5 ms·

I get the thrust of what you say but this wasn't always the case. The idea of linear progress upwards is not universal. Many cultures placed the pinnacle age in

I get the thrust of what you say but this wasn't always the case. The idea of linear progress upwards is not universal. Many cultures placed the pinnacle age in their past, before some corruption or decay took place -the ultimate expression of such would be like the biblical story of the Fall, but it also existed on less cosmic scales. The golden age when people were better, seeing your age as decay against the valorized past is in fact more common. Also just because others thought similar things doesn't mean it isn't true now. The progress since sometime in the 1800s has been insane. If in 100,000 years a super smart civilization, unimaginably advanced, looks at an estimated world population time series, they will be objectively impressed that those guys figured out / stumbled upon some impressive things to manage that. It's really interesting to think about just how desolate the world was even a few hundred years ago. Almost all our big cities today were little towns, except for like 1 or 2 globally. The change is undeniable. It's not all subjective and "they said X, we say X, nobody can decide if X is true, what is truth anyway, etc"

otabdeveloper4 1y ago
> The progress Progress towards what, exactly?
- willis936 1y ago
  Victory over the terror of the natural world on all of its fronts. That doesn't mean decimation of natural beauty, but answering the question "how will I live comfortably and not die today?" everyday for everyone forever.
  - getpokedagain 1y ago
    Do you/we think this is a truly possible or laudable goal.
    - falcor84 1y ago
      Leaving aside the heart death of the universe, I can imagine a future that's a more utopian version of the Altered Carbon universe, where everyone who wants to have daily backups, which they could set to restore either in the cloud or in a biological/robotic body in the case of an unintended death. I don't know if it's a laudable goal, but I think it'll eventually be possible.
    - willis936 1y ago
      I was asked about the direction of the destination. Saying the direction and having everyone agree on it is worth a lot when the current bus driver is heading towards a cliff. I do think things get better if we all pursued this destination together. If you asked me several years ago I would have said "yes, the star trek future is at least partially attainable", but that requires a lot of optimism in technological advancement that I don't have. I do think that with the technology and resources available to us today (or the near future) we could support 10 billion people working safe labor in air conditioning, full stomachs, free time, and on a planet that is still hospitable. If you want to know how to actually get there: I have no idea, but I do know if we don't agree on the direction and make steps towards it continuously for many generations that we'll never get there. For now I'm voting with my feet and contributing my labor to a cause I think pushes us in the right direction. Also, I'm setting aside the battle with natural death. Preserving brains and their contents indefinitely is not impossible, but transhumanism is as much philosophy as it is technology.
      - getpokedagain 1y ago
        Hmm. I think I get it and its certainly a goal you could get behind. I take it you basically oppose Ivan Illich's premise that modern medicine will never out smart death and fails to help people adapt to the truth of their mortality?
        willis936 1y ago
        I don't think that death is a certainty. It is today, but we are working on it. We are not supernatural. CGPGrey's thoughts on this mirror a lot of my own. I grant that not all care given to aged is a kindness, but not fighting aging is not virtuous. https://youtu.be/C25qzDhGLx8 https://youtu.be/C25qzDhGLx8 https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY
- _el1s7 1y ago
  Good question, I guess progress to the betterment of society, people's lives, and human knowledge and power. But no one really knows what future we are heading towards, or what would happen to us in 100,000 years. No one really cares to think that far ahead I guess.
  - yurishimo 1y ago
    We don’t think about it that much because every assumption we make is likely to turn out to be wildly inaccurate and the technology of the time will likely solve all of the problems we worry about now long before they ever reach that breaking point we are currently worrying about. Take the example from another thread today. In the 60s we were worried about food shortages to support the exploding population, but it turned out that we solved that problem way before the population number was at that assumed “breaking point”. We can theorize now about the problems we will face in 100k years, but what about the problems we can’t ever foresee? Aliens with hyperlight laser beams? Rogue asteroids? We have no answers for those types of problems, but they are probably more likely than anything we can dream up today.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      astroids are a problem, but we know enough physics to say aliens can't attack. if they exist they are too far away to know we are here.
      - griffzhowl 1y ago
        > we know enough physics to say aliens can't attack Don't be too optimistic... This isn't just a question of physics but also about the probability of the emergence of complex technological intelligence. Since we only know about a single case, we can't determine this probability. We can make various guesses but these all involve assumptions about things other than physics
        bluGill 1y ago
        all the alien intelligence needs to obey the laws of physics we know. There might be major things we don't know but it still fits in our current laws. unless you are appealing to 'God can do anything' - but since God wouldn't do that we can ignore that he could.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  I didn't mean it in a moral sense, but in sheer production, population, the physical energy moved around the mass of materials moved around etc. It's a wholly orthogonal question whether this is better in a moral sense, whether people are happier, live more in harmony with their authentic selves or with God or whatever. The point is that even an alien would be able to see that this age is not simply like any other where people thought highly of themselves. There has been massive material-technological improvement in the last two centuries in a way that doesn't apply to every era at all. Seriously look at a chart of a world population. It's a hockey stick. Again I'm not claiming here and now that this is a moral improvement. Maybe you think it's for the worse and take the cautionary view, like the stories of Icarus, or the Tower of Babel and think it's bad that we took too much control of things. But that's an orthogonal question.
- cutemonster 1y ago
  Not having half of your kids die, could be one thing: "For most of human history, around 1 in 2 newborns died before reaching the age of 15. By 1950, that figure had declined to around one-quarter globally. By 2020, it had fallen to 4%." https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality
- achrono 1y ago
  Towards maximizing the sum of individual happiness, power, beauty and knowledge. Maybe a few other attributes in there, but these are the bare minimum that no civilization would deny for itself. The question of course is 'how'. For the last few centuries, the answer has been technology.
vjk800 1y ago
In many cultures, there is/was also the idea of cyclical history. Things don't go forward or backward, they just repeat themselves in slightly different ways infinitely.
- grosswait 1y ago
  “ all this has happened before. All this shall happen again.”
- Tyrannosaur 1y ago
  It reminds me of Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought trilogy, especially the observation the traders make in the second book that all planet-bound civilizations are doomed to collapse at some point. They are usually able to restore technological progress more quickly the more records they have, but without leaving the planet are still doomed to repeat the cycle. IIRC there is even more-or-less standardized "uplift" protocols - series of technological reveals for less-developed civilizations to rapidly advance/restore their capabilities. I wonder if there is academic study comparing past-focused, future-focused, and cyclical views of human progress in literature.
  - korse 1y ago
    Excellent books.
  - rmah 1y ago
    Sounds like Niven and Pournell's Moties civilization cycle from "The Mote in God's Eye"
  - frmersdog 1y ago
    "Collapse" is maybe hyperbole in this case, if it's building on our own history to extrapolate forward. For us, certain societies have collapsed, and with them have been lost certain practices or technologies, but human civilization as a whole has been largely steady or growing since the agricultural revolution (using population size as a heuristic). There's always the threat of ecological collapse, but that's something that has only happened a few times in the history of life on the planet, and we haven't really faced anything like it before at civilization-wide scale. There's always been another group to move in and take up the abandoned land. Without some major technological breakthroughs, yes, we're likely to face a collapse eventually, but as a biosphere, not merely a civilization. Short of that, people seem to keep on keeping on. I think the mistake comes from something common to a lot of sci-fi, which is mistaking the scale of a planetary setting. It takes a lot of energy to disrupt life on a global scale (we're managing it, but it's taken hundreds of years). "At some point" is carrying a lot of weight in that observation.
ErroneousBosh 1y ago
> Many cultures placed the pinnacle age in their past, before some corruption or decay took place North America, for example.
teiferer 1y ago
> how desolate the world was even a few hundred years ago Well, those were the Dark Ages which objectively represented a decline of society relative to what came before them. Besides that, agreed to all you wrote.

otabdeveloper4 1y ago

> The progress Progress towards what, exactly?

willis936 1y ago
Victory over the terror of the natural world on all of its fronts. That doesn't mean decimation of natural beauty, but answering the question "how will I live comfortably and not die today?" everyday for everyone forever.
- getpokedagain 1y ago
  Do you/we think this is a truly possible or laudable goal.
  - falcor84 1y ago
    Leaving aside the heart death of the universe, I can imagine a future that's a more utopian version of the Altered Carbon universe, where everyone who wants to have daily backups, which they could set to restore either in the cloud or in a biological/robotic body in the case of an unintended death. I don't know if it's a laudable goal, but I think it'll eventually be possible.
  - willis936 1y ago
    I was asked about the direction of the destination. Saying the direction and having everyone agree on it is worth a lot when the current bus driver is heading towards a cliff. I do think things get better if we all pursued this destination together. If you asked me several years ago I would have said "yes, the star trek future is at least partially attainable", but that requires a lot of optimism in technological advancement that I don't have. I do think that with the technology and resources available to us today (or the near future) we could support 10 billion people working safe labor in air conditioning, full stomachs, free time, and on a planet that is still hospitable. If you want to know how to actually get there: I have no idea, but I do know if we don't agree on the direction and make steps towards it continuously for many generations that we'll never get there. For now I'm voting with my feet and contributing my labor to a cause I think pushes us in the right direction. Also, I'm setting aside the battle with natural death. Preserving brains and their contents indefinitely is not impossible, but transhumanism is as much philosophy as it is technology.
    - getpokedagain 1y ago
      Hmm. I think I get it and its certainly a goal you could get behind. I take it you basically oppose Ivan Illich's premise that modern medicine will never out smart death and fails to help people adapt to the truth of their mortality?
      - willis936 1y ago
        I don't think that death is a certainty. It is today, but we are working on it. We are not supernatural. CGPGrey's thoughts on this mirror a lot of my own. I grant that not all care given to aged is a kindness, but not fighting aging is not virtuous. https://youtu.be/C25qzDhGLx8 https://youtu.be/C25qzDhGLx8 https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY
_el1s7 1y ago
Good question, I guess progress to the betterment of society, people's lives, and human knowledge and power. But no one really knows what future we are heading towards, or what would happen to us in 100,000 years. No one really cares to think that far ahead I guess.
- yurishimo 1y ago
  We don’t think about it that much because every assumption we make is likely to turn out to be wildly inaccurate and the technology of the time will likely solve all of the problems we worry about now long before they ever reach that breaking point we are currently worrying about. Take the example from another thread today. In the 60s we were worried about food shortages to support the exploding population, but it turned out that we solved that problem way before the population number was at that assumed “breaking point”. We can theorize now about the problems we will face in 100k years, but what about the problems we can’t ever foresee? Aliens with hyperlight laser beams? Rogue asteroids? We have no answers for those types of problems, but they are probably more likely than anything we can dream up today.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    astroids are a problem, but we know enough physics to say aliens can't attack. if they exist they are too far away to know we are here.
    - griffzhowl 1y ago
      > we know enough physics to say aliens can't attack Don't be too optimistic... This isn't just a question of physics but also about the probability of the emergence of complex technological intelligence. Since we only know about a single case, we can't determine this probability. We can make various guesses but these all involve assumptions about things other than physics
      - bluGill 1y ago
        all the alien intelligence needs to obey the laws of physics we know. There might be major things we don't know but it still fits in our current laws. unless you are appealing to 'God can do anything' - but since God wouldn't do that we can ignore that he could.
bonoboTP 1y ago
I didn't mean it in a moral sense, but in sheer production, population, the physical energy moved around the mass of materials moved around etc. It's a wholly orthogonal question whether this is better in a moral sense, whether people are happier, live more in harmony with their authentic selves or with God or whatever. The point is that even an alien would be able to see that this age is not simply like any other where people thought highly of themselves. There has been massive material-technological improvement in the last two centuries in a way that doesn't apply to every era at all. Seriously look at a chart of a world population. It's a hockey stick. Again I'm not claiming here and now that this is a moral improvement. Maybe you think it's for the worse and take the cautionary view, like the stories of Icarus, or the Tower of Babel and think it's bad that we took too much control of things. But that's an orthogonal question.
cutemonster 1y ago
Not having half of your kids die, could be one thing: "For most of human history, around 1 in 2 newborns died before reaching the age of 15. By 1950, that figure had declined to around one-quarter globally. By 2020, it had fallen to 4%." https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality
achrono 1y ago
Towards maximizing the sum of individual happiness, power, beauty and knowledge. Maybe a few other attributes in there, but these are the bare minimum that no civilization would deny for itself. The question of course is 'how'. For the last few centuries, the answer has been technology.

vjk800 1y ago

In many cultures, there is/was also the idea of cyclical history. Things don't go forward or backward, they just repeat themselves in slightly different ways infinitely.

grosswait 1y ago
“ all this has happened before. All this shall happen again.”
Tyrannosaur 1y ago
It reminds me of Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought trilogy, especially the observation the traders make in the second book that all planet-bound civilizations are doomed to collapse at some point. They are usually able to restore technological progress more quickly the more records they have, but without leaving the planet are still doomed to repeat the cycle. IIRC there is even more-or-less standardized "uplift" protocols - series of technological reveals for less-developed civilizations to rapidly advance/restore their capabilities. I wonder if there is academic study comparing past-focused, future-focused, and cyclical views of human progress in literature.
- korse 1y ago
  Excellent books.
- rmah 1y ago
  Sounds like Niven and Pournell's Moties civilization cycle from "The Mote in God's Eye"
- frmersdog 1y ago
  "Collapse" is maybe hyperbole in this case, if it's building on our own history to extrapolate forward. For us, certain societies have collapsed, and with them have been lost certain practices or technologies, but human civilization as a whole has been largely steady or growing since the agricultural revolution (using population size as a heuristic). There's always the threat of ecological collapse, but that's something that has only happened a few times in the history of life on the planet, and we haven't really faced anything like it before at civilization-wide scale. There's always been another group to move in and take up the abandoned land. Without some major technological breakthroughs, yes, we're likely to face a collapse eventually, but as a biosphere, not merely a civilization. Short of that, people seem to keep on keeping on. I think the mistake comes from something common to a lot of sci-fi, which is mistaking the scale of a planetary setting. It takes a lot of energy to disrupt life on a global scale (we're managing it, but it's taken hundreds of years). "At some point" is carrying a lot of weight in that observation.

ErroneousBosh 1y ago

> Many cultures placed the pinnacle age in their past, before some corruption or decay took place North America, for example.

teiferer 1y ago

> how desolate the world was even a few hundred years ago Well, those were the Dark Ages which objectively represented a decline of society relative to what came before them. Besides that, agreed to all you wrote.