Dwarkesh Patel

If we collaborate, each generation's experience will be better than the last.

He says that to be a scientist is the ultimate act of charity because there is no greater act of charity than to give a gift to every human who will ever live after you.

So that is the rhetoric of what you would feel was happening if you're alive in the 1620s and 1630s.

And Galileo is publishing his observations, and Descartes is publishing his systems, and they've just discovered that the heart is a pump, pump, pump.

And that they were totally wrong about the four humors theory and that the blood circulates and they're trying to figure out what it does.

And they have magnification and they can see worlds of complex patterns on the wing of a flea.

And it sounds like the whole world is suddenly coming into view.

And we're at the beginning of progress.

Now, if we zoom out...

We would say there'd been progress the whole time.

People had always been inventing things.

Agriculture in France was better in 1300 than it was in in ten hundred.

Plows got better.

Seed got better.

Cabbages were bred to be bigger.

People worked out better pots.

There were always artisanal inventors.

And in fact, that's a lot of what Bacon is observing.

He worked in the patent office as a young man, and he would see a carpenter come in to patent.

I have invented a better chisel.