[ExI] Did Hugo de Garis leave the field?

[Anders Sandberg]

Stefano Vaj wrote:
> In retrospect, I am inclined to believe on the contrary that what the
> nice Kurzweilian S-shaped curves really describe are a few
> exceptionally "magic" periods on a background of substantial
> stagnation, the most important of which is probably that from 1860 to
> 1960.
Looking at the performance curve database by Bela Nagy at the Santa Fe 
Institute, http://pcdb.santafe.edu/ and especially his analysis of them, 
http://192.12.12.16/events/workshops/images/4/4f/Nagy.ModelingOrganizationalComplexity.pdf 

suggests that there is quite a lot of progress in quite a lot of 
domains. Those exponentials are not that unique.

This doesn't preclude stagnation either. Wright/Sahal's laws, implies 
exponential improvement for things that sell exponentially, but at lower 
production/sales rates progress is still made but the overall change is 
slow. What I would like is to have something like the performance curve 
database for other domains, seeing if we can get good examples of 
stagnation too. Is there any sources on this? Maybe Tyler Cowen's book 
has something?




-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute 
James Martin 21st Century School 
Philosophy Faculty 
Oxford University