A Conversation with Bertrand Russell (1952) [video] | Hacker News Reader

A Conversation with Bertrand Russell (1952) [video]

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Early on this interview [0] he says that his grandfather visited Napoleon in Elba (in 1814). It's always sort of mind-blowing how few generations, albeit long-lived ones, are required to reach to a very different era, where there existed this weird short-lived French empire. In this case just 3 or 4 generations are needed?

Another instance is President John Tyler's grand children still being alive [1]. John Tyler was born in 1790 when George Washington was still around, although I doubt he had any contact with Washington.

[0] https://youtu.be/fb3k6tB-Or8?t=129

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyler#Family_and_personal...

I think this is one of the most fascinating things about him to me, because he was born in 1872 and lived to 1970, so he went from living in a society where it was still common to travel by horse and buggy to one where we had nuclear energy and easy air travel, etc, and he never lost his sharp mind, so you get to hear the perspective of someone who went through all of that. I highly recommend giving his autobiography a read to anyone interested in his life.

You don't need to have been very long lived to see that.

My grandfather was born in 1914. Cars existed, but most people hadn't seen one yet. The Wright brothers' maiden flight was 10 years prior. He went to med school before WW2. Penicillin did not exist yet, not even in labs!

In the 50s (his 40s), he traveled commercially on a 747...

1950s futurism predicting flying cars and moon cities by 2000... they weren't being as silly as we tend to think. They saw planes go from nonexistent sputnik within half a lifetime. The projection was linear.

The futurism probably could have stayed true if the political impetus had stayed toward space development instead of Cold War and oil concerns. But planting the US flag on the moon and probably other factors I don’t realize made the Soviets being on the moon less of a reality.

Edit-really wish we had O'Neill cylinders though.

There's no guarantee that the futurism would have come true for the simple fact it doesn't seem likely that flying cars and moon cities are technically or economically feasible.

There seems to be an unspoken assumption behind a lot of techno-futurism that everything we've dreamed up - flying cars, space colonies, starships - are possible simply because we dreamed them up, that everything we can imagine is possible.

In reality, they may not be physically possible, or if possible, not desirable, or if desirable, not economically feasible. At any rate, the point is probably moot: the damage our obsession with technology and consumption has already caused is probably irreparable, and more techno-futurist dreams coming would have just accelerated it. We have been completely blind to the second-order effects of our industrial and technological development; climate change is only the tip of the iceberg.

I disagree, kinda.

There are lots of possible reasons for progress, or lack thereof. Political will is the easy answer, but it's not always true... or the biggest factor.

Space programs did get a ton of funding for the few short years of the moon race. Unsustainable funding really, given the gdp in 1965. But... they were still funded. NASA's budget is currently 2/3 of what it was in the 60s in constant dollars.

Maybe they hit a plateau with the tech. Maybe it was the lack of Russian competition. Maybe it was the lack of a massive goal. Maybe organisations age, and get less creative over time. Maybe in the 60s NASA just hit a genius groove that happens occasionally but can't be sustained forever.

Probably a 707. First flight of the 747 was in 1969.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747

My mistake.

Well, I think it's also telling that now Napoleon's reign could be thought of as "this weird short-lived French empire", because while it short-lived, the Napoleonic empire in many ways set the stage, created the model for the modern world. Certainly, Napoleon was defeated but the forces of France at that time represented a kind of progress, a kind of progress that other nations were only able to defeat by adopting - the mass army at the service of a centralized state implies a kind of democracy and mass participation in life that a feudal system couldn't manage (to name just one of enumerable example). That's why even in defeat, Napoleon represented a fundamental change in the world.

Oh yeah, no disrespect to Napoleon or France. I have Andrew Roberts' Napoleon in my reading queue for later during this quarantine. I just meant that it represents a very foreign era relative to now, though maybe I should think of it as the start of the current era based on your comment.

Yes,

My point is now the Napoleonic Empire can seem a weird little nook of history. Closer to the era, it cast a much larger shadow but things must pass.

Yeah, you can think of the Napoleon Wars as "World War Zero", and Napoleon as the Hitler of his time.

As you can maybe tell, the aspect of modernity where mass wars with millions of dead sweep the world because some dictator wants it, is not my favorite one.

Still, you're not wrong!

I think Napoleon was more similar to Caesar than to Hitler, and that modern universal sense of disdain towards Hitler is a sign of progress.

Maybe. The winners write history, and we've always hated those who lose wars.

That's not as much of an improvement as you might think... Caesar was absolutely murderous and no stranger to ordering ethnic genocide either.. During the Gallic Wars, his armies butchered off at least a million and a half people, while enslaving a few hundred thousand others, partly for the crude sake of boosting Caesar's political career and paying off his debts. Paving the way for smoother Roman colonization was another benefit of this genocide. These things should remind you much more of Hitler than they do of Napoleon.

Bear in mind also that this was done without modern weapons and killing techniques. Hardly a humane ruler. That Caesar happened to be much more rational and erudite than the German dictator certainly helped his long-term image, but just because 2000+ years of history and some good political observations for posterity blot out the mass murder of civilians doesn't make it any less grotesque.

The Seven Years' War (1756--1763) has been described as the first true world war:

It involved all five European great powers of the time--the Kingdoms of Great Britain, Prussia and France, the Habsburg Monarchy of Austria and the Russian Empire--plus many of Europe's middle powers and spanned five continents, affecting Europe, the Americas, West Africa, India, and the Philippines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Years%27_War

It was a global conflict that involved all of Europe's Great Powers, but the 7 Years' War just wasn't exceptionally lethal or even that destructive.

On the other hand, the 30 Years' War was much less global in its geography but absolutely devastated central Europe, and caused at least 8 million deaths, most of them civilian. This makes it 10 times or more deadlier than the 7 Years' War.

The older conflict was also a crucial game changer for world history because it led directly to the Treaty of Westphalia and the entrenchment of the modern, much more formalized nation state.

Classifications are endless and arbitrary.

What I'd noted was that the 7YW has been called the first true world war (to my knowledge in Manfred Weissenbacher, in Sources of Power, (2009) https://www.worldcat.org/title/sources-of-power-how-energy-f...), and represents the first time a single conflict and set of belligerents spanned the globe. The argument isn't based on intensity of conflict or consequent significance but areal scope.

Previously, multi-continent conflicts either represented contiguous spillover of generally localised battles (e.g., a few millennia of scrapes between southern & south-eastern Europe and Asia Minor), or what were largely maritime conflicts more properly considered as focused on a body of water, most often the Mediterranean (literally, the middle of the world), positioned between Europa, Asia, and Africa. Notable during Roman times but extending well before and since.

The 7YW represented the first time global force projection, even if weak by subsequent or current standards, was even possible.

Its role in setting up Britain and the English-speaking world for global dominance may well be greater than you're allowing for as well.

Very well, in terms of literal global spread of conflict, the 7YW was undeniably closer to being "the first true world war" but I argue that this is secondary to impact and destructiveness if we're measuring these pre-World War candidates for World War. If global involvement is a candidate, why not also include the American Revolutionary War. It too involved multiple belligerent states and conflict scattered across most of the globe.

The 30YW was on the other hand both fantastically destructive even by modern standards and of huge impact to the whole world even up to the present day. True, it was by no means a literally global conflict and couldn't be claimed as one, but the political systems that it led to were also a crucial factor in both the 7YW happening, and the rise of French power which partly made the latter global: The 30 Years' War was one of the factors that led to the ascendant France which later partly forced the English-Prussian alliance in the 7YW.

France could have perhaps only with difficulty have become such a global colonial and dominant European power had the earlier conflict not slowed the formation of centralized authority in the German-speaking states for decades.

The ramifications of Westphalia still reverberate today, the ramifications of the 7YW less so.

The oldest person in the world was born in 1903, before George Orwell, Frida Kahlo and Lyndon Johnson. It's genuinely hard to fathom.

For some time I have been thinking about why it seems like scientific progress has slowed down compared to a century ago, and then one day I came across a clip of an interview with Professor Russell where he was saying that if technological progress continued at the current rate, then very soon humanity would drive itself extinct from the creation and use of weapons that were too powerful and too easily produced. I wonder if the slowing of scientific progress might be in some ways a saving grace, where if too advanced of technology was developed too quickly, then society would be unable to evolve in time to handle it responsibly without major potential for calamity.

You've probably seen this, but for those who haven't, Bostrom's written an interesting formalization of this hunch: https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf

It seems to me the balance is between massive state power and massive individual power. I'm pretty sure about which one I fear more. That said, I think Nick's suggestions are pretty sound.

That said, I think about the call from Freeman Dyson to teach children to develop genetic engineering skills to create warm blooded plants to bring life to the asteroid belt.... Well, maybe at some point

> I'm pretty sure about which one I fear more

Which?

Not the OP, but they can both be pretty bad. Nazi Germany or the USSR on one side, or Somalian warlords on the other side. Perhaps the warlords are better, but that's not obvious to me.

Would just like to point out that Vaclov Smil says the time period between about 1870-1910 is unmatched by any other time period before or since, excepting a sliver of the Han dynasty, as measured by the rapid surge in invention, innovation, and the rapidity with which those new ideas were employed in the broader society (rate of adoption). He goes on to say that even in today’s seemingly endless cycle of new products and legitimate advancement, we’re making only point solutions in comparison. For instance, the whole-house AC power system would be easily recognizable by Edison today. Improved, yes, but compared to going from nothing to the direct-to-home and whole-home solution set, it’s illustrative of relative stagnation. To be clear though, he said that it’s unrealistic to expect society to perpetuate those periods, as they are flukes - again, only twice in recorded history. I’m not doing the depth of his reasoning justice by any means, but I think his would bring another interesting angle to the idea that you relate from Russell.

I wonder what Edison would think of the internet, self driving cars, speech recognition, image recognition, social manipulation at scale, VR, modern medicine, etc.

It would probably involve personal enrichment and lawsuits, judging by his record.

Self-driving cars in his age were called horsses. Those (and donleys and mules) still remain the preferred mode of autonomous all-terrain mobility in some regions.

The US Army was actively considering resurrecting pack mules fpr use in Afghanistan as of 2011, though I don't believe that actually occurred.

Otherwise, E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909) envisions much of what you describe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461514 (PDF)

Something of an HN perennial.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q="The%20Machine%20Stops"

Several notable postings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10490198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9544256

Not sure if you follow Chamath Palihapitiya but his company's annual letter had a really interesting take on this: https://www.socialcapital.com/annual-letters/2019

A new space race

A common theme amongst optimists is how much technological advance we have seen and how these advances seem to be accelerating. I am of the opposite camp and believe, roughly, that the rate of progress has been steadily declining since we landed on the moon in 1969. While I can’t explain the 1970s and 1980s, the modern Gilded Age’s lack of technological progress is easier to understand. The intellectual lobotomization of smart, young STEM talent has been an explicit strategy by Big Tech fueled by unseemly profitability and hi flying stock prices. If you can’t innovate but are wildly profitable, wouldn’t you also just pay the incremental talented engineer to work for you on anything versus working for a competitor or, worse still, work for themselves and invent something disruptive that could impact your monopoly? Of course you would...and they have.

If you were a bright, ambitious engineer graduating in STEM in the early 1960s this wasn’t the case. You went to work on something meaningful. The momentum towards spaceflight was a call to arms for the smartest and hardest working amongst us. These bright men and women worked to invent new capabilities and entire ecosystems in fuel cells, gas storage systems, thermodynamic materials, engines, mechanical timers and clocks and control systems to name a few. The cost of the entire Apollo program was $25 Billion or $150 Billion in today’s dollars.

Big Tech spent $75B on R&D in 2018 alone. Put another way, this means that in two 2018 equivalents of R&D spending, Big Tech could have sent people to the moon and back. It's fair to say, however, that what we have witnessed instead can graciously be described as something less ambitious and impactful than that.

This misallocation of capital won’t end until we demand it - every government, regulator and individual now has a role to play whether you know it or not.

If you're interested, and happen to be in Hamilton, Ontario, he donated his archives to McMaster University. They have thousands of documents and things like his Nobel Peace prize. It looks like a lot has been digitized now.

https://www.mcmaster.ca/russdocs/russell.htm

I've been to the archives (used to be a philosophy student there) and got to go through some of his letters. I remember reading a bunch of letters he wrote back and forth with Muhammad Ali during the vietnam war. They actually have some of his furniture and a portrait, IIRC too. They recently moved it all from the university archives into a dedicated house as well! The university has a special visiting professorship related to it as well https://philos.humanities.mcmaster.ca/visiting-bertrand-russ...

It's a really interesting story of how they even acquired the archives https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/celebrating-50-ye...

*Nobel prize in Literature. (Had to look up wondering why he would get a peace prize in that era)

Yes! Thanks for the correction.

>> The Nobel Prize in Literature 1950 was awarded to Earl (Bertrand Arthur William) Russell "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought."

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1950/summary/

Thanks, always enjoyed BR commentaries on history and modern perspectives.

Particularly enjoyed this one with CC on. "Don't upset the apple tart" for "grown ups had the apple tart" and some other Monty Python-esque machine gaffes.

> Well I think there are three things that are needed if the world is to adapt itself to the Industrial Revolution. The troubles we are suffering now are essentially troubles due to adapting ourselves to a new phase of human life, namely the industrial phase. And I think three things are necessary if people are to live happily in the industrial phase. One of these is world government, the second is an approximate economic equality between different parts of the world, and the third is a nearly stationary population.

There's a full transcript here: https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2019/02/02/a-conversation-with...

For those interested in Bertie you may find Logicomix (https://www.logicomix.com/en/index.html) an entertaining read

If you are curious his grand-father knew another great mind John Stuart Mill, also Bertrand Russell wrote this thing called principia mathematica and wrote 30 pages on proving 1+1=2 using formal logic. This man has achieved so much for one person, most notably writing history of Western Philosophy [1]

1.https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243685.A_History_of_West...

I rather prefer the Face to Face interview with Russell talking to John Freeman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZv3pSaLtY

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