I skimmed the paper but I still can’t understand how von Foerster comes up with the notion that more people = faster technological growth. (Kurzgesagt use the same assumption in their video on “egostic altruism”, but they don’t explain where they got it from either.) Does someone know how that works?
If 1 in 1,000,000 people is an irrepressible genius and produces a technological invention, then we should see as many technological inventions as there are millions of people.
Alternatively, each person has some chance of making such an invention, and the more persons there are the more chances for invention(s) happening.
If the question is ‘what is the model of innovation that justifies the assumption’ then I don’t know, but I would guess some variant of the Great Men theory of history. We might model it as an IQ distribution.
Yes, my confusion was indeed about the underlying model of innovation. Intuitively is seems to me that progress on a particular research problem would be a function of how smart {the smartest person working on the problem} is, but then I guess if you have more smart people, you can attack more research problems at once, so I guess the model does make sense 🤔
I don’t think you need to subscribe to a “Great Men” theory to achieve the same result. All you need to assume is that the number of technological discoveries (or the rate of technological advance) is proportional to the size of the population. This would validate the notion whether 1 in a million is making a discovery or whether everyone makes a discovery.
I skimmed the paper but I still can’t understand how von Foerster comes up with the notion that more people = faster technological growth. (Kurzgesagt use the same assumption in their video on “egostic altruism”, but they don’t explain where they got it from either.) Does someone know how that works?
If 1 in 1,000,000 people is an irrepressible genius and produces a technological invention, then we should see as many technological inventions as there are millions of people.
Alternatively, each person has some chance of making such an invention, and the more persons there are the more chances for invention(s) happening.
If the question is ‘what is the model of innovation that justifies the assumption’ then I don’t know, but I would guess some variant of the Great Men theory of history. We might model it as an IQ distribution.
Yes, my confusion was indeed about the underlying model of innovation. Intuitively is seems to me that progress on a particular research problem would be a function of how smart {the smartest person working on the problem} is, but then I guess if you have more smart people, you can attack more research problems at once, so I guess the model does make sense 🤔
I don’t think you need to subscribe to a “Great Men” theory to achieve the same result. All you need to assume is that the number of technological discoveries (or the rate of technological advance) is proportional to the size of the population. This would validate the notion whether 1 in a million is making a discovery or whether everyone makes a discovery.