YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Crawford

lines on the record: 51
first: 2020-08-25
most recent: 2020-08-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Appropriate. I think what you get is this fighting spirit, this no matter how bad the odds are, we're never going to give up. We're going to keep moving forward and we're going to give our best efforts to solving this. And so I think whether you have descriptive or prescriptive optimism, sorry, whether you have 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 take the risks or how worried you are about them, and some of that honestly comes down to a 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.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's always a chance, and no matter what, like there's nothing to do except to use our best efforts to create a better future. And so I think it's that fighting spirit that I want to communicate, right? I think in times, so when times when things are going well, so if you combine descriptive optimism with prescriptive optimism, then I think 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 create a mortality. Let's create a material abundance for everybody and give everybody in the world the standard of living that the richest people have today. These kinds of things, right? When you combine prescriptive optimism with descriptive pessimism, which is sometimes completely rational.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, you know, I don't a couple of months ago, I wrote an article about sort of coronavirus and what's the, you know, what is kind of the, if you're a progress, if you have a progress attitude, like what is the attitude to take towards the COVID 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 optimism was not exactly the right concept because we should be really facing the some of the worst realistic possibilities of outcomes and for the future. But at the same time, what I realized that I wanted to say was not, hey, everyone, it's going to be all right, which maybe it won't be. What I wanted to say was Don't give up. Keep fighting.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think so. It's a way to, I mean, I struggled with this for a while before I came to this kind of division between the two types of optimism because Myself feel very optimistic in general, but at the same time, I could not, I also, when I heard some very grim possibilities for the future, I could not prove that they were impossible. And I think it's important to take risks seriously. So, you know, the progress studies community.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Optimist. Like, no matter how bad the odds are we are facing, I think there's a chance, certainly from where we stand, to not have that outcome 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?”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, another essay I wrote recently was on two types of optimism, and I call 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. Prescriptive optimism is your determination to and your commitment to act to create a better future. So, you know, I am not always a descriptive optimist. I don't always think the world is definitely going to get better. I think it's on a good path in certain dimensions and it's on a bad path in other dimensions. And I absolutely think that really bad scenarios like Tyler's 800 years are entirely possible. I don't want to be a Panglossian or a Pollyanna or whatever metaphor you want to pick about that. But I am always and ever a prescript.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. I don't think we're doomed. And I think that is a, I don't know, it's just unproductive attitude to take. I don't know what the risk is. I don't want to make a prediction about 800 years out. Nobody can actually predict 800 years out. And 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.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mistake. I think the answer is not to just sort of slow down or to say that 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, the problem is an unwise portfolio allocation of what type of progress we are making. Let's reallocate so that we are making an appropriate amount of safety and resilience progress while we also make more bigger, faster, better progress. So it's a reallocation rather than a slur of slowing down or a compromise.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And we don't just devote all of it to, well, let's just do more bigger, faster, better, right? But we want to have that, that's not because more bigger, faster, better is wrong or bad. And I guess ultimately the key point is I think people see progress as just more, bigger, faster, better, and they see that, oh, this can have some downsides. And the answer that they come up with is essentially to compromise, to temper, to, oh, let's slow down. Let's put on the brakes, right? I think that's.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 to the economy as a whole, certainly to the financial system and so forth. Stepping back and looking at the way that we frame this, I think it's a mistake to think about quote-unquote progress as kind of this short-sighted, single-minded thing that only pursues more, bigger, faster, kind of in a very greedy way. Safety and resilience and protection against shocks and solidity and robustness of the system. Those are goals that we can pursue just as we can pursue more food, more material goods, more medicines, faster planes and cars, et cetera, right? All of these are just goals that we pursue through applied intelligence, through science and technology.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, through technology, through mathematics, through, in this case, an understanding of statistics, ultimately through applied intelligence, we can analyze systems in terms of their volume. And I think that's fundamentally what we should do. We can do this through all sorts of ways, right? We can do it through avoiding single points of failure. We can do it through building, like I said, sort of buffers and slack into the system so that one little thing doesn't ripple all the way instantly and send shocks through the entire system. There needs to be padding and buffers to absorb some of those shocks.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that is absolutely a risk. Okay, so let me answer the specific point and then let me step back and make a broader question about how we frame this. 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 unforeseen catastrophic events. There's also never been a time when we were not interdependent, really. I mean, humans, to my knowledge, have always lived in tribes. They've always been dependent on, you know, dependent on each other. That's just how we live. There are no lone wolf humans or very few and rare. So we've always been interdependent. You're right that we can set up systems That are set up for large shocks.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that, I mean, science and technology are distinct, if inseparable. They are different things, and they can be identified as such. And I think it's worth splitting them up just for the purposes of study, right? I mean, there's all sorts of things, I mean, this is in any area of study, there are things that 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, I mean, you know, physics and chemistry and biology, right? These things are not inseparable and there are linkages between them, but we split them up and we specialize. I think that's very natural. So, you know, but we need to recognize the connections between them and recognize that those connections are not simple and they're certainly not linear.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so there's this interplay between science and technology. I haven't even gotten into things like, of course, science is sometimes gated on technology, especially technology of measuring instruments and observation, right? So we need to invent the microscope, invent better microscopes, we need to invent the thermometer and better thermometers. We need to invent all sorts of instruments and ways of pressure chambers and all the instruments we use in chemistry and so on and so forth. All of this is technology that enables science. So there's a lot of back and forth in terms of the instruments, in terms of the motivation, in terms of, you know, there's just a lot of it that is very cyclical rather than linear. In other words.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, 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 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 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 the 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? And that's often what the science then comes along and does. It gives you, it actually quantifies, it gives new laws, maybe mathematical laws and equations that then allow us to optimize the invention for power, for efficiency, for reliability or safety or whatever.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Improved version, a much more efficient version in patent in 1769. Thermodynamics doesn't really begin until like the early 1800s, right? Carnot in the 1824 kind of kicks it off. What was going on there? Well, the steam engine did depend on previous science, it depended on the science of air pressure and the properties of the vacuum which had been worked out in the 1600s. And then the tinkerers were able to tinker and engineer James Watt actually rediscovered some principles of latent heat that Black had discovered in his science.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 even better versions of the transistor and so forth. So they actually shuttled back and forth very quickly between science and invention, between discovery and engineering. And 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. If you look at the steam engine, the classic central foundational invention of the Industrial Revolution, right? It's been said that the steam engine owes more to thermodynamics, sorry, thermodynamics. The size 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. James Watt famously created a much”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, 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 started with some of the initial attempts of the transistor. They found that it was not operating according to what theory would predict. They had to go back to the drawing board and actually refine the theory. They had to come up with new theory in 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”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where I think the linear model can be oversimplified or that caricature is wrong is in a number of places. Most tellingly is that new inventions often They are often the result of tinkering and exploration at the frontiers of science such that when”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a clear technological foundation for all of these things. 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. And for that reason, Direct and immediate applications should not, cannot be the kind of the gate or 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 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 cannot see and now and can never predict in advance, it will be good for the world.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is, so I mean, that was, again, the sort of deliberate caricature and oversimplification of kind of what the linear model is, right? So what is some truth in that? Well, 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 electrical, you know, the entire electrical and electronics industry without an understanding of the physics of electromagnetism 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 diagnostics and so forth without an understanding of microbiology and biochemistry. There's no way that we would have modern metallurgy without chemistry, et cetera, right?”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who apply them to create new inventions, which are the inventions are direct deductive applications of new scientific laws that have been discovered. And then these inventions can get turned into businesses which then distribute the benefits broadly.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the linear model has some truth to it and is also oversimplified. 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. So here is the caricature of the linear model that stresses the way that it is oversimplified, right? It goes like this. We have science. Science is pure basic research that is done by 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 taught to the engineers and the”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I think that Progress in 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 in some dimensions and some areas. If you want to go back to the 1950s, just look at the civil rights movement, right, which has happened in between. So there's But I don't think that there's been progress in every dimension or everything that you would look at or measure. It's much markier. 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 harder to tell.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The monarchy is mostly a thing of the past. And so I think it's not a coincidence that those three things happen together. Now, I haven't traced all of the patterns of the interconnections between them. But both Joel McKeer and George McCluskey point to, for instance, the dissolving of the guild system as something that was very important for new businesses to be able to be created, new technologies to be able to be adopted, and so forth. So, yeah, I do think there are absolutely linkages and interconnections between all three of those in pretty much all directions.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think all three are intertwined and cannot in the end be fully separated. And when I say moral, I think a lot in there sort of about society and government. I think absolutely the evolution of, I mean, I think 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 revolution of democratic republics, right, of in 1700s, you know, pretty much the entire world was under monarchy. And by today, a large part of the world is under sort of constitutional republics with democratically elected representatives.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think that goes along with some of my hypotheses about why stagnation, why is progress slowed in the last number of years, right? Like some of it is going to 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 feel that it wasn't such a good, you know, that as people thought it was for a long time, then not only would you get people going into fields that would push the frontier forward, but you'd also get fewer people in the humanities studying it and ask some questions about it. And you get more people maybe focusing on the negatives and the downsides. And so, you know, I mean, that's my hunch about what happened. Again, I just don't have the full answer for you here.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, so I return to my point that progress is not automatic or inevitable, and that includes progress and understanding progress. So creating a field of study is not automatic or inevitable. It requires choice and effort. It requires people to decide that it's worth doing. And where does that come from? 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. People have been asking interesting questions about Progress for a long time. I just think that 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, you know, about a year ago, Tyler Cowan and Patrick Collison coined the term progress studies in an article they published in The Atlantic.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Theological topics, political topics, I think that anybody to be a really informed and responsible citizen kind of needs to know the basics of how our world works, how is it that your standard of living is delivered to you, what makes your refrigerator run, 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 in a car or on a train or a bus or however you get there? What is it that powers the elevator that takes you up to the 37th floor? And where did those plate glass windows come from that you're looking out of all day, et cetera? 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 seriously degrade quality of living for really people around the world.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the history of progress is a neglected topic in education. It is underrepresented in history class. And it's really something where I think we're graduating students from high school and from university who just kind of take progress for granted and take the modern world for granted, take industrial civilization and don't have a vivid appreciation of how far we've really come in recent decades and in the last couple of centuries and how important that is to the world. And I think that's something that every citizen kind of needs, especially when you see how many of our debates today are about industrial policy, how much issues surrounding industrial civilization and the way it works are hot topics.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, certainly. So this summer I created an online learning program in the history of technology. It's called Progress Studies for Young Scholars. And 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 an after school program or homeschooling program. I did this as a kind of a joint venture with a school, private school called Higher Ground Education. They're the largest operator of Montazori schools in the United States. And they also have a Montazorian-spired 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. They reached out to me actually to do it. It's run by some folks I've known for a very long time and have deep respect for really we've been looking for an excuse to work together ever since I went full time on progress about nine months ago. And when they suggested that we do this over the summer, I just jumped to the chance. I thought it was a great idea.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is going to be some sort of implication for action or policy or whatever. And I think all of those things are kind of conditioned by those basic premises about the value of progress. So to my mind, that's what progress studies is. And I think there are already people in academia who have those basic set of ideas, and that's why they're looking into the things they're looking into. And so maybe it just needs 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 set of ideas, maybe rallying people around it, getting them all to talk to each other, and so forth.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's basically the conviction that progress is real and important, that it has or can have tremendously good effects and impact 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. 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, what data you're going to look at, and then ultimately what conclusions you're going to draw in terms of what implications are going to draw for action from whatever you find about the world.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of gelled or unified around this theme yet. And that's what I think could be interesting. I mean, to my mind, and again, I mean, I'm not an academic myself, but to my mind, progress studies is not really a new field perspective. It's not supposed to be something separate from or that will replace or supplant history or economics or economic history or et cetera. 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. It's a set of basic ideas about what is important, what matters, and what's worthy of study.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I think can form the basis of some new movement and certainly, I mean, as I have gone and investigated, I've found very interesting work that's been done by economic historians like Joel Makir. I've enjoyed some of the work of Derry McCluskey. Some newer writers and academics such as at MIT Sloan, there's Pierre Azalai, Andrew Lowe at Duke, there's Ashisha Rohr with this really interesting paper last year about the changing structure of American growth or economic growth, something like that. And so there's a lot of people doing good work. Matt Clancy writes a sub stack about the economics of innovation. He calls it. And so, you know, just some of these names, there's a lot of people. Investigating things already that I think are very related to progress studies”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, not to my knowledge. I'm not in academia, and I never have been, so that's not my area of expertise. I think it will need to be something new. Not that there aren't already, there's already, and there has been plenty of good work in academia.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think we should take it very seriously that ideas on this level do affect things. There's a great quote, I think it's from Keynes about people, I'm not going to be able to rattle it off, but it's something about how people are enthralled to dead philosophers or defunct economists. 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 the intellectual sphere. But in fact, the world is moved by little else. And I think that's true. So, you know, that doesn't say much about tactics or strategy exactly, but it does say that these movements are worth studying. And, you know, 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 how these movements are created and grow because I do think they are powerful.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are many lessons from previous movements. I am not an expert in them. I have not studied those movements as much as I would like. But 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 government, on our other institutions like the media and so forth. I think those philosophic effects are very long term. It seems to take decades for ideas to go from their originators, often in academia or some other intellectual form, people writing books and manifestos for that to get out into the world and have a big effect seems to take decades. And so I think if you are working on that kind of a thing, you should expect to be playing a very long game.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To have the effect of essentially adding overhead and friction to the creative and innovative process. Has all of that been slowed down? And is that a good thing? I mean, these rules were added for a reason. Many of them were added for safety reasons, right? 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 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? 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 a progress away?”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If people started to think that these were not forces for good in the world, like what did that do to the kind of long-term talent motivation and the recruiting of talent into those fields? That is a hypothesis that I would like to explore. Some other things are, well, what did all of this do to the regulatory layer, right? Have we, and again, this is more of a hypothesis with just a little bit of data behind it. This isn't a theory I'm putting forward, but I think it's something to look into is have we had sort of creeping regulation or sort of creeping bureaucracy at the legal level, but actually not only at the legal level, also at sort of the level of the way corporate bureaucracies work and the way university bureaucracy works and so forth.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the decades following World War II, that I think started to increase a certain strain of anti-technology and anti-progress kind of sentiment in the culture, certainly in the US. I think probably more broadly. Seeing the, I mean, really just the horror of the atomic bomb as a really negative thing that could come out of progress, right? The fears around nuclear power that kind of went along with that, the rise in general of the environmentalist movement in the 60s and into the 70s and just things like the oil shocks of the 70s. I think there were a number of things that sort of came together. And I just have to wonder, now this is a 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”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you want to ask well, why has progress maybe been a bit underwhelming the last 50 years? Why was it not as amazing as the previous 50? 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 one place where I suspect you'll find some of the answers to this. But there are a lot of other things as well. You can just look at these are all just hypotheses. Now I don't have the answer by any means, but some hypotheses to look at where has the talent been going? Has there been as much talent energized and motivated to go into”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so every individual technology or even broad technological areas go through something like that, right? 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 area. In fact, hopefully we've already been tinkering in some other area and some other area is like ready to take off. And so that could be chemistry. It could be computing and information. It could be biotech, you know, whatever, right? So I think a question to look at is”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things really take off in the 1880s or so when we get the electrical light bulbs and we start building out the grid and we have got power generators 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 doesn't exist yet. But 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 S curve, right? Starts off slow, has a faster ramp up, then levels off. I mean, maybe technical terms more like a sigmoid, right? But it kind of looks like an S. Stretched out S.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe an inflection point where it starts really accelerating and taking off. Progress is very fast for a while. And then eventually it 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? 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, you know, so telegraph is like mid-1800s or 1830s, 40s.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. 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, it's still a lot faster than the thousands of years before the Industrial Age, right? So progress has not stopped by any means, right? But maybe it is, as you say, sort of underwhelming compared to what we had before. So you ask, how can this happen? Well, again, it gets back to like progress is not automatic. It requires, I mean, 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 where I was talking about the different S-curves. So every sort of individual technology starts off in a period where it's relatively, progress is relatively slow, where just the basic inventions are sort of getting figured out. Then it hits.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hey, we might not, hey, look, this 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 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 could it be sped up? 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 caused by something we did or failed to do in the last 50 years, that's good to know, but only so that we can, you know, so that we can shape the future. That's really what it's all about.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's true. That was not my original motivation. And I think if you step back, you know, I think it's an important question, an important thing to look at. It's something that honestly, I was a little skeptical about when I first heard it and have since warmed up to it. I mean, I think the numbers are there and I see where this stagnation hypothesis comes from. I do think it's an important thing to look into. But I also think, but it wasn't the original motivation for me. I really got into it looking at the last 200 or so years and contrasting those with the thousands of years before. And that was what I wanted to understand and figure out. But I think they're really the same thing. Or, I mean, they're just very much along the same lines, right? 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,”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years we were limited to the speed of horses and sail, the wind. And then the last couple hundred years, all of that changed. And 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 caused things to take off and for life to improve? And how do we keep it going? 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.”
2020-08-25 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source