[FRIAM] for the optimists

[Frank Wimberly]

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

With many deaths.  I used to fly airplanes regularly.  It's nontrivial and
I don't see how the capacity to be a car too makes it easier.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Sat, Jul 3, 2021, 3:10 PM Barry MacKichan <barry.mackichan at mackichan.com>
wrote:

> 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
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