Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[Meetup Audio] Jason Crawford: "The Non-Linear Model of Innovation"
28 Oct 2020
This week the SSC Meetup features guest speaker Jason Crawford, author the blog The Roots of Progress, discussing 'the non-linear model of innovation.' "Innovation is often described with a "linear" model from discovery to invention to distribution. There is an element of truth in this, but a naive interpretation of the model does not match the reality of science and invention. In this talk, I'll show the feedback mechanisms between discovery and invention and how they are intertwined, using examples including the transistor at Bell Labs and the career of Louis Pasteur."
Full Episode
Welcome, everybody. Great to see so many folks here. Great to be here. Thanks for showing up. I have been a Slate Star Codex reader for at least five or six years. So some of you have probably been reading it a lot longer than I have, but it didn't take too long for it to become basically my favorite blog on the Internet.
Going through a little bit of withdrawal now in these last couple of months. The other night, I was checking out Scott's old posts on LessWrong, just like his all-time greatest hits and catching up on ones I hadn't caught because they were like 10 or 12 years old. They're still good, by the way. So if you're feeling some Scott withdrawal, you can give that a try.
Yeah, let me just dive right into the presentation. Okay, so let's talk about this nonlinear model of innovation. I just want to start with a simple question. What is the relationship between science and invention? Now, on the face of it, you might think this is a pretty easy question. Obviously, science is the foundation of technology.
By the way, I will use the words invention and technology more or less interchangeably in this talk. So yeah, duh, of course science is the basis of technology, right? I mean, you know, everything in our modern world seems to depend on science. Can't imagine having a smartphone without the science of electromagnetism or the physics of semiconductors.
Can't imagine antibiotics without understanding microbiology. And indeed, if we look historically, the scientific revolution came a couple hundred years before the Industrial Revolution. Here's a couple of key figures from those to just sort of represent some of the early or starting points. Bacon lived from the 16th to the 17th century.
Watt was mostly an 18th century, lived into the 19th century. In fact, Bacon himself told us in his Novum Organum, or New Method, published in 1620, That knowledge and human power are synonymous. For where the cause is not known, the effect cannot be produced. Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. This is where we get the aphorism, knowledge is power. It's condensed from that passage.
So, all right, Bacon has told us where the cause is not known, the effect cannot be produced. Obviously, we need science to create technology. except for that pesky problem of the historical record of invention. It turns out that there are plenty of inventions that came good ways before the science that explains them. Sometimes decades before, or even they're in different centuries.
So the steam engine, very famously, was invented in the 1700s. The science of thermodynamics didn't come along until the early 1800s. There are plenty of other examples. The first vaccine for smallpox and the early efforts at sanitation reform, especially water treatment, came long before, decades before the germ theory.
Some of the earliest polymer materials like cellulose, which is an early sort of proto-plastic made from plant material, or vulcanized rubber, came long before polymer chemistry. They came in the 1800s. Polymer chemistry started to really get figured out in the early 1900s.
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