The discipline of “progress studies” wants to figure out what drives discoveries and inventions so we can supercharge human flourishing.

I’ve said before that understanding where our modern standard of living comes from, at a basic level, is a responsibility of every citizen in an industrial civilization. Let’s call it “industrial literacy.”

Those who identify as optimists can be too quick to dismiss or downplay the problems of technology, while self-styled technology pessimists or progress skeptics can be too reluctant to believe in solutions

As I learn about the story of human progress, I have come to think that an entire subject is missing from basic education.

The bicycle, as we know it today, was not invented until the late 1800s. Yet it was a simple mechanical invention. It would seem to require no brilliant inventive insight, and certainly no scientific background.

Why, then, wasn’t it invented much earlier?

Smallpox was one of the worst diseases in human history. It killed an estimated 300 million people or more in the 20th century alone; only tuberculosis and malaria have been more deadly. Its victims were often children, even infants.

But of all the challenges facing the sailor, the biggest was simply knowing where you are.

I recently finished the book Empires of Light, by Jill Jonnes, about the “War of the Electric Currents”—AC vs DC—that took place as the electricity industry was getting established in the late 1800s.

I recently finished The Alchemy of Air, by Thomas Hager. It’s the story of the Haber-Bosch process, the lives of the men who created it, and its consequences for world agriculture and for Germany during the World Wars.

From the time that humans began to leave their nomadic ways and live in settled societies about ten thousand years ago, we have needed to build structures: to shelter ourselves, to store our goods, to honor the gods.

Metalworking is one of the oldest crafts, going back far beyond recorded history. But until a few thousand years ago, one of the most abundant metals—iron—was virtually unknown.

Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison recently published an article in The Atlantic calling for a new discipline of “progress studies”.

It met with an enthusiastic response from many people and has galvanized a small movement, which now has a Slack group and last Wednesday held its first meetup (hosted at Founders Fund). I was the speaker and gave a talk on the history of steel (recording coming soon).

I concluded with some thoughts on progress studies, why it’s crucially important, what I’m doing about it—and how you can help.

We live in an age that has lost its optimism. Polls show that people think the world is getting worse, not better.

The bears are only looking at Facebook's current revenue model. The bulls are thinking about all the potential revenue models Facebook could launch, given their (highly defensible) assets.

Sheryl Sandberg's speech to the graduating class of HBS is worth a read. My favorite part was her relating a conversation in 2001 with Eric Schmidt about an offer she had to work at Google.

Like most engineers in the Bay Area, I get a lot of recruiting emails. I got two today.

One was pretty bad. Multiple spelling and grammar mistakes, unsubstantiated bragging, virtually no description of the role, no description of the company culture

Ben Horowitz's latest blog post, on The Struggle, is a gem. It's a healthier, stronger take than some things I've read recently that say "being a CEO is awful", and a more mature, realistic take than "being a CEO is tons of fun".

When a new hire joins my team, in our first one-on-one, I give them a spiel that goes something like this...

From an article by Andrew Bosworth from a few years ago (emphasis added)

Travis Kalanick's recent talks at YC Startup School and elsewhere, in which he often decries the interference of protectionist regulations that block competition in the taxi business, have some people talking about how Kalanick has been influenced by Ayn Rand and Objectivism.

In her talk at YC Startup School, Jessica Livingston said in essence that determination is a startup's greatest virtue. She broke determination into two parts: resilience and drive. "Resilience keeps you from being pushed backwards. Drive moves you forwards."

If you’re like most people, you don’t think too much about how you type quotes, dashes, or ellipses. As people have done since the days when most text was in ASCII—or before that, the days of typewriters—you type the same character for left and right quotes, three dots for an ellipsis, and (bless your heart) two little dashes--like this--when you want to insert a pause. These substitutions were a good form of economy back when keyboards and character sets were limited, but today, almost all text is in UTF-8 and supports ideal quotes, dashes, and other marks.

An article in the Harvard Business Review gives some great examples of how product quality requires ruthless honesty

I became happier when I decided that everything has to fall into these three buckets:

Things that make me happy
Things I can change
Things I don’t care about

Because experience doesn’t necessarily make people better at what they do

One day in February 1966 [Bob] Taylor knocked at the office of ARPA’s director, the Austrian-born physicist Charles Herzfeld, armed with little more than this vague notion of a digital web connecting bands of time-sharers around the country. At any other agency he would have been expected to produce reams of documentation rationalizing the program and projecting its costs out to the next millennium; not ARPA. “I had no formal proposals for the ARPANET,” he recounted later. “I just decided that we were going to build a network that would connect these interactive communities into a larger community in such a way that a user of one community could connect to a distant community as though that user were on his own local system.”

An article by Glenn Reid on “What it’s Really Like Working with Steve Jobs” is worth reading because it counters a false image of how visionary leaders work.

As a software development manager I’ve met two types of engineers. I call them cowboys and artists.

An interview Hunter Walk did with Stewart Bonn about his time at Electronic Arts contains some tactics for experimenting and still delivering at high quality.