Really enjoyed this article. I get that you're trying to stay at a high level, but I think there are at least a couple of areas that could be explored further. First is in tech revolutions that had massive, society-wide impacts, thinking industrialization, electrification, computing, & networks. The second is the massive extent of engineering & application developments predicated on scientific breakthroughs. There's a parallel but in many ways different story about how medical/health sciences have developed vis a vis industrialization/elec/comp/networking.
This is great. Brings together a lot of research. I think a paper I read on the "Step and Wait Model" would also fit here.
I would like the S-curve to be a bit more defined - it's originally (diffusion of innovations) a population prevalence curve for an innovation in equipment or practice in the technologies that are being reproduced (still used, not obsolescent). There is a related 'phenotype performance' curve that is made up of increments of improvement from combination of innovations, but it seems to me that fitting an S-curve to that is not so obvious, although no doubt there are good examples. But niches and the qualities needed in equipment for them are conceptual handles and there are a lot of valid levels of description.
So what I got from this is that ideas and technology need space to have lots of sex in order to produce progress, so it's natural that intellectually prudish societies don't have much progress.
Just wanted to say that this is a great post. I might appreciate it more than others because it aligns with my intuitions, but I found the argumentation very compelling.
Relatedly: I always thought a good share of the progress study people were going in the wrong direction, with a very strong focus on the industrial revolution and a "make innovation great again" outlook. Although there some good things have come out of that thought approach, I feel they are looking for a silver bullet that is just not there (or at least, not where they are looking for it). Do you agree? Or I am misinterpreting you?
I think the culture of an institution matters much more than you give it credit. Entire societies have cultures that either cause or retard scientific progress. To me it is basically true China, India are basically paper mills, and US is also on it's way there. No intellectual output of any worth comes from these countries (even though they are far more populous), sometimes you find brilliant people but they would succeed anywhere. The country if anything kills intellectual growth. On the other hand if you witnessed Japan a few decades ago, they were a hotbed of Scientific Progress (Video Games, Robotics, Cameras) Though it seems everything went downhill after 1990s recession. Now even US builds better robots than Japan. I don't doubt your analysis, it is reasonable, in my opinion it is ignoring some of the most important factors that it has no predictive power. I predict Quantum Computing will go the way of Nano Technology, vapourware. The recent Quantum Supremacy articles are positively mendacious, while. At least Peter Shors original papers were honest but a bit too speculative. Self driving cars are easily more than 10+ years away. Andrew Ng recently admitted AI won't take away Radiologist jobs, we should be pretty close to an AI winter if even vision is not as good as it was marketed to be. GPT is a useless toy and is definitely not in any sense a path to AGI and if their internal stories are to be believed, OpenAI seems to be in a lot of turmoil. The thread is same, a larger focus on marketing (mendacity), lesser on doing. Gregory Perelman may have too exacting standards for even 25years ago, but 50 years ago he would have accepted Fields or whatever medal they gave him. The fact that Mathematics, the most rigorous science is facing mendacity is a bad sign. I do think mendacity in Academia has grown over the last century, though Maths is relatively more immune to it than other fields. Physics has suffered the most as demonstrated by Vladen Koltun (Stanford prof) gave a talk on CMU AI Seminar (available on youtube) basically indicating how metrics like H-Index are being gamed out of existence at the expense of science. He suggested new metrics but he has missed the deeper issues. I don't have a strong position on the Woit-Motl debate but I see more and more people coming around to the fact that String Theory is useless and a dead end. How did so much time get wasted in it (if true), it's almost like Nanotechnology. I highly recommend reading this article :
Really enjoyed this article. I get that you're trying to stay at a high level, but I think there are at least a couple of areas that could be explored further. First is in tech revolutions that had massive, society-wide impacts, thinking industrialization, electrification, computing, & networks. The second is the massive extent of engineering & application developments predicated on scientific breakthroughs. There's a parallel but in many ways different story about how medical/health sciences have developed vis a vis industrialization/elec/comp/networking.
This is great. Brings together a lot of research. I think a paper I read on the "Step and Wait Model" would also fit here.
I would like the S-curve to be a bit more defined - it's originally (diffusion of innovations) a population prevalence curve for an innovation in equipment or practice in the technologies that are being reproduced (still used, not obsolescent). There is a related 'phenotype performance' curve that is made up of increments of improvement from combination of innovations, but it seems to me that fitting an S-curve to that is not so obvious, although no doubt there are good examples. But niches and the qualities needed in equipment for them are conceptual handles and there are a lot of valid levels of description.
So what I got from this is that ideas and technology need space to have lots of sex in order to produce progress, so it's natural that intellectually prudish societies don't have much progress.
Just wanted to say that this is a great post. I might appreciate it more than others because it aligns with my intuitions, but I found the argumentation very compelling.
Relatedly: I always thought a good share of the progress study people were going in the wrong direction, with a very strong focus on the industrial revolution and a "make innovation great again" outlook. Although there some good things have come out of that thought approach, I feel they are looking for a silver bullet that is just not there (or at least, not where they are looking for it). Do you agree? Or I am misinterpreting you?
I think the culture of an institution matters much more than you give it credit. Entire societies have cultures that either cause or retard scientific progress. To me it is basically true China, India are basically paper mills, and US is also on it's way there. No intellectual output of any worth comes from these countries (even though they are far more populous), sometimes you find brilliant people but they would succeed anywhere. The country if anything kills intellectual growth. On the other hand if you witnessed Japan a few decades ago, they were a hotbed of Scientific Progress (Video Games, Robotics, Cameras) Though it seems everything went downhill after 1990s recession. Now even US builds better robots than Japan. I don't doubt your analysis, it is reasonable, in my opinion it is ignoring some of the most important factors that it has no predictive power. I predict Quantum Computing will go the way of Nano Technology, vapourware. The recent Quantum Supremacy articles are positively mendacious, while. At least Peter Shors original papers were honest but a bit too speculative. Self driving cars are easily more than 10+ years away. Andrew Ng recently admitted AI won't take away Radiologist jobs, we should be pretty close to an AI winter if even vision is not as good as it was marketed to be. GPT is a useless toy and is definitely not in any sense a path to AGI and if their internal stories are to be believed, OpenAI seems to be in a lot of turmoil. The thread is same, a larger focus on marketing (mendacity), lesser on doing. Gregory Perelman may have too exacting standards for even 25years ago, but 50 years ago he would have accepted Fields or whatever medal they gave him. The fact that Mathematics, the most rigorous science is facing mendacity is a bad sign. I do think mendacity in Academia has grown over the last century, though Maths is relatively more immune to it than other fields. Physics has suffered the most as demonstrated by Vladen Koltun (Stanford prof) gave a talk on CMU AI Seminar (available on youtube) basically indicating how metrics like H-Index are being gamed out of existence at the expense of science. He suggested new metrics but he has missed the deeper issues. I don't have a strong position on the Woit-Motl debate but I see more and more people coming around to the fact that String Theory is useless and a dead end. How did so much time get wasted in it (if true), it's almost like Nanotechnology. I highly recommend reading this article :
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/07/my-navrozov-moments/
The author in my opinion is basically right with the problem and the solution
FYI, Bacon isn't from the 1200's