Plant more trees or go to Mars?
Why that Salesforce ad with Matthew McConaughey is culture war against progress
Why that Salesforce ad with Matthew McConaughey is culture war against progress
Several times in this newsletter I’ve mentioned the 2020 paper “Are ‘Flows of Ideas and ‘Research Productivity in secular decline?” by economists Peter Cauwels and Didier Sornette at ETH Zurich. Short version: For decades, science has been generating fewer and fewer significant discoveries and inventions. (I go more in depth here.)
Not only is their methodology novel — they measure the number of elite scientists and technologists active in a given year — but their explanation is intuitively appealing. It just sort of feels right. Cauwels and Sornette argue that our scientific and technological stagnation is a result of tech entrepreneurs and science researchers focusing too much on incremental exploitation (innovation) as opposed to creativity (invention) and exploration (discovery).
They then highlight how stagnation is a sign that our affluent society has become extremely risk averse: “We refer to this as the zero-risk society. When wealth and age in society increases, people become ever more risk averse, focus on going concern, protection of existing wealth and rent seeking.”
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Πηγή:fasterplease.substack.com
