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Roko comments on A speculation on Near and Far Modes - Less Wrong
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Neither was ignored. Babbage was given much attention and sponsorship by rich people. The main problem was the expense and precision required in making his machines. Darwin was not ignored at all. He was considered a first-rate scientist in Britain, and his theory of evolution while controversial, gained general acceptance in Britain. It is true, that natural selection as the primary means of evolution did not become accepted until the 1920s, but post-Darwin all people thinking seriously about these issues acknowledged that evolution had occurred and that natural selection was the most likely hypothesis (and even then the nature of the mechanism was an issue among scientists not just the general public). It isn't at all an accident that Darwin got buried in Westminster Abbey.
My impression was that the problem with Babbage was largely that he was a terrible manager (like Einstein and many other scientists) and thus failed to deliver what he promised even though it was a reasonable proposition given the tech of the day (as Myhrvold demonstrated).
He was also horrific at politics. Nobody with half a political brain writes this: http://books.google.co.uk/books/reader?id=3bgPAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader
I'm not convinced that the far-mode/near-mode distinction is well-defined. I do however think that Victorian Great Britain did a very good job listening to their scientists, better than Great Britain or the United States does today. And I do think that both Darwin and Babbage were listened to quite a bit.
JoshuaZ:
The trouble nowadays is not that governments are not listening to scientists (in the sense of people officially and publicly recognized as such), but that the increased prominence of science in public affairs has subjected the very notion of "science" to a severe case of Goodhart's law. In other words, the fact that if something officially passes for "science," governments listen to it and are willing to pay for it has led to an awful debasement of the very concept of science in modern times.
Once governments started listening to scientists, it was only a matter of time before talented charlatans and bullshit-artists would figure out that they can sell their ideas to governments by presenting them in the form of plausible-looking pseudoscience. It seems to me that many areas have been completely overtaken by this sort of thing, and the fact that their output is being labeled as "scientific" and used to drive government policy is a major problem that poses frightful threats for the future.
That's a very valid point. I could point to anecdotal evidence that suggests that there's a real failure to listen to science, but that evidence would be very weak. primarily B and C list celebrities saying stupid anti-science stuff. Clearly, a lot of the problem is just confusion about what constitutes science.
Yes
Compare investment in railroads in the 19th century to investment patterns today. As Eliezer once said, that sounds like the sort of problem a financial system would solve. Too bad our society doesn't have a financial system.
The civilized world wasn't ever rational enough to develop AGI safely. It just used to be rational enough to plug holes in the Gulf of Mexico, to build Levees that worked, and to avoid rapid successions of speculative bubbles.
The ultimate test, IMHO, is GDP growth rate, but then again, I don't believe the official numbers for that, so...
What would a financial system look like?
1) My understanding is that historically there weren't any holes in the Gulf of Mexico that were as hard to plug as the one that is currently a problem.
2) Bubbles are most likely becoming more frequent as a result of more liquidity in financial markets. Fortunately the best evidence on bubble behaviour suggests that this trend is self-defeating, once a significant proportion of traders have been exposed to bubbles, we should see a decline in bubble activity, at least for a while cite
3) The New Orleans levy failure looks like a run of the mill bureaucracy SNAFU to me, I think it says more about our government institutions than our wider culture. Basically we like our government to be more risk averse than it was in the past, and that means it takes longer to do anything.
Out of curiosity, what are your concerns with official GDP statistics?
Many people say that railroads are quite comparable to the internet bubble. The investors did badly. Maybe Victorians were better at deploying capital to useful endeavors, but that's not the same as being good at investing. Also, one example doesn't demonstrate it. You've complained about the slow spread of farm tech [McCormick?].
I agree, the 19th Century railroad surge was most likely bubble driven. Some bubbles drive investment in capital goods (these tend to have some positive spillovers for non-investors) and some don't. In recent times the tech bubble was a capital good bubble and the housing bubble was pretty much a consumption bubble. In the 19th Century the railroad bubble was a capital bubble and the tulip bubble was consumption good based.
FWIW, the tulip bubble was in the 17th century. The South Seas bubble was in the 18th.
That's what happens when I try to comment from memory. I think the basic point stands though. Bubbles of different kinds have existed since financial exchanges have existed and I don't think there's a pattern toward particularly destructive ones.
The Victorians had a MUCH higher rate of return on capital than we do, in inflation adjusted dollars. Fair point about slow farm tech.