I am currently attending an “un-conference.” To the extent that there is a focus, it is on improving prospects for exploiting technology for economic growth and human flourishing,
Here are a few ideas that have come up so far in conversation, suggested by interesting people.
1. Science is stagnating because we are not providing the right environment for disagreeable people. The thinking is that breakthroughs tend to come from people whose personality registers very low on agreeableness. But you have to give them a lot of freedom and support, with enough enforcement of social norms to keep them from undermining each other but not so much that their creativity is stifled.
With that in mind, let me disagree with two other ideas.
2. Using a universal wage subsidy instead of a universal basic income. The idea is that work creates human capital (and human satisfaction), so we want to subsidize work rather than idleness. I get that, and I might even adopt that point of view, but:
What do you do with people who are severely disabled (think of a schizophrenic)?
Do you want to simultaneously tax labor (payroll tax) and subsidize it? Seems very inefficient.
What about people who claim that they are “self-employed” (wink, wink)? For example, does blogging qualify one for a subsidy?
3. “Re-writing the rules of the economy in the digital age.”
That one scares me. Good rules are not written by experts. They emerge organically. Think of common law (or norms in general) as law that evolves gradually through trial and error. Think of “re-writing the rules” as legislation and top-down regulation. I trust the common-law process more. Yes, it might entrench some bad precedents that might best be overturned by legislation, but I would rather live with that risk than the risk that the people “re-writing the rules” are not as clever as they think they are. And at this un-conference, that risk is rather high, in my opinion. Lots of strong leftists who have more faith than I do in the power of their (our) form of intelligence.
I wish people would pay more attention to the leftist who get there because they don’t have a lot of certainty in their position, but think compassion is a better way forward than greed.
I have a couple reservations about your wish:
1) What do you mean by “pay attention to”? In so far as people are motivated by compassion to alleviate the suffering of the most benighted, either through their own efforts or by inspiring others to selfless action, we should admire, emulate, and support those people for providing a necessary function to society.
But an emotional response is not insight. Aside from resisting some truly heinous social pathologies, there is no obvious way translate from calls for compassion into public policy.
2) Framing things as compassionate people vs. greedy people is incorrect (or at least insufficient). As the saying goes, the line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every person. The struggle against evil should therefore be focused primarily inward.
That is not to say that there are not people who have given themselves over to evil. However, there are several fundamental moral values, and it is not obvious that any one is superordinate over the others. These values don’t just affect our goals and motivations, but the very way in which we perceive the world. It’s more constructive to view our struggle with other people largely as a negotiation over which values should guide our actions in particular situations.
I disagree with the disagreeable hypothesis
Name 3 ground breaking scientists who are/were disagreeable
I think the genius=disagreeable is a trope
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InsufferableGenius
The fellow who gave me that idea did name names. John Von Neumann was one of them, but I forget the others that he named.
I’m skeptical of his use of von Neumann as an example of anything, since he’s being pretty much as close to the definition of “human outlier” as it comes.
I don’t think disagreeableness is sufficient, but I do think that a combination of openness (i.e. creativity + interest in ideas) and disagreeableness is essential to the scientific disposition. It seems fairly clear to me that most great scientists met this description.
Disagreeable doesn’t (necessarily) mean rude, it means a higher achievement drive and an preference for working things/systems over developing deep interpersonal relationships. Of course, a willingness to violate social norms in pursuit of the truth is sometimes helpful.
What is perhaps not obvious is whether such traits are being selected against in the modern scientific setting. Certainly as “grantsmanship” becomes more important for funding then extroversion will be moderately selected for. Also, graduate schools (schools in general, actually) select heavily for IQ and conscientiousness, and pretty much not at all (or slightly against) openness. This makes sense because you can’t really grade creative thinking – at least not in the typical way that school assessments are administered.
I think the best way to foster the scientific mindset is to apprentice in a laboratory setting. In such a setting, the standard of evaluation is not “regurgitate what the teacher talked about” but “generate and test hypotheses”.
With real estate prices varying to the extent they do in this country, I don’t see how anyone could set a “universal” income or wage subsidy. Or were you planning on just letting the proles live someplace far away from Silicon Valley and the other high-priced cities?
It also seems to me that if you want to subsidize seniors living alone, that same subsidy amount will also pay five twenty-somethings to live in a rented house near the beach and party, party, party!
If progress is slowing down, it’s not necessarily because we could be doing anything better.
Arguments about stagnating innovation often make the same mistake as economists do when saying the economy is performing “below potential”. How do we know what the potential really is?
In order to make any arguments about stagnating technology one needs to have some kind of model that can translate various conditions and contexts into potential paces of innovation, and then to say that there is a definitely superior set of social conditions and policies that is independent of issues regarding fundamental limits. So one needs to have a good model of fundamental limits first, and in reading a large number of these discussions, I’ve come to the conclusion that this issue is, if anything, treated as if it hardly deserves an afterthought. That wishful – indeed magical – thinking in an unserious sci-fi “anything is possible” mode.
I find that a useful way to think about fundamental limits and science stagnating is in terms of Feynman’s “plenty of room at the bottom” argument. It’s not quite the same as “low hanging fruit”, but a predictable path along which one knows one can pick up plenty of food. “Hey transistors are enormous now, but silicon atoms are so much smaller, that one could cut the size of fundamental components in half literally dozens of times before fundamental issues start to become real problems, and so it’s probably just a matter of improving our techniques until we get there. But once we get there, then we might be in trouble.”
Well, it took a long time, we improved our techniques steadily, and now components are small enough that atomic and thermodynamic issues are starting to dominate and we’re running into trouble making progress by merely making them any smaller.
Or consider commercial airplane speeds, which aren’t any faster than they were half a century ago. Well, from the beginning of aviation there was all kinds of “room for acceleration”, where overcoming the drag to go faster increased slowly with additional speed and was mostly a matter of developing incrementally more powerful engines without having to make radical changes to the fundamental designs. But when one approaches the sound barrier, non-linear problems of aerodynamics start to dominate, and one enters a completely different domain. It’s not that faster speeds aren’t possible, it’s that the laws of aerodynamics allow us no good way to solve the economic problems to make that mode of travel competitive enough to dominate and become the new mainstream.
It’s very likely the case that no increase in funding resources or alteration of social and professional norms regarding toleration of particular personality types is going to have any impact whatsoever on how fast we fly.
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that “tolerating disagreeable types” may be a kind of subtle code for asking people to reach a consensus that it worth cooperating to throttle down their insistence on conformities of many kinds that extend beyond mere matters of character and personality.
> Finally, it’s worth pointing out that “tolerating disagreeable types” may be a kind of subtle code for asking people to reach a consensus that it worth cooperating to throttle down their insistence on conformities of many kinds that extend beyond mere matters of character and personality.
This is almost undoubtedly true, but it is likely more effective (and possibly just as important) to emphasize tolerance of a natural variation in temperament, over trying to argue for tolerance of certain ideas.
In fact, it was never ideas that needed tolerance. Rather, what we have always needed was a respect for people, and to respect that people have reasons for believing things (even wrong things) that can’t simply be dismissed.
A lot of the efforts of Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Haidt (and our host) have been in this area, by showing the degree to which our personality influences our political preferences. It’s much harder to condemn another person for voting differently than you if you are both merely acting in line with your own perfectly normal instincts.
Critically, I don’t think this approach implies a fundamental moral relativism. Rather, it requires an acknowledgement that, whatever morality is, it must be distinct from and be able to incorporate our various moral instincts.
Disagreeable could just mean non-conformist. Someone who can resist the pressure to conform will often be disagreeable in their obstinance.
“All mankind’s progress has been achieved as a result of the initiative of a small minority that began to deviate from the ideas and customs of the majority until their example finally moved the others to accept the innovation themselves. To give the majority the right to dictate to the minority what it is to think, to read, and to do is to put a stop to progress once and for all.”
Mises, Ludwig von (1927). Liberalism (p. 54)
FWIW, Sir Isaac Newton was quite a “disagreeable” person. I wonder how far a scientist with his personality, however brilliant, would advance in today’s academic/corporate/bureaucratic science world.
Being disagreeable probably doesn’t hurt a person’s career if the disagreeableness is directed at the correct people, in the name of the correct ideology. Hillary Clinton, for example, is a supremely disagreeable person, and would have become president but for 100,000 or so unfashionably “deplorable” voters in PA, WI and MI. Similarly, the attraction of leftwing politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders seems to be based chiefly on their nastiness toward adversaries.
To be fair, Trump’s attraction to his fan base seems to be based on his own disagreeableness. I fear that Trump’s fans mistake his nastiness for effectiveness in office.