Going back to the violence issue, I am thinking if we can understand why violence has been declining we can also understand what is truly effective in bettering the human condition. I believe the reason is technological advancement. Does anyone have any good evidence to suggest other reasons?
It is often the case that technology increases with surprising inevitability, or at least regularity- Moore’s law is the famous example. Another amusing story has American researchers predicting the timing of the first orbital satellite based on nothing more than extrapolated trends in maximum rocket velocity. They dismissed the prediction, because they didn’t think their research project was on track. But sure enough, the first satellite was launched just on time- by the Russians.
Multiple discovery is another interesting phenomenon, in which a previously un-thought idea is simultaneously discovered by multiple people, often without any direct contact between them. It seems that there are a number of technological advancements that are simply ‘adjacent’, and are extremely likely to be discovered given some current civilization state.
There’s an implication here that the categories of ‘social forces’ and ‘technological advancement’ are not always carving reality at the joints. Moore’s law depend[s|ed] to at least some degree on the economic forces incentivizing chip innovation. Social policies can and will influence those incentives- and contrariwise, a single individual choosing to enter such a saturated field of research is unlikely to cause any kind of inflection point. Similarly, the ‘adjacent ideas’ are likely to be discovered with or without any given person’s input, but may be neglected if social forces empty out a discipline entirely or change its governing ethos.
None of this implies that a conscientious, intelligent person or group couldn’t individually make a world-changing technological discovery. But at a minimum, we can say tech is embedded in a network of economic and social forces, and that it has inputs from that network as well as outputs to it. I agree that it’s an extremely good choice if you’re looking for a career that will create a more awesome world, and if you have the aptitude for it. But public opinion and crime rates are not simple epiphenomena of the underlying technological infrastructure. Someone with great skill in social influence can set up virtuous or catastrophic cycles within the broader pattern of civilization- although perhaps with fewer degrees of freedom, since social problems are really hard.
Another amusing story has American researchers predicting the timing of the first orbital satellite based on nothing more than extrapolated trends in maximum rocket velocity. They dismissed the prediction, because they didn’t think their research project was on track. But sure enough, the first satellite was launched just on time- by the Russians.
There was an article published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact around 1960 (after Sputnik, of course) which basically did this. The graph would lead you to conclude that we’d achieve faster than light travel before the year 2000.
Dismissing predictions like the one you describe was perfectly legitimate, even if it turns out to be wrong. Things that increase on a sigmoid growth curve will increase faster up to a point where they slow down again, and the predictor had no reason to assert that the curve would stay steep for long enough to get a satellite launched, any more than the Analog writer had a reason to assert that it would stay steep for long enough to get FTL.
It is often the case that technology increases with surprising inevitability, or at least regularity- Moore’s law is the famous example. Another amusing story has American researchers predicting the timing of the first orbital satellite based on nothing more than extrapolated trends in maximum rocket velocity. They dismissed the prediction, because they didn’t think their research project was on track. But sure enough, the first satellite was launched just on time- by the Russians.
Multiple discovery is another interesting phenomenon, in which a previously un-thought idea is simultaneously discovered by multiple people, often without any direct contact between them. It seems that there are a number of technological advancements that are simply ‘adjacent’, and are extremely likely to be discovered given some current civilization state.
There’s an implication here that the categories of ‘social forces’ and ‘technological advancement’ are not always carving reality at the joints. Moore’s law depend[s|ed] to at least some degree on the economic forces incentivizing chip innovation. Social policies can and will influence those incentives- and contrariwise, a single individual choosing to enter such a saturated field of research is unlikely to cause any kind of inflection point. Similarly, the ‘adjacent ideas’ are likely to be discovered with or without any given person’s input, but may be neglected if social forces empty out a discipline entirely or change its governing ethos.
None of this implies that a conscientious, intelligent person or group couldn’t individually make a world-changing technological discovery. But at a minimum, we can say tech is embedded in a network of economic and social forces, and that it has inputs from that network as well as outputs to it. I agree that it’s an extremely good choice if you’re looking for a career that will create a more awesome world, and if you have the aptitude for it. But public opinion and crime rates are not simple epiphenomena of the underlying technological infrastructure. Someone with great skill in social influence can set up virtuous or catastrophic cycles within the broader pattern of civilization- although perhaps with fewer degrees of freedom, since social problems are really hard.
There was an article published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact around 1960 (after Sputnik, of course) which basically did this. The graph would lead you to conclude that we’d achieve faster than light travel before the year 2000.
Dismissing predictions like the one you describe was perfectly legitimate, even if it turns out to be wrong. Things that increase on a sigmoid growth curve will increase faster up to a point where they slow down again, and the predictor had no reason to assert that the curve would stay steep for long enough to get a satellite launched, any more than the Analog writer had a reason to assert that it would stay steep for long enough to get FTL.