About the Progress Studies Movement
The balance between Action and Reflection
Ideologies are useful tools for coordination. They package beliefs, values, methods and plans into one easily recognisable vibe, narrative and explanation.
This package makes it easy to communicate its content to outsiders and to organise with insiders.
I am missing an ideology. My ideology would be humanist, quite scientist (of course, scientific methods and knowledge are the best we have), with coordination as its core focus.
But creating an ideology takes time, and I have been recommended Progress Studies on Twitter when I asked for a recent ideology more aligned with my views than the traditional ones.
Jason Crawford then linked a nicely put page featuring many key essays and resources on the Progress Studies movement.
I am sharing here some preliminary thoughts, we’ll see how they evolve as I read more from the page :)
I am starting with “It’s time to build”, from Marc Andreessen.
It's time to build - Andreessen
This is a very short essay, very cheap to read. Its main theses are:
We, the West, are unable to build.
We should build more.
Not building enough is the cause of many of our problems. Housing? Build more homes. Education? Make schools bigger. Covid? Build more tests, ventilators, and ICU beds.
The West builds.
On some dimension, it is true. Even though we have the technological means, western countries all have lots of internal obstacles to building more, my main example being homes.
But it's also quite bullshit. Our economies have moved on to the virtual world, where the West builds a shit ton. AI, Cloud services, SaaS cos, programming languages, video games, and more.
Our virtual workers are so rich that they created a rich ecosystem of Open Source Software, which the whole world is free to use and build upon. We have built so many Wikis, indexing and storing so much knowledge, culminating in Wikipedia.
Bits might not be as tangible as Atoms, but they’re as real and physical.
Not building enough is a symptom of the problem.
In some areas, we build too much: addictive social media and runaway AI research. In others, we build too little.
I contend that the problem is that we do not know what to build and that we lack focus. In this frame, not building enough is a symptom, not a cause.
The causes are many. For instance:
There are too many things to be built, and we do not know which ones we should go for. Figuring this out takes real work, and we are not putting that work in. ("Something-something past modernist central planning bad, ergo all planning bad forever.")
Building great things requires great institutions, and no one wants to put in the work needed to merely maintain, let alone improve, our institutions. It is funnier to be a rich entrepreneur than a senior civil servant. No one wants to be a servant. That's the point.
Many prefer cosiness to building things together. Living in rich liberal societies means they are allowed to. Furthermore, living in liberal socialist societies means we must not only support people who need it, but also people who want to coast through their cosy lives.
Building things is pain, and we are rich enough to pay others to go through that pain. And unfortunately, we can not ship houses from Alibaba yet.
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By the way, this last point is a comically stereotypical example of the master-slave dialectic.
In it, two people meet and fight. The winner enslaves the loser. Initially, the slave depends on the goodwill of the master to survive. But over time, as the slave does more and more, the master ends up depending on the goodwill of the slave to survive.
A while ago, the West won and dominated the rest of the world. Rich enough to do so, it outsourced its industry to other countries. Thanks to this, those countries gained in power and the West lost in agency.
Good things require both reflection and action.
Any serious endeavour is a feedback loop featuring both reflection and action. And right now, Humanity is in a reflection overhang.
While Humanity is all over the place, it has become increasingly powerful over the last centuries. It is now akin to a child with a gun, ready to kill themself in an accident or an uncontrolled mood swing.
We have a limited safety budget for building dangerous things without thinking much about it. At some point, we go past it, and we die. I believe that right now, our main risk is Humanity's extinction from superintelligence. But extinction is not the only risk.
From the eugenics-filled Brave New World to a modern tech-powered 1984, there is a world of bad possibilities. Consider: it is finally literally feasible to put shock collars on everyone and constantly monitor them with cameras and AI.
We are not considerate towards our safety budget. We are acting like teenagers who believe they will never die.
But every time we improve technology without improving global geopolitics, global coordination and global institutions, we get closer to such terrible scenarios. Unfortunately, right now, we are not even improving our local politics, local coordination and local institutions.
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If God came down tomorrow and assured us through supernatural means that we could never kill ourselves or end in such dystopias, I would still believe that we are in a reflection overhang.
Fortunately, the downside would not be "humanity is doomed" anymore. But there would still be one. The downside would be that we progress much more slowly than needed and end up paying complexity costs that feel bad without being able to pinpoint a specific cause. (Sounds familiar? Welcome to managing complexity.)
I have too often seen people rush into building things without design, planning and consideration. The result is always a lot of wasted time and resources, with maintenance costs blowing up and too many path dependencies closing off venues with great potential.
This is what Humanity does.
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We are overdue for a lot of thinking, reflecting, and gathering our thoughts together.
We are overdue for a spring cleaning of our local and global institutions.
We should be drafting constitutions every month and debating them online with tens of millions of people in a way that we are all better off for it. We are rich and technologically advanced enough to afford a permanent constituent assembly.
We should solve one major problem of moral philosophy every year and spread its solution to everyone.
Reflecting and solving coordination at scale would let us leverage our technology much more than we ever did, and build new technology faster and safer than we ever did.
Techno-Optimism, Growth and Build-More are cop-outs
The immediate solution to these problems is not more technology, growth or building.
We physically live like fae, angels, demons and gods from fairy tales, mythologies and holy scriptures. Yet people are religious.
We have large populations of people who are under-nourished and people who are obese.
We are running off constitutions elaborated in the 18th century, 250 years ago. Our more recent constitutions are still following the same formula from back then!
Democracies are still running with manual votes, where we physically go to urns. Votes are run every couple of years, not every week. This is our best at belief and preference aggregation! (We are not even disentangling between beliefs and preferences!)
Is the reason why we can't do better that we are not building enough? Is it that we are missing 2 extra % of growth per year? Is it that we are missing some more technological progress?
Bruh.
We have AI and the Internet! Imagine people from the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the founding people of modern Western democracies. Imagine how crazy they would have gone if we told them that to build the constitutions, the backbone of their new states, they had access to those technologies.
We need to reflect hard. We need to shit treaties of political philosophy aiming at solving governance, do some serious state crafting and get back to building metaphorical cathedrals.
We need Hilbert's program for moral philosophy, political philosophy and state crafting.
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The focus on building feels like a distraction to me.
It is a drunkard search. At night, a drunk man lost his keys in a park. However, he looks for them under the streetlight, far from where he lost them, solely because there is light.
While building is hard, it is ultimately easier than collective reflection. Building is easily measurable, it is handsomely rewarded with up to billions of dollars, and it doesn't require the active participation of many people. Just a few key people in government, or a bunch of VC and founders.
Whereas group reflection is the ultimate oof activity. It is social, intellectual, ungrounded, it requires the active focus of many more people, there are no clear methods for it. And you don't get much money for it. It's just pain. Just maintaining a group is pain. Having it reflect meaningfully? Painer, painest even.
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To be clear, to the extent that we do not eat into our safety budget, all else equal, technological progress and building more are good.
But we have limited time and resources. To me, focusing more on them feels like purposely avoiding The Hard Thing. Even though The Hard Thing offers much more collective bang for the buck.
Conclusion
I'll keep on reading the docs from the Progress Studies Notion link for a while.
Sadly, writing is painfully slow for me. It took like 2 hours to write this commentary, but only 2 minutes to read the essay.
I think it was worth it though. I went beyond mere comment to the essay to express my main contention with progress-focused ideologies. I will likely refer to it in the future.
Let’s see how much my point of view changes as I read more of the other docs!
If it does not change much, I might write more about specific points of disagreement. It's a long shot, but it could help me clarify what would make for a better alternative ideology, or even help the progress movement with its failures.
Cheers, and have a nice day!