Interview with gwern

> I love the example of Isaac Newton looking at the rates of progress in Newton's time and going, “Wow, there's something strange here. Stuff is being invented now. We're making progress. How is that possible?” And then coming up with the answer, “Well, progress is possible now because civilization gets destroyed every couple of thousand years, and all we're doing is we're rediscovering the old stuff.”

The link in this paragraph goes to a post on gwern website. This post contains various links, both internal and external. But I still failed to find one that supports claims about Newton's views on "progress".

> This offers a little twist on the “Singularity” idea: apparently people have always been able to see progress as rapid in the right time periods, and they are not wrong to! We would not be too impressed at several centuries with merely some shipbuilding improvements or a long philosophy poem written in Latin, and we are only modestly impressed by needles or printing presses.

We absolutely _are_ impressed. The concept of "rapid progress" is relative. There was rapid progress then, and there is even more rapid progress now. There is no contradiction.

Anyway, I have no idea how this interview got that many upvotes. I just wasted my time.

That works in reverse too. While I am in awe of what humanity already achieved - when I read fictional timelines of fictional worlds (Middle-Earth or Westeros/Essos) I am wondering how getting frozen in medieval like time is even possible. Like, what are they _doing_?

They're probably doing the same thing humans on our earth were doing for centuries until ~1600. Surviving. Given how cruel nature is I think we're lucky to have the resources to do more than just survive, to build up all this crazy technology we don't strictly need to live, just for fun/profit.

I think people click upvote on reading an interesting title / first couple of lines.

Then there isn't a downvote option if it proves poor.

Most people get on with life without inventing much new stuff themselves. It was interesting trekking in Nepal that you could go to places without electricity or cars and life went on really quite similar to before and probably still does. Though they may have got solar electric and phones now - not quite sure of the latest status.

> I am wondering how getting frozen in medieval like time is even possible. Like, what are they _doing_?

Not discovering sources of cheap energy and other raw inputs. If you look carefully at history, every rapid period of growth was preceded by a discovery or conquest of cheap energy and resources. You need excess to grow towards the next equilibrium.

1400s Age of Explanation? 1200s Mongol Conquest? BC 100s Roman conquests of the Mediterranean?

None match that thesis

Those stories are inspired (somewhat) by the dark ages. Stagnation is kinda the default state of mankind. Look at places like Afghanistan. Other than imported western tech, it's basically a medieval society. Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the middle medieval era, technology didn't progress all that much. Many parts of the world were essentially still peasant societies at the start of the 20th century.

All you really need is a government or society that isn't conducive to technological development, either because they persecute it or because they just don't do anything to protect and encourage it (e.g. no patent system or enforceable trade secrets).

Even today, what we see is that technological progress isn't evenly distributed. Most of it comes out of the USA at the moment, a bit from Europe and China. In the past there's usually been one or two places that were clearly ahead and driving things forward, and it moves around over time.

The other thing that inspires the idea of a permanent medieval society is archaeological narratives about ancient Egypt. If you believe their chronologies (which you may not), then Egyptian society was frozen in time for thousands of years with little or no change in any respect. Not linguistic, not religious, not technological. This is unthinkable today but is what academics would have us believe really happened not so long ago.

You're right, really: it's not possible. It's a problem with the conservative impulse (*for a very specific meaning of conservative) in fiction: things don't stay frozen in amber like that. If it was nonfiction - aka real life - the experience of life itself from the perspective of living people would change and transform rapidly in the century view.

They all do?

Age of exploration was powered by finding new sources of slaves and materials in the East (india, asia, also eastern europe to an extent)

The mongol conquest itself was capturing vast sources of wealth (easier to take from others than build yourself)

Same with Rome. Each new conquest brought more slaves and natural resources to the empire. It used this to fuel more expansion.

burning libraries probably doesn't help

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom#Destruction_by...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#Burning_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda_mahavihara#Destruction...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Library_of_Constantin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_destroyed_libraries#Hu...

> “Well, progress is possible now because civilization gets destroyed every couple of thousand years, and all we're doing is we're rediscovering the old stuff.”

Irrespective of the historical accuracy of the quote I've always felt this way in some form, having personally lived through the transition from a world where it felt like you didn't have to have an opinion on everything to one dominated by the ubiquitous presence of the Internet. Although not so much because I believe an advanced human civilization has destroyed itself in our current timeline, but because the presence of so many life-changing breakthroughs in such a short period of time to me indicates a unceasing march towards a Great Filter.

Wasn't Middle-Earth repeatedly depopulated and ravaged by multiple continent-spanning wars?

> The link in this paragraph goes to a post on gwern website. This post contains various links, both internal and external. But I still failed to find one that supports claims about Newton's views on "progress".

Could you explain further what part of https://gwern.net/newton you thought didn't support my description of Newton's view?

I thought the large second blockquote in https://gwern.net/newton#excerpts , which very prominently links to https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THE... , fully justified my claims, which are taken directly from Newton's statements to his son-in-law, and also closely parallel other historical statements, like Lucretius, which I also present with clear references and specific blockquotes.

I'm a little mystified that you could describe any of this as not supporting it at all, and I'm wondering if you are looking at the wrong page or something?