BBC Future longform article on Progress Studies (including connection between progress and risk)

By Garrison @ 2022-06-16T15:13 (+65)

This is a linkpost to https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220615-do-we-need-a-better-understanding-of-progress

I wrote a 4k word feature on Progress Studies for BBC Future that just went up. (Tweet here). I explore:

• the stagnation hypothesis
• the origins of progress studies
• what PS believes
• will economic growth make us happier
• frontier vs. catch-up growth, and how PS’s focus on the former reveals its biases
• progress and existential risk
• the future of the community

I think of PS as like EA circa ~2012. They have billionaire support and are quickly professionalizing. The community seems very interested in learning from EA and has responded to critiques that they are not focused enough on x-risk. 

But they are different in important ways. Compared to EA, I think PS is:

• more entrepreneurial, with a strong bias to action
• less academic
• more American, tech-y, and rooted in the Bay Area
• less defined - PS is not nearly as rigorous or philosophically oriented
• less demanding - PS doesn't really ask much, if anything, from its followers. I think this may be a huge force multiplier for the community, as it will better appeal to wealthy tech people, but probably makes any individual member less effective
• more neoliberal and libertarian (though, compared to these groups PS is quicker to recognize market failures and call for govt intervention)
• more speciesist - the focus is just on human progress, and tech has clearly been net-bad for farmed animals IMO
• more growth-oriented

For an interesting look at what the intersection of PS and EA looks like, check out the Institute for Progress, a new think tank funded by PS co-founder Patrick Collison, Open Phil, SBF, and others. 

Timeline

• March 2017 - Roots of Progress blog starts
• July 2018 - Stripe Press launches 
• July 2019 - “We Need a New Science of Progress” essay published in Atlantic
• August 2019 - PS Slack channel launches
• Oct 2019 - Roots of Progress becomes a nonprofit
• Aug 2020 - Works in Progress online magazine starts
• January 2022 - Institute for Progress think tank launches
• Feb 2022 - Works in Progress acquired by Stripe Press
• April 2022 - Progress Forum launches (sponsored by Roots of Progress)
• May 2022 - The Atlantic Progress series launches