--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Jason Crawford. He's a former tech startup founder, and now he writes at the Roots of Progress. He has these posts that are very well-researched and insightful about the history of technology and industry, and he's filled the gap, at least in my education, and I suspect many others, of the history of progress and its consequences and the lessons we can learn from it. So, Jason, it's very nice to talk to you.
--:-- Jason Crawford: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Of course. And can you just tell us before we get into the weeds, what you're doing at the Roots of Progress?
--:-- Jason Crawford: Yeah, sure. I write about the history of technology and the philosophy of progress. The Roots of Progress looks at how, over the last couple of hundred years, we created this amazing world around us and this really wonderful, incredible standard of living that we now enjoy. Life is just so much better in so many ways, in almost every way, than it was about 200 or 250 years ago. Even compared to 100 years ago, or 50 years ago, things just keep getting better.
--:-- This phenomenon is unprecedented in history. For thousands, tens of thousands of years, as far back as you want to go, there was very little improvement in the standard of living, the way people lived, life expectancy, health, our ability to get around. For so many years, we were limited to the speed of horses and sail, the wind. Then the last couple hundred years, all of that changed. It was absolutely unprecedented.
--:-- So how did that happen? What were the steps? What were the major inventions and discoveries? And then what can we learn from this? Why did it take so long? What were the root causes that suddenly caused things to take off and for life to improve? And how do we keep it going? How do we make sure that it doesn't accidentally slow down or stop or even reverse? Those are the questions I'm concerned with.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Let me offer a different interpretation of what you might be up to. You say you're studying why progress has been so overwhelming, but maybe a different way to look at it is why you're studying progress at this moment and why people like Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen are worried about it. It's not because progress has been so overwhelming recently, but in the last 50 years it's actually been underwhelming. You mentioned the speed of travel, but we're still flying at the speed of the 747, which was invented in the 1970s.
--:-- Jason Crawford: It's true. That was not my original motivation. I think if you step back, it's an important question, an important thing to look at. Honestly, I was a little skeptical about it when I first heard it and have since warmed up to it. I think the numbers are there, and I see where this stagnation hypothesis comes from. I do think it's an important thing to look into.
--:-- But it wasn't the original motivation for me. I really got into it looking at the last 200 or so years and contrasting those with the thousands of years before. That was what I wanted to understand and figure out. But I think they're really the same thing. They're very much along the same lines. They're both wanting to understand what are the root causes of progress and how do we keep it going.
--:-- The stagnation hypothesis just gives it a little bit of extra urgency because it says, hey, this progress thing is not automatic. It's not inevitable. It doesn't just keep going with its own momentum. It can slow down. Maybe it's running into friction. Let's take a look at that. But in my mind, whether or not it has slowed down in the past is actually even less important than whether or not it could be sped up in the future, what the range of possible futures are, how much might it slow down, how much could it be sped up, and how much control do we have over this? What are the control knobs or levers? Those are the most important things.
--:-- If it was a natural slowdown in the last 50 years, or if it was caused by something we did or failed to do, that's good to know, but only so that we can shape the future. That's really what it's all about.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I'm curious what you mean by a natural slowdown. But before we get to that, one of the main insights from many of your blog posts is that progress begets progress. But if that's true, how can an era of great progress, which has been with us for the last 200 years, how can that progress lead to less progress?
--:-- Jason Crawford: One thing to keep in mind is even if progress has slowed down the last 50 years, let's just say it has, it's still a lot faster than the thousands of years before the industrial age. Progress has not stopped by any means. But maybe it is, as you say, underwhelming compared to what we had before.
--:-- So you ask, how can this happen? It gets back to the fact that progress is not automatic. Every new major discovery gives us a certain boost, and then the gains from that discovery level off over time. I wrote a recent post about this at the Roots of Progress where I was talking about the different S-curves. Every individual technology starts off in a period where progress is relatively slow, where just the basic inventions are getting figured out. Then it hits an inflection point where it starts really accelerating and taking off. Progress is very fast for a while. Then eventually it gets saturated. We've done everything we can do with it. It's transformed the entire economy.
--:-- Think about something like electricity. For a long time, people were experimenting with electricity, tinkering with it, weren't sure what to do with it. Maybe it was affecting a few things like the telegraph in the mid 1800s, 1830s, 40s. Things really take off in the 1880s or so when we get the electric light bulbs and we start building out the grid and we have power generators and everything. Then by the 1920s, 30s, 40s, things are starting to level off. What is there left to do with electricity? We can keep expanding it out to rural areas where it doesn't exist yet. But today, electricity is not a growth industry. It's a utility. It's a thing that's there, already totally integrated.
--:-- So that's the S-curve. Starts off slow, has a faster ramp up, then levels off. Every individual technology or even broad technological areas go through something like that.
--:-- How then do we get exponentially increasing progress over a very long period of time? We do it by overlapping the S-curves. As one area starts to level off and get saturated and mature, we hopefully are finding some other area. In fact, hopefully we've already been tinkering in some other area that is ready to take off. That could be chemistry, it could be computing and information, it could be biotech, whatever.
--:-- I think a question to look at is, if you want to ask why progress has maybe been a bit underwhelming the last 50 years, why it was not as amazing as the previous 50, you could look at how many of these different S-curves do we have going on at once and how fast were we finding new ones. When one starts to level off, how ready are we to jump to the next? That is one place where I suspect you'll find some of the answers to this.
--:-- But there are a lot of other things as well. These are all just hypotheses. I don't have the answer by any means. But some hypotheses to look at: Where has the talent been going? Has there been as much talent energized and motivated to go into technological fields and to make progress on various fronts?
--:-- I can certainly imagine with the number of factors in the decades following World War II that I think started to increase a certain strain of anti-technology and anti-progress sentiment in the culture, certainly in the US, probably more broadly. Seeing the horror of the atomic bomb as a really negative thing that could come out of progress. The fears around nuclear power that went along with that. The rise of the environmentalist movement in the 60s and into the 70s. Things like the oil shocks of the 70s. I think there were a number of things that sort of came together.
--:-- I just have to wonder, and this is a pure hypothesis, a speculation, I don't have data behind this, but did this change the motivation of young people around that time to even go into science, technology, and industry? If people started to think that these were not forces for good in the world, what did that do to the long-term talent motivation and the recruiting of talent into those fields? That is a hypothesis I would like to explore.
--:-- Some other things are, what did all of this do to the regulatory layer? Again, this is more of a hypothesis with just a little bit of data behind it. This isn't a theory I'm putting forward, but I think it's something to look into. Have we had creeping regulation or creeping bureaucracy at the legal level, but also at the level of the way corporate bureaucracies work and the way university bureaucracy works? Have all of our institutions evolved and accumulated a set of bureaucratic rules that have the effect of adding overhead and friction to the creative and innovative process? Has all of that been slowed down?
--:-- And is that a good thing? These rules were added for a reason. Many of them were added for safety reasons. Disasters happen, shocks happen, we see bad things happen, and then we say, we should have had a rule in place that would prevent this. That is fundamentally a good and rational response. It's good to do root cause analysis when things go wrong. It's good to improve systems, to make them more robust, to put safety mechanisms in place.
--:-- But did we actually evaluate the cost of each one of those? Were we even able to evaluate the cost? What is the cost benefit of each one individually? And what's the cost benefit when we add all of them up together? Have we unwittingly traded progress away to get safety? Was that a good trade? Did we go a little too far? I think that's another thing to look at.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: One of my favorite posts you wrote was "The Progress Studies of Civic Duty," where you pointed out that we're in a bad place to even make that determination, because so few of us are actually educated on the history of progress and the huge consequence it's had. When you're trying to ingratiate progress studies into our institutions, our academic institutions, are there lessons to take from previous intellectual movements? Like how well critical theory, which was a novel thing in the 60s, how it dominates academic life now, or at least many disciplines of academic life. Have you taken lessons from how other movements have started in academia to see how progress studies might evolve?
--:-- Jason Crawford: I think there are many lessons from previous movements. I am not an expert in them. I have not studied those movements as much as I would like. But at a high level, I think we can say a couple of things.
--:-- One is that deep philosophical ideas do over the very long term have very powerful effects on intellectual life and ultimately on culture, on the broader world, on government, on our other institutions like media and so forth. Those philosophic effects are very long term. It seems to take decades for ideas to go from their originators, often in academia or some other intellectual form, people writing books and manifestos, for that to get out into the world and have a big effect. So if you are working on that kind of thing, you should expect to be playing a very long game.
--:-- But I think we should take it very seriously that ideas on this level do affect things. There's a great quote from Keynes about how people are enthralled to dead philosophers or defunct economists. People think that they are quite unaffected by all of this stuff that goes on in the intellectual sphere, but in fact, the world is moved by little else. I think that's true.
--:-- That doesn't say much about tactics or strategy exactly, but it does say that these movements are worth studying. Whether you believe they have had good or bad effects overall, whether you believe the ideas are right or wrong, I think it is worth studying how these movements are created and grow because I do think they are powerful in the long term.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: One of the reasons I think critical theory might've been successful is because it was very analogous to Marxism, which was prevalent at the time in academia. You could just pick up on top of that and expand that paradigm. Is there an existing movement or an existing paradigm in academia that progress studies could pick up on and reinvigorate?
--:-- Jason Crawford: I don't know. Not to my knowledge. I'm not in academia and I never have been, so that's not my area of expertise. I think it will need to be something new. Not that there isn't already plenty of good work in academia that I think can form the basis of some new movement.
--:-- As I have investigated, I found very interesting work done by economic historians like Joel Mokyr. I've enjoyed some of the work of Deirdre McCloskey. There are newer writers and academics, such as at MIT Sloan, there's Pierre Azoulay, Andrew Lo. At Duke, there's Ashish Arora with a really interesting paper last year about the changing structure of American economic growth. Matt Clancy writes a Substack about the economics of innovation. There's a lot of people investigating things already that I think are very related to progress studies. It just hasn't gelled or unified around this theme yet. That's what I think could be interesting.
--:-- To my mind, progress studies is not really a new field per se. It's not supposed to be something separate from or that will replace or supplant history or economics or economic history. It is more like a school of thought. It's a set of premises and values. It's a set of basic ideas about what is important, what matters, and what's worthy of study. It's basically the conviction that progress is real and important, that it can have tremendously good effects and impact on life, on humanity, on the world. And also, as I said, that it's not automatic or inevitable. Therefore, we should study it, we should pay attention to it, we should look at its root causes, we need to protect and nurture it, and ultimately accelerate it.
--:-- That set of ideas conditions what history and economics you think is interesting and useful. It conditions what questions you ask, what phenomena you find intriguing, what data you're going to look at, and then ultimately what conclusions you're going to draw in terms of what implications you're going to draw for action. There is going to be some sort of implication for action or policy. All of those things are conditioned by those basic premises about the value of progress.
--:-- That to my mind is what progress studies is. I think there are already people in academia who have that basic set of ideas, and that's why they're looking into the things they're looking into. Maybe it just needs to gel as a school of thought or as a movement. There needs to be more identifying the set of ideas, rallying people around it, getting them all to talk to each other.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Forgetting about academia for a second, you've also been educating another group of students. You've been working with a group of high schoolers and developing curriculum for them and interviews for them about progress. Can you talk about what you're doing there and why are you focused on high schoolers?
--:-- Jason Crawford: Certainly. This summer, I created an online learning program in the history of technology. It's called Progress Studies for Young Scholars. We ran it as a summer program, and it was successful enough that we're going to be continuing the program now into the fall. It'll run as an after-school program or homeschooling program.
--:-- I did this as a joint venture with a private school called Higher Ground Education. They're the largest operator of Montessori schools in the United States. They also have a Montessori-inspired high school brand called the Academy of Thought and Industry, or ATI. It's ATI that is now running this course as part of their online or virtual offerings. They reached out to me to do it. It's run by some folks I've known for a very long time and have deep respect for. We'd been looking for an excuse to work together ever since I went full-time on Progress about nine months ago. When they suggested that we do this over the summer, I jumped at the chance. I thought it was a great idea.
--:-- I think the history of progress is a neglected topic in education. It is underrepresented in history class. We're graduating students from high school and from university who just take progress for granted and take the modern world for granted, take industrial civilization. They don't have a vivid appreciation of how far we've really come in recent decades and in the last couple of centuries and how important that is to the world.
--:-- I think that's something that every citizen needs, especially when you see how many of our debates today are about industrial policy, how issues surrounding industrial civilization and the way it works are hot topics, ideological topics, political topics. I think anybody to be a really informed and responsible citizen needs to know the basics of how our world works. How is it that your standard of living is delivered to you? What makes your refrigerator run? What makes it so that you can have fresh fruit and milk available in there every day? What is it that allows you to get to work in a car or on a train or a bus? What is it that powers the elevator that takes you up to the 37th floor? Where did those plate glass windows come from that you're looking out of all day?
--:-- People take all these things for granted and they really need to know at least the basics of where this comes from. So when they're talking about policy, they're not inadvertently proposing things that would seriously degrade quality of living for people around the world.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I'm 19, so I'm close to the ideal audience for that kind of stuff. But when you talk about how understudied innovation is, and not just understudied, it's not just that people don't know about it, but it's that nobody's actually explored it as much as we should have. How is it possible that one of the most basic facts about our life and our civilization has just been ignored or put under curtains? Is it some sort of bias? Is it some sort of incentive in our institutions? There must be something going wrong here.
--:-- Jason Crawford: I return to my point that progress is not automatic or inevitable, and that includes progress in understanding progress. Creating a field of study is not automatic or inevitable. It requires choice and effort. It requires people to decide that it's worth doing.
--:-- It's not as if nobody has been asking these questions. Plenty of work has been done in the history of technology. There's lots of great stuff out there. People have been asking interesting questions about progress for a long time. I just think it needs even more attention and more care. It needs to be more of a focus for more people.
--:-- About a year ago, Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison coined the term "progress studies" in an article they published in the Atlantic that ran under the headline something like "We Need a New Science of Progress." This is essentially what they said. It's not that no work is being done in this field, but more should be done and more attention should be paid to the work that is being done.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: In order to widely publicize this knowledge, there must already exist, or it's necessary to create, an explanation of why it has been so closely held for so long. Is there such an explanation?
--:-- Jason Crawford: I think that goes along with some of my hypotheses about why stagnation has occurred, why progress has slowed in the last number of years. How much do we appreciate progress? If people stopped appreciating progress so much or started to feel that it was an ambivalent thing, started to feel that it wasn't such a good thing as people thought it was for a long time, then not only would you get fewer people going into fields that would push the frontier forward, but you'd also get fewer people in the humanities studying it and asking questions about it. You'd get more people focusing on the negatives and the downsides. That's my hunch about what happened. Again, I just don't have the full answer for you.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You split progress up into three different areas: scientific, technological, and moral, roughly speaking. I want to talk about how science and tech relate. But before that, does moral progress increase technological progress? Does technological progress increase moral progress? What's the relationship between them?
--:-- Jason Crawford: I think all three are intertwined and cannot, in the end, be fully separated. When I say moral, I think a lot about society and government. I think it's not a coincidence that we had three revolutions that all happened around the same time in history. We had the scientific revolution, we had the industrial revolution, and then we had something that there actually isn't a good name for, but the revolution of democratic republics. In the 1700s, pretty much the entire world was under monarchy. By today, a large part of the world is under constitutional republics with democratically elected representatives. Monarchy is mostly a thing of the past.
--:-- I think it's not a coincidence that those three things happen together. I haven't traced all of the patterns of the interconnections between them, but both Joel Mokyr and Deirdre McCloskey point to the dissolving of the guild system as something that was very important for new businesses to be able to be created, new technologies to be able to be adopted, and so forth. I do think there are absolutely linkages and interconnections between all three of those in pretty much all directions.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Do you see progress in our political institutions in the US? Given the same level of technology, I'm not sure that the 1950s government would have been worse at handling coronavirus than we are today.
--:-- Jason Crawford: I think that progress in morality, society, and government is the area where it is most difficult to clearly see progress and where I think the story is the most mixed. I do think there has certainly been progress in some dimensions and some areas. If you want to go back to the 1950s, just look at the civil rights movement, which has happened in between. But I don't think that there's been progress in every dimension or everything that you would look at or measure. It's much murkier. It's much messier. It feels more like two steps forward, one step back, and sometimes two steps or three steps back. So it's harder to tell.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Let's talk about science and tech. Do you subscribe to the linear model of innovation? That science, basic research in science leads to technological innovation.
--:-- Jason Crawford: I think the linear model has some truth to it and is also oversimplified. That is probably not a controversial statement at all. Most people would agree with that. The linear model is broadly used for analytical purposes, but pretty much everybody agrees that it doesn't really exactly work that way.
--:-- Here is the caricature of the linear model that stresses the way that it is oversimplified. It goes like this: We have science. Science is pure basic research that is done by scientists, driven by the pure curiosity of the intellect, with complete intellectual freedom to just follow their curiosity wherever it goes. All they care about is discovering basic principles of nature, laws of nature, and they have no thought of practical applications whatsoever. They pursue this in complete freedom and discover laws of nature. Then those laws are taught to the engineers and the inventors who apply them to create new inventions. The inventions are direct deductive applications of new scientific laws that have been discovered. Then these inventions can get turned into businesses, which then distribute the benefits broadly.
--:-- That was the deliberate caricature and oversimplification of what the linear model is. What is some truth in that? There is a deep truth that science absolutely provides a foundation for technology. It is impossible to imagine anything close to modern technology without a lot of, if not all of, modern science. There's no way we would have the entire electrical and electronics industry without an understanding of the physics of electromagnetism on some basic level. There's no way we would even have semiconductors without some degree of quantum physics. There's no way that we would have modern medicine and antibiotics and diagnostics without an understanding of microbiology and biochemistry. There's no way that we would have modern metallurgy without chemistry, et cetera.
--:-- Jason Crawford: So there's a clear technological foundation for all of these things. And I think it is also true — another grain of truth in the linear model — that it is impossible to see all of the ramifications and technical applications of science when we're doing it. For that reason, direct and immediate applications should not and cannot be the gate or the absolute justification for new science. We should be doing new science motivated and justified by nothing more than understanding the world and discovering more about how it works. That alone is a sufficient justification for science, understanding that in the long term, through perhaps torturous connections that we can never see and can never predict in advance, it will be good for the world.
--:-- Where I think the linear model can be oversimplified, or that caricature is wrong, is in a number of places. Most tellingly, new inventions often occur as the result of tinkering and exploration at the frontiers of science, such that when the invention is created, nobody actually even fully understands why it works. Let's get concrete. An example of this that I also wrote an essay about recently at Roots of Progress is the transistor.
--:-- The transistor was invented at Bell Labs by the Semiconductor Research Group. Science absolutely provided a foundation for that research in the sense that it had identified the class of materials known as semiconductors. It had identified certain electrical properties about them. It had certain theories about what they were and why they worked. But it didn't have all of the theory that they actually needed to create the transistor. When they started with some of the initial attempts, they found that it was not operating according to what theory would predict. They had to go back to the drawing board and actually refine the theory. They had to come up with new theory in semiconductor physics to explain what they were seeing in their attempts at invention. With new theory, they were able to go back and do new experiments. The new experiments provided still more unexpected results. Then they went back to the theory again and refined it some more. That allowed them to create even better versions of the transistor and so forth. So they actually shuttled back and forth very quickly between science and invention, between discovery and engineering. This is not something that is at all elucidated by the linear model. The linear model doesn't tell you that this kind of thing happens, but it does happen. It happens all the time.
--:-- If you look at the steam engine, the classic foundational invention of the industrial revolution, it's been said that the steam engine owes more to thermodynamics — sorry, the science of thermodynamics owes more to the steam engine than vice versa. This is because the steam engine was invented in the 1700s. Newcomen came up with his initial steam engine in 1712. James Watt famously created a much improved, much more efficient version, patented in 1769. Thermodynamics doesn't really begin until the early 1800s — Sadi Carnot in 1824 kind of kicks it off. So what was going on there? The steam engine did depend on previous science. It depended on the science of air pressure and the properties of the vacuum, which had been worked out in the 1600s. Then the tinkerers were able to tinker and engineer. James Watt actually rediscovered some principles of latent heat that Black had discovered in his science. So sort of tinkering at the frontier of science, he was able to come up with something that science then could later come back and fully explain: what is this doing? Why does it have certain efficiency? How can we make it more efficient?
--:-- This is another pattern you see: the initial invention comes before the science explains it, but then the science comes along, actually motivated in part by the invention. That's another thing the linear model doesn't tell you about. Science can be motivated by, "We have this invention. Why does it work? Why does it have the efficiency or effectiveness that it does, and how can we make it more powerful and more efficient?" That's often what the science then comes along and does. It quantifies, it gives new laws, maybe mathematical laws and equations, that then allow us to optimize the invention for power, for efficiency, for reliability or safety or whatever. So there's this interplay between science and technology.
--:-- I haven't even gotten into things like science sometimes being gated on technology, especially technology of measuring instruments and observation. We need to invent the microscope, invent better microscopes. We need to invent the thermometer and better thermometers. We need to invent all sorts of instruments — pressure chambers, all the instruments we use in chemistry, and so on and so forth. All of this is technology that enables science. So there's a lot of back and forth in terms of the instruments, in terms of the motivation. There's a lot of it that is very cyclical rather than linear.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So then what's the utility of splitting up scientific and technological progress as you do? Because if science proceeds from the problem situation that technology illuminates, and it also requires the tools that innovation gives science, aren't we talking about the same thing there? What's the use of demarcating those two?
--:-- Jason Crawford: Well, I think science and technology are distinct, if inseparable. They are different things, and they can be identified as such. I think it's worth splitting them up just for the purposes of study. In any area of study, there are things that can't be completely separated, but they can be distinguished and we split them up for the purposes of specialized study. Physics and chemistry and biology — these things are not inseparable and there are linkages between them, but we split them up and we specialize. I think that's very natural. But we need to recognize the connections between them, and recognize that those connections are not simple and they're certainly not linear.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Now let me ask a question about a possible rebuttal to the benefits of progress. Progress and innovation increase interdependence because people have to specialize. That increases how well you can have technological innovation. As a result, not only is no place self-sufficient, but nobody has all the knowledge necessary to make a pencil or a smartphone. This makes you more susceptible to black swan events like coronavirus. One of the downsides of progress is that it makes your civilization more vulnerable to bad events. How do you respond?
--:-- Jason Crawford: Yeah, I think that is absolutely a risk. Let me answer the specific point and then step back and make a broader question about how we frame this.
--:-- First off, there has never been a time in history, and maybe there never will be, when we are not susceptible to unforeseen catastrophic events. There's also never been a time when we were not interdependent. Humans have always lived in tribes. They've always been dependent on each other. That's just how we live. There are no lone wolf humans, or very few and rare.
--:-- You're right that we can set up systems that are vulnerable to large shocks, and that is a risk. It is a risk that we should become aware of. It is also a risk that we can tackle through the very same fundamental mechanisms that created the risk in the first place. Through science, through technology, through mathematics, through an understanding of statistics, ultimately through applied intelligence, we can analyze systems in terms of their vulnerability to shock. We can figure out how to create slack, how to create buffers. Through statistics, we can analyze what these shocks look like: what is the distribution? How often do they occur? We can analyze complex systems and start to discover how they might be susceptible to this sort of thing. Then we can devise safety mechanisms. We can build resilience into the system. I think that's fundamentally what we should do.
--:-- We can do this through all sorts of ways. We can do it through avoiding single points of failure. We can do it through building buffers and slack into the system so that one little thing doesn't ripple all the way instantly and send shocks through the entire system. There needs to be padding and buffers to absorb some of those shocks. The discipline of engineering has figured out many ways to make such systems more resilient. I think we probably need to apply more of that to the economy as a whole, certainly to the financial system and so forth.
--:-- Stepping back and looking at the way that we frame this, I think it's a mistake to think about progress as this short-sighted, single-minded thing that only pursues the undisciplined pursuit of more, bigger, faster in a very greedy way. Safety and resilience and protection against shocks and solidity and robustness of the system — those are goals that we can pursue just as we can pursue more food, more material goods, more medicines, faster planes and cars. All of these are just goals that we pursue through applied intelligence, through science and technology. What we need to do is be smart and wise about which goals we decide to pursue and about how we allocate our efforts and our resources among these different goals. We need to make sure that we have the right percentage of our effort and resources going against things like safety, against things like resilience. We don't just devote all of it to "let's just do more, bigger, faster, better." That's not because more, bigger, faster, better is wrong or bad.
--:-- Ultimately, the key point is: I think people see progress as just more bigger, faster, better, and they see that this can have some downsides. The answer they come up with is essentially to compromise, to temper, to slow down, to put on the brakes. I think that's a mistake. The answer is not to just slow down or to say we're ambivalent about progress. It's to take a wider view of what progress means and can be. It's to say, "The problem is an unwise portfolio allocation of what type of progress we are making. Let's reallocate so that we are making an appropriate amount of safety and resilience progress while we also make more bigger, faster, better progress." So it's a reallocation rather than a slowing down or a compromise.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But what if, when Tyler Cowen was on the podcast, he said he doesn't expect human civilization to last longer than 800 years. He said this because he thinks that the risk of demolition and destruction — that kind of innovation happens faster than our capacity or the increase in our capacity to deal with that kind of shock potential. There's an asymmetry in which thing is easier to do and innovates faster. We've had nuclear weapons for close to 100 years now, but we have no way of making sure that one can't be detonated in a populated area. When a nuclear weapon costs $50,000 through further innovation, or engineering a pandemic costs that much money, how much innovation can you really do to deter that kind of risk?
--:-- Jason Crawford: I don't know, but I don't think we should give up. I think that is a real risk. But I think that is exactly the kind of prophecy that should shock us into action to make sure that it does not come true. I don't think we're doomed. I think that is an unproductive attitude to take. I don't know what the risk is. I don't want to make a prediction about 800 years out. Nobody can actually predict 800 years out. I don't think there is much value in such predictions except to the extent that they guide our action and our resource allocation now.
--:-- Another essay I wrote recently was on two types of optimism: descriptive versus prescriptive optimism. Descriptive optimism is your prediction for what's going to happen in the future and what track we are on. Prescriptive optimism is your determination and your commitment to act to create a better future. I am not always a descriptive optimist. I don't always think the world is definitely going to get better. I think it's on a good path in certain dimensions and on a bad path in other dimensions. I absolutely think that really bad scenarios like Tyler's 800 years are entirely possible. I don't want to be a Panglossian or a Pollyanna about that. But I am always and ever a prescriptive optimist. No matter how bad the odds are we are facing, I think there's a chance from where we stand to not have that outcome come true. But it'll only happen if we face up to the reality and then ask ourselves, "What do we need to do to prevent this?"
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think you just kind of pulled that number out of the air. I don't know how it's meaningful to assign probabilities to events that depend on human action and future human knowledge. 800 years out. Yeah.
--:-- Jason Crawford: Yeah.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: And I love that blog post about prescriptive optimism. Tell me if this interpretation is correct. It's a way to synthesize the infinite optimism of somebody like David Deutsch with the tragic vision of Thomas Sowell, who says systems go towards chaos unless we intrude on them and improve them and reform them. That there are more ways to mess things up than to make them better, that human nature is flawed, but that things can get better. Is it just a way to unite these different visions?
--:-- Jason Crawford: Yeah, I think so. I struggled with this for a while before I came to this division between the two types of optimism. I myself feel very optimistic in general, but at the same time, when I heard some very grim possibilities for the future, I could not prove that they were impossible. I think it's important to take risks seriously. The progress studies community overlaps or is pretty adjacent to the rationalist and effective altruist communities. There are a lot of people in those communities who think a lot about existential risk, and they're very smart and they think through issues very carefully. So I think you take what they say and what they're worried about seriously.
--:-- A couple of months ago, I wrote an article about coronavirus and what is the attitude to take towards the COVID epidemic if you have a pro-progress attitude. I started the article thinking I would be writing something about how to stay optimistic. I realized through the course of writing it that optimism was not exactly the right concept. We should be really facing some of the worst realistic possibilities and outcomes for the future. But at the same time, what I wanted to say was not, "Hey everyone, it's going to be all right," which maybe it won't be. What I wanted to say was, "Don't give up. Keep fighting. There's always a chance. No matter what, there's nothing to do except to use our best efforts to create a better future." I think it's that fighting spirit that I want to communicate.
--:-- When things are going well, if you combine descriptive optimism with prescriptive optimism, the attitude that comes out is bold, ambitious, expansive plans for the future: let's go colonize the solar system and eventually the galaxy, let's solve aging and create immortality, let's create material abundance for everybody and give everybody in the world the standard of living that the richest people have today. When you combine prescriptive optimism with descriptive pessimism, which is sometimes completely rational and appropriate, I think what you get is this fighting spirit: no matter how bad the odds are, we're never going to give up. We're going to keep moving forward and give our best efforts to solving this.
--:-- Whether you have descriptive optimism or pessimism, whether you think things are on a good track or a bad track, no matter how seriously you take the risks or how worried you are about them — and some of that honestly comes down to personal personality and temperament — I think we should always have prescriptive optimism. We should always be trying to work as hard as we can towards the best possible future, no matter what.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Well, I think that's an excellent note to leave it on: prescriptive optimism. Thank you so much for being on. This was very fun.
--:-- Jason Crawford: Absolutely. Yeah, I learned a lot. Thanks for having me. Yeah, good questions.
