of um came together uh and i just have to wonder now this is pure hypothesis this is a speculation i don't have data
behind this but did this change the motivation of young people around that time to even go into science technology and industry right if people started to think that these were not forces for good in the world like what did that do to the kind of like long-term talent motivation um and and the recruiting of talent into those fields um that is a hypothesis that i would
like to explore um some other things are well what did this what did all of this do to the regulatory layer right uh have we and again this is more of a hypothesis with just a little bit of of data behind it this isn't this isn't a theory i'm putting forward but it but i think it's something to look into is how you know have we uh had sort of creeping regulation or
sort of creeping bureaucracy um at the legal level but actually not only at the legal level um also at sort of the level of the way corporate bureaucracies work and the way university bureaucracy works and so forth um have all of our institutions kind of evolved and accumulated a set of bureaucratic rules that have the uh you know that have the effect of essentially adding overhead and friction
to the the creative and innovative process has all of that been slowed down and is that a good thing i mean some you know these rules were added for a reason many of them were added for safety reasons uh right uh disasters happen shocks happen we see bad things happen and then we say well we should have had a rule in place that would prevent this
that is fundamentally a good and rational response right it's good to do root cause analysis when things go wrong it's good to put to improve systems to make them more robust to put things you know safety mechanisms in place but have we you know did we actually evaluate the cost of each one of those were we even able to evaluate the cost uh and you know what is the sort of the
cost benefit of each one individually and what's the cost benefit when we add all of them up together right have we sort of unwittingly traded say a progress uh a way to get safety and was that a good trade did we go a little too far i think that's kind of another um you know another thing to look at yeah one of my favorite posts you wrote was uh the progress studies in civic duty
where you pointed out that we're in a bad place even make that determination because so so few of us are actually educated on uh the history of progress and uh the the huge consequence it's had um so when you're trying to ingratiate progress studies into our institutions our academic institutions are there lessons to take from previous intellectual movements like how well
critical um critical theory which was kind of like a novel thing in the 60s how it dominates academic life now or at least many disciplines of academic life do you have you taken lessons from how other movements have started in academia to see how progress studies might evolve i think there are many lessons uh from from previous movements i am not an expert in them i have not
studied those movements as much as i would like but like at a high level i think we can say a couple of things one is that deep philosophical ideas do over the very long term have very powerful effects on intellectual life and ultimately on culture on the broader world on uh you know on on government on our other institutions like uh you know media and so forth
um i think those philosophic effects are very long term it takes it seems to take decades for ideas to go from uh their originators uh often in academia or or some other intellectual form you know people writing books and manifestos for that to get out into the world and have a big effect seems to take decades uh and so i think if you are working on that kind of a thing
you should expect to be playing a very long game uh but i think the you know but i think we should take it very seriously that like ideas on this level do affect uh things there's a great quote i think it's from keane's about um you know people i think i'm not to be able to rattle it off but it's something about how you know people uh uh are enthralled to dead philosophers or uh or a
defunct economist i forget the term that he used right and that people think that they are quite unaffected by all of this stuff that goes on in in the intellectual sphere but in fact the world is moved by little else and i think that's i think that's true so um you know that doesn't say much about tactics uh or strategy exactly but it does say that these movements are worth studying and
um uh you know whether whether you believe they have had good or bad effects overall whether you believe the ideas are right or wrong i think it is worth studying um how these movements uh are created and grow because i do think they are powerful in the long term one of the reasons i think critical theory might have been successful is because uh it was very analogous to marxism which
was prevalent um at the time in academia and so you could just pick up on top of that and expand that paradigm is there an existing movement or an existing paradigm in academia that progress studies could pick up on and reinvigorate i don't know not to my knowledge i'm not in academia and i never have been so that's um that's not my area of expertise my i i think it will need
to be something new uh not that there aren't already there's already and there has been plenty of good work in academia that i think can form the basis of some new movement and and certainly i mean as i have gone and and and investigated i found very interesting work uh it's been done by uh you know economic historians like joel mccare um i've enjoyed some of the work of
george mccluskey um some uh you know newer um you know writers and academics uh such as uh at mit sloan there's uh uh here's pierre ezellais andrew lowe um at duke there's ashisha roar with this really interesting paper last year about the changing structure of american growth or economic growth something like that um and so there's a lot of people doing good work um uh
you know matt clancy writes a sub stack about the economics of innovation he calls it um and so uh you know just some of these names there's there's a lot of people investigating things already that i think are very related to progress studies it just hasn't uh you know sort of gelled or unified around this theme yet and that's what i think could be interesting i mean to my mind
uh and again i mean i'm not an academic myself but to my mind progress studies is not really a new field per se uh it's not supposed to be something separate from or that will replace or supplant history or economics or economic history or etc uh but it is kind of a you know progress studies in my mind is more like a school of thought it's a set of premises and values uh
it's a set of basic ideas about what is important what matters and what's worthy of study it's basically the conviction that uh progress is real and important that it has you know or can have tremendously good uh effects and impact on on life on humanity on the world and that therefore and also as i said that it's not automatic or inevitable and so that therefore
we should study it we should pay attention to it we should look at its root causes we need to kind of protect and nurture it really and ultimately accelerate it so that set of ideas conditions what history and economics you think is interesting and useful it kind of conditions what questions you ask what phenomena you find intriguing uh what data you're going to look at
and then ultimately what conclusions you're going to draw in terms of what what implications you're going to draw for action from whatever you find about you know about the world uh there is going to be some sort of implication for action or policy or or whatever and i think all of those things are kind of conditioned by those basic uh premises about the value of progress
so that to my mind that's what progress studies is and i think there are already people in academia who have that um who have those basic set of of ideas and that's why they're looking into the things they're looking into um and so uh you know maybe it just needs a a little bit more i don't know it needs to just sort of gel as a school of thought or as a movement
there needs to be more of kind of identifying this the set of uh set of ideas um you know maybe rallying people around it getting them all to talk to each other uh and so forth and uh forgetting about academia for a second you've also been uh educating another group of students we've been working with a group of high schoolers and building curriculum for them and interviews and for them um about
progress uh can you talk about what you're doing there and why are you focused on high schoolers yeah certainly so this summer i created a an online learning program in the history of technology it's called progress studies for young scholars we ran it as a summer program and it was successful enough that we're going to be continuing the program now into the fall it'll run as sort of a
an after-school program or homeschooling program uh i did this as a kind of a joint venture with a a school private school called higher ground education they're the largest operator of montessori schools in the united states and they also have a montessori-inspired high school brand called the academy of thought and industry or ati and it's ati that is now running
this course as part of their online or virtual offerings uh they reached out to me actually to do it uh it's run by some folks i've known for a very long time and have deep respect for uh really we've been looking for an excuse to work together ever since i went full time on progress about nine months ago and uh when they suggested that we do this over the summer i just jumped at
the chance i thought it was a great idea um i think that uh you know this the history of progress is a neglected topic in education it is underrepresented in uh in history class and uh it's really something where i think we're graduating students from from high school and from and from university who just kind of take progress for granted and take the modern world for
granted take industrial civilization and uh you know don't have a vivid uh appreciation of how far we've really come in recent decades and in the last couple of centuries and how important that is uh to the world and i think that's something that every citizen you know kind of needs especially when you when you see how many of our debates today are about industrial policy uh you know
how much issues surrounding industrial civilization and the way it works are hot topics in you know ideological topics political topics i think that anybody to be a really informed and responsible citizen kind of needs to know the basics of of how our world works how is it that your standard of living is delivered to you um what makes your refrigerator run you
know what uh what makes it so that you can have fresh fruit and milk available in there every day what is it that allows you to get to work uh in a car or on a train or or a bus or however you get there um right what is it that powers the the elevator that takes you up to the you know 37th floor and uh and where did those plate glass windows come
from that you're looking out of all day etc you know i just people take all these things for granted and they really need to know at least the basics of where does this come from so that when they're talking about policy you know they're not inadvertently proposing things that would uh you know that would seriously degrade quality of living for for really people around the world
hmm yeah i'm 19 so the i'm close to the uh uh ideal audience for uh that kind of stuff um but uh when you talk about how understudied innovation is and not just understand it's not just that people don't know about it but it's just that like nobody's actually or maybe i'm wrong here but like people have described it as progress as something that we haven't
explored as much as we should have um how is it possible that one of the most basic facts about our life and our civilization has just been kind of ignored or put under curtains is it is it some sort of bias is it some sort of incentive and institutions there must be something going wrong here right yeah i mean so i returned to my point that progress is not automatic or inevitable and that
includes you know progress and understanding progress uh so you know uh a creating a field of study is not automatic or inevitable it requires uh choice and effort it requires people to decide that it's worth doing and you know where does that come from right um again it's not as if nobody has been asking these questions plenty of work has been done in the history of technology there's
lots of great stuff out there um people have been asking you know interesting questions about progress for a long time i just think that it's it just needs even more it needs more attention and more care it needs to be more of a focus for more people i think that's what so uh you know about a year ago tyler cowan and patrick collison coined the term progress studies in an
article they published in the atlantic uh that ran under the headline something like we need a new science of progress and this is essentially what they said you know it's not that no work is being done in this field but more should be done and more attention should be paid to the work that is being done but but in order to widely publicize this knowledge uh
there must already exist or it's necessary to create an explanation of why it has been um so closely held for so long right is there such an explanation i mean i think that goes along with some of my hypotheses about why you know why stagnation why has progress slowed in the last number of years right like some of it is going to you know how much do we appreciate progress if people
stopped appreciating progress so much or started to feel that it was maybe an ambivalent thing you know started to feel ambivalent about it right or started to uh feel that it wasn't uh such a good uh you know that as as people thought it was uh for a long time then you know not only would you get people would you get fewer people going into fields that would push the frontier
forward but you'd also get fewer people in the humanities studying it and and you know asking questions about it and you get more people uh you know maybe focusing on uh the negatives and the downsides and so you know i mean that's my hunch about what happened again i just i don't have the full answer for you here you split progress up into three different areas scientific technological
and moral roughly speaking um before i want to talk about how science and tech uh relate but before that does moral progress increase technological progress as technological progress increase more progress what's the relationship between them yeah i think all three are intertwined and cannot in the end be fully separated um i i and when i say moral i think a lot
in their sort of about society and government um i think absolutely the uh the evolution of i mean i think it's it's not a coincidence that we kind of had three revolutions that all happened around the same time roughly speaking in history we had the scientific revolution we had the industrial revolution and then we had you know something that there actually isn't a good name for but
kind of the um the revolution of democratic republics right of in in 1700s you know pretty much the entire world was under monarchy and by today you know a a large part of the world is under sort of constitutional republics with democratically elected representatives um the monarchy is mostly a thing of the past um and so i i think it's not a coincidence
that those three things happen together now um i don't i haven't traced all of the the patterns of the the interconnections between them um but you know both joel mccare and george mccluskey point to for instance the the dissolving of the guild system as something that was you know very important for new businesses to be able to be created new technologies to be able to be adopted
uh and so forth so yeah i do think there are absolutely um you know uh linkages and interconnections between all three of those in in pretty much all directions do you see progress in our political institutions in the us uh it's given the same level of technology um i i'm not sure that the 1950s government would have been worse at handling coronavirus than we are today yeah
um i think that progress in uh morality society and government is the like that's the area where it is most difficult to clearly see progress and where i think the story is the most mixed i do think there has certainly been progress uh in some dimensions on some areas um uh you know i mean sir i mean just look you know if you want to go back to the 1950s just look at the civil rights
movement right which has happened in between uh so there's but i i don't think that there's been progress in every dimension or you know everything that you would look at or measure it's it's much murkier it's much messier it feels more like two steps forward one step back and sometimes you know two steps or three steps back so it's it's harder to tell let's talk about
science and tech so do you subscribe to the linear uh model of innovation which is like science basic research and science leads to uh technological innovation i think the linear model has some truth to it and is also oversimplified um that is probably not a controversial statement at all i think most people would sort of agree with that like the linear model is broadly
used for analytical purposes but pretty much everybody agrees that it doesn't really exactly work that way um so here is the uh here's the caricature of the linear model that that stresses the way that it is oversimplified right it goes like this uh we have science science is uh pure basic research that is done by uh scientists you know driven by the pure curiosity of the intellect completely
with complete intellectual freedom to just follow their curiosity wherever it goes all they care about is discovering basic principles of nature laws of nature and they have no thought of practical applications whatsoever they pursue this in complete freedom and discover laws of nature then those laws are you know taught to the engineers and the inventors who apply them
to create new inventions um which are the the inventions are direct deductive applications of you know new scientific laws that have been discovered and then these inventions uh can get turned into businesses which then distribute you know the benefits uh broadly this is you know i so i mean that was again the sort of deliberate caricature and oversimplification of kind of what the
the linear model is right so like what what is some truth in that well there there is a deep truth that science absolutely provides a foundation for technology it is impossible to imagine anything close to modern technology without a lot of if not all of modern science right there's no way we would have uh electrical you know the entire electrical electronics industry
without an understanding of the physics of electromagnetism uh on some basic level right there's no way we would even have semiconductors without some degree of quantum physics there's no way that we would have modern medicine and antibiotics and uh diagnostics and so forth without an understanding of microbiology and biochemistry um there's no way that we would have
modern metallurgy without chemistry et cetera right so um although there's there's a clear technological foundation for all of these things um and i think it is also true so another grain of truth in the linear model is that it is impossible to see all of the ramifications and technical applications of science when we're doing it um and for that reason direct and immediate applications should
not cannot be the kind of the gate or the the absolute justification for new science like we should be doing new science motivated and justified by nothing more than understanding the world and discovering uh more about how it works like that alone is a sufficient justification for science understanding that in the long term through perhaps torturous connections that we
can never cannot see and can you know now and can never predict in advance it will be good you know for the world um where i think the linear model can be oversimplified or that caricature is wrong is in a number of places uh most tellingly is that new inventions often occur they are often the result of tinkering and exploration at the frontiers of science such that when the
invention is created nobody actually even fully understands why it works um science so let's get concrete so an example of this that i also wrote an essay about recently at roots of progress is the transistor so the transistor was invented at bell labs by the semiconductor research group they are uh now science absolutely provided a foundation for that research in the sense that
it had identified the class of materials known as semiconductors it had identified certain property electrical properties about them it had certain theories about what they were and why they worked but it didn't have all of the theory that they actually needed to create the transistor when they they started with some of the initial attempts of the transistor uh they found
that it was not operating according to what theory would predict they had to go back to the drawing board and actually uh refine the theory they'd come up with new theory and semiconductor physics to explain what they were seeing in their attempts at invention and with new theory they were able to go back and do new experiments and the new experiments provided still
more unexpected results and then they went back to the theory again and refined the theory some more and that allowed them to create you know even better versions of the transistor and so forth so they actually um shuttled back and forth uh very quickly you know between science and invention between discovery and engineering and uh you know this is not something
that is at all elucidated by the linear model right the linear model doesn't tell you that this kind of thing happens but it does happen it happens all the time uh if you look at um the steam engine the classic you know central foundational uh invention of the industrial revolution right it's been said that the steam engine owes more to thermodynamics uh sorry thermodynamics the of
thermodynamics owes more to steam engine than vice versa than the steam engine does to thermodynamics this is because the steam engine was invented in the 1700s newcomen came up with his initial steam engine in 1712. uh james watt famously created a much improved version a much more efficient version in uh patent in 1769 thermodynamics doesn't really begin
until like the early 1800s right city carno in 1824 kind of kicks it off so uh what was going on there well the size the steam engine did depend on previous science it depended on the science of air pressure uh and the properties of the vacuum which had been worked out in the 1600s um and then uh you know the the the tinkerers were able to you know tinker and an engineer um james
watt actually rediscovered some principles of uh the principle of latent heat that uh that black uh had discovered in his uh science and so um you know sort of tinkering at the frontier of science i was able to come up with something that then science then could sort of come back and later you know fully explain what is this doing why does it have certain efficiency how
can we make it more efficient so this is another pattern that you see by the way is that and the initial invention comes before the science explains it but then the science comes along actually motivated in part by the invention that's another thing a linear model doesn't tell you about science can be motivated by well we have this invention why does it work and why does it have
the efficiency or effectiveness that it does and how can we make it more powerful and more efficient um and that's often what the science then comes along and does it gives you it actually quantifies it gives it gives new laws maybe mathematical laws and equations that then allow us to optimize the invention for power for efficiency uh you know for reliability or safety or
whatever and so there's this interplay between science and technology um i haven't even gotten into things like of course uh science is sometimes gated on technology especially technology of measuring instruments and uh you know an observation right so we need them we need to invent the microscope and then better microscopes we need to invent the thermometer and better thermometers we need to
invent you know all sorts of of instruments and uh you know ways of uh i mean pressure chambers and um you know all the the instruments we use in chemistry and and so on and so forth all of this is technology that enables science so there's a lot of back and forth um in terms of of the the instruments in terms of the motivation in terms of you know there's just a lot
of sick there's there's a lot of it that is very cyclical um rather than linear um in other words uh so then what's the utility of splitting up scientific and technological progress as you do because if um if if science proceeds from the problem situation that the technology illuminates and it also requires the tools that innovation uh give science uh aren't we talking about the same
thing there what's the use of demarcating those two well i think that i mean science and technology are distinct if inseparable um they are different things and they can be identified as such and uh and i think it's worth splitting them up just for the purposes of study right i mean there's all sorts of things and this is in any area of study there are things
that are you know can't be completely separated but they can be distinguished and we split them up for the purposes of specialized study i think that's just you know all i mean you know chem physics and chemistry and biology right these things are not uh are not inseparable and there are linkages between them but we split them up and we specialize i think that's i
think that's very natural um so you know but we need to recognize the connections between them and uh and recognize that those connections are not simple and they're certainly not linear okay now let me ask a question about um what what a possible rebuttal to uh the sort of benefits of progress progress and innovation increase uh interdependence because people have to specialize
that that you know increases how well you can have technological innovation and um as a result not only is no place self-sufficient but in fact no nobody has all the knowledge necessary to like make a pencil or a smartphone and so it makes you more susceptible to black swan events like coronavirus uh and in fact so that's one of the downsides of progress is that it makes
your civilization more vulnerable to um bad events how how do you respond yeah um i think that is absolutely a risk so okay so let me answer the specific point and then let me step back and make a broader question about how we frame this um that specific point so first off there has never been a time in history and maybe there never will be when we are not susceptible
to uh unforeseen you know catastrophic events there's also never been a time when we were not interdependent really i mean uh humans to to my knowledge have always lived in tribes they've always been dependent on uh you know i've always been dependent on each other that's just how we live um there are no there are no lone wolf you know humans or very you know few uh and rare so um
so we've always been interdependent uh you're right that we can set up systems that are set up for large shocks and that is a risk and it is a risk that we should become aware of it is also a risk that we can tackle through the very same fundamental mechanisms that we made the progress that created the risk in the first place through science uh through technology through mathematics
through in this case an understanding of statistics ultimately through applied intelligence we can analyze systems uh in terms of their vulnerability to shock and we can figure out how to create slack how to create buffers how to we can we can through statistics we can analyze what do these shocks look like what is the distribution how often do they occur
um we can analyze complex systems and and you know and start to discover uh how they might be susceptible to this sort of thing and then we can devise uh safety mechanisms we can build resilience into the system um and i think that's fundamentally what we what we should do uh we can do this through you know all sorts of ways right we can do it through uh avoiding single points of failure
we can do it through uh building like i said sort of buffers and slack into the system so that a you know one little thing doesn't ripple all the way you know instantly and send shocks through the entire system there needs to be padding and buffers to absorb some of those shocks um you know the discipline of engineering has figured out many ways to make such
systems more resilient and i think we probably need to apply more of that you know to the economy as a whole um certainly to the financial system uh and so forth stepping back and looking at the way that we frame this i think it is um it's a mistake to think about quote-unquote progress as kind of this short-sighted single-minded thing that only pursues you know kind of the undisciplined
pursuit of just like more bigger faster uh you know kind of in in a very greedy way safety and resilience and uh protection against shocks and uh you know solidity and and robustness of the system those are goals that we can pursue just as we can pursue uh more food more uh material goods uh more medicines faster planes and cars etc right um all of these are just goals
that we pursue through applied intelligence through science and technology what we need to do is we need to be smart and wise about which goals we decide to pursue and about how we allocate our efforts and our resources among these different goals we need to make sure that we have the right percentage of our effort and resources going against things like safety
going against things like resilience right um and and we don't just devote all of it to well let's just do more bigger faster better right um but we want to have that that's not because more bigger faster better is wrong or bad um right and and the and i guess ultimately the key point is i think people see progress as just more bigger faster better and and they see that oh this can have some
downsides and the answers uh that they come up with is essentially to compromise to temper to oh let's let's slow down let's put on the breaks right i think that's a mistake i think the answer is not to just sort of slow down or to say that oh we're ambivalent about progress it's to take a wider view of what progress means and can be and it's to say ah um the problem is
uh an unwise portfolio allocation of resource of of what type of progress we are making let's reallocate so that we are making an appropriate amount of safety and resilience progress uh while we also make more bigger faster better you know progress right so it's a so it's a reallocation rather than a sort of slowing down or a compromise but what if uh when tyler cowan was on
the podcast he said he doesn't expect human civilization to last longer than 800 years and he said this because he thinks that the risk of um demolition and destruction and those kinds of capacities that kind of innovation happens faster than our capacity or the increase in our capacity to deal with that kind of uh shock potential and uh so there's just like an asymmetry there
in which thing is easier to do and innovate faster because uh you know we haven't we've had nuclear weapons for more than 100 close to 100 years now uh but you know we have no way of like making sure that one can't be detonated in a populated area and you know when a nuclear weapon costs fifty thousand dollars through further innovation or uh engineering a pendant cost that
much money how much innovation can you really do to deter that kind of risk i don't know but i don't think we should give up i think that is a real risk but i think that is exactly the kind of prophecy that should shock us into action to make sure that it does not come true right um i don't think we're doomed uh and i think that is a um i don't know it's just unproductive
attitude to take i don't know what the risk is i don't wanna you know make a prediction of about 800 years out nobody can actually predict 800 years out and i don't think uh i don't think there is much value in such predictions except to the extent that they guide our action and our resource allocation now um so another essay i wrote recently was uh on two types of optimism and i called
them descriptive versus prescriptive optimism so descriptive optimism is your prediction for what's going to happen in the future and kind of what track are we on um prescriptive optimism is your determination to and your commitment to act to create a better future so um you know i am not always a descriptive optimist i don't always think the world is
definitely gonna get better um i think it's on a good path in certain uh dimensions and it's on a bad path in other dimensions and um i absolutely think that uh you know really bad scenarios like like tyler's you know 800 years is uh are entirely possible i don't want to be a a uh a panglossian or a pollyanna or whatever uh metaphor you want to pick uh about about that but i am always and
ever a a prescriptive optimist like no matter no matter how bad the odds are we are facing i you know i think there's a chance uh certainly from where we stand to not have that outcome uh come true but it'll only happen if we face up to the reality and then ask ourselves what do we need to do to you know to prevent this yeah i completely agree with you i don't know i
think you just kind of pulled that number out of the air and i don't know how it's meaningful to assign probabilities to events that depend on human action and future human knowledge which um you know it's david it's not really meaningful yeah 800 years out yeah yeah um and i love that blog post about uh prescriptive optimism uh tell me if this interpretation of
that blog post is correct it's it's a way to like synthesize sort of the intimate optimism of somebody like david deutsch with like the tragic vision of thomas soul you know who says like um systems go towards chaos unless we intrude on them or improve them and reform them and that um there's more ways to mess things up in there to make them better that human nature is flawed
but that you know things can get better is it just like a way to unite these different visions yeah i think so it's a way to um i mean i struggled with this for a while before i came to this kind of uh division between the two types of optimism because i you know myself feel very optimistic in general but at the same time i could not i i also you know when i when i heard some very
grim possibilities for the future i could not prove that they were impossible uh and i think it's important to take risks seriously um so you know uh the the progress studies community uh i would say overlaps was pretty adjacent to um the rationalist and effective altruist communities and there's a lot of people in those communities who think a lot about existential risk
and they're very smart and they are uh you know and they and they think through issues very carefully and so i think like you you just take what they you know what they say and what they're worried about seriously um and so you know i don't a couple of months ago i wrote uh an article about uh sort of coronavirus and what's the you know what is kind of the if you're a
if you're a pro progress if you have a pro progress attitude like what is your what's the attitude to take towards the covet epidemic and i started in on the article thinking that i would be writing something about how to like what is an optimistic take or how to stay optimistic and i realized through the course of writing it that i optimism was not exactly the right concept
um because we should be really facing the you know some of the worst realistic possibilities uh you know outcomes and for the future but at the same time what i realized that i wanted to say was not hey everyone it's gonna be all right which maybe it won't be what i wanted to say was don't give up keep fighting there's always a chance and no matter what like there's nothing
to do except to use our best efforts to to create a better future and so i think it's that um it's that fighting spirit that i want to communicate right i think in times so when when uh you know in in times when things are are going well you know so if you combine descriptive optimism with prescriptive optimism then i think the ad you know the attitude that comes out of that is
bold ambitious expansive plans for the future right let's go colonize the you know the solar system and eventually the galaxy let's solve aging and you know create a mortality let's create you know a material abundance for everybody and give everybody in the world the standard of living of that the richest people have today and you know all these these kinds of things that's right when
you combine prescriptive optimism with descriptive pessimism which is sometimes completely rational and appropriate i think what you get is this fighting spirit this like no matter how bad the odds are we're never gonna give up um we are we're gonna keep moving forward and we're gonna give our best efforts to to solving this and so i think you know whether you have
descriptive or prescriptive optimism oh sorry whether you have uh descriptive optimism or pessimism whether you think that things are on a good track or a bad track whether you no matter how seriously you know you take the risks or how worried you are about them and some of that honestly comes down to a personal uh you know personality and temperament difference
i think we should always have prescriptive optimism we should always just be trying to work as hard as we can towards the best possible future no matter what that is uh well i think uh that's the next little note to leave it on uh the you know prescriptive optimism and uh thank you so much for being on this is very fun and absolutely yeah i learned a lot thanks for having me yeah