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This is the digest newsletter for the Progress Forum—the best essays and posts from the previous week.
Are Technologies Inevitable?
By Matt Clancy
Matt invites commentary on his essay about the role of contingency, and path dependency, in technological development. He forwards an argument in favor of strong path dependence, hypothesizing that while different histories would likely affect the timing, sequence and details of technological development, these histories would nevertheless ultimately traffic in similar technological paradigms.
Age of Invention: The Beacons are Lit!
By Anton Howes
Anton treats us to an exploration of why the telegraph was not invented earlier. Like other seemingly ‘available’ historical technologies, Anton is forced to causally emphasize not science, nor economic demand, nor even material possibility, but rather the ways in which engineers and inventors were historically (un)available, and low-hanging fruit consequently remained unpicked.
Value Created vs. Value Extracted
By Sable
Sable explores the crucial progress-related notion of ‘value’. To do so, she elaborates a metaphor of a bridge which, once constructed, creates value. Under the bridge lives a troll which, by intimidating and extorting patrons of the bridge, comes to extract value from it. By extending it further, Sable’s metaphor carefully lays out the means by which value can be created, accredited, lost, and manipulated, with accompanying moral consequences.
The Mystery of the Miracle Year
By Dwarkesh Patel
Dwarkesh discusses the common phenomenon of an annus mirabilis among great scientists, whereby their key finding or a large majority of their contributions are concentrated in a year-ish period of time. Is it coincidence? Historical artifice? A function of the problem they solved rather than the scientist who solved it? Do scientists have a prime? Is success thereafter burdensome?
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Ross