“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible”
— Frank Zappa
Progress is not a given. It is a shared endeavor that requires the active engagement of us all. History shows that progress comes not from passive observation, but from the determination to make impactful changes despite significant challenges. To continue this path, we must commit to building a better future — a commitment that starts with a collective effort to ensure that progress remains within our grasp.
Maintaining open and efficient lines of communication is fundamental to this mission. Only through the free exchange of information and ideas can we effectively collaborate to address the challenges that confront us, transforming them into opportunities for growth. A thriving society depends on our ability to communicate and direct our resources toward a common vision of advancement.
This week, we are highlighting writers who explore the driving forces behind progress, reflecting on what makes it possible, how we can foster it, and why it matters. Their insights remind us that while the path forward may be uncertain, we must embrace our natural curiosity for continuous innovation to turn uncertainty into meaningful progress.
The Roots of Progress
Written by Jason Crawford, Founder of the Roots of Progress Institute, who writes about the history of technology and the philosophy of progress.
“most people today don’t appreciate progress. And how could they? They don’t learn about it in school: it falls between the cracks of history and science classes. They don’t learn about it from the news media, who are subject to strong negativity bias (“if it bleeds, it leads”). They don’t get it from popular culture, which since the 1950s has increasingly turned away from optimistic visions of the future and toward dystopian ones.
And even for those who have a glimmer of this amazing story and the curiosity to learn about it, it’s hard to study on your own. Serious books on the subject are dry, dense, academic, and often narrowly focused. Popularizations are often mere entertainment or “mind candy”, often focusing on human drama and glossing over the real story: the actual problems we faced and solutions we created. Neither of them leave you with a big picture that you can retain or a framework you can apply to new issues.
The result, according to polls, is that most people don’t even know or believe that progress has happened.”
Astral Codex Ten
Written by Scott Alexander, whose writing first came to prominence through the blog Slate Star Codex, where Meditations on Moloch became an often referenced piece in Ethereum subculture, and who we quoted at the top of last week’s writer spotlight, Enshittification.
Ṛta is a Sanskrit word, so ancient that it brushes up against the origin of Indo-European languages. It's related to English "rationality" and "arithmetic", but also "art" and "harmony". And "right", both in the senses of "natural rights" and "the right answer". And "order". And "arete" and "aristos" and all those other Greek words about morality. And "artificial", as in eg artificial intelligence. More speculatively "reign" and related words about rulership, and "rich" and related words about money.
(also "arthropod", but insects creep me out so I'll be skipping this one)
The dictionary defines ṛta as "truth", but I think of it as the intersection of all these concepts, a sort of hidden node at the center of art and harmony and rationality and the rest. What are the laws of thought? How do they reveal themselves, at every level, from the flow of electricity through the brain to the flow of money through the global economy? How can we cleave to them more closely, for our own good and the good of generations still to come?
In practice, articles (another ṛta relative!) here tend to focus on reasoning, science, psychiatry, medicine, ethics, genetics, AI, economics and politics”
Maximum Progress
Written by Maxwell Tabarrok, a pre-doctoral researcher studying meta-science at Dartmouth writing about economics, science, philosophy, and progress.
There are dozens of questions that arise from staring at this chart. Why did economic progress begin when and where it did? Is it slowing down? Can it speed up or even continue? How can we live in and understand a world where change is always getting faster?
Maximum Progress is a blog exploring these questions. To do that, we need to bring in mathematics, economics, history, science, philosophy, and culture.”
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