Trust is important, but… the Church banning cousin-marriage as the primary cause of a high-trust society? I find it hard to believe. No time now to elaborate on my reasons but if people are really interested maybe I will write something up later
I think in Allen's book there is both a generic claim of high wages, and some specific analyses of technologies like the spinning jenny and whether it would have paid to adopt them.
The builders' wages are part of the generic claim, because there was no building-related technology that was analyzed.
The spinners' wages might be related to the spinning jenny ROI calculations, but I haven't gone deep enough on the analysis to understand how the paper that was linked might affect those calculations.
Maybe! Or maybe you could interest him in a printing press, or a sextant, or at least a plow? That is sort of my point in the second-to-last paragraph (about shape/direction vs. rate).
That is one of many hypotheses. (I haven't studied all of them yet, but I'd be surprised if I ended up ranking that even in the top three causes.)
Insurance is exactly a mechanism that transforms high-variance penalties in the future into consistent penalties in the present: the more risky you are, the higher your premiums.
Yes, and similarly, William Crookes warning about a fertilizer shortage in 1898 was correct. Sometimes disaster truly is up ahead and it's crucial to change our course. What makes the difference IMO is between saying “this disaster will happen and there's nothing we can do about it” vs. “this disaster will happen unless we recant and turn backwards” vs. “this disaster might happen so we should take positive steps to make sure it doesn't.”
Right, and as Tyler Cowen pointed out in the article I linked to, we don't hold the phone company liable if, e.g., criminals use the telephone to plan and execute a crime.
So even if/when liability is the (or part of the) solution, it's not simple/obvious how to apply it. Needs good, careful thinking each time of where the liability should exist under what circumstances, etc. This is why we need experts in the law thinking about these things.
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.
...In the records of the society from the 1680s we find evidence of interest in the earliest steam engines and most important, the society was receptive at the time to what was to become a socially revolutionary argument. The fellows discussed the notion that mechanical devices could, and indeed should, save labor, in effect decrease rather than increase employment. At the time of those discussions it was extremely difficult to get a patent from the government for any device if its inventor argued that it would save labor. Indeed until the late 1720s patents
I can say my purpose now, before I give the answer. I'm glad you asked, because people tend to make assumptions.
My purpose is neither to cast doubt on the views expressed here nor to boost their source. It's just a piece of intellectual history. I think it's interesting that someone had this view at a particular time and place, and in a particular context. It's interesting to think about what evidence they had that might have led them to this view, and what evidence they clearly didn't have (e.g., because it hadn't happened yet) that therefore couldn't hav...
Weird, I don't know how it got reverted. I just restored my additional comments from version history.
Any chance? A one in a million chance? 1e-12? At some point you should take the chance. What is your Faust parameter?
But we have no idea if our current cryonics works. It's not clear to me whether it's easier to solve that or to solve aging.
Chess is a simple game and a professional chess player has played it many, many times. The first time a professional plays you is not their “first try” at chess.
Acting in the (messy, complicated) real world is different.
“On average, buildings that are being blasted with a firehose right now are significantly more likely to be on fire than the typical structure, but this does not mean we should ban fire departments as a clear fire hazard.” Byrne Hobart
It basically means large-scale, widely distributed electrical power generation. More narrowly, it can refer to specific proposals from around the 1920s by the progressives of that era for the buildout of electric power infrastructure: see e.g. “Giant Power: A Progressive Proposal of the Nineteen-Twenties”
Yup, you can always have a domino-effect hypothesis of course (if it matches the timeline of events), rather than positing some general antecedent cause in common to all the failures.
Thanks. Yes this is a good point, and related to @cousin_it's point. Had not heard of this poem, nice reference.
Good point. Related: “Milton Friedman's Thermostat”:
...If a house has a good thermostat, we should observe a strong negative correlation between the amount of oil burned in the furnace (M), and the outside temperature (V). But we should observe no correlation between the amount of oil burned in the furnace (M) and the inside temperature (P). And we should observe no correlation between the outside temperature (V) and the inside temperature (P).
An econometrician, observing the data, concludes that the amount of oil burned had no effect on the inside temperatur
A related metaphor that I like:
Suppose you are in a boat heading down a river, and there are rocks straight ahead. You might not be sure whether it is best to veer left or right, but you must pick one and put all your effort into it. Averaging the two choices is certain disaster.
(Source, as I recall, is Geoffrey Moore's book Crossing the Chasm.)
Thanks, I have belatedly updated the post with this chart and will include it in the next digest as well.
Well, I was trying to argue against the “statistical parrot” idea, because I think that unfairly downplays the significance and potential of these systems. That's part of the purpose of the “submarine” metaphor: a submarine is actually a very impressive and useful device, even if it doesn't swim like a fish.
I agree that there is some similarity between ANNs and brains, but the differences seem pretty stark to me.
Thanks, I tweaked the wording a bit in this paragraph, and I tried to explain later in the essay what it even means for a system to be “trying” to do something.
Good point, I say “cure” here but yes I really mean any combination of prevention + cure that solves the problem. You're right that prevention was the majority of the success against infection (and this may be true for cancer as well).
This is great, thanks. I added a link to this comment in the body of the post.
Where I was coming from was:
Thanks @ChristianKI, but I think you're confusing me with someone else? I don't know what transposons are and I haven't written about them.
Thanks. Maybe “pre-theory” is too strong? Maybe “crucial theoretical gaps” is more accurate? I would be interested to hear from experts on this.
If you think we have the basic theory of cancer, the epistemic equivalent of the germ theory, I would be curious to know, when was that established? The germ theory was established around the 1880s or so, and it took several decades for all the solutions I described to be put in place, so maybe by analogy we are in that phase of just seeking effective (and affordable) solutions.
I agree that a lot of the difficulty ...
The germ theory of disease is, most essentially, the theory that infectious diseases are caused by invasion of the patient's body by a pathogen. It is defined by the type of thing that is the root cause of the disease - in this case, a non-human cell, virus, or even a malformed protein.
The direct equivalent in cancer is the theory that the cancer is made from a human's own cells growing out of control. That's a universally accepted fact and it has been for a long time. Again, I know that you know this, so I'm just really unclear about why you're proposing ...
Here's some quantification, from Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth. In 1910, 47% of US jobs were what Gordon classifies as “disagreeable” (farming, blue-collar labor, and domestic service), and only 8% of jobs were “non-routine cognitive” (managerial and professional). By 2009, only 3% of jobs were “disagreeable” and over 37% were “non-routine cognitive”. See full chart below.
I did not say or mean that agricultural is non-vocational. But I think it is not the ideal vocation for 50+% of the workforce.
Vocation is not the same as choice, bu...
Oh, I misunderstood. Yes, my stats are per worker. It's interesting to see that per-person has increased a bit. Not sure what to make of that. The early-1900s stats didn't count a lot of housework that was done mostly by housewives.
To be clear, I'm talking about total working hours per person.
Most of the reduction happened before 1950, but as you can see from the Our World in Data chart, there was still some reduction after that.
You are not talking about per person, you are talking about per worker. Total working hours per person has increased ~20% from 1950-2000 for ages 25-55.
Note that “raising awareness” was actually an important part of the factory safety story. It can be useful if it is channeled into actual solutions (and, to your point about the HPV vaccines, if there isn't too much political tribalism going on such that any issue immediately becomes polarized).
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.
I'm a tech worker. I work 40-70 hours a week, depending on incident load. Nobody I work with or see on a regular basis works less than 40 hours a week, and some are substantially more than that.
My most cognitively productive hours are the four hours in the morning, but there's plenty of lower effort important organizational stuff to fill out the afternoons. I think a good fraction of my coworkers are like me and don't actually need the job anymore, but we still put forth effort.
I think one of the major missing pieces of your article is "s...
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?)
I'm a little surprised and confused by that comment. It seems a bit like telling Sloan Kettering, “I have misunderstood your vision, which appears to be to create a new branch of biology… I had thought you were interested in trying to figure out how to cure cancer.”
Certainly, I am ultimately interested in sustaining and accelerating progress. (I would be whether or not it had stalled—indeed, I was skeptical of the stagnation hypothesis until I was a couple of years into this project.) I think that in order to do that, we need intellectual work to better un...
Yeah. In the training I took, they said to apply a tourniquet if the bleeding is continuous and more than 6 oz of blood has been lost, in which case the wound is considered life-threatening.
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.
Better health and nutrition could plausibly have led to higher average intelligence, good point.
However, I think a large part of the Flynn effect is not actual raw intelligence increasing, but better education that leads people to score better on formal intelligence tests.
Smarter in terms of raw mental capacity? No, I doubt it.
They were getting more educated. In particular, in the 18th century there was a new, mechanistic view of the universe that was spreading, and this was crucial to the development of science and engineering.
(Self-review.) My comment that we could stop wearing masks was glib; I didn't foresee the Delta, Omicron, etc. waves. But I think the general point stands.
The article has a detailed analysis that comes up with a much lower cost. If you think that analysis goes wrong, I'd be curious to understand exactly where?