BBC Future longform article on Progress Studies (including connection between progress and risk)

Link post

I wrote a 4k word feature on Progress Studies for BBC Future that just went up. (Tweet here). I explore:

  • the stagnation hypothesis

  • the origins of progress studies

  • what PS believes

  • will economic growth make us happier

  • frontier vs. catch-up growth, and how PS’s focus on the former reveals its biases

  • progress and existential risk

  • the future of the community

I think of PS as like EA circa ~2012. They have billionaire support and are quickly professionalizing. The community seems very interested in learning from EA and has responded to critiques that they are not focused enough on x-risk.

But they are different in important ways. Compared to EA, I think PS is:

  • more entrepreneurial, with a strong bias to action

  • less academic

  • more American, tech-y, and rooted in the Bay Area

  • less defined—PS is not nearly as rigorous or philosophically oriented

  • less demanding—PS doesn’t really ask much, if anything, from its followers. I think this may be a huge force multiplier for the community, as it will better appeal to wealthy tech people, but probably makes any individual member less effective

  • more neoliberal and libertarian (though, compared to these groups PS is quicker to recognize market failures and call for govt intervention)

  • more speciesist—the focus is just on human progress, and tech has clearly been net-bad for farmed animals IMO

  • more growth-oriented

For an interesting look at what the intersection of PS and EA looks like, check out the Institute for Progress, a new think tank funded by PS co-founder Patrick Collison, Open Phil, SBF, and others.

Timeline

  • March 2017 - Roots of Progress blog starts

  • July 2018 - Stripe Press launches

  • July 2019 - “We Need a New Science of Progress” essay published in Atlantic

  • August 2019 - PS Slack channel launches

  • Oct 2019 - Roots of Progress becomes a nonprofit

  • Aug 2020 - Works in Progress online magazine starts

  • January 2022 - Institute for Progress think tank launches

  • Feb 2022 - Works in Progress acquired by Stripe Press

  • April 2022 - Progress Forum launches (sponsored by Roots of Progress)

  • May 2022 - The Atlantic Progress series launches