Despite a distinct lack of talent, and occasionally long hiatuses, I’ve enjoyed learning to play the electric guitar as an adult. One of the many variables in the feel and sound of a guitar is its strings, but the major manufacturers’ offerings all seemed rather similar to me. I eventually settled on D’Addario’s EXL offerings, mostly so that I didn’t have to think about it again.
Last year, needing to buy a new batch of strings, I idly looked around to see what is now available, and noticed that D’Addario had a newish “NYXL” range — at double the price of my EXL’s! Despite balking at the price, and knowing from experience that there is a tendency in music circles to ascribe magic to the mundane, the reviews I read were so positive that I decided to risk buying a single set.
I wasn’t expecting to notice much difference between the EXLs and NYXLs, but as soon as I fitted the latter, I was proven wrong. They sounded better, though that’s very subjective; they also appeared to be staying in tune better, which is more objective. But, gradually and more surprisingly, I realised that the NYXLs were taking perhaps three or more times longer to degrade (guitar strings gradually rust, in no small part thanks to our sweaty mitts).
On one level, this seems like a common story for those with money: pay twice as much, but get three times as much [1].
But, on another level, this made me realise anew how much progress still occurs in an age where, it is often said, progress has largely stalled. I might reasonably have guessed that, at most, one might improve guitar strings in a given metric by a handful of percent, but not by 3x — I have no idea what advances in metallurgy might have made such an improvement possible.
It is true, of course, that better guitar strings are not the most consequential improvement to human civilisation one can imagine — but guitar strings are not the only things that have become progressively better. Computers keep getting faster; cars and trains more comfortable; and, most importantly, many more people than ever before have access to sufficient nutrition and medication.
I try to bear this in mind whenever I am tempted to despair at the gross inefficiencies I observe in how we progress knowledge. Our publication model at best encourages us to write too many low-quality papers and at worst encourages outright fraud. Our funding model at best wastes our time by encouraging too many applications and at worst encourages us to move towards topics to which we are badly suited. The career options we provide are either tenuous short-term contracts or jobs-for-life. I could go on, but my point is simple — we are undoubtedly progressing slower than we could. However, despite this, we do still manage to keep moving forwards.
That forward progression is something we take for granted, which marks us out as unusual. Most of human history has witnessed little or no progress [2], and, for most of written human history, people have assumed that the best one could hope for was not to go backwards. Indeed, outright reverses are not uncommon. After the decline and fall of the Western Roman empire in the 4th and 5th centuries AD, people in my part of the world collectively forgot some of what they had once known. Much of that knowledge was regained only after it was brought back in book form by Greeks fleeing the fall of Constantinople in 1453 [3]!
The fact that we are managing to progress is thus important in its own right – every advance, no matter how small, is an advance – but it is almost certainly the precondition for future major advances. The harnessing of electricity was a revolution, but it built upon countless previous advances, some major and some minor, ranging from the study of magnetism, improvements in manufacturing, a better understanding of chemistry, and so on. We will probably only know in retrospect which minor advances were vital for any given future major advance.
I thus remain optimistic. So long as we keep progressing – even at a slower rate than we might like, and indeed a slower rate than we are capable of – the possibility of major advances remains a real one. Personally, I think it unlikely that I have the capabilities to make a major advance, but I hope that I am capable of helping nudge things very slightly forwards. Perhaps some of those nudges might one day help others go much further. It’s a modest aim, but if I can play even a tiny part in helping progress knowledge, I will consider this a life well lived. And I certainly won’t complain if I benefit from further improvements in guitar strings!
Footnotes
To the amusement of my teenaged self, who was an avid Pratchett fan, this has become known as the “Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ theory”.
To the amusement of my teenaged self, who was an avid Pratchett fan, this has become known as the “Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ theory”.
Bearing in mind that for most of human history there have been relatively few humans alive.
Bearing in mind that for most of human history there have been relatively few humans alive.
Even more astonishingly from my perspective, though with lower quality evidence, there are strong hints that some desert communities partly, and perhaps even wholly, forgot the wheel after realising that camels were better for transporting goods across sand!
Even more astonishingly from my perspective, though with lower quality evidence, there are strong hints that some desert communities partly, and perhaps even wholly, forgot the wheel after realising that camels were better for transporting goods across sand!