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SilasBarta comments on Science - Idealistic Versus Signaling - Less Wrong
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Comments (57)
Separate comment to so it can be voted on separately: I don't know how you get this:
I think you can only justify it by arbitrarily relabeling the progress of the last 50 years as "engineering" rather than science. This would be unfair, because the new technologies and capabilities did require new scientific advances to overcome the specific practical problems of getting them to work against everything Nature may throw at it.
Such advances may individually have less theoretical generality, but add them up, count the impact on our lives, and it's huge.
To avoid a long debate about this or that recent breakthrough, let me just borrow a point from (the usually angering) Steven Landsburg, who discusses a book written and set in 1991 -- less than 20 years ago -- with the following plot elements:
Notice how archaic all of that looks to us?
The advance of engineering during 1900-1950 is much more impressive than during 1950-2000. Likewise, 1850-1900 is more impressive than 1900-1950.
That seems a very subjective standard. Personally I find modern computer power a lot more impressive than any dang highway, however cheap. The Romans had highways. And before you accuse me of cherry-picking, they had steam engines too, and railroads. Drawn by elephants because it didn't occur to anyone to make a steam engine do it.
Yes, it is difficult to make these comparisons, but let me try. Most of Silas's examples were telecommunications. I think the incremental improvements in telegraphs 1850-1900 trump computers in changing the world. The incremental improvements in radio and telephones 1900-1950 probably don't. I don't expect to convince you of those comparisons, but they are swamped by a lot of other things 1850-1950, in contrast to practically nothing else 1950-2000.
I'm not sure what your point is about the Romans. I guess by the standards of "fundamental breakthroughs" steam engines get credited to them, but by Silas's standard, they largely get credited to the first half of the 19th century. Railroads to the second half, and that's what I'm talking about.
Honestly, I'm astounded. I agree that 1950-2000 has nothing comparable to telecommunications, while 1850-1900 and 1900-1950 did, but I think its obvious that telecommunications/computation effects from 1950-2000 swamp 1900-1950 which crushingly swamps 1850-1900. A tiny number of telegraph lines surely had very great impact given what they were, but WTF?!?
Also, it seems to me that the telecommunications of 1900-1950 remain the single biggest element of tech change during that time for all the impact of everything else.
A major question regarding the rate of change is "for whom". Things have changed less for elites than for the masses, as much tech consists of inferior goods, substitutes for things that elites accomplished via human labor or via the ability to pay high rents. For a Chinese commoner, things have changed more in the last 40 years than since the first cities. For ordinary non-intellectual Americans, the last 40 years have seen little significant change and what change has happened may actually be dominated by the improvement in food quality!
"Changing the world" seems like a rather poorly quantified metric.
It's hard to disagree with you when it's not very clear what you are saying.
The tendency to think that the golden age of scientific progress is past seems to me like an example of pessimistic bias. This particular bias is extremely common but not something I've seen discussed much here.
I wrote fundamental breakthroughs. And it isn't just engineering. Lasers and semiconductors for two examples were new science, but they have all been working out the implications of earlier breakthroughs.
What is the difference between a fundamental breakthrough and a not fundamental breakthrough? What method can I use to tell if a breakthrough is fundamental?
How about: a fundamental breakthrough enables new techniques/manipulations?
So all of the 'archaic' examples are for tasks we could already do but perhaps not as fast or as easily. The obscure-novel guy could resort to techniques honed by centuries of librarians & researchers to find out about it; the sound-effects collector could invest in the magnetic reels or whatever 'professionals' used. The man could easily stay in close contact - with a little more money. The customers who seek encyclopedic information get pretty much the same thing today. In all of these cases, the Internet & computers don't enable new things but cheaper, quicker versions of what we already had.
The fundamental breakthrough computing represents is letting us calculate things we could never afford to calculate even with the global GDP, and in the paradigm shift towards representing everything as a computation (and not, say, differential equations).
So, cracking the atom is a fundamental breakthrough, because we simply couldn't do that before. No matter how much money you spent, you could only exploit natural atom-cracking in radioactive decay - you could not vary the rate. So that was a fundamental breakthrough. Going from A-bomb to H-bomb, not so much (we could always just use a couple A-bombs where we could now use an H-bomb).
H bombs would seem to be a different fundamental breakthrough than atom splitting. The similarity is their engineering application more than their fundamentals.
Atom combining, as opposed to atom splitting?
Hm; you're right that that is a bad example - H-bombs are man-caused fusion, not fission.
Although, I'm not sure we couldn't fuse before the first H-bomb: sonoluminescence, which might be caused by bubble fusion, was first produced in 1934.
Well one thing is that this standard only works for engineering breakthroughs. What new manipulation techniques did natural selection give us? Or the Copernican revolution? Or even Newton's laws of motion? Better ballistics would appear to fall into the non-fundamental category, no?
Also, it all still looks like a matter of degree to me. Does heavier than air flying count? We could still fly before the Wright brothers, just not as fast and not as heavy. Twenty years ago I couldn't have had back and forth written communication with hundreds of people in real time. That seems pretty new to me. What about the light bulb... surely a huge breakthrough, but oil lamps worked pretty damn well before then.
A fundamental breakthrough is one that could not be developed from earlier knowledge (that required a new idea) and that formed the basis for further developments. That is, not an incremental advance.
The laser, for example, was not a fundamental breakthrough, because it was a direct development of quantum electrodynamics (which is the last fundamental breakthrough I can think of).
ADDED: QCD may be, but I can't think of any further developments it has contributed to, nor, the last I checked it out, had there been any definitive tests of its accuracy.
QED wasn't totally original, we obviously needed some earlier knowledge- like say about the photoelectric effect, black body radiation, and Maxwell's wave theory of light. Maybe the conceptual jump to QED was bigger than the jump to lasers and so maybe it is fair to say that we haven't has a big a breakthrough since. But I'm not sure what justifies putting a very small set of breakthroughs in a special category and only counting those. Is there a long enough list of breakthroughs as big as QED to even justify looking at the frequency with which they occur?