Sunday: Discussion of intellectual progress for LessWrong

On Sunday (Aug 30), from 12 noon to about 1pm, I’ll be discussing intellectual progress with Oliver Habryka for LessWrong. This is part of a celebration for the completion of their campaign to tag all LW articles! Announcement & Zoom link here.

Inteview: The Lunar Society with Dwarkesh Patel

I was interviewed for a new podcast, The Lunar Society, by Dwarkesh Patel, a CS student at UT Austin. Topics included the great stagnation, prescriptive vs descriptive optimism, and the linear model of innovation.

See all my interviews here.

19th-century progress studies

I wrote earlier about an 1857 plan for the transcontinental railroad (as yet unbuilt), and how it advocated funding the project through the sale of stock to a broad base of public investors. However, another aspect of the plan was even more striking: it explicitly advocating studying the history of progress, in order to judge what was possible and desirable for the railroad. It was like a 19th-century form of progress studies.

Read the post: https://rootsofprogress.org/19th-century-progress-studies

Study Group for Progress starts Sep 13

This fall I am hosting a study/discussion group on the history, economics and philosophy of progress.

We'll have a Q&A each week featuring a different special guest. Reading from the guest will be given ahead of time. Confirmed speakers so far include: Robert J. Gordon (author of The Rise and Fall of American Growth), Margaret Jacob (author of Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West), Richard Nelson (Columbia), Ashish Arora (Duke), Pierre Azoulay (MIT Sloan), Patrick Collison, and Anton Howes. The program will also include discussion of all of the reading from my high school course, Progress Studies for Young Scholars.

Weekly on Sundays at 4:00–6:30pm Pacific, from September 13 through December 13.

• Enroll now (non–full-time students): $2,400
• Full-time students only: $1,200 (50% off)