[benbreen]

Thank you for pointing this out. As an historian, the appeal to a deep historical argument in these situations drive me nuts. We find ultra-rationalist, data-driven people like Yudkowsky relying on a hugely flawed and imperfect historical record to make confident pronouncements.

In my opinion, the historical record from, say, 1517 (or even 1717) is so full of gaps and inconsistencies that it is impossible to make even an order of magnitude level estimate regarding something like rate of technological innovation (or even world GDP, arguably).

Economists and social scientists are often guilty of this as well - for instance, I really liked the parts of Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature that dealt with relatively reliable quantitative data from the 20th and 19th centuries. But once he starts talking about things like the An Lushan rebellion or the fall of the Roman Empire, it's a complete mess from an empirical point of view, doing things like taking the numbers of fatalities cited by contemporary participants in an historical conflict at face value. No self-respecting historian would make such big assumptions from such faulty data.

Anyway, I realize this is incidental to the larger argument here but insofar as questions about exponential growth of technology draw on historical arguments, I wanted to throw it out there.