Cool! I’ve read and enjoyed many of your most popular essays.
I’d like to see RoP investigate the role of unpaid work in human progress. I have the impression that many of the famous scientists and polymaths of the 19th century (and earlier) were wealthy, often via inheritance rather than entrepreneurship (correct me if I’m wrong). This implies that free time enabled their scientific hobbies which drove human knowledge forward. (Meanwhile, I’m an open-source developer who has put thousands of volunteer hours into free software that corporations would not normally produce.) So, among all the work our economy doesn’t reward, how much of it is important, and how can society arrange to do more important work of this sort?
In my opinion there is a particularly important underappreciated category of work that can be done to hasten progress, work that one of Scott Alexander’s old stories alludes to...
“Then you really could never advance past 700 years of knowledge.”
“You would have to be clever. We imagine each master writing down his knowledge in a book for the student who comes after, and each student reading it at a rate of ten times as quickly as the master discovered it. But what if there was a third person in between, an editor, who reads the book not to learn the contents, but to learn how to rewrite it better and more clearly? Someone whose job it is to figure out perfect analogies, clever shortcuts, new ways of graphing and diagramming the information involved. After he has processed the master’s notes, he redacts them into a textbook which can teach in only a twentieth the time it took the master to discover.”
Humans must spend a lot more time than necessary learning before they can advance any “state of the art” further than it has ever gone (this is especially true for the non-geniuses like myself, those of IQ 110 or 125 — these brains greatly outnumber the geniuses, so there is value to society in harnessing them). Plus I feel like the whole LessWrong project of sorting out the truths from the falsehoods feels unnecessarily slow and laborious, and mostly futile: having discovered a truth, sharing it with others is only occasionally useful, as others will normally go on believing whatever they believed already. For reasons such as these, I believe that “Improving Human Intellectual Efficiency” will be one of the pillars of future progress (but I’ve greatly procrastinated at publishing anything about this, and can only offer a draft).
Today there’s a set of institutions to support science and a whole career path based on them. What remaining important work is there that’s not being rewarded? I don’t know off the top of my head. My guess is that it’s something that most people don’t think about and that doesn’t have a prominent role in society—like science itself in the 17th/18th centuries.
On your second point, I agree that improving intellectual efficiency is an important part of progress. But I think that pretty much all of information technology, from the first writing system to the Internet, has been part of that effort.
Academic science works for learning about objective knowledge. It works less well for learning subjective knowledge like skills. If we look at the question like how one becomes a good software engineer, academia does pretty purely at answering the question.
We have inadequate equilibria where nobody is payed to solve it but it’s possible for someone who’s not payed to organize solving it.
Cool! I’ve read and enjoyed many of your most popular essays.
I’d like to see RoP investigate the role of unpaid work in human progress. I have the impression that many of the famous scientists and polymaths of the 19th century (and earlier) were wealthy, often via inheritance rather than entrepreneurship (correct me if I’m wrong). This implies that free time enabled their scientific hobbies which drove human knowledge forward. (Meanwhile, I’m an open-source developer who has put thousands of volunteer hours into free software that corporations would not normally produce.) So, among all the work our economy doesn’t reward, how much of it is important, and how can society arrange to do more important work of this sort?
In my opinion there is a particularly important underappreciated category of work that can be done to hasten progress, work that one of Scott Alexander’s old stories alludes to...
Humans must spend a lot more time than necessary learning before they can advance any “state of the art” further than it has ever gone (this is especially true for the non-geniuses like myself, those of IQ 110 or 125 — these brains greatly outnumber the geniuses, so there is value to society in harnessing them). Plus I feel like the whole LessWrong project of sorting out the truths from the falsehoods feels unnecessarily slow and laborious, and mostly futile: having discovered a truth, sharing it with others is only occasionally useful, as others will normally go on believing whatever they believed already. For reasons such as these, I believe that “Improving Human Intellectual Efficiency” will be one of the pillars of future progress (but I’ve greatly procrastinated at publishing anything about this, and can only offer a draft).
Thanks!
It’s true in the past, that many scientists and engineers were independently wealthy (and yes, often though not always through inheritance). Others had patrons or got jobs as assistants to other scientists. More here: https://rootsofprogress.org/funding-models-for-science-and-innovation
Today there’s a set of institutions to support science and a whole career path based on them. What remaining important work is there that’s not being rewarded? I don’t know off the top of my head. My guess is that it’s something that most people don’t think about and that doesn’t have a prominent role in society—like science itself in the 17th/18th centuries.
On your second point, I agree that improving intellectual efficiency is an important part of progress. But I think that pretty much all of information technology, from the first writing system to the Internet, has been part of that effort.
Academic science works for learning about objective knowledge. It works less well for learning subjective knowledge like skills. If we look at the question like how one becomes a good software engineer, academia does pretty purely at answering the question.
We have inadequate equilibria where nobody is payed to solve it but it’s possible for someone who’s not payed to organize solving it.