Dwarkesh PodcastJason Crawford - The Roots of Progress & the History of Technology
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
95 min read · 18,866 words- 0:00 – 4:10
Introduction
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Okay. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Jason Crawford. Uh, he's a former tech s- uh, 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, um, and he's filled the gap, at least in my education and I suspect many others', of, um, the history of progress and its consequences and the lessons we can learn from it. So, uh, Jason, it's very nice to talk to you.
- JCJason Crawford
Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Of course. And, uh, c- can you just tell us, before we get into the weeds, what you're doing at The Roots of Progress?
- JCJason Crawford
Yeah, sure. Uh, I write about the history of technology and the philosophy of progress. So, uh, The Roots of Progress looks at how did... over the last, you know, couple of hundred years, how did we create this amazing, uh, world, uh, around us and this really wonderful incredible standard of living that we now enjoy that is, uh, you know, so much b- life is just so much better in so many ways, in almost every way than it was about, uh, 200, 250 years ago, uh, or so. Uh, really even than if you compare to 100 years ago or 50 years ago. Um, things just keep getting better, and this phenomenon is unprecedented in history. For thousands, tens of thousands of years, as far back as you wanna go really, there was, uh, there was very little, uh, improvement in the standard of living, the way people lived, in life expectancy, in health, in, uh, you know, our ability to get around. I mean, for so many years, we were limited to the speed of horses and, and sail on the wind. And, uh, and then the last couple hundred years, all of that changed, and it was just, it was just 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? Like, why did it take so long? What were the root causes, uh, that suddenly, you know, caused things to take off an- and for life to improve? And, uh, you know, how do we keep it going? Um, and how do we make sure that it doesn't sort of accidentally slow down or stop or even reverse? Those are the questions I'm concerned with.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
So, let me offer a different interpretation of what you might be up to, 'cause you say you're studying why progress has been so overwhelming, but may- maybe a different way to look at it is, why, while 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. Uh, you mentioned the speed of travel, but we're still, uh, flying at the speed of the 747 which was invented in the 1970s.
- JCJason Crawford
It's true. That was not my original motivation. Um, and I think if you step back, you know, if you... I think that's a... it's a, it's an important question, an important thing to look at. Uh, it's something that honestly I was a little skeptical about when I first heard it and have since, you know, warmed up to it. I mean, I think the numbers are there, and I, I, uh, I see the, uh, you know, where this stagnation hypothesis comes from. I do think it's an important thing to look into. Uh, but I also think... but I... but it wasn't the original motivation for me. I really, uh, got into it looking at the last 200 or so years and s- and, and contrasting those with the thousands of years before, and, uh, that was what I wanted to understand and figure out. And... but I think they're really the same thing, um, or, or I mean, they're... you know, they're, they're just very much along the same lines, right? They're, they're both wanting to understand what are the root causes of progress, how do we keep it going. The stagnation hypothesis is just g- I would say just gives it a little bit of extra urgency because it says, "Hey, we might not... you know, hey, look, this thing is... this, 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, uh, whether or not it could be sped up in the future and sort of what are the range of possible futures? How much might it slow down? How much mi- could it be sped up? Um, and how much control do we have over this, and what are the control knobs or, or levers, right? Those are the most important things. If it was a natural slowdown in the last 50 years or if it was a... if it was caused by something we did or failed to do in the last 50 years, like that's good to know, but only so that we can, uh, cr- you know, so that we can shape the future. That's really what it's all about.
- 4:10 – 11:11
Progress is not automatic
- JCJason Crawford
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm. Uh, I, o- o- I'm curious what you mean by a natural slowdown, but before we get to that, um, one of the m- main insights from many of your blog posts is that progress begets progress. But if that's true, how can a, a era of great progress which has been with us, uh, forgetting the last 50 years, before that for the last 200 years, how can that progress lead to less progress?
- JCJason Crawford
Yeah. Um, I mean, one thing to keep in mind is, even if progress has slowed down the last 50 years - let's just say it has - uh, it's still a lot faster than, you know, the thousands of years before the Industrial Age, right? So, progress has not stopped, uh, by any means, right? It's not, but, um... but maybe it is as you say, sort of underwhelming compared to what we had, uh, before. So you ask, how can this happen? Well, again, it gets back to, like, progress is not automatic. It requires... I mean, every, uh, you know, every new major discovery gives us a certain boost, and then the gains from that discovery level off over time. Um, I wrote a recent post about this at The Roots of Progress, uh, where I was talking about the different S curves. So every sort of individual technology, um, starts off in a period where it's relatively, uh, progress is relatively slow, uh, where just the basic inventions are sort of getting figured out. Then it hits, uh, maybe an inflection point where it starts really accelerating and taking off. Progress is very fast for a while, and then eventually kinda gets saturated. We've sort of done everything we can do with it. It's transformed the entire economy. Think about something like electricity, right? Um, 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. Um, you know, so telegraph is, is sort of like mid-1800s or 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 got power generators and, and everything, right? And then, you know, by the 1920s, '30s, '40s, things are starting to level off. It's like, what is there left to do with electricity? Well, we can keep expanding it out to rural areas where it's... where it doesn't exist yet, but like-You know, and today, electricity is not like a growth industry, right? It's sort of, it's a utility, it's a thing that's there, it's already totally integrated. Okay. So that's the, that's the S-curve, right? Starts off slow, um, has a fast ramp up then levels off. Um, you get a, uh, I mean, maybe, the technical term is more like a sigmoid, right? But it kinda looks like an S, stretched out S. Okay, so every individual technology or even broad technological areas go through something like that, right? Um, how then do we get, uh, uh, exponentially increasing progress over a very long period of time? Well, we do it by overlapping the S-Curves, right? As one area starts to kind of 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 and, and some other area is like ready to take off. Um, and so, you know, that could be chemistry, it could be, uh, computing and information, it could be biotech. You know, whatever, right? So, um, I think a, a question to, to look at is, um, uh, w- as we... So if you wanna s- ask, "Well, why, uh, has progress maybe been a bit underwhelming the last 50 years? Why was it not as amazing as the previous 50?" Um, you could look at, "Well, how many of these different S-curves do we have going on at once? And how fast were we finding new ones? And when one starts to level off, like, how ready are we jump to the next?" That is o- that is one place where I suspect you'll find, you know, some of the answers to this. Um, but there are a lot of other things as well. You can just look at, um... And these are all just hypotheses, now I don't have the answer by any means. Um, uh, but, you know, some hypotheses to look at. Um, uh, where has the talent been going? Uh, has there been as much talent, uh, you know, energized and motivated to go into, uh, tech- technological fields and to, to make progress on various fronts? Um, or, you know, I can certainly imagine with the, uh, for instance, the, uh... There's a number of... Okay, so there's a number of factors in the decades following World War II that, um, I think started to increase a certain strain of anti-technology and anti-progress kind of sentiment, uh, in the culture. Certainly in The US, I think, I think probably more broadly. Um, seeing the, I mean, really just the, you know, the horror of the atomic bomb, um, and at, as, as a really negative thing that could come out of progress, right? Um, the fears, uh, around nuclear power that kind of went along with that. The rise in general of the environmentalist movement, um, in the '60s and into the '70s, um, and just, uh, uh, you know, things like the oil shocks of the '70s. I think there were a number of things that sort of, um, came together, uh, and I just have to wonder... Now this is pure hypothesis, this is 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? Right?
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- JCJason Crawford
If people started to think that these were not forces for good in the world, like what did that do to the kind of like long-term talent motivation, um, and, and the recruiting of talent into those fields? Um, that is a hypothesis that I would like to explore. Um, some other things are, well, what did those, what did all of this do to the regulatory layer? Right? Uh, have we... And again, this is more of a hypothesis with just a little bit of, of data behind it. This isn't, this isn't a theory I'm putting forward, but it, but I think it's something to look into, is how... You know, have we, uh, had sort of creeping regulation or sort of creeping bureaucracy, um, at the legal level, but actually not only at the legal level, um, also at sort of the level of the way corporate bureaucracies work and the way university bureaucracy works and so forth. Um, have all of our institutions kind of evolved and accumulated a set of bureaucratic rules that have the, uh, you know, have the effect of essentially adding overhead and friction to the, the creative and innovative process? Has all of that been slowed down? And is that a good thing? I mean, some, you know, these rules were added for a reason, many of them were added for safety reasons, uh, right? Um, disasters happen, shocks happen, we see bad things happen and then we say, "Well, we should've had a rule in place that would prevent this." That is fundamentally a, a good and rational response, right? It's good to do root cause analysis when things go wrong. It's good to put, to improve systems to make them more robust, to put things, uh, you know, safety mechanisms in place. But have we, you know, eh, eh, did we actually evaluate the cost of, of each one of those? Were we even able to evaluate the cost, uh, and, you know, what is the sort of the cost benefit of each one individually? And what's the cost benefit when we add all of them up together, right? Have we sort of unwittingly traded, say, a progress, a, away to get safety, and was that a good trade? Did we go a little too far? I think that's kind of another, um, you know, another thing to look at.
- 11:11 – 13:48
Lessons from other movements
- JCJason Crawford
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm. Yeah, I, I, uh, one of my favorite posts you wrote was, uh, The Progress Studies and Civic Duty where you pointed out that we're in a bad place to even make that determination because so, so few of us are actually educated on, uh, the history of progress and, um, it, the, the huge consequence it's had. Um, so when you're trying to ingratiate progress studies into our institutions, our academic institutions, are, are there lessons to take from previous, um, intellectual movements? Like, how well critical, um, critical theory, which was kind of like a novel thing in the '60s, no- how it dominates academic life now, or at least in many disciplines of academic life. I- i- do, have you taken lessons from how other movements have started in academia to see how progress studies might evolve?
- JCJason Crawford
I think there are many lessons, uh, from, from previous movements. I am not an expert in them, I've not studied those movements as much as I would like. Um, but like at a high level I think we can say a couple of things. Um, 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, uh, you know, on, on government, on our other institutions like, uh, you know, media and so forth. Um, I think those philosophic effects are very long-term. It takes, it seems to take decades for ideas to go from, uh, their originators, uh, often in academia or, or some other intellectual forum, you know, people writing books and manifestos. For that to get out into the world and have a big effect seems to take decades. Uh, and so I think if you are working on that kind of a thing, you should expect to be playing a very long game.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- JCJason Crawford
Uh, but I think the, you know, but I think we should take it very seriously that, like, ideas on this level do affect, uh, things. There's a great quote, I think it's from Keynes, about, um, you know, people... I for-... I'm not gonna be able to rattle it off, but it's something about how, you know, people, uh, uh, are in thrall to dead philosophers or, uh, or econ- defunct economists. I forget the term that he used, right? And that people think that they are quite unaffected by all of this stuff that goes on in, in, i- the intellectual sphere, but in fact, the world is moved by little else. And I think that's, I think that's true. So, um, you know, that doesn't say much about tactics, uh, or strategy exactly, but it, it does say that these movements are worth studying. And, um, uh, you know, whether, whether you believe they have had good or bad effects, uh, overall, whether you (laughs) believe the ideas, uh, are right or wrong, I think it is worth studying, um, how these movements, uh, are created and grow, because I do think they are powerful in the long term.
- 13:48 – 17:48
Progress Studies in academia
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm. Well, one of the reasons I think critical theory might have been successful is because, um, it was very analogous to Marxism, which was prevalent, um, at the time in academia. And so, it could just pick up on top of that and expand that paradigm. Is there an existing movement or an existing w- paradigm in academia that progress studies could pick up on and reinvigorate?
- JCJason Crawford
I don't know. N- not to my knowledge. I'm not in academia, and I never have been. So that's, um, that's not my area of expertise. My... Uh, I, I think it will need to be something new. Uh, not that there aren't already pl- uh, there's already and there has been plenty of good work in academia that I think can form the basis of some new movement. And, and certainly, I mean, as I have gone and, and, and investigated, I've found very interesting work, uh, uh, that's been done by, uh, you know, economic historians like Joel Mokyr. Um, I've enjoyed some of the work by Deirdre McCloskey, um, uh, some, uh, you know, newer, uh, um, uh, you know, writers and, uh, and academics, uh, such as, uh, at MIT Sloan, there's, uh, uh, there's Pierre Azoulay, um, Andrew Lo. Um, at Duke, there's Ashish Arora who wrote this really interesting paper last year about, uh, the changing structure of, uh, of American growth or economic growth, something like that. Um, and so, uh, there's a lot of people doing good work. Um, uh, you know, uh, Matt Clancy writes a Substack about the economics of innovation, he calls it. Um, and so, uh, you know, just some of these names. There's, there's a lot of people investigating things already that I think are very related to progress studies. It just hasn't, uh, you know, sort of gelled or unified around this theme yet. And that's what I think could be interesting. I mean, to my mind, uh, and again, I mean, I'm not an academic myself, but to my mind, progress studies is not really a new field per se. Uh, it's not supposed to be something separate from or that will replace or supplant history or economics or economic history or et cetera. Uh, but it is kind of a, you know, progress studies in my mind is more like a school of thought. It's a set of premises and values. Uh, it's a set of basic ideas about what is important, what matters, and what's worthy of study.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- JCJason Crawford
It's basically the conviction that, uh, progress is real and important, uh, that it has, you know, or can have tremendously good, uh, effects and impact on, on life, on humanity, on the world. And that therefore... Uh, a- and also, as I said, that it's not automatic or inevitable. And so that therefore, we should study it, we should pay attention to it, we should look at its root causes. We need to kind of protect and nurture it, really, and ultimately accelerate it. So that set of ideas conditions what history and economics you think is interesting and useful. It kinda conditions what questions you ask, what phenomena you find intriguing, uh, what data you're going to look at, and then ultimately, what, uh, conclusions you're going to draw, uh, in terms of what, what implications you're going to draw for action. From whatever you find about, you know, about the world, uh, there is going to be some sort of, uh, implication for action or policy or, or whatever. And I think all of those things are kind of conditioned by those basic, uh, uh, premises about the value of progress. So that, to, to my mind, that's what progress studies is. And I think there are already people in academia who have that, um, who have those basic set of, of ideas, and that's why they're looking into the things they're looking into. Um, and so, uh, you know, maybe it just needs, uh, uh, a little bit more... I don't know, it needs to just sort of gel as a school of thought or as a movement. There needs to be more of kind of identifying this, this set of, uh, set of ideas, um, r- you know, maybe rallying people around it, getting them all to talk to each other, uh, and so forth.
- 17:48 – 20:49
Progress Studies for Young Scholars
- JCJason Crawford
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm. And, uh, forgetting about academia for a second, you've also been, uh, eh- educating another group of students high... You've, you've been working with a group of high schoolers and developing curriculum for them and interviews, uh, for them, um, about progress. Uh, w- can you talk about what you're doing there? And why are you focused on high schoolers?
- JCJason Crawford
Yeah, certainly. So this summer, I created a, an online learning program in the history of technology. It's called Progress Studies for Young Scholars.And, uh, we ran it as a summer program, and it was successful enough that we're gonna be continuing the program now into the fall. It'll run as sort of, uh, an after-school program or homeschooling program. Uh, I did this as a, kind of a, a joint venture with a, a, a school, private school called Higher Ground Education. They're the largest operator of Montessori schools in the United States, and they also have a Montessori-inspired high school brand called The Academy of Thought and Industry, uh, or ATI. And it's ATI that is now running, uh, this course as part of their online, uh, or virtual offerings. Uh, uh, they reached out to me, actually, to do it. Uh, it's run by some folks I've known for a very long time and have deep respect for. Uh, really, we'd been looking for an excuse to work together ever since I went full-time on Progress about nine months ago, and, uh, when they suggested that we do this over the summer, I just jumped at the chance. I thought it was a great idea. Um, I think that, uh, you know, this, the history of progress is a neglected topic in education. It is underrepresented in, uh, in history class, and, uh, it's really something where I think we're graduating students from, from high school and from, and from university who just kinda take progress for granted, and take the modern world for granted, take industrial civilization, and, uh, you know, don't have a vivid, uh, uh, appreciation of how far we've really come in recent decades and, and the last couple of centuries, and how important that is, uh, to the world. And I think that's something that every citizen, you know, kind of needs, especially when you, when you see how many of our debates today are about industrial policy, uh, you know, h- how much issues surrounding industrial civilization and the way it works are hot topics in, you know, ideological topics, political topics. I think that anybody to be a really informed and responsible citizen kinda needs to know the basics of, of how our world works. How is it that your standard of living is delivered to you? Um, what makes your refrigerator run? You know, what, uh, what makes it so that you can have fresh fruit and milk available in there every day? Um, what is it that allows you to get to work, uh, in a car or on a train or, or a bus or however you get there? Um, right? What is it that powers the, the elevator that takes you up to the, you know, 37th floor and, uh, and where did those plate glass windows come from that you're looking out of all day? Uh, et cetera. You know, uh, just, people take all these things for granted, and they really need to know at least the basics of, of where does this come from, so that when they're talking about policy, you know, they're not inadvertently proposing things that would, uh, you know, that would seriously degrade quality of living for, for, really, people around the world.
- 20:49 – 22:31
Understudied Innovation
- JCJason Crawford
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I, I'm 19, so th- I'm close to the, uh, uh, ideal audience for that kind of stuff. Um, but, uh, w- when you talk about how understudied innovation is, and not just underst- it's not just that people don't know about it, but it's just that, like, nobody's actually... Or maybe I'm wrong here, but, like, people have described it as progress is something that we haven't e- explored as much as we should've. Um, how is it possible that one of the most basic facts about our life and our civilization h- has just been kind of ignored or put under curtains? Is it, is it some sort of bias? Is it some sort of incentive in our institutions? There must be something going wrong here, right?
- JCJason Crawford
Yeah. I mean, uh, so I, I return to my point that progress is not automatic or inevitable, and that includes, you know, progress in understanding progress. (laughs) Uh, so, you know, uh, a, creating a field of study is not automatic or inevitable. It requires, uh, choice and effort. It requires people to decide that it's worth doing, and, you know, where does that come from, right? Um, a- again, 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. Um, people have been asking, you know, interesting questions about progress for a long time. I just think that it's... I- it just needs even more. It needs more attention, uh, and more care. It needs to be more of a focus for more people. I think that's what... So, uh, you know, about a year ago, uh, Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison coined the term progress studies in an article they published in The Atlantic, uh, that ran under the headline, something like, We Need a New Science of Progress. And this is essentially what they said. You know, 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
- 22:31 – 23:47
Why Progress Slowed
- JCJason Crawford
done.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm. But, but in order to widely publicize this knowledge, um, eh, there must already exist or it's necessary to create an explanation of why it has been, um, so closely held for so long, right? I- is there such an explanation?
- JCJason Crawford
I mean, I think that goes along with some of my hypotheses about why, you know, why stagnation and why has progress slowed in the last number of years, right? Like, some of it is going to, well, you know, how much do we appreciate progress? If people stopped appreciating progress so much or started to feel that it was maybe an ambivalent thing, you know, started to feel ambivalent about it, right, or started to, uh, feel that it wasn't, uh, such a good, uh, you know, that, as, as people thought it was, uh, for a long time, then, you know, not only would you get people, 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, and, you know, asking questions about it, and you get more people, uh, you know, maybe focusing on, uh, the negatives and the downsides. And so, uh, you know, I mean, that's my hunch about what happened. Again, I just, I don't have the full answer for you.
- 23:47 – 25:37
Scientific Technological Moral
- JCJason Crawford
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm. Uh, you, you split progress up into three different areas, scientific, technological, and moral, roughly speaking. Um-
- JCJason Crawford
Roughly.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
... before, I, I wanna talk about how science and tech, uh, relate. But before that, does moral progress increase technological progress? Does technological progress increase moral progress? What's the relationship between them?
- JCJason Crawford
Yeah. I think all three are intertwined and cannot, in the end, be fully separated.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- JCJason Crawford
Um, I, I... And when I say moral, I think a lot in there is sort of about society and government. Um, I think absolutely the, uh, the evolution of... Uh, I mean, I think it's...It's not a coincidence that we kind of had three revolutions that all happened around the same time, roughly speaking, in history.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- JCJason Crawford
We had the Scientific Revolution, we had the Industrial Revolution, and then we had, you know, something that there actually isn't a good name for, but kind of the, um, the revolution of democratic republics, right? Of, uh, in, in 1700s, uh, you know, pretty much the entire world was under monarchy and by today, you know, a, a, a large part of the world is under sort of constitutional republics with democratically-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- JCJason Crawford
... elected representatives. Um, monarchy is mostly a thing of the past. Um, and so, uh, I, I, I think it's not a coincidence that those three things happened together. Now, um, I don't... I haven't traced all of the, the patterns of the, the interconnections between them, um, but, uh, you know, both Joel McKier and Deirdre McCloskey point to, for instance, the, the dissolving of the guild system as something that was, you know, very important for new businesses to be able to be created, new technologies to be able to be adopted, uh, uh, and so forth. Um, so-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- JCJason Crawford
... yeah, I do think there are, are absolutely, um, you know, uh, linkages and interconnections between all three of those in, in pretty much all directions.
- 25:37 – 26:37
Progress in Politics
- JCJason Crawford
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm. Do you see progress in our political institutions in the US? Uh, it's... Given the same, uh, level of technology, um, I- I- I'm not sure that the 1950s government would have been worse at handling coronavirus than we are today.
- JCJason Crawford
Yeah. Um, I think that progress in, uh, morality, society, and government is the... Like, that's 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, uh, in some dimensions and some areas. Um, uh, you know, I mean, cer- I mean, just look at... You know, if you wanna go back to the 1950s, just look at the Civil Rights movement-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah, right.
- JCJason Crawford
... right, which has happened in between. Uh, so there's, uh, but I, I don't think that there's been progress in every dimension or, you know, everything that you would look at or measure. It's, it's much murkier, it's much messier. It feels more like two steps forward, one step back, and sometimes, you know, two steps or three steps back. So, it's, it's harder to tell.
- 26:37 – 34:53
The Linear Model
- JCJason Crawford
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm. Uh, uh, let's talk about science and tech. So, uh, uh, do you subscribe to the linear, uh, model of innovation, which is like science, uh, basic research and science leads to, uh, technological innovation?
- JCJason Crawford
I think the linear model has some truth to it and is also oversimplified. Um, that is probably not a controversial statement at all. I think most people would sort of agree with that. Like, the linear model is broadly used for analytical purposes, but pretty much everybody agrees that it doesn't really exactly work that way. Um, uh, so here is the, uh... Here's the caricature of the linear model that, that stresses the way that it is oversimplified, right? It goes like this. Uh, we have science. Science is, uh, pure basic research that is done by, uh, scientists, you know, driven by the pure curiosity of the intellect, um, completely 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, you know, taught to the engineers and the inventors who apply them to create new inventions, um, uh, which are... The, the inventions are direct deductive applications of, you know, new scientific laws that have been discovered. And then what these inventions, uh, can get turned into businesses which then distribute, you know, the benefits, uh, broadly. This is... You know, I... So, I mean, that was, again, the just sort of deliberate caricature and oversimplification of kind of what the, the linear model is, right? So like what, what is some truth in that? Well, there, eh, 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, right? There's no way we would have, uh, electrical... you know, the entire electrical and electronics industry without an understanding of the physics of electromagnetism, uh, uh, on some basic level, right? There's no way we would even have semiconductors without some degree of quantum physics. There's no way, uh, that we would have modern medicine and antibiotics and, uh, diagnostics and so forth without an understanding of microbiology and biochemistry. Um, there's no way that we would have modern metallurgy without chemistry, et cetera, right? So, um, all... There's the, there, there's a clear technological foundation for all of these things. Um, and I think it is also true... So another grain of truth in the linear model is that it is impossible to see all of the ramifications and technical applications of science when we're doing it. Um, and for that reason, direct and immediate applications can... Should not, cannot be the kind of the gate or the, the absolute justification for new science. Like, we should be doing new science motivated and justified by nothing more than understanding the world and discovering, uh, more about how it works. Like, that alone is a sufficient justification for science. Understanding that in the long term through perhaps tortuous connections that we can never... Cannot see, and can, you know, now and can never predict in advance, it will be good, you know, for the world. Um, where I think the linear model can be oversimplified or, or that caricature is wrong is in a number of places. Uh, most tellingly is that new inventions often, uh, occur... Uh, they, they are often the result of...... tinkering and exploration at the frontiers of science, such that when the invention is created, w- nobody actually even fully understands why it works. Um, science ... So, uh, l- let's get concrete. So, uh, an e- an example of this that I also, uh, wrote an essay about recently, uh, uh, at Roots of Progress is the transistor. So the transistor was invented at Bell Labs by the Semiconductor Research Group. They are, uh ... Now science absolutely provided a foundation for that research in the sense that it had identified class of materials known as semiconductors. It had identified certain property, 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, they started with some of the initial attempts at the transistor, uh, they found that it was not operating according to (laughs) what theory would predict, and they had to go back to the drawing board and actually, uh, 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. And with new theory, they were able to go back and do new experiments, and the new experiments provided still more unexpected results, and then they went back to the theory again and refined the theory some more, and that allowed them to create, you know, even better versions of the transistor and so forth. So they actually, um, shuttled back and forth, uh, very quickly, eh, eh, you know, between science and invention, between discovery and engineering, and, uh, you know, this is not something that is at all elucidated by the linear model, right? The linear model doesn't tell you that this kind of thing happens, but it does happen. It happens all the time. Uh, if you look at, um, the steam engine, the classic, you know, central foundational, uh, invention of the Industrial Revolution, right? It's been said that the steam engine owes more to thermodynamics. Uh, sorry, thermodynamics, the science-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah, yeah.
- JCJason Crawford
... of thermodynamics owes more to the steam engine than vice versa, than the steam engine does to thermodynamics. This is because the steam engine was invented in the 1700s. Newcomen came up with his initial steam engine in 1712. Uh, uh, James Watt famously created a much, uh, improved version, a much more efficient version and, uh, patent in 1769. Thermodynamics doesn't really begin till, like, the early 1800s, right? Ste- uh, Carnot in, uh, 1824 kind of kicks it off. So, uh, what was going on there? Well, the sci- the steam engine did depend on previous science. It depended on the science of air pressure, uh, and the properties of the vacuum, which had been worked out in the 1600s. Um, and then, uh, you know, the, the, the tinkerers were able to, uh, you know, tinker and, and engineer. Um, James Watt actually rediscovered some principles of, uh, uh, the principle of latent heat that, uh, that, uh, Black, uh, had, had discovered in, in his, uh, science. And so, um, you know, sort of tinkering at the frontier of science, uh, he was able to come up with something that then ... science then could sort of come back and later, you know, fully explain what is this doing? Why does it have certain efficiency? How can we make it more efficient? Uh, uh, so this is another pattern that you see, by the way, is that, uh, and, uh, the initial invention comes before the science explains it, but then w- 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, "Well, we have this invention. Why does it work, and why does it have the efficiency or effectiveness that it does, and how can we make it more powerful and more efficient?" Um, and that's often what the science then comes along and does. It gives you ... It actually quantifies. It gives, uh, it gives new laws, maybe mathematical laws and equations that then allow us to optimize the invention for power, for efficiency, uh, you know, for reliability or safety or, or, or whatever. And so there's this interplay between science and technology. Um, I haven't even gotten into things like, of course, uh, science is sometimes gated on technology, especially technology of measuring instruments and, uh, you know, and observation, right?
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- JCJason Crawford
So we need the mi- ... We need to invent the microscope, invent better microscopes. We need to invent the thermometer and better thermometers. We need to invent, you know, all sorts of, of instruments and, uh, you know, ways of, uh, I mean, you know, pressure chambers and, um, you know, all the, the instruments we use in chemistry and, and so on and so forth. A- all of this is technology that enables science. So there's a lot of back and forth, um, in terms of, of the, the instruments, in terms of the motivation, in terms of ... You know, there's just a lot of cyc- ... There's, there's a lot of it that is very cyclical, um, uh, rather than linear, um-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- JCJason Crawford
...
- 34:53 – 36:03
The Utility of Splitting Up Science and Technology
- JCJason Crawford
in, in other words.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Uh, so then what's the utility of splitting up scientific and technological progress as you do? Because if, um, if, if science proceeds from the problem situation that the technology illuminates and it also requires the tools that innovation, uh, gives science, uh, ar- aren't we talking about the same thing there? What's the use of demarcating those two?
- JCJason Crawford
Well, I think that ... I mean, science and technology are distinct if inseparable. Um, they are different things, and they can be identified as such. And, uh, and I think it's worth splitting them up just for the purposes of study, right? I mean, w- there's all sorts of thing. I mean, this is ... In any area of study, there are things that are, you know, can't be completely separated, but they can be distinguished, and we split them up for the purposes of specialized study. I think that's just, you know, alway- ... I mean, you know, chem- physics and chemistry and biology, right? These things are not, uh, are not inseparable, and there are linkages between them, but we split them up and we specialize. I think that's, I think that's very natural. Um, uh, so, you know, but we need to recognize the connections between them and, uh, and recognize that those connections are not simple and they're certainly not linear.
- 36:03 – 41:30
The Risks of Progress
- JCJason Crawford
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm. Okay, now let me ask a question about, um, what, what ... a possible rebuttal to, uh, the sort of benefits of progress. Uh, progress and innovation increase, uh, interdependence because people have to specialize. That, that, you know, increases how well you can have technological innovation. And, um, as a result, not only is no place self-sufficient, but in fact, no- nobody has all the knowledge necessary to, like, make a pencil or a smartphone, and so it makes you more susceptible to black swan events like coronavirus. Uh, and in fact, so th- that's one of the downsides of progress, is that it makes your civilization more vulnerable to, um, bad events. How, how, how do you respond?
- JCJason Crawford
Yeah. Um, I think that is absolutely a risk. So, okay, so let me answer the specific point and then let me step back and make a broader question about how we frame this. Um, that specific point ... So first off, uh, there has never been a time in history, and maybe there never will be, when we are not susceptible to, uh, unforeseen, you know, catastrophic events.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- JCJason Crawford
There has also never been a time when we were not interdependent, really. I mean, uh, humans, to, to my knowledge, have always lived in tribes.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- JCJason Crawford
They've always been dependent on ... Uh, you know, have always been dependent on each other. That's just how we live. Um, there are no, there are no lone wolf, you know, humans. Or, or very, you know, few, uh, and rare. So, um, uh, so we've always been interdependent. Uh, you're right that we can set up systems that are set up for large shocks, and that is a risk, and 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 we made the progress that created the risk in the first place, through science, uh, through technology, through mathematics, through, in this case, an understanding of statistics. Ultimately, through applied intelligence, we can analyze systems, uh, uh, in terms of their vulnerability to shock, and we can figure out how to create slack, how to create buffers, how to ... We can, we can ... Through statistics, we can analyze, what do these shocks look like? What is the distribution? How often do they occur? Um, we can analyze complex systems and, and, uh, you know, and start to discover, uh, how they might be susceptible to this sort of thing, and then we can devise, uh, safety mechanisms. We can build resilience into the system, um, and I think that's fundamentally what we, what we should do. Uh, we can do this through, you know, all sorts of ways, right? We can do it through, uh, ha- n- avoiding single points of failure. We can do it through, uh, building, like I said, sort of buffers and slack into the system so that a ... You know, one little thing doesn't ripple all the way, you know, instantly, and, and send shocks through the entire system. There needs to be padding and buffers to absorb some of those shocks. Um, uh, you know, the discipline of engineering has figured out many ways to make such systems more resilient, and I think we probably need to apply more of that, you know, to the economy as a whole, um, certainly to the financial system, uh, uh, and so forth. Stepping back and, uh, looking at the way that we frame this, I think it is, um, it's a mistake to think about, quote unquote, "progress" as kind of this short-sighted, single-minded thing that only pursues, you know, kind of the undisciplined pursuit of just, like, more, bigger, faster, uh, you know, kind of in a, in a very greedy way. Safety and resilience and, uh, protection against shocks and, uh, you know, solidity and, and robustness of the system, those are goals that we can pursue just as we can pursue, uh, more food, more, uh, material goods, uh, more medicines, faster planes and cars, et cetera. Right? Um, all of these are just goals that we pursue through applied intelligence, through science and technology. What we need to do is, we need to 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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- JCJason Crawford
Um, we need to make sure that we have the right, uh, percentage of our effort and resources going against things like safety, going against things like resilience, right? Um, and, and we don't just devote all of it to, well, let's just do more, bigger, faster, better. Right? Um, but we wanna have that, uh, that's not because more, bigger, faster, better is wrong or bad, um, right? And, and the, and, uh, I guess ultimately the, the key point is, I think people see progress as just more, bigger, faster, better, and, and they see that, oh, this can have some downsides, and the answer, uh, that they come up with is essentially to compromise, to temper, to, oh, let's, let's slow down. Let's put on the brakes. Right? I think that's a mistake. I think the answer is not to just sort of slow down or to say that, oh, we're ambivalent about progress. It's to take a wider view of what progress means and can be, and it's to say, ah, um, the problem is, uh, an unwise portfolio allocation of resour- of, of, of what type of progress we are making. Let's reallocate so that we are making an appropriate amount of safety and resilience progress, uh, while we also make more, bigger, faster, better, you know, progress.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm.
- JCJason Crawford
Right? So it's a ... So it's a reallocation rather than a sort of slowing down or a compromise.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
But
- 41:30 – 48:32
Predicting the Future
- DPDwarkesh Patel
what if, uh ... When Tyler Cowen was on the podcast, he said he doesn't expect human civilization to last longer than 800 years, and he said this because he thinks that the risk of, um, demolition and destruction and those kinds of capacities, that kind of innovation happens faster than our capacity or, uh, the increase in our capacity to deal with that kind of, uh, shock potential. And, uh, so, uh, there's just, like, an asymmetry there in which thing is easier to do and innovates faster. Because, uh, you know, we have n- we've had nuclear weapons for more than 100 ... uh, uh, close to 100 years now, uh, but, you know, we have no way of, like, making sure that one can't be detonated in a populated area. And, you know, when a nuclear weapon costs $50,000, through further innovation, or, uh, engineering a pandemic costs that much money, uh, how much innovation can you really do to d- deter that kind of risk?
- JCJason 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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- JCJason Crawford
Right? Um, I don't think we're doomed, uh, and I think that is a, um ... I don't know. It's this unproductive attitude to take. I don't-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- JCJason Crawford
... know what the risk is. I don't wanna, you know, make a prediction about 800 years out. Nobody can actually predict 800 years out, and I don't think, uh ...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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- JCJason Crawford
Um, so another essay I wrote recently was, uh, on, uh, two types of optimism, and I called them-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- JCJason Crawford
... descriptive versus preprescriptive optimism. So descriptive awes- optimism is your prediction for what's gonna happen in the future and kind of what track are we on. Um, prescriptive optimism is your determination to, and your commitment to act to create a better future. So, um, you know, I am not always a descriptive optimist. I don't always think the world is definitely gonna get better. Um, I think it's on a good path in certain, uh, dimensions and it's on a bad path in other dimensions. And, um, I absolutely think that, uh, you know, really bad scenarios like, like Tyler's, you know, 800 years is, uh, are, are entirely possible. I don't wanna be a, a, uh, a Panglossian or a, or a Pollyanna or whatever, um, metaphor you wanna pick, uh, about, about that. But I am always and ever a, a prescriptive optimist. Like, no matter w- no matter how bad the odds are that w- we are facing, I, you know, I think there's a chance, uh, certainly from where we stand, to not have that outcome, uh, 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, you know, to prevent this?"
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah, I completely agree with you. I don't know, I think you just kind of pulled that number out of the air. And I don't know how it's meaningful to assign probabilities to events that depend on human action and future human knowledge, which, um, you know, as David Deutsch-
- JCJason Crawford
It's not really meaningful-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah, yeah.
- JCJason Crawford
... 800 years out, yeah.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah. Um, uh, and I love that blog post about, uh, prescriptive optimism. Uh, tell me if this interpretation of that blog post is correct. It's, it's a way to, like, synthesize sort of the infinite optimism of somebody like David Deutsch with, like, the tragic vision of Thomas Sowell, you know, who says, like, um, uh, "Systems go towards chaos unless we intrude on them or improve them and reform them," and that, um, "There's more ways to mess things up than there are to make them better, that human nature is flawed." But that, you know, things can get better. I- i- is it just, like, a way to unite these different visions?
- JCJason Crawford
Yeah, I think so. It's a way to, um... I mean, I struggled with this for a while before I came to this kind of, uh, division between the two types of optimism because I, you know, myself feel very optimistic in general. But at the same time, I could not... I, I, I also, uh, y- you know, when I, when I heard some very grim possibilities for the future, I could not prove that they were impossible. Uh, and I think it's important to take risks seriously. Um, so, you know, uh, the, the progress studies community, uh, I would say overlaps or is pretty adjacent to, um, the rationalist and effective altruist communities. And there's a lot of people in those communities who think a lot about existential risk. And they're very smart and they are, uh, you know, and they, and they think through issues very carefully. And so I think, like, you, you should take what they, you know, what they say and what they're worried about seriously. Um, and so, uh, you know, I don't... Uh, uh, a couple of months ago, I wrote, uh, an article about, uh, sort of coronavirus and what's the, you know, what is kind of the... if you, if you're a, if you're a pro-progress, if you have a pro-progress attitude, like, what is your, what is the attitude to take towards the COVID epidemic? And I started in on the article thinking that I would be writing something about how to... like, what does an optimistic take or how to stay optimistic. And I realized through the course of writing it that I- optimism was not exactly the right concept. Um, because we should be really facing the, you know, some of the worst po- realistic possibilities, uh, you know, outcomes and for the future. But at the same time, what I realized that I wanted to say was not, "Hey, every- everyone, it's gonna 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. And no matter what, like, there's nothing to do except to use our best efforts, uh, to, to create a better future." And so I think it's that, um, it's that fighting spirit that I want to communicate, right? I think in times... So when, when, w- uh... You know, in, in times when things are, are going well, you know, so if you c- if you combine descriptive optimism with prescriptive optimism, then I think the att- you know, the attitude that comes out of that is bold, ambitious, expansive plans for the future, right? Let's go colonize the, you know, the solar system and eventually the galaxy. Let's solve aging and, and, you know, create immortality. Let's create, you know, a b- material abundance for everybody and give everybody in the world the standard of living of that the richest people have today, and, you know, all these, these kinds of things. Let's... Right? When you combine prescriptive optimism with descriptive pessimism, which is sometimes completely rational and appropriate, I think what you get is this fighting spirit. This like, "No matter how bad the odds are, we're never gonna give up. Um, we are, we're gonna keep moving forward and we're gonna give our best efforts to, to solving this." And so I think, you know, whether you have descriptive or prescriptive optimism... uh, sorry, whether you have, uh, descriptive optimism or pessimism, whether you think that things are on a good track or a bad track, whether you, uh... uh, no matter how seriously, you know, you take the risks or how worried you are about them, and some of that honestly comes down to a personal, uh, you know, personality and, and temperament, uh, difference. I think we should always have prescriptive optimism. We should always just be trying to work as hard as we can towards the best possible future, no matter what that is.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Well, well, I think, uh, that's an excellent note to leave it on, uh, the, you know, prescriptive optimism. And, uh, thank you so much for being on. This was r- very fun and very-
- JCJason Crawford
Absolutely.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah. I learned a lot.
- JCJason Crawford
Thanks for having me. Yeah. Good questions.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah, yeah.
Episode duration: 48:38
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