- Quarks discovered in 1968; have we essentially exhausted most of the low hanging technological breakthroughs following such a period of scientific discovery without having reached the next level of scientific progress to enable a new generation of new tech? In other words, are we “fenced out” of the next level of technology
- Is it nature’s fault, did nature run out of “easily useful ideas”, or is it a cultural issue? The two are linked heavily; if nature “runs out of possibilities” the cultural surrounding “discoveries of nature” will derange
- More space on the frontier of science than just “the world of bits” i.e.
- Eric Weinstein’s mention of a “how do you know you’re not in 1970” test: when you go into a room, subtract away a number of the screens seen in the room. How easy is it to tell you’re not in 1970?
- Right now, there exists too much information for any one person to know all of it, leading to extreme specialization. In 1900, people like David Hilbert could still understand most/all of mathematics.
- Prompts increased skepticism of claims of people working in highly specialized areas: harder for people to understand the whole of progress being made on many research fronts, making it easier for people to lie about advancements
- “Embedded growth obligations”: systems that gain new members under the impression that the new members themselves will serve to grow the underlying organization. For example, adding law firm partners that will each claim a group of associates, who will become partners, and so on. Or the graduate study system, where graduate students are supervised by research professors to become professors who will then have their own graduate students, and so on.
- Point on this is that these systems are built on growth. These embedded growth obligations make the system depend fundamentally on exponential growth. And in many ways these systems cannot continue to grow at such a rapid pace after a certain point, leading to instability among other issues.
- Relative stagnation has occurred due to in part by difference in incentives between individual and group incentives. Peter Thiel mentions Hollywood as an example: 20k people move to California each year in attempt to become actors, and only about 20 make it. But people have been incentivized to act like everything is fine and they’re having success. In other words, while the group incentive might be honesty and open communication, on an individual level people are incentivized to lie and act like everything is wonderful. Same with tenured professors. “If you pretend the systems working, you’re signaling you’re one of the few people who should succeed in it.”