Founder, 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)
Thanks Ben! The critiques of progress from the EA/x-risk community have been the most thoughtful, well-informed, and difficult to answer of all the ones I’ve heard. In the spirit of epistemic humility, I invite you to keep up the criticism.
I love this, and I actually think it’s a very relevant comment! A poem like this is a type of celebration.
It reminds me that at the Golden Gate Bridge, there is a statue of the chief engineer, Joseph Strauss, with an inscription that reads:
Here at the Golden Gate is the eternal rainbow that he conceived and set to form a promise indeed that the race of man shall endure unto the ages.
Why do you find it unsatisfying? (Personally, I find it immensely satisfying.)
Why do you place a moral stigma against technological solutions to the problems of life and survival? What do you think we need to “repent”? Why do you say we “got away with it”, instead of, “we solved it!”
Why do you “imagine” we won’t continue to find new solutions to problems? Especially when we’ve already found so many, for many generations? Why make an argument from failure of imagination, rather than from history?
Also the phonograph, telegraph, telephone, radio, and television! If “information” wasn’t a category before the late 1800s, it was by then.
I’m not a comp bio expert, but the core of @johnswentworth’s argument seems to be that “protein shape tells us very little about [protein reactions] without extensive additional simulation”, and “the simulation is expensive in much the same way as the folding problem itself.”
Both true as far as I understand, but that doesn’t mean those problems are intractable, any more than protein folding itself was intractable.
So I think you can argue “this doesn’t immediately lead to massive practical applications, there are more hard problems to solve”, but not “this isn’t a big deal and doesn’t really matter” in the long run.
I have quipped that if you really wanted to slow down AI progress, you should create a Federal AI Initiative and give it billions of dollars in funding.
Or: “An old saw says that if the government really wanted to help literacy and reduce addiction in the inner cities, it would form a Department of Drugs and declare a War on Education.” (from Nanofuture by J. Storrs Hall, who also wrote Where Is My Flying Car?)
Good point, and one of the hypotheses I considered including was “tech workers already only work 4 hours a day…” but decided it was a bit too snarky and cynical.
There may be some truth to this, but note that there has always been some degree of loafing on the job! In factories it used to be called “soldiering”—see the bit on Taylor and scientific management in this essay.
Good thoughts. You’re right that a threshing machine only applies to a portion of agricultural labor, for part of the year. (Then again, weaving is only a portion of the textile manufacturing process, and printing is only a portion of the book-making process.)
My first reaction is that there is lots of evidence of farmers being actively interested in threshing machines. See that block quote from McClelland about how many things George Washington tried. Farmer’s journals have lots of stories about them. They got exhibited at fairs. When the compilation of The Commercial, Agricultural & Manufacturer’s Magazine came out, the preface to the whole volume mentioned the threshing machine, and then it’s the very first article in the first issue. So, there is a lot of interest from farmers.
Another point is that a good threshing machine did the job better than a human, so it not only saved labor, it saved grain. So it was increasing the farmer’s harvest, in addition to decreasing costs. And this was something explicitly anticipated / hoped for, even as early as the 1636 “patent” I referenced.
There could be other motivations, too: one article I read mentioned that a threshing machine could help farmers get their harvest ready for market before the rivers froze for the winter.
And in fact, when a good threshing machine was invented in Scotland in 1786, it was adopted locally. It’s just that adoption was slow to spread—even to England, let alone to the US (or the rest of the world).
So, although I didn’t explicitly consider it, when I add it all up, I don’t think lack of interest from farmers was an issue.
Cost was an issue. Some models were just too expensive, especially those imported from overseas. But there were also cheap models—they just didn’t work reliably. It seems that an increase in reliability, rather than a decrease in cost, was the key to adoption.
Yes, the famous Needham question. It is tougher to answer. Mokyr offers some thoughts in A Culture of Growth. I’m sure there are other hypotheses but I don’t have pointers right now.
I don’t blame anyone for being more personally interested in advancing the moral frontier than in distributing moral best practices. And we need both types of work. I’m just curious why the latter doesn’t figure larger in EA cause prioritization.
Looking at the “accelerating projection of 1960–1976” data points here, it reaches almost 3 TW by the mid-2010s:
According to Our World in Data’s energy data explorer, world electricity generation in 2021 was 27,812.74 TWh, which is 3.17 TW (using 1W = 8,766 Wh/year).
Comparing almost 3TW at about 2015 (just eyeballing the chart) to 3.17 TW in 2021, I say those are roughly equal. I did not make anything “significantly shinier”, or at least I did not intend to.
Since writing this, I’ve run across even more examples:
The transatlantic telegraph was met with celebrations similar to the transcontinental railroad, etc. (somewhat premature as the first cable broke after two weeks). Towards the end of Samuel Morse’s life and/or at his death, he was similarly feted as a hero.
The Wright Brothers were given an enormous parade and celebration in their hometown of Dayton, OH when they returned from their first international demonstrations of the airplane.
I’d like to write these up at some point.
Related: The poetry of progress (another form of celebration, broadly construed)
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.
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.
There was far more progress in aviation from 1920–1970 than from 1970–2020. In 1920, planes were still mostly made of wood and fabric. By 1970 most planes had jet engines and flew at ~600mph. Today planes actually fly a bit slower than they did in 1970. Yes, there has been progress in safety and cost, but it doesn’t compare to the previous 50-year period.
Similar pattern for automobiles and even highways.
Well here are some sources and further reading:
https://www.vaccines.gov/basics/types
https://www.sciencehistory.org/historical-profile/louis-pasteur
https://www.vbivaccines.com/wire/louis-pasteur-attenuated-vaccine/
RNA vaccine explainer from Moderna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJlP91xjvsQ
A longer essay I wrote: https://rootsofprogress.org/smallpox-and-vaccines
That’s really not clear to you?
Don’t you think it matters to the parents? And, for that matter, to the older siblings? To the child’s friends—if they live long enough to make friends?
Do you actually think an infant or young child is just… replaceable?
In the training they tell you to (1) check for responsiveness and then (2) check for breathing. You check for responsiveness by hitting them a bit and shouting “are you OK?” If they are unresponsive but breathing, they don’t need CPR. If they are not breathing, or only gasping, they need CPR.
The training did not say anything about checking for a heartbeat.
But there are two kinds of “vision of the future”. One is a descriptive/predictive vision: where are we going, what direction are we headed? That kind of vision ought to be accurate.
The other is a prescriptive/aspirational vision: what should we work towards? What would be ideal? That’s the kind I meant when I said “hold up a positive vision of the future”.
More: https://rootsofprogress.org/descriptive-vs-prescriptive-optimism
Re 2.2, a historical note: We had trains long before we had trucks, and people solved the last-mile problem with horses. Trains didn’t decrease horse usage because they were actually complements, not substitutes. Dependence on horses only decreases with the motor vehicle.
Hi everyone. I’ve discovered the rationality community gradually over the last several years, starting with Slate Star Codex, at some point discovering Julia Galef on Twitter/Facebook, and then reading Inadequate Equilibria. I still have tons of material on this site to go through!
I’m also the author of a blog, The Roots of Progress (https://rootsofprogress.org), about the history of technology and industry, and more generally the story of human progress.