Astral Codex Ten

Jason Crawford

13 min read

Jason Crawford

Article

Jason Crawford is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 8 times across 8 issues between September 20, 2021 and October 24, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Congratulations to Jason Crawford, whose Roots Of Progress blog is now a nonprofit organization”; “Jason Crawford writes”; “Jason Crawford’s holding a Progress Studies conference in Austin March 4-6”. It most often appears alongside Richard Hanania, Tyler Cowen, 4chan.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 8
  • Issue count: 8
  • First seen: September 20, 2021
  • Last seen: October 24, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links For September
September 20, 2021 · Original source
14: Congratulations to Jason Crawford, whose Roots Of Progress blog is now a nonprofit organization working within Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison, etc’s Progress Studies movement to “[establish] a new philosophy of progress for the twenty-first century”. They are fundraising and also looking for a Chief of Staff.
Inline links: Roots Of Progress, a nonprofit organization, Chief of Staff
Highlights From The Comments On Diseasonality
December 23, 2021 · Original source
Jason Crawford writes:
Inline links: writes
Open Thread 209
January 31, 2022 · Original source
- Nectome hiring a lab assistant for brain preservation work - ML engineer looking for work in AI alignment (and other ML engineers: 1, 2, 3) - Rob Miles needs volunteer writers for his AI alignment explainer project - Steve Hsu’s Genomic Prediction needs coders and data scientists - Rachel was my wedding photographer and is very good, hire her for your photos - Jason Crawford’s holding a Progress Studies conference in Austin March 4-6. - Lots of cool people to date - Or if dating isn’t your style, how about a nice calculus textbook?
Inline links: hiring a lab assistant, looking for work in AI alignment, 1, 2, 3, needs volunteer writers, needs coders and data scientists, hire her for your photos, Progress Studies conference, people to date, calculus textbook
22
October 18, 2022 · Original source
Jason Crawford from Roots of Progress
Inline links: Jason Crawford
Open Thread 328
May 06, 2024 · Original source
3: Jason Crawford is sponsoring another progress studies blog-building fellowship, with advisors including Tyler Cowen and Andrej Karpathy.
Inline links: progress studies blog-building fellowship
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
July 30, 2024 · Original source
You believe that people should be judged not by their actions, but by the purity of their ideas. Actions are difficult and your actions might be bad, so you definitely don’t want to be judged on those. But ideas are easy, and you can always believe that your ideas are the most pure of all. Also, anyone who acts in the world or achieves something probably is less than 100% slave moralist, so if you judge people based on who has the purest slave moralist ideas, you will always be better than anyone with accomplishments. When I first read Nietzsche, my question was: why worry about the master/slave dichotomy? Sure, maybe this was the way moral codes first formed during the Bronze Age; who cares? You can love excellence and be altruistic. It doesn’t take some Superman to combine them - you can just take the good parts of each. Right? I think Nietzsche would have two answers: First, you don’t pick your moral commitments like foods at a buffet. You deploy them as psychological defense mechanisms. You deploy slave morality when life has beaten you down and you want to maintain some of dignity. You don’t choose which subparts to swallow; you get whichever bits are load-bearing in your personal dignity-maintenance project. And second, you may not be interested in slave morality, but slave morality is interested in you. Master morality isn’t interested in you - the masters are out achieving things and conquering places, they’re not going to take time out of their day to turn missionary and “convert” you to master morality too2. But slave moralists are obsessed with ideological purity and invested in cutting down anybody who’s less slave moralist than they are. Even if you find it easy to avoid yourself, you need to be prepared to live in a slave morality world. V. Jason Crawford Nietzsche’s original dichotomy was aimed at the individual level, where people with psychological drives compete with each other for status. It doesn’t naturally transfer to the idea of societies. There’s a sort of trivial transfer where you can imagine superpowers boasting of their prowess and tiny city-states claiming the geopolitical game is rigged, but that doesn’t seem interesting to me. When I think of master/slave morality at the level of societies, I think of the slave moralist herd instinct to enforce their slave morality on everyone else. This will be a feature of all societies - you could argue it’s what society/civilization is - but some will have it more than others. Jason Crawford, one of the pioneers of Progress Studies, writes about a sort of mid twentieth century vibe shift. In the 19th and early 20th century, Western civilization was busy trying to embiggen itself. Some of this was literal. In America, we had Manifest Destiny, our God-given right to stretch from sea to sea (my sometimes-hometown of Berkeley was named after the guy who coined the slogan “westward the course of empire takes its way”). Europe had colonialism, the White Man’s Burden, and eventually lebensraum. But some of the embiggening was metaphorical. We believed in the cult of progress. We would hold giant World Fairs, where we tiled whole cities with beautiful monuments called things like The Temple Of Machinery or The Altar Of Reason. They would have elaborate friezes of classical goddesses blessing railroads or holding sheaves of mechanically-reaped wheat. Inside, tens of thousands of men would come from every corner of the Earth to behold the newest inventions making our lives richer, safer, and easier. It seemed like we were heading for a Utopia of limitless plenty, and our only responsibility was to bring that great day forward as fast as possible and spread our greatness to as-yet-unenlightened corners of the world like Africa and Tibet. The San Francisco World’s Fair, built in three years (1912 - 1915). The only surviving remnant, the Palace Of Fine Arts (the dome on the lower right), remains one of SF’s most beloved monuments. A picture from the St. Louis, MO World’s Fair of 1904. We erected glorious Art Deco skyscrapers, and boasted of how quickly they went up. We built the Empire State Building in a year and the Golden Gate Bridge in four. The interiors were bursting with color, ornament, and more classical goddesses representing Industry and Ingenuity or whatever. We held ticker tape parades for the glorious aviators and astronauts bringing us to ever-further corners of the world. Art Deco architecture, typical of the early 20th century. After (?) the trauma of the World Wars (?), something flipped. Instead of embiggening ourselves, we began to ensmallen. We replaced World’s Fairs with “World Expos”, which Wikipedia describes as “less focused on technology and aimed more at cultural themes and social progress”. Of the few inventions that did feature, more and more were “green tech” - machines aimed at reducing the damage we were doing to the world. The classical goddesses got replaced by murals of ordinary workers, then abstractions, then nothing. The last ticker tape parade for an individual was 1998; since then the (relatively few, comparatively small) parades have all been for classes of people (NYC’s most recent was for “COVID-19 Essential Workers”). Our buildings became smaller and duller. Last month’s Works In Progress magazine tried to investigate why. Some economists have blamed “Baumol’s cost disease” - as industrialization makes some things (like consumer goods) cheaper, other things (like skilled labor) become relatively more expensive. So maybe the rising cost of skilled labor put buildings like the one of the left out of reach. But Works In Progress found that wasn’t true; if anything, industrialization has made fancy buildings cheaper. They concluded that it was “a story of cultural choice, not of technological destiny” - in other words, people stopped wanting impressive buildings. The vibes were wrong, or something. Intellectuals started feting ideas like degrowth. Degrowth says that it’s gross, greedy, and unsustainable to want economic progress. Instead, we should deliberately aim for economic regress, until First World GDPs are closer to those of South America or Africa. Advocates are careful to emphasize that as long as we take common-sense steps (like implementing socialism), this won’t force anyone to starve to death, just get rid of our useless luxuries - and in some sense, wouldn’t that make us better off?3 The promised future utopia was replaced by almost unbroken dystopianism. Global warming will kill us all, or maybe we’ll be stuck in a cyberpunk world of hopeless soul-crushing inequality. Technological advance is interesting only insofar as it brings our cyberpunk hell closer and (unfairly) enriches some billionaires along the way. The only bright spots are occasional acts of voluntary ensmallening - power plants cancelled, products banned, indigenous tribes winning little legal triumphs over modernity. Live-people goals like “build giant skyscrapers!” and “go to the moon!” could have been followed up with even greater live-people goals like “tile the desert with solar plants”, “create genetically-engineered superbabies”, “get one billion Americans”, or “cure all diseases”. Instead, they’ve been replaced by dead-people goals like “don’t damage the traditional character of communities” or “don’t damage the environment”. If you Google “why aren’t there world’s fairs?” you get a link to this podcast, which explains that they had “useless gizmos”, that the towers were “unattractive”, and that it involved “a dismal thread of racism”. Also because “technology won’t save us”. I agree that this doesn’t literally say the words “we hate all life” - you either see it or you don’t. Parts of this vibe shift still confuse me, but the zoomed-out version seems clear enough. The old pro-embiggening world was complicit in moral catastrophes - racism, colonialism, the Holocaust, the destruction of much of the natural world. At some point these atrocities caught up to and outpaced its very real accomplishments, and society stopped being proud of itself and shifted to a harm-reduction approach. Nobody comes out and says outright that harm reduction necessarily has to mean doing as little as possible and trying to make yourself smaller and less impressive and sadder and uglier until you curl up into a tiny point and disappear. But “slave morality” and “master morality” are attractors; if you select too hard for part of one, you end up with the whole package. VI. Andrew Tate I originally wanted to explain to Bentham’s Bulldog why slave morality wasn’t obviously “the good one” and master morality “the bad one”. Lest I come down too hard and get you thinking that master morality is obviously “the good one”, let’s talk about Andrew Tate. In case you’ve been under a rock your whole life, Andrew Tate is a masculinity influencer. He’s a former world champion kickboxer who pivoted to self-help, sold scammy courses on business and relationships, and got rich. Some of his courses apparently recommended beating up women (I’m not sure if this was supposed to help your business or your relationship), and when people confronted him on this, his response was always “I’m strong and successful and own a Bugatti, which makes me better than you, you pathetic weakling failure”. He was credibly accused of rape (by “credibly” I mean that he sent one of the victims a text message saying “I love raping you”) and when people tried to cancel him over this, his response was always “I’m strong and successful and own a Bugatti, which makes me better than you, you pathetic weakling failure.” Finally he was indicted on one billion counts of sexual assault, human trafficking, and being a general scumbag of a human being; he is currently awaiting trial. Tate has, in some sense, many good qualities. He’s strong, athletic, and motivated. He earned tens of millions of dollars through hustle and hard work. He’s charismatic and compelling and, before his arrest, was one of the Internet’s most iconic influencers. I think master morality has to approve of all these things. Still, he’s obviously a jerk. This is exactly the situation that Nietzsche believes slave morality evolved for - letting me feel contempt for someone who’s stronger and richer and more successful than I am - and yup, now that I’m in this situation, I find myself definitely interested in a moral system that lets me do this. The obvious compromise goes something like: We can genuinely appreciate that Andrew Tate has the many good qualities listed above.
Inline links: 2, writes, World Fairs, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5vPJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5b5023c4-be4f-427d-a4d1-c8d69ed1fd7b_725x291.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TrEK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c8f847e-4b4f-4388-864a-567849f8f97e.avif, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rvQM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbf261702-dfd3-448e-900f-845a9ef014a4_893x377.png, since then, Last month’s, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AbVF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8c33c84-0e6e-4489-8a58-f3603361d7e9_1357x501.png, degrowth, 3, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7Ttz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7589c5dc-2f84-4f82-a6b8-c132ce4a0fc8_697x628.png, this podcast
Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
August 08, 2024 · Original source
Jason Crawford writes:
Inline links: writes
Notes From The Progress Studies Conference
October 24, 2024 · Original source
Tyler Cowen is an economics professor and blogger at Marginal Revolution. Patrick Collison is the billionaire founder of the online payments company Stripe. In 2019, they wrote an article calling for a discipline of Progress Studies, which would figure out what progress was and how to increase it. Later that year, tech entrepreneur Jason Crawford stepped up to spearhead the effort.
Inline links: Marginal Revolution, wrote an article