74. The Real Drivers of Technological Progress

In this episode Saifedean talks about popular misconceptions regarding scientific progress, focusing on aviation as a case study. He describes how the Wright brothers invented the first airplane in 1903 despite claims from scientific authorities of the time that human flight was impossible, and how commercial aircraft capabilities started to decline after the 1970s. Drawing on insights from the work of Terence Kealey, Saifedean describes how many other historical inventions – such as those of Thomas Newcomen and James Watt – were the result of tinkering and practitioner trial and error rather academic study. The podcast ends with a discussion of why the initial treatment of the Wright brothers has parallels with the treatment of bitcoiners today.

Related links:

• Graphs showing trends since the US went off the gold standard in 1971
• Encyclopedia Britannica article on Concorde
• Saifedean’s thread on trusting “the science” and technological decline in aviation
• Saifedean’s paper “Slowdown: Aviation and Modernity’s Lost Dynamism”
• Paul Graham on Twitter
• Graphic showing technologies invented under a non-inflationary gold standard
• The Economic Laws of Scientific Research by Terence Kealey. The discussion of Thomas Newcomen starts from page 63 and on saifedean.com in Arabic
• The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science by Robert K. Murton and Elinor Barber

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