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Interview with gwern

(www.dwarkeshpatel.com)
308 points synthmeat | 1 comments | 14 Nov 24 08:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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demaga ◴[14 Nov 24 13:07 UTC] No.42135821[source]▶
> 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.

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mynegation ◴[14 Nov 24 13:23 UTC] No.42135924[source]▶
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_?
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1. mike_hearn ◴[14 Nov 24 16:25 UTC] No.42137796[source]▶
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.