2026-04-04 11:00:26
(with apologies to Sasha Shulgin)
Gabapentinoids are weird.
For a start, they don’t do what they say on the tin. It was named after the thing the inventors thought it would do, i.e. bind to and modulate GABA receptors, the ones which cause sedation and anxiolysis. But they have no activity at these receptors. Intuitively then they wouldn’t have an effect on sleep or anxiety.
They also don’t bind to dopamine receptors — you would think then that they wouldn’t be helpful for psychosis (most antipsychotics antagonise dopamine receptors).
And they don’t bind to opioid receptors, so they’re surely not useful for treating pain.
But they do! Gabapentinoids are prescribed for sleep, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and epilepsy, as well as neuropathic pain and restless legs syndrome.
Gabapentinoids bind to the α2δ protein, a subunit of voltage-gated calcium channels (hence their alternative name of α2δ ligands). Usually the concentration of calcium ions outside the cell is thousands of times higher than inside; these channels respond to a voltage by opening and allowing calcium to flood in. Depending on the cell they’re attached to, this can cause muscle contraction, neuronal signalling, and protein synthesis.
Specifically they bind α2δ-1 and α2δ-2, but only exert their effect through the former (as proven by trials on α2δ-2-knockout mice). There seems to be an as-yet undiscovered natural ligand for α2δ-1 and -2 which binds to the same site as gabapentinoids.
Importantly they don’t block calcium channels — instead they inhibit the release of monoamines (serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine) and substance P1 triggered by calcium influx. They also inhibit calcium channel-dependent release of glutamate and glycine in various brain tissues.
There are states in which calcium channels become ‘sensitized’, such as in the case of neuronal injury, and gabapentinoids might selectively work in these conditions.
As they don’t simply block calcium channels, they have big advantages over drugs that do — they only minimally change synaptic function, unlike calcium channel blockers. They can essentially restore ‘normal’ functioning in overexcited calcium channels while leaving healthy ones alone.
Anticlockwise from top: gabapentin, leucine, isoleucine
Gabapentinoids have a suspicious structural similarity to leucine and isoleucine, two amino acids. Radiolabelling these amino acids shows they also bind the α2δ protein, and L-isoleucine blocks certain effects of gabapentinoids, suggesting they compete for binding at the same site.
Some people have reported relief of their restless legs syndrome from acetylleucine, a leucine analog, which suggests it’s acting in a similar way to gabapentinoids (Fields 2021). Curiously this drug is very hard to find except in France, where it’s sold over-the-counter.
Unlike lots of drugs, gabapentinoids seem to be actively transported into the body by LAT1, the large neutral amino acid transporter.
This is a disadvantage over other drugs, because it limits how much and how quickly gabapentin can be absorbed. Gabapentin often has to be taken multiple times per day to avoid saturating these transporters. It also competes with other amino acids (the ones above) for these transporters.
Pregabalin, another gabapentinoid, is superior here because it is transported by other carriers, not just LAT1, so its uptake doesn’t saturate in the same way. It binds α2δ much more strongly than gabapentin, and in animals is more potent as an analgesic and anticonvulsant.
Even weirder: Eroglu 2009 found that α2δ-1 is a neuronal receptor for thrombospondin, a molecule which promotes synaptogenesis in astrocytes. Specifically, it forms part of a larger signalling system. It acts as the extracellular receptor for a “synaptogenic signalling complex”; when thrombospondin binds, it causes a cascade of events which switches on this complex and leads to the start of synapse development.
As gabapentinoids also bind to this protein… does that mean they reduce synaptogenesis? In vitro, yes: gabapentin powerfully blocks synapse formation. Though this sounds slightly terrifying it’s also probably an important mechanism for gabapentinoids’ effects in epilepsy and neuropathic pain — synapse formation can be triggered by neuronal injury in these conditions and might well contribute to the pathology of these conditions (although this is uncertain).
It’s worth noting that gabapentin and thrombospondin, while both binding to the same protein, don’t bind to the same part of that protein.
(It’s kind of nuts that it took decades for one of the key mechanisms of action for this class of drug to be discovered. Makes you wonder what else we don’t know, about gabapentinoids and other drugs.)
Worryingly this suggests that gabapentinoids might affect the normal formation of synapses. Could this cause other deficits, such as in memory formation?
Behroozi 2023 attempted to test this and did not find an effect, although they were looking specifically at improvements in memory formation.
Gabapentinoids can certainly cause brain fog and slower processing. Eghrari 2025 also found an increased risk of cognitive impairment and dementia in patients with chronic low back pain prescribed gabapentin; when stratified by age, patients taking gabapentin had twice the risk of dementia and mild cognitive impairment. This risk was further increased in patients who had taken gabapentin more throughout their lives. Presumably this effect would also extend to pregabalin.
Gabapentinoids are frequently prescribed off label (when a doctor prescribes a drug outside of the conditions for which it’s approved). Not necessarily a bad thing: doctors use their discretion to decide when to do this, and for a drug with as broad a therapeutic profile as gabapentinoids it doesn’t seem wholly surprising.
But there are strict rules around advertising a drug for this sort of thing, or pushing doctors to prescribe it off label. The drug is approved for specific conditions and drug companies (in countries where they’re allowed to advertise) can only push for it to be prescribed for these conditions.
Their subsidiary Parke-Davis promoted Neurontin (gabapentin) for at least eleven unapproved conditions, flying doctors to lavish retreats, paying kickbacks, and commissioning ghostwritten journal articles. Off-label prescribing accounted for 78% of Neurontin sales.
Pfizer pleaded guilty to criminal charges and paid $945 million in settlements. In a separate 2009 case, they paid a further $2.3 billion for off-label marketing of several drugs including Lyrica (pregabalin).
Separately, top pain researcher Scott Reuben admitted to fabricating data in at least 21 studies – including Pfizer-funded trials of Lyrica – without ever enrolling a single patient. He was jailed in 2010.
More controversial. One epidemiological survey looked at a cohort of individuals before and after they were prescribed gabapentin, and found no increase in suicidality, as well as a reduction in suicide attempts in psychiatric patients (Gibbons 2011). A large Swedish cohort study found a significant increase in suicide – but only for pregabalin, and not gabapentin (Molero 2019).
It’s not clear why this would be the case, as the drugs work in exactly the same way (as far as we know). In fact, pregabalin was found to increase suicidal behaviour/deaths from suicide, unintentional overdoses, head and body injuries, road traffic accidents and offences, and arrests for violent crime, where gabapentin had no or almost no effect (and actually reduced road traffic incidents and arrests).
The obvious explanation is that pregabalin is simply more powerful, both due to the pharmacokinetic gap described above and because it binds α2δ much more strongly. The highest doses of gabapentin simply can’t compete with the highest doses of pregabalin.
Certainly for some people they are. Gabapentinoids are notorious for diversion, where people score prescriptions and then sell the drugs on. The prescription rate for these drugs in prisons is double that of the general population. In some ways pregabalin is the drug of choice in UK prisons. In France, 81% of recreational teenage pregabalin users reported to poison control centres were homeless or living in migrant shelters (Dufayet 2021).
This should surprise us; they don’t have any dopaminergic or opioidergic activity, so they don’t tick the obvious addictive drug boxes. Nonetheless, some people clearly find them enjoyable, with effects somewhat similar to alcohol/benzodiazepines, and develop dependence on them.
This might explain why there are more than 50 million gabapentinoid prescriptions issued every year in the US alone.
In the hilarious Drug User’s Bible, in which the author takes basically every drug imaginable, there’s this snippet from taking 300mg pregabalin (which is a hefty dose, users are started on 75mg typically):
I totally underestimated this drug. I am basically zombified and largely mistuned to what is going on around me, which appears to be distant. My hands are numb and I am, essentially, stupefied, with head spinning.
This one was a shock. I clearly took far too much and paid a price in terms of a strong intoxication which at times was extremely uncomfortable.
Gabapentinoids are weirder than I had realised.
Of course, the conditions they are prescribed for are horrific – anxiety, chronic pain etc can be a living hell, and a drug which effectively treats them is miraculous. But it’s wild that it took us decades to actually understand the first thing about how these drugs work.
And the effects on synaptogenesis, unknown effects on memory, increased risk of various kinds of death and dangerous behaviour (in the case of pregabalin), huge abuse in prisons and migrant shelters, and increased risk of cognitive deficits and dementia should probably worry us given how widely they’re prescribed.
2026-04-04 10:50:06
I've played a lot of dance weekends over the years [1] and if I could change one thing it would be no more challenging sessions. I see it happen every time: it's a great crowd of people, with a wide range of experience levels, and Saturday afternoon is going well. Then it's time for the challenging / advanced / experienced session. What happens? The dances are too hard for the crowd and it's not fun.
The callers had already been selecting dances that worked well for the group, which meant material that was interesting but not a struggle. Push the difficulty up from there, and what gives? You can take longer teaching, perhaps four minutes instead of two, which lets you explain material that's a bit harder, but only a bit and at the cost of a lot more talking. You can call no-walkthroughs, medleys, or even hash, but at most dance weekends you can get away with that at a regular session (and if you can't it won't work at a challenging session either). Or you can call material that's too hard for the crowd, and it falls apart in places.
To go well, challenging sessions can't just be a matter of picking harder dances, they require a group of dancers who are up to the challenge. This can work as a one-off event or even a whole weekend, where you communicate clearly what people should expect and people can self-select. It can work at a festival where you have multiple tracks and people can easily choose something else. But none of this applies to most dance weekends, since they only have one hall.
I think the desire for challenging sessions comes from two places. One is that some people just really like challenging dances, and I think the best you can do there is challenging-specific events. The other, though, and I think this is a bigger factor, is that a whole weekend of contra dancing can be a lot of the same. So if you're looking for ways to add some interest to the schedule without forcing the caller to choose between "that's not actually challenging" and "it's not fun when the dances fall apart", some ideas:
Teaching sessions, where the caller focuses on demonstrating a new skill. There are tons of possibilities here, including how to help a lost neighbor, role swapping, partner swapping, flourishes, swing variations, momentum and weight, and supporting other dancers in and out of moves.
Games sessions, where the caller has you do something unusual but also fun and educational. One session might include, sequentially, some dancers leaving the hall for the walkthrough, pool noodles, blindfolding, ghosts, sabotage and recovery, and teaching a different 1/4 of the dance to each 1/4 of the dancers.
A session of Chestnuts, Squares, Triplets, Triple-minors, or a mix of different unusual formations.
Early morning family dance with acoustic open band.
A "marathon" session, where you medley one dance after another and people typically drop out every so often to rest and swap around. Make sure you coordinate with the band(s) to ensure this is something they'd be up for playing for; it's not the default deal.
Play with tempo. Show the dancers what tempos from 104 to 128 feel like, and try the same dance at multiple tempos. Practice dancing spaciously at slow tempos, and with connected and efficient movement at fast ones.
You might notice I didn't include themed sessions like "flow and glide contras" or "well-balanced people". The variation in feeling from one dance to the next is key to keeping contra dance interesting, and while sessions that explore just one area still work, I personally think they're much less fun.
[1] I count 70: 54 with the Free Raisins and 16 with Kingfisher.
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2026-04-04 10:20:09
This year's Spring ACX Meetup everywhere in Shenzhen.
Location: We'll meet up right outside the Shenzhen Bay Kapok Hotel. There is a large open space with a huge set of stairs ~20 meters to the right of the Hotel (assuming that you're facing the hotel entrance). The Hotel itself is located at No. 3001 Binhai Avenue, Nanshan District, Shenzhen, and can be accessed directly from nearby streets. I'll hold up an ACX MEETUP sign at the hotel's entrance and guide you to the meeting area. - https://plus.codes/7PJMGW9W+HQ
Feel free to bring games/fun activities. Also, I expect the event to be bilingual (but primarily in English). Please email [email protected], and I'll create a mailing list/chain.
Contact: [email protected]
2026-04-04 10:10:07
A few years ago I listened to a fascinating podcast interview featuring former Democratic presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson. They agreed that politics is a mess and politicians are constantly doing bad things that harm the people they are supposed to serve. But they couldn’t agree on how bad that made the politicians as people.
Yang wanted to view the politicians as normal people responding to bad incentives, but Williamson wanted to call them evil for failing to exercise courage in the face of these bad incentives.
Morally, the notion that you can’t blame people when they are following incentives is akin to the “just following orders” excuse that Nazis tried to use at the Nuremberg trials. But what’s the alternative? In practice, we can’t and don’t expect people to always do the right thing even when everyone else around them isn’t.
Most of the time it’s something more complicated: Doing the right thing means being a bit better on the margin. If everyone else in your class is cheating and using AI to do their homework, it could mean living by a principle where you only use AI for parts of the assignment that are clearly useless busy work -- and letting this be known.
A colleague recently said something that sums it up nicely: “A person’s moral strength is exactly their ability to resist bad incentives.” *(paraphrased)
But this post is not ultimately about ethics. I want to ask a more basic question: what do we really mean when we say someone is “following incentives”?
I think most of the time, it’s not at all clear that it’s true in a literal sense. My take is that “apparent short-term incentive-like vibes” might be a better description for what they are actually following. Things that have more “incentive-y” vibes are those that are more associated with selfishness and vices like greed. Money: incentive!! Admiration of your peers: incentive???
I think often what “incentive” is really referring to is more like a feeling of competitive pressure, or a belief that “if I don’t do this, someone else will, and then I’ll be a sucker and a failure.”
When I was in grad school, the people around me generally felt a lot of pressure to publish a lot of papers. But the people who really stood out and succeeded often were more focused on making real contributions that were actually valuable to others in the field, even if it meant publishing less. The apparent incentive to publish constantly was almost exactly backwards!
Often people do actually get short-term benefits for doing something that’s not in their long-term interest. So it might be a case of following short-term incentives in particular (and potentially being confused about what’s good in the longer term). Publishing more often made it seem like a student was more productive or impressive in the short term, and unlocked travel funding to go to conferences. But what you really want to advance your career is to become known throughout the field for something you did; no amount of mediocre publications would ever get you there.
A special case of following short-term incentives, which is maybe the most puzzlingly common, is one-shot thinking. You’ve likely been in a situation where someone says something like: “Of course the other side won’t cooperate -- there’s no incentive to! So we can’t either!” and people listening treat this as the sophisticated, hard-nosed take. But failing to cooperate leaves value on the table. And when you have the chance to negotiate, build trust, and/or set-up enforcement mechanisms to make sure all parties follow through on a commitment, it seems like you should at least consider trying to find a way to cooperate. The basic mistake here is treating an interaction as an isolated “one-shot” game, after which everyone walks away and never interacts in any way ever again. Acting like a situation is “one-shot” when it’s not isn’t sophisticated, it’s stupid.
This also means that saying you did something bad because of “the incentives” doesn’t work as an excuse. You’ve done the thing. The “one-shot” part is over. You are now in the position of being judged for your previous behavior, but treating something as a one-shot game is only valid if you will never be in a position to be judged for your behavior during the game.
Applying these insights to AI is left as an exercise for the reader.
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2026-04-04 08:22:39
TL;DR: The efficient market hypothesis is a lie, there are no adults, you don't have to be as cool as the Very Cool People to contribute something, your comparative advantage tends to feel like just doing the obvious thing, and low hanging fruit is everywhere if you pay attention. The Very Cool People are anyways not so impossible to become; and perhaps most coolness is gated behind a self belief of having nothing to add. So put more out into the world, worry less about whether people already know or find it boring. At worst you'll be slightly annoying. How can you know, if you haven't even tried?
Apparently I live in the Iron Man timeline, so I asked Jarvis/Claude to make this and I got to see it get assembled piece by piece. In the words of Claude, "you have now witnessed art".[1]
Recently I've been commenting more on LessWrong[2]. This place is somehow the best[3] forum for sane reasoned discussion on the internet besides small academic-gated communities. A lot of posts and comments seem impressive, the product of minds greater than my own, the same way that even if I tried for years I probably wouldn't write a novel better than my own favorites[4] or beat Terrence Tao at his own game.
But... even taking for granted the (false) conclusion that all good posters here are unattainably beyond yourself, you just... don't need to be that good to have something to contribute. It's typically easier to notice that step 24 of an argument is fatally flawed than it is to come up with it, especially if you can read a dozen arguments and then only comment on the one you can find flaws in. Sometimes your life has given you evidence that others don't have, or you happened to hear a phrase from a friend that is apt. Sometimes people have good ideas or know a lot but cannot explain them.
Furthermore, frequently people systematically underestimate how good they are at their greatest strengths. When you have unusual skill in a domain, that domain will feel unusually easy. Thus, Focus on the places where everyone else is dropping the ball.
Personally I've found that having the mindset that you can fix things or contribute makes you notice when you can. It's like the frequency illusion. For example, the next time you're reading Wikipedia and get a twinge of "that's phrased poorly" or "that's a typo" or "why doesn't this mention X?", think "I could fix that, right now". You are allowed to edit Wikipedia. Similarly, comment with your addition.
What if that would take too much effort? Well... consider just half-assing it. That often gets you 80% of the way, and you shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of the good. You can always go back to put your full ass in it later. You think I'm proof reading this post? Hell no! I only added the image hours later. See the examples list for more.
What's the worst that could happen? You annoy a few people a little, some are a bit angry at you, maybe you mislead them (at least until someone deletes your text or comments about how wrong you are), you look a little lamer to the Cool Kids, and you lose some internet points.
Boo-hoo?[5] If you never take the risk of making people a little sad or annoyed or dumber, you'll never do much of anything anyways. I try to have life goals not best satisfied by a literal corpse. There are times and places to shy away from inaction due to the risk of causing harm but internet commenting just doesn't risk much harm to others.[6]
Now for examples, taken from my most upvoted comments, mostly in order to prevent cherry picking (currently I mostly write comments):
Bask in awe at my greatness[7], and realize that you might be in the same epistemic state that I was before I made these comments, and that most of these did not feel like 'effort posts', and I almost didn't do half of them due to thinking nobody would care. If you think mine are too impressive for you to replicate, this should make you wonder how you know you aren't in the same position. If you think mine are meh or trash, then you should have no problem beating me.[8]
Best Comments
Maybe you've heard most of this stuff before. I had. Maybe this time, you'll finally listen.
It rolled the arrogant rude annoyed teenager tone as specified in my user preferences prompt.
And less recently, Wikipedia. Same principles apply - you know you can just take snippets of non-Wikipedia stuff you read and put them on there, from as simple as "Disease X killed Y people in [recent year] according to the WHO" to updating said stats when time inexorably advances, to putting in lightly reformulated math or physics equations from papers or standard books like the Feynmann lectures or easy nice consequences of what's already on there. You may even get an ego boost when you look something up on Wikipedia and realize you wrote the text you are reading.
Read: The worst form of forum, except for all the other fora we've tried.
For fiction, the loophole I plan to exploit someday is that I only need to write something perfect for me or people like me, and I can just ask myself what I like.
I don't mean to trivialize your sadness if you've been harmed. I just mean that there's a thing that some people are more prone to than others where they overinflate/catastrophize minor or unlikely downsides, and often pointing out how silly the worries are helps dissolve them.
You can use a pseudonym and hide revealing information if you're worried about that. Here I was mostly talking about harm to others.
In case you missed it I am playing up my ego for the lols.
Unless you also think that LW is deeply flawed about what it rewards
Thanks to the people who downvoted my previous super short "Wow that's great!" comments - I may not have written that had you not kicked me to elaborate.
2026-04-04 07:09:46
Editor’s note: Post 2/30 for Inkhaven
Why did the philosophers fail to anticipate the industrial revolution? I often find myself wondering. On the one hand, you could argue that they weren’t in the business of predicting the future. But on the other hand, I’m sure if you plucked Plato and his students from The Academy and dropped them off in 1910, they’d probably have a few things to say about it. The most transformative event of the past ten thousand years is surely interesting to curious observers of the human condition. But then again maybe it’s not so surprising. Predicting the future is hard. Predicting an exponential at the start of said exponential is even harder.
So did anyone do it? And if so, who was the earliest? Could anyone possibly predict industrialization in antiquity? The middle ages? The age of the printing press? When did the first mind dare to pull back the veil of agriculturalism and sneak a glimpse at the dazzling, terrifying spectacle of the industrial age? We’ll never know for sure of course. But I present two candidates:
Christiaan Huygens was a brilliant Dutch scientist and mathematician active during the Dutch Golden Age. This isn’t a Wikipedia entry, so I won’t bother going into too much detail but I’ll mention that among many other achievements, he discovered Saturn’s largest moon Titan and invented the pendulum clock (building off Galileo’s insights). In the 1670s, he also designed the gunpowder engine, a very early kind of combustion engine that utilized gunpowder as its fuel source. In theory, this primeval engine could raise over a thousand pounds (Huygens at one point mentions raising 3,000 pounds over 30ft) but was never actually constructed. Historians today debate whether it could have been built at all. Less than half a century later, Newcomen would build his steam engine and interest in combustion engines faded for the following century. But even more interesting than Huygens’s failed combustion engine was the intellectual rabbit hole it led him down.
By means of this invention, the rapid, explosive effect of gunpowder is harnessed to produce a motion that is governed in precisely the same manner as that of a heavy weight. Moreover, it can serve not only for all purposes where weights are employed, but also for most of those where human or animal power is utilized; thus, it could be applied to hoisting large stones for construction, erecting obelisks, raising water for fountains, and driving mills to grind grain in locations where one lacks the convenience—or sufficient space—to employ horses. Furthermore, this motor possesses the distinct advantage of costing nothing to maintain during periods when it is not in use.
It can also be utilized as an exceptionally powerful spring, such that one could thereby construct machines capable of launching cannonballs, large arrows, and—perhaps—bombs with a force equal to that of conventional cannons and mortars. Indeed, according to my calculations, this would result in a significant saving of the gunpowder currently in use. Moreover, these machines would be far easier to transport than modern artillery, for in this invention, lightness is combined with strength.
This latter feature is of considerable significance and opens the door to inventing—by these very means—new types of vehicles for both water and land travel. And although it may seem absurd, it does not appear impossible to devise a vehicle capable of traversing the air; for the primary obstacle to the art of flight has, until now, been the difficulty of constructing machines that are simultaneously lightweight and capable of generating powerful propulsion. Nevertheless, I readily admit that a great deal of scientific knowledge and inventive ingenuity would still be required to successfully bring such an undertaking to fruition.[1]
-Christiaan Huygens, 1673
Prophetic. I found this quote originally in a strange polemic by a French scholar which argues that the British delayed the industrial revolution by over a hundred years. I’m not sure I buy his arguments, but to my delight, the quote is, as far as I can tell, the real deal.
So there’s our first candidate. 1673. Not bad, the early period of industrialization in Britain would begin by the mid-18th century but much of what he describes would only be developed well into the 19th century and his words were written some 230 years before the Wright Brothers’ first flight.
But, another challenger appears!
This second candidate is a stranger case. I’ll open with the quote:
Machines may be made by which the largest ships, with only one man steering them, will be moved faster than if they were filled with rowers; wagons may be built which will move with incredible speed and without the aid of beasts; flying machines can be constructed in which a man… may beat the air with wings like a bird… machines will make it possible to go to the bottom of seas and rivers.[2]
Roger Bacon, c. 1260
Also sounds eerily prophetic. A little background on Roger Bacon. He was a medieval friar and polymath famous for his ingenuity and early developments of empiricism. He was also the first known European to describe gunpowder (unless this part of his works was a later forgery as some scholars believe).
Unlike Huygens, Bacon does not directly identify the exact motive power for these machines for these machines but he does seem to describe at least the transportation revolution element of industrialization. As far as I can tell, this passage is quite a bit more famous than Huygens’s quote, which is very obscure. However, this translation is a bit generous and ignores a lot of context. In the following line of his writing Bacon writes:
But these things were done in ancient times, and have been done in our own times, as is certain; unless it is an instrument of flight, which I have not seen, nor have I known a man who has seen it; but I know the wise man who devised this artifice to accomplish it.[3]
Bacon isn’t attempting to predict the future here and the commonly circulated quote is misleading. He’s describing machines which he believes have already been developed at various times throughout history by various inventors. And he goes even further than that, asserting he personally has seen many of these inventions (aside from flying machines). I’m honestly not exactly sure what he’s talking about with regard to what he has seen. But what I can say is that Bacon lived during a time that was at once both exciting and one in which the information environment was deeply polluted.
Active during the reverberations of the Renaissance of the 12th century, Roger Bacon had access to a much wider corpus of classical texts than his earlier predecessors but also had access to a large variety of pseudepigrapha and it would have been virtually impossible for scholars at the time to distinguish between genuine and forged works in many cases. Because of this, among other things, Bacon believed Alexander the Great had used a submarine.[4]
So I’m less confident about counting Bacon’s claim. There is an inherent fuzziness to this game after all, because what counts as “predicting the industrial revolution” is a nebulous concept. That said, in addition to the haziness of what exactly he’s referring to, Bacon does not so much describe a world transformed by industrialization but rather lists a smorgasbord of wondrous machines. Roger Bacon is a difficult figure to assess, with some scholars professing his status as a visionary thinker, almost a modern man dropped into medieval times. Others are far more cautious, describing him as more of a product of his environment and questioning whether some of his works were in fact later forgeries. To truly have an informed opinion I would have to read far more of his works than I have currently made my way through.
I leave the reader here with a request. I have found two candidates thus far, two thinkers who arguably anticipated the industrial revolution. But I suspect they are not alone. If anyone out there is able to find more candidates, please message me, I’d be very excited to hear about them.
Oeuvres complètes. Tome XXII. Supplément à la correspondance. Varia. Biographie. Catalogue de vente
Original French:
L’effect rapide de la poudre est reduit par cette invention a un mouuement qui se gouverne de mesme que celuy d’un grand poids. Et elle peut servir non seulement a tous les usages ou le poids est employè, mais aussi a la plus part de ceux ou l’on se sert de la force d’hommes ou d’nimaux, de sorte qu’on pourra l’appliquer a monter des grosses pierres pour les bastimens, a dresser des obelisques, a monter des eaux pour les fontaines, a faire aller des moulins pour moudre du bled en des lieux ou l’on n’a pas la commoditè ou assez de place pour se servir de chevaux. Et ce moteur a cela de bon qu’il ne couste rien a entretenir pendant le temps qu’on ne l’employe point.
L’on s’en peut encore servir comme d’un tres puissant ressort, en sorte qu’on pourroit construire par ce moyen des machines qui jetteroient des boulets de canon, de grandes flesches et des bombes peut estre avec une aussi grande force qu’est celle du canon et des mortiers. Mesine selon mon calcul aves espargne d’une grande partie de la poudre qu’on employe maintenant. Et ces machines seroient d’un transport plus facile que n’est l’artillerie d’aujourdhuy par ce que dans cette invention la legeretè est jointe avec la force.
Cette derniere particularite est tresconsiderable et donne lieu a inventer par ce moyen de nouvelles sortes de voitures tant par eau que par terre. et quoy qu’il paroitra absurde pourtant il ne semble impossible d’en trouver quelqu’une pour aller par l’air, puis que le grand obstacle a l’art de voler a estè jusqu’ici la difficultè de construire des machines fort legeres et qui pussent produire un mouvement fort puissant. Mais javoue qu’il faudroit encore bien de la science et de l’invention pour venir a bout d’une telle entreprise.
(Translated to English via Google Translate)
Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White (page 134)
Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment (footnote 29)
Original Latin:
Haec autem facta sunt antiquitus, et nostris temporibus facta sunt, ut certum est; nisi sit instrumentum volandi, quod non vidi, nec hominem qui vidisset cognovi; sed sapientem qui hoc artificium excogitavit explere cognosco.
(Translated to English via Google Translate)