I work at Open Philanthropy, doing research for the biosecurity and pandemic preparedness team. Before that I was a research scholar at FHI, and before that did a PhD in physics.
djbinder
Karma: 327
I’m confused as to what your core outside-view argument is Will. My initial understanding of it was the following:
(A1) We are in a potentially large future with many trillions of trillions of humans
(A2) Our prior should be that we are randomly chosen amongst all living humans
then we conclude that
(C) We should have extremely low a prior odds of being amongst the most influential
To be very crudely quantitative about this, multiplying the number of humans on earth by the number of stars in the visible universe and the lifetime of the Earth, we quickly end up with estimates of ~1e38 total humans, and so priors on the order of ~1e-38.As Buck points out, this argument doesn’t work unless you are willing to also accept with similarly extremely likelihood that the fact we appear to be very early humans is wrong. Otherwise the sheer weight of 1e38 pushes you extremely strongly to the conclusion that either (A1) is false or that we are almost certainly in a simulation.
Perhaps a somewhat different argument is closer to what you actually think. Here I’ve tried to frame the argument in a way that I think both you and Buck would find reasonable:
(A1′) A prior it is plausible that the most influential human is early. For simplicity, let’s say we have a 10% prior that the most influential human lives while the majority of humanity is still all on earth.
(A2′) The number of humans that will be alive up to the end of this period is plausible on the scale of a 100 billion people.
(A3′) Our evidence that humanity is restricted to one planet is incontrivertible (ie, no simulation)
We now conclude that
(C’) We should have low, but not absurdly astronomically low odds of being amongst the most influential humansNote that compared to the previous argument, the a prior odds on being the most influential person is now 1e-10, so our earliness essentially increases our belief that we are the most influential by something like 1e28. But of course a 1-in-a-100 billion prior is still pretty low, and you don’t think our evidence is sufficiently strong to signficantly reduce it.
Do you agree with this argument Will? Or have a I misunderstood you?
I’m curious what numbers you are using for Europe’s growth between 1000-1700; I didn’t think European growth over that period was particularly unusual. It is worth remembering that Europe in 1000 (particularly northern Europe) was a backwater and so benefitted from catchup growth relative to (say) China. I also don’t know how much of European growth was driven by extensive growth in eastern Europe, which doesn’t seem to be relevant that to the great divergence.
Arguments against the idea that Europe c1700 was technologically ahead of the rest of Eurasia (r at least, China) are common in the great divergence literature. A good recent discussion is Chapter 16 of A Culture of Growth by Mokyr; he discusses various similarities and differences between the two regions around 1700. For detailed discussion focussed on military questions, see The Gunpowder Age by Andrade and Why did Europe conquer the world? by Hoffman, both of which argue that the gap between European and Chinese military technology was not very large during the 1600s.
For what it’s worth I think Europe development was distinct from previous economic efflorescences in so far as it took place in the context of a fractured political landscape. Most other examples (Rome, Abbasid caliphate, many Chinese dynasties) seem to be driven by political unification allowing the growth and diversification of markets; a discussion focussed on the roman example can be found in The Roman Market Economy by Temin. This seems different to the situation in Europe c1700.
For what it’s worth it seems to me that the most plausible explanations for the great divergence are rooted in European fragmentation. This allowed a number of different economic, political, and cultural arrangements to be explored while competitive pressure encouraged more efficient institutions to be adopted. A recent discussion of this can be found in Escape from Rome by Schiedel, but the argument is made in many other places and underpins a number of other more proximate explanations of the great divergence (including Mokyr’s cultural/institutional explanation).
There seems to be a major disconnect between the Hyperbolic Growth Hypothesis and the great divergence literature. If we take the Hyperbolic Growth Hypothesis seriously, it seems that there is really little to explain about the industrial revolution. It is just an inevitable consequence of hyperbolic growth and is not qualitatively distinct from what occured before. Although I’m not an economic historian, I have read a number of books on the great divergence and none of them seem to agree with that analysis. They may be disagreement about the causes and the precise timeline, but not about the existence of a question to be answered.
As to why they believe this, I think it essentially boils down to the fact that if we look at the historical record, it seems that the industrial revolution occuring c1800 was highly contingent. It seems unlikely that an observer in 500AD, even with excellent data about the past and detailed knowledge of future possible technologies, could have simply extrapolated growth trends to predict the industrial revolution. We know of a number of economically advanced societies which didn’t industrialize, and indeed didn’t appear to be on the path to industrialization. Examples include early modern China, Japan, or the Ottoman empire, or more tenously Song China or Early Imperial Rome. If northwestern Europe was more like China in the year 1600, industrialization may have taken much longer, even though in that conterfactual universe economic growth up to that point may have been similar to our own universe. Ditto for a conterfactual where the Americas didn’t exist. So it seems that the Hyperbolic Growth Hypothesis proves too much, and isn’t compatible with what we actually know about the industrial revolution.
In his first comment Will says he prefers to frame it as “influential people” rather than “influential times”. In particular if you read his article (rather than the blog post), then in the end of section 5 he says he thinks it is plausible that the most influential people may live within the next few thousand years, so I don’t his odds that this century is the most influential can be very low (at a guess, one in a thousand?). I might be wrong though; I’d be very curious to know what Will’s prior is that the most influential person will be alive this century.