Most of your post is good, but you’re too eager to describe trends as mysterious.
Also, your link to “a previous post” is broken.
Moore’s law appears to be a special case of Wright’s Law. I.e. it seems well explained by experience curve effects (or possibly economies of scale).
Secondly, we have strong reasons to suspect that there won’t be any explanation that ties together things like the early evolution of life on Earth, human brain evolution, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and future technology development. These phenomena have decent local explanations that we already roughly understand
I don’t see these strong reasons.
Age of Em gives some hints (page 14) that the last three transitions may have been caused by changes in how innovation diffused, maybe related to population densities enabling better division of labor.
I think Henrich’s The Secret of our Success gives a good theory human evolution which supports Robin’s intuitions there.
For the industrial revolution, there are too many theories, with inadequate evidence to test them. But it does seem possible that the printing press played a role that’s pretty similar to Henrich’s explanations for early human evolution.
I don’t know much about the causes of the agricultural revolution.
There’s something about reading the new style that makes me uncomfortable, and prompts me to skim some posts that I would have read more carefully on the old site. I’m not too clear on what causes that effect. I’m guessing that some of it is the excessive amount of white, causing modest sensory overload.
Some of it could be the fact that less of a post fits on a single screenful: I probably form initial guesses about a post’s value based on the first screenful, and putting less substance on that first screenful leads me to guess that the post has less substance. Or maybe I associate large fonts with click-baity sites, and small fonts with more intellectual sites.
The editor used for writing comments is really annoying. E.g. links expand to include unrelated text, or unexpectedly stop being links.
I want a way to enter html and/or markup that I can cut and paste after writing them in an editor with which I’m more comfortable. Without that, I’ll probably give up on writing comments that are more thoughtful than Facebook comments.
I presume the new karma system will be an important improvement. I’m unhappy that it’s bundled with such large changes to aspects of the UI that were working adequately.