Much of the history of progress is just prosopography of small groups:

• “Knitting Community: Human and Social Capital in the Early Transition into Entrepreneurship”, Kim2018 (quantifying social contagion/peer-effects of innovation: knitting groups & novel knitting designs on Ravelry)

• “Taste for Makers”, Paul Graham

• “The Social Subsidy of Angel Investing”, Alex Danco

• “One of Civilization’s Greatest Accomplishments”

• “Scenius, or Communal Genius”, Kevin Kelly

• “Construction of arbitrarily strong amplifiers of natural selection using evolutionary graph theory”, Pavlogiannis et al 2018 (‘plazas and warrens’)

• Art:

  • “Roadmap to the Renaissance”

  • the Bloomsbury Group

  • The Black Cat, H. P. Lovecraft & the amateur press, who were able to meet heroes like Lord Dunsany, eventually leading to the Cthulhu Mythos

  • Harlem Renaissance

  • Bauhaus

  • Walt Disney Studio: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

  • Black Mountain College

  • Francis Ford Coppola/George Lucas+Marcia Lucas et al & indie film-making/New Hollywood & the creation of Star Wars (Secret History of Star Wars)

  • Guarneri Quartet

  • Swedish music scene

• Mathematics: the Scottish Book & Café of the Lwów School (Wieschenberg1999); the Kürschák/Eötvös Math Competition & Középiskolai Matematikai és Fizikai Lapok; Paul Erdős; Douady & Mandelbrot sets

• Games:

  • “How Flash Games Shaped The Video Game Industry: Flash is dead. But the influence of Flash games on modern gameplay is inescapable”, Jonas Richner (why were Flash computer games so creative and popular worldwide, even in China? The Flash scene benefited from easy entry using an integrated programming environment, small-scale games enabling rapid iteration, many exemplars to imitate, envy and admiration driving imitators, the conviction that improvements were possible, a global talent pool with lots of free time, and game websites like Newgrounds to curate games to create a sophisticated & demanding userbase which could drive mega-traffic to hits, in a virtuous cycle of recruitment/competition/feedback/improvement.)

  • “The Revolution in Classic Tetris: How a younger generation used the Internet to master the falling blocks”; “The Charming Bloke Who Dominates GeoGuessr: Tom Davies has become a beloved icon of the Google Maps guessing game”

  • Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

  • Fosbury Flop

  • Épée fencing (Épée 2.0: Eric Sollee/Johan Harmenberg)

  • “What the success of rock climbing tells us about economic growth: Machines are not the only engines of greater productivity”; “Rock climbing and the economics of innovation” (although Alex Honnold dissents somewhat)

  • Jeff Cooper’s pistol Modern technique

  • “One Man’s Amazing Journey to the Center of the Bowling Ball”; “The Man Who Broke Bowling: Jason Belmonte’s two-handed technique made him an outcast. Then it made him the greatest—and changed the sport forever” (video)

  • Competitive Rubik’s cube playing

  • speedrunning (“Why Are Gamers So Much Better Than Scientists at Catching Fraud?”; speedrunning improvement over time; especially TAS runs like bruteforcing Breakout)

  • “Better All the Time: How the “performance revolution” came to athletics—and beyond”; “Personal Best: Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?”; “1⁄100^th of a Second Faster: Building Better Olympic Athletes”; “Studying the Limits of Human Perfection, Through Darts: Why do athletes always seem to get better, generation by generation? It’s not always for the reasons you might think.”

  • Weightlifting: “The Power and the Gory”, Solotaroff 1990_34ya (cf. Pumping Iron)

  • “What do revolutionary new Sudoku techniques teach us about real-world problem solving?”

  • “The Man Who Invented Fifteen Hundred Necktie Knots: For tie aficionados, knots are an art form—and a surprisingly difficult math problem”

• “Imre Festetics and the Sheep Breeders’ Society of Moravia: Mendel’s Forgotten ‘Research Network’”, Poczai et al 2014

• Technology:

  • Manhattan Project

  • Skunk Works

  • The Martians? (“The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project”; cf. in biology)

  • Apollo Project (Cummings2017)

  • John Boyd’s OODA loop

  • Engelbart’s The Mother of All Demos (see also Engelbart1962)

  • Xerox PARC

  • DARPA (Roland & Shiman2002)

  • Research chemicals (eg. The Hive)

  • Patrick Collison’s Industrial Labs & fast achievement lists

  • EleutherAI: “What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been: One Year Retrospective”

  • “Better Eats: The kitchen of 2020 looks mostly the same as that of 1960_64ya. But what we do in it has changed dramatically, almost entirely for the better—due to a culture of culinary innovation”

  • “The YouTube Revolution in Knowledge Transfer”, Samo Burja (Drosos & Guo2021); “Why is the quality of recorded classical music so rising?”

  • Hacking: warez scene/crack intro, demoscene, phreaking, hacking (‘APT stands for Advanced Persistent Teen’–Bulgarian virus factory, AOL, mIRC, Runescape, Neopets etc.)

• Politics:

  • Quakers¹

  • English Fabian Society; Jena1800 (Romanticism in Jena)

  • Bill Clinton 1992_32ya presidential campaign

  • Brexit (Cummings2019)

• Parasocial relationships:

  • “On Volitional Philanthropy”, Michael Nielsen; “You and Your Research”, Richard Hamming

  • “The high-return activity of raising others’ aspirations”; “The phantom Tyler Cowen”

  • On Really Trying: “I Could Tell You Something”

  • “Mentorship, Management, and Mysterious Old Wizards”

  • Emergent Ventures; Pioneer

  • “The Politics of Alignment and the ‘Quiet Transgender Revolution’ in Fortune 500 Corporations, 2008_16ya to 2017”, Ghosh2021

• See Also: “Origins of Innovation: Social Contagion?”, “Timing Technology: Lessons From The Media Lab: Try & Try Again (But Less & Less)” (startups as distributed Thompson sampling), Internet Community Design as Multilevel Optimization, Computing hardware & Deep Learning, Copyright Deadweight Losses, Local Optima & Greedy Choices/Ordinary Incompetence, Bloom’s 2-Sigma/apprenticeship

Have you ever noticed that amateur anime/illustrations online have gotten dramatically better since the 1990s?

The very best has gotten better, but I’m convinced that the average/median/mode/whatevers have also gotten much better. Some of that is just the boring observation that hard drives can now store high-resolution images and Internet connections can send them without breaking the bank, and some of that is Gimp/Photoshop/formerly-high-end tools becoming democratized by piracy/FLOSS/freeware and more obscure (to non-artists) technological improvements like cheap high-accuracy touchpads you can sketch on, but I feel that these seem insufficient to explain the drastic leap in sophistication and complexity and colorizing.

I think a lot of it comes from social mechanisms—I’ve noticed that many ‘digital native’ artists seem to rely heavily on online communities to learn from. They look at raw intermediates like .PSD files to see how it was gone, they watch videos of livestreamed art or ‘speedsketches’ (sometimes recorded as a video for future reference), they compete in informal and formal contests and try to win community approbation (‘mimetic desire’, anyone?), they follow pop culture which creates a constantly varying set of artistic styles to riff off, they post everything they do to DeviantArt or Tumblr and get instant feedback (however crude), they have enormous libraries of existing materials to trace in order to learn or simply outright copy into something they are working on, they can go full-time thanks to Patreon & 2-sided market commissioning websites like Skeb.jp… None of that will necessarily give one inspiration to create divine works of visual art, necessarily (although we have seen a rise of mangas/LNs which began as Pixiv posts), but it sure does help with being a skilled technician.

The same thing appears to have happened with music, coalescing around things like SoundCloud as well as YouTube.

Somewhat like chess, all of this could have been done before in a pre-Internet era, but the competitiveness & communities hyper-charge it all. There was another video game example I had in mind where I read recently a discussion which concluded that YouTube video tutorials/competitions had led to more NES Tetris progress in the past few years than in the prior 20 or so years since the game’s release. Tool-assisted or speedrun or video game hacking in general has been super-charged by the rise of the Internet and small hyper-focused groups collaborating to ‘make number go up’.

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1. Despite—or should that be because?—of their difficulty participating in universities, politics, military, or alcohol.↩︎

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