And by the way, I think flying cars would be a disaster — a three dimensional traffic jam.
With many deaths. I used to fly airplanes regularly. It's nontrivial and I don't see how the capacity to be a car too makes it easier. --- Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, Santa Fe, NM 87505 505 670-9918 Santa Fe, NM On Sat, Jul 3, 2021, 3:10 PM Barry MacKichan <[email protected]> wrote: > I’m not prepared to weigh in on any long discussion, but my impression is > that the reason that the inventions after 1960 pale in comparison with them > before is that the low-hanging fruit that really makes life easier > (electricity, public health infrastructure like sewage treatment and clean > water, fast transportation) was all invented earlier. > > The invention of computers — aided by the space race and DARPA — made some > things easier, but the record there is ambiguous. My sense now is that the > changes now are driven by advertising and marketing. Google and Facebook > are in the advertising business, and it’s hard to claim that is an > improvement for the majority of people. Software used to be about building > enabling tools, but for the last 25 years it seems like a part of the > advertising industry. > > The OECD study may have be just correlation, not causation. See > https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations and, especially, > https://twitter.com/bioluisinho/status/1224404802693668864?lang=en > > —Barry > > And by the way, I think flying cars would be a disaster — a three > dimensional traffic jam. > > —Barry > > On 1 Jul 2021, at 12:43, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote: > > Your Book Review: Where's My Flying Car? > https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-wheres-my-flying > > Is the following claim made by the author of the book (Hall - seemingly > accepted by the author of the review) largely accurate? I ask because it's > a common liberal talking point that publicly funded R&D has resulted in the > majority of the tech we rely on in *modern* life. I'm terrible at history. > > Hall blames public funding for science. Not just for nanotech, but for > actually hurting progress in general. (I’ve never heard anyone before say > government-funded science was bad for science!) “[The] great innovations > that made the major quality-of-life improvements came largely before 1960: > refrigerators, freezers, vacuum cleaners, gas and electric stoves, and > washing machines; indoor plumbing, detergent, and deodorants; electric > lights; cars, trucks, and buses; tractors and combines; fertilizer; air > travel, containerized freight, the vacuum tube and the transistor; the > telegraph, telephone, phonograph, movies, radio, and television—and they > were all developed privately.” “A survey and analysis performed by the OECD > in 2005 found, to their surprise, that while private R&D had a positive > 0.26 correlation with economic growth, government funded R&D had a negative > 0.37 correlation!” “Centralized funding of an intellectual elite makes it > easier for cadres, cliques, and the politically skilled to gain control of > a field, and they by their nature are resistant to new, outside, > non-Ptolemaic ideas.” This is what happened to nanotech; there was a huge > amount of buzz, culminating in $500 million dollars of funding under > Clinton in 1990. This huge prize kicked off an academic civil war, and the > fledgling field of nanotech lost hard to the more established field of > material science. Material science rebranded as “nanotech”, trashed the > reputation of actual nanotech (to make sure they won the competition for > the grant money), and took all the funding for themselves. Nanotech never > recovered. > > -- > ☤>$ uǝlƃ > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ >
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