The root cause of progress is precision in memetic transfer of information. In the past, knowledge was lost due to oral spread of information. Generations could inherit information from the past by telling the stories from the past, and we invented sacred canonical text to prevent too much informational loss in the most important domain of morals and cooperation, but we didn’t have reliable mechanisms to copy information from one generation to the next. First writing, then manual copying, then printing and ultimately, the atomization of symbolic representations of ideas (words, sentences) into moveable letters in a printing machine changed that. We were able to spread ideas reliably on a massive scale and preserve that information for generations, so each could iterate on each other in detail. Then the industrial revolution and boom, there’s your hockeystick.
That’s one important flywheel, but there are others. To paraphrase another comment I made here: If we lost all of our institutions, wealth, and infrastructure, except for our ability to precisely transfer information, growth would slow way down. So the only way to fully understand long-term growth is to understand all of these overlapping, interacting flywheels.
Absolute growth would slow down but relative growth would increase.
For example, if there’s only one working 30 foot sailboat in year zero, and next year there are 1000 such sailboats, that’s a 100000% growth rate. And there’s definitely more than enough people alive who could hand build such sailboat from wooden planks and easily built pre-industrial revolution tools.
But of course this assumes the preservation of memetic information.
Conversely if humanity lost its accumulated memetic information in this area and adjacent areas, but all equipment, tools, institutions, etc., were preserved, it would not be possible to build a single one within a year since it takes more than a year to relearn the process via trial-and-error.
Maybe if there was a fully automated factory that had a ‘make sailboat’ button then this would be possible. Though that just moves the need for accurate transfer of information from humans to the factory machines.
Either way you look at it, the ‘make sailboat’ knowledge would be by far the biggest determinant in growth rate of sailboat production post-catastrophe, at least for the first few years. Once the knowledge has been reacquired then growth rates will skyrocket compared to the world where only information has been preserved. This seems to indicate the biggest ‘flywheel’ would be time variant.
The root cause of progress is precision in memetic transfer of information. In the past, knowledge was lost due to oral spread of information. Generations could inherit information from the past by telling the stories from the past, and we invented sacred canonical text to prevent too much informational loss in the most important domain of morals and cooperation, but we didn’t have reliable mechanisms to copy information from one generation to the next. First writing, then manual copying, then printing and ultimately, the atomization of symbolic representations of ideas (words, sentences) into moveable letters in a printing machine changed that. We were able to spread ideas reliably on a massive scale and preserve that information for generations, so each could iterate on each other in detail. Then the industrial revolution and boom, there’s your hockeystick.
That’s one important flywheel, but there are others. To paraphrase another comment I made here: If we lost all of our institutions, wealth, and infrastructure, except for our ability to precisely transfer information, growth would slow way down. So the only way to fully understand long-term growth is to understand all of these overlapping, interacting flywheels.
Absolute growth would slow down but relative growth would increase.
For example, if there’s only one working 30 foot sailboat in year zero, and next year there are 1000 such sailboats, that’s a 100000% growth rate. And there’s definitely more than enough people alive who could hand build such sailboat from wooden planks and easily built pre-industrial revolution tools.
But of course this assumes the preservation of memetic information.
Conversely if humanity lost its accumulated memetic information in this area and adjacent areas, but all equipment, tools, institutions, etc., were preserved, it would not be possible to build a single one within a year since it takes more than a year to relearn the process via trial-and-error.
Maybe if there was a fully automated factory that had a ‘make sailboat’ button then this would be possible. Though that just moves the need for accurate transfer of information from humans to the factory machines.
Either way you look at it, the ‘make sailboat’ knowledge would be by far the biggest determinant in growth rate of sailboat production post-catastrophe, at least for the first few years. Once the knowledge has been reacquired then growth rates will skyrocket compared to the world where only information has been preserved. This seems to indicate the biggest ‘flywheel’ would be time variant.