First, I think that the chain looks like this: science produces theories/concepts/explanations/recipes, then engineering takes them and makes practical products on that basis, and then people use these products. So if science stalls, the pipeline will be empty and, basically, there will be nothing much for engineering to do except polish the existing products.
Second, looking at history is a bit iffy at the moment—the reason is speed of progress. In our times (technological) progress is very very fast by historical standards. That makes it easy to notice if science dies. But that does not apply to, say, the Middle Ages when the progress was so slow it took many generations to produce an appreciable change. During one lifetime things (technologically) did not change much if at all.
Second, looking at history is a bit iffy at the moment—the reason is speed of progress. In our times (technological) progress is very very fast by historical standards. That makes it easy to notice if science dies. But that does not apply to, say, the Middle Ages when the progress was so slow it took many generations to produce an appreciable change. During one lifetime things (technologically) did not change much if at all.
If you are correct, then historical figures have an excuse for not noticing technological stagnation. But that has nothing to do with my exercise, that we look at history. We can look at change over centuries and are not limited to the perspective of a single lifetime. You give an excuse for Pliny’s error, although it doesn’t explain why he thought differently of science and engineering. But we can look at actual history and not just trust Pliny.
Maybe stagnation is invisible, but regress can be quite visible, if only because of the artifacts left behind. Anyone can tell that Giotto had invented a technique of perspective just by looking at his paintings. All the Italian painters of 1400 knew that their art had regressed. We know that they knew because so many of them made failed attempts at perspective, unlike those before Giotto.
Did we have periods of technological stagnation? Of course, there is a reason a period of European history is called the Dark Ages.
Did we have technology regress? Of course, see above (or e.g. a story of how British Navy lost the knowledge of scurvy in more recent times).
Can you see the stagnation “in real time”? Of course, if you are using the same tools and technologies that your grandfather used, it’s a pretty good sign of technological stagnation.
An interesting question might be “How quickly can you recognize that in your society science has stalled?”, but I think the answer got to be “It depends” and here the (recent) speed of progress is very relevant. What you notice is deviation from the baseline of expectations.
If it is so easy to tell the difference between progress and regress, why do people living today disagree on whether Roman engineering progressed or regressed from Greek engineering? about whether the Renaissance was a period of scientific progress or regress?
If people disagree about the past, they may well disagree about the future.
why do people living today disagree on whether Roman engineering progressed or regressed from Greek engineering?
Because our information about the engineering of those times is very incomplete. We can look at surviving artifacts, but the available engineering texts from that era are a very small random sample of their knowledge.
about whether the Renaissance was a period of scientific progress or regress?
I was not aware that this is a contested issue. Links?
they may well disagree about the future
The question of whether the science has stalled is a question about the present (and immediate past). If you want a prediction of whether science will stall in the future, that’s an entirely different thing.
I already gave you an example of Renaissance regress. Here is a longer essay. Added: Here is someone even more negative about the Renaissance, although I’m not sure where he expressed that opinion except in his book (one book; two titles).
The example of Giotto is an anecdote of art technique, not regression of engineering.
And I don’t think the essay claims actual regression (unless I missed it), it basically says that if you define Renaissance narrowly (1453-1564) then the intellectual achievements during that century are curiously lacking. As the author puts it, “everything came to a stop”, though he spends a lot of time looking at literature, art, and philosophy. The Black Death is mentioned as a likely contributing cause.
But so what? Technological progress is not a smooth process, it moves in fits and jerks. Besides, it’s multifaceted—some chunks of technology develop faster, some slower, some are stuck for a while in the same place, etc. Even if you are having problem figuring out whether a particular century deserves a “Progress” or a “Regress” label, why does it matter?
P.S. The little note saying (emphasis mine) “For an account of the history of ideas free of anti-medieval prejudice, see my...” at the bottom of the essay is not a good sign.
Sure, if numbers are close to zero, it can be hard to tell if they are positive or negative. But I claim that there is substantial disagreement. If metrics live in a high dimensional space, the judgement can be sensitive to choice of projection, but neither is that responsible for the disagreements.
P.S. The little note saying (emphasis mine) “For an account of the history of ideas free of anti-medieval prejudice, see my...” at the bottom of the essay is not a good sign.
You asked me to document a controversy. That quote is a good sign for your purpose. I happen to believe that the Franklin is correct and the conventional wisdom is incorrect, but that is another matter. I added a link to Hannan, who has an even more extreme view that I do not endorse.
True, I accept that. The reason I said that is not a good sign is because it indicates he has an axe to grind and might be more interested in proving his point than in figuring out what actually happened.
On the basis of a brief look at your links, it seems to me that the controversy is really about, ahem, status of different historical periods. The people you quote think that Renaissance is overvalued, overexposed, overestimated, etc. while the late Medieval period is ignored and vilified. That might well be so, I have no opinion on the topic, but it’s rather peripheral to your main topic of technological stagnation.
But I claim that there is substantial disagreement.
I suspect that a large part of that disagreement concerns what people are looking at. Once you give hard-edged definitions to the metrics you’re interested in, much of it will go away. But if everyone is handwaving and implicitly or explicitly defining things in the way most advantageous to them, there could be much ado about nothing.
But if we run with the abstraction that science is input to engineering (and engineering is description of production (processes)) then it could very well be that all the technological progress we see could result from a very long back-log created by earlier science for engineering to catch up to and it could very well be that science has stalled to produce results (at least those that can be used as input to engineering) without us noticing anything wrong just looking at new products. Could.
When you can reliably determine whether science has stalled then this argument isn’t relevant. Some might disagree on that. I point out that in absence of evidence of science stalling or not we can’t rely on current engineering output as a proxy. That’s all.
Probably engineering—it is mostly about creating a working “thing” and not about discovering new underlying principles. But the boundary between engineering and applied science can be very fuzzy and there are often feedback loops between the two.
AlphaGo is absolutely science (as well as engineering—all experimental science involves some engineering). It involves fundamentally new constructions...
The simple construction of using evolutionary learning to refine heuristics that were extracted from deep learning neural networks trained on expert data.
Two previously known and well understood components, put together in a new and novel way that expands our knowledge of what is possible. That is science.
Two previously known and well understood components, put together in a new and novel way that expands our knowledge of what is possible. That is science.
Interesting. I think that is pretty clearly engineering :-)
It’s not an either-or. Some reasonable working definitions: Science is a process by which we expand human knowledge. Engineering is using extant human knowledge to construct artifacts, sometimes repetitive, sometimes novel. Doing some mindless engineering task is not science. But doing something innovative and new makes available new knowledge, which if processed in the correct way is doing science. So you can do both.
You are basically saying that the creation of s’mores was science (“previously known and well understood components, put together in a new and novel way that expands our knowledge of what is possible”).
Does that interpretion suggest that the model of science first producing theories/concepts/explanations/recipes and engineering then using them is falsified?
It’s both. I think the distinction can be reasonably clean—science aims at understanding via explicitly modeling the process (not necessarily mathematically but often) and then testing the model. The process of building the LHC was engineering, the experiments themselves are part of science.
First, I think that the chain looks like this: science produces theories/concepts/explanations/recipes, then engineering takes them and makes practical products on that basis, and then people use these products. So if science stalls, the pipeline will be empty and, basically, there will be nothing much for engineering to do except polish the existing products.
Second, looking at history is a bit iffy at the moment—the reason is speed of progress. In our times (technological) progress is very very fast by historical standards. That makes it easy to notice if science dies. But that does not apply to, say, the Middle Ages when the progress was so slow it took many generations to produce an appreciable change. During one lifetime things (technologically) did not change much if at all.
If you are correct, then historical figures have an excuse for not noticing technological stagnation. But that has nothing to do with my exercise, that we look at history. We can look at change over centuries and are not limited to the perspective of a single lifetime. You give an excuse for Pliny’s error, although it doesn’t explain why he thought differently of science and engineering. But we can look at actual history and not just trust Pliny.
Maybe stagnation is invisible, but regress can be quite visible, if only because of the artifacts left behind. Anyone can tell that Giotto had invented a technique of perspective just by looking at his paintings. All the Italian painters of 1400 knew that their art had regressed. We know that they knew because so many of them made failed attempts at perspective, unlike those before Giotto.
I am not sure what are you driving towards.
Did we have periods of technological stagnation? Of course, there is a reason a period of European history is called the Dark Ages.
Did we have technology regress? Of course, see above (or e.g. a story of how British Navy lost the knowledge of scurvy in more recent times).
Can you see the stagnation “in real time”? Of course, if you are using the same tools and technologies that your grandfather used, it’s a pretty good sign of technological stagnation.
An interesting question might be “How quickly can you recognize that in your society science has stalled?”, but I think the answer got to be “It depends” and here the (recent) speed of progress is very relevant. What you notice is deviation from the baseline of expectations.
If it is so easy to tell the difference between progress and regress, why do people living today disagree on whether Roman engineering progressed or regressed from Greek engineering? about whether the Renaissance was a period of scientific progress or regress?
If people disagree about the past, they may well disagree about the future.
Because our information about the engineering of those times is very incomplete. We can look at surviving artifacts, but the available engineering texts from that era are a very small random sample of their knowledge.
I was not aware that this is a contested issue. Links?
The question of whether the science has stalled is a question about the present (and immediate past). If you want a prediction of whether science will stall in the future, that’s an entirely different thing.
I already gave you an example of Renaissance regress. Here is a longer essay.
Added: Here is someone even more negative about the Renaissance, although I’m not sure where he expressed that opinion except in his book (one book; two titles).
The example of Giotto is an anecdote of art technique, not regression of engineering.
And I don’t think the essay claims actual regression (unless I missed it), it basically says that if you define Renaissance narrowly (1453-1564) then the intellectual achievements during that century are curiously lacking. As the author puts it, “everything came to a stop”, though he spends a lot of time looking at literature, art, and philosophy. The Black Death is mentioned as a likely contributing cause.
But so what? Technological progress is not a smooth process, it moves in fits and jerks. Besides, it’s multifaceted—some chunks of technology develop faster, some slower, some are stuck for a while in the same place, etc. Even if you are having problem figuring out whether a particular century deserves a “Progress” or a “Regress” label, why does it matter?
P.S. The little note saying (emphasis mine) “For an account of the history of ideas free of anti-medieval prejudice, see my...” at the bottom of the essay is not a good sign.
Sure, if numbers are close to zero, it can be hard to tell if they are positive or negative. But I claim that there is substantial disagreement. If metrics live in a high dimensional space, the judgement can be sensitive to choice of projection, but neither is that responsible for the disagreements.
You asked me to document a controversy. That quote is a good sign for your purpose. I happen to believe that the Franklin is correct and the conventional wisdom is incorrect, but that is another matter. I added a link to Hannan, who has an even more extreme view that I do not endorse.
True, I accept that. The reason I said that is not a good sign is because it indicates he has an axe to grind and might be more interested in proving his point than in figuring out what actually happened.
On the basis of a brief look at your links, it seems to me that the controversy is really about, ahem, status of different historical periods. The people you quote think that Renaissance is overvalued, overexposed, overestimated, etc. while the late Medieval period is ignored and vilified. That might well be so, I have no opinion on the topic, but it’s rather peripheral to your main topic of technological stagnation.
I suspect that a large part of that disagreement concerns what people are looking at. Once you give hard-edged definitions to the metrics you’re interested in, much of it will go away. But if everyone is handwaving and implicitly or explicitly defining things in the way most advantageous to them, there could be much ado about nothing.
But if we run with the abstraction that science is input to engineering (and engineering is description of production (processes)) then it could very well be that all the technological progress we see could result from a very long back-log created by earlier science for engineering to catch up to and it could very well be that science has stalled to produce results (at least those that can be used as input to engineering) without us noticing anything wrong just looking at new products. Could.
Yes, and..? I am not sure what point are you making.
That we have only tentative evidence that science hasn’t stalled from engineering productiveness.
Why would you care about that when you can go and look at science directly, without trying to proxy it with engineering success?
When you can reliably determine whether science has stalled then this argument isn’t relevant. Some might disagree on that. I point out that in absence of evidence of science stalling or not we can’t rely on current engineering output as a proxy. That’s all.
Would you labels Google’s project of AlphaGo “science” or “engineering”?
Probably engineering—it is mostly about creating a working “thing” and not about discovering new underlying principles. But the boundary between engineering and applied science can be very fuzzy and there are often feedback loops between the two.
AlphaGo is absolutely science (as well as engineering—all experimental science involves some engineering). It involves fundamentally new constructions...
Like what?
The simple construction of using evolutionary learning to refine heuristics that were extracted from deep learning neural networks trained on expert data.
Two previously known and well understood components, put together in a new and novel way that expands our knowledge of what is possible. That is science.
Interesting. I think that is pretty clearly engineering :-)
Of course, this is all a matter of definitions.
It’s not an either-or. Some reasonable working definitions: Science is a process by which we expand human knowledge. Engineering is using extant human knowledge to construct artifacts, sometimes repetitive, sometimes novel. Doing some mindless engineering task is not science. But doing something innovative and new makes available new knowledge, which if processed in the correct way is doing science. So you can do both.
You are basically saying that the creation of s’mores was science (“previously known and well understood components, put together in a new and novel way that expands our knowledge of what is possible”).
My idea of science is more narrow.
The first person that created a s’more? Yes. Culinary science is a thing.
Both. AlphaGo is a major engineering achievement in itself, and a pretty significant step in the empirical science of reinforcement-learning systems.
Does that interpretion suggest that the model of science first producing
theories/concepts/explanations/recipesand engineering then using them is falsified?Not strictly. It could very well be that
there is parallelism (think technology graphs from games)
that science feeds of from intermediate technological results
Would you label the LHC “science” or “engineering”?
I think the science/engineering-distinction used by Douglas Knight and Lumifer provides no good model, so you have to ask them.
It’s both. I think the distinction can be reasonably clean—science aims at understanding via explicitly modeling the process (not necessarily mathematically but often) and then testing the model. The process of building the LHC was engineering, the experiments themselves are part of science.
The LHC is multiple things
a set of theoretical results describing what might happen under what physical circumstances
an application of said theory to a certain realizable sub-set of technological reality and the prediction of what happens then
an engineering effort to build a complex experimental apparatus
(and also a social process driving the people to do all this)