Here's a piece that triggered me.

A few years ago I remember tweeting something from Human Progress (the Cato-sponsored project that maps and celebrates achievements/material progress in the world) to Aleks Svetski and he responded, with disgust, something like "anything with that name must be retarded."

Having written for them a lot, and admired the work by Marian Tupy and Steven Pinker, Jason Crawford (at Roots of Progress) etc for a long time, this hurt.

I believe reading this piece by Adam was the final nail in the coffin (#1476033) for me.

I had a couple of DM interactions with Tony Morley (whose progress work I've featured here #1059650) and Alex Hammond (who, as it were, I posted about today approvingly #1599500) in recent times, and they've been less than impressive.

So, I have intellectual respect for these people

...I've just come around/gone off-the-beaten path so much or become so blackpilled (#1598672) I just can't even grasp the naivety necessary to imbibe their perspective.

Here's a thing I posted in response to a HP tweet/article last month

Karl Friedrisch-Israel, a pretty cool Austrian economist I've crossed paths with a ton, had two great articles on the statistics for The Daily Economy #1578595, #1566496

Omary, a psychology PhD, naturally thinks that the resistance to progress and optimism and tech are psychological mistakes. Evolutionary psych, inappropriate biases, user manuals for the world outdated in the modern setting where different rules apply for understanding what happens than on the savanna.

Is progress a dirty word? Certainly not for my audience here on The Psychology of Progress** and at HumanProgress.org. But out in the real world, people are decidedly more pessimistic.

No, I mean, everybody loves progress: “progress” means things getting better. If that were unequivocally the case, there'd be no argument. So, as I pointed out in a DM to Alex... if people strongly and overwhelmingly express opinions that seem wrong according to your metrics, "you conclude irrationality and stupidity rather than there might be something missing/wrong with what you're looking at."

The map and reality, etc.

Omary invokes psychological tropes, instead of considering that maybe these lower beings outside of his progress bubble -- who express doubts and objections to everlasting "progress" (and "abundance") they're apperently going through -- know something you don't?

For somebody to unequivocally say that things are getting better – when it’s obvious that reality is a combination of some things getting worse, other things getting better – you have to either
a) brush over/wave away the bad stuff, or
b) argue that morally or economically or societally speaking, the good outweighs the bad – meaning, you’re doing a paternalistic value judgment that can’t possibly hold for all or even most of us.

The progress people don’t do that (or rather, they do a decent amount of hand-waving and navel-gazing); they just pretend you're an idiot and that the world obviously gets better for everyone, roughly speaking, all the time. (Or, as in this article, gaslight you and psychologize your "error")

Or you're doing a hidden Benthamite calculation behind the scenes ("greatest good for the greatest number of people"), which McCloskey incidentally teaches us is ludicrous (#1594630)... you can't maximize two things at once, moron.

My displeasure with the "Progress Movement" in meme form

Yes of course it’s an unquestionably good thing that more kids (and mothers!) survive childbirth and grow up without deforming diseases or stunted via undernourishing. It’s not unquestionably a good thing that we live longer (lifespan vs healthspan), since most of those extra years are spent in pain and wastefully expensive health care institutions.

The impressive improvements in tech and human welfare in the last 20 years are digital gadgets and in communication tech – and the jury is definitely still out on whether Netflix to the masses and social media to teenagers (let alone adults) were, on net, a good or bad thing for humanity.

I'll make a separate reading/writing post about Jason's recent tweet that it's amazing that humans will stop reading and writing. (One of my worst takeaways from BTCHEL #1585380, fueled by quite some people I do/used to admire, was the following realization: There are programmers who don't write code. Authors who don't read. Bitcoiners who have no bitcoin. AI has definitely changed the Bitcoin world.)

Back to Adam and his article:

Here's his intellectual awakening:

I first read [Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now] when I was 19, and wish I could say I was blown away. I was, in a sense, but seeing dozens of graphs spanning centuries of global data on human progress—how life expectancy has climbed, infant mortality and disease rates have plummeted, rising literacy and freedom and access to clean water and electricity and medicine, to name only a few—felt more like an intuitive recognition: Finally, someone who is making sense.

Cool, yeah. A tad childish. Maybe you should have, you know, moved on? I was blown away by this book, too, and for a while in 2018-2019, I couldn't stop talking about it.

...and then I learned. I wasn't 19, and so I could outgrow this childish single-minded obsession: Some from our friend Taleb (#1533284, #1540851), other stuff from looking at/reading the very graphs that were supposed to _scientifically_ tell us this, others yet from observing the insane downfall of everything sacred ala 2019-2022 (COVID, green stuff, inflation is transitory etc etc).
...Even more from the many ways in which the world is objectively getting worse -- mostly, fair enough, having to do with governments and central banks #1420917

it is in a sense of feeling like underdogs, like Cassandras, of alienation from the rest of society.

Yes, because you're obsessed with a mirage! If everyone, to invoke a joke, seemingly drives on the wrong side of the road, the problem might be elsewhere.

In an age where apocalyptic narratives are ubiquitous, whether about environmentalism or AI, and a depressing scarcity mindset demanding degrowth is floated as the only realistic alternative, it is difficult to embrace progress.

Totally agreed; these ideas are ridiculous and mostly based on incorrect observations. But they’re also not representative of the sensible voices that say “hang on…”

The most obvious elephant in the room – that’s not just standing there awkwardly but screaming loudly – is the fact that birth rates decline absolutely everywhere.

As France is burning, fertility is in freefall, we’re running wartime deficits in what the experts tell us are growing, prosperous post-pandemic times, I’m not sure why I’m being gaslit into thinking that because I see bad things there’s something psychologically broken with me. Surely, intellectuals of Chelsea’s or Adam’s calibre are capable of seeing the world before them instead of getting lost in the shiny new AI object dangled before them?

one of the criticisms of the Progress Movement is that it seems to outsiders almost a cult, or a secular religion talking in moralizing terms about a techno-optimist vision for the good life and threats to the sacred order of economic and technological progress.

Yessiir…

And this:

Yes, we know; that's not what's on the agenda. Rather: is the only possible comparison between [today's world as is right now] and [subsistence farmers/wartime refugees]? To invoke the other influencer mentioned in the article: “Any idiot can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters”

The progress movement is picking up steam, and there are now many other amazing groups spreading the good news of positive trends in global health, wealth, and technological advancement, while making it a central mission to identify the social attitudes and public policies necessary to further realize and accelerate progress and innovation.

PERFECT illustration:

• "positive trends in global health": Yes, I came off age watching Hans Rosling's lectures, I love them as much as the next Swede. But they're outdated information, as in those developments are not news AND they don't hold for the rich/western world. So you sneaky word "global" is doing all the work, because health is certainly not improving in, say, the US of A.
• "wealth": yes, true... for the AI masters and the boomers (#1598264, #1599126), very unclear if that's true for many other segments of (again, Western) societies. Plus, it's mostly a feature of rallying stock markets and (artificially restricted) property markets with insane gov-subsidized leverage, not that the world economy/productivity is so great that everyone's thriving, or a new scientific revolution/Industrial Revolution.
• tech advancement: things aren't necessarily better because they're new and techy... tech "advancement" can be bad also... and like I mentioned above, jury is still out on whether "tech" broadly speaking (streaming, doomscrolling, social media, surveillance state/capitalism) was a good thing.

Also, I'll just leave this here and let the schtackers answer whether or not this is "progress"

Finally, dude’s probably correct about this… we must come to terms with what the new world looks like, and that’s not a question of material but psychological makeup.

While people disagree about the timelines of material progress and how realistic AI superabundance might be, it is increasingly becoming clear that as technology progresses, the enduring problems for progress studies to tackle are social and psychological problems.

AND, it's not shocking that human progress-type people are hanging out in an AI-dominated Silicon Valley crowd. It's legit the only place you could point to that's growing and even have shiny new gadgets to point to. Most other domains of society (rural, nature, economics, fiscal, money, infrastructure, demographics, energy etc) are stagnating or burning.

But sure, celebrate the new robot, and do a PhD asking why the non-cult peeps "don't get it."

people were relieved that they could speak to other people who simply get it. People who believe in progress. People who, though they understand the risks of technology, are motivated by the challenge to mitigate those risks and invest in the upside potential that AI and other technology has to improve human welfare.

Uh-hu.

Yeah, this. As always:

“your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn’t stop to think if they should!