Jason Crawford

Telling the story of human progress to the world, and promote progress as a moral imperative.

All of Jason's work is in the domain of Progress Studies. He works on understanding what the primary causes of historical technological progress were, and what the broad effects of different types of technological progress have been. Since I consider most catastrophic risks to be the result of badly controlled emerging technologies, understanding the historical causes of technological progress, and humanity’s track record in controlling those technologies, is an essential part of thinking about global catastrophic risk and the long-term future.

I also consider this grant to be valuable because Jason seems to be a very capable researcher who has attracted the attention of multiple people whose thinking I respect a lot (he also received a grant from Tyler Cowen's Emergent Ventures). I think there is a good chance he could become a highly influential public writer, and having him collaborate with researchers and thinkers working on global catastrophic risks could be very valuable in the long-run.

I also think that his current research is going to be highly and directly relevant in worlds where catastrophic risks are not the primary type of issue that turns out to be important, and where human flourishing through technological progress may be the most important cause area. (This reasoning is similar to that behind last round’s grant toward improving reproducibility in science.)