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jasoncrawford — LessWrong

jasoncrawford

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jasoncrawford

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Founder, The Roots of Progress (rootsofprogress.org). Part-time tech consultant, Our World in Data. Former software engineering manager and tech startup founder.

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jasoncrawford

Founder, The Roots of Progress (rootsofprogress.org). Part-time tech consultant, Our World in Data. Former software engineering manager and tech startup founder.

Top postsTop post

Reflections on six months of fatherhood

To be fed from a spoon requires three distinct skills. First, you must open your mouth when the spoon approaches. Second, you must close your mouth around the spoon once it has fully entered the mouth (and not before). Third, you must swallow the food that remains in your mouth after the spoon is withdrawn, rather than spitting it out. I know this because my daughter, who is six months old, did not possess these skills two months ago. She learned rapidly—ah, to possess the neuroplasticity of the young—but there was a brief period when she literally did not know how to be spoon-fed. (Note that I have not begun to describe the skills required to feed oneself with a spoon, in part because she has not yet acquired them.) The first lesson I have received from fatherhood is that everything must be learned, or very nearly everything. Babies are born with a very small number of reflexes and instincts: to suck on whatever enters their mouth, to “root” around on mother’s chest to find the nipple, to cry when they are uncomfortable. Everything else is a mental step in a long, upward climb. In the first weeks, both the parents and the child are focused on digestion. The infant is essentially an alimentary canal with arms and legs. (The limbs are superfluous and indeed get in the way more than they help; if children were properly engineered, they would be born limbless, and the arms and legs would grow in as they were needed.) The infant is learning to nurse, to sleep, and to poop, and that’s about all they do for a little while. Yes, they even need to learn how to poop, or at least that’s how the nurse in the maternity ward explained her grunting sounds and puzzled expression. All capabilities come in the tiniest increments. At first she did not know what her hands were for, and was more likely to scratch her own face than to do anything useful with them. After a few months she started to realize that hands could grasp things, but not how to do so. She would pinch and grip

394Jan 31, 2022

Biological risk from the mirror world

338Dec 12, 2024

Industrial literacy

322Sep 30, 2020

Precognition

234Jun 14, 2021

Questions to ask when everyone is shooting themselves in the foot

* Why is everyone shooting themselves in the foot? What's wrong with institutions/incentives that makes foot-shooting an attractor state? Are we in an inadequate foot-shooting equilibrium? * When, how, and why did we start shooting ourselves in the foot? Did it seem like a good idea at the time? Was...

Progress links and short notes, 2026-01-26

Sorry for the late cross-post. Once again it’s been too long and this digest is too big. Feel free to skim and skip around, guilt-free, I give you permission. I try to put the more important and timely stuff at the top. Much of this content originated on social media....

No silver bullet: Lessons about how to create safety from the history of fire

Reality is a dangerous place. From the dawn of humanity we have faced the hazards of nature: fire, flood, disease, famine. Better technology and infrastructure have made us safer from many of these risks—but have also created new risks, from boiler explosions to carcinogens to ozone depletion, and exacerbated old...

How to tame a complex system

I get a lot of pushback to the idea that humanity can “master” nature. Nature is a complex system, I am told, and therefore unpredictable, uncontrollable, unruly. I think this is true but irrelevant. Consider the weather, a prime example of a complex system. We can predict the weather to...

My 2025 in review

Everyone loves writing annual letters these days. It’s the thing. (I blame Dan Wang.) So here’s mine. At least I can say I’ve been doing it for as long as Dan: nine years running (proof: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024). As usual, this is more of a...

Dec 31, 2025•11

The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, wrapup and publishing announcement

My essay series The Techno-Humanist Manifesto concluded in October. You can read the whole thing here. “Techno-humanism” is my philosophy of progress, and THM is my statement of it. It consolidates and restates material I’ve used in previous essays and talks, in a more unified and coherent form. Still, even...

Dec 29, 2025•12

Progress links and short notes, 2025-12-19

The links digest is back, baby! I got so busy writing The Techno-Humanist Manifesto this year that after May I stopped doing the links digest and my monthly reading updates. I’m bringing them back now (although we’ll see what frequency I can keep up). This one covers the last two...

Dec 19, 2025•8

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