14 ms·

Do we need a better understanding of 'progress'?

117 points by pmoriarty 4y ago

pmoriarty 4y ago
"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 (£83bn/€95bn) valuation puts Collison’s net worth north of $11bn (£9bn/€10.5bn)... "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 4y ago
  Q: Why do economists rob banks^W^W serve billionaires? A: Because that's where the money is.
- jdminhbg 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
  > "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 4y ago
    You put your effort into furthering your definition of progress. I'll put my effort furthering mine, and Patrick will work on his.
    - 4y ago
dane-pgp 4y ago
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%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_%28betting_system%2... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting
- hinkley 4y ago
  That is what we usually call 'hubris' when we are doing the postmortem.
statuslover9000 4y ago
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 https://www.fao.org/3/cb4474en/online/cb4474en.html
- eatmyshorts 4y ago
  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 https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment
  - luis_cho 4y ago
    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.
    - madacol 4y ago
      What do food systems have to do with fossil fuels?
spacemanmatt 4y ago
[Unserious] I'd say we understand progress so well, we've gamified it.: http://progressquest.com/ http://progressquest.com/
- scollet 4y ago
  Can you fuxk off
  - spacemanmatt 4y ago
    No?
B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
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 4y ago
  I'd wager it came from positive associations with the notion of "scientific progress". Google NGrams: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=scientific+progress&year_start=1700 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+progress%2Csocial+progress&year_start=1700&year_end=2019 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=scientific+pro...
  - B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
    The killer is "historical progress" - around Montaigne's time they still debated if the (golden age) ancients or the moderns had it. Afterwards they lost all doubt. What people will do for a little aspirin ... (Marx went to town on it, paradise on earth was at hand. Scientifically, of course.)
seydor 4y ago
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.
- alexfromapex 4y ago
  Agreed, it's all about choosing the correct performance indicators
  - LesZedCB 4y ago
    "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- peteradio 4y ago
  Consider all the buzz word paper milling was to supplant the nepotistic framework from before.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    But that nepotistic framework produced a lot of good results, so it is unclear if fixing it this way actually improved the output. Meritocracy isn't a good thing if the extra burden of trying to evaluate merit actually worsen the outcome of the process.
pessimizer 4y ago
"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.
kazinator 4y ago
> 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-cube-tray-into-the-freezer-section-of-her-picture-id140431603?s=2048x2048 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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    - germinalphrase 4y ago
      See any HN thread on airplanes, education, historical warfare…
  - kazinator 4y ago
    I don't know more about fridges than a bright fifth grader.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 4y ago
Gualdrapo 4y ago
Those single quotes on 'progress' made me remember about that video of James Baldwin[0]. [0] https://youtu.be/OCUlE5ldPvM https://youtu.be/OCUlE5ldPvM
_oghd 4y ago
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.
- cyber_kinetist 4y ago
  Ah, meeting a Deleuzian in HN is like catching a rare wild Pokemon... The main gist I got from Deleuze and Guattari (without reading the actual books, only from people who seem to just endlessly talk about them) was: system dynamics are totally cool and rad, but we can only explain its coolness in excruciatingly obtuse language. Which is helpful for writing good poetry, but doesn't seem that helpful for actually making decisions in real life. (I've got to admit they have some really good quotable sentences in there too. Including the one that basically said in order to destroy capitalism you need to accelerate it, which spawned a mysterious cult in Warwick University.) Jokes aside, if you think progress is dead and the status quo is shit, what alternative society are you imagining? (I think this is the most important question you can ask to any leftist)
  - LesZedCB 4y ago
    if I was really pressed to give my ideal, it would be some sort of gift economy based anarcho-syndicalism. but maybe I've been taken by the bogdanovists from KSRs mars trilogy, (or I guess Bogdanov's Red Star, though I haven't read it yet). as for D&G, really too bad it's notoriously hard to read. luckily I found some content out there that's more approachable to help me learn. their ideas, and Deleuze in particular, are captivating and astoundingly relevant decades later.
beefman 4y ago
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?
motohagiography 4y ago
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.
- madacol 4y ago
  1. What would look like progress to you? What are the things in your life that you would like to improve? 2. What do you think needs to be done to achieve those goals? We will all probably agree on 1. But disagree on how to achieve those goals
heresie-dabord 4y ago
> the slogan "a better world is possible" This is the essence of the notion of progress. It is naive to think that we cannot do better.
AussieWog93 4y ago
>the paper authors found that US research productivity has declined more than 40 times since the 1930s. >Some from the progress community point to sclerotic funding bureaucracies, which eat nearly half of researcher time and create perverse incentives. This is 100% believable to me. I don't think people quite understand how bad it is until they actually see academia from the inside, but the game researchers are playing is not "let's have a crack at some new idea and see if it works", but "let's put a slight twist on the existing paradigm that we know won't yield anything useful, because otherwise we won't get funding". _Everything_ has to be "rationally" justified within the context of the existing paradigms (which are generally speaking, wrong), and every single force within the academy is acting to prevent researchers from actually doing what they believe will lead to new technology. I'm convinced that the only progress actually comes from scientists with the skills to make the the grants board think they're being a "rational researcher", while a decent chunk of their time is actually doing whatever the hell they want.
- bdw5204 4y ago
  Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present -- and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. - President Dwight D. Eisenhower (Farewell Address, January 17th, 1961) (The above is from the same speech where Eisenhower warned of the military industrial complex. The section of the speech above is much less well known but just as prescient and just as unheeded. I think it explains why science now works the way it does even though this system is detrimental to real meaningful scientific research.)
- closedloop129 4y ago
madacol 4y ago
Crawford response to some of the criticisms https://rootsofprogress.org/bbc-future-covers-progress-studies https://rootsofprogress.org/bbc-future-covers-progress-studi...
TedShiller 4y ago
In politics, “progressive” has completely lost its meaning
fortran77 4y ago
It’s the opposite of “Congress”
- badpun 4y ago
  Joe Swanson (from Family Guy), is that you?
jl6 4y ago
I’m willing to believe that technology is an S-curve, limited by physics, and that we are now in the upper portion. No more low-hanging fruit, increments from here on out. But I also think we are in the very lowest portion of a cultural progress S-curve where there is no shortage whatsoever of low-hanging fruit available that could enormously improve lives. We’re a long way from just getting people to a reasonable baseline of fulfilment or even agreement on what that means (health, food, housing, family, purpose?).
- bergenty 4y ago
  I disagree. I feel we are on the cusp of close to general AI that may actually provide useful ideas to improve the world. Genetic engineering is in its infancy. Quantum computing and fusion are on the horizon. Neural brain links are a whole new paradigm. Renewable energy is just beginning to take hold.
  - tuxie_ 4y ago
    > No more low-hanging fruit > Genetic engineering is in its infancy. Quantum computing and fusion are on the horizon. Neural brain links... Well if anything none of those examples you gave sound like low-hanging fruit.
    - depereo 4y ago
      new technologies unlock newly realized low hanging fruits - what counts as 'low hanging' is based on current capability.
    - SyzygistSix 4y ago
      They very well might look like they were the low-hanging fruit in the future.
    - bergenty 4y ago
      When something is in its infancy, there are a lot of low hanging fruit.
closedloop129 4y ago
Could it be that we do understand progress but the world is not ready for it? We are worried about inflation, when the valuation of things explodes. What would happen if the opportunities of each human being explodes? E.g. if everybody can fly a rocket into space, there soon will be so much debris that further launches are impossible. >You have a computer, TV, and smartphone. These are impressive inventions, and some seem like magic, but over time, you realise that your living standards haven't transformed quite as much as when you woke up in 1940. The living standard of kings hasn't quite changed since 2000 BC. What's changing is the life of the less fortunate. Women not spending time on washing clothes is a huge difference. [1] What's holding society back is not lack of progress but conventions. When you have microwaves, but you still build houses with kitchens as if your wife stays at home all day, then resources are stuck and cannot be used to change living standards significantly. Similarly, Smartphones are called Smartphones and not mobile computers because people still use them as phones. Living standards will change when the general public starts engaging with computers and crunches data to e.g. automatically choose the best product to buy, or to coordinate housing projects. The housing bubble exists because buyers don't coordinate to remove bottlenecks on the supply side. In a sense, we have the printing press, but people are still illiterate. >There is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. How about China? It would be surprising if they hadn't analyzed how they can out-innovate the US. Then again, does progress need an intellectual movement? That sounds like increasing the study of arts to create more music and literature. Instead of letting intellectuals assemble, where could people meet who would want to make progress? I would like to say HN, but my suspicion is that the bottlenecks are not easily monetizable so that angle investors and VC are not enough. E.g. to build a city for the future with affordable housing, does it take nation states like China and Saudi Arabia, or could that be achieved in another way? [1] General Electric also introduced its first top loading automatic model in 1947 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washing_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washing_machine
- jasoncrawford 4y ago
  > The living standard of kings hasn't quite changed since 2000 BC. Not true. Ancient/medieval kings still got smallpox, peed in chamber pots, and shivered in the winter cold. They couldn't hear the music of great performers who had died, or travel to another continent for a weekend trip. Etc.
coding123 4y ago
Feels like lately a lot of people think progress is adding more letters to LGBTQ.....
known 4y ago

117 points by pmoriarty 4y ago

"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 (£83bn/€95bn) valuation puts Collison’s net worth north of $11bn (£9bn/€10.5bn)... "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 4y ago
Q: Why do economists rob banks^W^W serve billionaires? A: Because that's where the money is.
jdminhbg 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
> "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 4y ago
  You put your effort into furthering your definition of progress. I'll put my effort furthering mine, and Patrick will work on his.
  - 4y ago

dane-pgp 4y ago

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%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_%28betting_system%2... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting

hinkley 4y ago
That is what we usually call 'hubris' when we are doing the postmortem.

statuslover9000 4y ago

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 https://www.fao.org/3/cb4474en/online/cb4474en.html

eatmyshorts 4y ago
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 https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment
- luis_cho 4y ago
  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.
  - madacol 4y ago
    What do food systems have to do with fossil fuels?

spacemanmatt 4y ago

[Unserious] I'd say we understand progress so well, we've gamified it.: http://progressquest.com/ http://progressquest.com/

scollet 4y ago
Can you fuxk off
- spacemanmatt 4y ago
  No?

B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago

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 4y ago
I'd wager it came from positive associations with the notion of "scientific progress". Google NGrams: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=scientific+progress&year_start=1700 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+progress%2Csocial+progress&year_start=1700&year_end=2019 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=scientific+pro...
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
  The killer is "historical progress" - around Montaigne's time they still debated if the (golden age) ancients or the moderns had it. Afterwards they lost all doubt. What people will do for a little aspirin ... (Marx went to town on it, paradise on earth was at hand. Scientifically, of course.)

seydor 4y ago

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.

alexfromapex 4y ago
Agreed, it's all about choosing the correct performance indicators
- LesZedCB 4y ago
  "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
peteradio 4y ago
Consider all the buzz word paper milling was to supplant the nepotistic framework from before.
- Jensson 4y ago
  But that nepotistic framework produced a lot of good results, so it is unclear if fixing it this way actually improved the output. Meritocracy isn't a good thing if the extra burden of trying to evaluate merit actually worsen the outcome of the process.

pessimizer 4y ago

"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.

kazinator 4y ago

> 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-cube-tray-into-the-freezer-section-of-her-picture-id140431603?s=2048x2048 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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - germinalphrase 4y ago
    See any HN thread on airplanes, education, historical warfare…
- kazinator 4y ago
  I don't know more about fridges than a bright fifth grader.
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4y ago

Gualdrapo 4y ago

Those single quotes on 'progress' made me remember about that video of James Baldwin[0]. [0] https://youtu.be/OCUlE5ldPvM https://youtu.be/OCUlE5ldPvM

_oghd 4y ago

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.

cyber_kinetist 4y ago
Ah, meeting a Deleuzian in HN is like catching a rare wild Pokemon... The main gist I got from Deleuze and Guattari (without reading the actual books, only from people who seem to just endlessly talk about them) was: system dynamics are totally cool and rad, but we can only explain its coolness in excruciatingly obtuse language. Which is helpful for writing good poetry, but doesn't seem that helpful for actually making decisions in real life. (I've got to admit they have some really good quotable sentences in there too. Including the one that basically said in order to destroy capitalism you need to accelerate it, which spawned a mysterious cult in Warwick University.) Jokes aside, if you think progress is dead and the status quo is shit, what alternative society are you imagining? (I think this is the most important question you can ask to any leftist)
- LesZedCB 4y ago
  if I was really pressed to give my ideal, it would be some sort of gift economy based anarcho-syndicalism. but maybe I've been taken by the bogdanovists from KSRs mars trilogy, (or I guess Bogdanov's Red Star, though I haven't read it yet). as for D&G, really too bad it's notoriously hard to read. luckily I found some content out there that's more approachable to help me learn. their ideas, and Deleuze in particular, are captivating and astoundingly relevant decades later.

beefman 4y ago

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?

motohagiography 4y ago

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.

madacol 4y ago
1. What would look like progress to you? What are the things in your life that you would like to improve? 2. What do you think needs to be done to achieve those goals? We will all probably agree on 1. But disagree on how to achieve those goals

heresie-dabord 4y ago

> the slogan "a better world is possible" This is the essence of the notion of progress. It is naive to think that we cannot do better.

AussieWog93 4y ago

>the paper authors found that US research productivity has declined more than 40 times since the 1930s. >Some from the progress community point to sclerotic funding bureaucracies, which eat nearly half of researcher time and create perverse incentives. This is 100% believable to me. I don't think people quite understand how bad it is until they actually see academia from the inside, but the game researchers are playing is not "let's have a crack at some new idea and see if it works", but "let's put a slight twist on the existing paradigm that we know won't yield anything useful, because otherwise we won't get funding". _Everything_ has to be "rationally" justified within the context of the existing paradigms (which are generally speaking, wrong), and every single force within the academy is acting to prevent researchers from actually doing what they believe will lead to new technology. I'm convinced that the only progress actually comes from scientists with the skills to make the the grants board think they're being a "rational researcher", while a decent chunk of their time is actually doing whatever the hell they want.

bdw5204 4y ago
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present -- and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. - President Dwight D. Eisenhower (Farewell Address, January 17th, 1961) (The above is from the same speech where Eisenhower warned of the military industrial complex. The section of the speech above is much less well known but just as prescient and just as unheeded. I think it explains why science now works the way it does even though this system is detrimental to real meaningful scientific research.)
closedloop129 4y ago

madacol 4y ago

Crawford response to some of the criticisms https://rootsofprogress.org/bbc-future-covers-progress-studies https://rootsofprogress.org/bbc-future-covers-progress-studi...

TedShiller 4y ago

In politics, “progressive” has completely lost its meaning

fortran77 4y ago

It’s the opposite of “Congress”

badpun 4y ago
Joe Swanson (from Family Guy), is that you?

jl6 4y ago

I’m willing to believe that technology is an S-curve, limited by physics, and that we are now in the upper portion. No more low-hanging fruit, increments from here on out. But I also think we are in the very lowest portion of a cultural progress S-curve where there is no shortage whatsoever of low-hanging fruit available that could enormously improve lives. We’re a long way from just getting people to a reasonable baseline of fulfilment or even agreement on what that means (health, food, housing, family, purpose?).

bergenty 4y ago
I disagree. I feel we are on the cusp of close to general AI that may actually provide useful ideas to improve the world. Genetic engineering is in its infancy. Quantum computing and fusion are on the horizon. Neural brain links are a whole new paradigm. Renewable energy is just beginning to take hold.
- tuxie_ 4y ago
  > No more low-hanging fruit > Genetic engineering is in its infancy. Quantum computing and fusion are on the horizon. Neural brain links... Well if anything none of those examples you gave sound like low-hanging fruit.
  - depereo 4y ago
    new technologies unlock newly realized low hanging fruits - what counts as 'low hanging' is based on current capability.
  - SyzygistSix 4y ago
    They very well might look like they were the low-hanging fruit in the future.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    When something is in its infancy, there are a lot of low hanging fruit.

closedloop129 4y ago

Could it be that we do understand progress but the world is not ready for it? We are worried about inflation, when the valuation of things explodes. What would happen if the opportunities of each human being explodes? E.g. if everybody can fly a rocket into space, there soon will be so much debris that further launches are impossible. >You have a computer, TV, and smartphone. These are impressive inventions, and some seem like magic, but over time, you realise that your living standards haven't transformed quite as much as when you woke up in 1940. The living standard of kings hasn't quite changed since 2000 BC. What's changing is the life of the less fortunate. Women not spending time on washing clothes is a huge difference. [1] What's holding society back is not lack of progress but conventions. When you have microwaves, but you still build houses with kitchens as if your wife stays at home all day, then resources are stuck and cannot be used to change living standards significantly. Similarly, Smartphones are called Smartphones and not mobile computers because people still use them as phones. Living standards will change when the general public starts engaging with computers and crunches data to e.g. automatically choose the best product to buy, or to coordinate housing projects. The housing bubble exists because buyers don't coordinate to remove bottlenecks on the supply side. In a sense, we have the printing press, but people are still illiterate. >There is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. How about China? It would be surprising if they hadn't analyzed how they can out-innovate the US. Then again, does progress need an intellectual movement? That sounds like increasing the study of arts to create more music and literature. Instead of letting intellectuals assemble, where could people meet who would want to make progress? I would like to say HN, but my suspicion is that the bottlenecks are not easily monetizable so that angle investors and VC are not enough. E.g. to build a city for the future with affordable housing, does it take nation states like China and Saudi Arabia, or could that be achieved in another way? [1] General Electric also introduced its first top loading automatic model in 1947 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washing_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washing_machine

jasoncrawford 4y ago
> The living standard of kings hasn't quite changed since 2000 BC. Not true. Ancient/medieval kings still got smallpox, peed in chamber pots, and shivered in the winter cold. They couldn't hear the music of great performers who had died, or travel to another continent for a weekend trip. Etc.

coding123 4y ago

Feels like lately a lot of people think progress is adding more letters to LGBTQ.....

known 4y ago