Author, The Roots of Progress (rootsofprogress.org). Part-time tech consultant, Our World in Data. Former software engineering manager and tech startup founder.
jasoncrawford(Jason Crawford)
Karma: 2,184
Fair enough, I might consider React/GraphQL inventions. (Jest doesn’t seem that fundamentally new?)
But how much of Facebook’s engineering effort went to inventing React/GraphQL? 1% Surely less than 10%.
Low-hanging fruit alone doesn’t explain stagnation, because our ability to pick the fruit has also been improving. To explain stagnation, you have to explain why the former is happening faster than the latter, and why this only started happening in the last ~50 years.
See also my post here and this interview.
All (most?) invention is engineering, but a lot of engineering is not invention.
Boeing employs many airplane engineers, but they don’t really invent new planes. Facebook employs many software engineers but isn’t inventing much in software. Both are doing product development engineering—which is fine and something the world certainly needs a lot of, but it’s not the same thing.
I think anyone who wanted to be an inventor would train as an engineer. So the education/training part of the inventor career path is there. But it falls apart after university.
We need a career path for invention
Wanted: Research Assistant for The Roots of Progress
So here is the relevant excerpt, section 4.7.1:
Our bodies are equipped with damage repair systems that are pretty darn effective at low dose rates. If this were not the case, then life would never have evolved as it has. Life started about 3 billion years ago when average background radiation was about 10 mSv/y, about 4 times the current average. Life without repair mechanisms would be impossible. But these repair mechanisms can be overwhelmed by high dose rate damage.
The repair mechanisms take a bewildering number of forms, all of which seem to have names requiring a dictionary. And the strategies are remarkably clever. At doses below 3 mSv, a damaged cell attempts no repair but triggers its premature death. However, at higher doses, it triggers the repair process.23 This scheme avoids an unnecessary and possibly erroneous repair process when cell damage rate is so low that the cell can be sacrificed. But if the damage rate is high enough that the loss of the cell would cause its own problems, then the repair process is initiated. This magic is accomplished by activating/repressing a different set of genes for high and low doses.[143][page 15] LNT denies this is possible.
Even at the cell level, the repair process is fascinating. In terms of cancer, we are most interested in how the cell repairs breaks in its DNA. Single stand breaks are astonishingly frequent, tens of thousands per cell per day. Almost all these breaks are caused by ionized oxygen molecules from metabolism within the cell. MIT researchers observed that 100 mSv/y dose rates increased this number by about 12 per day.[114] Breaks that snap only one side of the chain are repaired almost automatically by the clever chemistry of the double helix itself.
The interesting question is: what happens if both sides of the double helix are broken? Double strand breaks (DSB) also occur naturally. Endogenous, non-radiogenic causes generate a DSB about once every ten days per cell. Average natural background radiation creates a DSB about every 10,000 days per cell.[50] However the break was caused, the DNA molecule is split in two.
Clever experiments at Berkeley show that the two halves migrate to “repair centers”, areas within the cell that are specialized in putting the DNA back together.[105] Berkeley actually has pictures of this process, Figure 4.15 which is a largely complete in about 2 hours for acute doses below 100 mSv and 10 hours for doses around 1000 mSv. These experiments show that if a “repair center” is only faced with one DSB, the repair process rarely makes a mistake in reconstructing the DNA. But if there are multiple breaks per repair center, then the error rate goes up drastically. A few of these errors will survive and a few of those will result in a viable mutation that will eventually cause cancer. The key feature of this process is it is non- linear. And it is critically dose rate dependent. If the damage rate is less than the repair rate, we are in good shape. If the damage rate is greater than the repair rate, we have a problem.
The Berkeley work was part of the DOE funded Low Dose Radiation Research Program. Despite the progress at Berkeley and other labs and bipartisan congressional support, DOE shut the program down in 2015. When the DOE administrator of the program, Dr. Noelle Metting, attempted to defend her program, she was fired and denied access to her office. The program records were not properly archived as required by DOE procedures.
Figure 4.15: UCB pictures of cell repair. The bright spots in the screenshots are clusters of damage sensing and repair proteins, dubbed Radiation Induced Foci (RIF). Berkeley found that the number of RIF’s increases less than linearly with dose. At 0.1 Gy, they observed 73 RIF’s/Gy. At 1.0 Gy, they saw 28 RIF’s/Gy. If an RIF is faced with a single DSB, the repair is almost always correct. If an RIF is faced with more than one DSB, the error rate skyrockets. We expect 25 to 40 DSB’s per gray. Do the math. 40 DSB’s and 73 RIF’s, no problem. 40 DSB’s and 28 RIF’s, trouble. Footnote 23 says:
To be a bit more precise, some repairs can only take place in the G2 phase just before cell division. Radiation to the cell above 3 mSv, activates the ATM-gene, which arrests the cell in the G2 phase. This allows time for the repair process to take place.
Presumably you would still hold them accountable for safety though? The point is to have a balance that properly recognizes tradeoffs
Why has nuclear power been a flop?
Yes, I remember that too—can’t remember where I read about it, maybe Yergin’s The Prize. The analogy that occurred to me was web/app analytics, especially the social media apps that learned to measure their “viral coefficient” around the late ’00s
Highlights from The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie
Maybe, but cars aren’t the only things we make out of metal, either. I deliberately made the categories as broad as possible while staying objective. Still, I agree there’s an issue here.
But cars getting better and cheaper shows up as more total cars getting sold, which does show up as increased material usage, at least up to a point.
Not obvious: in many cases, greater efficiency actually increases total resource usage! See Jevons Paradox.
It’s possible we’re at a turning point on one or more resources where we’ve kind of saturated the market… but I’m far from convinced.
That said, a productivity metric like you mention is also a good idea. I chose that for agriculture because I do think we have saturated that market.
A dashboard for progress
Here are some introductory posts that explain why progress matters:
I agree that the bar keeps getting raised, and therefore progress gets more difficult. I don’t see why that implies any asymptote. (I wrote in a previous post why exponential growth should be our baseline, even as we pick off low-hanging fruit.)
Great! Merkel made a good statement also. But the praise should be coming from world leaders everywhere.
How to end stagnation?
Exponential growth is the baseline
Interesting, but I think you’re underestimating the impact of other general-purpose technologies, such as in energy or manufacturing. New energy sources can be applied broadly across many areas, for instance.
Yup, I’ve read it, thanks!