[HN Gopher] Do we need a better understanding of 'progress'?
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Do we need a better understanding of 'progress'?
Author : pmoriarty
Score : 52 points
Date : 2022-06-16 11:11 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" Around 2016, Cowen received an out-of-the-blue email from
| Irish billionaire Patrick Collison... A few years earlier,
| Collison had cofounded the online payments company Stripe...
| Stripe's nearly $100bn (PS83bn/EUR95bn) valuation puts Collison's
| net worth north of $11bn (PS9bn/EUR10.5bn)..._
|
| _" During the pair's meetings, Cowen tells me, "we were both
| talking about the ideas, finding we had common ideas, and somehow
| hit upon the notion of an article". So, in 2019, they co-authored
| an essay in The Atlantic, which argued for "a new science of
| progress"._
|
| _" progress studies doesn't desire a world where humans live
| more harmoniously with nature. As Crawford writes: "Humanism says
| that when improving human life requires altering the environment,
| humanity takes moral precedence over nature." It doesn't
| necessarily want a world with less inequality and prefers to
| focus more on growing the pie than on how it's divided. It also
| doesn't care much for societal norms that stand in the way of
| what it conceives of as progress - even ones shared by all
| cultures..."_
|
| This position sounds so self-serving on the part of the
| billionaire.
|
| To reap the benefits of his wealth guilt-free, where he and
| people like him can exploit the world as they see fit and
| dominate others, it would be helpful for him to push a world view
| like this.
|
| And why would Cowen, who _" ranked 17th on a list of the top 100
| most influential economists"_ give the time of day to some rando
| who just happened to be rich? One word: money.
|
| So it looks like Collison bought himself an economist.
|
| That Peter Thiel is influential in this "movement" (or PR
| exercise) is also telling.
|
| _" Crawford and Cowen, the two leading intellectual figures of
| the progress community, come from the objectivist and libertarian
| traditions, respectively. On a panel at AynRandCon, Crawford
| described progress studies as adjacent to objectivism, the
| philosophical system outlined in 20th Century philosopher Ayn
| Rand's fiction."_
|
| Well, that just about explains it all..
|
| This whole movement actually has strong echoes of extropianism,
| which has roots in HG Wells' techno-utopianism, and might be
| termed neo-Wellsianism, were it not for Wells making a 180 near
| the end of his life and becoming a dystopian (see his book _"
| Mind at the End of Its Tether"_), and for Wells' utopias being
| socialist, not capitalist ones.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Q: Why do economists rob banks^W^W _serve billionaires_?
|
| A: Because that's where the money is.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| > And why would Cowen, who "ranked 17th on a list of the top
| 100 most influential economists" give the time of day to some
| rando who just happened to be rich? One word: money.
|
| Cowen is constantly giving the time of day to randos who are
| not remotely rich. He answers every non-spam email he gets. He
| runs a program that gives out small grants to nobodies who are
| just starting out their careers. He's probably the most
| pathologically available-for-interview economist alive today.
|
| In the time it took you to write out this conspiracy theory,
| you could have done even a cursory Google search instead.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > "It also doesn't care much for societal norms that stand in
| the way of what it conceives of as progress - even ones shared
| by all cultures..."
|
| Great. That's "we're going to chase _our_ idea of progress,
| even if the rest of the entire human race doesn 't see it as
| progress".
|
| _Real_ progress is not just economic. In the 19th century,
| there was much more of an idea that there could be _moral_
| progress - an idea echoed today by the progressives. (You don
| 't have to agree with the _direction_ the progressives think
| represents progress - I don 't - but their idea of progress is
| much more than economic gains.)
|
| Having an environment that isn't polluted is progress compared
| to having one that _is_ polluted. It may not be worth having
| people starve to get there, but it 's one axis of progress.
|
| _And_ having people not starve is progress. Having them not
| die of diseases is progress. Having them able to read, and to
| access information, is progress.
|
| Having them not die from violence would be progress.
| codefreeordie wrote:
| You put your effort into furthering your definition of
| progress. I'll put my effort furthering mine, and Patrick
| will work on his.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Humans barely live to 100 years, and "each new generation born is
| in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who
| must be civilized before it is too late." I don't think we need
| to invent further volatility than what producing new children
| already does.
|
| Every advocate of Progress I've read or spoken to sees it as
| managing and extracting value from other people - and not
| establishing a basic stability from which others can be free to
| actualize and thrive. Even basic income is really about putting
| the managers of such a scheme at the centre of it, and it's to
| the point where even the very word 'free' is triggering. I'd
| argue that belief in Progress is not a benevolent, charitable, or
| altruistic sentiment.
|
| It's said that change is the only constant, and I can sympathize
| with the idea that people imagine by aligning themselves to
| change for its own sake, they percieve themselves as aligning to
| the most powerful force in the universe, and are therefore on the
| right side of history. But the archeological record shows humans
| have made physical structures that are several thousands of years
| old, and as a human value, _stability_ has a very long track
| record. So much so that the artifacts of stability outlast human
| culture 's ability to remember them through periods of constant
| change, which suggests to me that what progress really reduces to
| is just leveraging chaos in a single lifetime for ephermeral,
| symbolic, materialist power.
|
| The axiom that history itself is a force of progress is a pretty
| big leap of faith, and I think the iterated logic of that idea is
| designed to unmoor people from a stabilizing belief in the
| existence of truth. In that sense, I would say Crawford and Cowen
| are just iterating the ideology of that axiom, and people who
| place themselves at the centre of solutions for 'all humanity'
| are really just expressing an infinite will to power _over_ all
| of humanity. Progress isn 't a thing, it's the artifact of an
| ideology.
|
| When someone tells you they represent change, what they tend to
| mean is they're here to take your stuff, and they've already
| moralized it to themselves, regardless of what you might believe.
| We should absolutely rethink the meaning of progress, but we
| should start with whether it is desirable at all, how much,
| compared to what, at what cost, and whether to build on our
| inheritance of stability, or continue to destroy it for the
| temporary feelings of power the destruction provides. There are
| thoughtful ways to engage this, if only we can get past merely
| litigating ideas and start actually using them to navigate and
| locate truth.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I think this article does a fairly good job of presenting
| different sides. In particular, I found this criticism very
| pertinent:
|
| > "you could tell a story where instead of things getting better,
| what we're seeing is that a lot of what's bad is getting
| concentrated into unlikely, infrequent but enormously bad
| events".
|
| It's like a Martingale betting strategy[0] where you turn a
| system of random wins and losses (like a technological/economic
| steady state) into one with repeated guarantees wins... until the
| guarantee fails (e.g. the Singularity, or a global market crash,
| or nuclear war).
|
| If we're only measuring economic growth and technological
| capability, and not risk (which is harder to measure, and
| tempting to underestimate), then we might be running at full
| speed towards outcomes that even hyperbolic discounting[1] can't
| justify.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_%28betting_system%2...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting
| hinkley wrote:
| That is what we usually call 'hubris' when we are doing the
| postmortem.
| seydor wrote:
| It's simpler than that, it is all about incentives. Science can
| happen even in the trenches of war, or by random employees in a
| patent office. Engineering needs resources and conerted efford.
| But when the incentives have nothing to do with science itself
| but rather with the struggle to keep all the PhD people employed,
| you end up with paper-mills and grant-harvester PIs. There s also
| a degeneration of the science culture due to so much self-
| promotion. Whatever happened to humility?
|
| Engineering projects like Apollo or Manhattan succeded by taking
| the theory invented by a few madmen and making the entire effort
| to the end product. Instead we now have projects like the Human
| brain project (EU) and the Brain initiative that don't seem to
| have a defined goal, and no clear incentives. The HBP used to be
| about building an artificial brain, as ambitious as it sounds.
| Instead, petty politics and meddling led to the project becoming
| a project salad with very little to show. AFAIK the Brain
| initiative has not done better.
|
| The article itself is another example of weak incentives. We
| don't need to invent another field called "progress studies" in
| order to make progress. That's only making the problem worse.
| [deleted]
| peteradio wrote:
| Consider all the buzz word paper milling was to supplant the
| nepotistic framework from before.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| Agreed, it's all about choosing the correct performance
| indicators
| LesZedCB wrote:
| "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
| measure"
|
| > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
| madacol wrote:
| So, what is progress?
|
| I like to think that progress is about maximizing global
| satisfaction. But then really hard questions follow
|
| - Who are included in "global"?, every human being?, every
| conscious mammal?. Do we all get the same weight?
|
| - (Assuming last answer is all human beings) How should we come
| to a consensus?. How do we coordinate to achieve our agreed
| goals?
|
| If you think this is all too subjective, should we stop pouring
| resources into philosophy and arts?
|
| I think this questions deserve at least some studying
| robocat wrote:
| > should we stop pouring resources into philosophy and arts?
|
| Do we exist just to eat, shit, and breed?
|
| Hopefully our civilisation is concerned with more than just
| the cold necessities of life: a civilisation that lets us do
| with our minds what we will. Circuses and Netflix have more
| meaning than bread: bread is merely a low level dependency in
| the skill tree.
|
| I think there is a lot of bollox to our liberal humanities:
| but who am I to judge what others choose to put their minds
| to?
|
| Disclaimer: I am Engineer, not Word Rotator.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| haha, i think it's been studied. you described "utilitarian
| ethics"
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/
| madacol wrote:
| Thanks!, good to know
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| Those single quotes on 'progress' made me remember about that
| video of James Baldwin[0].
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/OCUlE5ldPvM
| kazinator wrote:
| > _Imagine after that first nap as a typical American, you had
| taken a second one in 1940, waking up in the 2020s. Your fridge
| now has a freezer, and your new microwave lets you reheat your
| leftovers._
|
| What? Fridges had freezers in the 1940's. Usually as a small
| compartment, wrapped by the refrigerant evaporator ducts.
|
| https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/housewife-puts-an-ice-c...
|
| Residential microwave ovens rapidly increased in popularity in
| the USA in the 1970's and were common by the 1980's.
|
| If you woke up in 1950-something, your freezer might have had a
| timed heating coil in it: a defroster.
|
| If you woke up a bit later, it might have a magnetic door:
| because children were found to be suffocating in the externally
| latched fridges that couldn't be opened from the inside.
| kokanee wrote:
| The fun thing about Hacker News is that no matter the topic,
| there's always someone in the comments who knows more than the
| author about something they wrote.
| hencq wrote:
| True, but unfortunately for that one person there are usually
| 10 others who don't actually know more than the author, but
| are convinced they do.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| Progress is dead! Long live the plane of immanence!
|
| history doesn't progress in a forward arrow. just like evolution,
| it explodes outwards in every direction all at once, driven by
| desiring machines. humans, corporations, states, animals, plants,
| even the systems of the earth themselves have made themselves
| into political actors.
|
| anybody who has described a vector and metrics to demonstrate it
| should be scrutinized for their politics and what goals they are
| trying to achieve.
|
| economic indicators are used (by capitalist economists) to
| bludgeon those who dislike the status quo into accepting that
| "it's not as bad as you experience it" and keep chugging along
| towards our climate demise in the name of capital and profit.
| statuslover9000 wrote:
| GDP has been growing fine, but life expectancy in the US has been
| in historic decline for the past decade, largely driven by
| alcoholism, drug overdose, and suicide. Meanwhile over 2 billion
| people worldwide are food insecure, and that number is rising.
|
| Technology has certainly improved the standard of living of many
| many people over the last couple centuries, but there is no
| guarantee that it will continue to do so. Perhaps instead of a
| blind focus on "growing the pie", at this point in history we
| should be asking ourselves "what pie?" and "did everyone get a
| slice?"
|
| Edit: Updated "malnourished" to "food insecure", my mistake for
| using the wrong terminology. According to the UN Food and
| Agriculture Organization, there were 2.37 billion food insecure
| people in 2020, a number which has been steadily rising since
| 2014 with a larger jump since the start of the pandemic:
| https://www.fao.org/3/cb4474en/online/cb4474en.html
| floxy wrote:
| >life expectancy in the US has been in historic decline for the
| past decade
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/life-expectancy/life-ex...
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/mortality-trends...
| bergenty wrote:
| Your 2 billion number is incorrect. It was 500 million until
| 2020 and then slightly rose given the pandemic. That number has
| been dropping precipitously for decades.
| bergenty wrote:
| Your 2 billion number is incorrect. It was 500 million until
| 2020 and then slightly rose given the pandemic. That number has
| been dropping precipitously for decades. At this rate (ignoring
| 2021), there should be almost no malnutrition by 2030.
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| and why must a normal person give a damn about the misfortunes
| of junkies and alcoholics?
|
| >Meanwhile over 2 billion people worldwide are malnourished,
| and that number is rising.
|
| and will continue to do so as long as countries that can't feed
| themselves continue to grow at the rate they do.
|
| if you believe that we can feed the whole world, you didn't pay
| attention to the events of the past three years, and the last
| few months in particular. we can barely feed ourselves, and a
| small bump to food and energy prices has pushed a large chunk
| of our own very own population beyond the poverty line
| gilmore606 wrote:
| > and why must a normal person give a damn about the
| misfortunes of junkies and alcoholics?
|
| I give a damn about living in a society suffering from a
| surfeit of junkies and alcoholics. That affects me.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| > and why must a normal person give a damn about the
| misfortunes of junkies and alcoholics?
|
| You don't have to give a damn about anyone, but I'm friends
| and family with junkies and alcoholics, so I care. And even
| if you don't know any junkies or alcoholics and never will,
| can you not have sympathy for a person you've never met, even
| if some of their problems are to some degree their own fault?
|
| I know alcoholics who were binge-drinking at the age of 13
| because their parents were alcoholics too and encouraged it.
| I have cousins that often threw up when they were toddlers
| years old because their parents gave them too much to drink.
| If you were in these circumstances, how sure are you that you
| wouldn't end up a junkie or an alcoholic yourself?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >and why must a normal person give a damn about the
| misfortunes of junkies and alcoholics?
|
| for starters because they're also normal people. If you think
| there's no drug users or alcoholics even among all the people
| you know you'd be very surprised. It takes a lot of
| callousness to think that people who struggle with addiction
| or really any other thing aren't exactly what 'normal' people
| are like.
|
| What I wonder about is when it became normal to put that much
| lack of empathy and compassion proudly on public display.
| [deleted]
| BenoitP wrote:
| I have a very grim outlook on the future.
|
| > "did everyone get a slice?"
|
| I don't believe so, but it makes sense: we've always been at
| (economic) war with Eastasia/Oceania
| drekipus wrote:
| I'm from Australia and I agree! give me pie!
| eatmyshorts wrote:
| I think your data is a little old. The undernourished, defined
| as fewer than 1800 calories per day, has steadily declined from
| 2000 until 2019, and then risen very slightly as a result of
| Covid. There's about 660 million that meet this threshold.
| Global malnutrition really has gotten significantly better over
| the past few decades. https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-
| undernourishment
| luis_cho wrote:
| Sadly we will know in the next years how fragile is the
| current food production system. High centralised food system
| based mainly on fossil fuels gives high yields until it
| doesn't.
|
| Every time I listen to Steven Pinker I think that he would
| learn a lot with Nassim Taleb books.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| [Unserious]
|
| I'd say we understand progress so well, we've gamified it.:
| http://progressquest.com/
| beefman wrote:
| Collison and Cowen are asking the right questions but are
| unserious about finding answers. We need better data, a journal,
| forecasting competitions, etc. Podcasts and twitter cliques
| aren't going to cut it. Orthodox economics isn't going to cut it.
| A Humanities-based approach isn't going to cut it.
|
| Even more seriously, they've almost framed the inquiry as
| unanswerable from the start. What kind of answer or new discovery
| might they accept as an advance? What are the criteria for
| success?
| pessimizer wrote:
| "the organisations and writers that make up the community almost
| exclusively focus on material advancements, such as boosting
| economic growth, improving and accelerating scientific research,
| and increasing housing supply ("Yimby-ism") and immigration
| (particularly "high-skilled")."
|
| So the high-level pitch sounds very ambitious and comprehensive,
| but when we get down to the nitty gritty it's just wealthy
| professionals cloaking lobbying for the issues that affect them
| personally in philosophical verbiage. including YIMBYism and
| high-skilled immigration to the US in a discussion of global
| progress is like complaining about your dry cleaner's prices
| during a discussion of the world economy.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| I'd argue that we need to understand how progress got its current
| meaning, as something undisputedly good.
|
| A few centuries ago it just meant movement along a path - e.g.
| The Pilgrim's Progress.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| I'd wager it came from positive associations with the notion of
| "scientific progress". Google NGrams:
|
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=scientific+pro...
|
| It correlates pretty cleanly with "social progress" as well
|
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=scientific+pro...
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