Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started;
Does he know that Einstein's letter was not mailed? Alexander Sachs was given the letter, setup a personal audience with the President and read it to him.
There are other instances where I am less certain he is wrong but this idea that our present culture is so much worse for scientific research than our culture in the earlier part of the century seems weakly supported to me.
Yes. To strengthen the point:
After Roosevelt got the Einstein letter, very little happened. The White House did not actually jump into action or start spending money. The thing was referred to a committee that moved very lethargically. Progress only picked up several years later, once the British, independently, had figured out that a bomb was practical, and had started making noise about it.
It was rhetorical but he was still wrong - he seems to think science was taken more seriously at that time. It wasn't. Asr already pointed this out - but to add to it even before the "do nothing commission" was started the scientists wrote another letter to the President because he had taken no action on it at all after several months. Then he appointed a commission to do nothing for a good while longer. Then the bureaucracy got started on the org charts and Powerpoints. Er...you get the idea.
Given that productivity growth was slow for most of human history, it seems more appropriate to ask why it was so fast for a while. I keep thinking it may have been that manufacturing precision reached a point where we could drink a couple centuries of scientific milkshake.
FWIW, Thiel also makes an interesting connection between stagnation and the many recent speculative bubbles in "The Optimistic Thought Experiment".
"The speedup in information technology contrasts dramatically with the slowdown everywhere else."
I think this is the key sentence in Thiel's article. The issue is then to what degree the application of information technology to the sciences can alleviate the problem. Interestingly, Kurzweil's thesis is essentially that he sees general speed-up as a product of the other sciences becoming information sciences, but he is clearly much more optimistic about the degree to which this is happening and has already happened.
I'm surprised that Thiel doesn't engage more directly the hypothesis that for the last century (or perhaps century and a half), the living standards in the Western world have been determined by the race between rapid technological progress and somewhat less rapid degradation in the quality of government. To me this hypothesis seems very plausible, even highly probable. Assuming it is true, the interesting question is whether the recent stagnation is due to technological progress slowing down, the quality of government deteriorating faster, or perhaps the quality of government reaching some low point at which even extremely rapid technological progress can't save the day.
Also, these two variables are by no means independent. At the very least, bad government creates perverse incentives that draw smart and entrepreneurial people away from pushing real technical progress and towards rent-seeking. And as another interesting question, could it actually be that technological progress somehow inherently exacerbates the trends towards bad government, thus planting the seeds of its own future doom? I can think of some scary hypotheses along these lines, although they are highly speculative.
I'm surprised that Thiel doesn't engage more directly the hypothesis that for the last century (or perhaps century and a half), the living standards in the Western world have been determined by the race between rapid technological progress and somewhat less rapid degradation in the quality of government.
I think this is intentional.
...
Your speech in Aspen last month argued that technological change was stagnating, especially in energy. What's the solution? Is it that progress in energy is more difficult than progress in, say, chip design, so we have to be more patient? Thiel: It goes back to the why-things-have-slowed-down question, which is the one that I've tried to avoid.
Unfairly tried to avoid? Thiel: I'm not sure it's unfair. Because as soon as you get to the "why" question, it gets much more controversial. It makes people lose sight of the what, which is the thing I want people to pay attention to. I think that if we could get people to agree that there's a really big problem in innovation, then we can have a constructive conversation on what to do about it. As soon as we fixate people on why there's been an innovation slowdown, if you're on the right you can
What I have in mind is not how successful the hard sciences were in the U.S.S.R., but that the environment for them was qualitatively and fundamentally different from softer fields, in which there was little ground (except perhaps for occasional highly specialized and abstruse topics) where one could discuss things freely without running into the rigid constraints of state ideology. Even if the output of Soviet math or physics was comparably poor, their mathematicians and physicists still had the freedom to do the same rigorous and sound math and physics as their Western colleagues, and many of them indeed did so, though perhaps there were fewer than could have been under a better system.
In contrast, it was outright impossible for a Soviet intellectual to discuss freely and publicly interesting and novel ideas about history, economics, political theory, etc., let alone more general ideas about humanity and human society that draw on all these fields. This would immediately run afoul of the all-pervasive official ideology and its points of disconnect with reality. My thesis is that the Western societies nowadays are in fact in a similar situation, although the ideological enforcement mechanisms are more complex, subtle, and non-obvious. (But they're nevertheless utterly effective in producing ideological uniformity among those whose opinion actually matters, even if the dissenters are typically just marginalized rather than jailed.)
Of course if he did so, he would be instavoted down into oblivion.
Whenever you make such comments, you are making it impossible for me to upvote you, because if you end up upvoted, that'll by itself show the falseness of your claim, and therefore it would be a post unworthy of an upvote.
I promise an upvote for your comment however, if you edit to remove this sentence, because the remaining points you make are very interesting and worthy of such. (edited to add: Now upvoted, as per promise.)
Now to the content-relevant bits:
One obvious example is decolonization, which killed more people than the nazis. No postcolonial government was as good as the colonial government it replaced.
You are making true claims as far as it goes, but I don't think you're seeing the bigger picture in regards to colonialism and decolonization both. For starters it's my impression that the primary stated objections to colonization are deontological ("They don't have the right to rule us/We don't have the right to rule them") as opposed to utilitarian ("We're better off without them"/"They're better off without us")
Now I'm not a deontologist, but I wouldn't mind calling my...
Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation is worth a mention. (It is a fantastic, short, read. I highly recommend it to all Kindle owners on LW). One of TC's points is that we went through several decades (the 1930s excepted) of extraordinary growth, and made plans (revenue projections, budget forecasts, etc.) based on that growth continuing at the same high rate forever. This fits the broad pattern of the Planning Fallacy.
But the 19th-20th century boom had to end eventually, and we still have institutions (public and private) that work on the assumption that the growth will continue. So we'll have a painful period in which we all gradually catch up to the fact that "we aren't as rich as we thought we would be" as Cowen puts it.
I've seen those studies and his discussion of them. They all show that people would have to be paid a lot to stop using the internet (and they'd still be benefiting from its side effects), and they'd pay a lot if that were the only option. That indicates a huge consumer surplus, since you don't have to pay a lot for a base level of internet access.
Do these studies take into account the collective action problem? It's clearly extremely costly to forsake the internet now that everyone expects you to use it, both privately and professionally, so that it would render you an antisocial weirdo and likely unemployable. I certainly wouldn't accept it for anything less than a fortune, but on the other hand, I could definitely see some serious upsides if the state of communication technology were magically reverted twenty years back -- so much that I would have to think carefully about the answer if I were given this offer by some supernatural force.
Also, of course, preferences that are stated rather than revealed should always be taken with extreme skepticism, since they're likely to be heavy on signaling.
RK: Computers are getting faster.
PT: True, but new drugs are coming out slower.
RK: True, but computers are getting cheaper.
PT: True, but travel is getting slower.
RK: True, but the best medical technologies can do more.
PT: True, but the price of access to them is ballooning.
RK: True, but this can be overcome with sufficiently fast growth in a few critical sectors.
PT: True, but it won't be if the current political and economic environment persists.
RK: True, but it won't persist.
PT: Yes it will, unless we do something to reverse it.
RK: Yes, and we will.
PT: ...
RK: I think we still have 55 minutes left.
In the article, Peter says:
Science fiction has collapsed as a literary genre.
I can't say I have noticed that one.
Update 2011-10-05: Some concrete evidence from Google NGRAM offers little support for Peter's position.
I have. There are still people publishing books that go in the SF section of the bookstore, but I could count off on one hand the number of authors I can remember who are feeding people hope instead of stylish postmodern cynicism.
"SF don't inspire hope anymore" does not imply "SF has collapsed as a literary genre"; I'm not aware of "inspiring hope" being a factor in judging the existence of a literary genre.
However, I think a relevant data point in favor of Thiel's claim is this: where is our 2001: A Space Odyssey? That is, a work of hard-core sci-fi (10 on the "Mohs scale" of sci-fi) that's achieved mainstream success and entered the broader culture.
Actually, the more I read over Thiel's essay, the more I question our ideas about the future at mid century. For example:
--How many of those predictions were based on the erroneous belief that communist states were also valiantly leading the charge of progress? We now know that half the world essentially squandered five decades of human progress.
--To what extent were they underestimating the technical challenges involved?
--How many misplaced ideas about society were there? Many ideas, like interplanetary colonization, seemed to spring from a belief that p...
Note that the Nobel prizes are awarded from Sweden, and Russia has traditionally been Sweden's enemy.
Peter Thiel addresses this topic again in a debate with George Gilder:
When any given field takes half a lifetime of study to master, who can compare and contrast and properly weight the rate of progress in nanotechnology and cryptography and superstring theory and 610 other disciplines? Indeed, how do we even know whether the so-called scientists are not just lawmakers and politicians in disguise, as some conservatives suspect in fields as disparate as climate change, evolutionary biology, and embryonic-stem-cell research, and as I have come to suspect in almost all fields? [!!! -- SB]
I don’t necessarily dispute the point...
SIAI benefactor and VC Peter Thiel has an excellent article at National Review about the stagnating progress of science and technology, which he attributes to poorly-grounded political opposition, widespread scientific illiteracy, and overspecialized, insular scientific fields. He warns that this stagnation will undermine the growth that past policies have relied on.
Noteworthy excerpts (bold added by me):
In relation to concerns expressed here about evaluating scientific field soundness:
When any given field takes half a lifetime of study to master, who can compare and contrast and properly weight the rate of progress in nanotechnology and cryptography and superstring theory and 610 other disciplines? Indeed, how do we even know whether the so-called scientists are not just lawmakers and politicians in disguise, as some conservatives suspect in fields as disparate as climate change, evolutionary biology, and embryonic-stem-cell research, and as I have come to suspect in almost all fields? [!!! -- SB]
Grave indictors:
Looking forward, we see far fewer blockbuster drugs in the pipeline — perhaps because of the intransigence of the FDA, perhaps because of the fecklessness of today’s biological scientists, and perhaps because of the incredible complexity of human biology. In the next three years, the large pharmaceutical companies will lose approximately one-third of their current revenue stream as patents expire, so, in a perverse yet understandable response, they have begun the wholesale liquidation of the research departments that have borne so little fruit in the last decade and a half. [...]
The single most important economic development in recent times has been the broad stagnation of real wages and incomes since 1973, the year when oil prices quadrupled. To a first approximation, the progress in computers and the failure in energy appear to have roughly canceled each other out. Like Alice in the Red Queen’s race, we (and our computers) have been forced to run faster and faster to stay in the same place.
Taken at face value, the economic numbers suggest that the notion of breathtaking and across-the-board progress is far from the mark. If one believes the economic data, then one must reject the optimism of the scientific establishment. Indeed, if one shares the widely held view that the U.S. government may have understated the true rate of inflation — perhaps by ignoring the runaway inflation in government itself, notably in education and health care (where much higher spending has yielded no improvement in the former and only modest improvement in the latter) — then one may be inclined to take gold prices seriously and conclude that real incomes have fared even worse than the official data indicate. [...]
College graduates did better, and high-school graduates did worse. But both became worse off in the years after 2000, especially when one includes the rapidly escalating costs of college.[...]
The current crisis of housing and financial leverage contains many hidden links to broader questions concerning long-term progress in science and technology. On one hand, the lack of easy progress makes leverage more dangerous, because when something goes wrong, macroeconomic growth cannot offer a salve; time will not cure liquidity or solvency problems in a world where little grows or improves with time.