Fire in the hole, fire in the belly

We live in an era of rapid scientific and technological progress. The dominant narrative in the West tells a story of linear advancement: things are getting better all the time. Sure, we might need to smooth out the ethics of AI, nail room temperature superconductivity, and some other corner cases, but by and large we are trending upward. We are witnessing an accelerationist arc. Both in the US and Europe, kids can look forward to a brighter future than their parents’. The system is working.

And yet.

If you subtract the screens in your life, how do you know it’s not the 1970s? The appliances in your kitchen – refrigerator, stove, oven, microwave – are the very same your parents had growing up. If you look at progress solely through the narrow cone of bits, you might miss out on the inertia of “atoms”. This is the argument popularized by stagnation theorists Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen. Apart from bits, we haven’t really advanced much since the 70s.

How is that even possible?

Productivity growth has been in long-term decline since the 1970s. We were promised hyperloops and supersonic airplanes, yet building a simple NYC subway extension costs up to 15 times more per kilometer than it does in other cities around the world. Software is eating the world, but physical infrastructure is starving. Our Star Trek supercomputers are sitting on our grandma’s stove.

The moment the world got the Covid vaccine seemed like an incredible collective victory for science. As much as when we deciphered the entire human genome in 2003, building the first instruction manual of our DNA. But we can’t infer scientific progress from isolated examples. Cancer cases are still on the rise four decades after Nixon’s “war on cancer”. The average cost of developing new drugs keeps rising, and scientific research productivity is in freefall.

What’s happening?

Over the past few decades we funneled the smartest people in the world to optimize ad revenues, turn salespeople 2% more efficient or trade pictures of pet rocks. At the moment I am writing this piece the biggest deal in tech is the latest iPhone’s USB-C charge connector. We are basking in the blue light of our phones because that’s the very last residue of great technology left.

Politics too has been adding nothing meaningul over the past few decades. What political change on Earth since 1996 has been even 2% as wonderful as the collapse of Communism? Brexit, Tunisian democracy, increasing gay rights, multi-party democracy in Mexico, higher transparency: none of these are plausible candidates from a global perspective. To be in the running any political event would have to dramatically improve the lives of tens of millions. And no, the answer is certainly not Bitcoin either. 

Are we running out of good ideas? Stanford, whose President resigned over research manipulation allegations, published 40 pages of statistical gymnastics to conclude that "ideas are getting harder to find." and "research productivity is falling sharply”. True novelty is getting scarcer.

What does that even mean?

Okay, here is where I go out on a limb. If stagnation theory holds true, how is it possible that any field of human progress from science to technology, to politics and economics is inexplicably tapering off? If you believe that progress is stalling and this novelty business is getting tougher, it’s either a remarkable coincidence or there’s blood in the water. Let’s swim upstream.

To an important degree, “innovation” is a process of remixing existing ideas in novel ways. A smartphone is an antenna with a camera to the same degree a toilet is a siphon leveraging Bernoulli’s principle. Twenty years ago, the late Martin Weitzman spelled out what this model of innovation means for long-run economic growth: for the math inclined, given n ideas, the number of possible innovations (i.e., the number of unique pairs) is n(n-1)/2. In plain English, ideas “have babies”.

One of the implications of Weitzman is that the growth of ideas is initially constrained by the number of possible ideas. During this period, every possible combination is investigated and innovation is very slow. However, once enough components are added to the stock of ideas, the number of possibilities grows explosively. Innovation, like volcanos, has long periods of dormancy, followed by violent outbursts, only seemingly unannounced.

So how do we restock our idea pantry? Here’s an obvious suggestion that turns out to work: if you want more technological innovation, more science helps. All fields of inquiry yield knowledge, and knowledge is a good thing. But physics is arguably unique among the sciences for the quantity of knowledge it yields. This knowledge is not greater because the realm of physics is larger than, say, that of biology—as the cosmos is larger than the biosphere. Rather, it is because how much knowledge a theory contains is determined by the “fundamentality” of the objects, properties, and relations the knowledge concerns. Physics is upstream of everything.

If you learn an apple is a fruit, you grasp a more fundamental property than if you learn it belongs to your friend John. Similarly, physics reveals the most basic aspects of the world. Each field of inquiry adds to our understanding, but physics offers a deeper, more essential layer of knowledge. The more fundamental the knowledge, the higher the number of possible innovations that can be recombined downstream.

Which begs the question: how is physics doing?

Not great. The twentieth century was a truly exciting time in physics. From 1905 to 1973, we made extraordinary progress probing the mysteries of the universe: special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, the structure of the atom, the structure of the nucleus, enumerating the elementary particles. 

But today, there are several orders of magnitude more people paid by universities to make progress in physics than there were at the dawn of the twentieth century. And yet all these physicists aren’t making any progress. In the 1980s Stephen Hawking and other big shots claimed that physics was on the verge of a “theory of everything”. Strings are only one of several popular physics concepts that can be neither experimentally verified nor falsified. Physics is crashing into insurmountable limits.

In the foundations of physics, we have not seen progress since the mid 1970s when the standard model of particle physics was completed. Ever since then, the theories we use to describe observations have remained unchanged. Sure, some aspects of these theories have only been experimentally confirmed later. But all shortcomings of these theories – the lacking quantization of gravity, dark matter, the quantum measurement problem, and more – have been known for more than 80 years. And they are as unsolved today as they were then.

The major cause of this stagnation is that physics has changed, but physicists have not changed their methods. As physics has progressed, the foundations have become increasingly harder to probe by experiment. With fewer experiments, serendipitous discoveries become increasingly unlikely. And lacking those discoveries, the technological progress that would be needed to keep experiments economically viable never materializes. It’s a vicious cycle: costly experiments result in lack of progress. A $40 billion particle collider is such a dead end.

The thing is, physics is hard. It takes serious mental work to wrap your mind around something as difficult as String Theory. You have to mold your mind to be fluent in the mathematical language in which such theories are framed. Once you’ve molded your mind, it’s difficult to unmold it. Even if you’re able to remold your mind, you’re not much inclined to. You’ve made too much of an investment in an accepted way of thinking about the universe to want to start from scratch with an alternative way of thinking about the universe.

So how do we bring physics back?

No offense to physicists, but most of their great discoveries were propelled by a specific set of incentives rather than an unadulterated thirst for knowledge — survival. The Manhattan Project was a high-stakes race in nuclear fission against Nazi Germany. Electromagnetism birthed the radar to detect enemy aircraft. We put the first man on the moon during the Cold War. When the lives of entire civilizations are on the line, physics kicks it into high gear. It’s “fire in the hole” before “fire in the belly”.

Which brings us to war. Think about it this way: surprise presents a weapon to an enemy that it does not have nor a defense against. Technology (and the physics behind technology) provides that new weapon: the chemistry of gunpowder and poison gas, the mechanics of ballistics, the technology of submarines, tanks, and radar, and the physics of atomic bombs. If one side presents a new weapon, the other side copies and escalates or counters with defense, a cycle leading to further advances in technology and weaponry. Physics drives arms races, and arms races drive physics.

In early civilizations, there was no concept of physics, and science didn’t exist. Gunpowder was first used in China for fireworks, and its knowledge soon spread to Europe and England to pulverize castle walls with cannon balls. In the Medieval era, Tartaglia, a professor of mathematics, started the science of ballistics by improving cannon accuracy through the use of the “gunner’s gradient”, a device that showed angle versus distance. 

Benjamin Robins invented the ballistic pendulum that for the very first time measured a bullet’s speed as it left the barrel. John Wilkinson improved cannons by boring barrels instead of casting them around clay cores. Boring provided tighter tolerances, which led to lighter cannons of the same or better range. 

By the 1830s breech loading repeaters and revolvers began to replace muzzle-loaded smoothbores. There were mass-produced “rifled” barrels, and bullet-shaped bullets that were imparted spin by long grooves in the gun barrel to improve gyroscopic stability, range, and accuracy. War was the lab for early physics and still is. In the Grammy-awarded words of Daft Punk, physics was just a way to make arsenals “harder, better, faster, stronger”.

That changed after WWII.

During WWII, it was "develop the atom bomb before the Nazis." Later, in the absence of a pressing existential threat, both funding and intellectual focus scattered. Under the US cultural and economic hegemony, the Pax Americana extinguished the fire of urgency, in battlefields and labs alike.

So instead of the atomic bomb, we get 48-megapixel phone cameras, and the Internet, once conceived as a military communication network, dispatches “hope this finds you well” missives and short-form synchronized dance clips around the globe. This may sound silly, but as renowned HBS professor Clayton Christensen explains, it’s the shift from disruptive to sustaining innovation. We binge on YouTube’s cat videos because we have long been sheltered and safe.

This is far from a conclusive argument, and possibly a speculative one, but one I had a hard time ignoring. It’s not easily possible to test the Pax Americana hypothesis empirically. American power affected the whole globe, so it’s hard to do a cross-country analysis. And there aren’t that many interstate wars, so data is sparse. Regardless, it's an intriguing, if unprovable, hypothesis worth contemplating.

But suppose the argument is directionally correct. Why should we care at all, then?

Great question. Sure, we might not have widespread hypersonic missiles or AI-piloted airstrike drones, but we have peace — that is a big deal, isn’t it? What is the point of enforcing geopolitical stability if we can’t kick back and devour the same-day delivered fruits of our labor, with free returns at only $8.99/month? I believe there are at least a couple of answers worth exploring.

As you might have thought already, it’s hard to define the current times as an era of geopolitical stability. With at least two active conflicts at the very gates of the Western hemisphere, it’s almost impossible to ignore the direct consequences on Western domestic economies. The EU might have been a little asleep at the wheel lately, but as far as I remember the US is always ready to export some democracy as soon as gas prices hit $3 per gallon.

The second, less obvious answer is the threat to our collective understanding of the world, and shared Truth.

Modern times are increasingly accepting subjective beliefs as objective truths. You see it with the woke ideology, a constellation of ideas centered on the acceptance of feelings as personal rights, with the rise of conspiracy theories, uncalibrated climate alarmism, unhinged misinformation, and progressive narrative fragmentation. The lack of common ground makes us more gullible.

Wait, what does this have to do with physics?

Extended periods of peace have led people to trade hard sciences for soft ones. Entire educational fields — from political to environmental and food sciences — have been arbitrarily elevated to the rung of sciences without earned merit. The issue isn't the decline of physics, but the increasing distance from a form of fundamental knowledge grounded on methodological rigor, exactitude, and objectivity.

But unless you have been paying attention to it, you have likely not noticed any negative repercussions from the stagnation of physics. Like…who cares? We have created an environment in which we don’t grow because there are no incentives to do so, and that’s okay. We are living in a Nash equilibrium with no desire to perturb it. But…we have to grow. It is wired in our nature. Progress, not stagnation, is all we have known for the past human history. So we lie about it.

The surprising implication of stagnating growth is that we structure almost everything with an expectation of growth that never manifests. It feels like everywhere, institutions and systems of ambitions are becoming pathological liars, with a strong incentive to maintain the balance, to derange and lie to cover the fact that, deep down, those organizational units of society have nothing to do with progress, growth or advancement, and that this set of sociopathic organizations is benefitting none other than those who take part, individually, to them, but never the collectivity. 

Perhaps because I started my career in professional services (my first job was in management consulting), that’s the easiest example for me to describe what I mean. Take consulting, for example. MBB’s business never ceased to grow, and actually accelerated over the past 40 years or so. Here I disagree with stagnation theorist Tyler Cowen, who credits consulting firms with spreading positive business practices around the world: “One of the biggest, most positive (and most neglected) global trends over the last 30 years has been the spread of managerial and technocratic expertise to what used to be called “third world governments.” In most countries, the central banks, the public health authorities, the treasuries and many other public-sector institutions now collect good data, hire Western-educated advisers, and try to implement good solutions”. I mean, seriously?

The same reasoning can be extended to investment banking, corporate law, and other sought-after career tracks coining “best practices”. What are these elusive best practices, and why can’t they be learned by their very own clients, thus reducing the dependency on external vendors? If you reason from first principles, there’s no way those professions shouldn’t simply be just corporate functions. Do you think Elon hired McKinsey to optimize the processes of the Gigafactory? It is quite clear that the entire professional service class is able to recruit, hire, promote and build an entire hierarchy of technocrats whose sole reason to exist is predicated on corporate laziness. This is a whole new professional and societal layer, devoid of any substance, that we funnel our scarcest resources into: capital and talent.

There is no accountability system for this stuff. There is just hyperspecialization and scaffolding. Try arguing with quantum computer enthusiasts on the fact that we don’t really have mainstream quantum computing capabilities and, well, if we do, where is it? Or with university departments, that continue to recruit graduate students for disciplines that haven’t produced any remarkable results in more than 50 years, and yet they still incentivized tenured professors to build their little empires, as much as consulting firms hiring new associates or investment banks onboarding new analysts. A society that grows in form but not in substance is one that lies.

People tell lies for many reasons. They lie to avoid embarrassment, to exaggerate their own accomplishments, and to disguise wrongdoing. They make promises they do not intend to keep. They conceal defects in products and services. They mislead competitors to gain an advantage. They lie to friends and family to spare their feelings. Whatever the purpose of telling them, lies can be gross or subtle. Some entail elaborate ruses or forged documents. Others consist merely of euphemisms or tactical silences. But it is in believing one thing while intending to communicate another that a difficult relationship with the truth seeps into society’s institutions. Sociopathic institutions are organizations whose growth and trajectory are so completely unjustified, unnecessary, or even pernicious that even their own members cannot justify their existence, although they feel obliged to pretend that this is not the case because they have a strong incentive to do so. 

That is to say: an abundance of unexcusably bullshit jobs exist today at least in part because we won wars thanks to superior technology. This privilege may not last forever.

To be clear, I do not wish for war. But, as Nietzsche wrote, “war is essential. It is vain rhapsodizing and sentimentality to continue to expect much (even more, to expect a very great deal) from mankind, once it has learned not to wage war. For the time being, we know of no other means to imbue exhausted peoples, as strongly and surely as every great war does, with that raw energy of the battleground, that deep impersonal hatred, that murderous coldbloodedness with a good conscience, that communal, organized ardor in destroying the enemy, that proud indifference to great losses, to one’s own existence and to that of one’s friends, that muted, earthquake-like convulsion of the soul.” I wish there was an alternative to violence to elicit a murderous spirit out of the West and channel it into productive endeavors. I wish we wouldn’t need to go navigate trauma to birth “a dancing star”, but by the same token, I wish we wouldn’t be as scared of trauma to shelter into stagnation because I’d rather oscillate than plateau.