Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison recently published an article in The Atlantic calling for a new discipline of “progress studies”. It met with an enthusiastic response from many people and has galvanized a small movement, which now has a Slack group and last Wednesday held its first meetup (hosted at Founders Fund). I was the speaker and gave a talk on the history of steel (recording coming soon). I concluded with some thoughts on progress studies, why it’s crucially important, what I’m doing about it—and how you can help.