Why do we seem to be in a world where humanity is retreating into a world of digital imagination?

Axiom - A world with more growth and wonder would be preferable to the one we have now

# Are we actually living in a world where humanity is retreating into a world of digital imagination?
# Are we actually living in a world where humanity is retreating into a world of digital imagination
If we aren’t, the question [[Why do we seem to be in a world where humanity is retreating into a world of digital imagination?]] is irrelevant.

### Related
- [[Stagnation]]



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Phenomena-based cycles

Low Hanging fruit theory of stagnation

Graduate students are the labor in academic science and engineering

Regulations slow down technological advancement

Historical narrative is not scientific inquiry or engineering design but it is valuable

Regulations create paradigm lock-in

The peer review and citation system incentivizes people to work on things that other people think is interesting

Shareholder revolution caused public companies to focus on short-term profits

Conquest state of nature

Phenomena-based cycles are stuck

Competition and lack of slack  creates specialization

Systemic decay theory of stagnation

Exponential hardware does not lead to exponential software

Human capital theory of stagnation

Progress getting exponentially harder should be the null hypothesis

Disambiguating stagnation arguments

Technology has enabled progress to be a net positive

Regulations have increased by an order of magnitude

Does the nature of the activities to create new technology and science change over time?

Are we actually living in a world where humanity is retreating into a world of digital imagination?

Contemporary research has multiple failure modes

Why is there so little slack in mission-focused research?

The possible upsides of a healthy program design discipline seem like they could be huge

Missing productivity thread - BalajiS

The term moonshot is romantic bullshit

Is Science Hitting a Wall?

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

Research success in the first half of the 20th century led to many more people becoming researchers, which changed the nature of research in the second half of the 20th century

There are private companies that do planning on the timescale of decades

Vague language only works when dealing with competent people

What if the thoughts we think are nudged by our mediums of communication

# Stagnation
### List of as atomic as possible stagnation theories
1. [[Low Hanging fruit theory of stagnation]]
	- Specifically: [[Progress getting exponentially harder should be the null hypothesis]]
2. [[Regulations slow down technological advancement]]
3. [[Universities have been pushed more towards applied research since the end of WWII]] which then means that academics have been pushed away from more long-term and genera work 
	- This could be attributed to the peer review and citation system
 4. [[The peer review and citation system incentivizes people to work on things that other people think is interesting]] 
	 - This could be attributed to more government funding
	 - This could be attributed to 
 5. [[Embedded growth obligations have shifted the cultural narrative to the idea that everything can and needs to be a high-return investment]]
 6. [[Exponential hardware does not lead to exponential software]]
 7. [[Knowledge of how markets and innovation work has made us jaded]]
 8. [[Research has become a commodity]]
 9. [[The number of researchers has exploded]]
 10. [[Successful professors are not necessarily the best researchers]]
 11. [[Specialization in research and careers in general has cut off a lot of possible innovations]]
	

* What is the rate of discovering new S-curves? How has that changed over time?
* Are today’s S-curves, individually, developing faster or slower than before?
* Are the steep parts as steep as they used to be?
* Are they plateauing at a higher or lower level?
* What is the distribution of these characteristics, over the set of all S-curves?
From 
https://rootsofprogress.org/teasing-apart-the-s-curves
- [[Stagnation and Scientific Incentives]]
- [[Stagnation and Scientific Incentives argues against the low hanging fruit hypothesis by historical analogy]]
- [[Low Hanging fruit theory of stagnation]]
- [[There are three main theories of stagnation]]
- [[Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?]]
- [[Notes on Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?]]



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