[FRIAM] for the optimists

[Barry MacKichan]

I’m not prepared to weigh in on any long discussion, but my impression 
is that the reason that the inventions after 1960 pale in comparison 
with them before is that the low-hanging fruit that really makes life  
easier (electricity, public health infrastructure like sewage treatment 
and clean water, fast transportation) was all invented earlier.

The invention of computers — aided by the space race and DARPA — 
made some things easier, but the record there is ambiguous. My sense now 
is that the changes now are driven by advertising and marketing. Google 
and Facebook are in the advertising business, and it’s hard to claim 
that is an improvement for the majority of people. Software used to be 
about building enabling tools, but for the last 25 years it seems like a 
part of the advertising industry.

The OECD study may have be just correlation, not causation. See 
https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations and, especially, 
https://twitter.com/bioluisinho/status/1224404802693668864?lang=en

—Barry

And by the way, I think flying cars would be a disaster — a three 
dimensional traffic jam.

—Barry

On 1 Jul 2021, at 12:43, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:

> Your Book Review: Where's My Flying Car?
> https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-wheres-my-flying
>
> Is the following claim made by the author of the book (Hall - 
> seemingly accepted by the author of the review) largely accurate? I 
> ask because it's a common liberal talking point that publicly funded 
> R&D has resulted in the majority of the tech we rely on in *modern* 
> life. I'm terrible at history.
>
>> Hall blames public funding for science. Not just for nanotech, but 
>> for actually hurting progress in general. (I’ve never heard anyone 
>> before say government-funded science was bad for science!) “[The] 
>> great innovations that made the major quality-of-life improvements 
>> came largely before 1960: refrigerators, freezers, vacuum cleaners, 
>> gas and electric stoves, and washing machines; indoor plumbing, 
>> detergent, and deodorants; electric lights; cars, trucks, and buses; 
>> tractors and combines; fertilizer; air travel, containerized freight, 
>> the vacuum tube and the transistor; the telegraph, telephone, 
>> phonograph, movies, radio, and television—and they were all 
>> developed privately.” “A survey and analysis performed by the 
>> OECD in 2005 found, to their surprise, that while private R&D had a 
>> positive 0.26 correlation with economic growth, government funded R&D 
>> had a negative 0.37 correlation!” “Centralized funding of an 
>> intellectual elite makes it easier for cadres, cliques, and the 
>> politically skilled to gain control of a field, and they by their 
>> nature are resistant to new, outside, non-Ptolemaic ideas.” This is 
>> what happened to nanotech; there was a huge amount of buzz, 
>> culminating in $500 million dollars of funding under Clinton in 1990. 
>> This huge prize kicked off an academic civil war, and the fledgling 
>> field of nanotech lost hard to the more established field of material 
>> science. Material science rebranded as “nanotech”, trashed the 
>> reputation of actual nanotech (to make sure they won the competition 
>> for the grant money), and took all the funding for themselves. 
>> Nanotech never recovered.
>
>
>
> -- 
> ☤>$ uǝlƃ
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
> un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20210703/f0ca83dc/attachment.html>