I think it's helpful to keep the discussion focused on the big questions. What are the important/key/unanswered/hot questions in progress studies? I propose this list (with some answers).
A study of the innovation system gives the answer in terms of the use of science and technology (but it's complicated there and it's broken)
In the economy, progress from cheap energy from coal and oil
🌡 Is there progress now?
It has slowed down (energy turned out to be more important than innovation, IP is broken, ICT is useless)
By a bunch of metrics there is some progress, but not enough, given the ongoing deaths and the risk of civilization collapsing
👑 Who is ensuring progress?
Burya himself claims that individuals (the great founders)
See also "who runs the world" (complicated there)
Bureaucracies fail (see megaprojects, etc.)
Futurologists (new, ours) need to take control
💭 Is strong progress possible?
Yes - TG scenario. Singularity via UI/II, immortality (cryonics, head-grafting, cyborgization), nanotech (ATM), etc. Even space and energy (elevator, thermonuclear)
🎯 What is progress and where to go?
Don't need ALL progress in general, there are important things, there are unimportant
TG/imm - the right values (they are compatible with others). Immortality and upgrade are important
There are many models of the future (complicated there)
Sustainability and utopia would be fun, but little chance of making
Gotta go for the Singularity.
🚧 What would prevent progress?
The main one is an environmental/climatic/resource systemic crisis leading to collapse
Stagnation of the science and innovation system
🔮 How to ensure progress?
Futurology (ours) for long-term world governance (LSTS) - create a new school/institution based on the GFT model and save the world
Restart useful parts of the innovation system
Make intelligence amplification, NeuroCode, thinking about complexity
Urgently make supertechnology, including immortality, nanotech (and thermonuclear)
I've been following the Progress Studies movement via the Slack that Jim Crawford set up. One thing that's going on is educating people that there has been progress. This seems to me a good and very useful thing to do. but it doesn't address the issue you've identified.
On a somewhat different tack, I asked some of humanist friends a question on Twitter: "When do people start thinking about the future as something that can and will be significantly changed by human effort? I'm thinking mid to late 19th century." They told me it was a century earlier and it focused on perfecting humans and human society. The focus on technical progress is later and derivative. Where's the talk of human perfectibility in progress studies? It's not there. In techno-futurism human perfectibility has been entirely transferred to AI, the coming Singularity, mind uploads (or is it downloads?), and so forth.
As for your issue, I wonder if it isn't just tinkering around the edges of the problem. Our research institutions are built on models that came together in the 19th century. The Santa Fe Institute is somewhat different, which is your point, no? It's also an outlier. What changes would be required for it to be the prototype so that it is no longer an outlier?
Interesting points! I think there's a metaphysical angle here where we talk about perfecting our viewpoints, or at least getting them less wrong over time, but I find that to be individually rewarding but collectively stultifying as an exercise. The focus, if we do want to progress (rather than just glorofy it or write blogs about it) has to be to try and *do* something. Right now we have a lot of cheerleaders and critics but few players.
SFI is a model of something that was tried. And imperfect or no, it does seem to convene sole remarkable thinkers who cross pollinate. This seems like the optionality that we should be aiming for.
My comment would be that progress studies may be related to complexity issue (but there is more to complexity than just puttin a label on complex things, you need tools to augment human intelligence to work with it and not just numerical simulations). The world is complex, science is double so, technological and social progress triple so. Hence to understand progress and do it better than sociology undertands society or political science understand politics we need something better than just papers. I think we need to abandon blogs and move to collaborative system modeling. Yes, communications through slack or telegram or twitter or blogs are ok but only as a secondary part - dialog in progress instead of final content products. The content should be the model - behold!
Yes, there are very few tools for that (in fact I don't know of any usable public tools, only the one we developed), but if we want to understand the mechanisms of progress we may have to adopt them - augmenting our intelligence, like Doug Engelbart said we must to deal with complexities of this world.
I think when you say "We need some central core “thing/ place”", that's exactly it (it's good to have an Institute like SFI, but that's a bit of a red herring). This thing shouldn't be a repository of texts, because that would only work as well as all other science (which is not very well). It should be a model. A semi-formal assemblage of blocks and arrows with nested structures and zoomable interface to work with all that complexity on a nice 8K screen. That should work.
So what would I suggest. I suggest that a core group is established of people who want to invest some time in IA tools. They should be tested/trained in the basics (just the basics) of systems thinking, ontologics and a few areas likes this. They should be given access to a collaborative modeling tool and taught how to use it. Then self-guided and reflective process of building a model of the world together should start. I've done that on my own and I am pretty sure it should work with a group of reasonably intelligent people. Then we should very soon have much better clarity than with what the blogorreah produces.
I think it's helpful to keep the discussion focused on the big questions. What are the important/key/unanswered/hot questions in progress studies? I propose this list (with some answers).
Danila Medvedev
https://danilamedvedev.com/
💬 Key questions about progress and some answers
⛽️ Where does progress come from?
A study of the innovation system gives the answer in terms of the use of science and technology (but it's complicated there and it's broken)
In the economy, progress from cheap energy from coal and oil
🌡 Is there progress now?
It has slowed down (energy turned out to be more important than innovation, IP is broken, ICT is useless)
By a bunch of metrics there is some progress, but not enough, given the ongoing deaths and the risk of civilization collapsing
👑 Who is ensuring progress?
Burya himself claims that individuals (the great founders)
See also "who runs the world" (complicated there)
Bureaucracies fail (see megaprojects, etc.)
Futurologists (new, ours) need to take control
💭 Is strong progress possible?
Yes - TG scenario. Singularity via UI/II, immortality (cryonics, head-grafting, cyborgization), nanotech (ATM), etc. Even space and energy (elevator, thermonuclear)
🎯 What is progress and where to go?
Don't need ALL progress in general, there are important things, there are unimportant
TG/imm - the right values (they are compatible with others). Immortality and upgrade are important
There are many models of the future (complicated there)
Sustainability and utopia would be fun, but little chance of making
Gotta go for the Singularity.
🚧 What would prevent progress?
The main one is an environmental/climatic/resource systemic crisis leading to collapse
Stagnation of the science and innovation system
🔮 How to ensure progress?
Futurology (ours) for long-term world governance (LSTS) - create a new school/institution based on the GFT model and save the world
Restart useful parts of the innovation system
Make intelligence amplification, NeuroCode, thinking about complexity
Urgently make supertechnology, including immortality, nanotech (and thermonuclear)
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
I've been following the Progress Studies movement via the Slack that Jim Crawford set up. One thing that's going on is educating people that there has been progress. This seems to me a good and very useful thing to do. but it doesn't address the issue you've identified.
Progress Studies Slack: https://app.slack.com/client/TLXLF1CP5/CMAV8HYTZ
On a somewhat different tack, I asked some of humanist friends a question on Twitter: "When do people start thinking about the future as something that can and will be significantly changed by human effort? I'm thinking mid to late 19th century." They told me it was a century earlier and it focused on perfecting humans and human society. The focus on technical progress is later and derivative. Where's the talk of human perfectibility in progress studies? It's not there. In techno-futurism human perfectibility has been entirely transferred to AI, the coming Singularity, mind uploads (or is it downloads?), and so forth.
So I wrote a blog post about that: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2021/07/when-did-future-become-site-for-human.html
As for your issue, I wonder if it isn't just tinkering around the edges of the problem. Our research institutions are built on models that came together in the 19th century. The Santa Fe Institute is somewhat different, which is your point, no? It's also an outlier. What changes would be required for it to be the prototype so that it is no longer an outlier?
Interesting points! I think there's a metaphysical angle here where we talk about perfecting our viewpoints, or at least getting them less wrong over time, but I find that to be individually rewarding but collectively stultifying as an exercise. The focus, if we do want to progress (rather than just glorofy it or write blogs about it) has to be to try and *do* something. Right now we have a lot of cheerleaders and critics but few players.
SFI is a model of something that was tried. And imperfect or no, it does seem to convene sole remarkable thinkers who cross pollinate. This seems like the optionality that we should be aiming for.
My comment would be that progress studies may be related to complexity issue (but there is more to complexity than just puttin a label on complex things, you need tools to augment human intelligence to work with it and not just numerical simulations). The world is complex, science is double so, technological and social progress triple so. Hence to understand progress and do it better than sociology undertands society or political science understand politics we need something better than just papers. I think we need to abandon blogs and move to collaborative system modeling. Yes, communications through slack or telegram or twitter or blogs are ok but only as a secondary part - dialog in progress instead of final content products. The content should be the model - behold!
Yes, there are very few tools for that (in fact I don't know of any usable public tools, only the one we developed), but if we want to understand the mechanisms of progress we may have to adopt them - augmenting our intelligence, like Doug Engelbart said we must to deal with complexities of this world.
I think when you say "We need some central core “thing/ place”", that's exactly it (it's good to have an Institute like SFI, but that's a bit of a red herring). This thing shouldn't be a repository of texts, because that would only work as well as all other science (which is not very well). It should be a model. A semi-formal assemblage of blocks and arrows with nested structures and zoomable interface to work with all that complexity on a nice 8K screen. That should work.
So what would I suggest. I suggest that a core group is established of people who want to invest some time in IA tools. They should be tested/trained in the basics (just the basics) of systems thinking, ontologics and a few areas likes this. They should be given access to a collaborative modeling tool and taught how to use it. Then self-guided and reflective process of building a model of the world together should start. I've done that on my own and I am pretty sure it should work with a group of reasonably intelligent people. Then we should very soon have much better clarity than with what the blogorreah produces.