Rob Wiblin

Or like the programmer's credo.

This is my favorite one.

It's like, we do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.

So there's just this whole cloud of like, you know, it's naivete to think that things can go crazy fast.

If you write down a story that seems like...

perfect and unassailable for how things will be like super easy and fast.

There's all sorts of bottlenecks and all sorts of drag factors you inevitably failed to account for in that story.

It's like that's kind of like that perspective.

And then I think the alternative perspective

leans a lot on like much longer term economic history.

So if you attempt to try and like assign reasonable like GDP measures to the last 10,000 years of human history, you see acceleration.

So the growth rate was not always 2% per year at the frontier.

2% per year is actually blisteringly fast compared to what it was in like 3000 BC, which was like, maybe that was like 0.1% per year.

So the growth rate has already multiplied like many fold, maybe an order of magnitude, maybe two.

I think that like people in the slower camp tend to feel like the exercise of doing like long run historical data is just like too fraught to rely upon.

But people in both camps do agree that the industrial revolution happened and the industrial revolution accelerated growth rates a lot.

And we went from having growth rates that were well below 1% to having 2% a year growth rates.

And I think that, like...

Yeah, people in the faster camp tend to lean on the long run and on models that say that the reason that we had accelerating growth in the long run was a feedback loop where more people can try out more ideas and discover more innovations, which then leads to food production being more efficient, which then leads to a larger supportable population.

And then you can rinse and repeat and you get super exponential population growth.