Highlights on the Study of Progress, Part 3
Highlights on the Study of Progress, Part 3
Interesting New Ideas from the Roots of Progress Fellows
I recently sent you some excerpts from the work of my writing students from the fellowship program at Roots of Progress.
Below are selections from a few more of the fellows.
But first:
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Now to the progress fellows. I’ll take three more of them today and link you to their newsletters (mostly on Substack), so please give them a follow.
Jeremy Côté
Jeremy has a blog that is partly devoted to getting us to notice infrastructure, the “concealed wiring of our civilization.”
Here's a list of questions I don’t worry about: Where will I get my food? Do I have clean fuel to cook? Can I store food for later in a refrigerator or freezer? Where can I get clean water? Will my shower serve me hot water? Can I read at night with an electric light? How can I talk to my faraway friends who I haven’t seen in years? Infrastructure is a big part of why I don’t worry about these questions.
But his newsletter is called
, and a lot of his focus is on the use of data to understand the world and how to make it better. He looks at the importance of data but also at the “friction” that prevents us from getting at it.Statistics correct the distortion of our personal experience to give us a clear view of our world. [Max] Roser’s point is that we should therefore value statistics just as much as our personal experience to inform our worldview.
Roser’s essay focuses on the value of statistics, which I agree is important. I value statistics a lot, and I think others should too! But Roser only briefly touches on the current challenges in obtaining and understanding statistics as an end user: “These statistics exist, but they are often neither accessible nor understandable. They are buried in spreadsheets, hidden behind paywalls, and presented in academic jargon.” I think these challenges are critical to valuing statistics and worth honing in on….
Roser’s framing is about increasing the demand for statistics, raising its value relative to news media and personal experience. Though I agree demand is important, I’m arguing for the supply side: I find it difficult to imagine people valuing statistics if accessing them is an exercise in frustration. We need to remove the friction of finding, accessing, and interpreting data. Once we do, I think more people will be able to appreciate how statistics is the spell that expands our horizon of personal experience into a more representative worldview.
Follow Jeremy at
.Connor O’Brien
One of the more promising areas of research in progress is looking at the methods by which we pursue knowledge and innovation, and figuring out what is blocking us from being more successful.
In one post, Connor O’Brien looks at one of one of the paradoxes of bureaucracy: “the quickest way to doom a project to be over-budget and long-delayed is to make it an urgent public priority,” because then it becomes subject to all the pettifogging rules and restrictions of a government project.
In a later post, he considers the necessity for a diversity, not just of ideas, but of training and qualification, so as a society we can “hedge our bets” rather than devoting all of our resources to a single narrow consensus. He presents two interesting cautionary tales.
One is Katalin Kariko, who recently won the Nobel Prize for the mRNA research that led to the rapid development of covid vaccines.
For three decades, she bounced from one lab to another with little job stability and meager pay. Today we have the mRNA vaccines that saved so many lives mostly because of her dogged refusal to take “no” for an answer. The National Institutes of Health, the body that dominates biomedical research grantmaking, simply did not take her ideas seriously for many years. The issue was not inadequate funding to go around, but insufficiently diverse perspectives in the grantmaking ecosystem.
The other tale is the Keju system of civil service exams in imperial China. The system’s scrupulous meritocracy turned out, in the wider context, to be a disadvantage, since it made absorption into the bureaucracy by far the easiest and most certain path to advancement for talented young people.
As the sponge that soaked up the vast majority of highly intelligent and motivated young people, the Keju-powered bureaucracy would direct the energies of the nation’s top talent toward the preservation of state power. Religious, commercial, or research institutions that could have been the source of economic or intellectual flourishing were instead starved of talent. The merit-based nature of selection added a hefty layer of legitimacy to an expansive and stifling bureaucracy….
The material exam candidates were required to learn deeply enforced attitudes deferential to hierarchy, tradition, and state authority, all of which characterize China’s feeble civil society to this day.
There are some very clear lessons to be drawn for today’s meritocracy.
We have no Keju exam system in the United States today, of course. Yet there seem to be many echoes of Keju in the status and signaling games that dominate the time and attention of talented young people today, particularly higher education. No, universities are hardly explicit tools of political control. But just as Keju monopolized nearly all of China’s top talent, most bright young Americans pass through traditional academia at some point during their formative years.
Read the whole thing, and follow Connor’s work at
.Madeline Zimmerman
Taking up a similar theme, Madeline Zimmerman looks at the US military’s “banished heroes,” including one of my favorites, Air Force Colonel John Boyd.
Perhaps even more of a rabble-rouser than Mitchell, Boyd managed to escape a court martial but drew the ire of huge swaths of the DoD and its contractors. He started his career as an Air Force fighter pilot (a group hardly known for its subservience) and earned the nickname “Forty Second Boyd” for his ability to defeat any opposing pilot in less than forty seconds. His signature move can be spotted in an adrenaline-fueled sequence in the original Top Gun: Maverick lets the opposing MiG fighter get close up on his tail, ready to fire, then he pitches his own plane up at an angle, catching the air to slow him down so that the other guy flies right past him. When Maverick pitches the plane back down, he has the MiG directly in his sights.
Boyd’s fighter tactics are emblematic of how he approached life: Understand and anticipate your opponent’s decision-making process and find ways to use superior maneuverability to get one step ahead of him. All of his accomplishments used this framework, from his design of the F-16 fighter and invention of the OODA Loop to his invasion strategy for Operation Desert Storm and (my personal favorite) his bureaucratic wars with the Pentagon via the Reform Movement.
I’ve been a fan of Boyd ever since my friend Jack Wakeland became so insistent that I read about him that he sent me Boyd’s most well-known biography.
Madeline’s work focuses on military affairs and the Pentagon, where as you can imagine, the necessity of encouraging independent thought faces a lot of challenges. But she makes an argument for its necessity.
It’s difficult for any large bureaucracy to make room for independent thinkers, but the stakes are uniquely high for national security. The DoD is not leaning into its competitive advantage against any of our authoritarian foes when it crushes dissent by ensuring irreverent minds do not hold top leadership positions. There is too much focus on protecting downside and not enough emphasis on maximizing upside. Ironically, this “risk averse” attitude becomes exponentially riskier as we erode our ability to credibly deter conflict.
There are a lot of lessons here for everyone.
Follow Madeline at
, and check out the terrific graphic for its opening screen.I’ll be sharing more from the other fellows in the next few weeks, though I will soon be turning to my end-of-year review.
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