Agreed. The printing press, newspapers, and The Republic of Letters certainly expanded the communication bandwidth.
Lost Futures
Karma: 339
Any eta on when applicants will receive an update?
Does OpenAI releasing davinci_003 and ChatGPT, both derived from GPT-3, mean we should expect considerably more wait time for GPT-4? Feels like it’d be odd if they released updates to GPT-3 just a month or two before releasing GPT-4.
Interesting, how good can they get? Any ELO estimates?
I’m curious how long it’ll be until a general model can play Diplomacy at this level. Anyone fine-tuned an LLM like GPT-3 on chess yet? Chess should be simpler for an LLM to learn unless my intuition is misleading?
GPT-3 was announced less than two and a half years ago. I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that the market has fully absorbed its capabilities yet.
Hmm, I should rewrite the Falcon 9 sentence to clarify my intent. I meant to express that more affordable rockets were possible in the 90s compared to what existed, rather than that the F9 exactly was possible in the 90s.
They were, some Soviet engine design from the 70s were the best for their niche until the late 2010s.
Given that the Soviet Union collapsed soon after and that no competitive international launch market really began to emerge until the 2000s this isn’t surprising. There was no incentive to improve. Moreover, engines are just one component of the rocket launch cost equation.
From NASA:
The technical problems leading to high space launch costs have been identified and cures proposed, but the long delay until the recent reduction in launch costs suggests that cultural and institutional barriers have hindered implementing potential technical improvements.
One study suggested that the record low cost of the Saturn V could be reduced by a factor of 5, to a cost similar to the Falcon Heavy.
The fundamental cause of the past high commercial launch cost seems to be lack of competition. The US launch industry has been a monopoly, the United Launch Alliance (ULA), and its main customer has been the US government, NASA and the military, which need high reliability and had little incentive to exert cost pressure. The ULA lost most of the commercial market to Russia and Arianespace which are also heavily subsidized by their governments
In 2010, NASA compared SpaceX’s cost to develop the Falcon 9 to the cost NASA’s models predicted using the traditional cost-plus-fee method. Using the NASA-AF Cost Model (NAFCOM), NASA estimated that it would have cost NASA $1,383 million to develop these systems using traditional contracting. The estimated SpaceX cost was $443 million, a 68% reduction from the traditional approach.
Until recently, virtually all major players in this space (heh) were monopolies, whether public or private. These organizations had little incentive to improve and were known to be highly inefficient. Why assume the Soviets reached a magical price floor that was impassable prior to the 2010s?
Funny you should say that, the king of France initially wanted condemned criminals to be the first test pilots for that very reason.
Would you consider the space shuttle doomed from the start then? Even without bureaucratic mismanagement, legislative interference, and persistent budget cuts? The market for rocket development in the 80s and 90s seems hardly optimal. You had OTRAG crushed by political pressure, the space shuttle project heavily interfered with, and Buran’s development halted by the collapse of the Soviet Union. A global launch market didn’t really even emerge until the 2000s.
As a broader point, even if you chalk up the nonexistence of economically competitive partially reusable rockets to Moore’s law, that still leaves an apparent gap in the development of more cost-effective expendable systems. Launch prices stagnated from the early 1970s until the 2000s. Surely expendable rockets in the 70s were not already as optimized as possible without 2000s computers.
Are contemporary rocket computer systems necessary for economical reusability? As I understand it, rocket launch costs stagnated for decades due to a lack of price competition stemming from the high initial capital costs involved in developing new rocket designs rather than us hitting a performance ceiling.
Thanks for the response jmh!
One idea might be that it should have been invented then IF the idea that air (gases) were basically just like water (fluids).
I dunno if this is an intuitive jump but it seems unnecessary. Sky lanterns were built without knowledge of the air acting as a fluid. I don’t see why the same couldn’t be true for the hot air balloon.
But there would also have to be some expected net gain from the effort to make doing the work worthwhile. Is there any reason to think the expect value gained from the invention and availability of the balloon was seen as anything more than a trivial novelty or toy (such as the Chinese seemed to think)?
As I understand it, expectations for the hot air balloon were placed too high rather than too low. In the 1600s, Francesco Lana de Terzi envisioned that a hypothetical airship (which he deemed impossible) could break sieges (ofc airships are not the same as hot air balloons, but at the time there was no distinction). A very valuable use case. After the invention of the hot air balloon, lofty expectations continued for some time. From Wikipedia, “The military applications of balloons were recognized early, with Joseph Montgolfier jokingly suggesting in 1782 that the French could fly an entire army suspended underneath hundreds of paper bags into Gibraltar to seize it from the British. Military leaders and political leaders soon began to see a more practical potential for balloons to be used in warfare; specifically in the role of reconnaissance.”
After all, a balloon is not much like a ship which can be steered and the value of higher ground limited to just how far one can see clearly, and with sufficient detail.
This wasn’t known prior to the invention of the hot air balloon. Bartolomeu de Gusmão, who allegedly built a prototype of something similar to a hot air balloon in the early 1700s expected it to be steerable like a ship.
The Archimedes example might be an easy case, but I’m wondering if there are not things to look into regarding the motivations for the work on an invention at the time that offer some type of change in the “environment” (social or intellectual/level of knowledge) that point to why no one did something we now think of as obvious.
The scientific and budding industrial revolution motivated a “spirit of invention”. The idea of being an inventor by profession took root and led to more people taking a detailed look at the invention space. IMO, this shift in thinking turned the hot air balloon from an invention that some lone inventor with sufficient capital could have invented into a statistical inevitability.
Thanks for the detailed and informative response Breakfast! I think I largely agree with your post.
I find it likely that that the coincidence of the Montgolfier brothers’ and Lenormands’ demonstrations in France in 1873 was no accident. There was something about that place and that time that motivated them. If I had to guess, it was something cultural: the idea of testing things in the real world, familiarity with hundreds of years of parachute designs, a critical mass of competitive and supportive energy in the nascent aeronautics space, increasing cultural familiarity with connecting physical intuitions with practical engineering to design”magical” machines.
(1783* you mean.) A revolution in thought definitely aided the invention of the hot air balloon. Novel philosophical ideas and the scientific revolution inspired a more discerning examination of the invention space. But let me ask you this, do you believe the hot air balloon could not have been invented prior to these cultural ideas and parachute design knowledge? My intuition says no, especially given that the Montgolfiers’ first balloon prototype was just a large sky lantern made of thin wood and taffeta lifted by burning paper.
IMO, the hot air balloon is an invention that had a fair probability of being invented anytime after the invention of the sky lantern but simply failed to materialize until the scientific revolution and aeronautics pushed said probability near 100%.
This is my first post on LessWrong as well as my Substack. Been sitting on this post for a while but finally dug up the courage to publish it today. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Why Weren’t Hot Air Balloons Invented Sooner?
Wouldn’t the capital saved on fewer car accidents be free to boost consumption and production? Moreover, most of the $800 billion figure does not entail savings from car repairs/replacements but working hours lost to injuries, traffic jams, medical bills, and QALY lost.
For what it’s worth, I’m fairly confident self-driving cars will cause a bigger splash than $500 billion. Car accidents in the US alone cost $836 billion. In a world with ubiquitous self-driving cars, not only could this cost be slashed by 80% or more, but reduced parking spots will also allow much more economic activity. Parking spots currently comprise about a third of city land in the US. The total impact could easily be over a trillion for the US alone.
Still not enough to get even close to 20% growth though.
Guzey goes on to give other takes I find puzzling like the following:
If Google makes $5/month from you viewing ads bundled with Google Search but provides you with even just $500/month of value by giving you access to literally all of the information ever published on the internet, then economic statistics only capture 1% of the value Google Search provides.
He already has his conclusion and dismisses arguments that reject it. “Of course the internet has provided massive economic value, any metric which fails to observe this must be wrong.” What is the evidence that Google Search provides consumers with $500/month of value? The midcentury appliances revolution alone saved families 20 hours or more of weekly labor. No one argues that the digital revolution hasn’t improved technological productivity, economists cite it as the cause of the brief TFP growth efflorescence from the mid-90s to the early 2000s. But Guzey seems to think its impact is far larger and imagines scenarios to support this claim.
I’m skeptical. Guzey seems to be conflating two separate points in the section you’ve linked:
TFP is not a reliable indicator for measuring growth from the utilization of technological advancement
Bloom et al’s “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” is wrong to use TFP as a measure of research output
The second point is probably true, but not the question we’re seeking to answer. Research output does not automatically translate to growth from technological advancement.
For example, the US TFP did not grow in the decade between 1973 and 1982. In fact, it declined by about 2%. If – as Bloom et al claim – TFP tracks the level of innovation in the economy, we are forced to conclude that the US economy regressed technologically between 1973 and 1982.
Of course such conclusion is absurd.
Is it absurd? I’m not so sure. Between ’73 and ’82 the oil shock led to skyrocketing energy prices. Guzey acknowledges this economic crisis but goes on to claim that the indicator must be bad since semiconductors got better, crop yields improved, and life expectancy improved. And he’s right, for Bloom’s paper, this is a major discrepancy. TFP is not a good measure of research output. However, TFP roughly measures an economy’s technological capacity given current restraints.
America in ’73 was more productive than America in ‘82 because a key technological input (energy) was significantly cheaper in ’73 than it would be for most of the following decade while the technological advancements made during the same period were not enough to offset the balance.
Let’s look at the other examples provided:
According to the data provided, France’s TFP peaked prior to the Great Recession and has largely stagnated since. This doesn’t seem surprising given France’s sluggish economic growth since then. French GDP peaked in 2008. Its labor productivity has also barely grown. If one examines the data without holding the bias that tech advancements since 2001 MUST have vastly improved productivity, the results are hardly surprising.
This is harder to explain. According to the data, Italy’s TFP effectively peaked in 1979, remained near this peak until just before the Great Recession, and declined since. Italy’s GDP peaked around the time of the Great Recession and declined since. Nonetheless, its TFP being higher in 1970 than 2019 is shocking. CEPR argues that Italian manufacturing misallocates resources on a massive scale but I’d hesitate to give any firm opinion. Rising energy costs may also play a role? This is worthy of further research, but as Guzey points out, Italy is not on the technological frontier and is a bit of a basket case.
Japan’s TFP in 1990 was higher (a) than in 2009.
Unsurprising. 2009 was an unusually weak year for TFP in Japan given the Great Recession’s effects. Moreover, since the 1990s, Japan has been in its lost decades. Japan’s TFP growth looks more healthy and similar to America’s compared to France and Italy.
(See Italy)
Skipping Sweden and Switzerland as they are small countries.
The United Kingdom’s TFP peaked in 2007, one year before its GDP peaked. Like France, Italy, and Spain, it has yet to recover from the Great Recession.
TFP is NOT a measure of the pure technological frontier. It cannot tell you how much cutting-edge lab research has progressed over time. What it can tell you is how much technological advancement has soaked into the economy. Recessions, market shocks, structural barriers, and other forms of inertia can slow or even regress TFP.
Total Factor Productivity would fit the bill
Erik Engheim and Terje Tvedt introduced me another important development in Europe that seems connected to the industrial revolution: The Machine Revolution. While Medieval China invented plenty of industrial machines, including the first water-powered textile spinning wheel, by the high middle ages Western Europe was using more water and wind power per capita than anywhere else in history.
Cultural explanations are often given for this divergence but in recent years, geography has been given greater focus. Western Europe had waterways more naturally suited for the use of water-power than the rest of Eurasia.
While water and wind power had been harnessed for centuries prior, this intensification of capital provided Europe with far more output than what would otherwise have been possible and more opportunities for engineers and mechanics to experiment, tinker with, and improve machinery.
It may be that the earliest seeds of industrial revolution were planted as far back as the middle ages.