Comments for shorter Cold Takes pieces

Vipassana meditation aims to give meditators experiential knowledge (rather than theoretical/intellectual understanding) of this conception of self. I think that's what a lot of people get out of psychedelics as well. 

I thought this paper was really interesting: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.12590 

The abstract: 

"It is an old philosophical idea that if the future self is literally different from the current self, one should be less concerned with the death of the future self (Parfit, 1984). This paper examines the relation between attitudes about death and the self among Hindus, Westerners, and three Buddhist populations (Lay Tibetan, Lay Bhutanese, and monastic Tibetans). Compared with other groups, monastic Tibetans gave particularly strong denials of the continuity of self, across several measures. We predicted that the denial of self would be associated with a lower fear of death and greater generosity toward others. To our surprise, we found the opposite. Monastic Tibetan Buddhists showed significantly greater fear of death than any other group. The monastics were also less generous than any other group about the prospect of giving up a slightly longer life in order to extend the life of another."

One interesting note: "None of the participants we studied were long-term meditators (Tsongkhapa, 1991), and one important question for future research will be whether highly experienced practitioners of meditation would in fact show reduced fear of self-annihilation." I don't know if they ever did that future research. 

Hi Holden!

I am happy to see you think deeply about questions of personal identity. I've been thinking about the same for many years (e.g. see "Ontological Qualia: The Future of Personal Identity"), and I think that addressing such questions is critical for any consistent theory of consciousness and ethics.

I broadly agree with your view, but here are some things that stand out as worth pointing out:

First, I prefer Daniel Kolak's factorization of "views of personal identity". Namely, Closed Individualism (common sense - we are each a "timeline of experience"), Empty Individualism (we are all only individual moments of experience, perhaps most similar to Parfit's reductionist view as well as yours), and Open Individualism (we are all the same subject of experience). 

I think that if Open Individualism is true a lot of ethics could be drastically simplified: caring about all sentient beings is not only kind, but in fact rational. While I think that Empty Individualism is a really strong candidate, I don't discard Open Individualism. If you do assume that you are the same subject of experience over time (which I know you discard, but many don't), I think it follows that Open Individualism is the only way to reconcile that with the fact that each moment of experience generated by your brain is different. In other words, if there is no identity carrier  we can point to that connects every moment of experience generated by e.g. my brain, then we might infer that the very source of identity is the fact of consciousness per se. Just something to think about.

The other key thing I'd highlight is that you don't seem to pay much attention to the mystery of why each snapshot of your brain is unified. Parfit also seems have some sort of neglect around this puzzle, for I don't see it addressed anywhere in his writings despite its central importance to the problem of personal identity.

Synchrony is not a good criteria: there is no universal frame of reference. Plus, even if we could use synchrony as an approximate "unifier" of physical states, we then further have the problem that we would need a natural ground truth boundary to arise that would make your brain generate a moment of experience that is numerically distinct from those generated by other brains at the same time.

I do think that there is in fact a way to solve this. To do so, rather than thinking in terms of "binding" (i.e. why do these two atoms contribute to the same experience but not these two atoms?), we should think in terms of "boundaries" (i.e. what makes this region of reality have a natural boundary that separates it from the rest?). In particular, my solution uses topological segmentation, and IMO solves all of the classic problems. It results in a strong case for Empty Individualism, since topological boundaries in the fields of physics would be objective, causally significant, and frame-invariant (all highly desirable properties for the mechanism of individuation so that e.g. natural selection would have a way of recruiting moments of experience for computational purposes). Additionally, the topological pockets that define individual moments of experience would be spatiotemporal in nature. We don't need to worry about infinitesimal partitions and a lack of objective frames of reference for simultaneity because the topological pockets have definite spatial and temporal depth. There would, in fact, be a definite and objective answer to "how many experiences are there in this volume of spacetime?" and similar questions.

If interested, I recommend watching my video about my solution to the binding problem here: Solving the Phenomenal Binding Problem: Topological Segmentation as the Correct Explanation Space. Even just reading the video description goes a long way :-) Let me know your thoughts if you get to it.

All the best! 
 

What would be the "Continuous Replacement" take on cryonics?

For this question, assume that cryonics works (revival succeeds) and is costless.   From a personal identity standpoint, is cryonics any different from a nap? Would you be interested in cryonics only to the extent that your projects and relationships were still around? i.e. interested only if your loved ones were also preserved? Less interested the more time will pass before revival? Would projects very long-term projects like "learn how the world works" or "protect humanity" or "see how this all turns out" provide enough justification?

And out of curiosity: Are you signed up for cryonics or interested in signing up?

Cf. section 6.3 of Parfit's Ethics:

[O]ne way of characterizing Parfit's reductionism would be as a kind of illusionism or anti-realism about personal identity: you could say that we don't really persist through time at all--we can just talk as though we do, for convenience.

Here's a crucial question: is it rational to anticipate experiences that will be felt by some "future self" to whom you are strongly R-related?  Or does anticipation implicitly presuppose a non-reductionist view of identity?  Parfit  (1984, 312) does not commit himself either way, suggesting that it "seems defensible both to claim and to deny that Relation R gives us reason for special concern." Of course, your "future selves" (or R-related continuants) are as closely-related to you as can be, so if we have reason to be partial towards anyone, we presumably have reason to partial towards them.  But it would still seem a significant loss if we could no longer think of our future selves as ourselves: if they became mere relatives, however close.

I don't think such a bleak view is forced on us, however.  The distinction between philosophical reduction and elimination is notoriously thorny, and analogous questions arise all over the philosophical map.  Consciousness, normativity, and free will are three examples for which it is comparably contentious whether reduction amounts to elimination. ...

I find it tempting to give different answers in different cases.  Consciousness and normativity strike me as sui generis phenomena, missing from any account that countenances only things constituted by atoms. For free will and personal identity, by contrast, I'm inclined to think that the "non-reductive" views don't even make sense (the idea of ultimate sourcehood, or originally choosing the very basis on which you will make all choices--including that first one!--is literally incoherent).  Reductive accounts of these latter phenomena can fill their theoretical roles satisfactorily, in my view.

Other readers may carve up the cases differently.  However you do it, my suggestion would be that reductionists can more easily resist eliminativist pressures if they think there is no coherent possibility there to be eliminated.  If ultimate sourcehood makes no sense, it would seem unreasonable to treat it as a requirement for anything else, including moral desert.^[To avoid amounting to a merely verbal dispute, I take it that reductionists and eliminativists must disagree about whether some putative reduction base suffices to fill an important theoretical role associated with the original concept.]  So we might comfortably accept a compatibilist account as sufficing to make one responsible in the strongest sense, as there simply is nothing more that could be required.  Perhaps a similar thing could be said of personal identity.  If we think that "Further Fact" views are not merely theoretically extravagant, but outright impossible, it might be easier to regard relation R as sufficient to justify anticipation.  What more could be required, after all?

This reasoning is not decisive. Eliminativists could insist that anticipation is *essentially* irrational, presupposing something that could not possibly be. Or they could insist that the Further Fact view is not incoherent, but merely contingently false.  Even so, their side too seems to lack decisive arguments.  As is so often the case in philosophy, it is up to us to judge what strikes us as the most plausible position, all things considered.

The non-eliminative, reductionist view is, at least, much less drastically revisionary. (If our future selves are better regarded as entirely new people, there would seem no basis for distinguishing killing from failing to bring into existence.  You would have to reconceive of guns as contraceptive agents.  Nobody survives the present moment anyway, on this view, so the only effect of lethally shooting someone would be to prevent a new, qualitatively similar person from getting to exist in the next moment.  Not so bad!)  Though even if Parfit's reductionism can vindicate ordinary anticipation and self-concern, it certainly calls for some revisions to our normative thought....

Philosophy without the black box

Continuity of consciousness may be a notion that's more significant than commonly imagined.  Psychologist William James presented continuity in memorable form, in his "Principles of Psychology".  132 years later, his stream of thought, felt time-gaps, and unfelt time-gaps all remain active terms in the literature.  Yet the greater concept -- subjective continuity -- seems not to be bounded by James' familiar text.  The concept seems applicable even at the extremities of life; no accepted line of reasoning renders it inapplicable.  

Continuity reasoning can be structured around the natural case; i.e., the natural conditions and transitions found at extremities.   No fictive elements are necessary in the reasoning:  no teleporters, duplicates, digital copies, or re-creations are required.  In fact, sci-fi can cripple reasoning just because there's nothing to understand in the fictions, nothing functional inside the verbal "black box".   

For my part, I've made do without such black box fictions; I reasoned without them.  Judging from correspondence post-publication, this was the right call.

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Aristotle said, "All men by nature desire to know."  This was in fact the very first sentence of Aristotle's "Metaphysics".  What to make of the black box, then?  

There's nothing to know about the word, "teleporter", for example.  One can imagine things, of course; but these imaginings can't be solidified.  A writer can say, "Let's assume the teleportation black box works this way," but he says this without authority.  The reader can reply, "No, assume it works this entirely different way," and overwrite the author's analysis, freely.  There's no end to that fictive back-and-forth; it goes on and on.  

Common facts receive comparatively little analysis.

So, was Aristotle right or wrong?  Where the word "metaphysics" pertains, do all men desire to know, or not?

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For consideration, the old essay:  Metaphysics by Default

Chapters 1-4 are historical.

Chapters 5-7 give mathematical, computational, and neurological background, with a first inference.

Chapter 8 gives philosophical background, with a second inference.

Chapter 9 presents James' text and applies inferences toward reasoning for boundless continuity.  Some novelties follow.

ws

FYI Sam Harris has a good talk through of the death argument in #263

I've heard this view referred to as a time-slice view of personal identity before. 

Personal identity is tied to ordinary questions about the identity and persistence of ordinary objects.

So, you should probably have the same set of persistence conditions (time-slice / constant replacement) for cups, computers, organisms, atoms etc. 

If that's true, then "personality, relationships, and ongoing projects" are also only things that exist at a time-slices. Plausibly, they don't exist at all since each necessarily exists through time. Either way, there's no sense in which they can be shared with future selves.

I think this kind of issue is better solved by the "reductionist" understanding of Parfit's views than the "eliminativist" / "illusionist" version.  There's no illusion of selfhood or constant replacement, just degrees of similarity that compose our idea of a self.

If you vaporized me and created a copy of me somewhere else, that would just be totally fine. I would think of it as teleporting. It'd be chill. 

...

If that's right, "constant replacement" could join a number of other ideas that feel so radically alien (for many) that they must be "impossible to live with," but actually are just fine to live with. (E.g., atheism; physicalism; weird things about physics. I think many proponents of these views would characterize them as having fairly normal day-to-day implications while handling some otherwise confusing questions and situations better.) 

These contradict each other. Let's say, like you imagined in an earlier post, that one day I'll be able to become a digital person by destroying my physical body in a futuristic brain-scanning process. It's pretty obvious that the connected conscious experience I've (I hope!) experienced my whole life, would, at that transition, come to an end. Whether or not it counts as me dying, and whether this new person 'is' me, are to some extent just semantics. But your and Parfit's position seems to define away the basic idea of personal identity just to solve its problems. My lifelong connected conscious awareness would undeniably cease to exist; the awareness that was me will enter the inky nothingness. The fact that my clone is walking and talking is completely orthogonal to this basic reality.

So if I tried to live with this idea "for a full week", except at the end of the week I know I'd be shot and replaced, I'd be freaking out, and I think you would be too. Any satisfactory theory of personal identity has to avoid equating death with age-related change. I should read Reasons and Persons, but none of the paradoxes you link to undermine this 'connected consciousness' idea of personal identity (which differs from what Bernard Williams--and maybe Parfit?--would call psychological continuity). As I understand it, psychological continuity allows for any given awareness to end permanently as long as it's somewhere replaced, but what I'm naively calling 'connected consciousness' doesn't allow this.

Another way of putting it; in your view, the only reason death is undesirable is that it permanently ends your relationships and projects. I also care about this aspect, but for me, and I think most non-religious people, death is primarily undesirable because I don't want to sleep forever!

This (often framed as being about the hard problem of consciousness) has long been a topic of argument in the rationalsphere. What I've observed is that some people have a strong intuition that they have a particular continuous subjective experience that constitutes what they think of as being "them", and other people don't. I don't think this is because the people in the former group haven't thought about it. As far as I can tell, very little progress has been made by either camp of converting the other to their preferred viewpoint, because the intuitions remain even after the arguments have been made.

Let's say $H_T$ is Holden at time T.

Plausible Moral Rule (PMR): People cannot be morally blameworthy for actions that occurred before they existed.

By the PMR, for instance, $H_T$ cannot be blameworthy for a murder committed by  Ted Bundy.

Now suppose that $H_{T-1}$ committed murder on national television. 

According to the view of personhood laid out in this post, plus the PMR, it seems like $H_T$ is not blameworthy for the murder committed by $H_{T-1}$. 

That seems whacky. 

I think that seems whacky for precisely the reason that $H_T$ and $H_{T-1}$ are the same person.

(Quick note: $H_T$ seems blameworthy for $H_{T-1}$'s murder in a way that's fundamentally different than the way we might say Holden's parents are blameworthy, even if $H_{T-1}$ is a minor.)

I haven't heard much in the way of specific proposals for how the existing "system" could be fundamentally reformed, other than explicitly socialist and Marxist proposals such as the abolition of private property, which I don't support.

More right-wing flavoured versions that you could run into include flavours of anarcho-capitalism (see e.g. The Machinery of Freedom and The Problem of Political Authority) and Hansonian proposals such as futarchy and private criminal law enforcement.

How would you classify populist anti-establishment movements like Donald Trump's presidency or Brexit?

To me these are also a kind of mutiny, in that their proponents are motivated more by a sense of grievance that the system is not working for them than a specific idea of what the system should look like instead.

I don't think the link in the comment works. Here is a direct link: 

https://www.cold-takes.com/rowing-steering-anchoring-equity-mutiny/

Holden, I'm curious where you would put painist organizations - those who are only trying to reduce / alleviate pain. One Step for Animals and Lewis' Open Phil work are along these lines. Or do you think this is not a big enough area to warrant discussion (which could well be).

Re: your comment on Juan Cambeiro being

“one of the best Covid forecasters there is” according to this tweet, which might be based on some quantitative metrics I haven’t easily found or might just not be right

There isn't (ironically) a clean quantifiable metric for comparing forecasters [1] across different platforms and different question sets , but among the EA forecasting world (at least in 2020 when I paid attention to this), Juan has had nontrivial renown in having consistently one of the best coronavirus forecasting records across a broad range of platforms. For example, in addition to his native Metaculus, Juan currently is #3 for coronavirus questions among Good Judgement Open forecasters (and iirc used to be higher, note that he did not predict all questions). He was also #1 in a private GJP 2.0 tournament I was in. He became a certified superforecaster (TM) in the end of 2020. He also generally has explicit reasoning and good takes. 

With the caveat that I mostly stopped paying attention to covid in 2021, I think Juan is plausibly one of the best covid forecasters out there, at least among people willing to put their forecasts out there publicly. I think it's plausible that private entities (eg in intelligence agencies, or trading firms) have noticeably better private forecasts on covid than the public ones we've seen, but I'm pretty agnostic about this.  

[1] The Rick and Morty joke "science is more art than science"comes to mind.

Re Omicron-specific boosters -- I'd love some ideas about what to do here.  Orgs like 1DaySooner are helpful for advocacy but I don't see any path to the kind of speed we need here. 

And even Pfizer seems to think that there isn't a reason for urgency right now (WaPo):

“I believe, in principle, we will at a certain time point need a new vaccine against this new variant. The question is how urgent this needs to be available,” CEO Ugur Sahin told a conference hosted by Reuters.

I'm struggling to see a plausible intervention at all here.

(This is Dave Orr, on the board at Packard.)

(Copied from below from before there was this thread.)

Thanks for this post- I forwarded it to a Oxford bioethicist and nudged him to write about it and they just published a thoughtful piece on it in the BMJ: 'Regulating strain-specific vaccines – speed, rigour and challenge trials'.

I'm curious about when the FDA's expedited flu vaccine approval came to be.  It seems plausible to me that this is something grandfathered in from the early days and that the modern FDA wouldn't be flexible enough to start something like it.

This was possibly my favourite email in the Cold Takes email newsletter so far. I always enjoy understanding someone's thought process before they've become an expert on a topic. Once someone knows enough, I think that their views usually change too slowly to easily see or demonstrate (one new piece of information or consideration, one new data point, naturally can't swing the holistic viewpoint quite so much when a person knows a huge amount).

It (unsurprisingly) reminded me of early Givewell material. Givewell is likely right more of the time now than in 2007. With more careful thought and knowledge built-up over time, comes better calibration. There is something lost though. How do we know that someone would change their mind in response to new evidence if we rarely see them change their minds? There is something wonderful about seeing people shift their views somewhat (or their confidence in their views) in response to transparent thinking in real-time. Anecdotally, this seems to happen a lot more in conversation than in writing (everywhere, not just in the EA community and adjacent spaces). In conversation, it is often much more acceptable to express uncertainty about conclusions while still presenting a framework for how you are thinking around an issue. It seems to happen rarely in public outside this community and adjacent ones.

My priors on the object-level question are very different to Holden's. My worst mental health happens when I feel stagnant/ can't contribute/am not valued. Being in physical pain with purpose has always felt much more bearable than having all the creature comforts of our modern time while feeling like what I spend my time doing is meaningless and doesn't add value to anything I really care about. This is obviously extremely weak evidence; memory is unreliable and I am a single individual. There might already be good evidence either way on whether feeling like your day-to-day life has purpose is a better predictor of subjective wellbeing than income or health for a sample size greater than one.

If hunter-gatherer societies consistently give everyone roles that visibly contribute to the lives of the people they know and love (eg. searching for food for the tribe) my prior is that this would feel more purposeful than modern day life (on average). If purpose is a more important factor in predicting subjective wellbeing than health or material wealth, then I would expect this study (across tribes/maybe even looking at biomarkers of depression instead of a survey) to replicate.

Assuming that the high happiness reports from the Hadza are "real" (and not noise, sampling bias, etc), what might it be?

They have dramatically worse health and nutrition. Also worse "creature comforts" like cozy beds, Netflix and mulled wine. But maybe some combination of the following could be overcoming those drawbacks.

In the category of lifestyle/how you spend your time:

• Social structure (small communities, much stronger social connection, more social time)
• Work structure (more cooperation, more "meaning" in work due to knowing you're supporting your family directly / avoiding starvation for yourself and your loved ones)
• Non-social leisure structure (no Reddit, no TV; no street noise; you're always out in nature)

Or internal experience:

• Perhaps you'd have different dreams or fantasies?
• No Instagram, no "keeping up with the Joneses" or social-status stress beyond your immediate community
• Climate change, nuclear war, and x-risk presumably aren't a worry
• Could sexual and romantic relationships be more fulfilling related to the small community?

Other ideas?

You already expressed skepticism on the survey of Hadza happiness, but Kat Woods offers more on why such a survey might give inaccurate results. From the intro:

I think the biggest takeaway I had from my experience is that I am even more skeptical of survey methodologies than I was before, and I started off pretty intensely skeptical. The reasons for this is that I think that misunderstandings caused by translation, education levels, and just normal human-to-human communication errors are not only common, but the rule.

The four major issues she notes are:

• Not understanding hypotheticals.
• Not understanding in general.
• People giving inconsistent answers.
• Refusing to rate happiness.

This is from surveying in Rwanda and Uganda, which will certainly have many of the same difficulties as surveying Hadza. (It also surprised me article that the US and Mexico would have much higher self-reported happiness than, for example, Italy. I wonder if this is a real effect or if happiness surveying is fraught with cultural issues in general.)

Because 'how the question is interpreted' makes comparing subjective happiness survey results hard to compare, one other way to approach the question of 'are hunter-gatherer societies happier' is to look at the people who move between hunter-gatherer and modern societies and study their happiness and outcomes. On the one hand, lots of hunter-gatherer peoples who switched into living in modern societies (e.g. Inuit in Greenland) have fairly bad outcomes ( to my limited knowledge, further study obviously needed here), on the other hand,  few seem to opt to return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, potentially suggesting modern lifestyles are preferable to hunter-gather lifestyles. 

Is there a significant cohort of people who've gone from living in modern societies and moved to live in hunter-gatherer societies? If yes, they'd be a useful group to survey. If not, is this evidence that modern lifestyles are preferable to hunter-gatherer ones, because no one 'votes with their feet' and moves from modern societies into hunter-gatherer ones?

In response to the following parts of your post:

• "the only relevant-seeming academic field I found (Utopian Studies) is rooted in literary criticism rather than social science"
• "most of the people there were literary scholars who had a paper or two on utopia but didn't heavily specialize in it"
• "Rather than excitement about imagining designing utopias, the main vibe was critical examination of why one would do such a thing"

I know a scholar who heavily specializes in the study of Utopia from the social sciences perspective (history) rather than literaty criticism: Juan Pro Ruiz, coordinator of the HISTOPIA project (~30 researchers, link in English). In their latest project, they are:

"analyzing the locations and geographical spaces of utopianism - both of unrealized or merely imaginary utopian projects (literature, cinema, art...) and of utopian experiments tested with greater or lesser success (in the form of social movements or intentional communities) - throughout contemporary history (19th to 21st centuries), while making an exceptional foray into the Modern Age in search of precedents and long-term trends. [...] even testing the heuristic possibilities of the human body as a space for the realization of utopias and dystopias in the field of contemporary science fiction or the transhumanist movement."

I recently attended a symposium on Utopian thinking by Juan Pro in Madrid. He seemed extremely knowledgeable in the subject, and quite positive about the usefulness of serious Utopian exploration as a tool for navigating the present towards a better future. From the HISTOPIA web page:

"HISTOPIA seeks to go beyond the philological approach that predominates in Utopian Studies and to historicize the study of contemporary utopias and dystopias, showing how they respond to the contexts in which they arise, since they reflect the problems and frustrations of a society as well as the aspirations for change it contains, and the conditions of possibility that a particular cultural and emotional framework offers for developing them. [...] to recognize a new surge of the utopian impulse in the present times, asserting its need to provide a channel for the “hope principle” and stimulate the emergence of innovative ideas that constitute responses to the problems of the present. In short, the group explores the meaning of utopia (and its alternatives) for contemporary societies, as a mechanism for the construction of possibilities, a true laboratory of thought and action, in which we experiment with the forms of political, economic and social organization of the future."

I found this email online if you want to contact him: juan.pro@uam.es. If you prefer, I could make an introduction.

As far as I'm aware, the first person to explicitly address the question "why are literary utopias consistently places you wouldn't actually want to live?" was George Orwell, in "Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun". I consider this important prior art for anyone looking at this question.

EAsphere readers may also be familiar with the Fun Theory Sequence, which Orwell was an important influence on.

On a related note, I get the impression that utopianism was not as outright intellectually discredited and unfashionable when Orwell wrote as it is today (e.g., the above essay predates Walden Two), even though most of the problems given in this piece were clearly already present and visible at that time. That seems like it does have something to do with the events of the 20th century, and their effects on the intellectual climate.

My favorite utopia is probably Scott Alexander‘s Archipelago of Civilized Communities, a world in which humans can form communities on any principles they desire on a new uninhabited island, while individuals have the freedom to leave at any time. The central government does very little except keeping peace, preventing some negative externalities and such. It doesn‘t sound too dull, I hope for a vast complexity of different communities and histories, the ability to travel between communitie, etc. 

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/

Holden, have you had a look at the Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer? It's one of the better explorations of a not-quite-Utopia-but-much-better-than-our-world that I've come across, and it certainly contains a large degree of diversity. It also doesn't escape being alien, but perhaps it's not so alien as to lose people completely. My one caveat is that it is comprised of four substantial books, so it's quite the commitment to get through if you're not doing it for your own leisure.

The best fictional description I've ever read of utopia is in Worth the Candle's epilogues -- in that it made me feel "yeah, I'd enjoy living there".  Some broad principles:

• People choose which kind of heaven they participate in
• All physical needs met, no resource constraints
• Everything is consent based; there are p-zombies to act out other urges

Highly worth a read!

I recently rewatched the movie Her (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/) which is one of the few examples of unironically utopian fiction I can find. The total extent of conflict and suffering in the movie is typical of a standard romantic comedy - the main character is going through a bad breakup with an ex, and dealing with a new relationship (which happens to be with an artificially intelligent phone operating system). It's got its own amounts of heartache and loss, but it's utopian in that all the bigger problems of the world seem to be gone. The main character lives in Los Angeles, but the city is full of skyscrapers, and it seems to be easy for people to afford a spacious apartment (and it's decorated in warm woods and gets lots of natural light, rather than being the sort of cold glass and steel thing people imagine in a skyscraper city). All the outdoor scenes are in beautiful pedestrian-oriented spaces, full of clean air and happy people of all races and genders, interacting in a friendly way. He can take the subway to the beach and the high speed rail up to Lake Tahoe. He has a fulfilling job helping clients compose thoughtful handwritten letters to their loved ones. He's worried about being judged for dating an operating system, but his best friend down the hall stays up late sharing videos with her new operating system friend, and his work friend suggests they go on a double date to Catalina island - it's only the ex who reacts poorly to his relationship with a computer. Other than the computer relationship, the thing I've heard the most negative reactions to about the movie is that it's a future where men wear high-waisted pants in 1970s colors. It might be worth studying that movie to see how to depict a utopia in a realistic way that people can like.

I feel like the main blocker is homogeneity. A utopia in which everyone is free to design their own sub-community as they see fit (provided certain rights are respected) should appeal to pretty much everyone, surely... It can even contain conflict, in the form of law-abiding struggles over the only inherently scarce resources (status, attention, etc.). Like sports.

I have a suspicion that people often dislike talking about utopias for fear of hope.

A personal example: when asking a few friends why they didn't want to live forever, I got responses that seemed to indicate something like:

"I don't want false hope. I've spent years trying to make peace with the fact that I'm going to die. I don't even want to  entertain the idea unless you have extraordinarily strong evidence it's possible."

I'd love to research this question.

Erik Olin Wright, a sociologist and former member of the 'non-bullshit Marxists' (which included analytical philosophers GA Cohen and Jon Elster and economist John Roemer amongst others), has a good book Envisioning Real Utopias (full book on his webpage here) that I think would be a profitable read for those interested in utopias work.

Maybe this recent book could be of interest: Anna Neima - The Utopians: Six Attempts to Build the Perfect Society.

Great post, I think this captures something very important about how the increasing size of, and focus on, externalities leads to more stakeholder vetos.

I think this dynamic affects private companies, governments and more. While "red tape" appears in institutions, I think the underlying cause of the "red tape" often comes from the behavior of private individuals. And I don't think the world becoming more "libertarian" (at least in the narrow sense of seeking to shrink government) would necessarily solve much (at least, I wouldn't expect it to lead to more subway stations!) 

I think you're correct that the underlying cause is individuals, but I do think there is something here about the solution. Private businesses have always had to deal with stakeholders, like suppliers and workers, and have historically been able to deal with this relatively well, because costs to these stakeholders could be compensated with fungible dollars. This allows for mutually beneficial agreements, competition and so on. In contrast, many of the stakeholder vetoes that are created by government do not allow such solutions: paying off stakeholders is considered bribery rather than legitimate payment. It's true that making rights alienable is compatible with a relatively high degree of government oversight, but most people would probably regard it as a move in a libertarian direction.

Another potential reason that empowerment could lead to more onerous stakeholder management is that we're able to take more large-scale, impactful actions, and so it's much more common to have affected stakeholders than it was in the past.

Did you take this post down? Or does it not exist yet?

Recent post responding to you

Re: net neutrality, I have no insider knowledge, this is just my personal opinion as an observer.

Little has changed since the NN repeal precisely because there was a relatively strong outcry at the time. It's hard to think of another issue that polls with 60-80% support across both parties.

Practically, "little has changed" in the sense that AFAIK in these 4 years no ISP has switched to a business model based on charging internet companies for access to "fast lanes". IMO this is only because introducing tiered pricing would likely generate significant backlash, and ISPs have good reason to believe that, given the outcry at the time of repeal.

The downsides of NN include unpredictable tail risks of a kind of lock-in that is very hard to undo.

At the time of repeal, I think there were basically two categories of "sky is falling" rhetoric. (1) rational actors trying to drum up public opposition despite knowing that the worst-case scenario is unlikely, and (2) media actors who jumped on the NN bandwagon, simply because it generated engagement.

Doesn't make sense for (1) to state "I was wrong" takes because nothing in these past 4 years falsifies the claim that eroding NN could gradually lead to an ossified internet with (much more) rent-seeking ISPs. (2) probably wouldn't recant anything since "we were wrong" stories seem like ineffective clickbait.

In short, I think nothing bad has happened yet because people were so fired up about NN in the first place, and because practically a rent-seeking ISP would need more time to capitalize on the repeal.

Added to Metaculus:

• Will Holden win his Bet with Zvi about Omicron, conditional on one of them winning?
• Will Holden's Bet with Zvi about Omicron resolve ambiguously? (pending approval as of this comment)

Bet with Zvi about Omicron:

Fun exercise: which side of this bet would you want to be on?

I'm definitely on Holden's side of the bet.

In summary, I assign 80% to Holden's outcome, 15% to the ambiguous "push" outcome, and 5% to Zvi's outcome.

This is a low-information forecast, but there seem to be three outcomes to the bet, and Zvi's outcome clearly seems to be the least likely:

(1) For Zvi to win, Covid cases (of all variants, including any future ones) need to average ~18 times higher over the first two months of 2022 than over the following 12 months (math: 18 = (0.75/2) / (0.25/12)).

18 is such a high ratio given Covid's track record so far. The ratio of the 7-day-average of US cases from its high (1/11/2021 = ~256,000/day) to its low (6/21/2021 = ~12,000/day) is ~21, barely higher than ~18. Plus, those two weeks were months apart, giving time for cases to drop off.

I don't see a very plausible way to get that kind of ratio for the first two months of 2022 over the 12 months afterwards. E.g. It seems unlikely that cases would drop off sufficiently quickly at the end of February to avoid adding a large number of cases in March (and to a lesser degree, April, etc). (i.e. Even if cases virtually disappeared later in 2022 (such that the second period being 12 months instead of 6 doesn't matter much), it's really hard for cases to drop off so quickly that the number of cases from March 1 onwards don't end up being at least a third of the number of cases from January and February.) The prior on that steep drop-off happening by the end of February is quite low and the fact that it's only a little over a week until January and cases are still on the rise doesn't make it seem more likely that there will be a steep drop-off before March. There's just no way Zvi could know that that is likely going to happen. I don't need to read his post to know that he doesn't know that.

Given this simple consideration that cases would have to drop off exceptionally fast at just the right time for Zvi's outcome to happen, I assign a 5% chance to Zvi's outcome happening.

It was really just strongly disagreeing that Zvi's outcome seemed likely that made me want to write this comment, but I'll go ahead and write estimates for the other two outcomes:

(2) For Holden to win, cases in the 12-month period after February 2022 have to exceed one-third of cases in the first two months of 2022 before a new variant comes along and takes over. I haven't heard of any new variant after Omicron. Such a new variant would have to be much more contagious than Omicron for it to have a chance to take over everywhere in the US in time to stop Omicron's cases from exceeding that one-third threshold in March-May. I hear Omicron is super contagious so that seems unlikely. Therefore, my low-information forecast is that Holden's outcome is 80% likely.

(3) For the bet to be a "push" (i.e. for the bet to resolve ambiguously), a new variant or variants need to take over before Omicron-and-previous-variant cases after March 1 exceed the one-third threshold mentioned above. This seems more likely than Zvi's outcome, but still not that likely. I'll assign 15% to the ambiguous outcome.

I set up a prediction market for this bet! https://mantic.markets/AustinChen/will-at-least-75-of-the-usa-covid19

Also, this paragraph from Holden really resonated with me:

In an ideal world, we'd be making so many bets like this that our track records would give clear evidence of which of us was a better predictor, overall. But I don't think that's going to happen; it's a lot of work even to nail down a pretty simple, vivid disagreement like this one (and most important disagreements are much harder to reach bets on, and even this one may require a third-party judgment-driven adjustment). I don't think that whichever of us wins this one bet should gain too much credibility relative to the other.

What kind of tools, sites, or economic structures could enable this ideal world? At Mantic we're hoping accessible, user-created prediction markets will do the trick, but would love to hear alternative proposals!

I read your article and one element I think you might be missing, is the impact that Pet Sounds had on music production.

A Love Supreme is great, but it is pretty simple from a production standpoint. A group of talented musicians playing great music together.

Pet Sounds, on the other hand, is IMO widely regarded as an innovative musical production masterpiece. So leaving the quality of the songs aside, I recommend re-listening (maybe on high-end headphones) to how each of the sounds has been placed and fit together. I think often when people describe the album as being 'symphonic' they are in some way referring to the fact that this is a piece of pop music that feels like it holds a similar breadth and sophistication as an orchestra in terms of the raw sound.

I don't know that it will change the overall argument, but I thought you might be interested.

The obvious answer to what frame of mind are you missing here is that you have to actually like the genre of music Pet Sounds is working in relation to.

Simply put, there isn't any popular, jazz, or avant-garde music that was written and produced like Pet Sounds before Pet Sounds. It's literally an unprecedented work of art.

It's not just about the fact that it had an exorbitant budget, but the fact that it was composed and directed almost singlehandedly by Wilson. It's the fact that  Wilson found a way to be as successful and sophisticated to the degree that he was. He created commercial AM radio pop music with very complex forms and structures within an industry whose markets clamored for either simple three-chord rock 'n'  roll, bubblegum, throwaway novelty songs, or schmaltz -  an accomplishment that no one had thought possible back then.

Every track contains dozens of different musical parts played and sung by a full-sized virtual orchestra (virtual because many of the parts - mostly the vocals - were overdubbed). These tracks were designed to be as intricate as possible without forcing the listener to struggle with the bombardment of information they're receiving. And it worked. Newly married couples around the world still choose God Only Knows as their wedding song - a song that was crafted so incredibly well that nobody notices that it has no key center until they try to learn to play it.

"But it's doubtful that it used the recording studio better than today's music does." I don't know, I guess this comes down to whether you prefer:

A) the kind of music that would be composed by one guy with strange ideas about music, recorded organically with analogue equipment and real singers and musicians, and then released as-is

B) the kind of music that is composed by algorithms, programmed in a DAW, recorded with autotuned singers, and then screened by test audiences to take out all the "weird" parts

"But it's inevitable that pop music would have gone in more complex directions." Another weird point. It's also inevitable that man will develop civilizations on other planets. Is the "inevitability" supposed make it any less impressive to us?

Yet, 55 years later, there's still no album that hits every checkmark that Pet Sounds does. So much for the inevitability. So much for progress.

I've heard albums with one or two tracks that sorta sound like Pet Sounds, but none of those attempts are structured as complex as songs like Here Today and Don't Talk. The soundalikes use bass harmonicas and harpsichords, but they don't really mess with time signatures, or feature six-part vocal arrangements, or use chord extensions like m7sus4/b5, or modulate keys several times in less than 2 minutes without sounding like free jazz. On the rare occasions that they do, then it's only when they're directly quoting/referencing a line from Pet Sounds.

Yes, there's plenty of complex music out there with all those weird chords and key changes, but it's not pop, it's jazz, prog, heavy metal, and so on and so forth. It's very difficult to be complex and stay pop. That is what makes Pet Sounds so amazing.

Miles Davis could not have written Pet Sounds, and Brian Wilson could not have written A Love Supreme. Why even compare the two? Different backgrounds, different genres, different types of musicians, different markets. So silly.

I've felt flummoxed for a while about Pet Sounds. I first tried listening to it in high school (after learning of its acclaim) and couldn't make it through. When I listen to it now, over a decade later, I feel I can clearly hear and appreciate the "symphonic" quality of the songs, and the care and craft that went into the production, instrumentation, and compositions. It's not difficult for me to believe that it was a major leap forward and I think it's not too difficult to hear how influential it's been. A song I love, "John Allyn Smith Sails" by Okkervil River is partly an adaptation of "Sloop John B". 

Moreover, when I listen to Pet Sounds with 'audiophile brain' the sounds, melodies, and harmonies all sound great. But I just don't enjoy listening to the album. The vocals sound detached and clinical to me. For such an acclaimed and highly-ranked album, I feel it doesn't have many raw emotional hooks.

Compare to others on the top of the lists Holden linked: Marvin Gaye, Nirvana, The Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Dylan. Their songs have some powerful emotional energy that Pet Sounds seems to lack-- and will typically make you feel something, even if it's not your cup of tea. To me, Pet Sounds sounds like the odd one out, so I still feel confused why it's so high on these lists. 

Also, I would definitely rank A Love Supreme much closer to the top. 

I had a similar reaction on my first listen to Pet Sounds. I think the impact it had on production means that you need to have not heard any music after it to fully hear its importance. 

It sounds like a solid pop album to my ears. God only knows sounds beautiful to me but not other-worldly. But I'm assuming it would have blown my mind (as it did the Beatles) had I not heard the last 50 years of music.

Other than A Love Supreme, what albums have you found really impactful? Could you write 500-1000 words off the top of your head on why one of those albums is a work of genius? Have you ever taken over a conversation at a party (without really intending to)  to explain how good some piece of music is and how everyone should go home and listen to it right away?

I am really really not trying to call you a philistine, there is nothing wrong with not having super strong feelings about music. But my guess is that most music critics (professional or armchair) would answer yes to both. If you don't answer yes to these questions, maybe you're not responding to music the way that other people do. (Which, again, is okay.)

Personally, fine art (painting, sculpture) does almost nothing for me. I couldn't offer any authentic opinion at all on whether Jackson Pollack was a more important artist than Georgia O'Keefe. So I have to assume that the people who do care about that question are perceiving something that I'm not.

For what it's worth I consider Pet Sounds to be sublimely beautiful, but I have no idea how I'd explain what exactly is so beautful about it in a way that would convince anyone else.

To some extent I think a comparison between Pet Sounds and A Love Supreme is apples and  qumquats. 

But still...I suspect that someone who is capable of listening to and understanding A Love Supreme, whether or not they like it, is also capable to listening to and understanding Pet Sounds, whether or not they like it. But I don't think the converse is necessarily true. That is, having the ability to listen to and understand Pet Sounds does not imply that one can also understand A Love Supreme or, for that matter, a Beethoven piano sonata.

i wondered whilst reading through this if framing / comparing your take on a “complex” album (like A Love Supreme) is useful if we don’t actually dive into why you think that is more complex and layered than an album like Pet Sounds. would it be useful to contextualise A Love Supreme within Coltrane’s works as well and across the jazz landscape of the time? would a jazz purist consider Coltrane’s album, which is arguably in the popular music arena (as much as a jazz album can be), to be less complex than other contemporaries that someone with a more intense affinity for jazz might pick out (making assumptions here about your love/knowledge of jazz, but also thinking of the people i know that can only reference A Love Supreme or Kind of Blue when talking about great jazz). and do we all suffer from comparing pop rock music to pop jazz music and giving overwhelming weight to jazz just because of its supposed higher end status (which leads me back to the Beethoven writings and the way people perceive older classical music vs new music, etc.). these were all the questions that popped in my head when reading and would love to find some deep dives into these things.

I’d love to hear your take after doing a similar listen-through of Radiohead’s discography up through Kid A. They dominated the top 5 of Pitchfork’s reader poll of the best albums of all time, and that judgement feels much more representative to me of what a contemporary rock fan might choose than Pet Sounds.

I'm not sure you've quite nailed the central claim of the book. Which is fair, they don't make it clear, and I don't think the reviews did a good job of making it clear either. 

I think it's more along the lines of: 

Modern societies have lost the qualities of flexibility and political creativity that were once more common in human history. We have value lock in.

This seems plausible to me. 

They also make the following claim:

Western civilisation is not conducive to human flourishing. This is made evident by the fact that Western civilisation did not spread of its own accord. Instead, European powers ‘have been obliged to spend the last 500 or so years aiming guns at people’s heads in order to force them to adopt it’. 

This is more debatable. But I don't think it's very important (with regards to a discussion on the value of the book). 

Why? Because they only state this claim due to the fact that this is why they care about the truth of the first claim. However, I expect most people on this forum already agree that value lock in is bad and, therefore, don't need to buy this second claim to find value in the book.

Instead, to determine the value of the book (provided you already buy the first claim AND think lock in is bad), one ought to investigate claims such as the following (made in the conclusion):

• Our society's lack of flexibility and political creativity has its origins in a confusion between care and domination.
• Societies such as ours, i.e. those that are large and complex, do not require domination to flourish.

I believe Scott Alexander has cited this book’s “ballistically false” claim, and I definitely remember ~believing it and finding it strongly compelling.

It is so, so much worse. I investigated the claim in depth, found it was indeed "ballistically false" (the claim being that the source they cite supports what the book says, not whether what they say in the book is actually true), and then decided to find out if Wengrow had perhaps apologized and issued a retraction . I ran across this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1460660171496173577?s=21 in which Wengrow defends his scholarship by variously claiming that people misread the source, that people misunderstood the claims in the source, that the source saying that "many" whites chose to stay with the Indians is evidence for his claim that they "almost invariably" did so, and that his source is unreliable and should not be trusted. 

This guy is either very stupid, a very bad liar, or just lazy and thinks that everyone else is a gullible idiot. 

Reading this post reminded me of someone whose work may be interesting to look into: Rufus Pollock, a former academic economist who founded the Open Knowledge Foundation. His short book (freely available here) makes the case for replacing traditional IP, like patents and copyright, with a novel kind of remuneration. The major benefits he mentions include increasing innovation and creativity in art, science, technology, etc.

For those particularly concerned with counterfactual impact, this is an argument to work on problems or in fields that are just beginning or don’t exist yet in which many of the wins haven’t been realized; this is not a novel argument. I think the bigger update is that “ideas get harder to find” indicates that you may not need to have Beethoven’s creativity or Newton’s math skills in order to make progress on hard problems which are relatively new or have received little attention. In particular, AI Safety seems like a key place where this rings true, in my opinion.

I vote for innovation as mining. I've visualized an abstract version of that starting on p. 14 ("Stagnation, Redux: Like diamonds, good ideas are not evenly distributed") of this working paper, What economic growth and statistical semantics tell us about the structure of the world, piggy-backing on Romer's 1992, Two Strategies for Economic Development.

I'll talk exclusively about music (mostly the broader rock/pop realm), because that’s the area that I know the best (being a lifelong obsessive music lover who has played in bands and dabbled in music production and DJing). It seems pretty clear to me that what you describe is already the current state in the world of music - and perhaps that’s partly why we don't see any more Beethovens?

Riffing on past work is, arguably, something every musician does, consciously, or unconsciously. They cover songs, "steal" riffs, sample, and combine ideas from other artists. It's quite rare that you find someone even attempting to do something completely without precedent. (This seems so self-evident that I'm not going to provide examples, but I would be happy to, upon request.)

Population growth/demographics, but also technology (recording and distribution, not even AI) have already resulted in exponential growth of the amount of music being produced. You used to have to pay to go into a studio to record an album, and get a record contract to distribute it. As a consumer, you'd have to work harder too. If you read about some music, you'd have to go to a store to find it and buy it, sometimes without every hearing it. Now people record in their bedrooms, upload to Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Spotify, etc., and consumers can find it online immediately. (Certainly, it seems like the evolution of things like the OpenAi Jukebox will blow this up to absurd proportions.)

Why has this not resulted in more universally acclaimed music? Perhaps partly because of intense competition? These days, many more musicians can earn some income from their music, but it's spread much more thin. Few can earn enough to make a living. This has resulted in a flourishing of many genres and sub-genres that appeal more narrowly, but may have a more consistent audience. When Beethoven was alive, you had his genius, but nowhere near the breadth and variety of music available today. It's not surprising that no one is as universally acclaimed now. 

As Oleg Eterevsky mentions above there is certainly also an element of "stood the test of time", for Beethoven, which is not possible for contemporary works (though you could argue something like this for The Beatles or Led Zeppelin, for example). 

Of course, in the idea that there is less "great art" "as judged by critical acclaim", the "as judged by critical acclaim" is doing a lot of work. Another reason we may not have universally acclaimed musicians could be the decline in usefulness of critics in general. You can hear anything instantly online. Why do you even need anyone telling you what to like? You can use your ears! Just like it's harder to make a living off of music these days, it's probably even harder to make a living off music criticism (though there are certainly less people trying). 

I would argue that we are already experiencing an explosion of innovation in music, it just doesn't look like "great art" "as judged by critical acclaim", primarily because critical acclaim is less relevant (universal acclaim as a concept may just no longer exist), and secondarily, as Oleg mentioned above, we are not judging it through the test of time. It looks like many interesting and innovative ideas amongst a staggering breadth of new genres and sub-genres. So much so, that, even for an enthusiast, it is overwhelming. 

As far as mining vs. discovering, I think it's definitely useful to think of the creative process in both ways, but that considering music exclusively a mining activity would be completely wrong. Musical ideas are expressed very different depending on who's expressing them. Another way of putting this: Is it the idea that's important or the expression of the idea (or some combination of both)? 

In science, it's clearly heavily weighted towards the idea, but in music I think it has to be pretty equally both. If Beyoncé had come up with the ideas from Beethoven's 5th instead of Beethoven, it would have sounded a lot different (probably not like this, but maybe AI  Jukebox will be able to show us some day soon). It's possible for a brilliant idea to be poorly expressed, sound like garbage, and get completely ignored. Conversely, plenty of rehashed ideas are brilliantly executed and widely appreciated. 

Veering away from music briefly, I agree that a modern-day Shakespeare might resemble Sorkin. Beyond ideas being harder to find, I think you also have to factor in that there are just many more people of that talent level working today, and we tend to judge things in context. If there are 50 Shakespeares out there making excellent TV shows and movies today, no single one of them is going to seem that special. Beethoven and Shakespeare were head and shoulders above their contemporaries, in part, because they had fewer contemporaries.

I was pretty struck by how per capita output isn't obviously going down, and it's only when you do the effective population estimates that it does.

Could this suggest a 4th hypothesis: the 'innate genius' theory: about 1 in 10 million people are geniuses, and at least since around 1400, talent spotting mechanisms were good enough to find them, so the fraction of the population that was educated or urbanised doesn't make a difference to their chances of doing great work. 

I think I've seen people suggest this idea - I'm curious why you didn't include it in the post.

"Some of the people who have written the most detailed pieces about "innovation stagnation" seem to believe something like the "golden age" hypothesis - but they seem to say so only in interviews and casual discussions, not their main works."

Just fyi - You mention Peter Thiel in a footnote here. It's been a while since I read it but iirc Peter Thiel describes something you might consider a version of the golden age hypothesis in a bit of dusk in the "You are not a lottery ticket" chapter of zero to one.

This post lacks knowledge about western contemporary music (that's how "classical" music is kind of called nowadays). A brief list of innovative composers on par with Beethoven:
Debussy, Ravel, Shostakovich, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bartok, Varese, Messiaen, Ligeti, Berio, Boulez, Nono, Stockhausen, Steve Reich, John Cage, Penderecki, Ginastera, Villa-Lobos, Xenakis, Saariaho, John Adams, Elliot Carter, Manoury, Grisey, Murail, Haas, Kurtag, Davidovsky, Sciarrino, Alexander Schubert, Steen-Andersen, Ablinger, Oliveira, Mary, Kokoras... and of course there are a lot more.

A fun way to keep up on new composers is watching the ScoreFollower youtube channel videos. You can also look for composition contests and check out the winners and jury for names. Or... just google for contemporary music, read books about it or about music history, or even look for musicology research (the scientific study of music). Hope this helps.

[Disclaimer: Sheer idle speculation, not important or rigorous]

I am generally a fan of the innovation-as-mining hypothesis. However, even within the broad tent of that hypothesis, there is room to debate e.g. whether there has been a recent, temporary slowdown in progress due to cultural or genetic factors in addition to the usual ideas-getting-harder-to-find factor. I have two ideas here that I'd be interested to see explored:

1. You say 

Finally, this hypothesis implies that a literal duplicate of Beethoven, transplanted to today's society, would be a lot less impressive. My own best guesses at what Beethoven and Shakespeare duplicates would accomplish today might show up in a future short post that will make lots of people mad.

What about a duplicate of John von Neumann? Maybe our modern geniuses like Terry Tao are his equal, but I sometimes wonder if he was a class above even them.

2. One argument you make against the Golden Age hypothesis is that typically the golden age is also the first age, which is a suspicious coincidence. IIRC, I read somewhere that average human brain size has shrunk over the last ten thousand years or so. I dunno if that's true but suppose it is. Given the correlation between brain size and IQ, one might wonder whether selection pressure for intelligence -- or some important component of it -- has also diminished in the last ten thousand years or so. If that were true, a version of the Golden Age hypothesis would be more likely, and also would successfully predict that observed "golden ages" in various fields would happen at the beginning of said fields. 

>the "golden age" hypothesis (people in the past were better at innovation), the "bad taste" hypothesis (Beethoven and others don't deserve their reputations), and the "innovation as mining" hypothesis (ideas naturally get harder to find over time, and we should expect art and science to keep slowing down by default).

I think you're missing what I consider the most likely explanation: There are a lot more people in these fields now, trying to be the best. What's remarkable about these historical figures is not that they were better at what they did than people nowadays, but that they did it first. So I am not sure we'd notice a new Shakespeare. We'd simply lump him in with all of the other really good playwrights we have. Nothing would make him stand out as the best. 

So it's possible that our scientists, artists, etc. are better than these historical giants, but we just can't tell. 

The movie Yesterday sort of tackled this in an interesting way. Imagine a parallel universe where everything is the same but the Beatles never came together. Would someone releasing their exact music in 2021 still become highly successful and considered a musical icon? In the movie the answer is yes. In real life I imagine the answer would be no - the same exact music would no longer sound innovative and would thus not become particularly successful. This New-Beatles band might reach the level of a Top-100 artist but they'd never see the same level of admiration as the Beatles did and still do.

So I believe we're simply not judging more recent art works by the same standards, resulting in a huge bias towards older works. Beethoven is only noteworthy because his works are a cultural meme at this point - he was a great musician for his time, sure, but right now there's probably tens of thousands of musicians who could make music of the same caliber straight on their laptops. Today's Beethoven publishes his amazing tracks on SoundCloud and toils in obscurity.

Very much enjoyed the post. 

The thesis that recent (50 year) declines in innovation productivity are best explained by innovation generally getting structurally harder over time does, I think, somewhat overfit the data.

Sketched argument below:

1. Innovation is cumulative. And in particular new tools create new possibilities for innovation as much as the reverse. So no astronomy without the telescope, no modern medicine without organic chemistry, no Beethoven without the invention of the piano, no early mathematics without Hindu-Arabic numerals, etc.
2. When the right tool arrives, there is a subsequent explosion of innovation, followed by a slow down.
3. There is a degree of randomness in these bursts, and the 70 years around the turn of the 19th/20th century was a particularly strong cluster (from the publication of Maxwell's equations in 1865 to the Trinity nuclear test in 1945). Humanity went from candles and horses to nuclear power, jet engines,  eradication of most communicable diseases, electrification, relativity and quantum mechanics, the telephone, early computers, and many others. Art and culture also shifted abruptly and in a very interesting way.
4. Note that this was an acceleration from the 19th century - innovation doesn't always get harder.
5. If the limiting factor is the right tool, rather than people or money, then huge investment in research will lead to drops in productivity in producing fundamental breakthroughs. And the people we call geniuses are just those that get their hands on the tool first (bit like Bill Gates being one of a handful of people to globally able play with computers in their teens).
6. Post 1970 (?) slowdown in innovation is to some extent a contrast with an exceptional cluster, and and in itself a relative trough.

The big question, it seems to me, is whether AI and ~CRISPR the sorts of fundamental tools that can spark a new acceleration?

It may be hard to compare art from different periods, but it is direct to compare science and engineering from different periods because the same thing was discovered or invented multiple times.

Knowledge is not a ratchet. Sometimes knowledge is lost. But it is not only catastrophes like burning libraries and riots against scholars. There are Leaden Ages where scientific knowledge is lost century after century, such as Alexandria for about five centuries starting  150AD. Any period of progress is a Golden Age compared to that. Do people know that they are in a Leaden Age? I don't think the Alexandrians knew. The first task is not to fool yourself.

If a second age reconstructs the knowledge of the first age faster, it might be because they are better, or it might be because they are supported by the notes of the pioneers. But what if they are slower? This is strong evidence that the first age really was Golden. In particular, the Hellenistic Age, 330-130BC, subsumed virtually all scientific progress for thousands of years, at least to 1600, and maybe to 1700. 

One possibility (which may or not have been mentioned) is that an overflow of information/stimulation as a result of technology and faster paced societies inhibits creativity. Part of the issue may arise from excessive entertainment: Beethoven may have created musical pieces in periods of boredom, which the modern day Beethoven spends scrolling through social media or watching Netflix.

I think another potential explanation relates to the way people think about the history of a given field when asked to reflect on it (e.g. to create a top 100 list). We tend to conceive of fields as progressions unfolding over time, and even if we don't think this is always in a "better" direction, at least we conceive of the field as consisting of time periods characterized by a dominant paradigm or style. Certainly this is the way that "history of X" classes are usually taught. 

If this is the case, it seems natural to me that, when asked to reflect on the "most important" individuals or contributions to a field in its history, we will tend to structure that reflection around our conception of these periods, and likely identify an emblematic individual for each period. Indeed, part of our conception of "greatest" might include a feature like "dominated their field for a decade or more," and obviously the frequency of individuals characterized in this way cannot increase with greater population, education, or anything at all! To the extent that our thinking follows this approach, we will tend to see "best of" lists being pretty flat over time, and therefore, appearing to decline when normalized by anything that increases over time. 

Thanks for this, it's a fascinating subject.

At risk of anticipating your follow-ups, I have two suggestions regarding art. I don't think they apply as well to science.

1. If a work is considered to be among the greats, the older it is, the more foundational it has become. An enormous amount of great music since Beethoven is, often very deliberately, developing Beethoven's ideas further, or introducing new ideas by tweaking what Beethoven (or Mozart or Bach) did. Thus, what the art is gets tied up with the foundational works. In mining terms, finding a motherlode also seems to mean shutting down (or, at best, reducing focus on) other mines. It's impossible to imagine western classical music without Beethoven, in part because such a significant amount of it is Beethovian. Had some very talented and charismatic musician come along at the right time from the Balkans, maybe that foundational slot would be taken by someone/something else. If this is correct, there's bound to be some historical figures that are considered head-and-shoulders above the rest, and they must be quite old. A contemporary person cannot fill this role, though it's conceivable that a contemporary person would fill this role for people 200 years down the road.
2. The effectiveness of Beethoven's and Shakespeare's works relies on performance. While there are attempts at period authenticity, the most popular recording of the 5th symphony or performance of Hamlet is not that, and hasn't been that for a long time. This relates to (1) in a couple of ways:
   1. There have been centuries of "testing" to optimize the experience of these works, and it is ongoing. (This point is less relevant to, say, novelists, even if people are constantly re-interpreting Dickens.) Ranking Shakespeare #1 is really ranking centuries-of-optimizations-Shakespeare #1, which puts David Mamet at a pretty big disadvantage.
   2. Foundational works impact performance practice. At risk of oversimplifying, teenage violinists go to conservatory to learn how to play Beethoven. Even in the unlikely event that they never play Beethoven, present-day composers write for musicians trained to play Beethoven, not Harry Partch. Not all music requires virtuosity (or violinists), but huge subfields of the arts involve creators devising works for performers who were trained for old stuff.

Thank you for a thought provoking post! I enjoyed it a lot.

I also find the "innovation as mining" hypothesis intuitive. I'd just add that innovation gets harder for humans, but we don't know whether it holds in general (think AI). Our mental capacity has been roughly constant since ancient Greece, but there is more and more previous work to understand before one can come up with something new.  This might not be true for AI, if their capacity scales.

On the other hand there is a combinatorial explosion of facts that you can combine to come up with an innovation and I don't know what fraction of the combinations will actually be useful and judged as innovation. So overall, the difficulty might increase, stay roughly the same, or decrease, depending on how the number of useful combination scales with the number of all combinations.

I also suspect that subjective rankings of past accomplishments just tend, for whatever reason, to look overly favorably on the past.

One explanation of this would be that innovation needs time to collect its impact. Old innovations are well integrated into the society, so they have already collected most of its impact, while new innovations have most of their impact still in the future, so we don't perceive them as transformative yet.

I didn't exclude the middle because I think it's insignificant - more because I didn't have data on it. That said, I would actually guess that it's not as big as the other two categories.

If two groups got in a fight in the US and there were lots of deaths, these would be classified as homicides; for violent deaths to not be classified as homicides, there needs to be some sort of breakdown or abuse of the legal framework. Those events don't seem so common that I think we're obviously missing a ton when we just look at the most deadly ones (though I do wish we had data on all of them).

Great tip, thanks!

An interesting counterexample to some of your points is the Disney Renaissance, generally considered to be the golden age of Disney animation, which started fifty years after Disney began animating films. AIUI, the conventional wisdom is that there happened to be a confluence of incredible talents: in particular, Howard Ashman and Alan Menken  were an incredible songwriting duo. The Renaissance was also when the iconic Disney princess line was invented. Before the Renaissance, Disney happened to have made films about princesses, but it wasn't a distinct category, any more than films about talking animals were considered a distinct category. The anecdote I've heard is that a producer noticed that girls were wearing handmade Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella dresses, and decided to appeal to the obvious market here!

I for one would be very interested in it if you decided to look into why the Disney Renaissance was so good so long after Disney began animating films. 

You write "Is it in fact the case that the difference between the 1st- and 2nd-best performer should shrink as the number of competitors goes up? This isn't obvious to me either way."

I think that, if you're drawing without replacement n times from a normal distribution, the difference between highest and second-highest value drawn should shrink as n rises, but that the opposite is true if the distribution is log-normal.

I would expect that "greatness" in terms of critical acclaim in some field is log-distributed, so, the bigger the field, the greater the extent to which the leader should stand out above the second-best.

I generally like the innovation-as-mining hypothesis with regards to the science and with some respect to the arts, but I think that there is one issue with the logical chain.

You said that "[i]f not for this phenomenon [that ideas get harder to find], sequels should generally be better than the original," but I don't think this is necessarily true. I think a more likely reason that sequels aren't generally better than the original is mostly regression to the mean and selection effects, with two main causes:

1. Pure quality: Presumably, an author or a screenwriter will only make a sequel if the original enjoyed a sufficient level of success to merit the effort. While some of that quality is likely due to the skill of the author, some of it is likely due to luck. Accordingly, the quality of subsequent sequels is likely worse, even if the author improves over time.
2. Idea selection: When writing the original, the author had a lot of leeway in what type of media was being written, what the world building looked like, what plot was going to be used, etc. Given the uncertainty of the enterprise and the need to make a good pitch, the author likely chose ideas for their highest quality. However, when the sequel is written, the choice of ideas is less strict. For one, the pool of ideas is smaller, but further, the standards are lower. If a sequel is written, it is often due to demand from audiences rather than the desire of creators, so ideas are not held to the same standard.

I think a relevant example here is that of albums. There is this idea of a "sophomore slump" in albums, where a band's second album tends to be worse than their first. I don't think this is due to it being hard to make good albums after your first (quality generally seems to improve over the next few albums after that), but a shrinking pool of songs to choose from. On an artists debut album, they can choose pretty much any song they've ever written. On the second however, the artist is restricted to only the songs they've written after the first album and anything that wasn't good enough to make it onto the first. Even though they don't face the constraint of working within their pre-existing world, the quality decreases. I think that it is likely that that is the case here as well.

As such, I'm not sure exactly why "ideas get harder to find" should be the default. Another explanation for why the per-capita great successes could be lower than in the past has to do with competition and the importance of being the best. In sports, there is a lot of attention paid to the greats of the past, even though current athletes are at a higher level. The fiftieth best quarterback today in the NFL could very well be better than the best quarterback in 1980, but we remember the best quarterback then and not the fiftieth best now. As such, because the middle-brow gets cluttered (essentially, to be successful in the middlebrow, you need to be successful everywhere), there is much stiffer competition to be the best of the middle-brow today.

As such, you likely see more total success and less success per capita, which is about the pattern we see right now. That being said, I enjoyed the post.

I think this is one of your best posts. I learned a lot, built new models of art, and laughed out loud multiple times.

Obligatory link to Scott Alexander's "Ambijectivity" regarding the contentiousness of defining great art.

For a realistic but largely utopic near-future setting, I recommend Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. Much of the plot involves a weak and possibly immersion-breaking take on AGI, but in terms of forecasting a near-future world where most problems have become substantially more superficial and mild, the background  events and supporting material is very good.

I don't think I've seen anyone reference the Culture series in connection with these posts yet. The series places a utopian post-scarcity and post-death society — the Culture, run by benevolent AIs that do a good job of handling human values — in conflict with societies that are not the Culture.

I've only read The Player of Games myself, and that book spends more time with the non-utopian than the utopian society, but it's still a good book, and one that many people recommend as an entry point into the series.

Sorry to come in late, but I do have a link for a near-utopia here:

https://orionsarm.com/ is essentially as utopian as it can be, barring the 3 powers of time travel, reality warping or thermodynamics breaking.

It could be argued that advances today are already taking meaning out of our lives (thus for some people utopia is already getting too far). One example of this is teenagers that suffer more from depression but less from other diseases.  This post also reminded me of a blog post  by philosopher Mike Huemer in which he argues that the best afterlife is reincarnation https://fakenous.net/?p=2491
 

3. Reincarnation > Heaven

What might God do instead?

It would make more sense for a god to send us back into the world, to live this sort of existence again. Each life involves meaningful struggles in the face of adversity, the exercise of free will, and the opportunity to exhibit virtue. It never gets old, because we forget everything at the end of each lifetime. It can go on for eternity in that way.

You might be interested in my effort to characterise utopia.

I didn't make a claim that constant replacement occurs "empirically." As far as I can tell, it's not possible to empirically test whether it does or not. I think we are left deciding whether we choose to think of ourselves as being constantly replaced, or not - either choice won't contradict any empirical observations. My post was pointing out that if one does choose to think of things that way, a lot of other paradoxes seem to go away.