Jason Crawford & Yaron Discuss The Roots of Human Progress | Yaron Interviews
Channel: Yaron Brook
Date: 2023-02-09

Jason Crawford is the founder of The Roots of Progress, a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. He writes and speaks about the history and philosophy of progress, especially in technology and industry.
The creator of Progress Studies for Young Scholars, an online learning program about the history of technology for high schoolers, and a part-time technical consultant and adviser to Our World in Data.
Formerly, Jason was a software engineering manager and tech startup founder. He was co-founder & CEO of Fieldbook, a hybrid spreadsheet-database (read my postmortem).
He has also been an engineering manager at Flexport, Amazon and Groupon, and was at a few other startups as co-founder or early employee. Long ago Jason helped build a biotech supercomputer for D. E. Shaw Research.

For more about Jason Crawford see:  https://jasoncrawford.org/ and https://rootsofprogress.org/

00:00 Intro
02:35 What do we mean by Progress? 
04:38 Slow progress/regression in history
09:27 What’s happened in the last fifty years?
11:29 Moral Progress (and lack thereof)
17:59 Belief in Progress in the early 20th Century 
25:00 Tech industry of the late 20th century
29:50 Nuclear energy and optimism for the future
40:08 Philosophy of Progress
49:40 Roots of Progress and the progress movement
55:48 Freedom, reason, and progress
1:01:11 Law & safety regulation vs. insurance 

Live Questions:
1:08:35 The Romans made progress, but they glorified violence. I like to think that is less true now, is this a sign of moral progress?
1:10:23 It seems that progress/innovation are still able to push through regulation/veto/precautionary principle to have net progress to some degree, but it seems to be slowing. How do you see Progress Studies reversong that trend?
1:12:18 Response to Marc Andreessen’s It’s Time to Build
1:15:05 President Carter and Deregulation
1:16:44 Who’s your favorite builder?
1:18:10 Have you seen objectivists in tech? How common are oists in tech compared to other fields?
1:20:14 At some point will you consider developing curricula for teaching about progress?
1:22:54 How many years before there is a start of a curriculum, perhaps a kindergarten video, to teach the history of progress; something that parents (and future grandparents like me) could use to start to explain it to kids?
1:25:16 Has Jason looked at the history of power grids in the US? It seems like the companies ran into problems dealing with large numbers of property owners for permissions, ​then pushed for city level regulation to avoid the issue.
1:29:30 Jason, if Mel Brooks asked you to be a technical advisor for his new show, “History of the World Part 2,” would you accept and what sort of input might you provide?
1:29:56 Are you sure humans aren’t born with any instincts or knowledge of danger? Why are super young children afraid of snakes but not umbrella’s? Why are we all ​disgusted by the smell of feces? Dangerous knowledge about reality is hardwired into us?
1:32:15 I find a problem with even having a simple conversation about progress and the immense benefit to our current standard of living, the inevitable response is how someone is getting exploited as a result.
1:35:08 Would Jason consider collaborating on a series of ARU lectures "Luminaries of the Enlightenment", each highlighting a great figure of the 19th century (Darwin, Curie, ​Edison, etc) & their impact on today?
1:35:53 Can primitive technology be shown to people so they see how our survival depended on it, in order to put things into perspective today?
1:38:22 What do you say to those wanting to help the world innovate and progress, but they are frustrated by bureaucracy and are tempted to hold back that potential the way those do in Atlas until society adopts a more free philosophy
1:42:23 How do you gauge moral progress?
1:43:16 See pinned comment for timestamps of additional questions

1:56:39 Outro

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